The Sobbing School
— Xandria Phillips
The Sobbing School is a book of poetry and permission by Joshua Bennett, titled after Zora Neale Hurston’s quote, I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are hurt about it…No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.
This oyster knife,
honed by the will of Hurston and Bennett, is knowledge.
The provocative nature of Bennett’s first manuscript lies in its unwavering commitment to unsettling education, and the way it has been estranged from emotional knowledge. Toting long titles, keywords, and abstracts, the most ceremonial illustrations of this live in the poems that emulate the form of an academic essay.
Bennett’s new iteration of the abstract, which serves as the textual body of the poem, pedestals intuit knowledge. In the abstract the metaphysics of a poem overtake the execution. How often are we allowed to say exactly what we want to?
The first abstract poem titled ‘Didn’t Old Pharaoh Get Lost in The Red Sea: theorizing amnesia in Afro-diasporic maritime literature,’ utilizes the keywords: absence, being-for-another, undertow, thalassophobia, and phantom limb. In the abstract the plot holes of western academia, the phantom limbs of our inherited fear and memory come to the page, subverting the idea of knowledge existing in a neutral state outside of the body.
Thus, this poem is interested in using the moment the speaker looks into the sea for the first time on a family trip to the Bahamas, thousands of miles away from the unknowable depth of his block, which is its own kind of benthos, as a springboard for thinking about what it means to never be able to retract what is lost (even a name or less heavy tongue) and what that sort of truancy can make of a seven-year-old who, even then, could not shake the feeling that his legs did not belong to him.
How refreshing to consider the poem itself wanting to share its speaker’s most interior and antiquated yearnings. The poem’s announced interest affirms these bones. This re-purposed form highlights structure, opportunity, intuition, the word yes, and the way so many of us search for these things within institutions that are unwilling to support us.
Not a soul will tell you how to feel in The Sobbing School, but there is a sense of being granted access to familiar and unfamiliar truths. Familiar in that I too liked my blood very much & wanted to keep it inside of my body;
unfamiliar in that I have never known a father who showed up to school that day dressed up as a man with a son with a rage problem.
Here is a book obsessive in its scooping up and displaying of the improbabilities our survival has hinged upon, and at times, a little legend to sweeten the frame.