"Diabolic"

15 July 2020:

"How they say they love her
And how they look at her
Is what Phillis observes;
Like she’s the hole in the pocket
After the money rolls out." --Cornelius Eady, "Diabolic"

The poem Eady is writing about here--Wheatley's "On Being Brought from Africa to America"--is one of my favorite to teach. Eady's work is a terrific contemplation of what Wheatley must have thought in her very complicated and circumscribed world, where she was repeatedly fed conflicting ideologies and still managed to create powerful, lasting, and fundamentally American art. (Love that Eady calls "On Being Brought" "one of the most American poems I think we have.")