Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning

Author: Alice Walker

Title: Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning

Year Published: 1979

Thoughts and Notes (on publication, literary or historical context, or etc): Concerned with love, civil rights, and the African American female experience, this is Alice Walker's third book of poems. Walker is best known as a fiction writer, and I like her fiction more than her poetry. This book was a pretty quick read for me (despite how long it took me to actually sit down and write about it). It was the opposite experience of reading Oni Buchanan: almost all story, little sound. Although the poems present compelling stories and characters, and even compelling arguments, some of them just seemed jotted down, not particularly artful. On the up side, the poems are easy to understand, with ample explanation of context, some even with footnotes, but my favorites were the ones that held something back and made me wonder. (And I realize that in the Buchanan book, I wanted more story and to wonder less. I am a picky reader.)

I read an essay on Walker, though, that I liked very much, and it made me appreciate her poetry a bit more. In "Who Touches This Touches a Woman: The Naked Self in Alice Walker," Ruth Weston summarizes the collection by noting that "Walker writes about black women with the authority of the universal female experience, an experience made complex and contradictory by the phenomenon of love," and asserts that the collection is "her answer to Adrienne Rich's call to action in her 1972 essay "When We Dead Awaken": a call not only for women writers to express anger at their victimization by men, but also a call for women to stop permitting the abuse, to take responsibility for their lives, to exchange the imposition of pain for what Rich calls the self-actuated 'birth-pains [of] bearing ourselves'" (25). Considering the poems in the context of feminist writing made me value them more as pieces of honest or authentic female speech (which is not to say I think they are autobiographical; I don't), but at the same time, I just wasn't ever enthralled by the poems' language.

Favorites: "January 10, 1973"
"Now That the Book Is Finished"
(Here is a link for this poem; scroll down if you don't want to read the essay)
"Even As I Hold You"

Questions: It's for myself: While I was writing this post, reading essays about Walker, and finding links to the poems, I realized how touching some of her writing really is, and I liked it much more. Was I missing something? Am I a snobby sound poet? I would really like to read some of Walker's essays on writing. I will put that on my long reading list.

The Bottom Line, in 50 Words or Less: These poems are full of feeling and something that I think can only be called truth. I loved the moments when a certain line or image catapulted me into a new part of my imagination; I just wish there had been more of those moments.