Yes, I have performance anxiety folks. I don’t blog. I do send out epistles via e-mail to my friends and family, but you are a stranger to me Dear Reader and I am on one side of an odd equation. Okay, this is not about algebra, it’s about poetry. But “Ars poetica” always scared the heck out of me, so okay, poems, poets, intrigue. I ran into an old friend who had stopped writing poetry for a decade to focus on fiction and she’s returned to poetry. She’ll probably write fiction again, but poetry is still the essential art. It is essential because when you get down to it, our deepest, craziest emotions; our philosophical biases are often found in a few lines or stanzas of verse. It could be the relentless economy of the form(s) that lend poems a capacity to pack a BIG WALLOP in so small a space. Even in an era of growing cynicism, careerism, and just plain exhaustion from the bad news of this world, poetry remains subversive. Try as we might to join the cultural media industry as a kind of specialized entertainment—those hip hop guys rhyme, those MFA guys rhyme, we remain on the edges. There has been a lot of discussion about where poetry is in the marketplace, but I think that’s not what should worry poets. I agree with much of the argument from Tim Seibles in “An Open Letter” from his collection Hammerlock, I hear about what poets and poetry can do: Poetry will never reach the general public. Poetry will not succeed if it’s excessively imaginative. Poetry can’t change anything. . . . I used to believe these notions were born of thoughtful consideration and humility, but now I see them as a kind of preemptive apology, a small-hearted justification for the writing of a hobbled poetry. He goes on to ask Why not a sublimely reckless poetry—when the ascendant social order permits nearly every type of corruption and related hypocrisy? Why not risk more and more? Why not risk more and more? Like every art, poets have to learn craft; have to know something of what went before; have to have respect speech. And we need to take cues from the courage, and brilliance of our literary progenitors, no matter what their genre. Just think of Frederick Douglass’—not a poet, but truly one of our great writers—in his Narrative describing how he learned to read and write and how important literacy is to liberation, to humanity fulfilled. The clash between New Orleans police and cultural groups asserting their right to the streets came to a head in July 2005, just before Katrina hit, when Big Chief Allison "Tootie" Montana collapsed in the middle of public hearings on alleged police harassment of Mardi Gras Indians. He died hours later. His last words to the public were “I want this to stop.” This cultural disconnect from a living tradition plays out across this nation. I’ve been to New Orleans, was there when Andy Young’s father died. I went to the funeral—this was back in the day like the 1970s—indeed the brass bands’ somber tones sung the body into the crypt, this being New Orleans, where people are buried above ground. And of course, once the sad business is done, we’ll get up and party. “A happy death” someone called it. Well, who do you think did that partying? Guys in suits? Socialites—possibly? But mostly it was the dishwashers, the janitors, the dock workers, musicians in between jobs, and a guy or gal friend of a friend— the poor people who are NOT being welcomed back to New Orleans. Or think about the banning of fireworks during the Lunar New Year by the Giuliani administration—some part of me believes allowing so many bad spirits to not be loudly banished left New York City vulnerable, left us open to the attack of September 11. Okay, a quiet Lunar New Year did not create murderous Islamist hijackers. But their deed took place in the Year of the Dragon and I know that many fear the idea of spirits even as they play with crystals, burn candles, and add to their dream books. How much of what happens to us remains invisible, on some other plane? New Orleans will not be healed if poor people and their social network remain tattered and suppressed. New Orleans would just become another sanitized tourist trap—French Quarter Ville, y’all? But then the poor people in this country are not welcome anywhere, except to be exploited. I got a day job with health care; but I live like many of the people in New Orleans, paycheck to paycheck. I ain’t poor, but I ain’t rich and I would suggest that most poets are in the same shoes. How do we explore our status in our work? How do we categorize ourselves, class wise? Class like race is one of those topics that we recognize as important, but then suddenly we can’t quite speak. A good way to start the discussion is with an interesting book by Gary Lenhart entitled The Stamp of Class: Reflections On Poetry & Social Class. In it he discusses the question of class by looking at the work of a variety of poets: Tracie Morris, William Carlos Williams, Ted Berrigan, and Ron Padgett, among others. My questions to American poets on the eve of Independence Day: How do we write as citizens? What if we are not persons of faith? What if you have had an abortion? What if you oppose the military? What if you feel as if the Age of Reagan has driven all but the gloss out of America? What if you think war is a great thing, not all poets are pacifists? Where in quatrains, tercets, couplets, blues, and haikus are the words that examine our lives as lived now? How are we dealing with Babylon to give it that Rasta edge? I recently gave a talk on the life and work of Lorenzo Thomas at Poets House and one of the things about his poetry was its observation of how we live—from the desire to hit it rich to our willful inattention to the growing horror of nation’s imperialistic efforts. So why the fights over paltry things—the few major prizes will always go to the elder poets, a select lot and younger poets with “connections” will get the other ones. So what. Isn’t the work of thinking and inspiration and passion and anguish and the occasional belly laugh, the making of poems the most important thing to poets. And with a few exceptions, poetry alone does not pay the rent or the mortgage. So enough of economics. I’ve had the great pleasure of reading Maureen Owen’s most recent volume, Erosions’s Pull. Along with Lorenzo Thomas, I think of Maureen as my mentor. My work does not use her strategies on the page, but there is something about her fearlessness—her capacity to imbue ordinary problems (motherhood, gardening, divorce, aging) with language as colorful, charged, and layered as the Joseph Cornell boxes she so brilliantly examines in one of poem series—that truly inspires me to think more, see more, dare more in my own work. Plus she can be very, very funny. She ends the “Leaving Song or where would we be if we/weren’t where we are,” thusly: After the adoption On the eve of July 4th it is always good to reminded just how ignorant any of us are about our nation and any other. We live on one globe. And in only a few places do the birds sing without a chorus of gunfire. I wonder where would be or how would we be if weren’t where we are. What goes around comes around is usually about a negative experience. What if what goes around was positive to begin with and what comes around is an even greater affirmation? I wrote a meditation on the image and work of the great, late actress African-American Diana Sands that was published in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology in the 1970s and the anthology has been reissued by Rutgers University Press. The poem was read by a professor at Bennett College who happens be a scholar in residence at NYU this summer and he found me and brought K. D. Leary, a cousin of Sands, who just finished her biography, to one of my book events. I was stunned by the discovery of a poem written in my 20s that has great agency now. This experience seemed to be one more affirmation of the work of much maligned black feminists; cultural feminists, who during the 1970s tried in as many ways as possible to offer a different, more complex thinking about the lives and culture of Black women. It also made me think how much Chicago was home to Black Women writers who serve as leaders of our literary sorority and how each of us finds our way into the community. My admiration for Diana Sands started with her portrayal of Beneatha Younger in A Raisin in the Sun. In Beneatha, Lorraine Hansberry introduced a new kind of Black female character—intellectual, fascinated by Africa and African liberation, and unconventional and questioning; a character who talked back to her mother in an era when young people simply did not do that. Hansberry, a Chicago child whose prominent family tried to live out American privilege—buy a home in a community that they could well afford—but found themselves living the African American nightmare (racist violence and legal intimidation). From her child hood traumas, great plays were born. In her short life Hansberry, who died at 34, used her considerable talent and intellect to examine and rail against American racism and imperialism. There she was in the ‘50s and early ‘60s living her life as an engaged artist, a social liberal, who talked back to Jim Crow America by marrying a White man in a era where miscegenation was illegal in all but a handful of states; left leaning during the McCarthy era; writing plays when the majority of Broadway-bound playwrights were American men: Tennessee Williams, William Inge, Arthur Miller, et al. She became the first Black woman to have a play produced on Broadway in 1959. With A Raisin in the Sun, she entered history. Her plays, essays, and interviews allow us to follow a mind set on freedom. And with Beneatha, she gave my generation a character to identify with, someone with the tools required to take on post-Jim Crow America—to struggle against racism and sexism, to find out what integration might mean, to have the chance that our mothers did not have of seeking fuller, freer lives. Hansberry came from a city where female voices are heard—the powerful poet/teacher Gwendolyn Brooks who taught several generations of writers and sparked an institutionalization of her work on Chicago’s South Side. And there are others who have not been as celebrated, but should. I will be forever grateful for Carolyn Rodgers’ collection, “how i got ovah”— showed me how a poet could examine religion, the family, personal relationships, and desire in an era when many poets were removing any hint of Christianity from their work because everyone was intent on revolution, total change. If Lorraine Hansberry questioned Christianity in Black American lives, Rodgers found a way to show its strengths and cultural relevance. Given the assault on Black folk during the 1970s—urban renewal, massive unemployment—those institutions that actually worked like the church had to be examined and used. With that amazing Mahalia Jackson gospel hymn as inspiration, lines from the title poem ‘how i got ovah” gives you some of the flavor of her lyric and the rock of Black Christian culture on which her best poetry is based: I have waded eyelash deep/have crossed rivers/have shake the water weed out/of my lungs/have swam for strength/pulled by strength/through waterfalls with electric beats/I have bore the shocks / of water deep deep Another poet in the sorority and a dear friend of mine is Angela Jackson. Her collections grow and grow in sophistication and daring, but my favorite is Dark Legs and Silk Kisses: The Beatitudes o the Spinners. As many of you know, spiders are important and sacred in African cultures—the web is not to be trifled with. And Jackson’s poems celebrate the many aspects of narrative, myth and history including one of the very best poems about Rosa Parks, a true web spinner: “Miz Rosa Rides the Bus,” which ends: Jim Crow dies and ravens come with crumbs. Jackson, Rodgers, Hansberry, and Brooks are but a few of the incredible Black women writers from Chicago who give each of us direction or misdirection (if need be) in a poets’ journey. And they are only a few of the very many in that city who make and have made wonderful work as poets, playwrights, novelists, journalists, teachers, radicals, rebels, daughters, aunts, and mothers. They truly are fierce. A few years ago, Alexis DeVeaux, whose biography of Audre Lorde, Warrior Poet, should be on every one’s reading list, contacted me because Audre published early work of mine in Chrysalis along with other young Black women poets. It brought back a lot of great and not so great memories of the 1970s. One thing it did do was make me grateful for the gift of sorority. Sisters of all kinds were in my life—I participated in the first (and last) Sojourner Truth Art Festival in which I curated the poetry reading with a line up of Ntozake Shange, Thulani Davis, Debbie Harris (a poet and playwright from Memphis) and me, this just before For Colored Girls hit in NYC. That was wild. But one of the great things about not having huge legacies, women began to make their own. That’s why Sara Miles, Sandy Esteves, Fay Chiang and I edited and published Ordinary Women. That’s why the WOW festival started. That’s why there were two women’s bookstores in the Manhattan. The sorority was in full flower, but endangered—straight versus lesbian sexuality; artistic restlessness, the start of many families, the rise of the political right. But, we created legacies. I can only imagine what women will do in the 20 teens. They have lots of materials to play with. It is hot. It is July. In fact it is July 4th as I write this. So far the grilling has not started. There was so much smoke in Brooklyn the other day, you’d of thought smog had been imported from China. This morning there was a great commentary on NPR about the growth of tyranny—finally. It seems that in all our media the war talk and the loss of rights roar as loud as lions. And everyone seems much too quiet. But reading Frederick Douglass’ Narrative, seeing an exhibition at the New York Historical Society by contemporary artists—brilliant work for the most part, and remembering that slavery as an issue was not allowed to be discussed in the House and Senate for more than a decade, even as the nation expanded westward, I understand how skilled Americans are at denial and distance from historical truth and character, like white supremacy and its conventions. When Douglass challenges the conventions of his day by bringing enslavement front and center as THE problem for the Republic back in 1852, he did this before a group of abolitionists. In 1852, abolitionists were a minority. They may have had righteousness on their side, but they had little or no real national political power—the growing divide between Slave and non-Slave state was fueled by economics and the Europeans and many a New Yorker were on the side of the Slave states. But the abolitionists were righteous and relentless and part of a global campaign to end the African Slave Trade. Sometimes globalization is a good thing. We are now in an equally fraught period. The Bill of Rights (remember them?) is slowly disappearing in the miasma of propaganda, executive orders, and that awful cliché, the fog of war. The talk talk talk about the use of torture and a disregard for human rights conventions serve to make us less wary of bad decisions and abuse. At the International Center for Photography, I saw an exhibition of the photographs from Abu Ghraib and what struck me was their size—small, snapshots really. In wars atrocities happen, but they are not justified. The Geneva Conventions grew out of a history of awful treatment of prisoners (if prisoners were taken) over the past 100 years. I keep thinking as I grew up that I knew that any number of bad things may have been done by Americans to uphold American power, but, until the Church Report, we had no idea of what those things were. Now we do and now we are allowing our nation to become a place where words like terror are flung about like manna for the war hungry to feed. And there is really a feeding frenzy right now. Here is a passage from Christopher Logue’s War Music, in the voice of Achilles: Kings can admit so little. Logue’s “translations” of Homer are brilliant, brutal, and viciously witty. There is much war music being made now. We are not going to be able to shut it out. I walked out into a delicate pink and gray sunset after sitting for the second time in Cinema Three at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in less than one week. What took me to this particular theater on two separate occasions: two great movies, the first is 30 years old; the second premiered tonight. Cinema, film, the movies are profound works of art to me. You have to understand I was raised in a Pentecostal home so movie going was a sin. In fact, the only movie I was allowed to see when I was growing up was Imitation of Life because Mahalia Jackson sang in the funeral scene. And what a scene! The Black Mother (spurned by her biracial daughter, mind you) is given full serious honors—horse drawn carriage, marching band, the lot. I had a funny conversation with David Trinidad, who remembered this as a Lana Turner/John Gavin vehicle, while I thought of it as a Sandra Dee as the nice white girl to Susan Kohner, who dared to play a Black woman (passing) when playing outside your race was the equivalent of playing outside your sexuality like all those straight men playing gay, ya dig. Susan did not get an Oscar nod, but then she overacted like crazy. Oh those days of miscegenation and its bad consequences. Well back to Mahalia. She was dressed in luxurious robes, her abundant hair beautifully done and she sang. It was a three-four-five hankie movie where even the poor colored people were well-dressed and just a little less obsequious to the good and not so good white folks. Lana and John were all right, but I was there for Mahalia and the few Black folk who were allowed to look good and have their own crises of the heart. But I got to say the original Imitation of Life with Claudette Colbert, Louise Beavers in full Aunt Jemina drag and Fredi Washington, a very light-skinned Black American is 10 times better. So I love great movies. And there are so few. But one is Antonioni’s The Passenger starring Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider and a variety of African and European landscapes, interiors and resorts. That’s the simple version. The Passenger is a series of visual, philosophical, and emotional vignettes that builds a complexity that stays on your mind and in your heart years after seeing it. From the opening scenes in what looks to be Mali or some place North African in which a curious, depressed, fascinated, tired, hungry, and thirsty Nicholson follows one false lead after another to the final scenes framed by a window that looks at a world growing smaller and smaller, this is a film that takes its time and shifts the sense of who and where and what is seen even as it plays out conventional “suspense” traits and glories in alienation. Nicholson is gorgeous in The Passenger. He’s tan, trim, his voice like a deep, whiskey-soaked bell. You can smell his musk. And he is funny. His “hookup” with Maria Schneider is perfect. Barcelona is beautiful and sad. The Gaudi apartments are memorable. The picture perfect lighting is downright terrifying. And what’s more, Antonioni understands the use of the obscene. Horrible, brutal things happen to any number of characters, particularly the African ones, in the film, but you see some, but not all of it. Which makes their suffering so much more acute. Like any great romance, the movie’s eroticism simply amplifies a meditation of life and death. When I first saw this movie I identified with Maria Schneider’s character, a student, a tourist, seeking something, joining the “bad” guy for the thrill of it all. But now I see that serves as a kind of Beatrice demanding the pilgrim get his act together, meet his appointment, deal with the fate he’s taken. If you steal a dead man’s life, you will not live long. Tonight I also had the privilege of seeing The Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela by Thomas Allen Harris. He is an accomplished African American filmmaker and artist and the brother of Lyle Ashton Harris, whose photographs and other media-based art deal with questions of race, sexuality, and Black culture. These two young men were raised in the Bronx in a home of African American intellectuals, their mother a highly regarded teacher, a home that became a meeting place for South African exiles because their step father Benjamin Pule (Lee) Leinaeng was a member of the first group of exiles who carried the ANC’s message to a larger world. Mr. Leinang’s funeral in his home town in South Africa is the catalyst for a movie that is part portrait, part meditation on fathers and sons; part history lesson, part exploration of the influence of Pan Africanism on the Black community, part pursuit of a new African identity. A pursuit anticipated in Lorraine Hansberry’s work. The Twelve Disciples honors the 12 men, some of whom did not live to 30, who left the police state that was South Africa in their early 20s, with a passion for freedom for their nation and a hatred of apartheid. I have to say “No Afrikaners were harmed in the making of this movie.” But a part of me wishes that the farmer who refused to pay his worker could have been found, named, and made to pay with interest. When the murderer of the three civil rights workers was finally convicted in Mississippi, I know that many young people thought, Why bother? But why not? Justice must be done. Even if the person never sits in jail. His deed has been called. His name is in the record books. The coward and brute that was this person is now part of history. We live in an era where as Americans we run from pain as if it is the major problem to be dealt with. We got drugs to cauterize just about anything, even shyness. But numbness, indifference is so much worse. How are we to create fuller, more complex and morally rich stories if we cannot recognize suffering? If our stories remain untold, then a part of human history is left out, cut away and stereotypes, lies and distortions move into the breach. When I came to the New York in the 1970s there were exiles from all over: Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, South Africa, all over. I knew they were here because “home” meant torture, privation, death. What Harris’film gave me was a fuller idea of exile and a richer portrait of these men who were away from “home” for 30 years. They accomplished much, but they were truly hurting. Mr. Leinaeng literally created the public relations arm of the ANC and carried it out during the Reagan Administration, which was aligned with the powers in Pretoria. When the film presents the ANC rally at Yankee Stadium after Mandela’s release, I could feel the power of that day in audience full of ANC representatives and their friends. A Free South Africa exists with all the problems that free people deal with. Harris lets us understand the enormous sacrifice that people make as warriors, revolutionaries, idealists, and friends. They did this during our lifetime, and in his serious, emotional, complicated view of a man who he never called father, but who called him son, there is the usefulness of that greatest of poetic forms, the epic. How else to elevate justice and dignity—warriors are named, their deeds recalled, their deaths mourned. For me these two very different films (a fictional movie; a post-modern documentary) show a connection between African liberation and the West. How Africans dealt with a shift of power from the colonials to the colonels is still being played out with awful effects in the Sudan and elsewhere. But the continent is not only known for corruption and carnage, it is also a place of hope. The President of Liberia is a woman. The artist projects that make up the AIDS awareness campaigns in Uganda are models for the world. Malians are not only exporting a brilliant and varied musical culture but also Bogulan, a design aesthetic. And there has been an extraordinary commitment from regular people in the West, philanthropists, religious activists, scientist, community organizers, just plain folks to providing resources to combat AIDS, to demanding a better accounting from our political leaders about what is happening in Darfur, Nigeria, Liberia, the Sudan. We live on one globe. These films made by radically different filmmakers have given me the gift to know that romance can be a life and death proposition and that sometimes sons honor their fathers by making works of art that share that most intimate of truths—we may see someone each and every day, but we never truly know them until we throw dirt on their coffins. On July 4th, I stood on the rooftop of my Bed-Stuy tenement feeling the sweet breeze and watching the fireworks –or at least those parts that could be seen from my vantage point. The bursts looked like sparkling milkweed, or sperm swimming up towards stars, and those that were white turned blue or vice versa. When I saw them on television, I realized how little of the full picture I had seen. It made me realize that we often see only parts of things--how difficult it is to see things in all their amazing complexity. Okay folks, I am the granddaughter of a Church of God in Christ minister, so allow me a biblical digression. I’ve been thinking about First Corinthians, Chapter 13. The link between prophecy and charity has always seen odd to me. Why would compassion lead to knowing the future? But then prophecy is not about the future but the face of God unless I completely miss St. Paul’s meaning, which is probable. How to understand the sacred in our lives through charity is what I think Paul was talking about in verses 9-12: 9 For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. The epistle ends with Paul saluting “faith, hope, charity” but he says “but the greatest of these is charity.” As you can tell, I am no theologian, but I know that many of us are looking through the glass darkly and we have not put away childish things. We live in a nation in the throes of great conflict, terror and sadness even as wealth and comfort increases for some. When I went to college and told people I was from Arkansas, they always asked, “Are you from Little Rock.” The screaming, cursing, mean white folks made the Little Rock Nine heroes. Those well-groomed, well-behaved colored children who simply wanted the best education their taxpaying parents could provide. America was shocked, shocked to see such behavior from the middle-class, formerly well-behaved white citizens. But every day ordinary people do horrible things because of hatred, fear, anxiety, greed, and culture. And the people of Little Rock in 1957 were no different. How do we talk about such awful things? I’ve always admired Gwendolyn Brooks poem “The Chicago Defender Sends A Man to Little Rock”—spoken in the voice of a veteran Black reporter. The poem ends in these stanzas: I scratch my head, massage the hate-I-had. And true, they are hurling spittle, rock, I saw a bleeding brownish boy . . . The lariat lynch-wish I deplored. The loveliest lynchee was our Lord. While I am still find the crucifixion image a bit much to take, the depiction of that white mob in such a strict meter fascinates me. It is as if Ms. Brooks wanted to show in her measure the formality of violence—how carefully composed were those screaming girls and spitting boys. Ms. Brooks found a way to talk about this. I grew up in a community where Black people read the Kings James Version of the Bible. Where newspapers and Ebony and Jet magazines and the daily papers were read and re-read with vigor—seeking signs of change. The names of Daisy Bates, who headed the NAACP in Little Rock and Eisenhower and Faubus who tried to keep Black children out of Central High School and Kennedy and Dr. King were spoken of either with reverence or deep contempt. Arkansas is a complicated place to grow up, especially for Black people. The Delta still had plantations; some of my relatives lived on them up until the 1950s. The New South--this multicultural America is very new, but there are many parts that remain and they are hiding in plain sight. We are only beginning to truly come to terms with the legacy of enslavement and the Enlightenment in the country. We know that much of America’s past wealth was built on the backs of enslaved Africans, native peoples, indentured servants and immigrant labor and that in 2006, there are many who would build new American wealth in a similar way—cheap labor always has a friend in Congress. Evolution is an American characteristic, constant change, and yet, underneath, there are ideas, arguments that bedevil our ideals, lead us to leaving behind whole groups of people for the sake of power or a buck, allow us to look at only the parts we like and forget the rest. As poets, citizens, residents of this earth, we have a lot to account for, we have a lot to do. Justice is a mighty river and we cannot allow it to be dammed. This has been an interesting experience for me. I’ve heard from friends from around the globe, many of them chastising me for my past refusal to “use email” etc. But as I said to Jan Clausen, this was an opportunity that I could not pass up. And here’s some added information from my good friend Janet Goldner, a wonderful artist and teacher who has been to Mali like a million times on the word Bogolan: “Bogo" means clay it is also called "bogolanfini" And it is more than a design aesthetic. It is also a form of pictorial writing. but of course most people can't read it anymore so it becomes design aesthetic! May all your design aesthetic: literary and any other you create connect to the earth and tease the sky. |
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