Poems: giovanni singleton

A few years ago, when her first book appeared, I shared two poems by giovanni singleton, a poet I've known and been a fan of for years. giovanni's collection ascension deservedly won the California Book Award and garnered a great deal of praise from fellow poets and critics, some of whom noted her ability to utilize silence to great affect, and the cumulative power of poems, which, once they set the book down, continued to fizz in their consciousnesses. I wholeheartedly agreed. To this day, I can remember the effect a very short, seemingly simple but powerfully erotic little poem entitled "the chair" had when I heard her read it years ago.

Another direction giovanni has taken, related to those earlier poems, was in exploring poetry's material and graphic qualities. In her most recent book, American Letters: works on paper (Canarium Books, 2018), she reproduces a number of poems that are as much works of art in a visual sense, which is to say, drawings in language, as they are poems made of language. This is not ekphrastic poetry in any of the ways I have presenting it. It is poetry as art, akin to concrete poetry and textual performance (think of the poems I shared by Doug Kearney).

In the case of the second poem-artwork below, it also seems related to asemic writing, though giovanni's calligraphic poem's words are real and do mean something, individually and together, even as they challenge our ability to read them, and bar any easy interpretation. American Letters' poems' sources include African American spirit writing, sacred sound, Tibetan meditation practice, giovanni's study of Japanese language and calligraphy, and the multiple traditions of visual poetry.

The first poem was featured during last year's National Poetry Month by Colorado State University, and as soon as I came across it online, I found myself studying it. One need not read the words to see what giovanni is up to, and yet it is necessary to read them--you can enlarge the image by clicking on it and pinching your trackpad or screen, depending upon what you're using, or even download it, to get a fuller sense of what the poem is doing. Note also how the title, with the marker "Untitled," is similar to many works of visual art.

Poems like "Untitled (Bird Cage)" and the second poem below, from American Letters: works on paper, raise the question of what kind of language is appropriate to discussing the poem, and how to read it. Or rather, it organizes our ways of reading it first, and we have to come to terms with it and how it resets our expectations. That is what poetry and art does, it seems these poems keep reminding us. We can't hear this enough, though.

and from American Letters: works on paper (II):

Source: Poetry (December 2016),

Black Literary Avant-Garde Syllabus At ND Site

From Isaac Julien's Looking for Langston

A month or so ago on Facebook, I casually mentioned that I'd taught an undergraduate course in Black Literary Avant-gardism at Northwestern, most recently in 2010, and figured that that would be the end of it. The response, however, was enthusiastic, with a number of people asking me to share the syllabus. Northwestern never required us to post syllabi publicly, as Rutgers-Newark does, and I was amenable to sharing it, though I wasn't sure where I might do so. Here was the most likely spot.

Then Mieke Chew of New Directions asked me if I would be interested in presenting it there, and I was. After she distilled it a bit, removing dates and so forth, it went live. I intended it to be neither comprehensive nor exhaustive, and if I were to teach the course today, in addition to a longer calendar, I'd add more and new scholarly texts and draw from the rich store of contemporary innovative black writing, including digital work.

So here is "Temples for the Future": 20th and 21st Century Black Literary Avant-Gardes." 

I should note that I do not have an electronic course pack, but a number of the articles and shorter materials can be found in the special issue of Tripwire featuring giovanni singleton's and Renee Gladman's famous conference black innovative writing, as well as The Harlem Renaissance Reader.

Congrats to Prize Winners + RIP Bradbury & Menil

Natasha Trethewey
(John Amis for
The New York Times)

Congratulations to our new Poet Laureate of the United States and Consultant to the Library of Congress, Natasha Trethewey! She will assume the post beginning this fall. She's the first Southerner since the first Robert Penn Warren, the initial Poet Laureate, and the first African American since Rita Dove. How lucky the country is to have Natasha, as fine and generous a poet as there is writing today, at this helm!

Congratulations also to poet and translator Jen Hofer, whose translation of Negro Marfil/Ivory Black by Mexican poet Myriam Moscona (Les Figues 2011), poet, translator and critic Pierre Joris selected to receive this year's Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets! Jen is a superb poet and person, and one of the best impromptu letter writers (on a typewriter) and bookmakers as you'll ever find!

Congratulations to poet, translator and scholar Jennifer Scappettone, who received the 2012 Raiziss/de Palchi Translation Prize from the Academy of American Poets for her translation Locomotrix: Selected Poetry and Prose, by Amelia Rosselli (University of Chicago Press, 2012). In addition to being an outstanding colleague, I shall forever be grateful to Jen for introducing me to her own work and projects, and to the work of so many outstanding living Italian poets.

Congratulations to poet and editor giovanni singleton, whose first collection, Ascension, received the Gold Medal in the poetry category for the 81st California Book Awards!  giovanni is the real deal, and I'm so very happy to see her début collection so honored.

Congratulations also to this year's winners of the Lambda Literary Awards! An especial shout out to Bil Wright, who received the award in LGBT Children's/Young Adult Literature for Putting Makeup on the Fat Boy (Simon & Schuster); to Rahul Mehta, who received the award in Gay Debut Fiction for Quarantine: Stories (Harper Perennial); to Michael Hames-García and Ernesto Javier Martínez, editors, who received the award in LGBT Anthology, for Gay Latino Studies: A Critical Reader (Duke University Press); and to my old Boston compatriot Michael Bronski, who received the award LGBT Nonfiction for A Queer History of the United States (Beacon Press)!

UPDATE: Congratulations to Seamus Heaney on receiving the Griffin Trust Prize Lifetime Achievement Award!  Tomorrow the winners of the international and Canadian Griffin Prizes for poetry will be announced.

***

On a different note, farewells to Ray Bradbury (1920-2012), the leading speculative fiction and fantasy writer of his generation, the author of 20+ novels and many hundreds of stories, a visionary whose sense of what deeply imaginative and non-realist writing might conjure ranks among the most important in the American or any global literary tradition. Bradbury was a native of Waukegan, Illinois, and a lifelong resident of Southern California. A few years ago, when I taught his novel Fahrenheit 451 (Ballantine, 1953) in a huge survey course on 20th Century American literature, it easily ranked among the most popular texts on the syllabus, and rereading it then brought my childhood admiration for his skillfulness as a stylist and futurist. We are not burning books, thankfully, but we destroying libraries, watching bookstores vanish into thin air, flooding online sites with word-filled, content-less commodities that strip the very word "book" of meaning; and as in his novel, we are entranced by the sorts of screens he depicts, enthralled with the staged dramas, combats, fake political dramas, performed to lull us, as the 1% rob us blind and the government engages in endless wars it will not explain because it cannot. Too many of us still dismiss at our peril what the sharpest minds of our era put in the pages or touch-screens of texts, preferring to flow with the crowd, accept the widespread surveillance and remain silent, speak out only when we are directly touched by circumstance or tragedy. There is no site of refuge or resistance, except within us; that is one of the lesson I take from Bradbury's book, and from his work in general. He became a conservative crank in his later years, a technophobe, dismisser of the net and web, but it is on such systems that others and I can honor his larger vision tonight, and perhaps help others return to his work soon. RIP, Ray Bradbury.

Also RIP Alain Ménil, a Martinican philosopher and critic, only 54 years old, utterly unknown on these shores but an important figure in Caribbean and Francophone letters, who had published his most recent book Les voies de la créolisation. Essai sur Edouard Glissant (De l’Incidence éditeur, 2011), on the late, great Martinican poet, novelist and theorist last fall. The book was a finalist for the 2011 Prix Carbet de la Caraïbe et du Tout-Monde. At the time of his death Ménil was teaching at the Lycée Condorcet, and also had published a study of cinema's relationship to time, L'ecran du temps (Regards et ecoutes) (1992); a text on the Enlightenment and drama, Diderot et le drame: Theatre et politique (Philosophies) (1995); and a book on AIDS, Saints et saufs: Sida, une epidemie de l'interpretation (Visages du mouvement) (1997).  The Glissant book, which has received considerable praise, is 658 pages, so I hope an intrepid translator steps forward soon so that it'll be available to English readers too.

7th Blogiversary + Poems: giovanni singleton

Two days ago, in fact, marked the seventh anniversary, or blogiversary (or is it blogaversary?), of J's Theater. There are times, usually during the summers, which are always more vivid to me than any other season or part of the year, when 2005, and February 2005 specifically, doesn't seem that distant, and other times when it feels as far away as the summit of K2. I still recall who and what motivated me to start this blog; Bernie Tarver's blogging about sports and life and politics was one spur, and Charles Stephens's accounts of his and his friends' lives was another.

There were many other blogs that I was reading with pleasure too and which inspired me. Some are still around, others are long gone, and there have been more than a few times that I thought this blog would join them in the byteheap of history (save for the ministrations of the Wayback Machine).  Throughout the life of this blog, I have tried to focus mostly on arts and letters, and the political implications of both, and originally I tried to away from big-"P" politics in particular, since so many other blogs were covering that ground.  But that changed in short order, though I have tried to return as often as possible to original emphases of this blog.

I began by blogging by writing a short note about one of my favorite poets, Jay Wright (1935-), always underheralded, extraordinary though he is, and followed shortly upon it with posts about other poets and literary arts, the visual arts, and, also part of the early mix, popular culture.  To that end, I will post two poems by a poet I have known for many years, and whose first book, Ascenscion (Counterpath, 2012), is now available for purchase: giovanni singleton.

giovanni is an editor (her journal nocturnes (re)view of the literary arts has been a pacesetter in terms of publishing innovative writing); a teacher; an administrator; and a poet of sly and powerful wit, who knows who to turn a phrase on its end, and then turn it again. I cannot forget her unforgettable performance of her deceptively simple, deeply erotic little poem "chair" one year at Cave Canem's summer workshops. I swear I couldn't think about chairs the same for weeks after that. So here are two poems by giovanni, from the Woodland Pattern website, which offers a full(er) biography of her.  (Should you ever get to Milwaukee, please do visit Woodland Pattern, which is one of the best bookstores in the country.)

giovanni singleton (Photo by Sarah Collins)

(You can read a conversation between giovanni and poet D. Scott Miller here. You can hear a conversation between giovanni and E. Ethelbert Miller here.)

sepia


sitting in a darkened hallway. salt water bodies rock steady. muffled pounding.
the door of no return. is closed and closer. under measured reconstruction.
living seeps through in echoes. stillness outside in. a collective breath persists
without apology. mud stained spoons undulate from shore to distant shore.
then one day walk as if rowing a boat.

isotope

        after beauford delaney

dark blue to gold abstraction
patterned figurations
scattered light

        as if you would marry me

abstraction in red
blue light abstraction
abstract of black and gold

        as if we could marry someday

streaked light
cool blue green
light
light
red gold black abstracted

        as if we could amaze

Copyright © giovanni singleton, 2011, 2012. All rights reserved.