On Naps + Notes on Paris I + Poem: Giovanny Gómez

I've studiously avoided writing about the Imus controversy because so many other blogs and commentators (including bloviators) covered it, and my initial responses, to friends, to a cousin, to a fellow sports fan on a listserve, were categorical in their condemnation of his racism, sexism, misogyny, and cruelty, his long history of offensive (including homophobic, anti-Semitic, classist, etc.) dehumanizing statements and commentary (this man and his sideshow were causing an uproar back in 1996!), and the media punditocracy's (or is that punditocrisy?) and politicians' atrocious abetting of his and similar offenders' behavior. BECAUSE HE WAS THEIR MEAL TICKET.

All of the meta-commentary about the offensive discourse in hip hop, the diversionary critiques of Jackson and Sharpton, and Imus's essential "goodness" deserved to be cast into the wind. I strongly supported people boycotting his show and its sponsors, as well as some sort of disciplinary action, but I was surprised that MSNBC dropped his simulcast and then CBS fired him, given the influential audience base he cultivated and attracted. The frightened sponsors, it seems, left them no choice. I also thought that Vivian Stringer, the Rutgers women's basketball coach, and her team of dignified young women, responded in the finest fashion, exacting an apology, and then talking no more about the matter, especially given that he'd been flushed. More power to them, and I congratulate on their considerable success in the NCAA tournament, a fact that got lost in the brouhaha.

The tiny point I want to touch upon--and perhaps others have brought this up, so if they have, my apologies--is one aspect of his comments, the "nappy headed" part. (I'm sure many others have discussed the "hos" and the "j*gaboos" parts.) Like most people in this society, and many Black people around the globe, I grew up having pounded into my nappy head that "nappy hair"--that coarse, kinky, thick, coiled, corkscrewy hair that millions of us are born with--was somehow less beautiful, less desirable, less attractive, just less--than straight hair, or, as folks also (problematically) say, "good hair." (And such terms are as common among folks outside the US as in it.) I grew up hearing "nappy headed" occasionally used as an epithet (though not in my home), and this was after the period when afros and other natural hair styles not only became popular but were valorized as the do of choice. Alongside Ron O'Neal's flowing locks, which were de rigueur for the burgeoning pimp style of the 1970s, Angela Davis, Jim Kelly, Jim Brown, Pam Grier, Tamara Dobson, Richard Roundtree, Reggie Jackson, the Commodores, Earth Wind & Fire, Bootsy Collins, and countless other folks showed the way and beauty of the 'fro, making the nap the basis of an enduring symbol of racial and cultural solidarity and self-affirmation.

White supremacy and self-hate die hard, though. During the 1980s, a new version of the old-time conk became popular--the curl, as in Jheri curls, S curls, all kinds of curls, some of them (truly) sc[ary]'urls. This hairstyle, which even I sported back in the day, had its brief moment of charm, being yet another mode for self-fashioning, and eventually gave way to fades and flattops and braids--the naps return!--alongside the Jordanesque return of the shaved head, once known as the Quo Vadis--and then to the neo-fros and twists and locks again and the array of styles folks now sport, including megafros, carifros, eurofros and rows, and whatever else people can think of (though unfortunately the liqui-curl still linger). The curl was, you might say, a mass-marketed and temporarily successful attempt to suppress the nap, though few people with them ever ended looking like they came out of the womb with those greasy, glistening tresses--and they certainly left their mark, on countless couches, headrests, seatbacks. Count it the revenge of the nap. With afros, naturals, blowouts, etc., the nap--which is to say, sub-Saharan Africa--flowers in its full glory. Cornrows and dreadlocks don't subdue the nap, they draw on its power. But artificial curls, like conks and permanents, want to force the nap to complete surrender, to subjugate or eliminate it. Yet even with the thickest, heaviest curl juice, of course, or the most perfectly straightened perm, all it takes is a little water, and like a lightning bolt....

All of which is to say, echoing Carolivia Herron, Evette Collins, and numerous others (like the Nappturality.com site), I think we ought to work on shedding any lingering shame or inferiority we might have about (our) naps. The nap is as beautiful as any strand of straight, stringy hair, and it should long ago have ceased being a negative attribute, on male or female heads. Nappy is as straight does--embrace the beauty, embrace the nap!

***

For weeks I've been meaning to write some entries based on my impressions from our recent, too brief trip to Paris, but I keep tripping over false starts, so here are some thoughts in somewhat random fashion, and perhaps if I can find the time and focus, I'll clean them up.

Paris Ramblings, Part 1

I'm going to start with French hip hop, because the French presidential election is tomorrow, and the political implications of the music were as clear to me as the Eiffel Tower on a summer day. During our travels, C and I always flip on the TV to see what the local media have to offer. This time, we happened upon a channel I don't think we'd ever seen before, that showed basically two programs. The first was "'Zik," the French slang for "musique": from early morning to 10 pm on the dot (at which point it switched over to porn so graphic and hardcore that in the US you'd probably only find it after paying a fee on the Internet or going to a videostore), it showed nonstop French rap videos--along with a few clips of dancehall, US hiphop and some European house--that were so scorching they could easily have peeled the paint off the the hotel room's walls.

After watching just a few of these, I thought to myself, the people running for the presidency--right-winger Nicolas Sarkozy, who is on record as having referred to the young Black and Arab protesters as "racaille" (or "scum") in 2005, while also threatening to "kärcheriser" (flush them out with high-powered Kärcher waterhoses); Ségolène Royal, the glamorous but appallingly vapid Socialist candidate, who as of a few days ago appeared not to have realized that the Taliban were no longer in power in Afghanistan!, and who has proposed nothing more concrete than pieties and platitudes to address the country's social and economic problems; François Bayrou, the rural-born, English-speaking, self-described "Clintonian," who actually has repeatedly traveled to the banlieues, but is still running in third place; and Jean-Marie LePen, whose anti-immigrant, racialist commentary is well known--sure better be taking note, or they were going to have to deal with far worse social explosions than anything France witnessed in 2005 or before. From all I can tell, the two front-runners, Sarkozy and Royal, especially, are not, so I will not be surprised if reprises of the sort of public uprising that occurred in the Gare du Nord station (through which we'd passed) just days after we got back begin, particularly after a Sarkozy win. He has made his contempt quite apparent.


Abd al Malik concert poster in the Métro, alongside an ad for Gazoline

This 'Zik show transfixed me. The videos, many of which managed to dynamically combine aspects of gangsta rap (including one rap that literally referenced the "West Coast"), New York hiphop of the early 1990s (especially appeals to racial solidarity), and political and social militancy that would make the Black Panthers proud. Rapper after rapper, either of sub-Saharan African ancestry, French Caribbean ancestry, North African Arab ancestry, or some combo of the above pounded the airwaves with their grievances. We're not talking about MC Solaar, who for a while was the best known French rapper over here. They also were not all male; there were at least two women, both of them out-front aggressives, keeping pace with the men. Unlike MC Solaar's raps, too, these rappers tossed in English words (and Arabic, and I imagine other languages), without hesitation; some of them had American-sounding tags, English-language titles for their songs, and, based on their outfits, their hairstyles (cornrows, afros, fades, etc.), their entire self-presentation, could easily have been mistaken for New Yorkers, Chicagoans or Angelenos. (I even told one brotha in a clothing shop in Les Halles that he could easily pass for a New Yorker, and he took it as a huge compliment.)

Some of the names I wrote down, which may be familiar to hiphop afficionados but were totally unfamiliar to me, included MC Arabic; Les Sales Blancs; Chico Run; Rachid Wallas; DJ BLG; Stress; Griot; Grodash; Konwell (his rap was "Ghetto à la Congolaise"); Sefyu ("Va Avec" and "La vie qui va avec"); Mac Tyer aka Sokrate ("93 tu peux"); Kamelancien ("Grand mechant loup"); Diomay; Ramon; Abass ("Abass Mon F*cka"); Keny Arkana; Despo'Rutti ("Bolide"); CH3/Timony ("Long Time"); Faty; Dontcha ("Le rap criminel"); Abd Al Malik, one of whose rap songs was entitled "September 12, 2001," and Casey, a very butch female rapper from the French Caribbean, who just kept breaking it down--these folks were tired of being shat up, marginalized, ignored, and they showed little identification with the symbols or standard social signs of la belle France, which is to say, la France blanche, and instead with the Maghreb, the Bronx and Compton, with those aspects of current French reality that France's vaunted, anti-multicultural, "egalitarian" system and society refuse to acknowledge. There was one video that had an Arab version of Marianne, the female symbol of France, debating a rapper, but most of the videos were much more confrontational, full of frustration, reverse-disdain, rage. After watching a few in succession, we'd turn them off and hit the streets, but whenever we were back in the room, we'd periodically check them out (and using our camera I even recorded a few, which I've yet to post to YouTube or a similar site).

I also kept wondering if any of these rappers had, like many of the dancehall stars and even some of the reggetonistas, had had any direct contact with major current US hip hop figures, whose styles, poses, forms they had assimilated and reformulated, but whose message of hyperconsumption had only partly taken hold. The language barrier, at least on Americans' part, has probably meant little contact, but I could clearly see a dialogue and continuum going on between their work, even if the emphases were sometimes strikingly different. I almost wished there were more of the political awareness and vehemence--of the Dead Prez or Public Enemy or Mos Def/Black Star kind--especially given our present political and social problems--but I'm sure those who know hip hop a lot better than me can point me in the right direction. In the bookstore I did spot a theoretical book on French hip hop, but was immediately curious about whether someone on these shores was writing on these particular cross-national and cultural connections, because certainly others who've traveled over there and vice versa have taken similar note, I'm sure.

***

The first time C and I went to Paris, back in 1990, people were able to tell just from our outfits that we were Americans. We were clocked at one point right in front of the Pompidou Center back then, based on C's baseball cap, our jackets (or maybe it was just my jacket), and our sneakers. Very few people we encountered outside the hotels where we stayed spoke any English, and if they did, it was with hesitation (and a little annoyance). On the flipside, they seemed tickled to hear us speak French, however shaky, and I came back thinking, the French are certainly not as bad as so many people had warned me. In fact, they were easily more friendly and polite and welcoming than the people we encountered in Spain (where we had the wonderful experience of being stared at on the subway!) or Portugal (I won't go into those stories again, but I'm sure they're a lot, uh, nicer these days). On that first trip to Paris, while we did see quite a few people of color, I remember thinking (wrongly, I'm sure) that Paris perhaps wasn't as racially and ethnically diverse as New York or Chicago, or London--or Madrid, where we met friendly Egyptians who we thought were Latinos, and I exchanged drawings with them, or Lisbon, where Angolans and Mozambicans, hundreds of them, thronged a downtown square. (I was sure we'd stepped through a portal into Luanda.) After a few more trips, my views on Paris's obvious diversity changed, but this time, I can declare that the Black, Asian, Arab and mixed populations in Paris now appear to have doubled or tripled, and C and I certainly no longer stood out. At all. I wondered, were all these folks infants, little children, the not-yet-born or not-yet-immigrated-from-distant-parts 17 years ago? At times, such as when were in the maze of Les Halles, it was hard to tell if we were in Paris or Brooklyn, which I found quite comforting.


Like the most obvious touriste in the world, posing with a faux Didier Drogba

For the most part, no one was recognizing us immediately as Americans or non-residents, and unless we spoke English first, we were addressed in French and assumed to be...French-speaking, from somewhere, anywhere, but not immediately the US. Even my Chicago-influenced fashion sense did not stick out, as far as I could tell. On the other hand, nearly everyone we encountered spoke English, most fluently. The guy that I said looked like a New Yorker told us, after playing with C as if he didn't speak a word of English, that he'd learned it in school and from TV. His English was practically flawless. In nearly every shop, whenever we'd politely ask, "Parlez-vous anglais?" the response was, "Un peu" or "a leetle," and then the person would proceed to speak English rapidly and without hardly a pause.


At a multilevel men's clothing store

As for speaking French...at the hotel we stayed at, one of the night deskmen, a African Frenchman, snappily corrected my French; I said the equivalent of sixty-ten-and-one, instead of sixty-eleven, which is to say, seventy-one, and he wasn't having it. That put me on guard not to think I could get away with a few mistakes, as in the past. I still spoke French, but found that often times people were ready, almost eager, to speak English, with far less annoyance than on prior visits, and when I did speak French, they did not seem in the slightest impressed either way. That is, except at the airport, where I was searched quite thoroughly and had a security person hold up my rubber exercise rope and ask me, a mocking tone in her voice, if it was a weapon and if I was a terrorist. She even showed it to her superior. When she learned that I spoke French, she wasn't about to speak another word of English, she or any of the other security people nearby. They had a good laugh with the exercise rope, even brandishing it as if it were dangerous, and then, after they'd decided to find another person to torment, sent me packing. These antagonists were, by the way, Black French women.

***

In terms of fashion, Paris mirrors New York, except the badly dressed people aren't visible. (Of course this is an exaggeration.) But as the Sartorialist has amply documented, Parisians--from the children to the elderly, are some of the most sharply (ac)coutured people running around. The shoes! I've noted this every time we've gone there, and the people I saw this time, like during previous trips, were turning the simplest outfits out. From variations on the BCBG style to versions of hiphop fashion, punk and beyond, these Parisians were setting a casual but very stylish pace. Not even rainy March weather could soak or sink their fashion senses.


On a street in the Marais


At dinner on evening

Men and women well into their 70s and possibly 80s were featuring hats, shoes, coats, ensembles out of magazines. And considering the euro-laden prices of everything (oh, for the days when the dollar was strong and France still used the franc) and the fact that the country has had such a high unemployment and underemployment rate, I kept wondering, how were they able to afford it. (The vast majority of people were also thin or lean, so perhaps they were skipping meals to keep those outfits tight.) Less facetiously, on the other hand, we did see several tangible examples of the economic crisis: in addition to the homeless people we came across both on the Left and Right Banks (though more on the Right Bank--and parts of the Left Bank, along and off St. Germain des Prés, had really gentrified, to the point of glitz, than I recalled), there was a small tent city along an embankment on one of the highways leading into Paris, and a long soup line outside one of the churches (Saint-Eustache?) on the edge of the Les Halles area, just a stone's throw from some of the tony shops. I know la Soupe Saint-Eustache has been around for more than 20 years, but the contrast with the temples of commerce right near it, and below it in the caverns of Les Halles, was an eye-opener....


The soup line outside Saint-Eustache

And I'll end there for now, and post more soon.

***

And today's poem is by Giovanny Gómez, a 28-year-old Colombian poet who has been gaining considerable acclaim over the last few years. He won Colombia's National Poetry Prize María Mercedes Carranza for his first book, Casa de humo (House of Smoke), which will be published later this year, and has been traveling to poetry festivals in South America to read his work. Here is one of his prayer-like poems, translated by Nicolás Suescún, from Poetry International Web:

UNA PALABRA COMO CASA

Señor dame una palabra
que tenga la forma de un barco
un barco de velas inextinguibles
donde pueda ir a conocer el mar

Dame esta palabra por casa
por vestido por amante
deja que ella sea mi soledad
mi alimento y no pueda sobrevivirla

Aquí estoy tan vacío de formas
y silencio . . .

Toda mi inspiración semeja
el ruido de unas manos atadas
necesito un barco por cuerpo
y el amor por mar

Escúchame por estas alucinaciones
y la vastedad de las cosas que vuelven
a su lugar

Copyright © 2006, Giovanny Gómez, from: Casa de humo

A WORD FOR A HOUSE

Oh Lord give me a word
that has the form of a ship
a ship of inextinguishable sails
in which I can sail to know the sea

Give me this word for a house
for a garment for a lover
let it be my solitude my sustenance
let me be unable to survive it

Here I am so devoid of forms
and of silence . . .

All of my inspiration resembles
the noise of a pair of tied hands
I need a ship for a body
and a love for the sea

Listen to me through these hallucinations
and the vastness of things that come back
to their place

Copyright © Translation: 2007, Nicolás Suescún

Poems: Dunya Mikhail

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

THE ROCKING CHAIR

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

A VOICE

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

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

Some Thoughts + Poem: Robert Frost

More news has come out about the student who went on the murderous rampage at Virginia Tech, much of it very upsetting. One of the first things I thought when I heard he'd been an English major and creative writing student was that he'd studied with Nikki Giovanni, who is the senior poet in that department, and it turns out that not only was that the case, but that Giovanni and her students had been so disturbed by his work--she has spoken of how "mean" it was--that she threatened to quit the institution if the university didn't removed from her class. (For a tenured professor, and one of the most distinguished faculty members at the institution, to make such a demand it should have sent up a thousand red flags.) The professor who tutored him after his removal from that class, writer and program director Lucinda Roy, also noted his obvious emotional problems, stating that he appeared to be the "loneliest person" she had ever come across, and repeatedly urged him to seek psychological help, even offering to walk him to the university's counseling center herself. She also reported him to several different university authorities, and it turns out that he did finally receive a psychological evaluation stating that he was "mentally ill" before he was then released, after a subsequent evaluation. Roy is on record as saying that she now wonders if she could have done more--she has said that if she could have carried him to the counseling center she would have--but all of the accounts I've read lead me to believe that she, Giovanni, and the English department did what they were supposed to, and what they could. As news accounts have repeatedly stated, there are many legal and procedural limits on what faculty members, administrators, and colleges and universities as well can and may do.

Today, on NPR, I heard several discussions about how faculty members, and in particular, creative writing teachers, might respond when they noted signs of psychological and emotional turmoil, as well as potentially serious disturbances, in the students' work. I won't go in to the university's procedures, but I will say that over the decade or so that I've been teaching college-level creative writing and literary studies, from graduate school onwards, at different institutions, I've encountered several instances where I've had to discern, based initially on the student's work and then on discussions with the student, whether I was facing merely an overcharged, somewhat scary imagination, or something more serious. Only once, I believe, did the situation warrant my speaking to someone in a senior administrative position and handing over a copy of the student's work, and that occurred some years ago when I received a two-page parodic piece--neither poetry nor fiction--that was a multi-page, relentlessly racist rant. The other students in the class were so upset by it that they could barely comment on it, and it worried me enough that I did show it to the director of the program in which I was teaching. He reassured me that I'd done the right thing, and that the program at least would be on notice concerning this student. I didn't, however, consider the student was violent and I made a point of engaging him and the rest of the class in a discussion on the theme of racist and offensive writing, the writer's responsibilities and ethics, and how to deal with such kinds of work.

He did seem to register that it was offensive, though he did not apologize, and later approached me as if he'd done nothing wrong. In other cases, when I've received very troubling work--such as a story about a violent, avenging aborted fetus, or a story about a white man who elaborately and cruelly castrates a black man over a white woman, etc.--I have tended to go ahead and discuss the works in class, while also making sure to speak directly with the students on a one-to-one basis. I keep in mind that we live in a violent and violence-saturated culture, and that students' experiences reflect this in various ways; they may also have been subjected to personally violent traumas and abuses, and I do always consider my classes spaces where they can write about anything they're motivated to explore, with the aim of learning the craft of writing and how to become better readers and editors. I periodically encounter stories that include scenes of violence (or drug use, for example), some of it graphic, but I do not make the simple equation that the student is troubled or a danger to herself or others. At the same time, if I ever do have a situation that I think may be potentially dangerous, I will use the various channels the university makes available to address them, and as the director of an undergraduate creative writing program now, I have conveyed this to my colleagues.

In the radio discussions today, one of the NPR hosts asked where teachers drew the line. I tended to agree with the responses I heard, and I'd add a few: if a student's work frequently described suicides or ended with one, that would provoke immediate concern. If the violence in a story seemed out of proportion with the narrative, or the characters, that would provoke concern. If the student's work was consistently violent and offensive, or luxuriated in descriptions of abuse, torture, and so on, that would provoke concern. If a student's work appeared to be a personal attack against another student in the class, that would provoke concern. And then there were many other possible flags that could arise. At the same time, I strive not to mistake students' imaginations and imaginative works for mirror reflections of the mimetic realities of their lives (I do not teach creative nonfiction), and I am quite aware that, as I say above, they and we all live in a violent and violence-drenched society. It has always been thus (as Richard Slotkin and other scholars have persuasively argued). There are more than a few literary works--and countless films, video games, TV shows, etc.--that students might encounter in classes, or in their own travels through literature, that contain quite horrific violence, graphic and stomach churning scenes of sexual violation and abuse, racially, ethnically, anti-Semitic, gender-based, homophobic, and other kinds of offensive discourse, and so on. (I can vividly recall the trauma of having to sit through class discussions Huckleberry Finn in high school, as some of my classmates took delight in repeating the N* word over and over, or, in another class, reading Faulkner's brilliant but very nerve-wracking short stories "A Dry September" and "That Evening Sun," the latter of which includes the looming threat of chilling violence and almost a page of the N* word. I loathed the former book for years, while I think I've always been able to deal with Faulkner.)

In cases where I've taught works that might fall into the above categories, such as J.G. Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition, or Kathy Acker's Great Expectations (I have never dared to teach Isaac Babel's remarkable short story "Crossing into Poland," which a professor introduced me to in grad school), I've always tried to prepare the students in advance, provide a context for the works' content and the writer's aims, and examine specific and broader ethical, political, and social issues. As I noted in a prior blog entry, some works, like Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, for example, are so blood-drenched that I've known people who refuse to read them, and I understand why. (I have never had cause to teach that or any of his books, though I might do so next year.) J.M. Coetzee, as is well known, dedicates an entire chapter of his novel Elizabeth Costello to the very topic, and has the eponymous character "confront"--literally, as the novel does also in a philosophical manner--the writer Paul West, whose novel The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg, includes a wrench description of the brutal death of the eponymous aristocrat and military leader who attempted and failed to assassinate Adolf Hitler. (He also authored a book about Jack the Ripper that is not for the delicate of heart.) In the cases of most literature, the violence in the work did and does not correlate with any personal tendency in the author for violence; a number of Shakespeare's plays, especially the tragedies, contain violent scene after violent scene, such as Macbeth (Duncan being murdered in his bed, for example), Hamlet (poisoning that raises boils, a stabbing, etc.), Lear (eyes gouged out, etc.), Othello (the strangling and the suicide, etc.), the attestably gory Titus Andronicus, and so on, and few suggest that all this violence reflected something warped in the author himself (though he was living at a time when the state was waging wars and killing Catholics and dissidents without hesitation). I am not suggesting that student's drafts of whatever sort and Shakespeare or McCarthy are equivalent, but I am underlining the fact that one cannot so easily jump to conclusions, which seems to be what some in the media and blogosphere are doing. In addition, there are disturbed authors whose works do suggest something deeply amiss, but in a number of cases the suggestive material doesn't consist of such obvious signs. I have never read Slobodan Milosevic's poetry, but I doubt that it contains strophe after strophe of killing ethnic Albanians and other Muslims, Croats, Slovenes, and anyone not a Serb, but I could be quite wrong.

I also thought back to one of my earliest college-level teaching gigs, in New York. I had a student who wrote short fiction pieces, and at least one short story that freaked some of the other students out. We reached an impasse at one point when the student's dismissive comments upset some of the students, and I ended up having to send him out of the room to talk with him, letting him know if he didn't get his act together, he couldn't return. He did shape up, and came back. He was also, by a long shot, one of the most talented students I have ever taught; he could write quite impressive poets, deeply grounded in images and striking metaphors, without trying, and had a natural skill at figurative language in general that most of the other students could not grasp. He just needed to grow up, and he did. But today I thought, if he'd threatened me or used some of the rhetoric in his work outside it, I probably would have needed to take more serious steps. And I realized, I didn't have any guidance at all about what those steps should be. So one of the things I hope that comes out of the Virginia Tech tragedy is that institutions clarify what options faculty members, students and staff have when they think something may be seriously wrong.

***

Poems, poems. Here is a poem from the last century that strikes a different note, a Frostian paradox, I suppose; it is among other things a hymn to beauty and to nature, and to our capacity to conceive of the former, both in art (the poem) and nature, our capacity only to partially grasp the latter, and the relation between the two. It also includes a perfect example of the rhetorical device of paradiostole (another form of polysyndeton, or construction with conjunctions), which the poem's title and theme, you will notice, call for; the man really knew what he was doing. It originally appeared in Harper's Magazine in 1920:

FRAGMENTARY BLUE

WHY make so much of fragmentary blue
In here and there a bird, or butterfly,
Or flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye,
When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue?

Since earth is earth, perhaps, not heaven (as yet)—
Though some savants make earth include the sky;
And blue so far above us comes so high,
It only gives our wish for blue a whet.

Poems: Nikki Giovanni

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

COTTON CANDY ON A RAINY DAY

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

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

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

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

BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
(to quote a philosopher)

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

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

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

Copyright © 1978, Nikki Giovanni.

Trethewey Wins Pulitzer + Tragedy at VTech + Poem: Natasha Trethewey

I am so elated to type these words: Natasha Trethewey has won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry!

She was honored for her brilliant recent volume, Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), which appeared last year to great acclaim (and was a past J's Theater Book of the Month pick as well). Natasha was a member of the Dark Room Collective many years ago, and was one of the first winners of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, for her début collection, Domestic Work (Graywolf, 2000), and she later published She is also the fourth Black poet to win the Prize for poetry, following in the tradition of Gwendolyn Brooks, Rita Dove, and Yusef Komunyakaa. I've known her for almost a decade and a half, and can say without hesitation that she's a terrific, gracious person who really deserves this extraordinary honor. I am so happy for and proud of her! Congratulations, Natasha!

One of the two runners-up in the category was poet Martín Espada, another poet I know and think the world of. Martín was one of the earliest readers at the Dark Room's reading series, and has mentored and taught quite a few younger poets. Congrats to Martín as well.

Also, Eisa Davis, another fellow Cave Canem writer, was a finalist in the Drama category for her play "Bulrusher"! Congratulations, Eisa!

And other winners include Ornette Coleman in the Music category (no, you did not read that wrong--someone other than a classical music composer received the Pulitzer in music!--they must be fuming in quite a few university music departments), for his recording Sound Grammar; Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Cynthia Tucker, who often challenges the middling conventional wis-zards on Sunday talk shows, received the Pulitzer in Commentary; and John Coltrane was honored nearly 40 years after his death with a posthumous citation for his "his masterful improvisation, supreme musicianship and iconic centrality to the history of jazz." I only wish his wife, Alice, who died not long ago, had lived to see this day.

Finally, I must note that as was predicted by some in the media, Cormac McCarthy received the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for his most recent novel, The Road, which is the current pick of Oprah's Book Club. I haven't read it, but reader Kai did praise it strongly--at least up to its final scene (right, Kai?). I'll be getting to it one of these days soon.

***

I was busy with university business pretty much all day--we had on campus a very fine visiting poet, Josh Weiner, whom I'll write about soon--so I didn't get an opportunity to check the web or hear the full report from C on the horrific events that occurred today at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, in Blacksburg, where a gunmen went on a rampage and killed more than 30 people, including students, faculty and staff members, then killed himself.

Since I know only some of the particulars of the incident, I won't expatiate on the crime itself, except to say that my heart goes out to the families of the dead and injured, and to the Virginia Tech campus as a whole. Such events sadden me tremendously. Some reports are suggesting that this is the worst shooting and worst university mass-murder of all time. It certainly has to be one of the worst instances of a mass killing in the US outside of a war battle zone, outstripped only by the 9/11 suicide bombings and the Oklahoma City massacre. Such a senseless, horrible crime is almost too awful to register, much like the daily accounts of slaughter that reach us from cities across Iraq and Afghanistan and Sudan, that we heard about in Rwanda, in East Timor, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in Chechnya and Ingushetia....

When C and I lived in Virginia, we became aware of how easy it was and is to purchase guns there. I was and remain incredulous at the idea that anyone would need to purchase handguns right away, without a background check and waiting period, let alone 2 or 5 or 10 or 25 or 100 pistols and rifles and automatic rifles and machine guns and so on in one pop, unless she or he were outfitting a police force, or a military unit. Then, a few years ago, I believe that Virginia tightened its laws and limited the numbers of certain types of guns people could purchase per month, enraging a sizable number of fanatics, but I believe (though I could be wrong) that it's still the case that almost anyone can purchase an unlimited number of guns there at a gun show. Why? Again, what good can come from such a loophole?

As I said, my knowledge of the case is minimal, and I don't know where the murderer purchased his weaponry or why he went on this rampage, but given how easy it is to acquire guns in that state, and in particular, automatic weaponry, I wouldn't be surprised if after impulsively deciding that he was going to avenge some perceived hurt or humiliation he did some shopping there before his spree. Perhaps this will lead state legislators to tighten the laws further, but I'm not holding my breath. (There are already cries on the blogosphere that students, faculty and staff armed with concealed handguns could have prevented the crime. Personally, I find the prospect of anyone other than a policeperson walking around the university with weapons of any sort utterly terrifying.)

In the meantime, let's extend a moment of silence to those who were slain and to the survivors.

***

Back to a more positive note, here's a poem by Natasha Trethewey, from Native Guard:

THEORIES OF SPACE AND TIME

You can get there from here, though
there’s no going home.

Everywhere you go will be somewhere
you’ve never been. Try this:

head south on Mississippi 49, one-
by-one mile markers ticking off

another minute of your life. Follow this
to its natural conclusion – dead end

at the coast, the pier at Gulfport where
riggings of shrimp boats are loose stitches

in a sky threatening rain. Cross over
the man-made beach, 26 miles of sand

dumped on a mangrove swamp – buried
terrain of the past. Bring only

what you must carry – tome of memory
its random blank pages. On the dock

where you board the boat for Ship Island,
someone will take your picture:

the photograph – who you were –
will be waiting when you return

"Theories of Time and Space" from Native Guard: Poems by Natasha Trethewey. Copyright © 2006 by Natasha Trethewey. All rights reserved.

Reading at Woodland Pattern + Poem: Ethelbert Miller

(Okay, I hope that this blog reappears after I've posted this, because I've been forced over to the new Google Blogger (after having tried it once and lost my blog for several days), but here goes....)

Friday, I was on the road again, this time to Milwaukee, to read at the extraordinary Woodland Pattern Book Center with poet E. Ethelbert Miller. Despite the fact that it's closer to Chicago than St. Louis, I'd never been to Milwaukee before. After my Friday office hours and a number of other university-related duties, I hopped on the road and made the short, easy hour-and-thirty-minute drive. I'd also never read with Ethelbert, though back during my Dark Room Collective days the rest of the writing group and I had been his guests at the Ascension Reading Series. Chuck Stebelton, who runs the Myopic Poetry Series in Chicago and runs Woodland Pattern's poetry series, invited us up, and was an exemplary host, as was everyone affiliated with the bookstore, including Anne Kingsbury, who wined and dined us in royal fashion (c.f. chicken potpies with our initials in them!).

The store, from outside

Woodland Pattern which is the kind of bookstores that many writers, especially poets, dream about. In addition to one of the best poetry collections in the country, the store also has racks and cabinets full of rare chapbooks and broadsides, and an exhibition space that features shows of original book and visual art, and a friendly, staff that knows quite a bit about arts and letters. Many of them are writers themselves. An exhibit of multimedia artist Joel Lipman's stamp poetry pieces graced the walls of the room where we read, and the book center has an online site with information about his life and work.


One of the rooms, with the chapbook filled file bureau at the center of the photo (that's Ethelbert at right speaking with a former DC resident)

The reading was really enjoyable and energizing; I was especially pleased at the turnout and at the enthusiastic response, and it was also wonderful to meet local poets like Rick Ryan and Shelly Hall. Ethelbert, who read second, found a way to tie so many common strands in our quite different work together, including our tributes to recently deceased like Phebus Etienne, our joint love of baseball, and W's ongoing, senseless vanity war in Iraq. It was also a joy to sell some books!


Post-reading confab (I don't know the name of the guy on the left, but from l-r are Rick Ryan, Dante [who'd visited with the Chicago poets I know a few years ago], Ethelbert, and Anne Kingsbury)

I told the folks at Woodland Pattern that I'd be back one of these days, and I intend to return and browse at length.

Here's one of Ethelbert's love poems, tender, epigrammatic and bearing added layers of meaning through the reference to none other than Mr. Sun Ra:

SPACE IS THE PLACE

Love is the last planet in our solar
system. Your heart crying like the
rings of Saturn. How can we believe
in stars in this darkness? I watch
the sky for your return. Inside my
hands nothing but gravity.

Copyright © E. Ethelbert Miller, 2007.

Poem: Vénus Khoury-Ghata

Here's a poem by a poet I learned about a few years back, mainly because of her translator, the great poet Marilyn Hacker. The poet, Vénus Khoury-Ghata (1937-), is one of the giants of Lebanese literature, a literature marked by the often troubled, sometimes tragic, divided history of that country and the surrounding region. Khoury-Ghata's poetry, in French but strongly flavored by the Arabic she learned from her mother, reflect this tumultuous history, as well as the rich vein of her own personal experiences, which has encompassed a wide array of themes, including religion, village and more cosmopolitan life, cross-cultural exchange, and death and loss. I am posting both the French and Marilyn Hacker's translation; both are from the Poetry International Web site.

Pour Noha Al Hegelan

Si haute était la terre en ce temps-là
les femmes suspendaient linge et nuages à la meme corde
des anges s’accrochaient à leurs jupes pour les empecher de suivre les âmes égarées

Tout ce qui faisait commerce avec l’eau avait une âme
jarre calebasse bassine
les seaux repechaient celles qui végétaient dans l’indifférence des puits

Toute ombre mouvante était esquisse de revenant
tout chant de coq se transformait en présage
l’annonceur des naissances parlait plus haut que la cascade
mais plus bas que le vent qui avait mainmise sur le dedans et le dehors
dilatant les champs pauvres
repoussant l’horizon d’un arpent lorsque les maisons s’étrécissaient aux dimensions des cages

Le sage évitait de croiser son chemin
il vous cassait un homme sur son genou comme une paille

Copyright © 1999, Vénus Khoury-Ghata


For Noha al Hegelan

At that time the earth was so high up
women hung out clouds and laundry on the same line
angels gripped their skirts to keep them from following stray souls

Everything that frequented water had a soul
clay jug, gourd, basin
buckets fished out the ones stagnating in the wells’ indifference

Every moving shadow sketched a phantom
every cock-crow became an omen
the announcer of births spoke louder than the waterfall
but more softly than the wind which had taken over the indoors and the outdoors
swelling the paltry fields
pushing back the horizon of an acre as soon as the houses shrank to the size of cages

The wise man tried not to cross its path
it would break a man for you over its knee like a straw


Copyright © Translation: 2001, Marilyn Hacker

Memoria + Poem: Jorge Luis Borges

I saw in yesterday's papers that author Kurt Vonnegut and actor Roscoe Lee Brown passed away. Vonnegut was 84 and Brown 81. Both were fascinating, talented, irrepressible figures. Vonnegut, because of his singular works, which combine often science fiction, comedy and political critique, was a major cultural icon for several generations. Brown had a distinctive look, acting touch, and a voice that could heat coffee. I instantly associate both with my youth; I read Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle in junior high school and later tackled Slaughterhouse Five during my high school years (it wasn't on the curriculum), and I watched Brown playing versions of the same character in films, such as Uptown Saturday Night, and on TV shows like Soap, The Cosby Show, and A Different World (well, by then I was an adult, but...). Several other recent passings include the blues singer Dakota Staton, at 76; the actor Calvin Lockhart (also of Uptown Saturday Night fame), at 72, whose beautiful face could make your heart skip; and the artist Sol LeWitt, at 78, a genius of conceptualism, who expanded the boundaries of what we think of as contemporary art. (I also learned that the mother of a very dear friend of my just passed away. What a week.) To all of them, I say, this is but a tiny and inadequate tribute, but thank you.

Once upon a time, I used to have a glass wall in an office I occupied. This was in New York City, back in the last century (it sounds so long ago!). And on that wall, every week I'd post poems facing out so that those who passed by could read them. I did this for a while, posting poems by friends and by well known poets that I'd either type out, print out from what'd been emailed to me, or photocopy. Often people would pass right by the posted poems the first few times, then, for whatever reason, they'd realize that what their eyes glazed past wasn't another flyer or a list of rules for the floor, but a poem! And then many of them would stop and read them. One of the poems that I posted that my itinerant fellow floor mates most liked was "The Other Tiger," by the Argentinian fictionist Jorge Luis Borges. It is a classic poem, one of his finest, and perhaps quintessential in its display of his philosophical playfulness and depth. but I'm not going to post that today. Instead, I think I'll post another, briefer poem by him, which shows his wit and gravity, in keeping with the week's mood.

LIMITS

There is a line by Verlaine I shall not recall,
There is a nearby street forbidden to my step,
There is a mirror that has seen me for the last time,
There is a door I have shut until the end of the world.
Among the books in my library (I have them before me)
There are some I shall never reopen.
This summer I complete my fiftieth year;
Death reduces me incessantly.

Copyright © Jorge Luis Borges, 1967, translated by Anthony Kerrigan, by Grove Press, Inc., from A Personal Anthology.

Poem: Linh Dinh

Young, prodigious, linguistically daring, a hoot: Linh Dinh. My introduction to Linh's work came in the form of one of Renee Gladman's scrumptious little handsewn Leroy chapbooks (No. 8). Linh's was titled A Small Triumph Over Lassitude. Adorning the cover was an image by artist Layla Ali. I savored this and several of the other Leroy collections (by Rachel Levitsky, C.S. Giscombe, Hoa Nguyen, Bhanu Kapil) for a while, and they migrated with me from Jersey City to Chicago, sat for a while in my office, then made a few other journeys; now I can locate only Linh's chapbook. At another point, a former colleague of mine and I would speculate if Linh Dinh was several people--or at least two--because he published so much. When he came to Chicago in the fall of 2005, I naturally forgot to bring this gem of a chapbook with me for him to sign. I also forgot to ask him about the prevalence of "pigs" in the text. The poems later made it into one of his full-length book collections, but in my opinion they almost got lost in it; sometimes a chapbook is the perfect portion.

Here's one of his poems that reminds me, interestingly enough, of Harryette's work:

SOUVENIRS

Aphasia (sunrise)
Toothache (sunset)
A smelly window (sunrise)
A stinking door (sunset)
Strep throat (sunrise)
Glossolalia (sunset)

A century among thee comets.
A century among pigs.
A century on this earth.
And I still don't know where to go
To get a half-decent haircut.

An hour early. A minute late.
A day early. A century late.

He was neither late nor early, having arrived
At his appointed laceration
At exactly
The anointed time.

Copyright © Linh Dinh, 2001, from A Small Triumph Over Lassitude, Leroy Chapbook Series.

Poem: Harryette Mullen

It's been said that Maya Angelou could read a random page in a phone book and make it sound exciting; but I can think of only a few poets who could actually take those lines of names or ads or both and make a compelling poem out of them: Harryette Mullen. Of course Harryette works with other tools than phone book entries, but you are liable to find all kinds of strings and hidden operations in her work--some are more overt than others. I don't think that she'd consider herself part of the OuLiPo family, but she is definitely in a funky conversation with them. What I particularly love about Mullen's poetry is that it manages to be simultaneous playful in multiple sense and socially engaged, which is something that whole schools of poetry have aspired to but only intermittenly managed. The poem below is a very good example, and I thought, in tribute to Phebus, that I'd stick with another great Cave Canem-affiliated poet today.

ELLIPTICAL

They just can't seem to . . . They should try harder to . . . They ought to be more . . . We all wish they weren't so . . . They never . . . They always . . . Sometimes they . . . Once in a while they . . . However it is obvious that they . . . Their overall tendency has been . . . The consequences of which have been . . . They don't appear to understand . . . If only they would make an effort to . . . But we know how difficult it is for them to . . . Many of them remain unaware of . . . Some who should know better simply refuse to . . . Of course, their perspective has been limited by . . . On the other hand, they obviously feel entitled to . . . Certainly we can't forget that they . . . Nor can it be denied that they . . . We know that this has had an enormous impact on their . . . Nevertheless their behavior strikes us as . . . Our interactions unfortunately have been . . .

Copyright © Harryette Mullen, from Sleeping With the Dictionary, University of California Press, 2002.

RIP + Poems: Phebus Etienne

When I returned to Chicago today, I received the devastating news that Phebus Etienne (at left, photo by Amanda Johnston), a fellow Cave Canem poet and New Jerseyan, had recently passed away of a heart attack. She was only 41. The news brought me to the brink of tears, because it is just so unbelievable. I still cannot fully grasp it. I first met Phebus when we were at NYU together, over ten years ago. The graduate creative writing program there, as at many schools, is separated along genre lines, so most of the writers I took classes with and befriended primarily or exclusively wrote fiction. But I'd spent a lot of time with poets before I returned to graduate school, I knew a few poets who either were finishing up in the program (like Danielle LeGros-Georges and Ronaldo Wilson) or beginning it, and at the time I was even writing (a few terrible) poems, and so I developed an acquaintance with Phebus, Joseph Legaspi, January Gill, and some of the other poets who were enrolled in the poetry track. I would see Phebus and the other poets not only at university readings, but at other events around the city, and though we never really hung out, I cherished the time I ran into her. One of the things I always recall from the times I saw her was how sweet and truly friendly she was, and her laughter, which embodied the bright spirit she possessed. I remember wishing that the fiction writers in my program were as cohesive as the poets or the doctoral students, but I also realized that Phebus was a special person who fostered this kind of connection. I treasured the times I ran into her, because I felt an immediate sense of community with her.

A few years later, I returned for my second year of the Cave Canem workshops, in Esopus, and was so pleased to see Phebus among the new fellows. We had an opportunity to talk a little, about NYU, life in New York and New Jersey, poetry, and a few other things. I also finally had an opportunity to hear some of her poetry, and saw quickly that she was as fine a poet as the person I'd come to really like. It was clear to me that summer that in addition to talent she had an anchoring spirit; she was generous, kind, really interested in other people's thoughts and works and successes, and was someone that many different sorts of people could bond with, quite easily. Phebus had no airs or affectations, at least none that I could see; she was a lovely, down-to-earth, modest, and sometimes quite frank person whose poetry reflected her personality and values. We were at Cave Canem together again in 2001, which was a tougher year for me, but my brief moments with Phebus, that year at Cranbrook, were as enjoyable as ever, and again, I had the pleasure of hearing her read and talk about her poetry.

After my last year at CC, I ended up commuting to Providence, and a year later taking the job in Evanston, so I rarely saw Phebus. But occasionally I would run into her at Cave Canem events, and then this past summer, I had an opportunity to reconnect with her a little when we were on the fellows' events planning committee for Cave Canem's 10th anniversary celebration. One of the last times I saw her, I think, was at the celebration itself, a remarkable series of events, and then afterwards, when Keith and Mendi Obadike gave me and Phebus, who lived in Montclair, a ride home. Her smile, her grace, and her joyfulness, her high voice, her laugh, her beautiful smile, are all things I recall as if she were right here beside me; it is heartbreaking that they were taken from the world so soon. In addition to championing so many other poets and working to ensure Cave Canem's vibrancy, she was working hard on what will be a superlative book of her own poems when it's finally published. It's entitled Chainstitching. In it she addressed, among so many other things, her mother's passing and its effects on her, her life as a Haitian-American woman, a Black woman in this society, and the various byways of histories as they related to her personal experience.

She was taken too soon--it's still so hard to believe.

Here is one of Phebus's poems, from 2nd Avenue Poetry's Volume 2.

SERPENTINE INCIDENTS
after Wallace Stevens

1.
Eve, breathless with novel sensation.
Lips, tongue teasing Adam's erection.
Later, she saw the serpent's slanted daffodil eyes,
The ever-smiling mouth. She woke
Crying, spelling desire as shame.

                          2.
                          Confounded by the late, late movie,
                          Cleopatra's insomniac spirit muttered,
                          "What the hell is this?
                          After suicide with asps, my last resistance.
                          Did I come back white and forget? Damn!"
                          How else could she explain her saga played out
                          By an epidermal stranger with violet eyes.

3.
In the hills where Taino danced,
A single woman wanted peace from three vicious sisters
And bought a secluded acre with wild shadows.  An albino
Serpent languished on her avocado branch.

                          4.
                          Serpent jaw creaked open and consumed
                          Whole prey wider than its body.
                          Not tall as the cherry hibiscus,
                          The daughter wanted her father in battle stance.
                          "Your namesake was slayer of the dragon Python," he
                          reminded as he placed a machete in her hand.

5.
The water sang refrain of washwomen
at daybreak.  The serpent bathed
Searching for inattentive creatures,
Belly beating tempo on wet stones.

                 6.
                 A husband writhed atop his mistress
                 As his wife hung the wash.  The serpent
                 Paused at her feet, shook its head at her circumstance
                 And continued to travel.


7.
A stealth cat wanted to claw crevices on a spiraled white layer.
The marquis head rose, bared fangs and shattered curious bravery.

                        8.
                        Skin merchants coveted capture in the distance.
                        Forked tongue smelled fear and envy.
                        Muscled body undulated high in leaves,
                        scales gleaming like platinum.

9.
Electric summer on MLK Boulevard.
Pet serpent explored pea green deli counter.
Favorite eatery abandoned, a woman dreamed
Of armor, Excalibur as man and perfect against demons.

Copyright © Phebus Etienne, 2007, from Chainstitching.

Here is the title poem:

Chainstitching

After I buried my mother, I would see her often,
standing at the foot of my bed
in a handmade nightgown she trimmed with lace
whenever I was restless with fever or menstrual cramps.
I was not afraid, and if her appearance was a delusion,
it only confirmed my heritage.
Haitians always have relationships with the dead.
Each Sabbath, I lit a candle that burned for seven days.
I created an altar on the top shelf of an old television cart.
It was decorated with her Bible, a copy of The Three Musketeers,
freesia, delphinium or lilies if they were in season.
My offering of her favorite things didn’t conjure
conversations with her spirit as I had hoped.
But there was a dream or two where she was happy,
garnets dangling from her ears,
and one night she shuffled some papers,
which could have been history of my difficult luck
because she said, “We have to do something about this.”

She hasn’t visited me for months.
I worry that my life is an insult to her memory,
that she looks in and turns away
because I didn’t remain a virgin until I married,
because my debts will remain unforgiven.

Lightning tattoos the elms as florists make
corsages to honor living mothers.
I think of going to mass at St. Anne, where she was startled
by the fire of wine when she received her first communion.
But I remember that first Mother’s Day without her,
how it pissed me off to watch a seventy year-old daughter
escort her mom to sip from the chalice.

Yesterday, as the rain fell warm on the azaleas,
I planted creeping phlox on my mother’s grace,
urging the miniature flowers to bloom larger next year
like the velvet petals of bougainvillea that covered our neighbor’s gate.
I crave a yard to plant lemon and mango trees as she did.
Tonight I mold dumplings for pumpkin stew,
add a dash of vinegar for spice as she taught me,
sprinkle my palms with flour before rolling the dough between them.
I will thread my needle and embroider a coconut tree on a place mat,
keep stitching her presence in my life.


Copyright © Phebus Etienne, 2007, from Chainstitching.

Update: Here are other bloggers who've written or posted tributes to Phebus:
Reggie Harris
January Gill O'Neil
Cherryl Floyd-Miller
Tayari Jones
Oliver de la Paz
Mendi Lewis Obadike
Tara Betts
Amanda Johnston

Too Much TV + Poem: Victor Hernández Cruz

I actually am back to watching more TV than I want to now that the new quarter has begun. Really this isn't a problem, except that I hate (most of what's on) TV, and yet easily get addicted to (more than I want to of what's on) it. From late September through late March, I usually had several manuscripts to read every evening (if I properly spaced them out, which I didn't, but that's another story), but now, with a somewhat lighter reading workload, I have a bit more time, and I haven't turned as much of the free time over to reading for pleasure (or for self-education, edification, etc.) yet. In fact, I'm still trying to find my way back to reading for pleasure (although I did finish Vladimir Sorokin's strange and very disturbing novel Ice during our recent trip, which I'll blog about soon, and finally finished Cyrus Colter's equally strange and disturbing 1973 novel The Hippodrome, which my colleague Reg Gibbons had passed on to me as part of a gift packet of several Colter works that TriQuarterly and the university's press had reprinted about a decade and some years back). I've also begun Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives, which is a book for which the word "enchanting" is not too strong a term, and several books I recently brought back, including Guillaume Dustan's Dernier roman, which is anything but. (I have also been reading quite a bit on Central African religions, retentions in the African Diaspora, and so forth, but that is for two projects I'm working on, so I don't count it towards the pleasure side.)

I have also been trying to catch up on DVD movies. C. and I did finally watch Half Nelson, a pretty good film with excellent performances by Ryan Gosling and Shareeka Epps (why wasn't she nominated for an Academy Award???). I've also watched Favela Rising (better than I thought), On the Downlow (much worse, though the actors were attractive and the idea admirable), Inch'Allah Dimanche (tough to sit through and its ending was implausible), and the much-hyped new Casino Royale, with the blond buff broken-nosed Bond, Daniel Craig--and Mr. Jump Britain-Parkours himself, Sebastien Foucan (!), who [SPOILER ALERT!], like all the main Black male characters, ends up either being killed off or turns out to be a dupe. (My tolerance for such default nonsense is minimal, but the movie was still entertaining and, compared to most of the last few Bond films, thrilling.)

Nevertheless I have been watching a lot more TV. I'm amazed at how easily I get lured in and end up not only watching, but wasting precious time psychologically (and sometimes emotionally) immersed in some of these shows. I don't feel guilty for watching them, but I do often feel as if something vital has been drained out of my brain, and only the most persistent efforts will recover it. I also feel that so much TV these days entails a problematic form of highly mediated voyeurism that seeks to make viewers increasingly more passive and more infantile--and with the steady bombardment of ads and the widespread product placement--TV is well along the path of serving as the chief instrument for turning all of us into consumers whose consciousnesses are thoroughly industrialized. Knowing all of this, I still keep watching. And I'm not talking about C-SPAN, local access TV (which is fascinating both in Chicago and NY), and the paltry offerings of PBS (which I do watch regularly) or any of the most informative shows that occasionally pop up on TV these days. I've become hooked on Survivor: Fiji, after vowing not to watch that show (ever) again, in part because instead of the cheap racialist stunt they started off with last season, this time they've gone the opposite approach, which is to find the most diverse (and not obnoxious or stereotypical) cast in a while; BET's College Hill, which this season pairs 4 Americans with 4 Virgin Islanders, and the former do not come off well at all; American Idol, though primarily because of my fascination with the current cultural phenomenon that is Sanjaya Malakar; The Amazing Race All Stars 2, because I want to see if the Charla-Mirna or Eduardo-James (names?) pairs can finally win it all (Joyce-Uchenna, who'd previously won, and the really annoying "bad gay" Team Guido have both been eliminated); Human Giant, yet another bizarre MTV comedy show, which is almost like a cross between The Andy Milonakis Show with Kids in the Hall, though with more the former than the latter; and, on top of these, there are the new seasons of The Sopranos and Entourage, two shows that I was not especially interested in, and The Apprentice, for which my interest really oscillates. As I find myself facing more deadlines and my interest in some of these shows wanes (the Sopranos opener was pretty boring tonight and Entourage was both predictable and frantic), I probably will decrease my TV viewing, but right now, I'm both enjoying and struggling with the viewing....

***

Years ago, when I had to find poems that would both inspire and instruct the 7th, 8th and 9th grade public school students I was teaching, one of the poets I turned to was Victor Hernández Cruz (1949-), a Puerto Rican native who moved to East Harlem at the age of 5 and began publishing his poems in the 1960s. Hernández Cruz is a central figure in the development of late 20th century Puerto Rican/Nuyorican and Latino poetry. He also was linked to the Umbra group of writers, which included figures such as Steven Cannon and Ishmael Reed and edited Umbra, the group's literary journal. I want to say that I first came across his name in one of Ntozake Shange's poems, which provided a mini-education all their own, or whether I first heard Reed mention him, but either way, his books, which include Snaps, Mainland, Tropicalization, are essential reading. Here's one of his poems, which I think of as a very New York poem, from Rhythm, Content and Flavor (1989), which also appears in Globe Fearon's Latino Poetry. His play with metaphor was something the children instinctively picked up on, as well as his movement from negation to affirmation, and his seductive conversation poem, which might lead the reader to conclude at first that the poem couldn't be that profound.

SIDE 32

I am glad that I am not one of those
Big Con Edison pipes that sits by the
River crying smoke
I am glad that I am not the doorknob
Of a police car patrolling the Lower
East Side
How cool I am not a subway token
That has been lost and is sitting
Quietly and lonely by the edge of
A building on 47th Street
I am nothing and no one
I am the possibility of everything
I am a man in this crazy city
I am a door and a glass of water
I am a guitar string cutting through the
Smog
Vibrating and bringing morning
My head is a butterfly
Over the traffic jams

Copyright © 1989, Victor Hernández Cruz, from Rhythm, Content and Flavor, Arte Publico Press, all rights reserved.

Diana Ross at Madison Square Garden

C. got tickets so that we could go see Diana Ross perform live at the Madison Square Garden Theater last night. This was the first time I'd ever seen her perform live. It goes without saying that Ross, who was celebrating her birthday, gave an excellent performance. She sang for about an hour and a half, changed costumes five times, danced, did a little bit of talking, expressed her love for her fans repeatedly, and performed songs from nearly every period of her career, touching upon most of the best known ones, like "Baby Love," "I'm Coming Out," "Do You Know (The Theme from Mahogany)," "Upside Down" (during which she gave a shout out to Nile Rodgers, who was in the audience), and many others. One of the best moments was when she performed a few songs from Lady Sings the Blues. She handled these pieces superbly, and it made me want to hear her in a more intimate cabaret or café-style setting. (A fan of hers that we chatted with on the PATH ride home told us that her long-buried but now released Blue Album featured fine performances of Jazz standards.) Perhaps the only weak spot was the newest song she sang, "I Love You," which concluded the show and was both too simplistic and too saccharine; perhaps if she'd slotted it in amidst everything else it wouldn't have stood out so, but she ended the concert with it. Overall, however, she was incandescent, and her voice--!!! As for the photos, well, we thought cameras weren't really allowed, and so had only a very handy (and potentially confiscatable) model, but it turns out that fellow concertgoers had no qualms about bringing movie quality equipment in, which seemed to only intermittently rouse the ushers to issue warnings. I tried to steady my hand as best I could, and Ms. Ross is clearly visible, but....

Update: Here's Stephen Holden's NY Times take on the concert. He wasn't as sold on Diana Ross's voice as I was, and agreed with the fan who yelled out that she looked "35"--I'd say 45 and a few days, but so what? She looked great and sang well too.

Poem: Anna Akhmatova

A few weeks ago, while participating at a reading at Notre Dame, I had an opportunity to spend an afternoon hanging out with Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon (one of whose poems I featured a few poests ago). Lyrae suggested we go to Notre Dame's bookstore, and we quickly gravitated to the poetry section, where we ended up lucubrating for a few hours, just reading, taking notes, writing parts of poems. One of the books I pulled off the shelf was a fairly recent collection of Russian poetry, and the following poem, by one of the greatest poets in the Russian language, Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966), which Paul Schmidt translated.

I have always been a fan of Akhmatova's poetry, but didn't remember this one, which manages to convey the suffering she endured when, from 1924 to 1952 she was publicly condemned and declared a social and political persona non grata (and the similar proscription that befell her friend, the composer Dmitri Shostakovich) and banned from publishing her work, and to show music's transcendent power, beyond (despite the idealogues) ideology or creed. Its brevity and simplicity immediately struck me, and so I copied it down and read it aloud to Lyrae. For a little while that afternoon I could get it out of my head.

MUSIC
(To Dmitri Shostakovich)

Something miraculous burns in music;
As you watch, its edges crystallize.
Only music speaks to me
When others turn away their eyes.

When fearful friends abandoned me
music stayed, even at my grave,
and sang like earth's first shower of rain,
of flowers suddenly everywhere alive.

Copyright © Anna Akhmatova

Black Blogger Activism + Snow + Poem: Wallace Stevens

Other blogs may already have covered this, but I thought this Brown University Media Relations article, "E-Activism: Analysis of Black Bloggers in the Blogosphere," was insightful. It discusses a study, the first of its kind, by Brown researcher Antoinette Pole on how Black bloggers are using their blogs for political purposes. According to Pole's report, which she developed from in-depth interviews with 20 Black bloggers conducted in November 2005, and which appears in the International Journal of Technology, Knowledge and Society,

85 percent of respondents use their blogs to engage in political advocacy and to raise money for charitable causes. A majority of the bloggers said they encouraged their readers to vote or to register to vote; 40 percent of the bloggers asked their readers to contact elected officials; 35 percent suggested that their readers sign a petition or attend a rally, protest, or march. Several of the bloggers mentioned using their blogs to endorse candidates for office. Compared to other research examining blogging and political participation, black bloggers appear to be engaged in these online advocacy efforts and philanthropic endeavors to a greater degree than their white counterparts, according to the paper.

According to the article, the paper is part of a book Pole is working on, entitled titled Blogging the Political: Politics and Participation in a Networked Society, which will explore the impact of political blogging on politics and participation.

+++

(Please click on the photo below to get the full effect.)


Yes, it's April 5, and yes, that's snow (the sun, which was also shining, isn't visible in the photo)....

I'm not complaining, because I'm quite aware that soon enough, it'll be infernal outside and while I love very hot weather, I'm also aware that we may have temperatures and conditions in store that will make nearly all of us dream of soon-to-be quaint things as snow caps and glaciers and permafrost and ice-covered arctic circles.

Which brings me, associatively enough, to that infamously gnomic and brilliant poem by none other than the infamous (as in infamous in his racist discourse, sexism, etc.) sage of Hartford, Wallace Stevens:

THE SNOW MAN

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Copyright © Wallace Stevens

Random Musings + Poem: Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon

You can't base an entire baseball season on just three games, but so far the New York Mets have looked like the National League's team to beat, reprising their strong start of last season, and the defending champion Cardinals have looked really punchless, much like the dreadful team that limped through last season's second half. The Mets have power, speed, and so far their pitching looks decent; the Cardinals' best starter is out with a sore elbow, their outfield is a mess, and their bats are silent. Overall, the Mets will probably face the stiffest competition from Atlanta, Philadelphia, Houston, Los Angeles, and, it pains me to say, the Chicago Cubs. I haven't figured out who the strongest teams in the AL are yet, though Detroit, the Yankees, the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, and the over-hyped Boston Red Sox have very strong squads. I'll be watching Texas from time to time primarily because Sammy Sosa, so readily reviled (as a doper) by the sports media and fans and exiled, is back and playing for the Rangers, and I also want to see how the sports media respond if and when Barry Bonds breaks Hank Aaron's all-time home run record. Will they all go into cardiac arrest?

On more than one blog and news site I saw the remarkable news that Senator Barack Obama (the composite photo at right is from the Huffingtonpost.com) had attracted more than 100,000 donors, more than any of the other candidates, and more than his two main rivals combined. (I would caution readers about giving out his Obama08 campaign your phone number, however; I was besieged at odd hours until I finally had to demand that they communicate with me via mail and email.) His campaign raised a total of around $23.5 million, exceeding the $20 million quarterly take of the presumptive leading Democratic presidential candidate, Senator Hillary Clinton, who has so far bankrolled $26 million total, putting them both far ahead the other Democrats, as well as most of the sorry lot of Republicans who are vying for the job. While I always wish that the presidential campaign season were shorter (as in Britain and much of Europe) and publicly funded, and while I also recognize that money raised is no guarantee of victory, Obama's ability to generate funds and small donors, particularly online, is an excellent sign. I also know that it'll probably will lead to even more vicious attacks, coded messages, and so on against him, from his Democratic rivals, the Republicans, and the mainstream media. I've spoken to a number of people who're convinced that Obama "cannot" win, that American "will not vote for a Black man," and so on; some of these folks are Black themselves and they very well could be right, though I hope they are very wrong.

Eddie Robinson, one of the greatest football coaches of all time, died Tuesday in Ruston, Louisiana, at the age of 88. He began his legendary coaching career at what would become Grambling University in 1941, and finished with a 408-165-15 record, breaking University of Alabama coach Paul "Bear" Bryant's win total and sending hundreds of players to the National Football league, as well as to a host of other professions. One of his former players, Doug Williams, became the first Black quarterback to win a Super Bowl, in 1988 (God, but doesn't that just seem like yesterday!), with Washington, and Grambling, despite its comparatively small size and location, has become one of the best known historically Black universities in the country. Several reports I heard on the radio or came across online noted that over the years, some critics expressed criticism of Robinson's failure to be more vocal about racism, but what I also picked up was that his players championed his profound preparation of them not only for the gridiron, but for life itself.

Robert Mugabe's criminal misrule hangs on by a thread, but the support for that thread, it strikes me, has not yet vanished, and comes from several of the major neighboring states in Africa, such as South Africa, and to a lesser extent, Tanzania, Mozambique, Angola, Uganda, Botswana, and Namibia. Although South Africa is the only state that could force Mugabe's hand, all of these countries should be decrying his brutal, chimerical, corrosive reign, which has left Zimbabwe's economy in shambles, causing masses of his fellow countrypeople to starve or to flee to neighboring nations for food and peace. Despite the other nations' own problematic political records, they should also condemn the unfettered violence against the fractured opposition, led by the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), and in particular, Morgan Tsangvirai; this man and the opposition have been the target of repeated attacks by Mugabe's military, paramilitary and police forces, courts and popular supporters for several years, and just a day ago, before today's feebly sustained general strike, which the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) called, nine members of the MDC were badly beaten after being taken into custody. Mugabe also recently issued threats against Britain's ambassador to his country, and is daring outside and internal opponents to topple him. I understand the historical, ideological and political reasons why South Africa's post-apartheid leadership would almost as a default take his side against a former colonial master like the UK, or a neocolonial entity like the US, but at the same time, it must now be as clear as Cape Town's bay to Thabo Mbeki and others that the socioeconomic toll, by which I mean the human toll, of Mugabe's corrupt tenure, requires the strongest diplomatic and economic measures possible. He can no longer tinker behind the screen.

Earlier this week, as I was driving up to the university, I heard that Charles Burnett's 1977 masterpiece, Killer of Sheep, was going to be given its first theatrical release ever, which clarified a mysterious sidebar I saw in last week's New Yorker. (Reggie H. was kind enough to send Manohla Dargis's New York Times commentary on the film to the CC list.) I saw this movie when I took a Black film course as an undergraduate, and what I recall is that it's one of the most poetic and moving fictional portraits of Black American life ever to be captured on celluloid, with exceptional naturalistic acting, lyrical cinematographer, and some of the most appropriate uses of music one could experience in cinema. Although Killer of Sheep was Burnett's student thesis film at UCLA, it ranks as a major work, perhaps his magnum opus, and deserves the highest praise possible. Burnett has gone on to direct a number of important works, such To Sleep with Anger (1990), Nightjohn (1996), and The Glass Shield (1994), which is one of the most chilling essays on police corruption (and one of Michael Boatman's best acting performances bar none) in the American cinematic roster, but neither he nor his work have ever received the wider popular acclaim they deserve. With this theatrical release, perhaps Burnett will finally draw in more of the viewers his works merit, and perhaps renewed interest among funders so that he can continue to advance one of the finest aesthetics in contemporary American filmmaking.

***

The poem for the day is by one of my favorite poets, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, whose poetry is as beautiful and gracefula and unforgettable as she is, and who has the "bop" form down cold:

BOP: HAUNTING

In the evening she comes, her same unsatisfied self,
with the hard, smug look of salvation. Mama,
stop bothering me. When we argue, she says
what you’re saying is not scriptural.
You need to get back in your Bible.

In one dream, I slap her. I’m tired of her mouth.

I hate to see the evening
Sun go down

Yesterday, I dreamed a vampire
held my wrist, dared me to wake
to her, corporeal, stolid. Mama,
was that you? I refused to touch
her body in the casket.
At the gravesite I refused everything
but dry-eyed silence,
her picture in my hand.

I hate to see the evening
Sun go down

This is what I get for conjuring—
Mama, after me all night,
fussing about the holy ghost
when what I need is sleep.
But last night I lay dreamless.
I didn’t sleep sound.

I hate to see the evening

Sun go down

Bop: Haunting, Copyright © 2002 by Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon. Reprinted from Black Swan by Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon. (This book won the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, and was published by University of Pittsburgh Press.)

Civil Rights Game

Last night Major League Baseball played its first Civil Rights Game, which in essence was a glorified final spring training game, in Memphis, Tennessee. Memphis is certainly significant, as it's the location of the Civil Rights Museum, formerly the Lorraine Hotel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in cold blood in 1968, and was racially segregated along Jim Crow lines into the late 20th century, and Tennessee itself, obviously, was a slave state and member of the Confederacy. The aim of the game was to highlight the progress the league has made since Jackie Robinson integrated it in 1947, and to call attention to the precipitous drop in African-American players, who once constituted some of its biggest stars and nearly 1/4th of its players, but who now are a diminishing presence on most clubs, with some, like Houston, having not even one African-American starting position player or pitcher. While there were never a lot of Black catchers or pitchers, there are less than a handful of Black Americans starting at either of these two positions (though two of the best younger pitchers in each league are African Americans) in the entire league.

What tends not to get articulated by man in the media is that Black American baseball players have to a great degree been replaced not just by Latino players, but by Black Latino players; many of baseball's contemporary stars are Latinos of evident African descent. The majority of these players are from the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Puerto Rico or Cuba, all of which have complex racial histories and sizable-to-majority populations of mixed-race people. The racial demographics and economies of all four countries include people who are outright considered "Black," with variations based on class, region, and history, though when this is translated to the racial logic that now holds in the US, ethnicity (Latino) almost automatically cancels out race (Black)--though sometimes not the case for Cubans and Puerto Ricans. The most common name cited in support of the presence of Black Latinos in the major leagues is Sammy Sosa, but I would assert, isn't Orlando "El Duque" Hernández Black? David Ortiz? Manny Ramírez? Carlos Delgado? José Reyes (shown above)? Albert Pujols? Not African Americans, at least in the ethnic sense that term denotes, but aren't they Black people?

The presence of Black Latinos, however, doesn't mitigate the waning number of Black American players. In part, the replacement is the result of neoliberal economics and market forces; it's cheaper to groom and sign impoverished talented and determined young men from the Dominican Republic or other countries than to fund programs for Black Americans here--and why more Black baseball players have not banded together to create such programs and push the extremely wealthy major league franchises to do more is beyond me--and baseball now competes with a host of other sports that draw African American young people, from basketball and football, whose professional leagues are predominantly African-American, to other sports such as boxing, ice hockey, soccer, tennis, track and field, lacrosse, and so on. Baseball is also increasingly drawing on an international talent pool, as Japan's leagues have made it easier to draft its best players, and South Koreans, and Canadians and Australians also are increasingly being drafted. (One of the most talented younger starting Black catchers is from Canada.) A delegation that included the New York Mets' Dominican General Manager even went to Ghana to sell the sport there and scout new sources of talent. It's also the case that African Americans have in recent years excelled in sports that once had little to no Black presence, such as golf, rowing, and fencing. Yet talented African Americans continue to vie to enter baseball's major leagues, only in far smaller numbers, and continue to excel, which may perhaps mask the problem. Last year's National League MVP was the Philadelphia Phillies' Ryan Howard, an extraordinarily talented Black American born in St. Louis. (The AL MVP was also Black, but a native of the Dominican Republic, the beloved Big Papi, David Ortiz.) The World Series runners-up, the Detroit Tigers, have had as many as five Black Americans rotating through their starting lineup (two went to the new Washington Senators) in recent years, while other teams, like the Florida Marlins , the Tampa Bay Devil Rays (whose entire starting outfield consists of Black Americans), and the Los Angeles Dodgers, actually have managed to find a number of young Black American and Black Latino players. Yet the fact remains that some teams have shown little interest in the issue, or have made no demonstrative effort to field Black American players, and in the case of Houston, had only one non-White starter as recently as a year ago.

I watched a little of the game, which pitted last year's World Series champion St. Louis Cardinals (my favorite team) against the Cleveland Indians, who've been up and down over the last few years. The Cardinals played like the season had begun, and won 5-1. During the broadcast, a number of Black American Hall of Famers, like Lou Brock and Dave Winfield, as well as Spike Lee, journalists and others concerned with the issue, spoke about the problem of declining African-American presence, but I have to say I heard little that was really informed about race or economics, or about concrete steps anyone was going to take to rectify things. Really, is a symbolic game going to bring about any changes? Will it put any pressures on the ballclubs or owners? Will it lead to new programs? How many young African Americans even watched the game, and why isn't baseball marketing Howard and other younger Black American players more? I also thought about the two teams who participated in the game: the Cardinals currently have only one Black American starter, Preston Wilson, among its position players, and no Black starting or relief pitchers, while Cleveland has no Black American starting position players, and one very good Black American starting pitcher, C.C. Sabathia. Both teams have a number of Latino players of African descent; Saint Louis's star is Albert Pujols, one of the best younger players in the game, and the starting catcher, Yadier Molina, is Puerto Rican, while Cleveland has several younger Black Latino players, like Jhonny Peralta, Andy Marte, Fausto Carmona, and Joshua Barfield. The first three are Dominican, and Barfield is Venezuelan. By the discourse that predominated yesterday, none of these players was Black--and any sense that they might inspire young African American players seemed lost on the commentators, even though many young Latino players cite African Americans like Ken Griffey Jr., Willie Mays, and others, as inspirations, and certainly Roberto Clemente, one of the greatest outfielders ever, also a (proud) Black Puerto Rican, inspired African Americans during the years he played. During the 50th anniversary celebrations for Jackie Robinson's play, I noted--and certainly I wasn't the only one--that some of the Black Latinos openly paid homage to Robinson and to the Negro Leaguers, and the New York Yankees even have a Dominican player, Robinson Cañó, whose first name is an homage to the revolutionary pioneer. Did I hear any mention of this connection or others yesterday? No. Were promising younger Black American high school or college players brought to watch the game? Not that I know of, but I may have missed this aspect of the program. Indeed, I didn't even hear anything about inspiring the huge and increasing population of Mexican-American young people to participate in baseball. (Truth be told, I've pretty much given up on any sophistication or nuance in mass media discussions of race and ethnicity, particularly involving African Americans and Latinos.)

Tonight the Cardinals will open the season against the Mets, who have no African-American starters, but one of the most racially and ethnically diverse teams in the league. I'm rooting for the Cardinals, but I'm also rooting for baseball--and Black baseball players, current and retired--to help turn things around.

Poem: Robert Hayden

Since it's National Poetry Month, here's one of my favorite poems, by poet Robert Hayden, which I'd loved for years and which Michael S. Harper finally got me to memorize years ago, when Cave Canem held its summer workshop retreats in Esopus, New York, at Mount Saint Alphonsus.

It hasn't left my head since, and I even recited it just last week to Crystal Williams's class. The poem's statement used to push me towards tears, though now I can handle it okay, but the final two lines of the final stanza (or pentastich) never cease to awe me.

(And to honor the month, please pick a book of poetry or a poet, and read at least one poem once a week, very slowly, aloud, and listen to the language, let it reside in your ears and body, and then in the space around you. And then urge at least five people you know, whether they read poetry or not, to do the same. Just one poem, once a week, for this month. See how many people take you up on the suggestion.)

THOSE WINTER SUNDAYS

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

By Robert Hayden, "Those Winter Sundays" from Angle of Ascent: New and Collected Poems. Copyright © 1962, Robert Hayden.