13 Years: Listening and Witnessing

Listening to St. Louis Public Radio’s broadcast of “A Conversation about Race,” moderated by Michel Martin with the citizens of Ferguson, MO, was fascinating. The White power structure as represented by the mayor and a couple of others are at a loss. They’ve created monstrous police departments that have waged war on the poor, mostly but not exclusively Black, and used the spoils thereof to pay for their salaries and furnishing—riot gear, rubber bullets, etc. Meanwhile, the good White people are at a loss as to why the Black people (who have been tear gassed, shot with rubber bullets, had their parents, children, grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, and siblings hauled into court for MINOR tiny violations that would be overlooked if the driver, pedestrian, person in or outside the liquor store was not Black) are so mad. Racism has been lucrative in Missouri and elsewhere. Here in New York City, the same idiotic mindset (broken windows, broken tailgate) of police interaction with citizens for MINOR tiny violations too often lead to bench warrants, criminal records, and in the case of Eric Garner, DEATH.

Poets have been writing and agitating against the abuses by the police for decades. When I first came to New York City in the early seventies, there seemed to be a police shooting of a Black or Brown youth every summer, like the annual ritual in “The Lottery.” June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Miguel Piñero, Jesús Papoleto Meléndez, Fay Chiang and many others wrote about police brutality and police murder. It was a trope, shall we say and alas a necessary one. There may have been White poets writing about this, but I don’t remember anything specific. It was as if everyone decided that this was the writers of color job. But then I came across Adrienne Rich’s The Dream of a Common Language and other White feminists and activists poets and became more aware of a broader critique of American power and culture. Later when I was getting my MFA, I was assigned Terence De Pres’s Praises and Dispraises, Poetry and Politics in the 20th Century. The New York Times review by Marianne Dekoven summed up some of my problems with the book:

Des Pres's cataclysmically bleak view of our century's politics accords with this elision of groups engaged in political resistance: the actual historical movements, with their successes and continuing aspirations as well as their highly visible failures and betrayals, without which all these poets' work would be impossible - Sinn Fein, Brecht's Marxism, the African National Congress, Mr. McGrath's American populist socialism and Ms. Rich's feminism. While Des Pres's readings of poems are powerful and fresh, this neglect of their being embedded in the history of political resistance makes the poetry seem strangely disembodied, as if each poet were crying out not to a tribe but to Des Pres, supremely simpatico but alone in his study.

Along with that lack of connection to the political history, there was another problem I had with Des Pres’ work. I wanted to know WHERE THE PEOPLE OF COLOR AT? No Langston Hughes, no Claude McKay, no Gwendolyn Brooks. Nada. That a noted literary scholar could write a book with such a theme and not include say McKay or Hughes or somebody Black or Brown, reflected an astounding neglect of a very real literary tradition and speaks volumes about the attitudes of White critics up until the end of the 20th century. I would hope that no one would ever again write a critical book about poetry and politics that either included only writers of color or did not include any. Rich’s work was powerfully, consistently political and she set an example for others that has rarely been achieved. Even in her later years, she was speaking truth to power as can be seen in this video of an awards ceremony at San Francisco State.

But this also got me thinking about poets who I think are often neglected or not seen because they may wear other public hats. Or their output has been not as extensive as one would wish. It seems to me there should be at least two, three more full-length books of poetry from Lorenzo Thomas. His last full-length Dancing on Main Street is brilliant and has a tone of foreboding to it that makes me think he could feel the birth of 21st century monsters—parented by gluttony, emotional lassitude, amorality and intentional blindness. In the penultimate stanza for the “Dirge for Amadou Diallo,” he says of the Americans' response to the Diallo Family’s simple plea for justice/recompense:

     O no,

In spite of all our history of terror

In the world

     Unaccountable eons of sorrow

Of the world

O no, O no

We do not understand.

That lack of understanding, the continued stumbling about as if we turned all the lights off so that we could not be blamed for knocking over the furniture or killing little dogs, led too many people after the attacks on September 11 asking “why do the hate us”? As a New Yorker, who had friends (Barbara Einzig and Maureen Owen) literally run for their lives on that day—that anyone would even ask such a question was beyond galling. Take any continent, any industry, any number of things done openly or covertly from the assassination of Lumumba to the massive arming of Israel to allowing the Balkans to fall into genocide to the support apartheid South Africa to the embargo of Cuba, just to name a few, and well, what’s to love? So thirteen years later, listening to the Mayor of Ferguson, Missouri, who after one young woman tells him “I was shot with a rubber bullet while standing in a neighbor’s yard passing out cups of water,” say basically that it was not the town’s police department that was in charge when that happened, is equally galling. Because despite his “service” and desire to do good, he literally could not “understand” the rage unleashed by the people he has hired to police his city. The only riot in Ferguson was a police riot. The people know it. The police know it. The mayor would rather go blind or be blind or hide behind his “lack of understanding.” The young woman who shared her anger and her wound understood the mayor and she’s not having it anymore.

Her rage is matched by anxiety. A well-known Missouri-based poet cannot publicly discuss what went on in her college classroom when a guest lecturer who had written a book on “colorism” came to her class the other day. The author has been involved in the Ferguson protests and someone on the poet’s campus got wind of this and police were sent to her classroom. I grew up on stories of the Soviets’s intimidation of Hungarian or Polish or Russian intellectuals, now such stories are frequently happening within our own nation. No one is asking for a loyalty oath, just yet. But just as no corruption is greater than local corruption, no repression is greater than local repression. In an age of seemingly instant communication, any of us may be isolated and intimidated in certain ways. WE MUST FIGHT AGAINST THAT.

Our rights and privileges and responsibilities as citizens are ever present—the 13th anniversary of the attacks on September 11 are a few days away. I live in New York City which has been on “high alert” since the day after. Tourists don’t see it, but long time New Yorkers do. And we deal. Poetry served as a kind of valve for us all post the attacks. Words had to be found, not so much to explain the attack or attackers, but to explain how we dealt with it. As Tracie Morris once said to me, New Yorkers had an experience that no one else can even begin to understand. I remember walking from midtown to the Village in my bad office shoes to Jessica Hagedorn’s apartment which was just above the “frozen zone.” The smell, the smoke, the empty buses commandeered to carry victims, the people walking uptown covered in dust, covered in the shattered bodies of those who had died, shadowed that walk. Getting back to Brooklyn became a combination of subway lines I hardly took and buses that I didn’t even knew existed. Everyone, everyone was kind. From the candles burning in Union Square while people talked, sang, ranted to tales of people walking miles up Third Avenue to the Bronx or across Brooklyn bridges to home—Quraysh Ali Lansana later burned the shoes he wore to recalling the lines made by people wanting to donate blood when there was no need for blood, the ways we moved through this city was with a great deal of dignity, grief and a sense of grace.

Several collections came out that examined in full or part the events of that day, but none moves me as much as Lee Briccetti’s Day Mark. Briccetti who was born in Rome, Italy considers her origins and her experiences in her adopted country and city. More importantly, she witnessed these events as she details in the collection’s title poem, “Day Mark”:

There is a blister on my mind.
I agree to that.
Moment as the plane, four blocks away
turned, angling in—and I knew
they would be dead and I would live.
And so it is.

Time, a membrane
we both slipped through, into the next
moment when I could scream.

Or in her smart take on the emotional costs to living for/in the city in another poem, “City Walker”

. . . Someone stiches a smile
Fastened with straight pins (ouch!)
Then follows her grief into the streets.
No love unless you find it in yourself

But it’s easy to find: extravagant, sibilant, talked about secret
Everyone pecks at no matter their pigeonhole,

Literary hero or the derelict, each with a hidden heartbreak.
My heartbreak

Strapped like an attaché case as I walk through the park.

Briccetti’s day job is as executive director of Poets House, but I am grateful for her real job as poet. Her ability to witness, to map the moment where both loss and gratitude (she’s alive) combine and to show both empathy for the many kinds of people who walk this city, indeed any city is one more way of letting me know that human endeavors cruel and compassionate are available to each and every one of us. That our gifts are to be shared across class, race, and gender lines if they are allowed to. Unlike the mayor of Ferguson or scholars locked away in his or her study. Close reading is like close listening and both are difficult but necessary habits to acquire. Terence Des Pres commentary on Rich’s poems is very important, but narrow. Too many politicians only listen to those with money and power and act accordingly. Poets have a more complex task. We are both close readers and close listeners—how else to shape language that will communicate ideas in interesting, effective and affective ways. Again, I am grateful to all of the poets who found ways to mark the devastation, the occupation (yes downtown was occupied by the National Guard), the anger, grief and bewilderment that accompanied so much destruction based on so much hatred.

I have not and may never write a poem that is directly about September 11. But in Painkiller, I included the poem “All Saints Day, 2001” that gives some idea of the way the city felt to me—here’s an excerpt:

Who is the Saint of
our city decelerated in thick humidity, intemperate heat?

Who is the Saint of
smiling eyed pretty girls wearing tiny heeled shoes and short
     skirts
prowling loud pubs on 2nd avenue or the gray hooded Black
     guys
smoking weed, talking trash in the shadows of Grand
     Central?

Who is the Saint of
the Black woman in the pizza parlor who, after too many
     noise complaints
unheeded, declares I own a 9 millimeter, legal,
if I shoot your dog what are you going to do about it?

Who is the Saint of
the boys in my “hood”
who call each other “son”
peer to peer father to father

Where’s daddy
Where’s mama
Where’s the good old days?

Thirteen years and a new building has been raised to carve the air and prove that we can come back. It is tall and shiny and ugly and many people from around the world will visit it in search of the World Trade Center as if searching for a symbol of loss in a city that does not allow loss to be visible. Indeed, where are the good old days?