Chris Rice Cooper
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**PLEASE TAKE NOTE: This is an analysis of Christal Rice
Cooper’s interpretation of American Happiness. The poet's interpretation of his or her own poems are in “italicized quotes.”
Jacqueline
Allen Trimble’s
AMERICAN HAPPINESS
“Then Emerge Like a
Lady: A Poet’s Remembrance of Her Mother
And The Lessons She Taught Her”
On September 27, 2016 New South Books (http://www.newsouthbooks.com) published American
Happiness New Poems by Jacqueline Allen Trimble
The cover art of American Happiness is by
New South Books co-founder and co-publisher Suzanne La Rosa (http://www.newsouthbooks.com/pages/newsouth-staff/suzanne-la-rosa/) and graphic designer
Scott Markel (https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-markel-ba242388/)
Left to right: Jacqueline Trimble, Suzanne LaRosa, Scott Markel, jacket cover American Happiness.
American Happiness, named the Best Book for 2016 by Seven Sisters Books (http://sevensistersbookawards.com), is Trimble’s first poetry collection.
Trimble lives
with her husband Joseph ((https://www.facebook.com/jacqueline.trimble.58?hc_ref=SEARCH&fref=nf) who she dedicates American Happiness to), their two
sons, and one daughter in Montgomery, Alabama, where she is an associate
professor of English and chairs the Department of Languages and Literatures at
Alabama State University (http://www.alasu.edu/index.aspx).
Trimble, a Cave
Canem Fellow (https://cavecanempoets.org), was
recently awarded a Key West Literary Seminar Teacher and Librarian Scholarship (http://www.kwls.org/news-updates/2017-teacher-librarian/) and is
the recipient of a 2017 literary arts fellowship from the Alabama State Council
on the Arts (http://arts.state.al.us).
American Happiness
consists of three parts: Closure (12 poems), The Geography of Passion (10 poems), and American Happiness (12 poems).
Trimble in the
preface to American Happiness pays tribute to her mother, Erna Dungee
Allen.
“When I was four days
old, I was adopted by Cleola and James Allen. When I was four, my
adoptive mother, Cleola died. My father married Erna Dungee when I was
around five. A month before my seventh birthday, my father, James Franklin
Allen, died suddenly of a heart attack, so my stepmother, Erna Dungee Allen
raised me and officially adopted me again, though legally she did not have
to.”
copyright granted by imgarcade.com webpage
Trimble never viewed
Erna Dungee Allen as her stepmother but a mother who loved her like any mother
would love her own flesh and blood.
copyright granted by imgarcade.com
Her mother taught her many lessons from her own life one of
which was to stand up for what is right which she did as a foot soldier for the
Civil Rights movement.
Foot soldiers during the Civil Rights Movement.
And to never give up on finding that true love, which is
expressed in the poem “Cinderella Finds
Happiness With Her Third Husband.”
Vintage painting of an old fashioned wedding
She also instilled a sense of healthy power and black pride in
her child – Trimble became the only black child to attend Davis Elementary
School her first year.
Davis Elementary School Pubic Domain
Perhaps the greatest lesson her mother taught her was the power
of poetry. Erna’s mother recited poetry
to her and she passed on the tradition to her own daughter. And she taught her daughter poetry in action
when she had her daughter dress as a ghost for the local Fall Festival where
her mother read palms:
There I was. The only little black child in the whole
school wandering the halls of the festival in a sheet with a pointed pillow
case hat in which my mother had cut two little eyeholes. It was years before I understood why my
mother laughed and laughed and took so many pictures of me in my white sheet
that night. Even then she was teaching
me the power of pleasure of ironic juxtaposition – a lesson that continues to
inform my sense of humor as well as my poetry.
The Saturday Evening Post cover 10/23/1920
In the poem “The Klan Panhandles For Donations At The
Intersection Of Court Street And The Southern Bypass” Trimble exemplifies
her mother’s humor without diminishing her mother’s horror of those white
sheets:
Above the Southern
Bypass, the Ku Klux Klan
rose, a chimera of
white as white as my mother’s
sheets, swaying, even
then, on the other side of
town.
The KKK marching on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington D.C. 1928
The speaker of the
poem, like her mother, recognizes the power of poetry in the humorous “If I Didn’t Write Poetry” where the
speaker of the poem imagines robbing a bank, without a gun and without the
violence:
Then give her my note.
Perhaps something in
iambic pentameter.
Better yet, heroic
couplets:
Please give me all the money in your till,
So no one in this bank I’ll have to kill.
Even though her
mother is not specifically mentioned in “How
A Woman Carves Poetry of Her Bones” it validates her mother’s view of
poetry and how it could change lives for the good; but unfortunately there are
those who will ignore its powerful and good qualities, and utilize it for evil.
Her daughter is not superior or
inferior to any other human being (The world does not owe you/ indigo,the quiet charm/ of purple love)
She will not teach
her daughter to eat, but how to grow her own food: (Mama will not fall/ to fill your anxious belly.)
She taught her daughter that it was up to her to make her own dreams come true and not the stars she wished upon: (No matter how many stars/ you wish on, those distant suns/ flamed out long ago.)
She taught her daughter that it was up to her to make her own dreams come true and not the stars she wished upon: (No matter how many stars/ you wish on, those distant suns/ flamed out long ago.)
She taught her
daughter the importance of good hard work and the attitude in which to do that
good hard work: (Pick up your
implement/ and move on down that row. / Go on and sing while you’re at
it./ Might as well.)
“Everybody in America Hate the South” is a contradiction at best –
not in fact, but in mood. It starts out
as a serous poem but then is followed by sarcastic humor, while at the same
time neither diminishing or overstating the other.
In the first stanza
the speaker of the poem boldly states the South’s history of depraved violence
That land filled to
the rafters
with ghosts of lynched
boys and attics full
of souvenirs – dried
ears, fingers, genitalia
like prunes –
The body of Emmitt Till which his mother insisted be visible to all so that no one would ever forget the atrocity that was done to him.
The speaker of the poem describes Mammy and Miss Scarlett from Gone
With The Wind and this description has nothing to do with the novel by
Margaret Mitchell or the film by David Selznick: (of Miss Scarlett calling for Mammy who/ has now
grown some dreadlocks and owns/ the chicken restaurant on the boulevard.)
“The closest comment I
remember my mother saying about something akin to Gone With the Wind was when I came home from sixth grade history
class and my teacher Coach Edwards had made some comment about how kind and
benevolent slaveholders were to slaves, parroting the pervasive position of the
time. My mother said, "You go tell him that that is not how it
was. Slaves often didn't have enough to eat, were often want of proper
clothing, and were treated like animals."
Vintage African Mosaic Painting
In the poem “A Feast With The Sane” the speaker of the poem’s brother seems to
suffer from mental illness or violent tendencies and the speaker of the poem
learns that food home-cooked from her mother can heal even this, but only when
the family communes over Mother’s kitchen table.
In “Family Photograph: A Conjugation” the speaker of the poem
writes about her last Christmas she shared with her mother.
In “Second Sight” the speaker of the
poem’s mother is at her deathbed, and her daughter at the age of 22 is praying
that the end will come, to spare her mother the pain.
In the third stanza, the speaker
of the poem is witnessing God answering her prayer right in progress, her
mother just on the brink of death. Just
when her prayer is answered, she begins another prayer.
I hiss at the moon and
pray for sight:
Wondrous and mystic
light,
embrace my soul,
inflame my vacant eye.
In “The Day After Her Mother Died” the
speaker of the poem misses her mother so much that everything she sees, even
the yellow in the eggs reminds her of the color of the dress she wore when her
mother took her to a recital in the park.
Vintage card of African Ameircan little girl in yellow dress.
At the end of the
poem, the speaker of the poem yearns to be held by her mother, only to lie in
bed “sweating/ afraid of the silence in the next room?”
The mourning of her
mother’s death continues in the poem “Things
That Are Lost.”
If objects remain in
motion
until some force stops
them
what force stops our
memory of the dead?
Even in spirit her mother is still
teaching Trimble lessons in life; one of which is to always value herself even
when others do not.
That lesson is expressed in the
poem In “Did Jean Paul Sartre Ever Ask
Simone De Beauvoir To Go To The Winn-Dixie?” where the speaker of the poem
measures her value as a woman to that of a man, and reveals a feminine power
necessary for all women to heal and to feel whole:
I can throw a
basketball through a hoop
and ensure the survival of the species by incubating
a basketball-sized
human being in my uterus
for almost ten months
It is in this pride
of being a poet, woman, African American that the speaker of the poem finds her
thriving voice and will always emerge like a lady (line
from the poem “Did Jean Paul Sartre Ever
Ask Simone De Beauvoir To Go To The Winn-Dixie?”)
