Quotes: Will Alexander

Will Alexander, Celebration for Bob Kaufman,
San Francisco Public Library, April 11, 2016

Living art can withstand the peril of the vitriolic via the extrinsic as propaganda, of the masses condoned as they are by critical misperception.

*

I am a spirit who exposes his mandibles in order to appear and disappear. This being a kinetics that spontaneously arranges ghostly collapse to appear as simultaneous visibility. The latter being an apparition that allows the mind to ruminate upon its circuitous connecting traces.

*

I work always knowing that one must resist carking exhaustion, always resisting its a priori inclination as did Alhazen, and in later times Rimbaud. One gains from this resistance impalpable nths of stamina so as to enact prolific creativity rife with palpable transmutation.

*

I think of Desnos rife with oneiric eruption, verbally fishing for oquassa. This being the inner work of extending lightning bolts from stark extremities of sleep. What follows are vocables that mimic proto-fires that condense in the shape of burgeoning aural seed. What then emerges are slivers from uncanny aural scarps that magnify and extend into strangeness.

*

I speak Gullah and cater to stored rats. As for me, there always exists abominable increase, dazed lepers, arachnids crawling through hair. As for hunting migrating forms from the inferno, I scour its satanic region, I take into account forms of unleashed fever, creating from my presence a brackish type of moth, soaring, yet all the while cadenced by telepathic inherence.

-- five selections from Will Alexander's Across the Vapour Gulf, New Directions Poetry Pamphlet #22, New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2017. Copyright © 2017. All rights reserved.

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)

MLA 2013 Panel on Black Poetics

The Black Poetics panel audience, before the room filled to capacity

So the 2013 Modern Language Association conference, held this year in Boston, has come and gone, and though I have more than once felt not just MLAlienation but also that sensation that those of us who write criticism and are conversant in and with theory, but who primarily live and work as creative writers also feel, I nevertheless headed north, was able to meet up with wonderful students and former colleagues, participated on a great panel on Black Poetics, chaired by Jennifer DeVere Brody (Stanford University), and comprising Marcellus Blount (Columbia University) and Meta DuEwa Jones (University of Texas), all superlative scholars, thus making me a bit of an interloper, and in the end I think all in all it went well. (There was even positive real-time Twitter commentary on the panel, and on my paper.) The topic of Black Poetics is vast; many are the byways down which you might travel in discussing the very concept, which would in part begin with definitions of "black" and "poetics." Jennifer's focus was on form, and both Marcellus and Meta spoke specifically on questions of "form" and "formalism," in contemporary black poetics.

Last year, as Jennifer was assembling the panel, I asked if I might steer my talk more to the issue of black digital poetics, or black digital literature, and Jennifer agreed that that would be interesting, so that's where I went, giving a refined version of the paper, "The Work of Black Poetry in the Age of Digital Reproducibility," that I first presented at MESEA in Barcelona this past June. The Poetry and Poetics Colloquium at Northwestern's excellent conversations only reinforced my desire to pursue the paper, and some of the many excellent exchanges led or sustained by Keguro Macharia also got me thinking hard about the topic. I attempted to contextualize the topic, historicize it, theorize it a bit, and then present one example of it, Mendi Lewis Obadike's online digital work from the late 1990s. The panel's audience was packed, with many amazing poets and scholars (including Keguro, January Gill O'Neill, Maryemma Graham, and many more) I knew, some senior, some junior, but so many really smart people, so I was a bit dazed even before I took the podium. But I finished, and when I finished, I felt clear-headed enough to respond to some of the questions directed my way, among them Aldon Nielsen's, which zeroed in on the fact of funding for an online archive of black digital poetry and poetics. Where would it come from? I urged (some in) the audience to consider setting one up, and as I also exhorted in my paper, it must be easily accessible and free, which would, I think, have the effect of both making available and visible some of the fascinating online poetic work people are undertaking, and jumpstarting a range of projects from here on out.

Another questioner, Robin Coste Lewis, I think, inquired about teaching the work of a poet like Douglas Kearney, and it struck me even as I was preparing the paper--and I answered along these lines to Robin--that an app like Faber & Faber's The Waste Land offered one possible vision of what a poet like Doug, whose texts, as poetic objects, possess tremendous vitality, but whose performances add to, expand and transform those texts dynamically, might consider. An tablet-ready or mobile app could include versions of the poem, but also a digital version of the poem, programmed by Doug and someone deeply knowledgeable about code, which could "eventilize" (to use scholar Nathan Brown's term) some of the poems in ways neither the text nor the video of the performance exactly can, since each represents a distinct and different medium. Instead, we might now think about the digital as making available a new format, to use David Joselit's concept, which would both present the existing media in which Doug's poetry exists while also expanding its possibilities and his (and black) poetics.

I unfortunately had to run--I mean, I really had to run!--out before the session had fully ended, to catch a train back to New York, so as to get home in time (MANY thanks to Evie Shockley and Stephane Robolin, who rode back from MLA with me, since the PATH was not running past 10 pm and C wasn't feeling well) to catch another train from New York to another destination first thing the next morning, as the possibility of traveling from Boston to my destination by any means other than car was nonexistent, but I was glad to have been able to present at this year's MLA, see that Boston has not changed all that much (except for more pleasant people in its Copley Square restaurants), and not wonder, as I have done more than once at past conferences, what on earth am I doing here?

(PS: As William Pannapacker also notes on the Chronicle of Higher Education's site, this was the year the Digital Humanities really broke out at MLA, as did recognition of the importance of Tweeting and blogging, so....)

Yours truly, photographed by January Gill O'Neill