Taylor Archive Post, Post #7
Shange Flow Poem. The photo above is reproducing a journal entry by Ntozake Shange in which it seems she began a poem she titled “ Flow” the Poem is written on 5inches x 8 inches white paper. Note: I am working on changing the orientation of then photo, apologies!
An exciting aspect of the Archival search, is that we can potentially find really important works of literature that aren’t accessible otherwise. I think that the archive also helps us gauge the context of Ntozake Shange’s work in ways we could not have otherwise, simply by trying to google or look up what her timeline and life and projects were like.
Finding the “Flow” poem was exciting because as soon as I saw it, the first things I read were the first and last words, “Flow” and “World”. These two words are already some that come to mind when I consider Shange’s body of work, choreographically and literarily.
My first thought in reading the poem was to connect flow to this sense of erotic we were exploring earlier in the semester. I connected in one of my previous blog posts a part of Shange’s Nappy Edges and Audre Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic, as many of us did. In Nappy Edges, Shange writes “a poem shd fill you up with something…a poem shd happen to you like cold water or a kiss” (24). First of all, the phrase reminds me of her journal poem in which she also references a “ cool liquid embrace”. Beyond that the phrase connects to parts of Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic” in which she writes that the erotic is a sense of fullness and a question of “how acutely and fully we can feel in…doing”. In writing Flow, I ams seeing an extension of thoughts developed within Nappy Edges and even more connections with Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic. The imagery that these lines surface in me is imagery of overflowing from being so full. It harkens back to the biblical phrase “my cup runneth over”.
Shange also writes in the poem of an “umbilical” connection to our “entry into the world” and once again she is drawing our thought to the breach between this world and another perhaps, or at the very least she is drawing our thoughts to concepts of birth and the birth of worlds which has been a central theme in a lot of her writing especially within Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo.
This poem has really helped me connect these understandings of fulness and the birth of new worlds (and beyond that the idea of thinking critically and deeply about ones positionally and entry point into this world, and perhaps the next).
While the photo is being displayed in the post for educational reasons and without the purpose of dissemination I believe we have permission form the archive under Fair Use to reproduce this photo for one another. However if I were to pursue any external publishing I would need permission from Shange’s estate.
Metadata associated with this photo can include:
-The date the poem was written
-The type of paper Flow is written on
-The type of journal Flow is written in
-How Ntozake Shange bought, received, came by this journal?
-The place that Ntozake Shange was when she wrote the Flow Poem
I do not at present have the information necessary to cultivate that metadata however, ideally this would be information I could provide. Otherwise I can state where and when I personally engaged with the data for the first time, Barnard College, November 7, 1:12pm
Citation
Ntozake Shange Papers, 1966-2014: Box 17 Folder 3; Barnard Archives and Special Collections, Barnard Library, Barnard College
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