Convenient Amnesia - Poetry by Donald Vincent

Publication Date: July 1, 2020
Paperback, 96 pages
ISBN: 978-1-937968-65-6

Available from Small Press Distribution

An old movie theme song once observed, “What’s too painful to remember, we simply choose to forget.” That sort of convenient amnesia is at the heart of this incandescent first poetry collection from Donald Vincent. Incandescent, because that’s the sort of light that is produced by heat, and there’s a mighty heat raging in these pages, producing a brilliance that illuminates a legacy of racism and violence and appropriation and disenfranchisement and, and, and…all those things we’d like to forget, ignore, disown. All that pain. This is, in other words, a document on the subject of getting woke.

And what an awakening! Vincent is by his own description “Prankster and intelligent gangster all-in-one,” and that phrase captures perfectly the tone, and charm, of this book. But beware that beguiling charm, because it’s dangerous. Indeed, “Lucky Charm” is the title of the first poem, where he declares, “I inherited the bop in my walk from my great, / great grandpa’s lashings on the farm.” That’s a hard-won bop, indeed, and in case we’re inclined to forget, conveniently, that those lashings are not just a thing of the past (cf. post-racial society), he doubles down a few lines later with the incendiary reminder, “I want to whistle whimsical feelings to white women, / Emmett Till’s charm.” Vincent identifies himself with Till again a few poems later, and laments that black children are born as “a small, black imprint / forced into a blank, / white world.” Elsewhere, he declares, “they built me / to be filthy / black & ugly / and forever / guilty.” He won’t let us forget how that feels, how that works, even if it would be convenient to do so.

Vincent scrutinizes the aftermath of this legacy on stages large and small, and after a first section devoted to more political poems, in the second he tightens his focus on a more domestic scale. The title poem in fact examines an all-too-familiar scene of troubled marriage, the husband “stumbling through the garage / entrance, smelling of Wild Irish Rose,” his wife having “dun cooked…dun cleaned up” and finally demanding “What happened to us?” His answer: “I forgot. / I don’t know. Dear, I forgot. / Just give me one more chance.” Yes, it’s a melodramatic stereotype, but it’s also a sad reality for too many families, a product of too many generations of denied opportunity, even to form stable families and communities. How many chances do we have left? (But lest this sound too unremittingly gloomy, this section also contains some whimsical “Dating Advice from Married Women,” along with unabashedly romantic poems. There are things worth remembering, things worth striving for.)

In the final section, the “intelligent gangster” is most evident, as Vincent interrogates, responds to, and riffs off works by authors and artists as various as Amira Baraka and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Maya Angelou and Emily Dickinson, Degas and Basquiat. This is no mere display of erudition, however, but more a declaration that a fully formed culture, a truly humane world, must be open to all, accepting of all, and incorporate all that has come before us. Nothing can be forgotten. Even what’s too painful.

Praise for Donald Vincent & Convenient Amnesia

Convenient Amnesia highlights how Donald Vincent is humorous, sarcastic, critical, and somber all at once, and it doesn’t matter which coast he’s on or if he’s trekking through Paris. The poems ripple with observations and formal range. This book is filled with head nods and at least one utterance of damn at a moment that dissolves pretense. Damn!

—Tara Betts, author of Break the Habit

Donald Vincent’s first book Convenient Amnesia is the book of a poet who says truthfully that he will “embody struggle/defying expectation every day.” A poet against the erasure of blackness, with all his registers of ten-ways poetry, Donald Vincent writes for being one whole person right here, right now.

—David Blair, author of Barbarian Seasons

Because Amnesia might, as a towering creative twin associate, stand in for America, there’s a hole, and I and eyehole, in the middle of each of the pages of this book, one that the reader must spin and un-spin, mix and remix, in order to reshuffle the changing turntable of “commas in the wrong place.” The hole is the whole of history, personal and under-surveillance, where public memory is the currency of flow. Thus Convenient Amnesia is a very versatile creative phrenology of the roots of a wise (yet casual) witnessing. In poems that climb, from source to sound, the known and unknown ladders of the cultural register, Donald Vincent is both cunning and courageous as well as full of the poetic swag it takes to mix and mingle with the old battles between justice and injustices that our ancestors were forced to leave unfinished. Here is a new record for future playlists and damn-near every groove contains a Black Ass Free mind treat!

—Thomas Sayers Ellis, author of The Corny Toys

Convenient Amnesia takes upon itself the grave paradox involved in nothing being forgotten, everything being exposed, everything standing judged, all being overcome; Vincent’s poems reveal and revel within poetry’s genius for finding the edges and true centers of beauty and truth in visible and hidden centers and hard to find outskirts everywhere. Vincent writes with historical purpose and communal love for living via poetry’s advantage. His poems invoke Dr. Martin Luther King, President Barack Obama, martyrs and musicians, family and friends; his poems are about these times and all times, they are unafraid to go where they must go if they are to do what poetry always wants to do.

—Dara Wier, author of In the Still of the Night

Donald Vincent received his BA in Writing and Public Relations at Loyola University Maryland and MFA in Poetry from Emerson College. He is also known as Mr. Hip, a music recording artist with music available on all streaming platforms. His music projects include Vegan Paradise (2018), Who Is Mr. Hip (2018), International Hip (2017), and Jokes From My Ex (2015). He teaches English Composition at UCLA and Visual & Media
Arts at Emerson College Los Angeles. Originally from the Southeast sector of Washington, DC, he currently lives in Los Angeles and at www.hidonaldvincent.com.