‘How Do You Raise A Black Child?’
— jayy dodd
From the dead. With pallbearers who are half as young
as their faces suggest
Cortney Lamar Charleston’s first poem in his latest collection, Telepathologies, creates the frequency he requires of you to process his work. From the opening stanza there is a teasing & confrontation of language & meaning that upends & unsettles the subject & reader. Charleston creates a new language for myth, allowing so much ground for possibility. He gives each a sonic & linguistic weight. This skilled formation of language translates to the screen in the short film adaptation of the poem. The simple but highly detailed video, directed by Seyi Peter Thomas of Station Film, gives Charlestons’s text a needed & expansive world to live in. I think of the voice. The act of conjuring & raising of the dead. I think of how this poem is able to work, live & breathe on multiple planes. While there is a need for urgency, it is also the timeless work—like that of ‘How Do You Raise A Black Child?’—that fortifies the canon.