today is not a day for poetry

For this assignment, I read Wake-Up Calls by Wanda Phipps. It is a collection, as the cover describes, of 66 “morning poems”. Phipps writes in short free-verse of her sensory experiences in the morning, and of her (often alcohol-filled) last nights. Her changing subject matter makes the audience question what a morning really is. Is it not simply a time for recollection and reflection on the previous days, months, and years? When we sleep, we are allowed a short amount of time to stumble into a state of unconsciousness. When we awake, we spend the first few seconds and minutes realizing our identity and our history once again. This, it seems to me, is what Phipps is writing of.
The author’s diction is simple enough. It is the fractured manner of her lines that make the poetry interesting. Her capitalization is slim and I only spotted two periods in the entire book. Phipps has no problem beginning a line with a noun or a verb. She jumps into her lines, ignoring the common literary courtesy of using transitions. In this way, her verse is truly free verse. She is writing what is in her mind just as it comes to her: jumpy and often illogical.
The titles of her poems are simply numbers: “Poem #1”, “Poem #14”, “Poem #54”. Without suggestive titles, the audience reads the poems without a preconceived notion of what they will address. It seemed almost as if the pieces all ran together and formed one, 82 page poem.
Phipps is excellent at describing the actions of everyday life. She references alcohol and sex and is unafraid of profanity (this reminded me of Meredith’s second poem). This makes her poems real and amusing, they are playfully blunt. Sometimes the poems have a plot or some sort of logic and sometimes they are simply jumbled thoughts put on the page and separated by space. I had to admire her carelessness in entertaining the audience. She writes beautiful, funny, and disgusting words but does not place them in a familiar way so as to make the audience comprehend her words or hold their attention. It is as if she is saying “read them if you want, they’re just poems,”.
Although the poems narrate the life of one woman and can be seen as light-hearted, Phipps does mention larger aspects of life, such as class. Her description of the poorer area of a Black neighborhood is reminiscent of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.
Oftentimes, Phipps repeats phrases like “I am a perfect fool” or “the loss of”. Her repetition and her willingness not to write when the words aren’t there, make her work seem like an inner monologue. Poem #26, for example goes as follows: “today is not a day for poetry.” Phipps’ poems are deliberately intimate. She writes what comes to her without censoring herself or condemning writers’ block.
The collection is a compilation of her written thoughts based around one idea: the morning. Whether she intended them to be read in the morning or whether she wrote them shortly after she woke up is uncertain. But the way in which she writes makes the morning timeless. She describes every part of the day and night in her writing using simple language in short poems.