The Hero’s Journey: Two Poets on Reconfiguring the Lyric

Yona Harvey is a poet. She wrote Hemming the Water. She is among the first black women writers for Marvel Comics and her work has been published and anthologized in many publications including Letters to the Future: Black WOMEN / Radical WRITING, A Poet’s Craft: A Comprehensive Guide to Making and Sharing Your Poetry and The Force of What’s Possible: Accessibility and the Avant-Garde. She contributed to Marvel’s World of Wakanda with Ta-Nehisi Coates and Roxane Gay, followed by a collaboration with Coates on Black Panther & The Crew. The poems on You Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love (Four Way Books) follow an unnamed protagonist on her multidimensional, Afro-futuristic journey. Her story stretches the boundaries normally constraining a black, female body like hers. Half-superhero, half-secret-identity, she encounters side-slipping, speculative realities testing her in poems that appear like the panels of a comic book. Music directs readers through large and small emotional arcs, constantly re-troubled by lyric experimentation. Harvey layers her poems with a chorus of women’s voices. Her artful use of refrain emphasizes the protagonist’s meaning-making and doubling back: “Who am I to say? The eye is often mistaken. Or is it the mind? Always eager to interpret.” Our hero gets captured, escapes, scuba dives, and goes interstellar, and she emerges on the other end of her journey renewed. Publishers Weekly celebrated Harvey’s exploration of “the relationship between freedom, social justice, and the lyric imagination. Spanning a variety of literary forms, from prose poems and lyric

Major Jackson is the author of five volumes of poetry, including Roll Deep, and Leaving Saturn. He has edited Best American Poetry 2019 and his work has appeared in American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, and the Paris Review, among other publications. He is also the poetry editor of the Harvard Review. Inspired by Albert Camus’s seminal Myth of Sisyphus, Major Jackson’s The Absurd Man (W. W. Norton & Company) subtly configures the poet as “absurd hero” and plunges headfirst into a search for stable ground in an unstable world. We follow Jackson’s restless, vulnerable speaker as he ponders creation in the face of meaninglessness, chronicles an increasingly technological world and the difficulty of social and political unity, probes a failed marriage, and grieves his lost mother with a stunning, lucid lyricism. He confronts his past, including his betrayals and his mistakes, and questions who he is as a father, as a husband, as a son, and as a poet. The Absurd Man also faces outward, finding refuge in intellectual and sensuous passions. In Jackson’s view the journey of humanity, with all its foibles, as a sacred pattern of discovery reconciled by art and the imagination. Poet and critic Sandra Simonds called it “Erudite…Moments of startling linguistic play interrupt Jackson’s elegant semiformal style… [The Absurd Man] bring[s] us back to an existential truth that only poetry’s fierce tenderness can offer.”