Poem: Lucie Brock-Broido (RIP)

Lucie Brock-Broido
(Concord Poetry Center)

The award-winning poet Lucie Brock-Broido (1956-2018) passed away yesterday at the age of 61.

The Washington Post offers a brief obituary, with an overview of her work. The Poetry Foundation, which has links to a number of her poems, shares a deeper picture of her life and career.

Some years ago, when her collection The Master Letters, invoking her--and our--ancestral American poet Emily Dickinson, appeared in 1995, Brock-Broido, already praised for her distinctive voice, became one of the most highly regarded poets of her generation. She was, as many online testimonies underline, a beloved, rigorous teacher, and a crucial mentor for many.

In 2013, critic and poet Dan Chiasson thoughtfully discussed her collection Stay, Illusion, in The New Yorker; a good deal of his praise in that essay could stand for all of her work. is one of her poems, so many of which have unforgettable titles: "The Supernatural Is Only The Natural, Disclosed," from Ploughshares, Vol. 17, No. 2/3, Twentieth Anniversary Issue, Fall 1991, pp. 137-38.

May she rest and write in peace.

"Words" on Academy of American Poets' Poem-A-Day

Today Twitter (naturally) brought some very good news: one of my poems, "Words," which the brilliant poet and critic Dawn Lundy Martin selected for the Academy of American Poet's "poem-a-day," was featured today on the last day in February and thus Black History Month. Many, many thanks to Dawn for contacting me about new poems, and thanks also to Mary Gannon and Maya Phillips at the Academy of American Poets for their work in publishing it on the site!

Though I have been writing and publishing poems for over 25 years, and though I have several books of poetry (two in collaboration with wonderful artists), I have never had any of my poetry featured on any of the US's major poetry organization sites (beyond Cave Canem). Essays? Yes. Biographical notes? Yes. References to my fiction? Yes. But poetry? No such luck. So this is a first and again, many thanks to Dawn, Mary and Maya.

The Academy's site also includes an audio track of me reading the poem, and my brief statement about it:

“I initially conceived this poem while participating in the Vulnerable Rumble, an amazing reading-performance organized by Laura Goldstein, Jennifer Karmin, and Laura Mullen, as part of the Red Rover Series at OuterSpace Studios in Chicago in January 2014. In the midst of the excellent poetry everyone was reading, I thought carefully about where the United States was in 2014 and where we might be heading. I started to mull over how we have been struggling to communicate with and understand one another—even at the level of basic language and art-making. We have misvalued and disvalued the power of words and their social, political, and economic meanings and effects. From this kernel I drafted the poem and, learning quite a bit from an Italian translator’s attempts to wrangle it into that language, I have revised it over the last couple of years.”

It feels especially appropriate for where we are today. I should add that the Vulnerable Rumble ranks amongthe most singular and thrilling readings I have ever participated in, and I wrote it up on this blog shortly after participating. I highly recommend that post and will share this paragraph:

Indication by raising the hand or shaking one's head. Duets and choral readings. Self-halting and disabling. Strategies to encourage reader time. Failure. What principles, and I say that without irony. Oh, if only more poets would internalize many of these! What became clear as the evening proceeded was that many of us did, and rather quickly; there were some who read briefly, some who leapt in and then out, some who paired up more than once but never too long, some who added a theatrical or performative element to change the reading dynamics, and a few who seemed to step right back into the usual holding-of-the-floor at length, as if any other approach would not do. But, as Jennifer [Karmin] said and underlined, even failure at these "codes" was acceptable, so anything went.

Out of that event came "Words"--and more.

Black History Month/Langston Hughes Day + Poems by Langston Hughes

February 1 always marks the start of US Black History Month, as well as the birthday of one of the greatest poets this country gave the wider world, James Langston Mercer Hughes (1902-1967). I think I've alternated in the past by celebrating one or the other, but today, in tribute to the month and to Hughes, here are a few of his poems, all taken from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, Arnold Rampersad and David E. Roessel, Editors (New York: Vintage, 1995).

The first is a poem drawn from Hughes's time on the sea; Sekondi, part of Sekondi-Takoradi, is a port city in Ghana. Note the ironic play on fog and the swift punchline-like turn at the poem's end.

FOG

Singing black boatmen
An August morning
In the thick white fog at Sekondi
Coming out to take cargo
From anchored alien ships,
You do not know the fog
We strange so-civilized ones
Sail in always.

***

Here are three queer poems drawn from Hughes's collections up to 1936. I reread all the poems in these volumes in preparation for my story "Blues," which involves a (fictional?) meeting between Hughes and the Mexican poet Xavier Villaurrutia, who had already translated some of Hughes' work into Spanish.

In his first three or so collections, Hughes has, among a wide array of poems in which a male voice addresses a female beloved; a female voice addresses or speaks of a male beloved; and gender-ambiguous poems, many invoke nocturnal imagery (because we all know what goes on in the dark).

SONG

Lovely, dark, and lonely one,
Bare your bosom to the sun.
Do not be afraid of light,
You who are a child of night.

Open wide your arms to life,
Whirl in the wind of pain and strife,
Face the wall with the dark, closed gate,
Beat with bare, brown fists--
And wait.

HARLEM NIGHT SONG

Come,
Let us sing the night together,
Singing.

I love you.

Across
The Harlem roof-tops
Moon is shining.
Night sky is blue.
Stars are great drops
Of golden dew.

Down the street
a band is playing
I love you.

Come, let us roam the night together
Singing.

DESIRE

Desire to us
Was like a double death,
Swift dying
Of our mingled breath,
Evaporation
Of an unknown strange perfume
Between us quickly
In a naked
Room.

***

Lastly, Hughes was a poet who did not shy away from political and social commentary, but he had a gift for figuring out how to express it without it (for the most part) sounding like propaganda. Part of his success hinges on his use of humor, part on his careful use of rhyme, rhetoric and rhythm, part on his inclusion of vernacular and the viewpoint of the subaltern, and part on his skillful deployment of irony. The parodic tone and collage quality here point in the direction of post-modernism.

"Advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria" appeared in 1931 in New Masses magazine, and later in Hughes's aubiography, The Big Sea, and is considered a masterpiece of Popular Front aesthetics. I checked the Inflation Calculator, and $10,000/year in 1931 would equal $155,747.37/year in 2014 dollars. That would come to about $12,978/month, which, it turns out, was about the price of the lowest end rentals in the Waldorf Towers in 2011 (I can only imagine that it has risen by several thousand dollars as the price of high-end real estate keeps rising.) To put it another way, Hughes was prescient, and not for the first time!

Excerpt from ADVERTISEMENT FOR THE WALDORF ASTORIA

EVICTED FAMILIES

All you families put out in the street

   Apartments in the Towers are only $10,000 a year. (Three

   rooms and two baths.) Move in there until times get good,

   and you can do better. $10,000 are about the same

   to you, aren't they?

Who cares about money with a wife and kids homeless, and no-

   body in the family working? Wouldn't a duplex high above

   the street be grand, with a view of the richest city in the

   world at your nose?

"A lease, if you prefer, or an arrangement terminable at will."

All poems Copyright © Estate of Langston Hughes, 1995, 2015. All rights reserved.

Poem: Kei Miller

Kei Miller 

SOME DEFINITIONS FOR SONG

the speech of birds, as in birdsong, but with exceptions. Pigeons do not sing. Vultures do not sing. A bargain, or a very small sum, as in “he bought it for a song.” Think what we could purchase with songs, thrown across the counter and landing more softly than coins. Perhaps then, the origin of the expression, to sing for your supper. The troubled sound that escapes from a woman’s mouth while she dreams of fire, also any sound that escapes, also anything that escapes; a passage out, the fling up of hands. A prison break is a song. The parting of the red sea was a song. In Israel there are many songs, but there should have been six million more. Across the Atlantic, there are many songs, but we needed 10 million more. Sòng (宋國) was a state during the Eastern Zhou Spring and Autumn Period (770–476 BC). Its capital was Shangqiu. Anything that climbs is a song; vines are a song; my father, 70 years old, at the top of the ackee tree is a song; all planes are songs. Song was a low-cost airline operated by Delta. Tourists were flown by Song to Florida. Song’s last flight was on April 30, 2006. All that pleases the heart. All that pleases the ear. The final measure of joy. When we have lost song, we have lost everything. A common surname in Korea, often transliterated as Soong. What would it mean if your name was Song? Song is the third and final album of Lullaby for the Working Class. It was released October 19, 1999. Songs often refer to songs, as in “He shall encompass me with a song”; “Sing unto the Lord a new song”; “Sing a song of sixpence”. Sing a song. Sing a song.

Copyright © Kei Miller (b. 1978), "Some Definitions for Song," in the The Caribbean Review of Books, May 2010.

Two Draft Poems (Spring 2012)

Back in April in several blog posts on the Northwestern University's annual spring Writing Festival, I mentioned my participation in a related program, sponsored by NU's undergraduate Creative Writing Program and the Poetry and Poetics Colloquium, that involved working with the excellent young undergraduate creative writing poetry students, who were in turn serving as mentors and teachers for talented, enthusiastic high school poets at Evanston Township High School, the main public school in the suburban city, just north of Chicago, where Northwestern's main campus sits. 

As part of that program, a half dozen NU faculty members, I included, all affiliated with the Poetry and Poetics Colloquium or the undergraduate Creative Writing program, attended several sessions at the high school, and during those, some of us actually wrote drafts of poems with the students. Yesterday I was reading through my current Moleskin notebook, which I began late last year, and came across my drafts of two poems I wrote based on prompts that my faculty colleagues gave to the high school students. I wrote them while sitting with the undergraduates and high schools, even reading the first aloud to them when they pressed me to hear it, and thought I'd post them here, instead of letting the blog remain in radio silence.

I did not write down and cannot recall the prompts, although I believe that in relation to my first piece, one of the high school students wrote and then later revised a poem about finding money on the street. Perhaps that was the source of the "million dollars." With the second I believe a colleague had the students reading poems by Louise Bogan and Melvin Dixon, and it may have been their prosody and rhyme schemes I was following. At any rate these were a nice reminder of last spring, and are but drafts resulting from prompts, so take them as you will.

PEOPLE SAY

People say the sun rises in the east and sets in the west.
People say that the cows will eventually come home.
People say that the child will do better than her parents.
People say that the child who has her own is blessed.
People say there are more stars in the heavens than moons.
People say if you hear songs in your dreams you'll win a million dollars.
People say if you hear don't hear songs in your dreams you'll win a million dollars.
People say that a lover's kiss is worth more than a million dollars.
People say you can buy a kiss from anyone you dream of for a million dollars.
People say it's better to give than receive, whether it's one kiss, one dollar or a million.
People give a million reasons why they call you or do not call you.
People say they're telling you the truth when they're giving you these reasons.
People say if you listen to the earth you might hear things you need to hear.
People say if you listen to the earth you might hear things you don't want to hear.
People say that if you play your cards right they could still go very wrong.
People say that if you play your cards wrong things could still turn out alright.
People say there's a right way and a wrong way to hear the things people say.

People say there's a right way and a wrong way to understand the things people say.

People say it's often better not to pay close attention to what people say.

People say it's always a good idea to pay close attention to what people say.

People say if you pay close or even a little attention you can learn a great deal about not just what's being said about but about who is saying it.
People say so many things it's almost impossible to remember them.
People say nevertheless it's a good idea to remember the basics, like the sun rising in the east, et cetera.
People sometimes say these things in such a whisper though, you can't can be sure what people say.

EVANSTON

Gold sun green lawns
black yards white dawn
steel tracks fast trains
station wagons

brick homes stone manors

silver lake bronze sand
wide streets polite manners
snow caps mittened hands

tall poles long wires
school songs home choirs
ascending sparrows
alighting crows

Copyright © John Keene, 2012.

Poems: Dunya Mikhail

Here are two poems from the 2005 collection The War Works Hard, which gathers selections from three volumes of poems by the young (1965-) and very talented Iraqi poet Dunya Mikhail. I chose two of the shortest poems, which give some hints of her ability to capture the gravity, with the simplest materials, of both the tenuous humanity and the continuously unfolding tragedy that has marked her native country since the most recent war began, but I strongly recommend the full collection, which gives a fuller view of her gifts as a poet; the sarcastic, sad, moving title poem is one that should be read and entered into the record at the next press conference that our Disaster-in-Chief deigns to deliver. Mikhail now lives is the Detroit area, so I hope that we can bring her to the university at some point in the near(er) future.

THE ROCKING CHAIR

When they came,
the aunt was still there
on the rocking chair.
For thirty years
she rocked...
Now
that death has asked for her hand,
she has departed
without a word,
leaving the chair
alone
rocking

A VOICE

I want to return
return
return
return
repeated the parrot
in the room where
her owner had left her
alone
to repeat:
return
return
return . . .

Copyright © Dunya Mikhail, from The War Works Hard, 2005. All rights reserved, New Directions Publishing Corporation.

Poems: Nikki Giovanni

Nikki Giovanni, whom I have spoken about in variously places previously as one of my favorite poets in childhood and adolescence, gave the rousing, consoling conclusion to the Virginia Tech convocation today. You can view that here. I realized as I watched the clips of Giovanni's speech that she has written quite a lot about the pain of loneliness, of making choices in the faces of various kinds of difficulties, of the constrained life. I wonder if Cho Seung-Hui ever read any of these poems, like "Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day," or "Choices"--in the best of all worlds, they might have helped him, lifted him, reached him. Poetry sometimes can have that effect. Below is Giovanni's poem "Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day," whose treacly title belies its simple profundity. I've added another one, a bit more witty, to show her range. The students, her colleagues, and everyone at Virginia Tech are lucky she's there.

COTTON CANDY ON A RAINY DAY

Don't look now
I'm fading away
Into the gray of my mornings
Or the blues of every night

Is it that my nails
keep breaking
Or maybe the corn
on my second little piggy
Things keep popping out
on my face
     or
of my life

It seems no matter how
I try I become more difficult
to hold
I am not an easy woman
to want

They have asked
the psychiatrists     psychologists     politicians and
social workers
What this decade will be
known for
There is no doubt      it is
loneliness

BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
(to quote a philosopher)

i haven't done anything
meaningful in so long
it's almost meaningful
to do nothing

i suppose i could fall in love
or at least in line
since i'm so discontented
but that takes effort
and i don't want to exert anything
neither my energy nor my emotions

i've always prided myself
on being a child of the sixties
and we are all finished
so that makes being
nothing

Copyright © 1978, Nikki Giovanni.