AWP Presentation: Notes on Literary Style in Fiction

UPDATE: The full and corrected version of this essay is now up at LitHub, as "Elements of Literary Style." I'm keeping the introduction here, with one quote. Please check out the full version at LitHub, and many thanks again to Christian Kiefer, and to Jonny Diamond at LitHub, for agreeing to run the piece.

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Yesterday I mentioned that I would post my remarks for the AWP 2018 panel "Profundity as Purpose: Thoughts on Sentences, Vocabulary and Style," organized by writer and critic Christian Kiefer. Other panelists included Coffee House Press editor Caroline Casey; acclaimed writers Kim O'Neill and Christine Schutt. I should note that I slightly modified the introduction below when I read it aloud, and also read only a portion of the full set of notes, to which I added a few quotations, by panelists O'Neill and Schutt, based on their remarks and readings. Many thanks to Christian, Caroline, Kim, Christine, and everyone who attended the panel, which was held at 9 am on Saturday, and drew a full house. Many thanks to Christian and my fellow panelists, and to all who attended the event!

(I should also note that at the panel Caroline and I offered the name of some living authors whose styles exemplified what Christian, others on the panel, and I were talking about--ourselves included--but I decided not to list them here, because there are so many great fiction writers, and I do mention but a few of the many I admire and regularly read with enthusiasm in my notes. I encourage J's Theater readers to add names of distinctive living fiction stylists they admire in the comments, if you'd like, and I'll aim to post them at some point soon if there are more than a handful.)

Lastly, I also want to note another highlight of this year's AWP, which was attending the Jack Jones Literary Arts' welcome event at the Columbia Cafe in Tampa! Many thanks to Kima Jones and Allison Conner, and it was so much fun to meet everyone on Jack Jones' roster--which includes yours truly--and its fans!

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INTRODUCTION

I want to begin by thanking Christian for organizing this panel, and thank all of my fellow panelists for their thoughts on this topic, I initially thought I would write a short essay, but instead I decided to draft a series of provisional notes on the topic of literary style in fiction, interlaced with quotations on the topic by various writers of note. (You can find a number of these quotes online, as well as on the website "Some Literary Criticism Quotes," which is where I culled them.) Unless otherwise noted, however, the comments and thoughts are mine.

Two quotes:

Is there an ethics of style? How might we talk about it? What happens when we consider how one template for now-dominant literary styles, emphasizing craft and de-emphasizing politics, that are taught in many—most?—MFA and undergraduate programs, may have their possible origins in the US government-funded approaches instituted at Iowa and Stanford, as Eric Bennett argues us in his 2015 scholarly study Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle and American Creative Writing During the Cold War (University of Iowa Press)? Even setting this particular history to the side, as usually occurs in most creative writing programs, doesn’t every artistic act require some level of ethical inquiry? Are there styles and stylistic approaches we might label more ethical or less, and if so, why? Or might another way to speak of the ethics of style be to raise questions not just of historicity and genealogy, but also of the truth(fulness) of representations in relation to a given narrative? What role or roles do the larger social, political, economic, and cultural contexts hold in this line of questioning?

*

“In order to find his voice he must first have mastered style”

–A. Alvarez, The Writer’s Voice

*

Prose (fiction) should not be musical; this is the province of poetry. (“Poetry is music set to words” –Dennis O’Driscoll.) This is another dictum I have always worked under, and to some degree, because of my inner sensibility, against. Yet so much of the most memorable prose, not just poetry, appears to aspire to, as the old phrase goes, and often achieves the condition of music. What lines in prose fiction do you most readily recall? Even the ideas and statements that engrave themselves on your consciousness do so not just because of their aptness and timeliness, but because of how they were written, how they unfold, almost like lyrics or lyric, as prose.

Photos: American Book Awards

Here a few photos from the 2016 American Book Awards ceremony, which was held at the San Francisco Jazz Center. The highlight of the event for me was meeting all of the other honorees--congratulations to ALL of them, those present and those unable to be there--and hearing the extraordinary, often deeply moving speeches. Thanks once again to the Before Columbus Foundation and its board, Justin Desmangles, Ishmael Reed, and everyone who makes the foundation, the awards, the event, and all the important work BCF does in the world possible! (All photos are by C (thank you!).)

With THE Beefeater,
in front of the Sir Francis Drake
Hotel, Union Square

C & I before the event 

Chatting with my Rutgers-Newark
colleague Lyra Monteiro 

Meeting ABA winner Jesús Salvador Treviño,
author of Return to Arroyo Grande 

The façade of jazz greats across the
street from SFJazz Center 

Justin Desmangles, radio host, writer,
and MC for American Book Awards 

ABA winner Lauret Savoy, author of Trace:
Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape

Poet Laura Da', author
of Tributaries and ABA winner

Jesús Salvador Treviño 

ABA winner Susan Muaddi Darraj, author
of Curious Land: Stories from Home 

ABA winner Deepa Iyer, author
of We Too Sing America:
South Asian, Arab, Muslim, and Sikh Immigrants
Shape Our Multiracial Future

Before Columbus Foundation and American
Book Awards founder Ishmael Reed,
introducing the Lowenfels Award for
Criticism, which went to Lyra Monteiro
and Nancy Isenberg

Lyra Monteiro, accepting her award

Washington University professor Bill Maxwell,
speaking after receiving his American Book
Award for his study F. B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover's
Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, accepting ABAs for
Ned Sublette and Constance Sublette,
authors of The American Slave Coast: A History
of the Slave-Breeding Industry

The mother and sister of college student
Chiitaanibah Johnson, who received the
Andrew Hope Award for her activism

Lyra speaking and breaking it down

Yours truly, giving my speech

A group photo

Lyra and I

Counternarratives Wins an American Book Award

I am elated to announce that Counternarratives has received a 2016 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation (BCF).  When I remember this book's long journey to publication, and meditate on the aims of this vitally important literary and cultural organization and all the books and authors it has honored in the past, including my MFA colleague, poet, memoirist, fiction writer, and critic Rigoberto González, I consider this be one of the highest honors possible.

Congratulations also go to all of this year's other recipients, and an especial congrats to two other honorees affiliated with Rutgers-Newark: my colleague Lyra Monteiro, an assistant professor of history, who received the Walter and Lillian Lowenfels Prize for Criticism for her essay on the play Hamilton, and journalist Nick Turse, author of Tomorrow's Battlefield: US Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa (Haymarket Books), who received an MA in history from RU-N in 1999. 

About the three of us, BCF chairman Justin Desmangles said:

“We are proud to honor the work of John Keene, whom we regard as among the most innovative and exciting writers in America today. The richness and fertility of his imagination coupled with the elegance of his prose produce a unique literary experience. In addition, we consider Lyra Montiero's critical perspectives to be both vital and courageous. Her rigorous, inventive, and powerfully deciphering analysis of “Hamilton,” the musical, was a much-needed antidote to the toxic commercial hyperbole. Finally, Nick Turse's efforts to expose secret U.S. military operations in Africa should be regarded as heroic. At BCF, we consider Turse to be in the tradition of the greatest journalists, penetrating the subterfuge and excavating information and perspectives otherwise missing or ignored.

Below is the official announcement from the Before Columbus Foundation.

Again, many thanks to them, and to everyone who helped make this book possible!

Counternarratives on WNYC's/NPR's On the Media + The Nation & Konch Reviews

Three weeks back, through serendipity's hand, Counternarratives and its author made their way into the WNYC studios and onto the air, courtesy of On the Media host Brooke Gladstone, producer Kimmie Regler, and their amazing staff. Why do I lay this turn of fortune at serendipity? Because it was not the the usual route of a New York Times review (there hasn't been one) or a galvanizing PR campaign (none exists), but old-style independent bookstore advocacy by the exceptional people at Park Slope Community Bookstore. They sold--and championed--the book to Brooke Gladstone's husband, who in turn passed it onto her, and after she read it, and shared it with Kimmie Regler, they decided the book and I should be on the air.

What I had originally thought would be a hour-long session extended to over two, I believe, with Gladstone (about and to whom I had to kvell, as I am a longtime fan) posing a wide array of questions and inviting me to read (and re-read) selections from the book, including from "Our Lady of the Sorrows," the novella at the heart of the collection and a text I'd never read from publicly. Afterwards, Gladstone, Regler and their team went to work and cooked up a delicious, distilled confection that also drew in musician and host Terrance McKnight, who with his rich bass voice read the part of Jim (aka James Alton Rivers), from my story "Rivers," and included musical selections by Georges Bizet ("L'Arlesienne Suite No 1 (III. Minuet)"), Jim Taylor ("Little Rose Is Gone/Billy in the Lowground"); George Whitefield Chadwick ("String Quartet No. (II. Andante semplice)"), and John Scofield ("After the Facts").

The result: "Every Story Has a Twin."

You can hear the show here, and you can find the rush(ed) transcript here. I couldn't be happier with the beautiful work Gladstone, Regler, and the On the Media staff did, and it has been one of the best boosts the book has received thus far. Many thanks to everyone involved!

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Of the many things about which I can express gratitude concerning Counternarratives, one is the steady stream of reviews, and excellent ones, that have appeared since the book's début in May. It feels, at least to me, almost inconceivable that nearly five months have passed since I got the official word from New Directions that Counternarratives was on bookstore shelves, and from shortly before its appearance the notices have flowed in. Two of the very best are the most recent. 

In esteemed progressive magazine The Nation, writer and critic Ben Ehrenreich recently provided an appraisal not only of the new book but of my first as well, in his review "Literature as Map to Liberty." This is without question one of the finest reviews I've received. A quote:

Counternarratives is no less ambitious or complex a work than Annotations, but it is considerably more approachable. Yet it is a book of such richness that it’s hard to know where to begin, so I’ll start with a moment—and there are many of these—where Keene’s text slides into another’s. This one occurs in a novella with the sly, unwieldy title “Gloss on a History of Roman Catholics in the Early American Republic, 1790–1825; or the Strange History of Our Lady of the Sorrows.” Like many of his stories, it’s quite epic for its length. It follows a young and variously gifted enslaved woman named Carmel as she accompanies her erstwhile master (mistress, really—a teenage girl holds title to her body) from Haiti in the throes of revolution to a Catholic convent school in Kentucky, which was then on the far western fringes of the young American Republic. Keene interrupts the narrative with several brief intertextual meditations on “the role of duty,” one of which leads with a quote from Gilles Deleuze and concludes with a question: “Within the context shaped by a musket barrel, is there any ethical responsibility besides silence, resistance and cunning?”

“To speak of culture,” Keene wrote in Annotations, “is to foreshadow a battle.” With Counternarratives, Keene is engaged, the battle roaring on several fronts at once. As in his previous book, there are missing texts at work in all these stories. This time, they are the reader’s assumptions and expectations, the dominant narratives—historical and political as well as strictly literary—with which we conjure the world and reproduce it, exclusions and erasures intact. Probably the most exemplary of them in that regard is “Rivers,” a tender and brutal tale in which Keene avenges a historic injustice, granting Mark Twain’s Jim the opportunity to narrate his own post-Huckleberry life. Tom Sawyer has aged into a less charming version of the glib sadist we always knew he was. Huck is broken and earnest and sad. And Jim, who has in freedom renamed himself James Alton Rivers, is something Twain never allowed him to be: a man of complexity and depth, with his own loves, tragedies, desires. Even here, Keene lets the telling be hinged on white hunger for a narrative in which Jim will always be pushed aside. The story is spurred by a—presumably white—reporter’s question about “the time you and that little boy…” Jim shushes him with a glance, annoyed because “this is supposed to be an interview about the war and my service in it”—at 46, Jim enlisted in the First Missouri Colored Troops and fought with them all the way to Texas. He seldom even thinks of Huck Finn anymore, “not even in dreams or nightmares.” I won’t give away the end, but you will never think of either Jim or Huck in quite the same way after reading it.

Another review, sidereal, if I may use that word, with an understanding as deep as a seismograph's needle, appeared in Konch Magazine, the journal that Ishmael Reed has been publishing for decades (the online archives, however, only go back to 2008). Reviewer, author and artist D. Scot Miller sussed out aspects of the collection that almost no other reviewers have mentioned. Here is a snippet:

And passage requires papers. Permits, letters, carte de visits, journals, diaries, and newspaper clippings give access, and decipher the cipher secreted within the stories. Mute Carmel creates specific languages for all she encounters, and draws maps as she secretly learns how to “make marks”, while Red learns how to mark time, creating a map of Civil War Washington D.C. in his head, but not free to walk its streets without his freedom papers. Jim Rivers has his in a water-proof metal locket laced around his neck when he bumps into “Mr. Tom Sawyer, Sir”, and the boy who tried to lead the fugitive slave deeper into the south years before in Rivers. It’s Rivers who gives a pass-key in the passage, “Have you ever noticed how on the decisive day the future reveal themselves as a ghost language and you got to do more than just pay attention but use all the knowledge and wisdom you have ever gained to interpret it?...the gleaming dressing the leaves with omens and auguries, printing clues in shadowed patterns in the grass and soil you just needed to discern if you could, because the real test is always to go beyond mere guessing to following the map the world around you sets forth.”

There are clues along the way, but they are coded in the ghost languages of history. A dedication to Samuel Delany invites the reader to seek, and find them through Möbius strips, through fractured text, peering between columns, or nestled between subtle breaks in type, notation, and marginalia. Keene posits history as a map of time, with language as the passage to freedom from time, through time. Time un-marked and un-timed, conjured by a multi-lingual tongue of a mix of Portuguese, Spanish, Haitian French, English, Pig Latin, German, and Arabic, like a poem from The Hallucinated City, containing neither rhyme nor meter, speaking what remains unsaid.

What is not being unsaid? The “unknown knowns” found in Langston Hughes’ "Blues" (“He slept like a rock/Or a man whose dead.”), the gentle caress between Carmel and Sophie, or Red and Horatio. Keene succeeds in “un-queering” history by queering historical text. Not so much re-writing it, as reclaiming it.

Many thanks to both reviewers and to The Nation and Konch!

Celebrating the Umbra Workshop @ CUNY

The Black Arts Movement has rightly received extensive--though still not enough--critical and scholarly treatment as one of the major moments in 20th century African American and American literary and cultural history, but before the founding of the Black Arts Repertory Theater School (BARTS) in Harlem in 1965, another group of young black writers and artists had already gathered in New York City, mostly on the Lower East Side, hosting workshops, throwing parties that brought together people creating in a range of genres, and publishing a magazine, titled Umbra. They were the Umbra workshop. Established on New York's LES in 1961, most of its members had dispersed by 1964, some of them heading up to Harlem, others across the northeast and to the South, still others to California, Europe, and parts beyond. Umbra's influence, through its members' work, projects (like Cannon's Gathering of the Tribes, Reed's numerous literary, cultural and political projects, including the St. Mark's Poetry Workshops, the Before Columbus Foundation, Konch, and The Yardbird Reader, to name a few), teaching and links to parallel and subsequent movements, including the Black Arts Movement and many others.

On Friday, several of the former members, including Steve Cannon, David Henderson, Rashidah Ismaili, Joe Johnson, and Ishmael Reed, convened at the CUNY Graduate Center for two events sponsored by IRADAC and the PhD Program in English, as well as by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, an afternoon seminar and conversation (which I was unable to attend) and a reading, which included not only their work, but also the poetry of some of the notable members who had already passed away, including Calvin Hernton, Tom Dent, Tom Feelings, Raymond Patterson, and Norman Pritchard (an influence on my own poetry, especially in Seismosis).  As the CUNY announcement stated, the Umbra Workshop comprised "an aesthetically diverse group of young artists, many with 'a strong commitment to "nonliterary" black culture.'" During the workshop's active years, elders like Langston Hughes and peers like Andrew Young encouraged the members, while musicians like Archie Shepp and Cecil Taylor performed at events. As several members noted, the aesthetic and political foci were intraracial and intercultural, and interracial and intercultural, as non-black writers also participated at times too.

Nearly all of the writers read selections from their work and that of their late peers, though Phoebe Halkowich read a piece based on her conversations with Steven Cannon. In her conversational piece, which was really a performance, one of the things Cannon noted was the general sense of possibility at that moment in history, but also the sense of terror; it was the season of assassinations, with President John F. Kennedy being murdered in 1963, and only two years later, Malcolm X was killed. The society was moving towards upheaval and transformation; the Civil Rights Movement was underway, and Black Americans were shifting in their views of themselves and what they expected and were demanding from the nation. The literary world was hardly immune from these currents and tensions, and, as several members noted, they played out in the workshop and in part led to its demise. Yet it was great to see the members together; the fondness and deep respect each held for the others was quite apparent. It also drew a wide array of New York-area writers who have been inspired (and taught and mentored, etc.) by one or many of the Umbra Workshop's former participants. Many thanks must go to poet, critic and grad student Tonya Foster, who was deeply involved in planning, organizing and pulling off the events, including a festive dinner.

Below are some photos from the event.

Ammiel Alcalay, offering introductory remarks,
with the panelists beside him (l-r, Joe Johnson,
Ishmael Reed, Rashidah Ismaili AbuBakr, and
Phoebe Halkowich with Steve Cannon

Tonya Foster, offering a wonderful
introduction to the panel.

The one and only Steve Cannon

Phoebe Halkowich

David Henderson

Rashida Ismaili AbuBakr

Joe Johnson

Ishmael Reed

The long and lively dinner table

Toni Morrison & Ishmael Reed @ Harlem Arts

This past Sunday brought the sort of event that too seldom occurs: two of the leading African American writers and cultural avatars--two of the leading American writers and cultural avatars--in a conversation guided by the third, in an intimate, welcoming non-academic setting. Or perhaps this does occur frequently but I have not been around to catch it. As soon as a friend alerted me that Toni Morrison (1931-) and Ishmael Reed (1938-) would participate in a conversation, led by Quincy Troupe (1939-) in Harlem no less, at the home of Quincy and Margaret Porter Troupe, as part of the Harlem Arts Salon, which has been presenting amazing programs for years now, I let friends know and got a ticket so as not to miss them. I have seen (and drawn) Toni Morrison a number of times, I studied with Ishmael Reed as an undergraduate, and I have heard Quincy Troupe read his work and was fortunate to have him select one of the first poems I ever had published in a mass circulation publication years ago, but I had never seen them all together chatting publicly. And it goes without saying that they did not disappoint.

Toni Morrison, after the talk (Eugene Redmond behind her)

Before I provide a few highlights of their conversation, let me first note that a number of other wonderful writers and literary folks (and I will certainly accidentally miss some people, so forgive me) were present, among them John Edgar Wideman, Marilyn Nelson, Eugene Redmond, Steve Cannon, Elizabeth Nunez, Keith Gilyard, Kate Rushin, Tyehimba Jess, Tonya Foster, Randall Horton, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Lorelei Williams, Brenda Greene, and Charles Ruas, just to name a few. That was just (part of) the audience, which poured into some three or four rooms of Margaret and Quincy Troupe's beautiful home. So packed was the gathering that I sat in a side room, with many others, and watched the luminaries on a screen, though I could hear them clearly just a room away. Acclaimed Bay Area artist Mildred Howard prepared a range of delicious, healthy meals, as well as some of the softest, most scrumptious but not too sweet sugar cookies I've eaten in years. Also, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's Open Space blog featured a streaming livecast of the event, and you can watch the entire conversation here. (A head's up: I'm briefly visible behind the video technician.) Lastly, poet Rich Villar, co-curator and one of the main forces behind the Acentos Foundation, which nurtures and promotes Latino/a writers and literature, delivered a spirited introduction to the event and for all three writers that did him and them proud.

Morrison and Reed have known each other for many years, going back to the period when both were living in New York and beginning their careers, and both have known Troupe as well since the late 1960s; Morrison and Troupe met at the loft that late, great writer Toni Cade Bambara had once maintained in Harlem. Rich Villar even read biographical notes for each from the mid 1970s, when they were already quite accomplished and yet still early in their careers. The conversation proceeded with Troupe asking open-ended questions about several topics, ranging from teachers who had an influence, to literary and cultural models, to the importance of geography, to how each writer wrote on a daily basis, to their thoughts on contemporary literature, and each spoke at length, with Reed (one of the best teachers I have ever had, and the first person to publish me in my adult life) often divagating into topics he wanted to discuss, and Morrison mostly sticking to the question but providing delectable anecdotes and motes of wisdom as she did so.

Margaret Porter Troupe and Ishmael Reed

Some of my favorite Morrison comments were when she was describing how, as an undergraduate at Howard, she had wanted to write on blacks in Shakespeare, but her professor felt this was outlandish and denigrated her. (She would have been ahead of her time on this topic, as subsequent scholarship has made quite clear.) She mentioned this anecdote as a way of distinguishing such professors from the ones who were more open, nurturing and forward-thinking, among them Sterling Brown, the great poet, and Alain Locke, the philosopher, whose "personal idiosyncrasies," such as using a handkerchief to touch doorknobs and folding a napkin on the desk onto which he placed his thereafter unmoving hands she found even more compelling than his difficult philosophizing. With regard to influences, she mentioned how important James Baldwin's essays were, particularly his evocative and effective use of language, and she also praised Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka for not "writing under the [white] gaze", something she has always striven not to do. One powerful aspect of Achebe's work she noted was a moment in which a male character is about to depart his home, and loving runs his hands through the thick hair of his wife. This small loving gesture towards hair that is so often reviled (even in Africa) was something many readers might overlook, but she found it telling about Achebe's mindset and larger aesthetic and social outlook, and worth thinking about in relation to her own writing.

Quincy Troupe

Morrison also talked about being a radio story-telling child, and how, growing up in her family, people would tell stories and then retell them over and over, often changing and transforming them, and expect the children to do the same. (I grew up in a similar environment; stories were retold, and changed, though certain elements were invariant.)  Growing up in Lorain, Ohio, she recalled there were no "black neighborhoods" and that her world was integrated, though her home was a different sort of place, and that the segregation she encountered in Washington while at Howard University, which she chose to attend so that she could be around black intellectuals, black thinkers, her professors and fellow students, became "theater" for her. As she noted, the care and detail, and money, that went into maintaining segregation and segregated facilities was noteworthy--and, I often think, a sign of an societal-wide psychosis, but that's for another time. About her writing routine, she noted that she woke up early, when she was sure she could still be smart on the page, and she provide a bit of insight into her method of characterization, noting that she usually does not describe every attribute of a character, instead writing in such a way that the reader will draw her in our heads, but also know her when we see her in the world. She described this is as "call and response," perhaps the first time I've heard that term used in this regard, and it struck me as deeply insightful and apt.

Toni Morrison signing a book

Ishmael Reed was his usual volcanic self; the years have turned hair almost titanium, but he has lost none of the fire I've always admired. He told the audience that one of his models was the Modernist satirist Nathanaël West, particularly West's non-linear, collage method, which one can see in not only in Reed's earliest fiction but in his most recent novel, Juice (Dalkey, 2011). He also mentioned J. A. Rodgers, the famous autodidactic historian whose work re-educated several generations of black readers, and his peers in the Umbra Group, one of the New York-based early 1960s predecessors to what became the Black Arts Movement and the other innovative artistic movements of that era and ones that followed. Freestyling and riffing off Troupe's questions, Reed moved from "geography" and "region" to a discussion of 19th century Black poets--one of the second moments he appeared in intellectual sync with the work of my former colleague Ivy Wilson--and discussed the courage of some of them in terms of their overt critiques, with so much more at stake, of President Andrew Johnson and other powerful, white figures. He offered some choice quotes, among them that "A good writer is a rival state" (he was quoting ), and "We don't get to tell our stories," meaning that the pipeline remains a narrow one, we often write to the expectations of publishers and certain groups and readers, and so on. (This is far more true in other genres than fiction and poetry, though.) He ended this electric slide of commentary by saying that he wanted to be "like Mike Tyson" in his literature. I think he's achieved that many times over.

Lorelei Williams and Kate Rushin

Responding to the question of how he wrote, Reed discussed waking up and reading the papers every day, and getting angry. (Among his prodigious literary production was a blog he maintained for a while at the San Francisco Chronicle, which I had linked to on this blog. I particularly enjoyed his editorial cartoons, which can acidly funny.) He was angry on Sunday too, noting how Law and Order (I think he said) was planning an episode based on Chris Brown's domestic abuse of Rihanna, only in the episode the Brown-like character was killed. The exploitation and spectacularity of it are the kinds of things Reed has long pointed out, and he was no less acute in his comments. He went on to say, anticipating what Morrison would say, that he was always writing and urged people in the room never to stop writing, but also to write in a variety of genres, undertake a "full-court press." He even spoke about a program for low income students he and his daughter had developed that got them reading and writing, and described it as a "Midnight Basketball During the Day," or Midday Basketball program. The participants, mostly black and latino, told him when he asked why they'd gone off track that they had no idea where they came from, and addressing this problem had long been an aim of his work.

Ishmael Reed on the monitor

A few other points he made involved him talking about learning Yoruba, the language and literature, as a way of studying the roots of African American culture and of another tradition of storytelling. He also talked about his study of Japanese, and how after Reckless Eyeballing, which deeply enraged white feminists and their allies across the country, he became "literary roadkill," though he noted Morrison supported both him and that book, but also that after that he'd followed Langston Hughes's example of going to Japan (and this connection with Japan in particular, I must note editorially, has a history in black innovative art practice; it came up at the Now Dig This! conference as well), where his book Japanese By Spring, as well as his other works, were praised and he was feted. Among his final thoughts were praise for contemporary American writer, in part because of the changing technological landscape, with e-books and print-on-demand possibilities unavailable to earlier generations, and "more players" out there, as opposed to the gatekeepers and literary elites of the past. He did admit to addiction to Facebook, an enthusiasm I'm thankful I've been able to avoid but which many writer friends have not, but Reed flipped it by noting that for him it was also a "platform" of the kind he is so fond of, and so even on Facebook, he is being none other than Ishmael Reed, writing and fighting.

Marilyn Nelson

It was an amazing event, and whetted my desire to catch any and every future Harlem Arts Salon event. It was also a perfect way to spend a Sunday afternoon in New York during Black History Month!

John Edgar Wideman

Poem: Ishmael Reed

Ishmael Reed (National Black Writers Conference)

We come to the end of Poetry Month. Since I began the month with a poem by a poet I know and have had the great luck to study with, I shall choose a final poem about poetry by another poet, of an earlier generation, whom I also had the good fortune to study with. This writer's poem "i am a cowboy in the boat of ra" was my favorite in childhood and for many years after, even though it took me years to fully understand what he was talking about. In fact, I would have chosen that poem, but it doesn't foreground thinking about poets or poetry as a medium in the way that the poems I've selected all month do, so I must pass it by, this time.  This poet first introduced me to the work of Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge (in person, no less); Adrienne Kennedy; and Jessica Hagedorn.  He also invited me to participate in the only reading I gave as a college student (which, it turns out, several of the Dark Room Writers Collective founders attended, though we didn't know each other then), and has over the years been an advocate. I know he is a controversial figure for many, but he was an excellent teacher, and, when I think of his work in prose fiction, in poetry, in playwrighting, in nonfictional and critical essays, and in lyric writing for musical accompaniment (whether it be jazz, hiphop, or other musical genres) I can only say that he remains one of the more original American and African American authors of his and subsequent eras.

He also has been a diehard champion of underrepresented perspectives in American literature, whether championing the work of Native American, Latino and Latina, Asian American, Arab American and mixed race writers, or founding Konch, which provided a venue for those writers, or editing over a dozen anthologies, such as From Totems to Hip-Hop: A Multicultural Anthology of Poetry Across the Americas, 1900–2001 (2003), featuring writers of all backgarounds, or establishing with others the Before Columbus Foundation and PEN/Oakland, which has given out the American Book Awards to writers whom the mainstream literary world often ignored.  His most frequent mode is satire, which often works very well, but sometimes not; but it has provided him with a means for engaging in one of the longest sustained critiques of of American exceptionalism, imperialism and structural racism of any American writer living. While producing this large and impressive body of work, he taught for 35 years at the University of California, Berkeley and elsewhere (which is where I encountered him). In 1998, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, perhaps considering not just his many literary works but his literary advocacy and community building efforts, honored him with their "Genius" Award.

Who am I talking about? I am talking about Ishmael Reed (1938-). And I will end this month with one of his best known--and, according to Gale Research, one of the most widely taught--poems in the curriculum. You may know which one I mean: "Beware: Do Not Read this Poem."  It is a masterful post-modern poem about poetry's seductive power, the satire undercutting the figurative and literal horror Reed invokes when he talks about the film's and the poem's voracious, anthropophagic appetite, but then cites the US Census figures on missing persons, a stat whose bureaucratic and ominous significance shifts through its connection to poetry.  Reed is saying, I think, through and amidst his satire, that poetry does have power, even if it might be rendered hyperbolic and linked to the obvious artifice of a "horror film" scenario and character.  It makes you laugh and think. Look at yourself, the poem says: not just the poem, but the poet and the readers themselves, have quite a bit of power. The power to devour each other, but of a voraciousness that might not be so bad. If you let it, if it lets you.

BEWARE: DO NOT READ THIS POEM

tonite, thriller was 
abt an ol woman , so vain she 
surrounded herself w/ 
          many mirrors

it got so bad that finally she 
locked herself indoors & her 
whole life became the 
          mirrors

one day the villagers broke 
into her house , but she was too 
swift for them . she disappeared 
          into a mirror 
each tenant who bought the house 
after that , lost a loved one to 
          the ol woman in the mirror : 
          first a little girl 
          then a young woman 
          then the young woman/s husband

the hunger of this poem is legendary 
it has taken in many victims 
back off from this poem 
it has drawn in yr feet 
back off from this poem 
it has drawn in yr legs

back off from this poem 
it is a greedy mirror 
you are into the poem . from 
         the waist down 
nobody can hear you can they ? 
this poem has had you up to here 
          belch 
this poem aint got no manners 
you cant call out frm this poem 
relax now & go w/ this poem

move & roll on to this poem 
do not resist this poem 
this poem has yr eyes 
this poem has his head 
this poem has his arms 
this poem has his fingers 
this poem has his fingertips

this poem is the reader & the 
reader this poem

statistic : the us bureau of missing persons re- 
         ports that in 1968 over 100,000 people 
          disappeared leaving no solid clues 
          nor trace     only 
a space     in the lives of their friends 

Copyright © Ishmael Reed, "Beware: Do Not Read This Poem," from New and Collected Poems, 1966-2006, New York: Carroll & Graf, 2006.

Friday Full Fare (Reed on Precious, 2.0 + Embodied Cognition + Killer Phones + Free Stuff)

I still haven't seen Precious, Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire, though I suppose I'll get around to it eventually. Having read the book, I really have no desire to see the movie, though many people whose opinions I value, including a notable Black filmmaker, have told me not only that Gabourey Sidibe and Mo'Nique (at right, Lucy Nicholson - Reuters), like others in the cast, turn in excellent performances, and I believe them, because Mo'Nique could act her way out of a lead safe, but that they thought the film was very good.

My old prof, Ishmael Reed, isn't having it, nor is he having Hollywood's praise for and hyping of this film, nor, for that matter, producers Tyler Perry and Oprah [Winfrey]. Back in November I mentioned (and updated in December) his full-blast critiques of the movie, and he breaks it down, in much more condensed form, in today's New York Times: "Fade to White." A sampling:

Redemption through learning the ways of white culture is an old Hollywood theme. D. W. Griffith produced a series of movies in which Chinese, Indians and blacks were lifted from savagery through assimilation. A more recent example of climbing out of the ghetto through assimilation is “Dangerous Minds,” where black and Latino students are rescued by a curriculum that doesn’t include a single black or Latino writer.

Yes sirree.

Any surprise that this film is also high on the Oscar buzz list?
==

About three weeks ago while discussing orality and literacy I was trying to make a point in class and reached for a name I usually can utter without pausing--UC Berkeley professor George Lakoff--but what came to mind was a completely different scholar and intellectual, George Landow (the hypertext guru, of Brown University) ["I said Landow when I meant Lakoff" almost sounds like a line from a Michael Palmer poem, doesn't it?], so I offered a verbal ellipsis, to be filled in later, to the class, and proceeded to the next point.

Lakoff is probably best known for his important linguistic insights and, perhaps more widely, for the brief moment of public attention he received when the Democrats, who for a host of reasons, are incapable of sustained effective messaging, turned to him after their 2004 electoral disasters to help craft their appeals to voters. New York Times writer Matt Bai even wrote a longish Times Magazine piece about it. Lakoff's ideas on "framing" incurred some caricatures and ridicules--he wants the Democrats to use special words and phrases to gull people was the gist--but his larger ideas, about how people cognize ideas and why frames are so crucial, how metaphors are embodied, and so on, which in fact would have and should be internalized by every liberal commentator, though they still aren't, got lost in the shuffle. (Cf. "Jobs bill" vs. "stimulus package," "Employment spending" vs. "Deficit growth," etc.) Republican messengers--"death tax," "death panels," "welfare queens," etc.--long ago figured this out.

More stuff + the free joint after the jump!