“who is setting these priorities?” and “advice” revealed a facet of Shange to me that was almost more (or at least differently) vulnerable than her work I had previously read.
One of the most defining features of her writing to me has always been the confidence with which she makes art, defines herself as an artist, and transitions between mediums so fluidly that the lines between them are called into question. This, just as much as her characteristic syntax, has always been, as she named it in “takin a solo/ a poetic possibility/ a poetic imperative”, “the particular flow of [her] certain somebody.”
The syntax of “who is setting these priorities?” and “advice” immediately inform you that they will be something different than her usual descending stanzas. They look like prose and read more like a rant, inner monologue, or even a conversation, and deal with an anxiety about writing, performing, and simply living that the powerful self or extension-of-self that speaks in most of her work never questions.
The primary question of “who is setting these priorities?” is “What in the hell am I supposed to do with my body every day?”
The primary question of “advice” is “What in the hell am I supposed to do with my mind?”
They are both in response to external noise; in the former: media-noises and existential smallness, in the latter: the “them” of every artist –who make you feel like an alien and are always asking when you’re going to get a real job.
These poems investigate and meld the mind-body question that Shange is always responding to. “who is setting these priorities?” speaks of physical inhibition instead of physical freedom, which is another departure from what I perceive to be her typical approach. The poem is an anxious accumulation of maladies: “today the cosmos satellite fell down over uranium city”, “4 or 3 million american women who take the pill & smoke are 10 times more likely to have heart attacks than women who don’t take the pill or smoke”, “the wilmington 10 are still in jail. there’s only one woman’s survival house in brooklyn.” Instead of describing her physical self as a way to free her from these stresses, she implies that they build up in her –knots that can only loosen with itches:
“i like to fuck. i’m too nervous not to smoke. no one likes to eat pussy if you wear a diaphragm…i need a cigarette cuz this is just too much for me. plus there are women who actually find sex boring/ me/ i’m gonna have a heart attack.”
“advice” takes the opposite to the same problem; it speaks of body inhibiting mind rather than mind halting body. It opens and closes with the mention of the bodies of those who are giving her advice:
“people keep tellin me to put my feet on the ground i get mad and scream/ there is no ground”
“i am gonna write poems til i die & when i have gotten outta this body i am gonna hang round in the wind & knock over everybody who got their feet on the ground”
In this case, her physical limitations are not the center of the conversation so much as the others’ are, who are have such tunnel-vision that they can’t acknowledge the preciousness of her lifeblood, and “[can’t] read or understand english anymore” to the point where it makes her feel like “the last survivor of a crew from mars”.
The response to the vulnerability in the two poems synthesizes why Shange must do her work. When everyone is telling her she can’t be a poet, her black body writes for her: “cartwheel and somersault down pages outta my mouth come visions distilled like bootleg whiskey” When there are too many problems, too much noise, and too many voices, she opens another show after the one that just closed, keeps fucking and taking the pill, and catching the 8:00am train.