Serena Tome: Introduction to a Poet

Serena Tome is more than a young poet with dazzling gifts. She is an artistic explosion. When she emerged very recently in the on-line publication scene, poets, editors, readers, were put on immediate notice. Yes, she was that good. In examining her work and talking to this artist, what becomes immediately clear is the depth of engagement. She speaks to this in her definition of poetry:

“Poetry is a spirit that lives inside of me. It is demanding and emotional. It warrants respect and patience. It is a creative expression of the mystical side of the human experience with extraordinary manifestations.”

Her motivation to write is then a natural emanation of this spirit which dwells

within:

“I have no choice but to write. I am unsatisfied with myself if I do not write. The challenge for me now is learning to steward the gift appropriately.”

The importance of such stewardship becomes clear in the first encounter with

originality of voice:

Pearls

                  -after Sade 
 

Tears reach no one 

The sun burns

Cracked

Parched earth 

Screeching animal echoes

Over fresh wounds 

Psyche has no room

For her moods 

The moon is hidden behind

Moving blackness 

Palms grasp thick wades

Of kinky corn rows newly

Twisted 

Cry…cry…cry… 

Tears reach no one 

A warrior sings in these words. She has suffered much and gives no quarter to.

‘Psyche and her moods’. Longing for Cupid and other ‘womanly’ predispositions are null factors when existence is a gape of a wound, when ‘blackness’ fills the horizon and defines the self as abuse-worthy object.

These are not abstract concepts to this African-American young woman, raised in the deep South.

In speaking of what it meant to be in an interracial Shakespearean production in Dublin, Georgia, it is not difficult to see that the immediacy and authenticity which underscore such resonating, such penetrating verse has an experiential grounding.

“I was selected to play Juliet in the play "Romeo and Juliet." I was the only black person in the whole play. My Romeo was white and the director was gave me the part because she could not find a white girl who could remember the lines and recite them without a Southern accent. The school was self segregated and everyone in the black
community thought I was crazy for even wanting to be in the play. We were told not to kiss during the balcony scene. It wasn't going to be a big kiss, just a peck, but we were told not to do it. Interracial dating was not allowed and when one guy attempted a relationship with a white girl it tore the school the apart. The principal had to tell stories of his time in Vietnam to calm everyone down. Here I was on stage just wanting to give a good performance, but like most of my life, racism was the wedge; the ever present black veil that always seemed to get in the way.

We did the play without kissing. I hated it. Most of my classes did not have black students. They filled the general classes. My peers thought that because my skin was light that I had white blood in me and they concluded that that was the reason for my intellect and special interest.... I have never been able to embrace that part of my heritage, yet I embrace those who are of that ethnic background. I do not want to looked at as ‘a color’ but, for the person I am. It would be nice to venture into something for once and not hear the question: ‘What are you doing here?’"

The creative complexity herein becomes even more apparent when we focus on final words in the statement above, the poet’s desire ‘to not be looked at as ‘a color’.

Looking at her as the poet she is, it is clear that multiform influences impact her work. In asked to describe her work, Tome explains the difficulty in response in that it “changes so frequently … My work has movement, music, color, yet it likes to breathe, be silent, and shout.” Some thematic continuities, however, include nature and spirituality, in beds of stylistic abstraction as in “An Early Spring”:

Why ask questions?

                  Winter terrorizes warm-

                              blood  -ed

                                    fetus

                  crouched in the position of

                  survival light breaks 

                        shot   glass 

                              painkiller

                  wasted

                        life lived B.C.

                  cannot… 

In a pool of knit, there is silence.

The left flush opening and close embrace the work in an initial query of purpose and a pained hollow response. ‘In a pool of knit’, staccato connections are made.

Iced ‘Spring’ comes in as chilling suffocation. Time is slowed to‘blood –ed’ increments. New life curls around itself, unable to take root. The sense of anomie and anguish deepens in a stair stepped maelstrom. No beginnings and no endings … here.

Structurally, the nihilism of the work is underscored, as if there is a movement
forward, an attempted warming gust, a lined visage ~ a pushing? As with all art, there are no definitive answers, but what is unmistakable is: force, rawness, an unequivocal power.

This power is seen is Tome’s most recent groundbreaking series of ‘collaborative’ works with dead and living poets: “Sketches of the Faces of Gods”. She discusses the nature
and intent of the project:

“The concept is similar to ekphrastic poetry, but instead of using visual art I use poems that I find interesting. I want my readers to want to explore (re)explore the work of the poets I write about. I want my verse to be like stepping stones into greater possibilities of poetic dialogue. I hope to honor each poet that I write about by speaking their names along side snippets of their poems to display another facet of art appreciation.“

The ‘dialogue’ with Robert Hayden is illustrative.

Sketch #13: Robert Hayden-Those Winter Sundays 

“Sundays too my father got up early

And put his clothes on in the blue back cold... 

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

When the rooms were warm, he’d call… 

Speaking indifferently to him,

who had driven out the cold

and polished my good shoes as well.

What did I know, what did I know

of love’s austere and lonely offices? ” 
 

                                          white Christmas lights’

                                    pearl teeth glisten from the window of a splintered home 

            he—peers cautiously inside before

entering as a wolf bursting through a bush

covering her like fire ants

moving in circular motion 

            I lean back swallowing my heartbeats— slowly

eyes transfixed on the action

as his silhouette vanishes

behind soft lines of condensation

sliding down glass

Here are two conjoined poetic explorations of ‘the father’ in terms of loss and absence. In Hayden’s work, through memory, we feel the child’s reaction to the heady absence of love, to the continuity of an upbringing in the womb of rage. Tome counterpoints this with another paternal absence, the father as a lupine-like predator of women, “entering as a wolf bursting through a bush/covering her like fire ants.” The bonding of verse is as real as the layering of surreal textures, as an impressionist’s canvas. The genesis of this work intrigues: ‘I saw holiday lights in the window of a Chinese restaurant and the vision began until it became what you read.’

As for the future, there is much. An e-chapbook, another collaborative effort, “Night Writers” (Differentia Press) is on the cusp of release. The new series continues. Indeed, there is a cascade of possible projects: “I would love to have someone choreograph a dance to one of my poems. There is contest in the fall where this would be the prize. Fingers crossed. I would like to do a CD/DVD/book project where I chronicle some of my experiences in the international community poetically and record the sounds and verse of those cultures. I plan to publish as much as I can and collaborate with other talented artists when the opportunity arises.”

Serena Tome is unstoppable. We reap rich benefit.

--Constance Stadler is the Review Editor for Calliope Nerve and author of Paper Cuts which marked the debut of Calliope Nerve Media. She has been writing, publishing, and editing poetry from the prehistoric epoch of print journals to modern e-times. As a political anthropologist specializing in North Africa and a violinist, her influences are multiform. Work in formative years with the late poet Gwendolyn Brooks was seminal, but no less so than Sufi Dervish dancers, and the challenges of mastering Bruch's first concerto.