Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal Special Issue on Paule Marshall

The vagaries of literary fortune are such that a writer who was quite famous in her time might very well be forgotten a decade later, while a little known and acknowledged wordsmith might find her work resurrected and championed. For a writer like Paule Marshall (1929-), still with us and an author whose long career has included numerous distinctions, she should be part of current literary, critical, theoretical, and cultural conversations, particularly around Black women's, Caribbean, African American, African Diasporic, immigrant, New York, and contemporary US writing.

To that end, Kelly Baker Josephs, Associate Professor of English at York College, CUNY, has edited a new issue of Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal (Vol. 14, No. 1) devoted to Paule Marshall's life and work. The issue comprises a range of essays that offer ways of thinking and reading Marshall's writing, particularly around the theme of Black women--especially Black Caribbean women--and personhood, as Baker Josephs frames it in her introduction. Other contributors include Marlene Clark on Marshall's prescient understanding of "slumming" and gentrification in Brooklyn; Justin Haynes reading Marshall's The Timeless Place, The Chosen People through the lens of the posthuman; and Shirley D. Toland-Dix on Marshall's rereading of The Tempest.

Also in the issue are Janelle Rodriques on Afrofuturistic diaspora in Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow; Petal Samuel on "regimes of aural discipline" in Marshall's The Fisher King; Patricia G. Lespinasse on women and jazz in that same novel; Lia Bascomb on mapping Diaspora "through biomythography"; and Jason Hendrickson on speech, resistance, and the ongoing relevance of Marshall's work. I contributed a short piece that began as response to questions posed by Baker Josephs, about having studied with Paule Marshall, which was one of the best classroom experiences I had at NYU.

I'll end by quoting Baker Josephs's insightful introduction, and urge you to check the full issue out:

The very different approaches to Chosen Place included in this issue indicate how fertile it can be for us at this historical moment, in which one has to cull the past to understand the roots of—and to locate resources with which to combat—contemporary traumatic social and political violences. In “Ghosts in the Posthuman Machine: Prostheses and Performance in The Chosen Place, the Timeless People,” Justin Haynes reads the interaction between humans and machines in the novel as the space within which we might examine the limits of resistance and mobility then and now. Haynes’ reading of Vere’s Opel is especially compelling amidst current controversies about autonomous automobiles. More interested in the timeless challenges of human interaction in the novel, Shirley D. Toland-Dix reads the novel as Marshall’s “audacious” reimagining of the Caliban-Prospero dyad via the Merle-Harriet dyad. TolandDix’s careful reading of the interactions between these two complex characters against the larger backdrop of the novel and its concerns argues for the ways in which Marshall articulates and anticipates the later demands of black and third world feminist movements.

In particular, the dynamic Marshall probes between socially (and often financially) privileged white women and less powerful women of color illustrates the implicit “limits of personhood” that plague attempts at intersectionality (when attempts are made at all). The direct link in the novel between Harriet’s choices and the failure of the Bournehills project foregrounds the blind enactment of privilege that we see criticized today in similar “development” projects. Harriet’s consistent alignment with power, even as she professes otherwise, may also evoke for readers comparable contemporary moments in which race and class privilege prevail over the promise of gender and sex equality—think here of the demographic breakdown of results in the 2016 United States presidential election, with 53% of white women voting for Donald Trump while 94% of black women voted for Hillary Clinton. One can easily see parallels between Merle’s insistent (especially about Harriet’s complicity) and Angela Peoples’ iconic 2017 Women’s March photo.

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

Photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

DUENDE

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

          Why can’t you leave on Tuesday?

Tracy K. Smith, "Duende" from Duende.

Copyright © 2007 by Tracy K. Smith.

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

Call and Response: The Gift of Women Poets

Ntozake Shange in 1977
(© Marilyn K. Yee/New York Times)

A month ago, poet, critic, activist, and visionary Amy King sent out a call to an array of writers inviting us to write on a woman poet who had influenced our work and whose poetic gifts to the world we wanted to celebrate. The effort was to be collective and collaborative, producing a micro-anthology commemorating some of the greatest--and in some cases forgotten--voices in and of our literatures, voices without whose efforts many of us would not be writing. 

We were urged to choose writers who either were no longer physically with us or who were getting up in years, since in both cases they are less likely to receive the attention that contemporary, younger women writers do. Most importantly, given the continued sexism and misogyny in the literary and wider worlds, compiling this poetic pageant remains necessary work. Singing these poets' talents, and bringing others to their songs, is one of the most important things we can do. We need their vision, and we need it to shape our own.

As Amy says in her introduction to "Call and Response: The Gift of Women Poets (Part 1)," which now appears on the Poetry Foundation's Harriet website:

While I am very much a fan of recovery projects, this collaborative endeavor is not that. If, as the curator, I must frame it at all, this rich pageant of poets highlights the very worthwhile intersections we all reach individually in our lives: that of recognizing that women-identified poets are of intense, even transformative value, despite living in a culture that often devalues the feminine. Each writer sings out an older or no longer living poet who had a personal influence on them. What you will find is a series of anecdotes and lead-ins to the work & personhood of these female poets who have endured and brought forth, for us, words that have deepened, moved, and given us the gift to see otherwise.

I wrote about the great Ntozake Shange (1948-), an ever-innovative writer who has been and continues to be tremendously influential for me. She is still with us, but several years ago suffered several strokes, in addition to the effects of a neurological disorder, and has experienced trouble speaking and getting around.  Her imagination and artistry are incandescent; most people rightly know her landmark choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, but Shange also is the prolific author of collections of poetry, novels, essays, works for children, and numerous other plays and choreopieces. You can find my celebration of Shange at the second link below; Part 1 encompasses Etel Adnan to Myung Mi Kim, while Part 2 includes Carolyn Kizer through Margaret Walker.

Call and Response: The Gift of Women Poets (Part 1)

Call and Response: The Gift of Women Poets (Part 2)

Between the Lines: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie & Zadie Smith

Just days after winning the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for her extraordinary novel Americanah (Knopf, 2013), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie participated in a public conversation yesterday evening with fellow writer Zadie Smith. The event took place at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library, and was sold out in no time. Thankfully the Schomburg and NYPL were ready, and the event streamed live, and is archived below in case you, like me, were unable to get in, or are nowhere near the New York area. Enjoy!

"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

Poems: Muriel Rukeyser

I have been thinking about poetry, politics, political poetry and the politics of poetry quite a bit of late, and one poet from the middle years of the 20th century whose work was insistently political, often successfully so and not to its aesthetic detriment, pressing on in her attempt to address the social, political and inequalities in and through her verse was Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980). Whether it was covering the Scottsboro Boys Case or writing about the effects of silicosis, whether it was speaking as a feminist or talking about her identity, as Jewish woman, her sexuality in all its complexity, whether it was being before the letter before the letter was dreamt off, composed and mailed off to poetry's many precincts, Rukeyser was there. Her first collection, Theory of Flight (1935), was selected by judge Steven Vincent Benét for the Yale Younger Poets Series, and she went on to publish numerous books, of poetry, critical essays, memoir and autobiography, anthologies, drama, and her rich store of correspondence. The two poems below are among my favorites by her; both are political, fairly straightforward on the surface, and yet contain powerful currents below. First, the more lyrical of the two, then what could be read as an ars poetica, the title rippling out, despite its simplicity, into multiple meanings, which is to say: a poem.

THE POEM AS MASK    

Orpheus

When I wrote of the women in their dances and
      wildness, it was a mask,
on their mountain, gold-hunting, singing, in orgy,
it was a mask; when I wrote of the god,
fragmented, exiled from himself, his life, the love gone
      down with song,
it was myself, split open, unable to speak, in exile from
      myself.
     
There is no mountain, there is no god, there is memory
of my torn life, myself split open in sleep, the rescued
      child
beside me among the doctors, and a word
of rescue from the great eyes.

No more masks! No more mythologies!

Now, for the first time, the god lifts his hand,
the fragments join in me with their own music.





From Muriel Rukeyser: Selected Poems by Muriel Rukeyser. Published by Library of America (American Poets Project). Copyright © 2004 by William Rukeyser. All rights reserved.

POEM

I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane,
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
The news would pour out of various devices
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.
I would call my friends on other devices;
They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.
Slowly I would get to pen and paper,
Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.
In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,
Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,
Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,
We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,
To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile
Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,
Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means
To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,
To let go the means, to wake.

I lived in the first century of these wars.

Muriel Rukeyser, “Poem” from The Speed of Darkness. New York, Vintage Books, 1968. Copyright © 1968 by Muriel Rukeyser. All rights reserved.

Aaarg.org Is Dead, Long Live Capital(isms) + Danto Responds to Queries on Art + NY Times on Black Straight Women's Marriage Prospects + 77 Banks Gone Under: Did You Know That?

For five years or so, an unheralded P2P site featuring a massive intellectual trove existed, mostly under the radar, and now it's dead. Aaaarg.org was an open-source, virtual library, one of the few places online where you could find a vast array of intellectual material usually on lockdown by publishers, private institutions, anyone. (It was linked to The Public School, a truly public, free-form, anti-institutional collective, initiated by the Telic Arts Exchange in Los Angeles in 2008, that has created and offered classes, at low cost, on a variety of utterly relevant topics, by anyone, in LA and 6 other cities (Helsinki, Brussels, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Juan). The Public School is still alive.)

Organized by participants and loosely overseen by Sean Dockery, aaarg's archive included work by almost every major theorist past and present and many not so well known, and "courses" or lists (think "Posthumanism," "Queer Technologies," "Bodies and Time," etc., ), also self-organized, which people could study to learn about...well, a great number of things in the realm of the humanities and social sciences. It did encounter legal threats, from Verso, OMA Rem Koolhaas, Columbia University Press, and Macmillan, the most recent press to issue it a cease-and-desist letter, tellingly enough, not long after Macmillan had worked out a deal with Apple for the iPad. Originally it communicated via email, but that shifted to a Twitter feed that went kaput as of May 27, 2010.

My own experience with Aaarg was limited, but I do want to note one remarkable thing that happened as a result of the site: for several years now, I've been trying to reach the Italian conceptual artist Cesare Pietroiusti. I first came across his work, particular Non-functional Thoughts, while surfing through MIT's news feeds. (I'm known to do such things.) He had been a guest there back in 2004, I believe. I found the gallery that had originally published Pietroiusti's work, and contacted them, but had no luck whatsoever getting ahold of the book. So I posted on Aaarg to see if anyone knew how to acquire the book or reach Pietroiusti, because it wasn't in any library I had access to, it wasn't available on Amazon or any other online book-seller, and I didn't know anyone who could lend me a copy. Lo and behold, after posting this request several times, a certain someone replied that he would try to upload the book, but never did. And this someone wrote me some months later and said that not only would I be able to find Non-functional Thoughts online (cf. above), but that if I sent my address, I would receive more Pietroiusti materials--because it was Pietroiusti himself! I loved this; he not only did send me his work (several books, including 100 things that certainly are not art; a CD), but also two original conceptual pieces, one of which I gave out, via raffle, to my students on the last day of classes! The work requires that if you're its owner, you must give it to whoever requests it, so whom better to have it than my student artists? Perhaps this might have happened via email or this blog or Facebook or some other means, but I appreciated how things unfolded via and as a result of this peer-to-peer site.

What I keep thinking about is the how the desire for proprietary control, control in the form of copyight, of intellectual property, that these publishers are demonstrating, which I grasp rests on a particular economic viewpoint that in part does benefit the authors of some of these works, contrasts not only with the work of The Public School and similar networks, but also with the push for free access to intellectual material and capital--classes, syllabi and so forth--by a number of very wealthy and powerful private universities, including two of the leading ones in the world, the aforementioned MIT* and Stanford. As anyone who has access to iTunes knows, for example, both of these schools, which cost about $50,000 to attend as undergraduates nowadays, make a wide array of their material free (you must, however, sign up for Apple), and MIT in particular has pushed for open-sourcing its syllabi for some time. (Other institutions also make their course materials, classes, and so forth available, but nowhere to the extent of MIT and Stanford). I think that making this material available is an excellent idea, but I also realize that the economics of it, the questions of property rights (especially in this country), control and access, are fraught. While being able to watch online classes on computer science, or chemistry, or the philosophy of mind, or sexuality, gender and performance in the contemporary global context, benefits potentially millions of people who will never be able to attend Stanford, and benefits Stanford too, what about the students who are paying a premium to attend (though they do get a substantially value-added experience, including direct access to the professor, the possibility of collaborative work and face-to-face conversations with each other, classroom time, access to world-class facilities, etc.), what about the contracting nature of humanities and social sciences academe, its march towards commercialism, and the prospects for those scholars who would benefit greatly from being able to teach, with pay, these courses elsewhere? Also, I think about the complex issues of intellectual work, its status as labor and property, and its control and dissemination: who ultimately has the say on what happens to it?

Nevertheless, I mourn the (temporary?) disappearance of Aaarg, and look forward to its (phantasmal) return--in some other guise.