Quote: Clarice Lispector

"Before the appearance of the mirror, the person didn't know his own face except reflected in the waters of a lake. After a certain point everyone is responsible for the face he has. I'll now look at mine. It is a naked face. And when I think that no other like it exists in the world, I get a happy shock. Nor will there ever be. Never is the impossible. I like never. I also like ever. What is there between never and ever that links them so indirectly and intimately?

"At the bottom of everything there is the hallelujah.

"This instant is. You who read me are."

--Copyright © Clarice Lispector, from Água Viva, newly translated by Stefan Tobler, with an introduction by Benjamin Moser, New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2012. All rights reserved.

Poem: Kamau Brathwaite

Edward Kamau Brathwaite (from repeatingislands.com)

I was trying to remember if I had featured Kamau Brathwaite (1930-) on J's Theater before, and I was pretty sure I had, but it turns out that while I have mentioned him many times, including in my very first post, the only work of his that I've ever featured is his highly anguished call for help to save CowPastor/Cow Pasture, the large open areas near where he lives in Christ Church, Barbados, that the government and private entities seized control of through which to lay roads. Not to aestheticize the letter, but it bears many of the hallmarks of Brathwaite's poetry, from its orthography to its reconstitution of language itself. As it turns out, poet Tom Raworth set up a site, Save Cowpasture, that's still up, and last fall Brathwaite wrote Raworth to thank him for keeping the site up. He also mentions the TIME OF SALT, and there's a link to +++SaVing CowPastor & the KB Cultural Lynching 2004-2011+ by clicking this link, which is, to put it mildly, an extraordinary document, a setting of the letters, accounts, recountings, the stories, of the fight for CowPastor/CowPasture and Brathwaite's struggles in New York and Barbados.

Extraordinary really only scratches the surface when it comes to Brathwaite. I know. I studied with him, and count the experience among the most fortunate in my life. I'm not just talking about him as a teacher, critic, theorist, historian, or raconteur, nor as the sort of person who, almost out of nowhere, announces that a graduate class should begin preparing to go to a foreign country for a class trip (he did this), or who tells of how he witnessed another famous writer's wife walking through a wall (he did this). I don't want to start delving into mysticism, metaphysics and the supernatural, but let me just say that when you spend some time around someone operating at this level, a true konjur man with a mind like the libraries of Alexandria and an ability to see into the hidden heart of things you tend not to doubt them. He pulled off that trip. That transmural passage as a result didn't seem so inconceivable. There are keys all throughout his work that he operates or accesses many different channels. You really could spend a lifetime teasing some of these keys out, following the threads, raveling and reraveling them again, and if you read him carefully enough he points them out. A sharp graduate student will probably elect to do this at some point down the road.

To put it another way, he is the one of the most important and original living Caribbean poets, one of the major poets writing in English, a signal figure of African Diasporic poetry and poetics, and a living treasure. He has proved this over nearly 40 books of poetry, critical prose, and memoirs, many of these works constituting works of hybrid genre that defy easy categorization. Through this rich body of work, he has developed a language drawn from his native Barbados, the Caribbean and Latin America, his readings, studies and experiences in Britain and the US, strikingly singular and personal, but also transnational and universal. To fully capture this language, informed by the principle, in part of nommo (from the Bantu) and nam, he created typography/textual form, the Sycorax Dub script (I believe that's the name). He has garnered, among his many awards, the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, which used often to be a tip for the Nobel Prize; the Griffin Poetry Prize, one of the highest awards for world poetry, handed out in Canada; and Premio de la Casa de las Américas, awarded by the Cuban government for an exceptional from the Caribbean.  I know him because he has served for two decades as Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University.

This potted intro hardly does him justice, though. There is no substitute for his poetry, which is so verbally and visually powerful it dazzles. The poem below, which I recalled from a journal I had in my office, is a distillation. If you can, read it aloud, and you will feel the bird rising off this screen; it might even guide you to places you had not ever imagined.

BIRD RISING

Until it come to the time for the great bird the Mithurii .
    to begin its ascent
its challenge against the eart . the paradoxical oracle of wind . the
    the wings beating
unchaining. out. boarding as seamen might say . the gret beast
    ruffled & rising
as in all the great legends

and this happening here before me now under me now wonderfully
    surrounding me
the white silver louvered feather shift & chevron stretching out
    across the sunlight
the great terrible beauty & beating we have always heard about
beating beating upward & forward . the planks of its shape
    shivering at first like a ship

like a dhow . then spheering down into smooth as we scool
    up. wards

Now the first hills at the darker mountains of english . the sea
    below all shard
& silver like our shadow . the beacon topaz eyes unblinking even
    through all the shudder
the wings now stretched across all space openly & awesomely . so
    that we are not beating
any. more but ahh sailing something like singing . because at last
    I have been able

to use all the wounds in the language . as long as I lay them out
    softly & carefully
like these unfluttering feathers of song . like the sea below
    turning into a grey ball of wine
without fishes or sperm . like the darkness no longer lingering
    above us
but we moving towards it as part of its fuse & its future . the àxé
    & ayisha of sails

one last time in our ears . the earth gone a long time now from
    green spur arrogance
of john crow mountain. strange
not even the memory of a veiled carefree river in these high
    places . too far up now
for sunsets through all this rain & distance in our eyes. in our
    sleep. in our silence

the metaphor at last afloat almost alight in the darkness

Copyright © Edward Kamau Brathwaite, "Bird Rising," in Conjunctions: Bi-Annual Volumes of New Writing, No. 27, The Archipelago: New Writing From and About the Caribbean, Edited by Robert Antoni and Bradford Morrow, pp. 89-90. All rights reserved.

Happy Poetry Month + Poem: Elizabeth Alexander

Happy Poetry Month! (Yes, I know I left off the "national," since my poetry interests, like poetry itself, crosses all borders, especially national ones.) I have been reading David Orr's beautiful and pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry (New York: Harper Perennial, 2011), and it's gotten me thinking that one angle I might consider for poems this month are ones that comment directly on poetry itself. Of course all poems in various ways undertake this, but I'm thinking of poems that self-consciously articulate poetry as their subject, that pose direct questions about what poetry is or isn't, does or cannot do, that focus on the metapoetic, while embodying and enacting their understandings of poetry's powers or lack thereof. I may not stick strictly to this subset of poems, but I do want to see how they speak to each other if assembled together. What I won't be doing is offering my potted exegeses of the poets or poems this year. The trend on the net is towards minimalism of commentary (think Twitter, Facebook's like culture, all those YouTube links without even an introduction that friends send, or at least mine do, etc.), so I'll mostly be posting just the names of the poets and their poems--oh, why am I even saying this, I very well may start blabbing my mouth (or running off at the keyboard), but if there's little commentary, you're forewarned.

(A caveat: in past years with my poetry month postings I have tried not to post poems by peers I am close to, current colleagues, students or others whom I'm close to because I do not want to feature certain folks and miss others, so I'm going to aim to do this again, but let me just say, if I do not post one of your poems, it does not mean I dislike or dishonor you or your poetry. As regular J's Theater readers know, I post poems throughout the year, and have highlighted many poets at various times.)

© Yale Daily News

I'm going to begin with one of my favorite poets, Elizabeth Alexander (1962-), who is also an essayist, scholar, and fiction writer (I remember when she published a story in the Village Voice umpteen years ago). She is also our most recent inaugural poet (2008) and the Thomas Donnelley Professor of American Studies and the Chair of the African American Studies Department at Yale University. (She is also one of the smartest people I know and an incredibly lovely person, and I've been fortunate to have her as a teacher a few times at Cave Canem, and can say that her students are very lucky to have her there.) Here is one of her poems about poetry--she has written a number of them--from her book American Sublime (Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2005), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. (You see, I have to do what people I grew up with called my "propers," you know, giving a little bit of the goodness as introduction. Brevity, blah!) Anyways, here is Elizabeth's poem:

ARS POETIC #100: I BELIEVE

Poetry, I tell my students,
is idiosyncratic. Poetry

is where we are ourselves,
(though Sterling Brown said

“Every ‘I’ is a dramatic ‘I’”)
digging in the clam flats

for the shell that snaps,
emptying the proverbial pocketbook.

Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,

overhear on the bus, God
in the details, the only way

to get from here to there.
Poetry (and now my voice is rising)

is not all love, love, love,
and I’m sorry the dog died.

Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)
is the human voice,

and are we not of interest to each other?

Copyright © Elizabeth Alexander, from American Sublime, Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2005. All rights reserved.