LINE LEVEL #8

By Frontier Poetry | July 15, 2024

Welcome to LINE LEVEL: Craft Lessons from Poets of Color, a monthly column in which writer, editor, and educator Joanna Acevedo zooms in on an element of craft from the work of BIPOC poets. LINE LEVEL unfolds in three parts: an excerpt of a poem, followed by a contributor’s note, followed by Acevedo’s own exploration into the poet’s world of language. Guided by a curiosity that yields learning, we are invited to consider historical context, stylistic influences, and more, all the way down to the level of the line. This month, Acevedo discusses excerpts from American Graphic, forthcoming in December 2024 from Green Linden Press, by JoAnne McFarland.

A call and response with excerpts from A Domestic Cook Book, self–published in 1866 by Malinda Russell, the first known cookbook published by a Black woman in the United States.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

(from the cookbook):

I have made Cooking my employment for the last twenty years, in the first families of Tennessee, (my native place) Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky. I know my Receipts to be good, as they have always given satisfaction. I have been advised to have my Receipts published, as they are valuable, and every family has use for them.

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Use

(ingredients)

Every woman has a use

Every woman has a fuse

A woman who refuses must still eat

A refusal to eat is a death sentence

A sentence puts death in order 

A meal is a promise of care made from

yolks

A woman is expected

to care

Not every family has use for

a woman who wants

more

Sometimes a series of bites 

swallows everything

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Every woman has a tongue

Her appetite can be a death sentence

A sentence is a system of

yokes

A woman is expected to

yield

to never want

more

Some bites

swallow

fields

Contributor’s Note // JoAnne McFarland

I believe that violence and creativity are opposites. Violence, propelled by the past, by belief systems that already exist, seeks to preserve the status quo. By its very definition, creativity is the process of using what we have now to invent the future.

In the Ingredients section of my collection American Graphic, cooking represents the ultimate creative act, and hunger is the most erotic impulse. I use Malinda Russell’s 1866 recipes, so specific and generous, to explore how poems get made, and how violence against women continues. A woman who unashamedly follows her own desires is often viewed as a threat to the social order.

Each piece in Ingredients consists of three parts: Russell’s text, my list of ingredients (essentially the first draft of a poem), and then the final meal/poem. 

The list of ingredients serves as a way to ‘show my work’, as math teachers used to make us do in grade school. The reader can figure out, pretty easily, how each line leads to the next, since the line that follows has words or ideas from the previous one.

The draft makes its own heat and light, is as alive, as erotic as the final poem. I hope the reader realizes that they too can make magic from the very same ingredients.

Craft Lessons from Poets of Color //  Joanna Acevedo

In American Graphic, JoAnne McFarland brings so-called “found text,” to its new and natural progression, using the material from Malinda Russell’s A Domestic Cook Book from 1866. As McFarland notes, this is the first known cookbook published by a Black woman in the US. 

Russell’s text is a jumping off point for McFarland; found text can take all kinds of forms and be incredibly generative. For McFarland it’s clearly been not only generative but radically inspiring. The concept of “ingredients,” for poetry feels warm and inviting, and McFarland herself notes that in her manuscript, cooking is the most creative act. The ingredients of the poem that McFarland is sharing with us as readers are actually just the drafts she is assembling from these found snippets she is collecting, and as we examine them closely, we can begin to easily see the relationship between the different parts and how they lead to each other. 

Found elements can come in all kinds, and they have been a part of contemporary writing at least since the beginning of the 20th century. The Beats were famous for their cut-ups and erasures, a common example, and famous writers like T.S. Eliot added all kinds of found elements into their poetry. If you look in the back of any contemporary book of poetry, you’ll find notes which detail all the moments that your particular poet took from someone else. 

In the writing and sharing of American Graphic, McFarland is being incredibly generous. She’s allowing us as readers into her poetic space and allowing us to dig around, moving words into new places and discovering new ideas for ourselves. There’s a kind of collaborative aspect to this material—as she states herself, a “call and response,” both between herself and Russell but also between herself and the reader, as she comments that, “I hope the reader realizes that they too can make magic from the very same ingredients.”

Violence, as McFarland explains, is the opposite of creativity. Cooking becomes a creative enterprise when we think of it not only as a mode of sustenance—again, opposing violence which negates life itself—but also opens up a huge volume of potential choices and decisions. Cooking is creative but also, it sustains us. Violence merely destroys, often without purpose. 

In the finished poem she shares, after moving through Russell’s comments and her drafted portion, we see concise and minimalist writing. McFarland’s technique and ability to draw inspiration from the source material is a wonderful example of how other kinds of writing can become scaffolding for our own work, and how writing in response to texts which feel relevant, emotionally moving, or politically charged—just to name a few reactions—can be a generative and very useful way to get yourself started if you are looking for inspiration, or a great way to organize a longform project which needs direction and structure. These are just some of the benefits of writing in this way. 

For McFarland, Russell’s recipes create a space which can open a new potential for creative thought. It’s not all about creativity, however. The first found text poems are often attributed to absurdist art movements like the Surrealists or Dada, but this approach to language is a smart movement forward rather than a nonsensical ploy. The intimacy of the recipes creates an emotional space for McFarland to engage, but the political element of the poem cannot be denied either. As the women in McFarland’s poem wrestle with difficult topics like managing their own desire, the feeling is one of frustration at the world we inhabit, where natural impulses are punished and we are told to deny ourselves freedom to be the compassionate people we are. 

There is an element of loss in McFarland’s final poetic product. We have seen the elements that have gone into its construction, but the poem itself feels somewhat stripped of its immediate elements. Of course the poem exists in context, but McFarland has removed what feel like crucial parts. 

As we come back to the poem, however, we see the smart edits she has made. The poem feels sparse because McFarland has cut everything extraneous out of the narrative. It feels like a loss to discard her beautiful imagery, but the disjointed, jerky feeling of the frequent line breaks contributes to the feeling of unrest for the women she mentions, and the lack of punctuation is stylistic, leaving the lines floating in the ether and creating a tension in space and time. 

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In her contributor’s note, McFarland notes that the draft generates its own “heat and light.” I’m hesitant to make such a claim as it feels a little superstitious, but with the way that McFarland manipulates text, there does seem to be a lightness in the way that we encounter this writing. Even as she grips these complicated topics, in particular the violence against women, the poetry and writing that she provides seem almost preternaturally calm. 

This system that McFarland has created is unique to her, but as writers we all have systems. We have ways to generate ideas and we know what to do when we have writer’s block. It’s a fact of the trade that we don’t always feel like writing, and by giving herself assignments to respond to another text, McFarland has hacked the system and ended up with a book to prove it. 

The heat and light come from within. McFarland is a powerhouse writer. Her work speaks for itself and her ingredients do indeed create magic without a question.