The Pen Is Mighty, The Body Is Mightier
Happy Tuesday!
Happy April everyone. It’s a busy and buzzing time here at Chronically Porscha HQ. As a poet, Global Poetry Month is always busy and bursting with inspiration and new ways to approach my craft and to interact with other poets. April is also the time when I feel like I’ve fully emerged from the cocoon of winter hibernation, seasonal depression and feel like my feet are ready to touch warm earth.
I had the pleasure of opening poetry month by co-hosting a poetry workshop on YouTube with the lovely Veronica King and my good friend Michael C.B. Chen. The poem I wrote which is the first for this month can be viewed here:
Watch the entire workshop below:
I think its good juju and a powerful hand on the shoulder from my Ancestors that as I’m crafting this missive, it’s Maya Angelou’s birthday. As I’m putting together my excitement about words but also my marveling at, working with, and honoring my body as I go forward with creating.
I am reminded of Mama Maya’s story. How she is most known for her words but how she used her body. She was a dancer, a streetcar conductor. She was many things over the course of her life. She lived in her body. She had two husbands, lovers. She lived. The word embodiment probably wasn’t in the lexicon the way that it is now, but Maya Angelou was embodied! She was complex, and she wasn’t just okay with that she welcomed it and folded it into everything she did. I love the photo of Maya Angelou and Amiri Baraka dancing at a party.
It reminds me that there is always a place for joy and kinship, even when you are about the business of your work.
Embodiment hasn’t always been easy for me. As a matter of fact, I have lived most of my life in my head. Growing up in that golden era of Black television like ‘A Different World’ and ‘Living Single’ it was about advancement. My family and my media instilled in me that that is where the focus was, and my body was secondary.
Eventually I became chronically ill and disabled and I STAYED in my head because I didn’t want to be fully enmeshed in a house that felt like it was on fire. I wanted to work, even after being diagnosed with Psoriatic Arthritis and eventually some of the comorbidities that come with it, I didn’t quite understand that my brain and my body were on the same team. Even as the pandemic was at the height of raging and ravaging and transforming the planet. I was living in my head and letting my body do what it was doing, which I thought was falling apart.
I don’t remember exactly when I started to integrate and make friends with my body and listen to her and I became convinced that she needed help, and support, and a listening ear not to be ignored and not to be treated like something to work around. I’ve voice recorded parts of this essay in bed when my back had had enough and I needed rest. I wrote parts of this outside on my back porch enjoying a gorgeous 80-degree day. I took a break to go outside and put my feet on the earth and be thankful and that’s all part of it. All part of being a human and not having to ‘do’ constantly and to my body’s demise to be anything. As a friend of mine says, “You are a human being, not a human doing.”
I’d love to hear from you in the comments what are your goals for April and how do you plan to show up and be instead of do this month?
P.S. I’d like to wish every one of my subscribers and readers a happy anniversary. I started this substack last year on April 1st. It means so much to me that you all have read and supported and witnessed me for an entire year. THANK YOU.