Skirball Tapes: Robin Coste Lewis

A NOTE FROM CATHARINE STIMPSON

I am utterly delighted that Robin Coste Lewis is a guest on “The Skirball Tapes.”

            In 2015, in a bookstore, I picked up a book, began to leaf through it, and then said to myself, “I must buy this book now.  I must take it home.”  For I was in the magnetic presence of a voice who would deepen my ideas about what a poem could do and be.

            The book was Voyage of the Sable Venus.  The author was Robin Coste Lewis.  She had been born in Compton, California in 1964. From Louisiana, her family had been part of the westward African-American diaspora. She had striking academic credentials—in Sanskrit and religious literature, creative writing, literature and visual studies.  Her poems had structure, allusive depth, and shape.  Yet, they were wildly original, with an emotional range from sweetness to a searing sorrow.

            I talked about Voyage.  I gave it to people.  Yet I was still unprepared for Lewis’ next revelatory book, published in 2022, To The Realization of Perfect Helplessness.  Over twice as long, it had greater heft and magnitude than Voyage.  Most of its pages were a rich black color.  On the left, in white ink, was language, some shards, some stanzas, some paragraphs.  And, on the right, were family photographs that Lewis’ grandmother, Dorothy Mary (nee Coste Thomas) Brooks, a seamstress, had taken over her lifetime and left in a suitcase under a bed for her grand-daughter Robin to find as she was cleaning out and closing the house.  As that grand-daughter was to write,  Brooks had “created and preserved this invaluable archive of Black culture…she also picked up a camera, then framed the world.”

            Both books tell of immense, harrowing journies:  the emergence of human life itself from the stars and sea; the African Diaspora; the seven trips of Matthew Henson, the black explorer, to the Arctic; the poet’s own leaving of her Compton home.  These are historical.  The voyage of the Sable Venus is at once historical and mythic, a demanding research project and a triumphantly imaginative revision of Botticelli’s painting, “The Birth of Venus.”   The Sable Venus compels the poet to join her on a trip that will collect all the titles of the representations of black women from pre-history to today.  These lists, which together have their own poetry and meaning, often reflect viciousness, condescension, or that now familiar brew of misogyny and racial contempt. But  Darkness and Beauty can also be the “same agent.”

            We will have nowhere near the time we need to explore the achievements of this astonishing artist.  However, let her words call out to you.