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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
The Sula poem in Lift Every Voice by Phillip B. Williams is titled “While Reading Sula.” It’s on page 14. In the poem, the feeling of reading Sula is fresh and loud. I had the sense that the speaker uses the novel’s imagery as an amplifier for their own voice. Each line seems linked to something straight from Sula’s pages.
My Notes on “While Reading Sula”
“I realized I was Nel and wept” is the opening line, which immediately transported me to the ending of Sula and Nel’s “circles and circles of sorrow” The following line is a reference to the plague of robins that appeared when Sula returned to The Bottom in 1937. That plague is held within the image of “the robins rotting inside me.” I thought of Sula’s rose-shaped birthmark when the speaker says, “roses made of cinders.” There is a particular line from the novel this evokes, which I’ve quoted down below.
“…the meaning of the birthmark over her eye; it was not a stemmed rose, or a snake, it was Hannah’s ashes marking her from the very beginning.”
– Toni Morrison in Sula (Chapter 1939, p 114)
The dangling of this unfinished question “Why should I burn” is a perfect example of why enjambment is one of my favorite techniques in poetry. “Why should I burn” made think of the fires in the plot, of Plum, and of Hannah.
“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 engages in playful “lovemaking”1 with her husband. This particular line feels loaded with Nel’s feelings about Sula’s betrayal. It has Nel’s anger after the 1937 chapter when Sula makes the choice to fuck Jude, Nel’s husband.
Last thing, the em dashes in the poem’s final line surrounding “–scared–” felt like an homage to the em dashes surrounding “–loud and long– in the novel’s final line.
“It was a fine cry—loud and long—but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.”
– Toni Morrison in Sula (Chapter 1965, p 174)
Sula in Modern Poetry By Diane Seuss
Diane Suess’ poem “Modern Poetry” (the eponymous poem for the collection) is a three-page poem that engages with Sula in a nostalgic way. You can find this poem on pages 11-13 of the collection. The presence of Sula is not intense in the poem. In fact, a mention of it does not appear until the final stanza, so the reference feels much different than in “While Reading Sula” by Phillip B. Williams. First of all, the speaker of “Modern Poetry” is decades removed from reading the novel. Reading it is not fresh, but the memory it evokes is. Sula is conduit 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 whose class altered her view of modern poetry and literature forever.
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You can read Phillip B. Williams poem “While Reading Sula“ on The Poetry Foundation’s website!
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- From Sula in the chapter titled 1937: “Even Nel’s love for Jude, which over the years had spun a steady gray web around her heart, became a bright and easy affection, a playfulness that was reflected in their lovemaking.” ↩︎
