Celebrating Nikki Giovanni at the Center

Yesterday, the Publishing Triangle, in collaboration with the bookstore Bureau of General Services-Queer Division (BGSQD), held a marvelous tribute to open Black History Month: "OutSpoken: A Tribute to Nikki Giovanni," honoring the essential poet, writer, teacher, intellectual, publisher, militant, and activist, who passed away last December 9, 2024, at 81. Nikki Giovanni gained public acclaim as one of the most important women and feminist thinkers and voices in the Black Arts Movement of the late 60s and early 70s, publishing her first two volumes of poetry, Black Thought, Black Feeling and Black Judgment, in 1968. She would go on to published scores more books, including poetry, essays, children's books, and more, including spoken word albums, and receive a vast array of honors for her work, including an American Book Award, the Ruth Lilly Prize, the Sankofa Freedom Award, and countless others.  She also became an influential teacher, at Virginia Tech, where she taught for 35 years, and at Cave Canem (how I wished I'd been there when she was teaching there!).

 

Hosted by the incomparable Emanuel Xavier, the event featured readings by leading queer poets Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, Reginald Harris, Darrel Alejandro Holnes, JP Howard & UGBA, and a Drag Queen Story Hour performance by none other than Harmonica Sunbeam. (The last time she participated in a Drag Queen Story Hour at the Center, as she reminded those present, back in March 2023, the event, which also featured New York State Attorney General Tish James, occasioned a minor media firestorm. There were no such disturbances on this night.) The readers each selected a poem by Giovanni, who has become iconic for several generations of poets, particularly Black queer and activist poets and other artists, and shared their own work, each before a beautiful still image of Giovanni during various stages of her life. Each aspect of this event would have made Giovanni feel truly loved and honored. "OutSpoken" also interspersed clips of readings by and interviews with Giovanni, bringing her actual voice into the room. 

A video clip of Nikki
Giovanni reading her work

Having taught her poetry once again last fall as part of my Black Arts Movement course, I was curious to see if anyone--or rather felt it likely that no one--was going to read some of her most rousing and incendiary early poems, particularly "The True Import of Present Dialogue, Black vs. Negro (For Peppe, Who Will Ultimately Judge Our Efforts," which is to say, the poem that begins "N****r / can you kill...." No one did, of course--and I want to say that Giovanni even left the poem out of her Selected Poems and Collected Poems, though I may be wrong on both accounts. My students this past semester, like students the prior time I taught this course, and like my own young self when I first read "The True Import," found that poem shocking, electrifying, disturbing, and yet so relevant, even decades later, for successive current moments. Giovanni wrote a follow-up poem, "My Poem," in which she basically says that she was already paying a price--political harassment, isolation, and so on--for writing "The True Import," but that, nevertheless, nothing would or will stop the revolution. 

In some ways she was right, while in other ways, the Civil Rights and Black Arts Movements did not achieve the goals many of its leading figures hoped for, though revolutions--cultural, political, social, psychic, if not economic--did occur and continue to resonate, and Giovanni, through her words, actions and life, was one of the people who made these transformations possible. Reggie Harris made a point in his remarks to note how Nikki lowkey affirmatively responded to a query about her partner and wife, now widow, Virginia Fowler, which was an effective and thoughtful way, I thought, to broach how Giovanni approached the subject matter of queerness and queer sexuality. Sex and love--for she is one of the great American poets on and of love--appear throughout her work, and her approach to queer desire and love increasingly appear in later work.

A few photos from the event--enjoy! (I would have posted a video of UGBA performing but unfortunately the video button here isn't working.)

Host Emanuel Xavier

Reggie Harris

 

Samiya Bashir

JP Howard

Cheryl Boyce-Taylor

Darrel Alejandro Holnes

UGBA

The one & only
Harmonica Sunbeam

First Reviews Are (Coming) In for Punks

Punks has been out roughly two and a half weeks, but it has begun to receive some very good, thoughtful reviews. They include 

• a fine review, the very first official one, on the Poetry Foundation's Harriet site by David Woo; 
• a starred review in Publishers Weekly; 
• a selection as one of Entropy's (soon to be RIP) Best Poetry Books of the last two years;
• one of Hyperallergic's Favorite Poetry Books of 2021 picks, reviewed by Albert Mobilio;
• and a wonderful initial review by the incomparable Samuel R. Delany on Facebook.

If you had asked me back in January or June what I thought might be the response, I'd probably have said I'd be happy if it sold through the first printing. This isn't false modesty but my earnest acknowledgement of the (years') long and arduous process it took for this book to make it into print. As it also turns out, however, it is Small Press Distributor's BEST SELLER for the month of November! Many thanks to all of the publications, reviewers and readers so far!

Please consider purchasing a copy ($20), from The Song Cave (it ships internationally too) or other retailers, and do recommend it to others if you think they might be interested and ask your local bookstores and libraries to order copies if you can! 

Thanks so much!

Punks' Official Debut

It's official! Punks, my new book of poems is officially in the world! You can order a copy directly from my publisher The Song Cave, via Small Press Distributors, and from bookstores (such as Barnes & Noble to Powells.com, etc., as well as the behemoth) around the country!

This collection, which includes a selection of collaborative poems with the late poet Cynthia Gray, experienced many false starts over the years on the way to publication, but once I connected with The Song Cave editors, talented poets in their own right Alan Felsenthal and Ben Estes, Punks was on the road to publication!

Please consider ordering a copy or at least urging your local bookstores--very important to support them--and your local libraries to order copies if you can. If copies are in bookstores people will see them and consider buying them and if libraries purchase them far more people have the opportunity to read them!

Many thanks to everyone who helped me and this book along the way, and enjoy! 

Tracy K. Smith New Poet Laureate of the US + Poem

Photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

In a marvelous move, the new Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, has just named Tracy K. Smith (1972-) as the new Poet Laureate Consultant to the Library of Congress, i.e., Poet Laureate of the US. She is the 22nd person to hold this post, and succeeds acclaimed poet Juan Felipe Herrera, who was the first Latino to serve as in the post. She also will join a long list of distinguished predecessors, including three Black women who have won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, as she did: Gwendolyn Brooks, who served--as Consultant for Poetry, before the Poet Laureate post was officially created--in 1985 and 1986; Rita Dove, who served from 1993 through 1995; and Natasha Trethewey, who served from 2012 through 2014.

Tracy is a native of Massachusetts, and grew up in California. I have known her since her undergraduate years, when she first joined the Dark Room Writers Collective as she was finishing up at Harvard, where she studied English and African American Studies. She later attended Columbia, where she received her MFA, and was a Stegner Fellow from 1997 to 1999. Tracy now directs the undergraduate Creative Writing Program at Princeton University, where she is Professor of Creative Writing.

Her poetry has received acclaim from her earliest book, The Body's Question, which received the Cave Canem Prize and was published by Graywolf Press in 2003. Her second book, Duende, earned her the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets and was published by Graywolf Press in 2007, and her third book, Life on Mars, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2012. In 2014, she received the prestigious Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, given for distinguished achievement. Tracy has also published a highly praised work of nonfiction entitled Ordinary Light: A Memoir, and has a new book of poetry, Wade in the Water, forthcoming next year.

Among the last ten or so Poet Laureates, some, like Trethewey and Herrera, have been very active in taking poetry outside the academy and engaging an array of communities in public programs and projects. About her own aims for the post, Tracy has told the New York Times' Alexandra Alter:

“I’m very excited about the opportunity to take what I consider to be the good news of poetry to parts of the country where literary festivals don’t always go,” she said. “Poetry is something that’s relevant to everyone’s life, whether they’re habitual readers of poetry or not.”

I am excited about her appointment, not only because of her gifts as a poet, teacher and poetry citizen, but particularly because if there is anyone who can negotiate and navigate the challenges a Poet Laureate--or any major figure in the arts--might face in our deeply divided country, particularly with the current President and administration operating in the foreground and background, it's someone like Tracy. Congratulations to her!

Update: Although Tracy noted in the Alter article that she did not plan to "advocate social causes," despite the fact that her work has, from the beginning, demonstrated a complex grasp of the world and social engagement, the following first step is a good sign: On the PBS News Hour's site, Tracy recommends four poetry books to read, and all are not just fine works of craft, but each speaks in a different and necessary way to our current political moment: Solmaz Sharif's Look; Erika L. Sánchez's Lessons on Expulsion; James Richardson's During; and Claudia Rankine's Citizen.

***

Here's one of Tracy's eponymous poems from Duende, her second collection, my personal favorite of her three poetry books, and perhaps the most formally daring, borrowed from the Poets.Org (Academy of American Poets) website. (One poet who comes to mind whenever I read Tracy's Duende poems but whose name I've never seen mentioned in conjunction with hers is Jay Wright, oddly enough.) The voice in this collection's poems immediately grabbed me. Tracy's lyric transformations, the dramatic movement in these poems, which follows not just the actions the poems describe but the pathways of feeling flowing throughout them, show incredible skill, and often in this volume, as here, cast a spell.

DUENDE

1.
 
The earth is dry and they live wanting.
Each with a small reservoir
Of furious music heavy in the throat.
They drag it out and with nails in their feet
Coax the night into being. Brief believing.
A skirt shimmering with sequins and lies.
And in this night that is not night,
Each word is a wish, each phrase
A shape their bodies ache to fill—
 
         I’m going to braid my hair
     Braid many colors into my hair
         I’ll put a long braid in my hair
     And write your name there
 
They defy gravity to feel tugged back.
The clatter, the mad slap of landing.
 
 
                                    2.
 
And not just them. Not just
The ramshackle family, the tíos,
Primitos, not just the bailaor
Whose heels have notched
And hammered time
So the hours flow in place
Like a tin river, marking
Only what once was.
Not just the voices of scraping
Against the river, nor the hands
Nudging them farther, fingers
Like blind birds, palms empty,
Echoing. Not just the women
With sober faces and flowers
In their hair, the ones who dance
As though they’re burying
Memory—one last time—
Beneath them.
               And I hate to do it here.
To set myself heavily beside them.
Not now that they’ve proven
The body a myth, a parable
For what not even language
Moves quickly enough to name.
If I call it pain, and try to touch it
With my hands, my own life,
It lies still and the music thins,
A pulse felt for through garments.
If I lean into the desire it starts from—
If I lean unbuttoned into the blow
Of loss after loss, love tossed
Into the ecstatic void—
It carries me with it farther,
To chords that stretch and bend
Like light through colored glass.
But it races on, toward shadows
Where the world I know
And the world I fear
Threaten to meet.
 
                                    3.
 
There is always a road,
The sea, dark hair, dolor.
 
Always a question
Bigger than itself—
 
          They say you’re leaving Monday

          Why can’t you leave on Tuesday?

Tracy K. Smith, "Duende" from Duende.

Copyright © 2007 by Tracy K. Smith.

Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press.
www.graywolfpress.org

Brooksday: Gwendolyn Brooks Centennial + Poem

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000)

One hundred years ago today, in Topeka, Kansas, Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was born to Keziah Wims Brooks and David Anderson Brooks. Before she had turned a year old, her family moved to Chicago, specifically the South Side Bronzeville neighborhood, which became her lifelong home, and which she memorialized in a series of works including 1949's Annie Allen, which would make her first African American and first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize, in 1950, one many august honors.  From an early age, her mother, a teacher and concert-trained pianist, knew she possessed a gift for literature, and told her that she was going to be the "lady Paul Laurence Dunbar" (Wikipedia), and, like Dunbar, she has left a mark that continues to influence, her poetic gifts and her influence among successive generations of writers anchoring her reputation as one of the major figures in 20th century American and African American poetry and literature.

A number of organizations are celebrating the centennial of Brooks's life. One that has a wide array of events planned is Our Miss Brooks 100, which uses the name she liked to be known by, and which is the effort of local Chicago and national individuals and organizations. Through June 2018, Our Miss Brooks 100 will be sponsoring programs. They include:

• January 1-December 31: Hands On Stanzas (which will bring poets into the Chicago-area schools for 20-week residencies) 
• May 12-June 18: ETA Creative Arts Foundation presents "Among All This We Stand Like a Fine Brownstone by Vantile Whitfield", at eta Creative Arts fourth (4th) mainstage production (in Chicago) & repeating throughout the summer 
• June 17: A Gwendolyn Brooks Trolley Tour, Lecture / Discussion, Literature, Guided Trolley Tour (in Chicago)
• Nov. 18: Manual Cinema's Life of Gwendolyn Brooks, Evening performance (Poetry Foundation, Chicago)

On the Our Miss Brooks 100 site, you can find information about her life in Chicago, and links to articles about Gwendolyn Brooks, testimonies by poets, librarians and readers.

The Academy of American Poets site features a Centennial Celebration for Gwendolyn Brooks,  which includes her poetry, an interview with her, lesson plans for teachers, essays by noted poets, and archival audio material, including Brooks's 1983 reading at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. I was quite fortunate enough to hear Miss Brooks read with then Poet Laureate Rita Dove in the early 1990s. The room was packed, and she and Dove, to no one's surprise, brought the house down again and again.

Below is one of the poems from one of her later collections, Blacks, "Boy Breaking Glass," which I reprint from the Poetry Foundation's website. In this poem, she provides a glimpse of the Chicago she lived, knew and captured in her distinctive style, while also underlining her psychological and social perceptiveness, and her deep humanity. Do check out the Centennial Celebration site, and if you have never listened to Miss Brooks, please click on the audio link there, or Google "Gwendolyn Brooks reading" to find more links.

Boy Breaking Glass

By Gwendolyn Brooks

To Marc Crawford
from whom the commission

Whose broken window is a cry of art   
(success, that winks aware
as elegance, as a treasonable faith)
is raw: is sonic: is old-eyed première.
Our beautiful flaw and terrible ornament.   
Our barbarous and metal little man.

“I shall create! If not a note, a hole.   
If not an overture, a desecration.”

Full of pepper and light
and Salt and night and cargoes.

“Don’t go down the plank
if you see there’s no extension.   
Each to his grief, each to
his loneliness and fidgety revenge.
Nobody knew where I was and now
                   I am no longer there.”

The only sanity is a cup of tea.   
The music is in minors.

Each one other
is having different weather.

“It was you, it was you who threw away my name!   
And this is everything I have for me.”

Who has not Congress, lobster, love, luau,   
the Regency Room, the Statue of Liberty,   
runs. A sloppy amalgamation.
A mistake.
A cliff.
A hymn, a snare, and an exceeding sun.

Gwendolyn Brooks, “Boy Breaking Glass,” from Blacks
(Chicago: Third World Press, 1987).
Reprinted by consent of Brooks Permissions.
Source: Blacks (1987)

RIP Mari Evans & Derek Walcott

Within the last few weeks, two major Black poets, Mari Evans (1919/1923?-2017) and Derek Walcott (1930-2017), have passed. Unsurprisingly, there has been much more coverage of Walcott, an internationally renown poet and playwright, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature, than of Evans, who probably is best known among afficionados of 20th century Black Women's writing and the Black Arts Movement. In both she was an invaluable voice. As I have come to do when thinking about the rich constellations of Black poetries throughout history, I see them as part of a continuum, a point I doubt will be mentioned in obituaries of either. Both poets probed their intersectional identities in part through an investigation of history and contemporary society, and both drew upon the oral traditions in which they had grown up, to different but parallel ends. With their passing, the poetry world has lost two significant voices.

Evans was the older poet, an African American, a native of Toledo, Ohio, and did not publish her first book until she was already 40 years old. It was around this time, in the late 1960s, which marked the rise of the Black Arts Movement, that she began teaching, a profession in which she made her mark. In 1970, she issued her second volume, I Am a Black Woman, which stands alongside early books by Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Jayne Cortez, Lucille Clifton, and Carolyn Rodgers as exemplars of the new Black women's poetry that still continues to influence Black poets writing in the US and globally today. In this collection's poems you can see the themes, the style, the fierceness that would appear in all of Evans's later work, and you can also see how it serves and continues to function as an important counterweight to the sometimes masculinist, misogynistic discourse that marked some--but not all--poetry by Black Arts male poets.

A feminist, politically progressive, a poet drawing from vernacular traditions but possessing a keen sense of the line, and of humor, Evans would go on to publish four more books of poetry, as well as writings for children and plays, while also pursuing a career as a poetry professor at a number of institutions. I had the pleasure of hearing Mari Evans read a few times, though I never got an opportunity to speak with her at length. A longtime resident of Indianapolis, Indiana, she died there on March 10, 2017. Here is one of her most famous poems, "I Am a Black Woman," from the AfroPoets website, and I hear echoes of it in so many poems being written today, even as they take different approaches to the themes Evans so movingly articulated in her work:

I Am a Black Woman

I am a black woman
the music of my song
some sweet arpeggio of tears
is written in a minor key
and I
can be heard humming in the night
Can be heard
humming
in the night


I saw my mate leap screaming to the sea
and I/with these hands/cupped the lifebreath
from my issue in the canebrake
I lost Nat's swinging body in a rain of tears
and heard my son scream all the way from Anzio
for Peace he never knew....I
learned Da Nang and Pork Chop Hill
in anguish
Now my nostrils know the gas
and these trigger tire/d fingers
seek the softness in my warrior's beard


I am a black woman
tall as a cypress
strong
beyond all definition still
defying place
and time
and circumstance
assailed
impervious
indestructible
Look
on me and be
renewed 

Copyright © Mari Evans, 2017. All rights reserved.

I have written about and posted a few poems by Derek Walcott over the years, including back in 2006, when I ran into him at a New York bank branch, spoke with and snapped a photo of him, upsetting the customer assistant who was handling his business. (A subsequent encounter at Sea Grape--which nearly shares the name of his 1976 collection--a wine store on Hudson Street, was without incident, and he was warm and gregarious, though I still think he really had no idea who I was beyond a vag with Boston.) I wrote about him again in 2008, when I posted "As John to Patmos," the first poem by him I ever read, when I was in junior high and I happened upon it in a poetry anthology my class was using. If I remember correctly,  we were not assigned Walcott's poem but the poem's final lines immediately drew me to it. I did have the pleasure of meeting Walcott a few times over the years, including all the way back to the early Dark Room Writers Collective days, when he read with Martín Espada. His delivery of his poems that night was as unforgettable as the lead up to the event, when several Dark Room members had to go fetch him, I think, and later, as his inimitable entrance into the Dark Room house, with a little entourage. Every reading thereafter I always measured by that first one, and he rarely disappointed.

Even before I'd met him in person, I'd heard about him as a teacher, including the good--his brilliance in finding ways to help poets reshape and perfect their poems, his many nuggets of wisdom, his sharp eye--and the bad; the year before I started college, he was called out for having sexually harassed an undergraduate student, and he was called out again a few years later for the same behavior. His life's complexities and complications are there in the work, which drew upon a range of traditions, including English formalism and Caribbean orality and its trove of storytelling and myth-making. The rich fusion of this poetics is apparent from the very beginning; Walcott's first book, In a Green Night: Poems 1948-1960, was more accomplished than the second or third books of highly praised poets. It reaches its apogee, I think, in the later work, particularly his masterpiece Omeros (1990), which stands as one of the great long poems of all time in English, and a landmark in Anglophone, Caribbean and Black Diasporic literature.

Here is the 1lth section of "The Schooner Flight," another of my favorite Walcott poems. You can find the entire poem here, on the Poetry Foundation's website.

From "The Schooner Flight"

11 After the Storm

There’s a fresh light that follows a storm
while the whole sea still havoc; in its bright wake   
I saw the veiled face of Maria Concepcion   
marrying the ocean, then drifting away
in the widening lace of her bridal train
with white gulls her bridesmaids, till she was gone.   
I wanted nothing after that day.
Across my own face, like the face of the sun,   
a light rain was falling, with the sea calm.

Fall gently, rain, on the sea’s upturned face   
like a girl showering; make these islands fresh   
as Shabine once knew them! Let every trace,   
every hot road, smell like clothes she just press   
and sprinkle with drizzle. I finish dream;   
whatever the rain wash and the sun iron:
the white clouds, the sea and sky with one seam,   
is clothes enough for my nakedness.   
Though my Flight never pass the incoming tide   
of this inland sea beyond the loud reefs   
of the final Bahamas, I am satisfied   
if my hand gave voice to one people’s grief.   
Open the map. More islands there, man,   
than peas on a tin plate, all different size,   
one thousand in the Bahamas alone,   
from mountains to low scrub with coral keys,   
and from this bowsprit, I bless every town,   
the blue smell of smoke in hills behind them,
and the one small road winding down them like twine
to the roofs below; I have only one theme:

The bowsprit, the arrow, the longing, the lunging heart—
the flight to a target whose aim we’ll never know,   
vain search for one island that heals with its harbor   
and a guiltless horizon, where the almond’s shadow   
doesn’t injure the sand. There are so many islands!   
As many islands as the stars at night
on that branched tree from which meteors are shaken
like falling fruit around the schooner Flight.   
But things must fall, and so it always was,   
on one hand Venus, on the other Mars;   
fall, and are one, just as this earth is one   
island in archipelagoes of stars.
My first friend was the sea. Now, is my last.   
I stop talking now. I work, then I read,   
cotching under a lantern hooked to the mast.   
I try to forget what happiness was,
and when that don’t work, I study the stars.   
Sometimes is just me, and the soft-scissored foam   
as the deck turn white and the moon open   
a cloud like a door, and the light over me   
is a road in white moonlight taking me home.   
Shabine sang to you from the depths of the sea.

Derek Walcott, “The Schooner Flight” from Collected Poems 1948-1984. Copyright © 1990 by Derek Walcott. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC, http://us.macmillan.com/fsg. All rights reserved. Source: Poems 1965-1980 (Jonathan Cape, 1980)

Fourth of July Poem: Jay Wright

Jay Wright at Rutgers-
New Brunswick, 2006

In place of a prose post about the Fourth of July, I thought I'd cede the space to a poet: Jay Wright (1935-). My very first post on this blog, 11 years ago, was a tribute to him when he received the Bollingen Prize, and I often think that I should post his poetry more, and occasionally have done so, but the ones I want to post tend to be quite long. 

Here's a poem from his début book, The Homecoming Singer (Corinth, 1971), which was reprinted in Transfigurations (LSU Press, 2000), a volume that should have received the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, National Book Critics' Circle Award, and every other major poetic honor. History will, I hope, be the ultimate judge in favor of his greatness; the poems are the testimony. 

"Crispus Attucks" is Wright's meditation on the Revolutionary War hero, who the first person to die in this country's first, decisive battle for freedom. A few years ago, while conducting research for a novel, I came across John Adams's dismissive description of Attucks, which was part of his trial defense of the British soldiers who killed the patriots during the Boston Massacre. 

Twenty years before, as that post also reveals, Attucks had run away from his master in Framingham; clearly freedom was on his mind, or as Wright calls it, the prelude to his "impulsive miracle." This was also his personal and mortal sacrifice, which helped this country to achieve the liberty it trumpets to the entire world. Too often, as Wright makes clear, we forget its first architect. Let's honor him today.

Crispus Attucks

CRISPUS ATTUCKS

When we speak

of those musket-draped

and manqué Englishman;

that cloistered country;

all those common people,

dotting the potted stoves,

hating the king,

shifting uneasily under

the sharp sails

of the unwelcome boats,

sometimes we forget you.

Who asked you

for that impulsive miracle?

I form it now,

with my own motives.

The flag dipping in your hands,

your crafted boots

hammering up the unclaimed streets,

all that was in that unformed moment.

But it wasn't the feel of those things,

nor the burden of the American character;

it was somehow the sense

of an unencumbered escape,

the breaking of a Protestant host,

the ambiguous, detached

judgment of yourself.

Now, we think of you,

when, through the sibilant streets,

another season drums

your intense, communal daring.

Copyright © Jay Wright, 1971, 2000. From Transfigurations: Collected Poems, Louisiana University Press, 2000. All rights reserved.

RIP Michael S. Harper

Yesterday I learned that Michael S. Harper (March 18, 1938 - May 7, 2016), one of the major poets of his generation, a profoundly influential teacher and mentor, and the Kapstein University Professor Emeritus at Brown University, had passed away, surrounded by his family and the music of one of his favorite musicians, John Coltrane.

Michael was, first and foremost, a poet of tremendous skill, whose poetry often fused a precise contemporary lyric style, profoundly informed by the African American tradition, with subject matter drawn from his personal life, as well as the vaster tapestry of black history and culture. Though he emerged in the wake of the Black Arts Movement and developed a poetics informed by it, he was not a polemicist, and his later poems suggested ways to bridge the racial divide. He was in particular a master of the occasional poem.

Michael published fifteen collections of poems, was twice nominated for the National Book Award, edited several important anthologies, including (with Robert Stepto) Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Art, and Scholarship, and Every Shut Eye Ain't Asleep: An Anthology of Poetry by African Americans since 1945 (with Anthony Walton); served as the first poet laureate of Rhode Island; and received many honors, including the Melville Cane Award of the Poetry Society of America and the Frost Medal for lifetime achievement from the Academy of American Poets.

As any of his students might attest, Michael was a proselytizer for the cause of poetry in general, and of black poetry in particular. He urged those who studied with him as well as fellow poets to delve more deeply in the black American poetic past. Accounts of how he would send a budding poet, who came to his office to chat about poems with him, into the archive to do background work in preparation, are legion. His own personal stories about figures like Sterling Brown were legendary, and he trained a number of major writers during his long tenure at Brown.


My own interactions were Michael were few, but memorable. The first came during a National Black Arts Festival and involved assuring him that I had a distinct identity from my boss, a literary editor, at that time. It took a while, and the intercession of another academic figure, to convince him of this. The next came several years later during my first year at Cave Canem, I found myself no longer needing an alarm clock, as Michael's early morning efforts on his typewriter in the room next door more than sufficed in waking me up early. Very early. Then there was the experience of walking alongside him and as we chatted he listed in my direction and eventually had me flat against the wall, all the while recounting a series of insights I can no longer remember. (I remember that experience of being against the wall!). He was a towering figure, literally as well as figuratively, so I believe I squeaked out a "Professor Harper" to free myself, and return us both to our journey down the hallway.

In my second year at Cave Canem I lucked out in having Michael as one of my workshop leaders. I'd been waiting for this experience for years, since I'd never attended Brown and had missed him in the round-robin rotation of faculty members the year before. As part of his workshop, he had us memorize poems, and I chose Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays," one of the masterpieces of 20th century African American and American poetry, a poem I had read more than once but had not fully internalized. One of the pleasures of memorizing that Hayden poem, in addition to integrating it into the very fiber of my being, was witnessing all the other poets in Michael's workshops that summer learning their chosen poems by heart. And recite them we did. To this day, I can still recite that poem, and, despite the fact that he wasn't so fond of the poem I wrote in his workshop, can recall many of the lessons Michael taught about rigor and concision and listening to one's ear.

During the year I taught at Brown I never saw Michael, but we communicated a few times via notes. I have retained one of the notes he left for me, typed out on a standard index card, and the little message unfolds like poetry. I knew he had gone through a great deal and recognized the toll that academe had taken on him; that was another lesson I tried to learn, that our colleague Aishah Rahman tried to make sure I understood. He was a poet to the core, and one of my hopes is that readers return to his work and find the many treasures in it. I also hope that his students carry on the best aspects of his teaching, including sending students to the archives to read and read and read some more, and to be as exacting with their own work as is possible. Read the greatest writers, learn how they do what they do, listen to their stories and share them with others, and push yourself. Push yourself. You can't fake the funk.


Here is one of my favorite poems by Michael S. Harper. When he read during my first year at Cave Canem, as all the faculty do, I tried to send him brain waves to read it. He went through poem and poem and then announced, "A Mother Speaks..." and I turned to Toni Asante Lightfoot and said, I willed that poem! Perhaps it was telepathy, or just him deciding on one of his masterpieces, as relevant, sadly, today as it was when he wrote it in the 1960s. For this and all his work in the world, I think him. RIP, Michael S. Harper.

A MOTHER SPEAKS: THE ALGIERS MOTEL INCIDENT, DETROIT

It's too dark to see black
in the windows of
Woodward or Virginia Park.
The undertaker pushed his body
back into place with plastic and gum
but it wouldn't hold water.
When I looked for marks or lineament or fine stitching
I was led away without seeing
this plastic face they'd built
that was not my son's.
They tied the eye torn out
by shotgun into place
and his shattered arm cut away
with his buttocks that remained.
My son's gone by white hands
though he said to his last word--
"Oh I'm so sorry, officer,
I broke your gun."

Copyright © Michael S. Harper, from Dear John, Dear Coltrane,
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1970.

Poem: James Baldwin

One of the treats of this year's Inter/National Poetry Month is the publication of a new collection of poems by James Baldwin (1924-1987), one of the greatest figures in 20th century African American and American literature and culture. Baldwin was an exemplary essayist, social critic and public intellectual whose vision and insights, nearly three decades after his death, still provides a vital lens for understanding our society, and a talented, pioneering fiction writer and playwright, whose courage in tackling subject matter, especially racism and white supremacy, and the complexities of black and queer lives, and whose lyrical voice, sometimes achieving a condition not unlike poetry and song, enshrine him as an important author always worth returning to.

Like many writers of prose, Baldwin loved and wrote poetry all his life. From my perusal of his 1983 volume Jimmy's Blues, I would say that he saw poetry as a way to memorialize not just moments but people, and thus among his oeuvre are some famous occasional poems, including "Sweet Lorraine," a tribute to his friend, another great, pioneering writer, Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965). For him poetry often served as as a way for Baldwin to register the rich currents of personal and societal feeling, flashes of intellection, in and as language, without the systematic approach a writer choosing poetry as her primary mode of expression might follow. Nevertheless his poetry, as Nikky Finney argues persuasively in her introduction to Jimmy's Blues and Other Poems (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014), Baldwin's poetry merits our reading. Its rewards are multiple. To quote Finney, excerpted on the Poetry Foundation's website Harriet:

James Baldwin, as poet, was incessantly paying attention and always leaning into the din and hum around him, making his poems from his notes of what was found there, making his outlines, his annotations, doing his jotting down, writing from the mettle and marginalia of his life, giving commentary, scribbling, then dispatching out to the world what he knew and felt about that world. James Baldwin, as poet, was forever licking the tip of his pencil, preparing for more calculations, more inventory, moving, counting each letter being made inside the abacus of the poem. James Baldwin, as poet, never forgot what he had taught me in that seventeen-hundred-and-seventy-six-word essay — to remember where one came from. So many of the poems are dedicated back to someone who perhaps had gone the distance, perhaps had taught him about the rain: for David, for Jefe, for Lena Horne, for Rico, for Berdis, for Y.S.

and

When the writer Cecil Brown went to see James Baldwin in Paris in the summer of 1982, he found him “busy writing poems,” quite possibly these poems. Brown reports that Baldwin would work on a poem for a while and then stop from time to time to read one aloud to him. “Staggerlee wonders” was one of those poems, and “Staggerlee wonders” opens Jimmy’s Blues, the collection he published in 1983. The poem begins with indefatigable might, setting the tone and temperature for everything else in this volume, as well as the sound and sense found throughout Baldwin’s oeuvre. “Baldwin read to me from the poem with great humor and laughter,” Brown wrote in his book Stagolee Shot Billy.

Here is one of the poems from the collection, which I am reprinting from Buzzfeed.com, which originally ran three. Enjoy!

“MUNICH, WINTER 1973 (for Y.S.)”

In a strange house,
a strange bed
in a strange town,
a very strange me
is waiting for you.

Now
it is very early in the morning.
The silence is loud.
The baby is walking about
with his foaming bottle,
making strange sounds
and deciding, after all,
to be my friend.

You
arrive tonight.

How dull time is!
How empty—and yet,
since I am sitting here,
lying here,
walking up and down here,
waiting,
I see
that time’s cruel ability
to make one wait
is time’s reality.

I see your hair
which I call red.
I lie here in this bed.

Someone teased me once,
a friend of ours—
saying that I saw your hair red
because I was not thinking
of the hair on your head.

Someone also told me,
a long time ago:
my father said to me,
It is a terrible thing,
son,
to fall into the hands of the living God.
Now,
I know what he was saying.
I could not have seen red
before finding myself
in this strange, this waiting bed.
Nor had my naked eye suggested

RIP Amiri Baraka (1934-2014)

Amiri Baraka (at right), at NYU,
May 3, 2014

"What will be / the sacred words?" - Amiri Baraka

A great light, a fire, a forge has gone out of our literatures, our cultures, our society: Amiri Baraka has passed away. There are many important and a few major living poets, writers, social critics today; fewer still have assumed the mantle of change-agents, have put and continue to place themselves at center of social, political and economic, as well as aesthetic transformation, and done so continuously for most of their lives. The risks are tremendous, the payoff perhaps invisible and too small in personal, let alone broader terms. But Amiri Baraka did. He lived what he thought and believed, even when it was problematic or outright wrong, and in the process he played crucial roles in reframing how we think and see. If we think of him primarily as a poet, we should also consider that his poetry, and a poetics of the self, of the mind, of action, flowed through everything he did, whether it was producing literature across a range of genres (poetry, drama, fiction, essays, speeches, collaborative works, etc.), creating institutions and fighting to keep them alive, serving as a teacher, a professor, an editor, a mentor, a paterfamilias and parent, a polemicist, a friend, a cultural connector, a mage, working with activists of his generation and younger ones, being and living as a revolutionary and liberationist. He took very seriously, embodied, the charge of the ancestors and the principles espoused by W. E. B. DuBois in his famous essay, "Criteria of Negro Art." For Baraka, art and culture were not value-free or worthless, but, as the great Cape Verdean-Guiné-Bissauan poet and freedom fighter Amílcar Cabral pointed out, often weapons, and Amiri Baraka wielded them, when necessary, towards goals and aims far beyond himself or his career.

I first read Amiri Baraka's work in childhood, in an anthology (was it Black Fire!) that my godparents had in their library. In junior high, I am amazed to say, we read his poem "In Memory of Radio (for Lamont Cranston)," which I did not really understand--the radio's centrality to American culture having given way by then to TV--though I did grasp that at some elemental level I was picking up a frequency I had to pay attention to. By the time I graduated from high school I had decided to include a quote by Baraka on my high school senior yearbook page (along with quotes by Gwendolyn Brooks, T. S. Eliot (!) and Archibald MacLeish). Yet again I did not fully grasp what I was quoting--and did not realize until this past spring, when I was teaching my course on the "Black Arts Movement" at Rutgers-Newark that the words came from his introduction, as "Imamu Ameer Baraka," the first name he chose after ceasing to be Everett LeRoi Jones, as he was born in Newark in 1934, to Black Fire!, the landmark anthology of Black Arts Poetry--but something in his words spoke directly to me, almost like a life-force, and if I cannot remember much poetry by heart these days, those words, or a version of them, took root deep inside me.

An excerpt from Amiri Baraka's
"Foreword," from Black Fire!

Later, in college and after, I read quite a bit of Baraka's work, and found some of it deeply upsetting, confounding, enraging, especially his sexism, misogyny and patriarchy, his homophobia, his anti-Semitism; sometimes all of these can be found in just a single of his works, like "Black Art" or the play Mad Heart. Yet I also learned to read Baraka as a person of his time--my own father shared many of the same feelings and ideas, even if he never, expressed them as furiously or eloquently as Baraka, or became a Black Nationalist, Marxist, a Maoist--and to appreciate his deep love of black people, of working and poor people, of people engaged in the struggle whatever their race or ethnicity or gender or sexuality; I came to appreciate his ongoing self-criticism and self-correction, however stuttered it sometimes was, his capacity for reading himself and rethinking his views, and for his courage--and this is one of the greatest gifts Baraka has given us, in addition to the work--his remarkable courage, at speaking out, and then even greater courage in revising and recalibrating his views.

The Black Renaissance Noire panel
at NYU (Barrett, Ismaili, Baraka, Johnson,
Dill, Jess), May 3, 2014

As a writer and artist, I admire his tremendous prodigiousness and fluency, the richness and variability of his works, their capacity to engage the mind and the heart in multiple ways. I admire his critical acuity and facility, his ability to merge creativity and critique in ways that still hold value long after the moment of a given work's conception has passed. I admire the range of his learning and his ability to infuse his art with it. I admire his use of his own life, in multiple ways, as the ground for his art, and his fusion of times of life and art, his performance of his life as a work of political art. Had he merely continued writing only poetry, he still would have been a significant literary figure in the poetic firmament, his first five books alone worth dozens by other poets of his generation. Had he shifted to plays and stopped there, he would have ranked with Adrienne Kennedy as one of the most innovative American and African American playwrights of the 1960s, and with his revolutionary plays that appeared in the late 1960s, he would have cemented his fame alongside Ed Bullins and others. Had he written more fiction, he could have gained significant currency as an innovator in that genre. As a music critic he wrote one of the still salient--foundational--texts on Black music, Blues People: Negro Music in White America, and could have rested on those laurels for the rest of his life. As an essayist he was original from the start, and could have packaged all his essays together and used their afterlife as a calling card, if not to a cushy position somewhere--his battles in and with academe are legendary, though it is in part through his struggles and those of other black literary pioneers that I and many others have our jobs today--then to the lecture circuit. 

Outside of the literary realm, as one of the co-founders of the Black Arts Movement, as one of the political artists engaged in real-world politics in pushing for a national black political convention, as a force in New York and in Newark (New Ark, he labeled) it who helped to elect the latter city's first African American mayor, Kenneth Gibson, he could have operated primarily in the political and social arenas, with identifiable success in his track record. Yet Baraka did all these things and more. It is both the particularities and the holistic quality of his life and work that commend him to us and to the ages. He was that rare thing, the real thing, and even in the works that were less successful--some of the poetry of the 1970s, for example--the force of his drive to work through his vision and understanding, even if a misunderstanding, of the world still burns through.

"Ka 'Ba," from The Amiri Baraka Reader

I feel very fortunate to have met and spoken with Amiri Baraka several times. One story involving him that I have told many times (forgive me for repeating it again) involves a job I had at NYU in the late 1990s, which entailed sometimes going to pick up important visitors for a weeklong summer faculty development program. I was thus sent, via car service, to Newark, to go pick up Amiri Baraka at his home. Off we drove, we arrived at his house, I went in, and met his assistant, and then, we waited. He was getting ready, I believe--I don't think he was feeling his best then--and various people, all friendly, came and went from the living room. I cannot remember if Mrs. Baraka was there, or if I spoke with any of his children--I had met Ras Baraka some years earlier, when I was in my early 20s and with the Dark Room Writers Collective--but I vividly recall him finally appearing from upstairs, and then, we were off. Only we weren't. We had to stop to get his books and pamphlets, from another residence. I began to worry because given the awfulness of New Jersey and New York traffic at the best of times, but especially near rush hour, I could see us being late, possibly very late, and I knew my boss, and my boss's boss, the then-Senior Vice President at NYU, were not going to be happy. But I also had to accommodate our speaker. So as things proceeded at a glacial pace, our car eventually on the road and crawling from Newark through Jersey City to the Holland Tunnel, I sat there beside Baraka, and tried, despite my mounting anxiety, to make small talk with him and his assistant. (I wish I could remember his name.)

What did we talk about? His work, my admiration for him, Ras, black writing, NYU, all sorts of things. It was light and nothing went beyond the surface of my nerves or his politeness. He was not warm, but he also was not rude. I even summoned the brazenness to give him a copy of my first book. At some point, one of my bosses called my cellphone and said, "Where are you? You're late, and the big boss is thinking of firing you on the spot." I pleaded with him and tried to explain what was going on, but knew it was out of his hands. On we crept, inching forward, and Baraka could feel my anxiety, so he asked me what was wrong. I told him, and he urged me not to worry. Finally we arrived at NYU's Cantor Film Center, where he was to give his talk. All my colleagues were lined up at the curb, including the Senior Vice President. (Even she knew how important Baraka was.) The first thing he uttered after getting out of the car and greeting everyone was to defend me and explain why we were so late. He assumed all the blame, and even said something to the effect of "Do not fire him," quite forcefully, as if to preempt what at least one of the higher ups was considering. I apologized profusely and quickly, and then my direct boss said, "Just find out what he needs and bring him into the lecture hall." I accompanied him inside, he said he had to go to the bathroom, I made sure he was okay and he asked me if I was okay, and with that, he went into the packed hall where faculty members from all over the country were waiting, and brought the house down. It was one of the best lectures the program had witnessed, I was told, in its history. I kept my job.

Amiri Baraka, at NYU, May 3, 2014

Last spring I saw Baraka for the last time this past spring when I attended a May 3, 2014 launch reading for the Spring/Summer 2013, Vol 13.1 issue of the journal Black Renaissance Noire, edited by Quincy Troupe. Among the readers were Tyehimba Jess, A. Igoni Barrett, Rashida Ismaili, Lesley Dill, and Jacqueline Johnson. And Amiri Baraka. I thought I had blogged about this, but when I searched my posts it turned out that I hadn't, nor had I at the very least included the photos in my "Random Photos" post. He was fiery, feisty, full of life, referring to the provocative essay he had written on the anthology Angles of Ascent, but more than anything, he was vintage Baraka, a figure who in a few words could bring a room to life. All of the readers were superb, and I was glad that I caught the reading, but I especially wanted to speak with Baraka afterwards, because, since I was teaching his work, so wanted to say hello to him in person after the reading, express on behalf of my students their enthusiasm for him and the ideas of his and the other Black Arts figures that they were encountering, and ask if he would be willing to come speak to my class in the future. Without hesitation, he told me, "Yes." I asked a gentleman who was standing nearby to take our picture, and he only captured our hands, in a shake, though I didn't realize this until afterwards.  I think of that handshake now, and of all that I have gotten from Amiri Baraka, all that we all have received from him over the years, and without hesitation, I can say, Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Rest in piece, Amiri Baraka (1934-2014).

Amiri Baraka's hand, and mine 

Poem & RIP: Wanda Coleman

Wanda Coleman at Woodland
Pattern's 25th Anniversary Celebration,
Milwaukee (© Woodland Pattern)

There is so much to say when a great poet leaves us, and so much we need to say when that poet, while critically praised, nevertheless did not receive the acclaim she deserved during her lifetime. Wanda Coleman (1946-2013) was such a poet. The unofficial poet laureate of Los Angeles, her native city, a product of the flowering of writing workshops, some informed by the political and social currents of the 1960s, a working poet her entire life as well as a TV scriptwriter, journalist, playwright, novelist, a soothsayer and mage of language in a range of registers, a writer who knew how to fuse criticism and beauty, wit and ugliness, often funny, often lacerating, rough as tea leaves, gentle as a blowtorch, prolific, daring, unapologetically black and a woman and a mother and a lover, unapologetically cosmopolitan and creative and visionary, someone who lived her literature, Coleman passed away last weekend after a long illness.

She was one of the poets I always wanted to hear and see read live. I remember someone telling me about her performance that later appeared as poems in Tripwire, how she rocked as she read, how she declaimed the poetry with force and ferocity, how she could as easily be reading with a jazz or blues or rock band--and she recorded with Excene Cervenka among others. There was rhythm, blues, jazz, roll, rap, struggle, soar, and sear throughout her work. But I never was where she was when she was reading live, and so I was a fan from afar, turning to the pages of Mercurochrome or African Sleeping Sickness or her other books with admiration and awe, knowing that somewhere out there in the cosmos, Wanda Coleman's gifts, received and given, were and are resounding, and that readers, young and old, who were unfamiliar with her work might be so moved to crack open a volume to sample and savor what she has to offer.

Here are two poems from Mercurochrome: New Poems, a volume which includes a fine range of her talents, including her continuation of her "American Sonnets" series, which play hard with that form, as well as her "Retro Rogue Anthology," a series of riffs on major American poets (from Alan Ansen and John Ashbery, to C. D. Wright and Charles Wright), that both capture and send up those writers while also demonstrating Coleman's skill and verve. She was the real thing, word. So: two poems. Remember her, remember and read her, read her and listen to what she has to say.

EL CAMINO REAL

leads me through one overtaxed
little citytown
after gas stop after vista view,
eludes the gridlocked main highway,
avoids the rain-and-moon patrols and fiery
extinction on that hairpin curve
of credit and industry. i'm on the look see
for that mean motor scooter,
one payment outracing the other
as i nightdrag cloud-lined bluffs toward
the destination i'm building on installments,
fingers crossed as i drive, double-malted in one hand,
French fries tucked against the armrest,
cheeseburger leaving grease stains
on the dashboard of my vision

AMERICAN SONNETS: 95

seized by wicked enchantment, i surrendered my song

as i fled for the stairs, i saw an earth child
in a distant hallway, crying out
to his mother, "please don't go away
and leave us." he was, i saw, my son. immediately,
i discontinued my flight

from here, i see the clock tower in a sweep of light,
framed by wild ivy. it pierces all nights to come

i haunt these chambers but they belong to cruel
     churchified insects.
among the books mine go unread, dust-covered.
i write about urban bleeders and breeders, but am
troubled because their tragedies echo mine.

at this moment i am sickened by the urge
to smash. my thighs present themselves

stillborn, misshapened wings within me.

"El Camino Real" and "American Sonnets: 95," Copyright © by Wanda Coleman, from Mercurochrome: New Poems, Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 2001. All rights reserved.

Two Poems

I plan to post a short note, with photos doing most of the talking, about this past weekend's Dark Room Collective reunion at Poets House, and the celebration at the Harlem Arts Salon for US Poet Laureate and Dark Room member, poet extraordinaire Natasha Trethewey, but I think as fitting a tribute might be to post new poems inspired by the conversations we had with the audiences and each other.

One topic that arose at the Saturday panel, provoking some contention, centered on the role of politics in black poetry, and in particular, the role of the Black Arts Movement. As some J's Theater readers may be aware, Amiri Baraka recently posted on the Poetry Foundation website "A New Post-racial Anthology?," a sharp critique of a new anthology, Angle of Ascent by Callaloo editor Charles Rowell, that reads Rowell for reading out of the African American poetic tradition various trends and schools. I am not in the anthology and have not seen it, but having just taught a semester-long class on the Black Arts Movement, some of its predecessors and some of its heirs, I will only reiterate what I said at Poets House, which is that all aesthetics are political, if we understand the latter term broadly, and that the influence of the Black Arts Movement, like that of the Harlem Renaissance, runs like a river--or in some cases, a tiny stream--through a broad swathe of contemporary Black Diasporic writing, including work produced outside the United States.

That said, this morning I wrote two poems which I then posted first to Twitter, in keeping with an idea I have produced a conference paper about, black digital literature. What is the experience of reading a poem on Twitter, which now allows stanzas and line breaks? (I've already seen someone delightfully mash up the poem in his citation of it.) I have slightly modified them here. The poems are rather simple, overtly political, and topical, and in couplets, sparked in part by a comment by the scholar and poet Keguro Macharia made this morning on poems using that stanzaic form. Like haikai and senryus, both of which I've tweeted before, short coupleted stanzaic poems are Twitter-fit.

CO2

An engineer fires up a new power plant.

A city on the grid flares like the surface of a star.

At the border, a small army masses and husbands its weapons.

We fail to grasp that we are always grasping

and mostly feeling, which eludes the plotted axis.

The mother tortoise sweeps beneath the silver wave

and the axes, if not the plastic nets. Will we eventually dream

of tortoises when there are no more tortoises or mothers to dream of?

CLEVELAND

Something unspeakable struggles behind these windows.

Shadows of a cry or cries or their aftermath.

Neighbors come and go and say hello and drive

into the silence of their hard, separate lives.

Or do not say goodbyes or enough to sustain a single

sentence. Do not lend an eye to tear into the darkness.

While in it there are horrors no sentence could bear, not

even the tumor feeding off indifference. Love thy neighbor.

Copyright "CO2" and "Cleveland" © John Keene, 2013. All rights reserved.

Poem: Sonia Sanchez

Sonia Sanchez
(courtesy of AALBC.com)

Earlier this semester, as part of my undergraduate literature class on The Black Arts Movement, I taught a number of poems by Sonia Sanchez (1934-), about whom I've written on here before, and among the many that moved me again, after having not looked at them in many years, was this one, "blues," from the landmark Black Fire anthology that LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal edited in 1968. In it Sanchez demonstrates the gifts that have made her one of the most important poets of that group as well as major poet today; the skillful handling in manner almost so subtle as to seem effortless of poetic music and rhythm, her grasp of irony and humor, the ability to shift registers, and the ability to make the personal resonate beyond herself. Likeher sister poets in the Black Arts Movement she made the male "warriors" did not forget there would be no revolution--or any of them--without women, and she often did so, as critic and poet Cherise Pollard points out in a wonderful article on the Black Arts Movement, with a deft, subversive hand and eye. The poem opens with a statement of real blues, and by the end, as the blues often do, has turned those challenges, that pain, inside out. As she was turned (inside) out, bringing out another aspect of the blues. Several students have called her poetry a revelation. I feel the same way about her. Great in so many ways.

blues

in the night
in the half hour
negro dreams
i hear voices knocking at the door
i see walls dripping screams up
and down the halls.
                 won't someone open
the door for me? won't some
one schedule my sleep
and don't ask no questions?
noise.
      like when he took me to his
home away from home place
and i died the long sought after
death he'd planned for me.
                        (yeah. bessie
he put in the bacon and it overflowed
                                  the pot)
and two days later
when i was talking
i started to grin.
as everyone knows
i'm still grinning.

Copyright © Sonia Sanchez, from Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing. Edited by LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal. New York: William Morrow & Company, Inc. 1968.

National Poetry Month + Poem: Langston Hughes

It's National Poetry Month, and also one of the busiest in the year for me (giving exams, reading theses, etc.), but I am aiming to post poems regularly this month, if not every day, then at least several times per week, or at least more frequently than I do in any given month (though I do periodically post poems, including several of the last few weeks, I think.) As I did in each of the past few annual National Poetry Month posts, I also am going to pick a theme and try to stick with it. Last year I focused on poetry about poems, thinking about them, writing them, reflecting on them in and as poems, a fruitful theme that led to a wide array of poems. For some reason I thought this year about poems about the night, which sounds rather inappropriate as Spring is nearly upon us, but let's see if I can find 30 poems about the night--broadly construed--to post.

Let's begin with a poet I hold perhaps more highly than all others, whose work I've been reading since childhood (and once had to memorize), and teaching this spring. It and he never ceases to surprise me. By it I mean a deceptively simple poem, entitled "Dream Variation," and by he, I mean Langston Hughes, whose evocation of the night, whose darkness and beauty he analogizes to himself, is immediately evident. This is a poem he wrote for children, though it works too for adults (and I can imagine it being set to beautiful music, notated or improvised). Read it aloud and hear how he creates a whirling music, informed by the blues, that lifts the poem, like the poem's speaker who has been twirling till the night arrives, off the page, not unlike the dancing he also invokes in both of the poem's stanzas.  For some children, the affirmation in the poem's penultimate line would come as a lovely surprise--a needed one. To get closer to the spirit, through dance, and poetry, and thus to the natural world, the world behind the surfaces of the visible, to become a tree and simultaneously one's deeper, truer self--the poem suggests all of this and more. Enjoy, and if you get the opportunity, have a twirl!

DREAM VARIATION

To fling my arms wide
In some place of the sun,
To whirl and to dance
Till the white day is done.
Then rest at cool evening
Beneath a tall tree
While night comes on gently,
Dark like me-
That is my dream!

To fling my arms wide
In the face of the sun,
Dance! Whirl! Whirl!
Till the quick day is done.
Rest at pale evening...
A tall, slim tree...
Night coming tenderly
Black like me. 

Copyright © Langston Hughes, from The Collected Works of Langston Hughes: Works for Children and Young Adults: Poetry, Fiction, and Other Writing. Volume 11. Edited and with an introduction by Dianne Johnson. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003.