Poetry has an uncomfortable relationship to political power. For centuries, poets were the mouthpieces of administration, forging ballads and lyricizing history. The voice of the poet sung the deeds of the ruling class, not the daily lives of the people. In the modern world, poetry is less beholden to power, but vestiges of its earlier subservient role linger. In part, they remain in the mere idea of poetic diction, as if some mysterious, elusive muse must descend upon us to transform our speaking voices from prose, as it were, to poetry. And no amount of MTV popularity will make poetry the place people turn for news. One considers this history when reading Trapeta Mayson's poems, in part because her works threaten to overturn it. Mayson's poems give voice to speakers who have traditionally been silent. She sketches stories of girls who have been forced into womanhood too early, of men struggling in economic situations they cannot overcome, and of lives in which dreams are put on hold by the challenges that accompany simply waking up for another day. Of silence, she writes, "I come from people who largely believe that things like pains and suffering are as connected to us as arms and legs. One isn't encouraged to talk so much about him or herself because others may be going through much worse." But Mayson's poetry doesn't exist to establish some relative scale of suffering. Reading of the trials - poverty, domestic violence, the glare of hatred reserved for INS bureaucrats who must tear families apart - her various narrators endure, one is less inclined to heave a sigh of relief that the subject's miseries are so much greater than the readers than to ask how the world gets to such a sad state in the first place. If poetry has some blame for its part in making history a tale told by the victors, Mayson's poems hold out the promise that the form may somehow yet be redeemed.

Mayson received her B.A. from Temple University, Philadelphia, and her M.S.S. from Bryn Mawr College, Pa. She had contributed her work to Panoramic Poetry Journal, Defiance Literary Journal, Aura - University of Alabama Literary Journal, and Drumvoices 2000 Poetry Anthology. She has been an artist-in-residence at Art Sanctuary in Philadelphia and Callaloo Writer's Workshop at the University of Virginia, among others. She has conducted poetry workshops at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Franklin Institute, and the Germantown Women's Center in Philadelphia. In 1999, Mayson received a fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.