The Blog

Helene Cardona's beautifully crafted collection, Dreaming My Animal Selves, drifts in and out of languages, presenting poems in both English and French translations. By doing so, the book raises several compelling questions about the relationship between language and human consciousness: Does language, with its complex grammatical rules, limit what is possible within conscious experience? When one inhabits more than one language, what possibilities open up for thought, expression, and the creation of meaning? Lastly, does language make us who we are, or is there an identity core that exists apart from, or beyond, language? As Cardona teases out possible answers to these thought-provoking questions, her poems prove to be as image-rich and musical as they are faultlessly constructed. 

The essay below is the result of an ongoing contemplation about whether, as a poet of color, I have a special obligation to write "political poems" or to engage, through my poetry, in the national debate on race. In my student days, I didn't want to write "identity" poems or be known as "the black poet with a social message." If you'd asked me at the time, I would've said something like, "I'm not a political poet, I just want to write good poems"...as if those concepts are mutually exclusive. It has taken me many years, and a lot of study, to realize that compelling language and a politically engaged sensibility can coexist in the same poem. And, more precisely: that I can write a poem that addresses race in those terms.