Tongue and Voice - Jean Toomer and Tonya M. Foster

The tone and rhythm of “Her Lips Are Copper Wire” make this poem one of Jean Toomer’s most engaging. The opening lines set the tones of secrecy and privacy: “Whisper of yellow globes/ Gleaming on lamp-posts that sway/ Like bootleg licker drinkers in the fog.” As I read I picture streets with dim yellow lights and maybe even a drizzle of rain. The assonance of the “bootleg licker drinkers in the fog” creates fluid sounds that add to the secret and even seductive ambiance of the poem.

As the title suggests, the speaker is comparing a woman to industrial features such as “copper wires” and “incandescent” bulbs.  The speaker says to the woman: “and let your breath be moist against me/ like bright beads on yellow globes.” The brightness of the globes indicates a power and ability of the woman. In the final stanza, the speaker again asks the woman to take action: “then with your tongue remove the tape/ and press your lips to mine/ till they are incandescent.” The image of the tongue and the tape suggest a theme of the speaker finding his voice. Perhaps the speaker is not finding his voice, but learning how to make this voice power like the surround industrial materials. 

My reading of this poem is influenced by the anthology’s introduction to Toomer’s Cane poetry: “...Toomer’s own racial self-image was conflicted—a conflict, of course, that is only possible in a culture that insists one have a racial identity” (352). Perhaps the tongue removing the tape demonstrates this conflict through the struggle of finding and using one’s voice.

The poem “In Tongues” by Tonya M. Foster also relates the ability of the tongue to the power of one’s voice. The opening stanza explains how the “tongue stumbles and stutters,/ sticks to the roof and floor as if the mouth were just/ a house in which it could stagger like a body unto itself.” The poem continues tracing the sounds of a stuttering tongue through alliteration and consonance as seen in the fourth stanza: “What mastadonic presumptions precede and/ follow each word, each be, each bitter being?” The alliterated p sound and the cacophony of the consonant sounds ch and b challenges the reader’s voice to speak musically and clearly. 

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In Tongues

Tonya M. Foster

for Auntie Jeanette

1.
Because you haven’t spoken
in so long, the tongue stumbles and stutters,
sticks to the roof and floor as if the mouth were just
a house in which it could stagger like a body unto itself.

You once loved a man so tall
sometimes you stood on a chair to kiss him.

2.
What to say when one says,
“You’re sooo musical,” takes your stuttering for scatting,
takes your stagger for strutting,
takes your try and tried again for willful/playful deviation?

It makes you wanna not holla
silence to miss perception’s face.

3.
It ain’t even morning or early,
though the sun-up says “day,” and you been
staggering lange Zeit gegen a certain
breathless stillness that we can’t but call death.

Though stillness suggests a possibility
of less than dead, of move, of still be.

4.
How that one calling your tryin’
music, calling you sayin’ entertaining, thinks
there’s no then that we, (who den dat we?), remember/
trace in our permutations of say?

What mastadonic presumptions precede and
follow each word, each be, each bitter being?

5.
These yawns into which we enter as into a harbor—
Come. Go. Don’t. says the vocal oceans which usher
each us, so unlike any ship steered or steering into.
A habit of place and placing a body.

Which choruses of limbs and wanting, of limp
linger in each syllabic foot tapping its chronic codes?