The Poetry of Moss by Thylias Moss

First published:Hosiery Seams on a Bowlegged Woman, 1983; Pyramid of Bone, 1989; At Redbones, 1990; Rainbow Remnants in Rock Bottom Ghetto Sky, 1991; Small Congregations: New and Selected Poems, 1993; Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler, 1998; Slave Moth: A Narrative in Verse, 2004; Tokyo Butter: A Search for Forms of Deidre, 2006

Type of work: Poetry

A Complex Poet of Wide Range

Thylias Rebecca Brasier Moss, who was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1954, has been hailed by the poet Charles Simic as “a major figure in contemporary American poetry.” Part of the reason for Moss’s steadily growing reputation as a poet and for her steadily growing audience is the unusually wide range of formal styles, voices, and subject matters that make up the poems in her books. Although Moss was once considered by critics and by fellow poets such as Marilyn Hacker as primarily an angry and defiant poet whose creativity stemmed from her bitterness over the oppression of African Americans, women, and members of the working class, Moss’s poetry is by no means composed strictly of hostile statements about what Hacker called “the black truths behind white lies.” Moss’s fourth book, Rainbow Remnants in Rock Bottom Ghetto Sky, which was selected by Simic for the National Poetry Series, particularly reveals her wide emotional range. Moss’s poetry embraces love, friendship, and visionary and religious experiences, as well as the political themes found in such poems as “Lunch Counter Poem,” which reflects Moss’s memories of the struggle endured by African Americans to achieve civil rights through the protest movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s.

Moss believes that her poetry has gained in technical control since her first book, Hosiery Seams on a Bowlegged Woman, appeared in 1983. She was not yet thirty and had only recently graduated from the University of New Hampshire’s master’s degree program in English. Her work expresses a sense of personal hopefulness and exuberance while remaining sensitive to the difficulties of maintaining this optimism as an African American living in a country with a painful history of racial conflict. Moss’s optimism about life, the sanctity she finds in everyday experiences, and her feeling for community and for continuity between familial generations stem from her often delightful and nurturing experiences as a child. Moss grew up in what literary scholar Gerri Bates has described as “a stable, working-class environment in Cleveland.” Her mother was a maid, and her father worked for a tire company. Moss’s affection for her mother caused her to dedicate her third book, the National Book Critics Circle Award nominee Pyramid of Bone, to a woman who, Moss writes, “made it to the dean’s list of preferred housekeepers; she is a maid of honor.”

Mother and Daughter

Moss’s sensitivity to the depth and complexities of the relationship between mother and daughter is especially poignant in the poem that opens Pyramid of Bone, “One for All Newborns.” While the poem’s speaker relishes the joy and hopefulness of a new birth (“Everything about it was wonderful”), this poem also reflects Moss’s awareness as a mother of her own children that tensions inevitably surround the mother-daughter relationship, especially as the daughter reaches toward her own maturity. In the poem, the speaker realizes that her personal growth implies her mother’s loss of unquestioned authority:

Then the dark succession of constricting years,mother competing with daughter for beauty and losing,varicose veins and hot water bottles, joy boiled away.................and the less familiar gait of grown progeny.

The poet is here dealing with a memory of conflict with her mother, but later in the poem Moss hints that this memory was precipitated by her feelings of sadness and guilt over her mother’s recent death. On a delayed flight home to her own daughter, Moss begins to feel remorse that she did not treat her mother as well as she might have: “I am now at the age where I must begin to pay/ for the way I treated my mother. My daughter is just like me.” The last three lines shift the poem’s terms away from Moss’s relationship to her mother and toward her relationship to “another parent”:

I treated God badly also; he is another parentwatching his kids through a window, eager to be proudof his creation, looking for signs of spring.

The integration of secular and religious relationships in this poem is reminiscent of the unified vision found in the religious lyrics of seventeenth century English metaphysical poets such as John Donne and George Herbert. Like Moss, these poets often described their relationship to deity by using a deeply personal language usually reserved for secular love relationships. Moss’s infusion of a theological, or at least a spiritual, dimension to her everyday relationships with friends and family is a consistent feature of many of her poems. The title poem to her third book, At Redbones, which is named for a local gathering place that combined the roles of church and club, again suggests the importance of community and place in Moss’s background and in her poetry, as well as the interrelationship she experiences between sacred and secular community.

A Difficult Childhood

Although Moss’s poetry often conveys a sense of the marvelous and the mysterious aspects of the ordinary experiences of childhood, she also stresses how difficult it was for her to grow up with dark skin in Cleveland, Ohio, in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, when the privileged models of youthful beauty in fables, fairy stories, and popular culture (such as Snow White and Heidi) were not often related to her own physical appearance. In “Lessons from a Mirror” and “The Wreckage on the Wall of Eggs,” two poems from Pyramid of Bone, Moss recalls how easy it was for her to feel invisible in a society that placed an exclusive value on white skin and, in turn, how easy it was for her to resent other girls in her neighborhood only because their skin was white. In “The Wreckage on the Wall of Eggs,” Moss recalls jumping rope in her driveway and noting the “hundreds of girls/ perfect for the part of Heidi.” Because she realized that her ancestry “would not lead to Dörfli/ in the Alps,” Moss writes, she found it easy to resent the white “girls who couldn’t control ancestry.” Her mature response to her youthful recognition that her skin color would alienate her from accepted models of beauty is, paradoxically, to experience regret that she “can’t hate Heidi well.” Moss recalls the story of Humpty Dumpty as a metaphor to describe her own situation as a young girl segregated from other children. Through this conversion of a fairy tale to her own purposes, Moss is able to recognize a connection between her fundamental nature and that of the white children whom she once envied:

When I look down at the wreckage on the wall of eggs thatcame out of me, I see that what’s inside is as white andgold as Heidi.

In Moss’s poetry, events that might be interpreted by others as violent, dreadful, or tragic are often construed as containing the potential for salvation or beauty. In this instance, the young girl’s fall and her literal breaking apart reveal an “inside” that is equivalent to the valuable “outside” of the girls who could fit the part of Heidi.

In her fourth book of poems, Rainbow Remnants in Rock Bottom Ghetto Sky, Moss concentrates her attention on the mysterious rituals of youth that might otherwise be overlooked as insignificant experiences but that are understood by the poet to have been formative expressions of friendship and love. Moss’s early relationships shaped her adult perceptions and influenced her mature affection for children. “Poem for My Mothers and Other Makers of Asafetida” reveals that Moss’s embrace of all types of experience in her poetry, whether pleasant or unpleasant, is derived from her mother’s and her grandmother’s saying that it is “maybe possible to have so much/ death can’t take it all.” Moss’s childhood experiences have influenced not only her subject matter but also her literary style. Her affection for the rhymes, repetitions, and speech rhythms found in children’s chants and games is often evident in her poetry. Rainbow Remnants in Rock Bottom Ghetto Sky consists of many poems that are filled with the rhythms and music, the sounds, and the ritual games of children at play.

Moss’s “Better Eyes”

“An Anointing” is an excellent example of Moss’s ability to combine her impulse to tell stories about her own past in an incantatory rhythm that is related to a child’s speech with her training in traditional forms of English poetry. Besides being a child’s chant, “An Anointing” is also a dramatic monologue, or a narrative poem spoken in a voice other than that of the poet. Often, as in the case of the nineteenth century English poet Robert Browning’s “Fra Lippo Lippi,” which concerns the life of a painter in Renaissance Italy, the poet uses the dramatic monologue to capture the intimacy and nuance of a character from a distant time and place. In “An Anointing,” however, Moss uses the dramatic monologue form to recapture the voice and vision of the world of Thylias Moss as a young girl. “An Anointing” is also a love poem, but Moss turns this traditional motif into a celebration of the special affection between two young girls who are best friends: a first-person speaker, referred to in the poem as “Me,” and her virtual identical twin, “Molly.” The image and anecdotes Moss uses to suggest their closeness reveals one of her mature strengths as a writer. Charles Simic has argued that this strength stems from her “better eyes,” by which he means her skill at finding precise yet unusual visual images to convey her emotional life in a colorful and indelible way.

“Boys have to slash their fingers to become brothers. Girls trade/ their Kotex, me and Molly do in the mall’s public facility.” In this opening stanza, Moss converts the violent and shopworn image of blood brothers into a startling image appropriate for two young women. The sharing of the mystery of menstruation is the perfect way to suggest the depth of the bond between them. The beginning of menstruation indicates both the growth of the young girls into womanhood and the possibility of their bearing children, a subject that Moss comments upon in other poems, including “One for All Newborns” and “Preferable Truth.”

The opening image of the trading of the brand-name good “Kotex” in a shopping mall illustrates another aspect of Moss’s originality and freshness. The setting is by itself a statement about where young people spend much of their time and money in a consumer economy in which brand-name goods abound; these brand names become markers that, taken together, convey a sense of personal identity and a collective past.

An anointing usually refers to the application onto the body of oil at a sacred rite, such as the election of a person to a sacred office. In the context of the poem, however, this act is an induction into the role of womanhood and childbearing. It is also the induction of the speaker into liberation from social stereotyping. A part of the poem’s pleasure is that Molly and her friend form a kind of self-sufficient community of two. They help each other find the strength and the confidence to “go as who we are” and to “go as what we are”: “Me and Molly don’t care what people think. We’re just glad that/ they do.”

While these lines suggest the pithiness, warmth, and infectious energy of a child whose life has been sheltered from the ways the world can hurt those most vulnerable to its dangers, other poems in Rainbow Remnants in Rock Bottom Ghetto Sky that are spoken in the mature poet’s own voice do not share this tone of innocence. Moss is a public writer who also uses her poetry to call attention to the outrages of the African American experience, from chattel slavery to the Jim Crow laws of the American South to the lynching and burning of African Americans by the Ku Klux Klan in the 1950’s.

Public Poetry

In “The Place That Makes Presidents,” Moss meditates about the African American experience from the setting of a Protestant church in Massachusetts. Within the context of this site of “history,” “tradition,” and “solitude,” the “noisy violence” of the lives of contemporary African Americans living in the predominantly black Boston neighborhoods of Roxbury and Mattapan have no place to be heard. The “old theft” of slavery and the “acquisition of the continent” by white settlers through violence are erased within the pious settings of “Pilgrim privilege” and “Yankee superiority.” “Quietly a crime becomes heroic,” Moss writes.

In “Interpretation of a Poem by Frost,” Moss rewrites the American poet Robert Frost’s famous poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” (1923) from the perspective of “a young black girl” who finds herself trespassing on the property of a white landowner:

A young black girl stopped by the woods,so young she knew only one man: Jim Crowbut she wasn’t allowed to call him Mister.The woods were his and she respected his boundarieseven in the absence of fence.

Moss’s ability to turn Frost’s poem inside out allows her to express a new way of looking at life, a new way of thinking about an issue from an unexpected perspective. This type of conversion is a general strategy that Moss uses to make poetry out of familiar materials. It is also her strategy for turning scenes of oppression or despair into starting points for poetic insights and for displays of her strength as a poet.

A good example of Moss’s ability to turn inside out a negative or unpleasant experience in her own life and to remake it into an image of beauty occurs in “The Rapture of Dry Ice Burning Off Skin as the Moment of the Soul’s Apotheosis.” As in “An Anointing,” Moss uses sacred terminology to describe secular events in an unexpectedly heightened way. “Apotheosis” is a term gathered from religious discourse that refers to the moment when an ordinary person is elevated to divine status. The fact that this elevation occurs in her poem through an unpleasant and painful event—dry ice burning off skin—is consistent with Moss’s general strategy of transforming unpleasant experiences into events of special, possibly sacred, significance.

“The Rapture of Dry Ice Burning Off Skin as the Moment of the Soul’s Apotheosis” expresses the poet’s empathetic relationship to the near-extinct buffaloes and to drug addicts whose habits bring them, like the buffaloes, near to the edge of extinction. Within this wide-ranging meditation about such weighty topics, however, a brief anecdote appears that encapsulates Moss’s tendency to convert everyday, mundane experience into the spectacular:

Every time I use itthe umbrella is turned inside out,metal veins, totally hardened arteries and survivalwithout anything flowing within, nothing sayinglife came from the sea, from anywhere but coincidenceor God’s ulcer, revealed. Yet also, inside outthe umbrella tries to be a bouquet, or at leastthe rugged wrapping for one that must endure much. . . .

In this vignette, the relatively minor discomfort of living in a world that is not always kind—the world of nasty weather—reveals to Moss an ambiguous image that contains within it both chaos and beauty. In one sense, the upturned umbrella reveals a frightening image of decay. The metal ribs of the destroyed umbrella are described as veins and hardened arteries. The destroyed umbrella, however, also causes Moss to think about an image of natural beauty and of human endurance in the face of difficulty. The umbrella reminds her of bouquets, and the rugged wrapping is a thing capable of endurance. Although the image is based in an ordinary ordeal, the process of thinking about it poetically—that is, as a metaphor for something else that is described through images—enlarges and enhances a reader’s sense of the world as it is. In “The Rapture of Dry Ice Burning Off Skin as the Moment of the Soul’s Apotheosis,” the experience of lacking something, the experience of heartbreak, is described as “glorious” and “marvelous” because it is an experience of intense emotion. Moss believes it is necessary to record in her poetry experiences of intense emotion, whether of great joy or of great sadness, because these experiences are fundamental signs of humanity.

Moss’s ability to connect everyday experiences, ethnic history, pain and triumph, while showing their interdependence, is also evident in her memoir, Tale of a Sky-Blue Dress (1998). Vividly and lyrically, Moss takes readers through the joy as well as the pain of her life, most notably her early school days at a racially mixed elementary school—where she was nurtured, challenged, and able to relish learning—and her subsequent transfer in the fourth grade to a nearly all white school, where she was almost invisible as an African American child from whom little was expected. Even though she eventually transcended her withdrawal at the later school from the very thing she loved—imagination and creativity—and punctured the glass ceiling, the impact of these experiences on her writings seems clear. In a book report on Anne Frank, Moss speculated on the interdependence of Anne’s eventual fame and the tragedy that befell the young girl. Even as a young student, Moss recognized the impact tragedy can have on life: Without her own years of invisibility, Moss’s essence as a social poet, playwright, and book author might have taken on a different dimension. Even the abuse she suffered at the hands of her babysitter, who often wore a “blue dress” that appeared too small, seems to illustrate the interdependence of Moss’s life experiences and her writings. Another example of this interplay and Moss’s appreciation for youth and their struggles is apparent in her children’s books: I Want to Be (1993), in which the imagination of the main character teaches children to reach for the stars, and Some One Else Right Now (1997), in which a mother and daughter muse about their own love as well as love around the world.

Continually evolving and analyzing linguistic expressions, Moss, a professor of English at the University of Michigan since 1992, is known as the mother of limited fork poetics (LFP), an approach that teaches that all events utilize and must be examined from multiple senses—the visual (including textual), sonic, tactile, and olfactory, as well as digital, virtual, and architectural systems. Using a fork—a common object—as the central metaphorical focus, Moss theorizes the matter on the fork is just as influential as what falls through its cracks. Each time the fork is used, the combination changes, suggesting that events and systems are dynamic, constantly in flux, and not confined by strict boundaries. However, Moss’s Slave Moth: A Narrative in Verse (2004), Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler (1998), and Small Congregations: New and Selected Poems (1993) pre-date LFP, since they contain poems and not “Poams,” a term Moss uses to denote boundary products that do not conform to more static forms of expression. While Tokyo Butter (2006) also contains poems, the influence of LFP is evident. Proliferation of LFP and “forkergirl” Web logs confirms LFP’s acceptance across a variety of creative forms, including music, videos, and other media. Moss’s influence inside and outside academia and literature is notable, and she has won numerous awards in recognition of her contributions to American and African American literature, including a Guttenheim Award, McArthur Fellowship, Witter Bynner Award for Poetry, and Whiting Writer’s Award.

Bibliography

Auburt, Alvin. Review of At Redbones and Rainbow Remnants in Rock Bottom Ghetto Sky, by Thylias Moss. American Book Review 13 (February/March, 1992): 29. Praises Moss’s development of an “assertive poetic voice” that is reminiscent of Ishmael Reed’s but nevertheless “very much her own.”

Brouwer, Joel. “Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler.” In Boston Review: A Political and Literary Forum (October/November, 1998). Uses Moss’s “A Shoe in the Road” and “Sour Milk” to illustrate her passion, intellectual stamina, and expansiveness—considered her strengths as well as her weaknesses at times.

Dance, Daryl Cumber, ed. Hush Honey! An Anthology of African American Woman’s Humor. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. Examines humor among a variety of genres. Moss’s “Lessons from a Mirror” and “A Reconsideration of the Blackbird” are included in a chapter titled “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: A Black Woman’s Physical Image.”

Fink, Thomas. “Problematizing Visibility.” In A Different Sense of Power: Problems of Community in Later Twentieth-Century U.S. Poetry. Madison, N.J.: Farleigh Dickson University Press, 2001. Analyzes the works of diverse poets who address social issues. Moss is discussed extensively in the introduction and the first chapter on visual images in U.S. pop culture.

Hegaman, Tonya. “Slave Moth: A Narrative in Verse.” Black Issues Book Review, September/October, 2004. Overview and positive review of Moss’s single-poem narrative, with descriptions of the main characters and their relationships.

Lee, Valerie, ed. The Prentice Hall Anthology of African American Women’s Literature. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2005. Comprehensive collection of writings that includes two poems by Moss, “The Warmth of Hot Chocolate” and “Remembering Kitchens.” A brief biography is given to place the poems in their historical contexts.

Moss, Thylias. Tale of a Sky-Blue Dress. New York: Bard, 1998. Moss’s memoir is necessary reading for anyone wanting to appreciate Moss’s complex ideas, passion, and writings.

Silberman, Eve. “Thylias Moss: A Poet of Many Voices and a Spellbinding Delivery.” Michigan Today 27, no. 3 (October, 1995). Provides highlights from a poetry reading by Moss and includes a review of her history and a discussion of Moss as an African American poet and her impact.

Smith, Dinitia. “On Your Marks, Get Set, Poeticize: Dueling Poets on the Web.” The New York Times, May 29, 2006. Discusses an online “contest” in which Moss and a fellow poet were given fifteen minutes to construct a poem online with Web viewers “watching.”

Winston, Jay. “The Trickster Metaphysics of Thylias Moss.” In Trickster Lives: Culture and Myth in American Fiction, edited by Jeanne Campbell Reesman. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001. Examines several of Moss’s poems to illustrate and interpret her use of trickster characters, who can be pranksters or saviors offering glimpses into one’s psyche.