Carmen Giménez Smith’s Be Recorder
Be Recorder, Carmen Giménez Smith’s sixth collection of poetry, is out to challenge us. The very outset of the book frames our reading and warns us against making assumptions within the first poem “Origins”:
People sometimes confuse me for someone else they know
because they’ve projected an idea onto me. I’ve developed
a second sense for this—some call it paranoia, but I call it
the profoundest consciousness on the face of the earth.
The poem later notes that the feeling “when someone looks / at your face and thinks you’re someone else” is also the feeling of “being invisible.” This forces the reader into awareness of our own projections before journeying into the rest of the collection. It encourages the reader to really listen to the poems—their distinct calls and reflections—as we are made aware what the consequences are when we fail to do so. As such, the reader is primed to enter into Giménez Smith’s world and gain a deeper understanding by seeing it through the poet’s eyes.
That vision is especially highlighted in the entire second section as the long form, sectioned poem “Be Recorder” encompasses 42 pages of an 81 page collection. Long form poems have a way of allowing multiple, complex ideas and emotions to live together side by side. That continues to be true here. Some sections are delicate and fragile as when Giménez Smith writes,
I was light from the mouth of every part of me
I was of the earth or a scar in the earth pouring through
the ruins of early civilization…
It contrasts with sections hardened in their rage and grief:
brown bodies brown
murdered bodies and drowned
bodies brown repelled bodies
uncounted brown bodies
on borders in boats from hurricanes
in holds and shipping
containers against walls the new word
for global encroachment
and now winter
All those emotions are true. They all exist at once. They are all an expression of the multiple experiences the speaker witnesses and lives. Some are difficult to express in tangible ways. For instance, when the speaker asks, “will you hold my curls when I’m expelling phantoms / who open tunnels into the past…” Sometimes the expression is crystalline as when describing what it is for the speaker to “be” American:
… though I was born in America
I wasn’t born American
I know it’s hard to understand
but it’s also not hard I became American
when I memorized the national anthem
or when I had sex with a white boy
or when I thought my first
racist thought or when I decided
I wanted to always live in a place like US
which is how America becomes
an event that happens only for the lucky
It is in this way that we, the readers, witness what she witnesses. We experience the world as she experiences it: stricken, fierce, conflicted, obstinate. We trail behind the poet as if she were a tour guide pointing out the sense she’s made of the unsensible or what simply remains unsensible. We are given the gift of correction: we are not to project our experience onto the book. Instead, follow it, experience her vision, record it as she shows it to us.
Be Recorder by Carmen Giménez Smith