The Poetry of Walker by Alice Walker

First published:Once: Poems, 1968; Revolutionary Petunias, and Other Poems, 1973; Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning: Poems, 1979; Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful, 1984; Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems, 1965-1990 Complete, 1991; Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth: New Poems, 2003; A Poem Traveled Down My Arm: Poem and Drawings, 2003

Type of work: Poetry

Poetry’s Restorative Power

Although it is less well known than her fiction, Alice Walker’s poetry is integral to her development as a writer. The restorative power of poetry, Walker claims, has continually saved her from hopelessness and suicide. In her poetry, Walker records intensely felt emotions, purging her psyche of stultifying mental states that could hamper growth. Written out of firsthand experience, Walker’s poetry reveals a sensitive African American intellectual coming to terms with disparate strands of her own existence. Along with her other literary achievements, essays, and long and short fiction, Walker’s poetry is a significant contribution to American letters, expressing the African American female consciousness.

The work with which Walker’s name is most often associated is the epistolary novel The Color Purple (1982), for which she won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize. Steven Spielberg, the well-known director of such films as E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), directed the film adaptation of the book, catapulting Walker to international celebrity status. Having been writing for fifteen years before the publication of The Color Purple, Walker had been known mainly among literary audiences as one of a number of African American writers who became visible in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. With The Color Purple, Walker’s niche as a writer was secured. A skillfully written story about the travails of Celie, a black woman living in the South under oppression imposed by whites and by black males, the novel is a poignant commentary on the spiritual liberation of Celie. For the most part, Walker’s writing, controversial in its portrayal of character, has evoked strong reaction.

Given the circumstances of Walker’s early life, it seemed unlikely that the young girl would overcome poverty and deprivation to become an educated woman, much less a noted writer. Born February 9, 1944, Alice was the eighth and last child of Willie Lee Walker and Minnie Tallulah Grant Walker, sharecroppers earning about three hundred dollars a year working in the cotton fields of Eatonton, Georgia. An eye injury Walker suffered when she was eight helped steer her to a literary life. Self-conscious of the resulting scar tissue and impaired vision, Walker, although prom queen as well as class valedictorian, became reflective, turning her attention to reading, observing people, and writing poems, unwittingly developing a writer’s sensibility.

Paradoxically, it was also the eye injury that enabled Walker to go to college by entitling her to a scholarship to Spelman College, an elite African American women’s school in Atlanta. Walker became active in civil rights activities while in Atlanta. She felt stifled by the conservatism at Spelman, so she transferred to Sarah Lawrence College, an exclusive women’s school in Bronxville, New York. While at Sarah Lawrence, Walker gained the education and exposure she needed to master her craft. Her literary talents were soon noticed, and Walker won fellowships to various writing conferences. By 1967, Walker was on her way to a professional writing career, finding several outlets for her work. While a contributing editor to Ms. magazine, Walker published short pieces with feminist overtones. The poet Muriel Rukeyser, one of Walker’s teachers at Sarah Lawrence, took a special interest in her writing and sent it to an editor at Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, resulting in 1968 in her first publication, Once, a volume of poems. Throughout her career, Alice Walker has continued to write in different genres, moving outward to create fiction and then inward to create essays and poetry.

An All-Encompassing Vision

The range of topics in Alice Walker’s poetry can be described as anything with which the poet has come in contact. Thus, themes in her work include her rich African American heritage, failures and successes in relationships, the ramifications of living in a family and in a community, and social and political issues. Walker often denounces racial injustice and prejudice, sometimes showing anger and resentment toward the oppressors without becoming militant. Convictions are strong, but they remain part of a process, as if Walker is continually listening to her own voice, then adjusting volume and tone so that she might best achieve a mature perspective. Even in poems written about specific instances of prejudice, although Walker shows indignation, her ultimate conclusion is that change must take place within the individual, that only those with myopic vision believe that wholesale racial reform can be imposed from without.

Always confessional, Walker’s poetry closely resembles the art form she envies most, music; like the musician, she strives to achieve unity with her creation. For Walker, this effort translates into capturing the poet’s authentic feelings, including all nuances of emotion, in her poems. The effect is both a strength and a weakness, as the resulting poems are often vigorous yet sometimes overly sentimental. A reader may suspect that what Walker says of journal writing also can be said of her poetry: “In my journal/ I thought I could/ capture/ everything. . . .” To project personal reality, Walker exercises stylistic freedom, creating free verse that is often prosaic rather than rhythmic. In her effort to write realistically, Walker avoids symbolic language, preferring language that is colloquial and direct, candid, expressive, and generally forceful. With a predilection for terseness, Walker forges lines that are straightforward, free of flourishes and decoration.

Walker’s stories and novels are populated by characters who might be tangentially related to the author, but the persona of her poetry is the voice of the speaker. In her poetry, Walker works through personal conflict, feelings, moods, and concerns, thus freely exposing the self. All Walker’s poetry can be viewed as a self-study. In fact, in her fifth volume of poetry, a compilation of Walker’s first four books of poetry, some uncollected poems, and some never-before-published pieces titled Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems, 1965-1990 Complete, readers are encouraged to read the poems as a narrative of Walker’s past. She has even added contextual prefaces that explain the biographical circumstances of each book of poems.

Writing Between Two Worlds

In the preface to Once, Walker explains that she wrote most of the collection’s poems while sitting under a tree in Kenya; the others she wrote at Sarah Lawrence. The voice in this book is that of a young idealist whose desire to understand herself takes her to Africa, to the inner workings of romantic relationships and to experiences with racial prejudice in the South. Walker communicates the grandeur of the African landscape through description and the unobtrusive posture she takes. She observes and then recedes into the background. Commentary is minimal; imagery tells all. There is indirect commentary, however, as in these lines, “Holding three fingers/ The African Child/ Looked up at me/ The sky was very/ Blue.” An obvious problem for Walker is her relationship to her African heritage. With her usual wry humor, Walker writes of African custom and ritual; she mimics her own pretentiousness in reenacting the life of the African nobility as she says, “I try to be a native/ queen,” then she observes a giraffe that “turns up/ his nose” at the sham. Aware that she will never reconcile her two geographical selves, Walker describes a Harvard-educated friend in Africa whose education, like her own, pales in comparison to the vastness of the continent. Walker is aware of the incongruity, just as she is aware of many incongruities in Africa; to convey inconsistency, Walker uses juxtaposition, as in the poem that shows a “Noble Savage” with infected pierced ears.

Often, Walker uses the element of surprise, which works well in poems about love and home as well as in those about Africa. In her title poem “Once,” one vignette presents a young white civil rights worker who disowns her racist mother; in another poem, Walker brazenly announces, “I/ never liked/ white folks/ really.” Such forthrightness is characteristic of Walker’s poetic voice, which unrestrainedly addresses such issues as abortion, interracial dating, and suicide.

An increasingly mature vision marks Walker’s second book of poems, Revolutionary Petunias, and Other Poems, for which she received a National Book Award. In the introductory background essay to these poems in Her Blue Body Everything We Know, Walker explains that the context of these poems is her return to the South from New York, where she had been working for the city welfare department. In Revolutionary Petunias, Walker embraces her native African American culture, acknowledging that it possesses wisdom as well as life-sustaining rhythms. She indicates in a poem describing her grandmother’s funeral a desire to transmit her own cultural richness to her daughter. With originality and grace, Walker writes affectionately of family, describing men so in tune to the life cycle that they naturally know how to “gently swing/ A casket,” and the women, or “Headragged Generals,” who, though uneducated, “knew what we/ Must know.”

Walker carefully culls her memories, suggesting that she is poised between two worlds, like the sister in “For My Sister Molly Who in the Fifties” whose relationship to her family once she has left it for wider vistas becomes precarious. Bringing knowledge and manners to those who have never left home, as Molly does, brings both admiration and disdain. Certainly, Walker knows how being enlightened is enhancing and threatening. Walker is also wise enough to see herself in the old women in the poem who sing with cracked voices about Jesus. Another sign of understanding is evident in Walker’s multiple references to spiritual forces outside herself that she cannot control, references that indicate that Walker is becoming increasingly comfortable with the inexplicable and with uncertainty. Taking the position of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, Walker perceives the theme of search as a mandate, announcing, “I must love the questions.”

This second book of poems is also stylistically more mature than the earlier work. Gone are excessive pathos and the overabundant use of dashes of the first book. Images are sharper and wittier; some lines with their clever playfulness are reminiscent of Emily Dickinson, as in one monologue in which the persona states “Coincidence makes me laugh/ out loud.” Several poems addressed to lovers, including the poem dedicated to her husband Mel, show passion and romance as revolutionary forces. Bridging racial and cultural barriers to marry the young Jewish lawyer, whom she had met while they were both working in a voter registration campaign in New York, Walker creates lyrics in protest of the status quo in which love is “unfashionable” and some relationships “forbidden.” That resistance is both natural and necessary is underscored by the emblem of revolutionary petunias, bold blossoms commonly found in southern gardens, that are impervious to any “Elemental Crush.”

Poetry of Loss

Two landmark events, the breakup of her marriage and the death of her father, guided the poetic voice in Alice Walker’s third volume of poetry, Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning: Poems, through the grief process. The sections in the book, beginning with “Confession” and ending with “Forgiveness,” expressly re-create the pain necessarily suffered in the process of coping with loss. To describe the dissolution of a love relationship, Walker uses pointed questions, monologue, and dialogue, honestly conveying anger, fear, and pain. In the section entitled “Early Losses: A Requiem,” Walker delves into a lifetime of bereavement. A poem examining an early loss of love, an expression of guilt following a father’s death, and lyrics about the death of Malcolm X are included. As Walker explores the deaths of loved ones, she seeks to understand their impact on her present and future existence. Regret, a sentiment associated with life and death processes, is openly expressed in these poems. The lesson that the speaker hears in the title poem is one of acceptance and understated hope, for as Alice Walker’s mother speaks the parting words to her husband, “Good night, Willie Lee, I’ll see you/ in the morning,” the healing process of forgiveness has already begun.

Dedicating her fourth volume of poetry, Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful, to her Cherokee great-grandmother and her white great-great-grandfather, Walker resurrects these family members, believing that their existence is closely tied to her own and that they may shed light on her own identity. In the book’s dedication, she addresses them saying “the meaning of your lives/ is still/ unfolding.” Walker focuses especially on her Native American ancestry, sensing that her own reverence for plants, trees, the sun, and the earth can be traced to the reverence Native Americans held for a harmonious relationship with nature (the book’s title is taken from a speech by a Native American). In the poem “These Days,” Walker enumerates many friends for whom she hopes “the earth can be saved. ” A consistent theme is the lamentation of destruction, whether it is the deterioration of the planet or the degradation of women. While her message and intent are unmistakable, Walker’s tone does show some musicality and mellowing as her universe expands backward into personal history and forward to the future of the globe.

A Return to Poetry

Walker’s sixth volume of poetry, Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth (2003), is divided into seventeen sections, each devoted to a specific realm of the human condition, ranging from war and destruction to love and forgiveness. The publication followed a significant hiatus during which the author did not compose poems. Over a decade had passed since the publication of Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful, and Walker had expressed doubt that she would return to the genre. Despite Walker’s claim that she had left poetry, poetry had not left Walker. In her preface to her first twenty-first century collection of poems, she acknowledges, “Unlike ’writing,’ poetry chooses when it will be expressed, how it will be expressed, and under what circumstances.”

Two events, one external and horrific, one internal and healing, compelled Walker’s return to poetry: the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon building on September 11, 2001, and the poet’s immersion into the study of Native American plant rituals. Walker portrays the events of September 11 as the end of America’s self-absorbed innocence. Some poems address what happened in New York City on that day; others, what happened overseas in Afghanistan and Iraq in response. In “Falling Bodies,” Walker describes people leaping hand in hand from the burning Trade Center. She sees in this final act a true connection between human beings and, with it, hope for the future. She observes, “Everything/ It is/ Necessary/ To Understand/ They mastered/ In the last/ Rich/ Moments/ That/ They Owned.” Later in the poem, she muses about a pilot and a hijacker, wondering whether they too might have grasped hands in their final moments. In “Thousands of Feet Below You,” Walker narrates the efforts of a young boy to evade a bomb discharged from a military plane. The narrator speaks to the bomber directly; he is the “you” of the title. She requests that, upon his return home, he set a place at his mother’s table for the boy he has killed. Walker suggests that the bomber, too distant to know who or what he is destroying with his weapon, has, in the discharge of his duties, killed his own innocence, becoming simultaneously bomber and boy. The final image of thwarted communion, a meal that cannot possibly occur because the boy has been blown apart, reminds readers of a shared humanity disrupted by acts of war.

As a counterpoint or possibly an antidote to Walker’s poems about the human capacity to destroy, poems about the regenerative properties of the earth, particularly its plant life, occur in greater measure. In “At First It Is True, I Thought There Were Only Peaches & Wild Grapes,” Walker relishes the bounty of fresh fruits and their myriad tastes, colors, and textures. Another poem, “Backyard, Careyes” resembles haiku in its exquisitely simple form and intensely pleasurable image: “Lying grateful/ Under a tree/ Wind blows./ Yellow leaves/ Cover me./ Gold/ Leaf shower.” The image of the narrator buried in gold leaves implies a bond between woman and nature and portends her eventual return to the earth in death. “My Friend Yeshi” both praises a midwife who, following a midlife crisis, returns to deliver more babies into the world and marvels at the earth’s ability to nurture all the species it contains. “The Climate of the Southern Hemisphere” is Walker’s tribute to her choice of an ideal locale. Other poems express concern about an imperiled environment. “Despite the Hunger” and “A Native Person Looks Up from the Plate” emphasize that ownership of the earth and its resources is a delusion people must dispel if they are to continue.

Walker’s seventh collection, A Poem Traveled Down My Arm (2003), is a compilation of poems and drawings with an unusual genesis. Fatigued and bored by the process of presigning hundreds of sheets of paper to be bound into advance copies of Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth, Walker found herself doodling with her pen instead of signing. Her autograph transformed itself into whimsical images, many of animal shapes, and she was struck by their resemblance to folk-art drawings. Instead of writing her name, Walker began to compose short poems, often containing the same whimsical qualities as the illustrations. These poems and drawings become the impetus for A Poem Traveled Down My Arm.

The poems in this collection are among Walker’s briefest. Composed of relatively few words and lines, the poems appear in columns down the left or right hand margins of the pages, many accompanied by related drawings. The poem that announces “Who dives/ knows/ water/ ways” is accompanied by an illustration of two fanciful fish. Many entries appear in the form of epigrams or pithy statements. As the poems are untitled, it is often unclear where one stops and another begins. The poems’ fluidity, reminiscent of stream-of-consciousness writing, allows the entire volume to be read as one continuous rumination on human life in its various facets.

Despite their brevity, these poems carry philosophical weight as they express the poet’s ruminations on life. In her late fifties when she composed this volume, Walker speaks as both wise woman and elder as she offers observations on a diversity of topics: love, friendship, war, oppression, culture, the environment, and significant personages, including Virginia Woolf, Albert Einstein, Nelson Mandela, and Frederick Douglas. The three men share a poem in which Walker comically links their genius to their unruly hair. Some entries pose conundrums: “The straight/ path/ follows/ an endless/ curve”; in others, the message is more direct: “To remember/ is/ to plan.” In this volume, Walker embodies a modern-day Confucius, offering advice and perhaps wisdom to readers.

Walker’s highly personal poetry, to some extent her own shrine that draws readers into an intimate relationship, is at once art, process, and struggle. Affirmation, sometimes triumphantly proclaimed, is temporary, yielding to pessimism in a continuous cycle. Walker’s poetry mirrors the ongoing dialectic of hope and despair. Even the poetic process, which Walker describes as “Having to almost die/ before some weird light/ comes creeping through,” involves an act of faith in the redeeming power of words.

Bibliography

Bloom, Harold, ed. Alice Walker. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2002. Includes a biography and overview of Walker’s work, along with critical essays by significant scholars.

Coleman, Jeffrey Lamar. “Revolutionary Stanzas: The Civil and Human Rights Poetry of Alice Walker.” In Critical Essays on Alice Walker, edited by Ikenna Dieke. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1999. Focuses on how Walker addresses civil rights, particularly those of women, in selected poems.

Davis, Thadious. “Poetry as Preface to Fiction.” In Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives, Past and Present, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Kwame Anthony Appiah. New York: Amistad Press, 1993. Views Walker’s poetry as subtext for her novels and short fiction.

Dieke, Ikenna. “Alice Walker: Poesy and the Earthling Psyche.” In Critical Essays on Alice Walker, edited by Ikenna Dieke. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1999. Explores Walker’s use of mimesis, the representation of human emotions, in her poetry.

Walker, Alice. “Alice Walker: Engaging the World.” Interview. Literary Cavalcade 57, no. 8 (May, 2005): 28. Walker discusses her literary origins and what books have taught her about humanity.

Walker, Alice. “Alice Walker: ’I Know What the Earth Says.’” Interview by Ferris Williams. Southern Cultures 10, no. 1 (Spring, 2004): 5-24. Transcriptions of recorded conversation with Alice Walker in which she discusses her fondness for music and describes her life as a writer. Includes photographs.

Weston, Ruth. “Who Touches This Touches a Woman: The Naked Self in Alice Walker.” In Critical Essays on Alice Walker, edited by Ikenna Dieke. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1999. Compares Walker’s poems to those by Walt Whitman, noting similarities in the poets’ portrayals of the unclothed human form.

White, Evelyn. Alice Walker: A Life. New York: Norton, 2004. Expansive literary biography that places Walker’s life and writing in their historical contexts, including the poet’s participation in the Civil Rights and women’s movements. Considers the impact of Walker’s work on American culture.

Worsham, Fabian Clements. “The Politics of Matrilineage: Mothers and Daughters in the Poetry of African American Women, 1965-1985.” In Women of Color: Mother-Daughter Relationships in Twentieth-Century Literature, edited by Elizabeth Brown-Guillory. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. Discusses Walker’s poetry in terms of its presentation of relationships between mothers and daughters.