![]() Gorman uses form as prism - both as mirror and as window. I found that approach fascinating, and so when I came across Corporal Plummer’s diaries, digitized by the National Museum of African American History and Culture, I thought it would be an interesting way to have a conversation back and forth with time.” ![]() “I remember reading “DMZ Colony” by Don Mee Choi, in which she kind of imagined what diary entries would look like for Korean children who’d grown up during the War. “It just took me a little bit of time to figure out what text worked and for what moment.” ![]() “When I first started writing this, I knew that I wanted in some way, shape or form to engage with historical text,” she says. Gorman leans into Plummer’s “clear-cut” prose, documenting war and the dawning edges of the 1918 influenza outbreak. Gorman explains that Plummer served in France in Company C of the 506th Engineer Battalion, which built roads and fortifications and conducted other manual labor. Army corporal named Roy Underwood Plummer. In this fashion, what’s revealed “is not necessarily solely by me.” An exquisite example is Gorman’s interaction with the century-old journal of a Black U.S. Interacting with older texts and rubbing away to unearth new themes was a way to have conversations over time. It is, she writes, an accounting - “the poet’s diagnosis” - of what we bear. “It’s what eventually became the poem that starts the book, called ‘Ship’s Manifest.’” “When I first started writing it, I tried to lay out a manifesto of what I wanted to at least attempt to do,” Gorman says, “which is to try to poeticize the experience of the last two and a half years - the pandemic and everything else in the world that manifests.”Ĭorralling stray thoughts, she opened her iPhone and tapped fragments, images and questions into the Notes app. She responded to the uncertainties of the pandemic, churning political unrest and a painful racial reckoning by reaching for varying forms of verse - erasure poems, shape poems and interrogations of captivating archival finds - that open up the page and the mind. “ Call Us What We Carry,” the April selection of the Los Angeles Times Book Club, is an elegy to that lost time and the fragility of language, when emotions had not quite caught up with thought or action. ![]() Be more with nature and quiet and solitude and letting those pockets have their own kind of space in my reckoning of the city.” “I was used to, you know, maybe a nice weekend going to the beach with family and friends - and now the beaches were closed, so that wasn’t necessarily available. Sealed away from friends and family, the city began to feel like a memory. The time away from her routines required her to connect with the city in a different way. Like many braving silence and seclusion during 2020, Gorman had to adjust to an altered terrain - interior and exterior. And the Festival of Books? I went for the first time when I was 8 … and it was like one of the best days.” They had journalists there, and honestly, it was like Writers Disneyland. The first event I went to was at the L.A. “I remember my first workshop … because part of their model was letting young girls partner with mentors. So many of my formative poetic moments happened there.”Īnother touchstone, WriteGirl, enabled her to visualize what it meant to be a writer. “It was forever teenagers eating carrots and sunflower seeds, but it was such a special place. “I remember taking the bus or walking or whatever it took to get there,” she says. She recalls poetry workshops on Saturdays at Beyond Baroque, Venice’s venerable cultural center. Born and raised in Los Angeles before studying at Harvard, she praises the playgrounds that have been instrumental in shaping who she’s become. Gorman is grateful for those sturdy roots. That was more me trying to get back to my roots as a written-word poet.” “So I wanted to lean into that specific playground, when you can make images and play with fonts and size and color. “It was an exploratory act on my part because a lot of people think of me as a spoken-word artist, which I am, but I also think that there is something special about the written word and what you can do with printed text,” she says. What the poet has revealed are the many ways these many months have marked us and that we, like the poems on the page, embody what we now hold.Ĭreating these pieces was a way to stretch, even twist, herself.
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