“Malcolm”
As one might suspect, the title character of this poem is Malcolm X. The poem itself is a kind of eulogy, but also a rejection of the interpretation of his assassination as an act of martyrdom. Martyrs choose to die so that may become remembered, but Malcolm lived to shine the light of knowledge and understanding.
“Poem #3”
This very short poem of eight lines, none of which is longer than three words, is a textbook lesson in how with poetry as with so much other literature, less can be more. Purely symbolic, the speaker confesses to some unidentified lover that she gathers up sound left behind and strews them on the bed where she gets high on breathing the leftover essence.
“Personal Letter #3”
A strange title for a poem that bears little resemblance to a letter. But then again, the key word may not be letter but personal; as in writing a letter to yourself. That’s possible because this dramatic monologue does not really seem to be directed to any external entity; it rather sounds like the musings of an interior monologue, focusing on the reality of aging and how nothing can really keep one young as well as how most go through life never really being what they think are.
“This is not a Small Voice”
The voices belong to LaTanya, Shaniqua, Shaquille among others. They are immediately coded as African-America and their voices are not small. The voices are love, a specific kind of metaphorical love:
“This is a love colored with iron and lace.
This is a love initialed Black Genius.”
This is a poem nourishing the black experience in America and demanding that it be heart and tucked away and compartmentalized and reduced to a special edition of the curricula one month out of the year.
“For Sister Gwen Brooks”
Not this does sound like a letter. A love letter to a fellow black female American author. With startling imagery, the speaker adopts the second person perspective to deliver a series of assertions on the almost magical power exercised in the literature of Gwendolyn Brooks.
“Under a Soprano Sky”
Here is an excellent example of Sanchez’s late-career movement toward a more surrealistic construction of verse in which words collide, sticking together or bouncing apart to create an indelible image which nevertheless is completely ambiguous in meaning. After all, what is a “soprano sky” when you really start to think about it. Other illustrations of this ideological shift to be found in the body of the poem are “rocked in a choir of worms,” “obscure birds purchasing orthopedic wings,” and “I cannot waltz my tongue.” Beneath that soprano sky the poems concludes with a woman “lovely as chandeliers” singing.
“Tanka”
Tanka is the name for another type of short-form Japanese verse; kind of a cousin to the haiku. Thirty-one syllables spread across five lines that serve to facilitate a very specific image of an action or event. To these rigid rules of composition, Sanchez introduces the elasticity of meaning inherent in surrealistic imagery. The speaker describes the act of kneeling before a lover, describing it with imaginative imagery bending forward like a “collector of jewels,” singing “one long necklace of love,” and mouth that is a “sapphire of grapes.”
“Depression”
Many poets—countless poets—have written about depression from the perspective of dealing with it either as a malevolent force that brutally assaults the creative process or as benign guardian angel helping the writer to dig into places one usually fears to tread. Sanchez appears to be doing something different and a little more rebellious. Oddly grotesque imagery, fragmented punctuation and contradictions within individual thoughts, the much longer first stanza seems like an interior monologue not by a person suffering depression, but the depression itself as a living, breathing, sentient entity. The second stanza subtly shifts in tone and structure so that it now seems as if the person that the depression has assaulted is now crying out for in pain for help.
