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My “Sula Books”
In my small home poetry collection, Modern Poetry by Diane Seuss and Lift Every Voice by Phillip B. Williams stand out. They’re my “Sula books,” a shelf nickname I’ve given to them because of the poem within each that pays homage to Toni Morrison’s second novel Sula.
Sula in Lift Every Voice by Phillip B. Williams
In Life Every Voice, the Sula poem is “While Reading Sula,” and in the poem, Sula feel fresh and loud, like the speaker is using the novel’s imagery as an amplifier. Each line seems linked to something straight from Sula’s pages.
“I realized I was Nel and wept” is the opening line, quickly followed by a reference to the plague of robins that appeared when Sula returned to The Bottom in 1937. That plague is held within this line: “the robins rotting inside me.” I thought of Sula’s rose-shaped birthmark blended with the fire in the novel’s plot when the speaker says, “roses made of cinders.”
“I refused to fuck” is a line toward the end that led me back to Nel’s character (who the speaker has already identified with in the opening line). In the novel, Nel isn’t a character who fucks. She has sex, but as a married woman with children. This particular line feels loaded with Nel’s feelings about Sula’s betrayal, as if the speaker is taking on anger from the 1937 chapter when Sula makes the choice to fuck Jude, Nel’s husband.
Sula in Modern Poetry By Diane Seuss
Diane Suess’ poem “Modern Poetry” (the eponymous poem for the collection) engages with Sula in a nostalgic way in the final stanza of the poem. Unlike Phillip B. Williams’ speaker in “While Reading Sula,” the speaker in Seuss’ poem is decades removed from reading the novel. Reading it is not fresh, but the memory it evokes is. Sula is tied to a time in this speaker’s life when she was safe in community with other women, out in the woods reading and discussing books with a professor.
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You can read Phillip B. Williams poem “While Reading Sula“ on The Poetry Foundation’s website!
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