COLLECTED POEMS
It seems like only yesterday — We ...
were laying on the hard wood floor — Watching ...
Saturday morning cartoons, wrapped in the — aroma ...
of momma's cooking: pancakes, bacon, and eggs — Laughing ...
watching Daffy-Duck plotting some obscure scheme.
Gwendolyn Brook’s A Street in Bronzeville, the collection of poems she published in 1945 was inspired by her upbringing in Chicago. Brooks drew from the people in her neighborhood and life in the kitchenette building where she was raised. The collection captured Stressla Lynn Johnson’s imagination. Perhaps he recognized something of his own Portland neighborhood and the sturdy wooden homes filled with watchful parental eyes and the treasures he found at the corner store. By the 1970s, urban renewal projects bisected his Albina neighborhood and undermined community stability. The land grab displaced Black families: it gutted the community’s center and undermined the economic and social vitality of the neighborhood. Stressla has been writing poems that mine his early childhood memories, such as Penny Candy … Gone Street Market (II). Tucked into his writing are his own stories of his family and many of the people incarcerated at Oregon State Penitentiary. We asked him to consider compiling his poems in the manner of Brooks to make a larger collection. In the past six years, Stressla has been processing loss upon the death of his siblings. In his reflective work, he has come to accept the joy in these passings. The Movement of Light: Insight to a conscious paradigm shift is an ambitious work that allows the joy of those relationships to displace the loss. | TDS