Lambda Literary Awards + Lambda Literary Review Interview

Gloria Steinem, presenting the
Pioneer Award to Rita Mae Brown

This past Monday, the Lambda Literary Foundation held its 27th Lambda Literary Awards, honoring some of the best of the previous year's LGBTIQ writing. The ceremony, mc'd by comedian Kate Clinton, was held in the Great Hall at the Cooper Union, and included performances by Toshi Reagon, who dedicated her songs to the late Octavia Butler, and Lauren Patten of the musical version of Alison Bechdel's marvelous graphic novel, Fun Home. Though I did not attend, I followed the social media tweets and posts about it, experiencing the excitement of the presenters, award finalists and recipients, and friends attending vicariously.

NY Times Opinion columnist Charles
Blow, accepting the Lambda Literary
Award in Bisexual Nonfiction

Author Alexis De Veaux accepting
the Lambda Literary Award in
Lesbian Fiction for Yabo

Chief among the honorees were foundational lesbian author Rita Mae Brown, who received the Pioneer Award, and filmmaker and writer John Waters, who received the Lambda Trustee's Award for Excellence in Literature. Other winners in categories that ranged from Bisexual Fiction to Lesbian Erotica to Transgender Non-Fiction to LGBT Studies include the late poet Vincent Woodard, a Cave Canem graduate fellow, whose academic study Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within US Slave Culture, edited by Justin A. Joyce and Dwight McBride (NYU Press), took the scholarly prize; young playwright Robert O'Hara in the Drama category for his play Bootycandy (Samuel French); and New York Times Opinion page columnist Charles Blow, in the Bisexual Nonfiction category, for his memoir Fire Shut Up In My Bones (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

Additionally, Alethia Banks and Virginie Eubanks, with Barbara Smith, were honored in the Lesbian Memoir/Biography category for Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around: Forty Years of Movement Building with Barbara Smith (SUNY Press); Alexis De Veaux received the Lesbian General Fiction for her superb novel Yabo (Red Bone Press), which I enjoyed tremendously; and, in the talent-filled Gay Poetry category, Danez Smith received the award for his exceptional debut collection, [insert] boy (YesYes Books), which I was delighted to select last winter for my Volta Best of 2014 list.

Danez Smith, accepting the Lambda
Literary Award for Gay Poetry

You can find the complete list of Lambda Literary winners and finalists here, and more photos of the event here! It looks like it was so much fun I sincerely hope to attend the event one of these future years!

***

The Lambda Literary Review--and Reggie Harris in particular--conducted a short email interview with me, titled "John Keene: On Hidden Histories and Why Writing Official Narratives is Queer" that posted two days ago. Reggie takes a somewhat different tact from other recent conversations, asking questions specifically about the queer aspects of Counternarratives. I deeply appreciate the opportunity to talk about the book, so thank you Reggie (and thanks also to William Johnson at Lambda)!

Below are two excerpts. Please do peep the entire interview too!

Can form itself be queer?The answer, I think, is yes. If form pushes against and destabilizes usual norms and conventions, then it would be queer, no? The stories in Counternarratives trouble contemporary narrative conventions in American fiction, in part through an emphasis on storytelling in itself; through a play with structure, genre and voice; and through the queerness of the characters themselves. Nevertheless, the stories all are—at another level, I trust—accessible and readable.

and

Why did you feature 20^th-century queer writers Langston Hughes and Mário de Andrade in two of the stories—and why include sex scenes?Hughes and Andrade are heroes of mine. Towering modernist figures in their respective countries, both were of African descent, both displayed multiple talents, and both are now widely though not uncontroversially understood to have been gay, so I wanted to offer glimpses at moments in each man’s life, particularly beyond their youth. In the case of both, a public narrative arose that elided their queerness. With Hughes, we saw this with the furor, sparked in part by the Hughes estate, around Isaac Julien’s 1988 film Looking for Langston, and later in Hughes’ biographer Arnold Rampersad’s suggestion that Hughes was “asexual.” In Brazil, with Andrade’s life, a similar storyline that downplays his queerness has developed. There are so many clues in each man’s work, as well as in their biographies, letters, etc. Also, as scholar Robert F. Reid-Pharr has suggested in Hughes’ case (and this could be the same for Andrade), and as the CUNY Lost and Found Series of pamphlets exemplify, there are still archival troves that have yet to be examined. I should add that in both cases, their poems provoked me to write about them, and for both, I also wanted to make the sex(uality) a reality.

Motion of Light: Samuel R. Delany Tribute at Jacket2

Last April 11 in Philadelphia, the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania organized a tribute to Samuel R. Delany (1942-), "Motion of Light," honoring his "performative poetics."

Though I always associate Chip Delany with his native New York City, he has taught at Temple University for over a decade (and will be retiring this year), and has become an integral member of that city's literary communities, so it was fitting that he was honored there. A number of admirers of Delany's work were present; though invited I was already booked at a conference (&Now) in Colorado, so I sent my contribution, "Paean," to Tracie Morris, one of the organizers, to present in my absence. The original event was archived at PennSound.

Now Tracie has edited a special section at Jacket2 featuring some of the events' tributes, including work by Kenneth R. James, Ira Livingston, Sarah Micklem, Fred Moten, Jena Osman, Frank Sherlock, Anne Waldman, Tracie herself I, and, as well as Chip offering his own contribution to the event through a concluding conversation with Charles Bernstein. Although Chip needs no introduction and his work as a creative writing, critic and intellectual could fill a month-long conference, if you're interested in seeing others speak (or create Möbius strips in response) to his poetics, the Jacket2 features offers a fine introduction.

Here's a snippet from Tracie's warm introduction to the special section:

The magnitude of Chip’s impact in a variety of fields is impossible to calculate, much less organize into one volume. Here’s hoping for more and more celebrations, compilations, cheers, toasts, and discussions on his monumental work and importance to so many people and at so many stages of their lives. Chip is a constellation that continues to be fixed, yet revolves, for me and for so many lovers of poetry, of resonant words. I’m eternally grateful to be part of bringing these many hands together that have lifted a glass in Samuel R. Delany’s honor during his birth month in 2014, a microcosm of his worlds-full of admirers. As this is coming out in February, a month, in the US, given to emphasizing the experiences of Black people and Black culture, I’m especially glad to share this celebration of one of the world’s great Black thinkers, writers, creators. A maker of many worlds. Worlds for everyo

Here's a snippet from Fred Moten's perfectly titled "Amuse-Bouche":

Moved movers amid the intensity of the pas de deux my offering asks you to imagine, Delany and Taylor are bound in what Denise Ferreira da Silva would call the affectability of no-bodies.[4] Bound for that embrace, they hold, in their openness, to its general, generative pattern. Openness to the embrace moves against the backdrop of exclusion and the history of exclusion, which is a series of incorporative operations. This is how openness to being affected is inseparable from the resistance to being affected. Dance writes this push and pull into the air and onto the ground and all over the skin of the earth and flesh that form the city. The words of these moved movers have something specific to do with dance and I want to talk about that specificity as an interplay between walking and talking, between crossing and tasting, between quickness and flavor. Their words and work form part of the aesthetic and philosophical atmosphere that attends the various flows and steps that have taken place in and as New York City over the last fifty years, especially downtown in the serially and simultaneously emergent and submergent dance space between two churches, Judson and St. Mark’s.

"not only this but "New language beckons us'" @ NYU

Vernissage at Fales Library and Special Collections, NYU

For those in NYC or visiting before July 27, 2013, do check out a wonderful exhibit organized and curated by Andrew Blackley for Visual AIDS at New York University's Fales Library and Special Collections, entitled "not only this, but 'new language beckons us'." 

The exhibit features original works by artists in NYU's collections as well as new works by authors in conversation with these artists and their works, including Julie Ault, Dodie Bellamy, Gregg Bordowitz, Nancy Brooks Brody, AA Bronson, Elijah Burgher, Kathe Burkhart, Sean Carrillo, Peter Cramer, Lia Gangitano, Matthias Herrmann, Jim Hubbard, Doug Ischar, William E. Jones, Kevin Killian, Nathanaël, John Neff, Uzi Parnes, Mary Patten, Nina Sobell, Ela Troyano, Ultra-red, Jack Waters, Joe Westmoreland, Danh Vo, and yours truly.

People viewing the cases

As Andrew's announcement states:

This exhibition is composed of archival objects from the Fales Library's Downtown Collection coupled with newly commissioned texts from contemporary artists and writers. Each text corresponds to a figure or object from the collection and highlights interpersonal affinities and adjacencies, influences and recollections. These couplings give voice to still-present narratives and discourses orbiting the intersection of art and HIV/AIDS—a theme that speaks to Visual AIDS' ongoing mission: to serve as an advocate for artists with AIDS and to recognize art as a tool for education and activism in the fight against AIDS.

Some of the texts on display

My contribution is a prose piece riffing specifically on "Hypnos and Thanatos," as well as the drawing books and other artworks by the late painter, graffiti artist and collector, and set designer Martin Wong (1946-1999), onetime lover of the playwright and poet Miguel Piñero (1946-1988) and an important figure in the emerging 1980s Lower East Side/East Village art scene. Other pieces include essays, meditations, poems, one-line provocations, and new visual pieces, and the works from the Fales Collection range across genres, but offer glimpses of a world, or worlds, now almost completely invisible, if not gone, in hypergentrifying Manhattan and New York City. Below are some photos from the opening, which took place on May 23.

A Peter Hujar/David Wojnarowicz piece at left,
with a corresponding response

The exhibit, at NYU

Poem: Aaron Shurin

I cannot find my copy now (it is hidden among the shelves of writing study books that this summer will enjoy reorganization), but Aaron Shurin's (1947-) A's Dream (O Books, 1989), was one of those revelations that serendipity in a bookstore brought me. I had never heard of him or his work, pulled the book off the shelf, realized quickly that I could not put it down, and then read it a number of times, letting its lush, lyrical language seep in and steep. A queer text in theme and form, it enfolds you in its prose, particularly the sequence "City of Men," which I read as specifically about San Francisco, where Shurin has lived for many years and where he directs MFA program at the University of San Francisco, but which I analogized to many an urban setting.

What I particularly love about this sequence is the specificity in the elusiveness; there is something always both before you and just out of reach, like desire itself, though what also overshadows this series of poems is the AIDS pandemic, which was well underway when Shurin wrote the poems. The poems incorporate that horror, but also each day's quotidian beauties. About his work Shurin has said (according to Wikipedia): "Poetry remains for me an act of investigation, by which the imagination makes itself visible in a real world - and through which the inhabitants of that realer world become dimensional." As the little snippet below demonstrates (the "disappear" is not a typo, just to be clear), we can see an imagination crystallizing in words; desire, a life, a world rendered, in its complexity, as poetry.

from CITY OF MEN

I heard my name, the day rose and disappear over the beach. the day on each breath tasted my food,that night roll slowly cover in the cool, his face around my breast. the day inhaling grow pale and disappear, water on his way, up the shores hissing. under the night stillness inclined my morning beach, undressing the friend of my liquid, my most same. at evening while whispering from the bed by me, his way was accomplished. his full perfect arm a health of ripe waters. the day received moon laughing, love lay me that night.

Copyright © Aaron Shurin, from The Paradise of Forms: Selected Poems, Jersey City: Talisman House, 1999. All rights reserved.

Poem/Translation: Xavier Villaurrutia

I could not possibly post poetry about the night without again posting a poem by Xavier Villarrutia, one of whose poems I translated and posted back in January. Here is another, "Cuando la tarde," which, like all his poems, I enjoy reading aloud in the Spanish and then in the English. The lush sensuality of his poems, his language that approximates touch while also capturing a particularly powerful experience of yearning, is on full display here. The poem's messages are self-evident, but I would only call attention to the final line, where the heart of the matter lies, and, both in his Spanish and the English translation, bursts forth at the end of the line: el deseo. Desire, indeed, rising like that ash, that dust, that smoke, that absence of light, in the night.

***

CUANDO LA TARDE

Cuando la tarde cierra sus ventanas remotas,
sus puertas invisibles,
para que el polvo, el humo, la ceniza,
impalpables, oscuros,
lentos como el trabajo de la muerte,
en el cuerpo del niño,
vaya creciendo;
cuando la tarde, al fin, ha recogido
el último destello de luz, la última nube,
el reflejo olvidado y el ruido interrumpido,
la noche surge silenciosamente
de ranuras secretas,
de rincones ocultos,
de bocas entreabiertas,
de ojos insomnes.

La noche surge con el humo denso
del cigarillo y la chimenea.
La noche surge envuelta en su manto de polvo.
El polvo asciende, lento.
Y de un cielo impasible,
cada vez más cercano y más compacto,
lluevo ceniza.

Cuando la noche de humo, de polvo y de ceniza
envuelve la ciudad, los hombres quedan
suspensos un instante,
porque ha nacido en ellos, con la noche, el deseo.

Copyright © Xavier Villarrutia, from Nostalgia de la muerte. Introduction by César Antonio Molina. Madrid: Huerga y Fierro Editores, 1999. All rights reserved.

WHEN EVENING

When evening closes its distant windows,
its invisible doors,
so that the dust, the smoke, the ash,
impalpable, obscure,
slow as the work of death
in the body of a child,
keep growing;
when evening, finally, has recovered
the last glimmer of light, the last cloud,
the forgotten reflection and the interrupted sound,
night surges silently
from secret slots,
from hidden corners,
from half-open mouths,
from sleepless eyes.

Night surges forth with the dense smoke
of cigarette and chimney.
Night surges forth wrapped in its mantle of dust.
The dust rises, slowly.
And from an impassive sky,
each time closer and more compact,
ash rains.

When the night of smoke, of dust and ash
envelops the city, men stay
suspended but an instant,
because in them is born, with the night, desire.

Copyright © Translation by John Keene, 2013. All rights reserved.

The Next Big Thing

THE NEXT BIG THING

Thank you to poet and lovely person Sheila Maldonado, for tagging me for this. I usually eschew posts of this sort, since as Samuel R. Delany has said it is better not to talk too much publicly about things that you have not completed, but since I agreed to do it, I'm going follow through.

What is the working title of the book?
There are several, but I'll mention two. One is a book I just finished translating, entitled Letters from a Seducer, by the Brazilian author Hilda Hilst (1930-2004). Another, which still has a bit to go, is a novel entitled Palimpsests. And there are other projects (fiction, poetry, etc.), as always, in the crockpot.

Where did the idea come from for the book?
The translation was suggested by the Brazilian publisher, as I'd written the introduction to a translation by her and an author, and greatly admired their work. (This is the second book I have translated from Portuguese; the first, by the out gay Brazilian legislator and reality TV star, Jean Wyllys, remains unpublished, except for a few individual stories here and there.) For my own novel, the idea came from attending an OutWrite conference in Boston many moons and skies ago, and seeing a tiny historical note. It took me years to figure out what I wanted to do with the idea, and then it has taken a while to write it.

What genre does your book fall under?
Fiction and fiction.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?
I would say no one is going to make a film of Hilst's novel anytime soon, except that if 1) Lars von Trier, 2) Bruce La Bruce, or 3) Rosa von Praunheim could find a screenwriter to do it, it might at least have a chance. The text is beyond the American cinematic imagination, for the most part. As for the novel I'm writing, Idris Elba would be my first choice for the main male character, and Kimberly Elise would be great as his sister, who is a significant figure in the work. Anthony Mackie would probably be very good as the third major character. I could fill entire blog post with actors for the other parts, but will just ask you to imagine any number of talented actors and actresses, ranging from Mahershala Ali to Angela Bassett.

In terms of the major white characters, I have no idea whatsoever, save for the 20-something daughter of the main character's nominal boss. That should be played by someone with a somewhat grave, fragile face, and an ability to show tremendous acting restraint.

There are a range of characters, so it would give an array of actors, especially black and brown ones, some jobs.

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?
A man has a stranger appear on his doorstep one night, and he has to help him create a new life.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?
Almost forever, minus a kaput computer and a half.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?
With the translation, my inspiration is always Langston Hughes, who was a true person of letters, with translation as one aspect his prolific practice. It's an aspect of his career that people often leave out, but it is one I have taken to heart. Melvin Dixon was also a great translator, writer, and scholar, and someone I deeply admire still, and I would add my former colleague Reginald Gibbons, as well as Marilyn Hacker and Nathanaël, among many, as inspiring writer-translators that come immediately to mind.

With my novel the historical note I came across was the major inspiration. Also years ago my partner's late aunt gave him a book about early African American literature, and it turns out that the real-life person on whom my character is based was a figure notable enough to appear in that book, and even appears in this book. So that was inspiration too. Then there are so many writers and artists and thinkers I have read, followed, admired, known, many of them no longer with us, many lost to AIDS or psychological troubles, and I often think that either with this book or another, I will eventually follow Clarice Lispector's strange little introductory method in The Hour of the Star and list all these "imaginary artist friends,"as Sheila labeled them in her response, either at the beginning or the end of the book. Also, see Delany, Samuel R., Jr.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
The Hilst book is the very definition of genre-breaking, and required me to learn more words for sexual terms in Portuguese than I know in English. English is vocabulary-rich, but comparatively sex-vocabulary poor.

My novel is set in 1804. How often do you read a book set in that year in America? And there are no electric lights, no cars, no airplanes, no TVs, nothing of the sort. They wear smallclothes and Empire-style dresses and ill-fitting shoes. Everything carries a thin veneer of candle smoke, and the fragrance of urine. There were coaches and the beginnings of plumbing and a museum exhibiting little wax statuettes of Othello and Harvard College and free black people, some queer, too. It was quite a time!

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
The Hilst book is to be published this fall by Nightboat Books, based in NYC, in conjunction with Abolha Editora in Rio de Janeiro (I believe). They published the first translation into English of Hilst, and I highly recommend it. I do have an agent, so with my novel we shall see.

My tagged writers for next Wednesday are:
Reginald Harris
Lee P. Jones

Poem/Translation: Xavier Villaurrutia

For a long time I've loved the poetry of Xavier Villaurrutia (1903-1950), one of the greatest poets in Mexican and Latin American literature, and I've read translations of his work that I liked, but I've only tinkered with translating one or two poems of his, publishing none of them on here. Back in September 2005, however, I did publish one of Rachel Benson's translations, of his poem "Love Is an Anguish, A Question," and also posted my typical potted biography of the poet as an introduction.

Recently during this tiny breather between classes I decided to tackle one of his masterpieces that I mentioned in that post, the haunting "Nocturno de Los Ángeles," one of a group of poems in this genre, the "nocturne," that Villaurrutia published in his collection "Nostálgia de Muerte" in 1938. He had previously published an entire collection in 1933 entitled "Nocturnos." This exceptional example of the form is, as you will see, more openly homoerotic than its predecessors, though all of the ones he wrote, as well as many of his other poems, possess a queer thematic undertow.

The very idea of a poem invoking and celebrating the night and nocturnal life suggests and opens up queer possibilities for a gay poet, especially one such as Villaurrutia, who wrote before the more widespread acceptance, in Mexico and elsewhere, of LGBTIQ literature. In the poem "Nocturno," he offers a definition of sorts, beginning "Todo lo que la noche/dibuja con su mano/de sombra;/el placer que revela/el vicio que desnuda" (Everything that the night/draws with its shadowy/hand;/the pleasure it reveals/the ugliness it lays bare." There is Villaurrutia's thematics of the "nocture" in a stanza. Turning darker in tone and imagery towards the end of life, they also point to his chief strategy for revealing and concealing at the same time his interests, as a man and poet, among them an abiding cosmopolitanism, a probing interest in metaphysics and the deeper realities behind and beyond the surface of things, and, rather obviously, queer desire and sociality.

Often in Villaurrutia's poems the rhetoric and discourse cut, at differing angles, through the abstractions; what is not said, "the secret" he broaches below, "shatters" into revelation nevertheless through its presence and invocation. We know it; he chooses to share it with by not sharing it openly. Except below, and in a few other poems. He did not need to hide among his circle of friends, the important group of modernist poets centered in Mexico City, nor was he hiding much when he was translating foreign writers including André Gide and Langston Hughes. His student Octavio Paz, among others, was in on the secret. As all of us who read his poems eventually are.

"Nocturno de Los Ángeles" is one of his most beautiful. It is as strange (with angels, no less) as Rilke, but distinctly Villaurrutia's gem. I recommend reading the English and Spanish aloud, to get the fullest sense of what he's doing. The Spanish, unsurprisingly, casts a greater spell than (my workmanly) English (translation) ever can, at least to my ear. Still, enjoy!

NOCTURNO DE LOS ÁNGELES
to Agustin J. Fink

You could say the streets flow sweetly into the night.
The lights are not so bright that they actually reveal the secret,
the secret that men who come and go know,
because everyone is in on the secret
and nothing would be gained by shattering it
     into a thousand pieces
if, on the one hand, it is so sweet to keep
and share it only with the one you choose.

If each one were to say at a given moment,
in only one word, what he thinks,
the six letters of DESIRE would form
an enormous, luminous scar,
a constellation more ancient, more brilliant
     than any other.
And that constellation would be like a sex organ burning
in the deep body of the night,
or, better, like the Gemini who for the first time
     in their lives
saw themselves brow to brow, eye to eye,
and then took each other in their arms forever.

Suddenly the river of the street peoples with thirsty beings,
they stroll, they pause, they walk on by.
They exchange glances, they dare smiles.
They improbably couple up.

There are shadowy bends and banks,
edges of indefinable and bottomless forms
and sudden blinding shafts of light
and doors that give way to the slightest pressures.

The river of the street stands deserted for a moment.
Soon it seems to rearrange itself by itself
longing to begin again.
For a moment it stays paralyzed, mute, yearning
like the heart between two orgasms.

But a new pulsation, a new beat
casts into the river of the street new thirsty beings.
They cruise, intermingle, lift off.
The fly above the earth.
They swim on foot, so miraculously
that no one would dare to say they were not walking.

They're angels!
They've come down to earth
by invisible ladders.
They come from the sea, that mirror of the sky,
in ships of smoke and shadow,
to find themselves, conjoin themselves with mortals,
to surrender their brows to the thighs of women,
let others feverishly caress their bodies,
as other bodies search for theirs until they find them
as they find them when closing
their lips on the same mouth,
wearing out their mouths unused for so long,
setting free their tongues of flame,
chanting the songs, the pledges and the cursewords
in which men concentrate the ancient mystery
of flesh, blood and desire.

They take assumed names, divinely simple.
They call themselves Dick or John, or Marvin or Louis.
In no way way beyond their beauty can they be
    distinguished from mortals.
They stroll, they pause, they walk on by.
They exchange glances, they dare smiles.
They improbably couple up.

They smile maliciously ascending
the hotel elevators
where they can still practice slow and vertical flight.
On their nude bodies are heavenly marks--
signs, stars, blue tattooed letters.
They fall back into bed, drown themselves in pillows
that make them recall, for a moment, the clouds. 
But they close their eyes in order to give themselves up
to the pleasures of their mysterious incarnations,
and, when they sleep, they dream of mortals, not angels.

Los Angeles, California

Copyright © Estate of Xavier Villarrutia. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Translation by John Keene, 2013.


NOCTURNO DE LOS ÁNGELES
a Agustín J. Fink

Se diría que las calles fluyen dulcemente en la noche.
Las luces no son tan vivas que logren desvelar el secreto,
el secreto que los hombres que van y vienen conocen,
porque todos están en el secreto
y nada se ganaría con partirlo en mil pedazos
si, por el contrario, es tan dulce guardarlo
y compartirlo sólo con la persona elegida.

Si cada uno dijera en un momento dado,
en sólo una palabra, lo que piensa,
las cinco letras del DESEO formarían una enorme
      cicatriz luminosa,
una constelación más antigua, más viva aún que las otras.
Y esa constelación sería como un ardiente sexo
en el profundo cuerpo de la noche,
o, mejor, como los Gemelos que por vez primera en la vida
se miraran de frente, a los ojos, y se abrazaran
      ya para siempre.

De pronto el río de la calle se puebla de sedientos seres,
caminan, se detienen, prosiguen.
Cambian miradas, atreven sonrisas,
forman imprevistas parejas...

Hay recodos y bancos de sombra,
orillas de indefinibles formas profundas
y súbitos huecos de luz que ciega
y puertas que ceden a la presión más leve.

El río de la calle queda desierto un instante.
Luego parece remontar de sí mismo
deseoso de volver a empezar.
Queda un momento paralizado, mudo, anhelante
como el corazón entre dos espasmos.

Pero una nueva pulsación, un nuevo latido
arroja al río de la calle nuevos sedientos seres.
Se cruzan, se entrecruzan y suben.
Vuelan a ras de tierra.
Nadan de pie, tan milagrosamente
que nadie se atrevería a decir que no caminan.

¡Son los ángeles!
Han bajado a la tierra
por invisibles escalas.
Vienen del mar, que es el espejo del cielo,
en barcos de humo y sombra,
a fundirse y confundirse con los mortales,
a rendir sus frentes en los muslos de las mujeres,
a dejar que otras manos palpen sus cuerpos febrilmente,
y que otros cuerpos busquen los suyos hasta encontrarlos
como se encuentran al cerrarse los labios de una misma boca,
a fatigar su boca tanto tiempo inactiva,
a poner en libertad sus lenguas de fuego,
a decir las canciones, los juramentos, las malas palabras
en que los hombres concentran el antiguo misterio
de la carne, la sangre y el deseo.
Tienen nombres supuestos, divinamente sencillos.
Se llaman Dick o John, o Marvin o Louis.
En nada sino en la belleza se distinguen de los mortales.
Caminan, se detienen, prosiguen.
Cambian miradas, atreven sonrisas.
Forman imprevistas parejas.

Sonríen maliciosamente al subir en los ascensores de los hoteles
donde aún se practica el vuelo lento y vertical.
En sus cuerpos desnudos hay huellas celestiales;
signos, estrellas y letras azules.
Se dejan caer en las camas, se hunden en las almohadas
que los hacen pensar todavía un momento en las nubes.
Pero cierran los ojos para entregarse mejor a los goces
     de su encarnación misteriosa,
y, cuando duermen, sueñan no con los ángeles sino con los mortales.

Los Angeles, California

"The Black Female Body in Art" Panel at the Brooklyn Museum

"How has the black female body been idealized and misread in visual culture?" And: "How might these tendencies affect black women today?"

Tisa Bryant, Isolde Brielmeier, Deborah Willis, Carla Williams

These were just two of the many provocative questions posed yesterday at a Brooklyn Museum of Art panel discussion entitled "The Black Female Body in Art," which took place in conjunction with the museum's superb current exhibit, Mickalene Thomas: Origin of the Universe. The exhibit, featuring a range of Thomas's (1971-) current work, includes a mural, large scale paintings, smaller mixed-media works, photographs, a room-sized multi-part installation, and a video, and is located in the Morris A. and Meyer Schapiro Wing, on the museum's 4th floor. It runs through January 20, 2012. The panel comprised four distinguished participants, each of whom brought distinctive perspectives to their viewings of and discussions on Thomas's work, and on the broader topic: visual artist, photographer, curator, historian, and NYU professor Deborah Willis; Isolde Brielmaier, Chief Curator at Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) and Visiting Assistant Professor of Art at Vassar; Carla Williams, coauthor of The Black Female Body: A Photographic History; and my very good friend, writer, art and cultural critic and CalArts professor Tisa Bryant.

The conversation, which ran for about 2 hours, somewhat skirted the very open-ended questions I noted above, yet did provide insightful context for and readings of Mickalene Thomas's show, and of topics and themes related to and deriving out of it. One of the issues the panel spoke about involved Thomas's revisioning and reappropriation of imagery from the European art historical tradition. The very title of her show, "The Origin of the Universe," derives from Gustave Courbet's controversial 1866 painting of a nude, head-and-limb-obscured white woman's genitalia, "L'origine du monde," though as Tisa and other panelists queried, what happens when the artwork and the gaze implicit in it is a woman's, a lesbian's, a black woman's, a black lesbian's (and Thomas is a black lesbian) how does that resituate the image, as well as its relation to Courbet's image? (No one noted that Courbet was a committed ideological and political leader of the French avant-garde, and how that underpinned the vision, gaze and gestures implicit in his work, including this one.) Moreover, Tisa pointed out the metonymic resonances in Thomas work, among them black physicality, sensuality, reproductive agency and power, and an invocation of Lucy/Dinknesh, the first human mother/female ancestor. (Other figures Thomas riffs on, directly in terms of images and styles, include Edouard Manet, Pablo Picasso, and David Hockney, though I also saw a bit of Richard Diebenkorn, the Cubists, and Romare Bearden in her collagistic compositions.)

Mickalene Thomas's "“Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe: Les Trois Femmes Noires, Fractured” (2011),
a direct riff on Edouard Manet's "Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe"

Some other topics I'm still thinking about include Carla Williams's point about the specifics of Thomas's technique and images, and how, despite the artist's direct engagement with the Euro-American (male) artistic past, one could come to and connect with them without "the history of [Euro-American] art," in part because of their rich, bedazzled surfaces, their inviting and provocative imagery, and the personal histories a viewer, especially a black female viewer, might bring. (I thought as well of Kehinde Wiley, Thomas's contemporary, and his use and appropriation of Renaissance iconography, as well as of predecessors like Robert Colescott and Bob Thompson, just to name a few.) For Tisa, the "bling" of the rhinestones--one of the most arresting aspects of Thomas's work, from a distance and up close--brought to mind associations such as the celestial, cosmology, stars and the star system (of mass culture, the art world, etc.), high and low culture, the earthly and the heavenly. "What shines?" she asked aloud, much as the paintings ask us as we look at them. Mouths, eyes and eyelids, sometimes jewelry, areola, fleshly contours, pubic hair and genitalia: what happens when Thomas focuses our gaze on these aspects of her paintings? Where is the feminine, the queer gaze, and how is she activating it? (My question.)

The topic of black woman's gazes, and black women looking at, seeing, and painting/creating artwork about and for each other, arose several times, including when Deborah Willis asked Tisa specifically about the "diaristic" aspect of the work. Isolde Brielmeier had just noted the "multiple directionality of the gaze," echoing Thomas's own comments, the many "points of entry," the queerness of looking. For Tisa, in the installations was where "subjectivity was most palpable." Carla Williams added that Thomas was one of only a few very well-known and high profile contemporary out black queer female artists, which made even more significant the ways in which she was changing "iconography." I thought about this and about what it means for a black queer woman, especially in an art world that continues to be dominated by white male artists, and which primarily has elevated black male (straight and queer) artists while overlooking many black women, to portray one's mother, one's female friends, one's female lovers, as subjects and objects of love, desire, fantasy, beauty--and manage to shift viewer's expectations, while also not losing your own focus.  This issue of looking led Tisa to note the presence of mirrors in Thomas's work--calling to mind Oshun, among others--and the concept of women, regular women, as sources of inspiration, as "muses," to use Willis term and an idea long known to male artists. As Tisa asked, "Who do we look at?" In Thomas's work, "reverb(erations)"--reappropriations, repurposings, revisionings--she answered, are taking place.

The panelists before one of the many evocative images
that accompanied their conversation

Quote: Jonas Mekas

Still from Andy Warhol's Empire(from Behindthehype.com)

Q: Earlier this year you selected films for a "Boring Masterpieces" series at Anthology [Film Archives].  A few of the 60 or so people that came for Andy Warhol's Empire, stayed for its entire running time of 8 hours and 5 minutes. You were the cameraman for Empire - what was the experience of making that film?

A: It was the spring of 1964. My loft was the Film-Maker's Cooperative office: Film Culture [the magazine Mekas cofounded with his brother Adolfas in 1954) magazine office; and a hangout of underground film-makers, poets, people in transit. Bob Kaufman, Barbara Rubin, Christo, Salvador Dalí, Ginsberg, Leroi Jones, [Gregory] Corso, George Maciunas, Warhol, Jack Smith.... I slept under the editing table while the parties were going. A new issue of Film Culture was out and I had asked John Palmer, a young film-maker, to help to carry bags full of magazines to the nearest post office, in the Empire State Building. As we were carrying our heavy loads, the Empire State Building was our Star of Bethlehem: it was always there, leading us...Suddenly we both had to stop to admire it. I don't remember who said it, John or myself, or both of us at the same time: "Isn't it great?" This is a perfect Andy Warhol movie!"

"Why don't you tell that to Andy," I said. Next day he calls me. "And is very excited about filming Empire. Can you help us?"

So on Saturday, July 25th there we were, on the 41st floor of the Time-Life building. I set up the camera and framed the Empire State Building. Andy was there to check framing. The premiere of Empire had to wait for almost a year. It was a very, very busy period of the Sixties, we kept doing new things, and we had no time to look at what we did yesterday. Ahead, ahead we moved!

***

In 1962 or '64, I met Andy on Second Avenue. I was going to a LaMonte Young concert. He said he would join me. LaMonte played one of those very, very long pieces, four or six hours-long variations on a single note. Andy sat through the entire piece. Andy was already doing serial pictures, repetitions of the same image. Stretching time. Jackson MacLow had already written his script/note about filming a tree for twenty-four hours. It was all in the air, Empire. Andy was very up-to-date with what was happening in the arts. One could say that Empire was his conversation with other avant-garde artists of his day, with minimalists, conceptualists, real-time artists and, at the same time, an aesthetic celebration of reality. As such, it will never date, it will always remain alive and unique.

--Copyright © Jonas Mekas, interviewed by Marianne Shaneen, SFAQ: International Arts and Culture, Issue 11: Nov. Dec. Jan. 2012-13, pp. 52-53.

Jonas Mekas (l) and Andy Warhol (r)

Charles Rice-González at the Center

On Friday I went to the New York Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Center to hear Charles Rice-González read from and talk about his new book and first novel, Chulito (New York: Magnus Press, 2011). Men of All Colors Together sponsored the event, and Tom Wirth, a longtime MACT member and the editor of Richard Bruce Nugent's Gentleman Jigger (New York: DaCapo, 2008), and Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance: Selections from the Work of Richard Bruce Nugent (Durham: Duke, 2002), introduced the event.

Chulito tells the story of a 16-year-old Bronx Puerto Rican-American native, a b-boy to the core, who falls in love with his childhood friend, Carlos, an academic pacesetter and Adelphia University student. Chulito struggles with his understandings of desire, masculinity and machismo, sexuality, and his own and others' homophobia, and must come to terms not just with himself but with the future he steps into once he openly avows his feelings toward Carlos. Rice-González captures the Hunts Point section of the Bronx, contemporary urban New York latino cultures, and the travails of youth in their rich particularities; above all he shows the reader the world of queer brown and black working-class outer-borough New York.

The narrative, a romance at its core, is enthralling, often funny, and deeply moving, particularly at those moments when Chulito must confront and overcome his fears. Rice-González not only selected and read sections that showed the novel to its best effect, but he animated in a way I wish more writers would when reading their work. The story came to life right there in the Center. Before the event he talked about growing up queer and latino in the Bronx and the City, his work at the Bronx Academy of Art and Design, and the background to his work on the novel, and after he read he answered questions from the audience, including one about a potential movie. There isn't one slated yet, but there should be. In the meantime I cannot wait to read more works from this author.

Charles Rice-González

Charles Rice-González

Rice-González reading

Tom Wirth introducing Rice-González

George Dureau @ Higher Pictures + Rotimi Fani-Kayode @ The Walther Collection

Laurence Patterson, 1970s (© George Dureau, Higher Pictures)

By splendid coincidence, two exhibits, both quite small but nevertheless impressive, of queer photography from the heyday era of the late 1970s through the mid-1980s are still up in New York City, so yesterday, despite the heat, which turns Manhattan sidewalks into griddles and the subway stations into kilns, I ventured out and over (or under) to catch both.

The first was a tiny exihibit at Higher Pictures gallery, on the Upper East Side, entitled George Dureau Black 1973-1986, totaling only 15 pictures total by the New Orleans-based photographer (1930-), who has been taking photographs for over 50 years, and snapped these as studies for his paintings. All of these were black and white prints from 1973 through 1986, and to my astonishment, it turned out that this is Dureau's first solo exhibit in New York. I'd first seen Dureau's work in book form when I was in my early 20s and working at the old Glad Day Bookshop in Boston, and flipped through it often enough; in that volume, which included many of the images in the show, Dureau creates portraits, suffused with homoeroticism, of young working-class and poor men, some of them with physical challenges.

The portraits bear strong similarities of focus and style with those of Robert Mapplethorpe, but it was Dureau who influenced the younger photographer, who went to New Orleans in the early 1970s to meet and study the senior artist's work, evening restaging them in some cases. Unlike Mapplethorpe's work, Dureau's portraits manage to portray without objectification, possessing a simplicity of composition and manipulation of light and shadow without being simplistic, a casualness of depiction that never feels like happenstance, and an eroticism, even with the nudes, that leaves a great deal to the viewer's imagination. Far more so than Mapplethorpe's work, the subjects of the portraits seem to retain their subjectivity, their individuality, the richness of lives only captured for an instant by the photographer in his studio or on the street. In the gallery's news release, the literary scholar Claude J. Summers describes the difference between the two as "foremost a matter of empathy."

Though we cannot see the milieus from which these men emerge, we can imagine and glimpse them in a way that is not always possible with Mapplethorpe's images. Nevertheless, though Dureau's have documentary power, they represent their subjects as more than indices of a particular time and place; they come alive, as works of art, burning through the moment of their original creation to touch the viewer today. But I don't want to belabor the contrasts; Dureau's pictures speak for themselves. If I have any complain I only wish there were many more on display. Several things I found myself wondering, as I always do when I see such work, is who these men are, what their lives were like, whether they're still around to answer these questions.  Dureau's rich images keep me wondering, and thinking.

The exhibit closes on July 13, 2012.




Alphonse Dotson, 1977 (© George Dureau, Higher Pictures)




***

I took the 6 downtown to Union Square and switched over the L to get to Chelsea, where The Walther Collection is featuring the first solo New York show (no less astonishing), Rotimi Fani-Kayode: Nothing to Lose, of the late Nigerian-British photographer (1955-1989) whose work represents some of the most evocative visual cultural production from period in the late 1970s and early 1980s when Black Diasporic queer arts and letters truly emerged.  As with Dureau's photographs, I first came across Fani-Kayode's in books, anthologies and journals when I was in my early 20s and he was still alive, and to this day I associate them with the wide array of Black queer art of that moment, but I'd never had the opportunity to see them up close until today, and for that I thank the Walther Collection tremendously. (The exhibit runs until July 28, 2012.)

Gathering a little over a dozen large color and small-scale black-and-white portraits that Fani-Kayode, who was born in Lagos and emigrated with his family to the UK in 1966, after the Nigerian military coup and burgeoning conflict that became the Biafran War, produced during the final years of his life.  Fani-Kayode studied at Georgetown University and Pratt Institute, and got to know Robert Mapplethorpe, even drawing upon the latter poet's body of work as he constructed his own.

© Rotimi Fani-Kayode, The Walther Collection

If I may quote The Walther Collection's press release,

the photographs on view at The Walther Collection Project Space represent ke works from the series "Nothing to Lose," commissioned as part of the 1989 group exhibition Bodies of Experience: Stories About Living with HIV, which feature primarily portraits and self-portraiture; and from the series "Ecstatic Antibodies," included in the 1990 group exhibition Ecstatic Antibodies: Resisting the AIDS Mythology, which display transformations of the body through the use of masking. In addition, a selection of other black-and-white and color photographs, produced between 1986 and 1989, will also be on view.

The color photographs, some of which have become iconic, depict Fani-Kayode and others in spiritually grounded, ritualistic poses that queer elements of Christian and Yoruba iconography, presenting visual depictions of cultural connection and difference that still feel original, despite the passage of nearly two and half decades and numerous photographers who have taken up his threads.  Many present rites that might allow the subject, and the viewer, to transcend the temporal and physical realm; others suggest menace, danger, a choice--as in a bite of a toxic fruit--that might have dire consequences. As the Walther Collection's press release states, they merge Fani-Kayode's "fascination with Yoruba 'techniques of ecstasy' and homoerotic self-expression through symbolic gestures, religion, sexuality, and elaborate decoration."  Other motifs that occur in these portraits include exile, death and blackness.

As he was making these images, Fani-Kayode was dealing with HIV/AIDS, and his personal struggle, which mirrored his outspoken public activism regarding the HIV/AIDS pandemic, informs all of these portraits.  The bodies here, Fani-Kayode's and others', black, male, queer, even while visually bestilled, often appear to be in motion, transition, in flight, but not away from the horrors of this disease, then at the apogee of its destruction, but toward and against it, in resistance to it, as well as toward zones of possibility, of healing and restoration, of connection of body and spirit, and differing cultural traditions. Rather than depictions of alienation or suffering (which too are here), the images are sites of potentiality, and Fani-Kayode's compositional choices, his use of vibrant color, and his pairing of obvious and more hidden symbols combine to charge each portrait on display.

Yet central to this potentiality and resistance is eros.  The eroticized, painted and adorned, partially masked or hidden, anointed and transformed black body, his and other bodies, lose none of their beauty or appeal despite the specter of HIV/AIDS not just hovering over them, but within them. Whereas Mapplethorpe, in hiding a face or focusing on a penis, sometimes slid into objectification, the effect in Fani-Kayode's portraits is synecdochic, and metonymic. The feet or hands or head of hair stand in for the whole body, in the fight of its life and facing down death, the whole body pointing to and standing alongside all the other black male and queer bodies that HIV/AIDS would carry away from this human realm. The spiritual nature of Fani-Kayode's portraiture then is especially important, because it suggests he was in touch with other worlds, that his subjects might, even if leaving this world, would be prepared for other ones.

One final note: the gallery had several books for sale, including one featuring the work of Fani-Kayode and his late partner Alex Hirst, and while flipping through it I came across a number of Fani-Kayode's portraits featuring writers and artists I knew many years ago, among them the writer and scholar Guy-Mark Foster; one of the images I stopped on was titled "The Kiss" (or perhaps it was "Kiss"), featuring two beautiful young black men embracing, one cradling the other, about to kiss. I noted to the young gallery attendant that the two people in the photo were Essex Hemphill and Isaac Julien, two figures who played key roles in the emergence of Black Diasporic queer art. (He asked who Hemphill was, but certainly knew Julian.) For me, the image, like the others in the show, threaded the needle in terms of demonstrating that Fani-Kayode was and is another such figure. It also underlines his centrality to an era now gone, but captured in the literature and films and images that thankfully endure.

Frank Ocean, Anderson Cooper & Coming Out

Frank Ocean

A few days ago, the noted TV news personality and multimillionaire heir (to the Vanderbilt fortune) Anderson Cooper came out, after years of public speculation by his fans and years of being open among a private network of friends, associates and coworkers. To be truthful, Cooper, a very rich and well-placed white man, had very little to lose but his gossamer secret by declaring, in the offhanded way he did via a letter to his friend, conservative writer and pundit Andrew Sullivan, that he was "gay." He did not, as his peer Don Lemon did, come on the air and tell the world. He didn't even pick a gay pride celebration to make his statement. Yet he did it, and in so doing he was not going to lose his post as a CNN media figure; he was not going to lose his fans, most of whom not only couldn't have cared less that he was gay but had long wanted him to publicly come out; he was not going to lose his millions by being cut off by his mother, designer and heiress Gloria Vanderbilt; in fact, he wasn't going to lose much of anything except his key to a gilded yet fairly transparent closet. I say all of this not to attack Cooper, because I praise his public self-affirmation as a gay person, as queer man. I think it's wonderful, especially in light of the ongoing shift in public attitudes in the US and across the globe concerning gay rights and equality, and in light of the ongoing struggles, de facto and de jure, that queer people all over the US and the globe still face in terms of homophobic and heterosexist oppression. I applaud Anderson Cooper with the strongest and gayest claps possible. But he didn't have much to lose, and he didn't have a long walk to take out of a closet that barely existed, though he'd kept its door cracked and its walls intact.

In contrast, on Tuesday the 24-year-old singer and songwriter Frank Ocean, a member of the loose collective Odd Future, which has been rightly criticized for the violently anti-gay and misogynistic raps of some of its members, particularly Tyler the Creator (cf. "Yonkers"), bravely posted on his Tumblr page a two-paragraph letter--who says this ancient form no longer has relevance or power!?--letting the world know that his first love was a man he'd met when they were both 19 years old, and that that experience, however complicated and painful in some ways, however unreciprocal and difficult, had been transformative for him. Ocean did not use the word "gay" or any similar term, preferring instead simply to state for the record that the relationship had existed, what it meant and continues to mean for him, thanking hte unnamed beloved and letting him know that because of it he felt and "feel[s] like a free man." In other words, he acknowledged his queerness by acknowledging the truth of his life, and no labels were nor are necessary, though this did not prevent media outlets, Twitterers and Facebookers, and a good many of everybody else stating that he was "gay" or "bisexual" or trying to pin a label on him.

Ocean's letter, from his Tumblr page

Since then neither Ocean nor his publicists nor his bandmates have posted a retraction. The responses from Odd Future's Tyler the Creator and others across the music industry, especially in the genres that Ocean has worked most extensively, hiphop and R&B, have been almost uniformly positive and affirming. (Tyler tweeted on Wednesday, "My big brother finally f---ing did that. Proud of that n---a cause I know that sh-- is difficult or whatever. Anyway. I'm a toilet." Uh, okay.) Ocean's new and first full album, Channel Orange, is set to drop, and with media speculation percolating about the pronouns he'd chosen in three songs, so he very well could have come up with an excuse or denials and kept hidden the sort of relationship, however one-sided the letter suggests it was emotionally, that Terrance Dean chronicled in his 2008 book Hiding In Hip Hop: On the Down Low in the Entertainment Industry from Music to Hollywood (Simon & Schuster), and played the game as it usually is. Instead, by sharing this aspect of still brief life, he risked quite a bit, and still faces huge risks, but nevertheless took a step that unfortunately far too many figures much further along in their careers--Queen Latifah, for example--are still unwilling to take.

Tyler the Creator and Frank Ocean (© Getty Images)

One may argue that given these risks and dangers are far greater for non-celebrities--Ocean after all appears on one of the best-known tracks on Jay Z's and Kanye West's recent album and is a member of a thriving musical group--and, in the absence of federal civil protections for queer people and the institution of overtly anti-gay laws in some states, as well as persistent homophobic and heterosexist attitudes, rhetoric and behavior by many major religious groups, anyone who is considering coming out has reason to be wary. This is true; one can ask too to what and to whom anyone is "coming out"; in the absence of affirmation and support, being openly queer--gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, unlabeled but self-posited as a non-heterosexual, as questioning, as emergent, as sexually and gender-fluid--can still be a life or death proposition, for someone of any age. For women, for people of color, for working-class and poor people, for a person with physical or mental challenges, for a religious minority or someone occupying all of these categories, the challenges and risks multiply. Thus the simplistic call for people to come out, born out of the earliest days of the post-Stonewall Rebellion movement towards gay rights and equality--Come Out! was in fact the name of one of the very first gay publications--must always be considered within the context of the specific people for whom it is cast, the society in which it might occur, the risks it entails. One can come out and go back in, or be out and still be continually be coming out. It isn't a one-time proposition, and it won't be for Cooper, if you can believe that, and certainly not for Frank Ocean.

Anderson Cooper

Whatever Frank Ocean decides to do, whatever he decides to call himself tomorrow or down the road, whatever he songs he writes and to whomever he address them, whatever the gender, he has had a major impact on the public discourse through his courageous step, and, I want to note this, those around him in the R&B and hiphop communities have also made a major impact by responding as they did. It is particularly invaluable for young black people, not just in the US but all over the globe, especially in places where internal and outside forces have ramped up homophobia, to see that a young black person, at the center of the forms of cultural production that animates local and global imaginaries, can speak about his life with truth and bravery and not be ashamed or duplicitous, that he can speak about falling in love with another person of the same sex, and talk about his hurt but also how much he gained from that experienced, and how it has brought him a freedom many people dream of, an emotional freedom, and a truthfulness, that so many queer people still struggle to attain.

I praise his courage and his candor, and urge others who can and are able to follow his lead to do so, just as I praise those like Cooper who have already got the world by their fingertips and decide to step out, be out, open up. I also urge all who can work to change the laws, here and abroad, that foment homophobia--which, as Barbara Smith, Eve Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Audre Lorde, and countless other visionaries have in their various ways noted lies at the core of nearly all anti-gay activity--and that foster oppression and inequality to do so, because by doing both, as he suggests, we all might be on the road to being "free."

Poem: W. H. Auden

W. H. Auden
(Photo © Jill Krementz)

I mentioned him in yesterday's (or a recent) post, so here a poem by the one and only W. H. Auden (1907-1973), one of the lodestones of 20th century Anglo-American poetry, whose life and work really need no introduction.  The fifth line in this poem's second stanza is one of the most quoted by poets, though the fuller thought often is not. Ireland remains (even today) torn, and the Irish Republic finds itself saddled with one of the worst economic collapses in all of Europe (blame those bankers and their government enablers), so in that regard, as with the weather, Yeats' poetry might not have made anything happen, but on the other hand, it's clear that Yeats and countless other writers prepared the way, politically, culturally, socially, discursively, for the Free Irish State and the Republic that followed, and provided a framework through which an Ireland, no matter how governed, could imagine itself as constituting a(n even illusory) whole.

That was in part the aim of Modernism, shoring fragments up against ruin, to echo T. S. Eliot, trying to create a whole from the shards modernity, in its multifarious ways, had left behind.  Auden continues: "For poetry....survives/In the valley of its making where executives/Would never want to tamper, flows on south/From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,/Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,/A way of happening, a mouth." In effect, it does make things happen, by its every survival, which, he astutely noticed, passes right by the "executives" out of the mostly solitary conditions (this was in the days before MFA programs) of poets' affective and material labor ("busy griefs"), onto pages, into eyes and ears, through and out of every "mouth" that utters or imagines uttering a poem. So it was with Yeats's poetry, so it is with Auden's, so it will be with every poem that survives. There is so much more to say about this poem, a tribute, a memoriam, an elegy, an invocation, but I will leave it to Auden himself, one of the best rhetoricians of his or any age.

IN MEMORY OF W. B. YEATS   

I


He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree 
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

II

     You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
     The parish of rich women, physical decay,
     Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
     Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
     For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
     In the valley of its making where executives
     Would never want to tamper, flows on south
     From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
     Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
     A way of happening, a mouth.


III

          Earth, receive an honoured guest:
          William Yeats is laid to rest.
          Let the Irish vessel lie
          Emptied of its poetry.

          In the nightmare of the dark
          All the dogs of Europe bark,
          And the living nations wait,
          Each sequestered in its hate;

          Intellectual disgrace
          Stares from every human face,
          And the seas of pity lie
          Locked and frozen in each eye.

          Follow, poet, follow right
          To the bottom of the night,
          With your unconstraining voice
          Still persuade us to rejoice;

          With the farming of a verse
          Make a vineyard of the curse,
          Sing of human unsuccess
          In a rapture of distress;

          In the deserts of the heart
          Let the healing fountain start,
          In the prison of his days
          Teach the free man how to praise.

From Another Time by W. H. Auden, published by Random House. Copyright © 1940 W. H. Auden, renewed by The Estate of W. H. Auden. Used by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.

Poems: Nikki Giovanni

Nikki Giovanni
(www.afropoets.net)

Ah, Nikki Giovanni (1943-). When I was in junior high and starting high school she was my favorite poet. There was something about the directness of her address, the humorous way she dealt with frustration and rage (though she wasn't always so funny), her articulation of power in the face of marginalization, her truthfulness about what it meant and means to be young and black and living in the US (and she was at least a generation or two older than me, but everything she wrote spoke immediately to me), her sophisticated use of vernacular, all of it made her a poet I could not get enough of. There were other poets I adulated at this age, but alongside nearly all of them, Giovanni held pride of place until I turned 16 or so, and then I drifted away from her work.

I used to be able to recite "Nikki-Rosa," "Ego-Tripping," and some of her other poems by memory. Now I can only summon a few lines. But I have been fortunate to be able to teach her work in the intervening years, to junior high and high school students, and then to college students, and I marvel at how readily they take to her, how powerfully her work continues to resonate.  Among literary scholars, though, she doesn't make the same impact. I sometimes think it's because she's considered not especially profound or interesting or innovative, that she's read as too simple and not worthy of research beyond work on the Black Arts Movement. That may be just my misreading, but I would be hard-pressed to recall any discussion of I've had with folks teaching poetry and poetics, except those working specifically in African American literature, or with other creative writers, over the last 10 years, in which her name arose.

That is, outside of the moment when the tragic events at Virginia Tech thrust her back into public view. Yet this year at the Associated Writing Programs conference in Chicago, her public conversation with Thomas Sayers Ellis--which I couldn't attend because I was teaching at that hour--reportedly was packed.  Among the creative writing community she still is a draw. That results not only from her poetry, which speaks for itself, but from her work as a teacher, consciousness-raiser, and mentor, especially to younger writers. She has taught at Virginia Tech since 1987, where she is now Distinguished Professor, and has received many awards for her poetry, which can be found in more than two dozen collections. She also has published essays, children's book, and recorded her work on vinyl and CD.

Here are two early poems by Giovanni that capture some of what I described above. Both are also about being a poet and writing poetry, which is to say, about art, artists and their power.  As a young poet who saw the need for and participated in a social and cultural revolution, she was aware, even when expressing her doubts, that what she was doing had some value. Poetry does make things happen, pace W. H. Auden (whose poem in which this formulation, more carefully and fully stated, I probably should select for tomorrow), though not in the ways that poets might imagine and that others dismiss. What is clear is that good poems do survive, and their work continues long after they were written and for that we should always be thankful. So thank you to Giovanni, and here are two of her poems. Enjoy.

kidnap poem

ever been kidnapped
by a poet
if i were a poet
i'd kidnap you
put you in my phrases and meter
you to jones beach
or maybe coney island
or maybe just to my house
lyric you in lilacs
dash you in the rain
blend into the beach
to complement my see
play the lyre for you
ode you with my love song
anything to win you
wrap you in the red Black green
show you off to mama
yeah if i were a poet i'd kid
nap you

My Poem

i am 25 years old
black female poet
wrote a poem asking
nigger can you kill
if they kill me
it won't stop
the revolution

i have been robbed
it looked like they knew
that i was to be hit
they took my tv
my two rings
my piece of african print
and my two guns
if they take my life
it won't stop
the revolution

my phone is tapped
my mail is opened
they've caused me to turn
on all my old friends
and all my new lovers
if i hate all black
people
and all negroes
it won't stop
the revolution

if i never write
another poem
or short story
if i flunk out
of grad school
if my car is reclaimed
and my record player
won't play
and if i never see
a peaceful day
or do a meaningful
black thing
it won't stop
the revolution

the revolution
is in the streets
and if i stay on 
the fifth floor
it will go on
if i never do
anything
it will go on

Copyright © Nikki Giovanni, "kidnap poem" and "My Poem," from The Selected Poems of Nikki Giovanni, New York: William Morrow & Co., 1996. All rights reserved.

Poem: Edward Field

I have been out and about all day and all night, and so had no time really to post today's poem, by a poet who sadly is far too underread, despite having proved he was the real thing from his first book, despite being a queer pioneer, and despite having received acclaim over the years. I can guarantee you that when people mention gay American poets of the 1960s and 1970s, his name probably won't arise. Why? That is a good question. His poetry includes mentions of popular culture, politics, the every life experiences of people of his generation. It's often witty, sometimes outright funny, and is serious without taking itself too seriously. This poet even wrote a delightful, gossipy memoir that includes Susan Sontag in its title (The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag and Other Intimate Literary Portraits of the Bohemian Era, University of Wisconsin Press, 2005). And yet.... Okay, who am I talking about? Edward Field (1924-)!

A native of Brooklyn, a World War II veteran, the winner of many major prizes, including the Lamont Poetry Prize, the Prix de Rome, the Lambda Literary Award for Poetry, and an Academy Award in the 1964 Documentary Short for To Be Alive! Now does this make you want to find out who he is? I will admit I rushed out to find his first book when, paging through Richard Howard's snappish 1969 edition of Alone With America, I noted that rather than savaging Field, he praised him. I need to read this poet, I decided. And I did. Also, the titles of two of his first three books alone are worth the effort of finding them: Stand Up, Friend, With Me (Grove Press, 1963), and Variety Photoplays (Grove Press, 1967). He has published 12 books of poetry, five books of fiction, 2 nonfiction books (including said memoir above), and edited or co-edited 5 books as well. A poet I met some years back at a writing colony, Lisa Glatt, told me she'd met Field and could not stop singing his praises. The memoir suggests he at least has a good sense of humor, as well as poetic and narrative talent.

Let me stop there and post the poem, from his 2007 book, After the Fall: Poems Old and New (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007). If you read the most recent poems, you'll see that Field, nearing the end of his life--though he's still with us!--takes a much sterner perspective in some of them. As in the following one. I don't agree with what he's saying, because sometimes seemingly "harmless wordplay," as I've written about before on here, is anything but. One could also point to the irony of its status as a gloss on the great Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004), who did write actively against tyranny but was aware of how little poetry, at least in certain senses, could do.  Nevertheless, he is quite right about the government simply getting rid of us if it sees fit to, and his "Credo" stands, especially given that he's a poet in the winter of his years, as an admonition, charge and challenge to us all.

CREDO

What good is poetry
if it doesn't stand up
against the lies of the government,
if it doesn't rescue us
from the liars that mislead ups?
What good is it
if it doesn't speak out, denounce what's going on?
It's nothing
but harmless wordplay to titillate and distract—
the government knows it
and can always get rid of us if we step out of line.

That I believed in poetry,
even when I betrayed it,
that I came back to its central meaning
--to save the world—
this and only this
has been my own salvation.

after C. Milosz

Copyright © Edward Field, "Credo," from After the Fall: Poems Old and New, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007. All rights reserved.