Gukira on Claudia Rankine's *Citizen: An American Lyric* & "microaggressions"

A week ago I posted about two standout examples of literary criticism, a young Barack Obama's super-concise reading of T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," and Frank Kermode's extraordinary disquisition on the word and concept of "shudder" in that and other works by Eliot and a range of authors. Neither is exactly a model of traditional literary criticism, which brings me to another stellar example, at Gukira: With(out) Predicates, the brilliant Keguro Macharia's thought-site (to call it a blog barely does it justice).

In his January 19, 2016 post "microaggressions," Keguro shows what another approach to critical writing about literature might look like, exploring Claudia Rankine's highly lauded 2014 collection Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf) with a level of discernment, analytical brio and lyric verve that marks all of his writing. I won't try to summarize the piece's argumentation except to say that it takes one on a journey both into Rankine's book and into the aesthetic, social and political discourse surrounding it. He begins by pointing out that the book "circulates as an aesthetic object that documents microaggressions," and then continues:

The “micro” in microaggressions suggests the low hum of noncatharsis Sianne Ngai taught us to call “ugly feelings.”

Nothing explodes. 

Nothing releases. 

An archive builds. 

We are far from anger, far from rage, far from the demands created by the word racism.
Instead, we are in the world of microaggressions, the world of archive building, the world of opportunities created by the aesthetic object to engage in a dialogue on race or a conversation on race, in which we are encouraged to share our stories of racialization, of being marked by race, singled out, unseen in our particularities and embedded within histories we did not create and do not want to own.

Learning from Fanon, we scream that we are not our histories. 

Frantz Fanon is only one of many figures he thinks with--alongside, to, and through--beginning with Elizabeth Alexander and Barack Obama (whom he also critiques). As importantly, Keguro historicizes and defines the term "microaggression," so ubiquitous these days, in order to show what it means--what meanings emerge--from, around and because of the circulation of an "aesthetic object that documents microaggressions." The (current) aesthetic object that documents microagressions--in American society. Is much of the extant criticism about the book about the book or about the discourse that surrounds it--"the wreck and not the story of the wreck / the thing and not the myth that surrounds it," quoting, as he does Adrienne Rich? 

As I note above, this essay--in the truest sense of the world,  a trying out of thought, an attempt to think into and through ideas--concludes on a powerful note. I'll quote it:

I conclude this writing a week after Obama’s State of the Union speech, on the Monday designated this year as Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. I am arrested by the question of lag, caught by the duration of the pause. The “micro” in “microaggressions” might describe the lag that one must overcome—that return to the untime of unmaking, that disembedding from the human that one overcomes but does not overcome. How long is that pause? How is it measured? What happens in that pause? 

Chester Pierce names that pause as where the cumulative takes hold. What accretes in the pause, and how? A model of resilience reaches for the grit in the oyster, the pearl-making potential of adversity. Recall, the much-lauded Citizen is the aesthetic object that documents microaggressions. White space can be a pause. Pauses are cumulative. Something accumulates in the pause. How long is that pause? How is it to be measured? How does one measure pauses as they accumulate? How does one evaluate the pause that is considered an aesthetic object? 

how does one live—how can one breathe—in the pause

This is one dazzling example of how one thinks--in the pause.

Amidst the Notes: RIP Pierre Boulez & David Bowie

Pierre Boulez,
by Carlo Bavagnoli

I've been of two minds about the recent deaths of two leading figures in the world of music, Pierre Boulez (1925-2016), and David Bowie (1947-2016), mourning their deaths while also feeling the need to acknowledge key faults--which are not commensurate, let me be clear--that marked the characters of both. Both were musicians of original vision and talent, and born performers. Both left a deep mark not only in the musical cultures of their native countries but in the US and globally. Both wrote music that I turn and return to periodically, for differing but aesthetically and emotionally necessary reasons. So I feel sorrow and grief at their deaths, but at the same time, perhaps akin to the form of negative capability I maintain when reading certain writers like Wallace Stevens or T. S. Eliot, I keep in mind certain criticisms of them, even if the elation and admiration their music brings sometimes temporarily evacuates that criticism. (Keguro at "With(out) Predicates" offers one of his characteristically profound, moving and concise meditations on the necessary distinction between acknowledging the flaws of a deceased person and haranguing someone who is mourning that person as a way of forcing them to engage in such acknowledgement.)

Pierre Boulez was perhaps the towering figure in avant-garde Western classical music in the second half of the 20th century. He became one of the leading composers and judgmental exponents of new music, championing certain composers, especially those of his generation, as well as key figures in the French tradition, and the leader early 20th century modernists. He pursued a parallel career as a conductor, beginning in the 1950s, and perhaps most famously, led the New York Philharmonic from 1970-1975, a tenure that still provokes mixed reviews, though his focus on contemporary composers and the 20th century repertoire was undeniable, and remains unmatched by the Philharmonic even today, in 2016. His conducting style, without a baton and noted for its precision and clarity, brought the modernist composers Claude Debussy, Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Gustav Mahler, Bela Bartók, Maurice Ravel, and Edgard Varèse in particular to life. His own work showed their influences while moving in its own direction; just a few years ago I saw Messagésquisse performed at Columbia University, and it was more beautiful and stirring than any recording of it I'd ever listened to. Boulez, however, could be extremely harsh to the point of cruelty in his criticisms. He famously proclaimed Arnold Schoenberg "dead" at the end of an eponymous essay in which he trashed Schoenberg's failure to fully exploit the possibilities of the dodecaphonic system he had developed, and published the essay shortly after that pioneering composer died. Boulez cruelly described the great Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich as "the third pressing...of Mahler," and cast Karl Amadeus Mozart off as "trite." His fallings out with fellow musicians, including his former teacher Leibowitz, and former experimental compatriots John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, are well recorded. He also apparently never publicly came out of the closet as a gay man, though some critics and many fellow musicians knew about his sexual orientation and relationships. I take all of this into account, but also point to his music itself, which at its best--and there are certainly high points--is the lasting testament of the man.


Pierre Boulez, Répons - Ensemble intercontemporain - Matthias Pintscher, conductor, 2015.


 Pierre Boulez, Messagesquisse - Eric-Maria Couturier - Ensemble intercontemporain, Matthias Pintscher, conductor, 2014.

David Bowie, 2016

David Bowie championed another kind of 20th century music, or several, rock & roll and soul-influenced pop. Born Robert Jones in Brixton, London, he initially launched his career in the late 1960s, and first made the charts with his song "Space Oddity," which introduced the figure Major Tom, whom Bowie would revisit later in his career. In the early 1970s, he created the queer, glam rock alter ego character Ziggy Stardust, the titular figure of his LP The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, and transformed the public figure of the male rock icon through his overtly androgynous persona, which he concluded with Diamond Dogs. Throughout his career, Bowie remade himself, shifting into "plastic soul" in 1975, with the album Young Americans, which featured the overtly queer "John, I'm Only Dancing," one of my favorites, includes one of my favorite songs, and 1976's Station to Station, with the track "Golden Years," which he performed as one of the first white musicians on Soul Train. Subsequent shifts included the adoption of electronic elements and collaboration with Brian Eno, a stagy pop style with "Ashes to Ashes," and his biggest hit, which was one of the top tunes during my senior year of high school and freshman year in college, "Let's Dance." Bowie continued to record up through the final months before his death, issuing his final album, Blackstar, just days before he died. He acted in films, including the still striking and bizarre The Man Who Fell to Earth, an unforgettable vampire in The Hunger's sex trial, and an equally memorable Andy Warhol in the biopic Basquiat. David Bowie flirted with Nazism in his youth, adopting some of its trappings as a kind of fashion statement and aesthetic performance, and also had sex with an underage girl, the first of which I knew, the latter of which I didn't, and both disturb me tremendously. On the racist front, he did speak out more than once about the racism in the music industry, famously calling out MTV's overt discrimination while on air; as to whether the song China Girl is heard as something other than the Orientalism it ostensibly is a matter for others to uncover, and whether he ever atoned for what essentially involves the abuse of a teenager I cannot say. I can speak to the electric feeling I felt as an early adolescent watching him perform in a plastic suit, and later drag, with gender performers Joey Arias and Klaus Nomi, which I link to below.

David Bowie - Let's Dance, EMI Music.


David Bowie & Klaus Nomi - TVC15 & Boys Keep... by ZapMan69

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr & Eslanda Goode Robeson,
Schomburg Center digital collection

“And one day we must ask the question, ‘Why are there forty million poor people in America? And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth.’ When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I’m simply saying that more and more, we’ve got to begin to ask questions about the whole society…” –Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Speech to Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Atlanta, Georgia, August 16, 1967.

From "11 Most Anti-Capitalist Quotes from Martin Luther King, Jr.," compiled by Katie Halper at Raw Story.

Counternarratives Featured on Howard Rambsy's Culture Front

Photo from Cultural Front (© Howard Rambsy II)

UPDATED: Cultural Front has added two new posts, "John Keene's 'Acrobatique' and the poet as short story writer" and, bestowing me what I consider to be one of highest possible honors, he places the remarkable Elizabeth Alexander and her foundation poem "The Venus Hottentot" in conversation with "Acrobatique." (This is particularly important to me because Elizabeth has been a huge inspiration since I first saw her read, from The Venus Hottentot no less, at the Dark Room in Cambridge, Massachusetts many moons ago. I hold her and her art--her poetry, her criticism, her nonfiction--in the highest esteem. She is for me one of essential poets of her generation.)

The reviews of Counternarratives continue to trickle in now that we're a few weeks into 2016. One by Daniel Green is forthcoming on Kenyon Review's online, and I think it will be positive, given that he selected it as the best book of 2015. Currently online but inaccessible--to me, since neither the Rutgers or New York Public Library systems subscribe to the journal--is Alex McElroy's review, at Georgia Review. (We currently are conversing by email about the book and hope to see a copy of the review one of these says soon.) Just before the new year arrived, another online site, Wuthering Heights blog, which had previously wrestled with the book, named it to its "Best of 2015" list (you can read the prior review at the link). Lastly James Crossley of Mercer Island Books selected Counternarratives as one of his 2015 "Books to Give At the Holidays."

In the meantime, it has been encouraging to have an African American scholar, Howard Rambsy II, who teaches at Southern Illinois University and writes about black poetry and poetics, book history and textual studies, to write a bit about the book on his blog Cultural Front. Rambsy is the author of The Black Arts Enterprise and the Production of African American Poetry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), and is involved with several important scholarly and critical projects involving black literature, among them the Project on History of Black Writing, based at University of Kansas. He also served as faculty member for the Black Poetry after the Black Arts Movement Institute, about which I heard extensive praise, this past summer at KU. As Rambsy's archive list will show, he has been blogging about poetry and black writing more generally since 2008, so make sure to scroll through the trove of posts.

Howard has now posted three entries about Counternarratives. The first provides a list of some of the online coverage of the collection, helpfully aggregating many of the book's reviews. The second does something that I think is a first for this collection and which has not popped up in most of the reviews, which is to explore how the Counternarratives fits, extends and exceeds--I guess that's the right word--the African American short story tradition. As Rambsy notes, there are aesthetic links to prior black writers, some of them like Charles Chestnut and Zora Neale Hurston (though I love their work) whom I was not thinking of, and some of whom, like Richard Wright and Charles Johnson, that I was. (I would add that other black short story writers who have strongly influenced my work include James Baldwin, Toni Cade Bambara, Ernest J. Gaines, Gayl Jones, Paule Marshall, Reginald McKnight, James Alan McPherson, Alice Walker, and John Edgar Wideman, to name just a few from preceding generations.)

His third post concerns the character "Zion" from my story "An Outtake from the Ideological Origins of the American Revolution," and focuses as this protagonist as an example of the "bad man," akin to similar figures in African American folklore and popular culture, and in books by writers I deeply admire, including Tyehimba Jess, Adrian Matejka, Tony Medina, Cornelius Eady, and Rita Dove. Rambsy points out that Zion is in some ways linked to the mythical figure (High) John the Conqueror, and like him he continually eludes attempts to keep him in bondage. Yet Zion also operates on the plane of realism in that he moves through his world attempting always to experience and embody freedom, but as an enslaved black person, is denied the option, in part because he is not recognized with in the larger discursive space, as Bernard Bailyn so artfully describes in his landmark 1967 book The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, that would permit him to realize freedom as the unfolding social and political systems and practices of the society around him. His revolution is internal and considered lawless, even as it mirrors that of the larger society and of black people across the northern states. 

I imagined Zion as a fictional counterpoint to figures like Phillis Wheatley, Prince Hall, Wentworth Cheswell, and Lucy Terry, to give just a few examples of real 18th century African American pioneers. Zion, as the story makes clear, refuses to play by any rules, unlike his fellow enslaved person Jubal, because he senses that the entire system disregards and oppresses him. Moreover, there is the fact that much of his behavior parallels that of his white master and others whose actions are rationalized and permitted by the society's racialized legal, political, cultural, and social structures.  One need only look at the contemporary prison-industrial complex, the ties between capital and criminalization, and the unequal application of justice and incarceration to see that we are still living with these same systems and institutional mechanisms. I'll stop there, but I offer my deep thanks to Howard for highlighting the book, and welcome any comments from readers of his blog or this one about the book (or anything else).

Two Literary Critics: Barack Obama & Frank Kermode

The other day I came across Columbia professor and W. H. Auden scholar Edward Mendelson's short blog entry at the New York Review of Books on a critique President Barack Obama wrote while still quite young on T. S. Eliot's landmark poem "The Waste Land." (Let me say that though I decry the racially exclusive precincts of New York Review of Books, which only intermittently publishes critical reviews by or about writing by authors who are not white, I nevertheless explore its free blog site, which often offers provocative, distilled commentary by smart people on a range of current topics.) This letter has, as Mendelson notes, sparked a range of commentary, some praising the president's critical judgment and some reading it as incomplete, hasty and deficient in one way or another. It is certainly brief, and not a full essay, so any praise has to account for its partial quality. Additionally, Eliot scholars, Modernist academics and critics of Anglo-American literary might dispute its formulation of how to read and understand the St. Louis-born, High Anglican convert, poet, playwright, and essayist.

What struck me, though, to echo Mendelson, was the acuteness of the assessment, the deep understanding and ability to articulate, in concise, lapidary fashion what Eliot was wrestling with not just in "The Waste Land" but throughout his work, which scholarship over the last 50 years has increasingly revealed. The tensions between the material and sexual, on the one hand, and the spiritual, abstract and ascetic, on the other, are evident not only in a poem like "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," which opens with a sensuous simile that is also deeply suffused with the morbid--"like a patient etherized upon a table"--and which one could read as an extended negotiation between the "asexual purity" and "brutal sexual realism" (especially evident in some of his bawdy, racist college and post-graduate poetry, or in the anti-Semitic "Sweeney Among the Nightingales," which appears in Poems (1920), to give two examples) that culminates in a broken reverie culminating in the very morbidity with which the poem began--"till mermaids wake us, and we drown." (Can I also just register here how enduring strange--bizarre--Eliot's two 1920 collections, Poems and Prufrock and Other Observations are? I mean, many of these poems, at least in my reading, have lost none of their thematic and linguistic weirdness, even though they are for the most part formally retrograde at this point.)

That Obama was still a young man--a student? I did not read the David Maraniss biography from which Mendelson draws the quoted material--makes this assessment all the more remarkable. Or rather, based on my experience as a teacher of literature and a wide-ranging reader, it is rare. Even my best students for the most part would not be summarizing a work and an author so pithily. That the President, who studied political science, if I'm remembering correctly, can do so, makes it that much more impressive. Mendelson has more to say about Obama's critical reading of Eliot's form of conservatism, which was less idealist and utopian than realist and socially grounded, so I recommend reading his complete entry. It isn't "TL;dr" by any means. He concludes by speaking of his mixed feelings about Obama's tenure given his high expectations in 2008, and notes whether the "fatalism" that the president expresses in the letter, in agreement with Eliot, is even desirable in a politician.

I wonder, however, given Obama's rhetoric in his first term, during which he repeatedly expressed what I sometimes felt to be candy-colored expectations about his ability to work with the GOP, which had vowed--publicly, and we have since learned, secretly--to oppose him at every step, whether that "fatalism" was not a useful opinion that his subsequent political rise dispelled. This was a man who ran for the US Senate at a time in which only two Black people ever had been elected to that body, and in a state in which another Black person--Carole Moseley Braun--had previously been elected almost miraculously then lost her reelection bid. In that election, Obama espoused an agenda that was considerably to the left of his Democratic primary opponents, then stayed left in his policy prescriptions as he faced the Republicans, yet won in a landslide. His speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention was anything but "fatalistic"; it was almost narcotic in its optimism, and unsurprisingly elevated him in the national consciousness. He then dared to run for the presidency after only four in the Senate, knowing full well that no candidate from that house who had not also served as governor had been elected in 48 years, yet he did so against one of the most formidable candidates in politics--who is running again--and, defeating her, then went on to soundly defeat his Republican opponent--again.

One way of looking at Obama's choices would be to point to a laser-sharp opportunism, but even the most opportunistic candidate might have feared taking on Daley's Chicago machine in 2004, or Hillary Clinton in 2008. (I was fortunate enough to meet Barack Obama as he was running for the Senate, and told friends that he was the real thing, and would win in November.) What I think Mendelson misses, but what has become clear during Obama's two terms, is that for all the missteps, the triaging, the cynicism, the tinselly rhetoric that was clearly meant to be just that, the president does possess a capacity to see quite deeply into the hallmark of many issues--not all, but quite a few--and think several steps ahead, which is rare quality no matter what sort of person we're talking about. Part of this may involve calculation, in the negative sense of that word, which means that someone and some things will have to be sacrificed in favor of some larger goal, and that the particulars and niceties may be fudged, but it also has meant that for all of the GOP's opposition, Obama has pulled off a string of successes that will resonate for decades to come. To put it another way, he has been transformative, and his successes have resulted not from intuitiveness or (just) luck, but from being able to see that by achieving certain things--the Affordable Care Act, for example--a range of other things might come into being.

The fact that this is how he has operated has infuriated progressives--I am one--and upset many of his liberal supporters, but it is also the case that conservatives of the utopian kind--not Eliot's crew--and racists have been pushed to levels of rage that make the emergence of a figure like Donald Trump utterly comprehensible. He is the material emanation of that conservative rage, and whether he wins the nomination or not, his political prominence, despite his clear insufficiency for the job, is a sign not just of how effective Barack Obama has been as president, but how many of the policies resulting from his analytical skills, have proved. Whether they or his policies have proved enough is another issue, though by many objective indicators, the country is doing well, even if communities within it are still struggling. I say this not as exoneration but in a spirit of realism; to put it another way that 11th dimension chess approach that some commentators have called joked about and that the squib about Eliot makes clear has worked in some key ways, though it's also led to a blindness about other things.

This blog post's title suggests that I was going to talk not just about Barack Obama but also about the analytical skills of the late critic Frank Kermode (1919-2010), so let me conclude by pointing J's Theater readers to the essay of his that Mendelson cites, "Eliot and the Shudder," which appeared in the London Review of Books shortly before Kermode died at the age of 90. It was originally to be a lecture about William Shakespeare, to be delivered at a lecture for that publication. What resulted, however, is an astonishing piece of literary analysis, so effortless in its learning, so organic (a troublesome word these days, I know) in its argumentation, that it strikes me both as the very best model one could follow and yet almost impossible to reproduce. It is a remarkable tour (de force) of discussion about literature, aesthetics, emotion, faith, sexuality, and so much more that also gives deep insight also into how the word "shudder" itself carries particular kinds of emotional and metaphysical charges in English. This single word, Kermode shows, can convey both an involuntary physiological and emotional response as well as a profoundly sublime one. That strangeness that I noted above in Eliot's poetry is a hallmark of literary effects that can produce a "shudder" in a reader, as Kermode makes clear. A different approach on Eliot than Obama's, certainly, but in the case of both, whether in teardrop or cataract form, two readings--and minds--that, without question, show what a little thinking can do.

Quote: Alexander G. Weheliye

"I emphasize the family ties between political violence and suffering not because they are nobler or more worthy than other forms of suffering, but because they usher us away form the liberal notion of wounding that that is at the core of modern western politics and culture. Given the prominence of political violence within the histories of colonialism, indigenous genocide, racial slavery, internment, de jure segregation, and so on, black studies and other incarnations of racialized minority discourse offer pathways to distinctive understandings of suffering that serve as the speculative blueprint for new forms of humanity, which are defined above all by overdetermined conjurings of freedom. Overall, I am asking whether there exists freedom (not necessarily as a commonsensically positive category, but as a way to think what it makes possible) in this pain that most definitely cannot be reduced to mere recognition based on the alleviation of injury or redressed by the laws of the liberal state, and if said freedom might lead to other forms of emancipation, which can be imagined but not (yet) described."
- Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human, Durham: Duke University Press, 2014, pp. 14-15.

Translations: Paulo Leminski

Paulo Leminski (photo Julio Covello)

It has been eons since I've posted translations; the last, I think, were several poems by Sunjata, from French. Over the last few days, as the new year rolls in, I've been reviewing old translations I'd completed but never published, and I found a trove of translated short poems by Paulo Leminski (1944-1989), whom I've featured several times on this blog. He remains a favorite of mine. My first led to a lively conversation in the comments section with Kai hingeing on the sonorities of vowel sounds in Spanish and Portuguese and the word "dezenas" (close but distinct from "dozenas"), which led me to think even more carefully not just about Leminski's work but about translating poetry in general. I find translating poetry considerably harder but more rewarding than translating most prose (though writers deeply rooted in their native languages, like Guimarães Rosa, are more difficult or even impossible to render into another language, though people still do so).

As I wrote about Leminski before--and here I'm going to be lazy and collage parts of my previous postings--he is mostly unknown in the United States, though he is acclaimed as one of the important 20th century poets in his native Brazil. (You can scan a thorough bibliographic timeline here.) A native of Curitiba, Paraná State, he was incredibly prodigious in his brief 45 years, producing "poetry, fiction, biographies, criticism, journalistic pieces, translations, children's literature, performance scores, song lyrics, and photographs" before suffering the effects of cirrhosis of the liver. As I also wrote, "He also found time to become a martial arts master!" He apparently did not sleep.

I also wrote:

A good deal of Leminski's best known poetry is brief and linguistically playful, almost defying translation; a poem like "Ali," which turns on the Portuguese word for "there" and homonyms formed through verb juxtaposition while also referring to and riffing off the name of his second wife, "Alice," loses most of its zip in English. He also like forms such as the hakai and Leminski's work also shows affinities with the Concrete work of his good friends Haroldo (1929-2003) andAugusto de Campos (1931-). One of the best sites for translations is Edson Froes's Kamiquase: p. leminski, which features translations by Michael Palmer, Chris Daniels, and others.

Here are several of those short, linguistically playful poems, all taken from Leminskianas: antologia variada, by Paulo Leminski, with the collaboration of Maria Esther Maciel; Célia Pedrosa y André Dick and with a prologue by Mario Cámara (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Corregidor, 2005).

soprando esse bambu
só tiro
o que lhe deu o vento


breathing in this bamboo
I get only
what the wind lets through

***

mês s/ fim
vem de fora
ou de dentro
esse cheiro de jasmin?

month w/out end
it is coming from outside
or from within
this scent of jasmine?

***

a hora do tigre


um tigre
que se entigre
não é flor
que se cheire
não é tigre
que se queira
ser tigre
dura a vida
inteira


The Hour of the Tiger

a tiger
which entigers
is not a flower
it has no odor
is not a tiger
that can be desired
being tiger
lasts an entire
lifetime

***

And a slightly longer poem, about Leon and Natalia Trotsky:

El viejo León y Natalia en Coyoacán

desta vez não vai ter neve como en Petrogrado aquele dia
o céu vai estar limpo e o sol brilhando
você dormindo e eu sonhando

nem casacos nem cossacos como en Petrogrado aquele dia
apenas você nu e eu como nasci
eu dormido e você sonhando

não vai mais ter multidões gritando como en Petrogrado aquele dia
silêncio nós dois murmúrios azuis
eu e você dormindo e sonhando

nunca mais vais ter un dia como en Petrogrado aquele dia
nada como un dia indo atrás de outro vindo
você e eu sonhando e dormindo


Old Leon and Natalia in Coyoacán

this time there was going to be no snow as in Petrograd that day
the sky would be clear and the sun shining
you sleeping and I dreaming

Neither overcoats nor Cossacks like in Petrograd that day
only you and I just as I was born
Me sleeping and you dreaming

there would not be screaming multitudes as in Petrograd that day
silence we two blue murmurs
I and you asleep and dreaming

there would never be a day like those in Petrograd that day
nothing like a day departing behind another arriving
you and I in dreams and sleeping

All poems copyright © the estate of Paulo Leminski Filho, from Leminskianas: antologia variada, by Paulo Leminski, with the collaboration of Maria Esther Maciel; Célia Pedrosa y André Dick and with a prologue by Mario Cámara (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Corregidor, 2005). All translations copyright © John Keene, 2015.

RIP Natalie Cole

The new year brought with it the saddening news that the golden-voiced Natalie Cole (1950-2015) had died of congestive heart failure, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, at the age of 65. One of the most talented singers of her generation, Cole debuted in 1975 with Inseparable, which was an instant success, with both the title song and "This Will Be" charting and confirming that she was not just the daughter of one of the greatest singers of all time, Nat King Cole (1919-1965), and former Ellington Orchestra Maria Hawkins Cole, but a major talent in her own right.

Nominated 21 times for a Grammy Award and recipient of 9, Cole posted platinum-level sales several times and scored many hits, including "Sophisticated Lady," "Mr. Melody"(one of my favorites of all her songs), "I've Got Love On My Mind," "Our Love," "Miss You Like Crazy," "Pink Cadillac," "I Live for Your Love," and the remarkable "Unforgettable," her duo with her late father, which would go down as one of her most popular recordings (and LPs) of her career.

In addition to her 4-decade musical career, Cole also acted on TV and in films, and published a memoir in which she discussed her struggles with drugs and challenges from a range of illnesses throughout her career. I grew up listening to Natalie Cole as a child and have been a lifelong fan, but her record Unforgettable touched me deeply, in part because by the early 1990s I had started to re-immerse myself in jazz, and her decision, after refusing for much of her career to cover her father's songs, struck me as a gesture of tremendous grace and tribute. The result was a treasure for the entire world, like so much of Natalie Cole's music.

Here are a few videos featuring Natalie Cole. Enjoy!

Natalie Cole singing "Inseparable" and "This Will Be," November 5, 2014, Hard Rock Café.
Natalie Cole singing "Stardust," LIVE at the Singapore International Jazz Festival 2014.
Natalie Cole singing one of her father's first hits, the folk tune "Straighten Up and Fly Right," in 1991.
Natalie Cole singing "Mr. Melody" live, from Natalie Cole: Love Songs
A heartbreaking duo, featuring Natalie Cole and Whitney Houston (RIP), singing "Say A Little Prayer"
Natalie Cole, at the "Unforgettable" concert in Los Angeles, 1992 Natalie Cole's complete concert from Bergen PAC, Englewood, NJ April 25, 2014 (in 1080p/24fr).

HAPPY 2016!

Happy New Year!

Feliz año nuevo

Feliz Ano Novo

Bonne année

Buon Anno e tanti auguri

Kull 'aam wa-antum bikhayr

Aliheli'sdi Itse Udetiyvasadisv

Na MwakaMweru wi Gikeno

Feliĉan novan jaron

聖誕快樂 新年快樂 [圣诞快乐 新年快乐]

Bliain úr faoi shéan is faoi mise duit

Nava Varsh Ki Haardik Shubh Kaamnaayen

Ein gesundes neues Jahr

Mwaka Mwena

Pudhu Varusha Vaazhthukkal

Afe nhyia pa

Ufaaveri aa ahareh

Er sala we pîroz be

سال نو

С наступающим Новым Годом

šťastný nový rok

Manigong Bagong Taon sa inyong lahat

Feliç Any Nou

Yeni yılınızı kutlar, sağlık ve başarılar dileriz

نايا سال مبارک هو

Emnandi Nonyaka Omtsha Ozele Iintsikelelo

Subha Aluth Awrudhak Vewa

Chronia polla

Szczesliwego Nowego Roku

Kia pai te Tau Hou e heke mai nei

Shinnen omedeto goziamasu (クリスマスと新年おめでとうございます)

IHozhi Naghai

a manuia le Tausaga Fou

Paglaun Ukiutchiaq

Naya Saal Mubarak Ho

(International greetings courtesy of Omniglot and Jennifer's Polyglot Links; please note a few of the phrases may also contain Christmas greetings)

Counternarratives at Year's End & Blogging Honor

UPDATED!

Roughly 7 months have passed since Counternarratives appeared on bookshelves, though at times they feel like a year or more. Along the way, the collection, which has received strong reviews--only one, however, in a major daily newspaper, The Wall Street Journal (thank you, WSJ!)--also has made its way onto various "Best of 2015" lists, for which I am deeply grateful, not least because it is challenging book both aesthetically and perhaps even more so in its themes and ideas.

I want to offer my sincerest thanks to all of the book's readers and gifters, its reviewers, and its champions, who have promoted it at bookstores, in their classrooms, to friends and family members, and as one of their top selections for the year. (Thanks also to the reviewers who have written to say that reviews are forthcoming, too, in 2016!)

As a result of the books' sales, New Directions will be issuing a paperback version in 2016, which is already online at Barnes & Noble and Amazon for pre-order, though you can also urge your local bookstore to order it as well. An independent British publisher, Fitzcarraldo Editions, has purchased the rights for the UK, so it will appear there under that imprint, in a cobalt blue cover, in 2016. Their small but glittering backlist includes books by my brilliant former colleague Eula Biss, philosopher Simon Critchley, Chilean author Alejandro Zambra, and the scholar and writer Mathias Énard, winner of the 2015 Prix Goncourt.

Among the most recent "Best of Lists" the book has been fortunate to grace include:

• Conversational Reader--"Favorite Reads of 2015: #2 Counternarratives by John Keene" 
• Entropy -- "Best of 2015: Best of Fiction Books" 
• Flavorwire -- "Best Fiction of 2015" and "50 Best Independent Press Books of 2015" (This follows the earlier selection of Counternarratives as one of their "Best Books of 2015 (So Far)"
• UPDATED: Full Stop -- "Best of Reviews, 2015"
• Lambda Literary -- "Ten of this Year's Standout LGBTQ Books" 
• LitHub - "25 Best Books of the Year, According to Booksellers" 
• Mosaic Magazine -- "Best Books of 2015" 
• Slate - "The Overlooked Books of 2015" 
• Vanity Fair -- "Best Books of 2015 for Gifting...and Hoarding" (This follows their earlier selection of Counternarratives as one of their "Top Spring Picks for Parks and Picnics")

Again, to all these publications, many of the small, independent and online, and to all the booksellers, editors and reviewers who have offered praise and support, I send my deepest thanks always!

***

Although I have been blogging for a decade now and though some prior blog posts have been cited (including, as one of my former colleagues noted with dismay, because I was and am not an expert in the field, in a dissertation on dance!), this December marks the first time that a blog post of mine has received a public honor of any sort.

What am I talking about? In addition to shining the best light on Counternarratives, Flavorwire's Jonathon Sturgeon also selected my blog post (later republished in Atticus Review) "On Vanessa Place, Gone With the Wind, and the Limit Point of Certain Conceptual Aesthetics" for that site's "Best Literary Criticism of 2015."

Thanks again to Mr. Sturgeon and Flavorwire, and thanks also to the more than 11,000 readers who've read and forwarded the post!

Fall Semester's Embers

It's nearly January, which is another way of saying that the fall semester has raced past and is now over. In addition to marking my return from my spring sabbatical, this term also included my first stint as full-time chair of African American and African Studies. At the same time, as I've chronicled to some extent here, these last few months have also included a mini-book tour, which encompassed stops on both coasts. The combination--and pace--of the teaching, administration and travel has worn me out, so I'm truly grateful for the holiday break, though as I was able to share during the final course meeting with my students in "Foundations of Literary Study," the undergraduate course I taught this fall, no matter how tired I felt on the Monday following my trips or reading through a stack of papers, I experienced a surge of exhilaration once I entered the classroom. I also had the benefit of an exceptional teaching assistant, award-winning writer Drew Ciccolo, who graduated from Rutgers-Newark's MFA program and is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in American Studies at the university. To Drew, a million thanks many times over!

Although I'd taught this course once before, in the fall of 2013, I decided to update it with some new works and slightly modify my approach, using post-colonialism as our underlying theoretical approach, since it struck me as salient in light of contemporary national and global events. We looked at five genres, in the following order: creative and critical nonfiction; poetry; drama; fiction; and graphic novels. Among the new works I added were Akhil Sharma's acclaimed novel Family Life, poems by Mónica de la Torre, Monica Ong, and Edward Baugh (who read on campus this fall), and stories by Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Toni Cade Bambara, and Jaquira Díaz. I also retained components that had worked before, like the transcription-and-commentary exercise involving Emily Dickinson's texts online at the Boston Public Library's Flickr page, Shakespeare's sonnets as our introduction to the poetry unit, and Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art" to teach the fixed form of the villanelle, but added a new exercise, involving use of Google's n-gram tool, as a way of exploring the field and practice of distant reading. For a change I threw in a few pop quizzes, the first of which appeared to serve as a spur for some in the class to read a bit further in the assigned longer works than they had been.

What worked particularly well was the requirement of multiple short papers (7 in total) and research and creative exercises (4) in building up my students' critical and literary skills. The two-stage final, in which they submitted half their final papers to me in order to ensure that their arguments were on track, also worked well. For those students who failed to submit the first half of their papers, however, the results were less positive. Nevertheless, many of the final papers did show some evident improvement in some way over their authors' initial submissions in the course's early weeks, and even in those cases where the technical aspects of the writing were still shaky, I could at least perceive an improved sense of confidence in argumentation.

Emily Dickinson,
Ms. Am. 1093(3),
Boston Public Library
(Flickr.com)

To conclude the class I decided to try something new this time. Since I was teaching an intro to literary studies course for English majors, I held a book raffle of extra copies of wonderful books on my office shelf, with everyone picking a number attached to a book, and then calling out the numbers, with each student receiving a book. Since some did not show up, I allowed everyone who'd gotten a book to exchange it at the end of class. A few did, and they snapped every single poetry text (by Van Jordan, Tyehimba Jess, Allen Ginsberg, Kristiana Rae Colón, etc.), along with fiction books by Junot Díaz, Michael Lukas, and others. Sadly, no one appeared to want the volumes by Raymond Carver or Ray Bradbury!

I also asked the students to write a letter to future students, detailing what they found useful in the course and what they would change or wanted more of. (I'd just seen someone else suggest this.) I was curious to see their assessments, in order to incorporate them into future iterations of this class.
Among the comments: "I would like a bigger selection of poetry only because I love poetry and diving into poetic devices and how they're used in other forms of literature (or vice versa)." And: "I started [to] love authors like Junior Díaz and I loved reading the Shakespeare play and I wish we could have studied more on those authors, but then I would have never learned what a travel narrative is or even given a chance to graphic novels that are not comic books. Odd assignment like the Emily Dickinson [manuscript] decipherment was brilliant." And: "Thankfully we do not only read white, male, cis, heterosexual authors!" And: "Side effects may include: interest in literary research; improved writing; appreciation/admiration for what at first seemed boring; drowsiness/fascination by Roland Barthes' theory regarding 'The Death of the Author'...."

And now, it's just a matter of entering those final grades!

Edward Baugh @ Rutgers-Newark + Poems

Last Friday, poet and scholar Dr. Edward Baugh paid a visit to Rutgers-Newark. Professor Emeritus of English at the University of the West Indies, Jamaica, Baugh over the years has held many visiting posts in the US and UK, among them at UCLA and Howard University, as well as as Flinders, Macquarie, and Wollongong Universities. Baugh is widely known as ab eminent literary critic whose academic writings focused on West Indian literature, especially the study of Anglophone Caribbean poetry, and in particular the work of Nobel Laureate, Derek Walcott.

Yet throughout his scholarly career he also has been a poet of note, and it was in that capacity that he came to campus from Jamaica as part of the Department of African American and African Studies' lecture series, with the co-sponsorship of the English Department and the MFA Program in Creative Writing. Also key to his visit was support from my colleague Rachel Hadas, who not only helped to organize and provided key financial sponsorship for his reading, but also hosted Dr. Baugh during his visit. (While in New York and New Jersey, Dr. Baugh also visited Ramapo College under the auspices of Professor Shalom Gorewitz, Rachel's husband.)

As part of his visit, I offered introductory remarks, excerpted below. The reading, Q&A and reception drew a strong crowd that included many Rutgers-Newark colleagues and students. My English and African American Studies colleague Belinda Edmondson, a noted Caribbeanist scholar is, I believe, one of his former students. Also attending was Baugh's longtime friend, multimedia artist, poet and arts activist Gerd Stern, one of the founders of the legendary arts collective USCO. Stern, I learned, had maintained a home for decades in Jamaica, which is where he befriended Baugh.

A snippet of my remarks:

Edward Baugh's poetry disarms with a quiet power. It does not indulge in rhetorical flashiness or imagistic legerdermain, but rather draws upon the poet's commitment to careful observation and an engagement with the flow of daily life. 

It is poetry very much of its time and place, of the Jamaica of Baugh's lifetime, and indeed of his life, flavored with everyday speech and the tonalities of the contemporary lyric, but also it is a cosmopolitan poetry that casts a net out to and hauls in perspectives from the wider world, the black and diasporic worlds, the worlds of literature itself. 

It is a poetry brimming with wit, sometimes machete-sharp, and an ear keenly attuned to the resonant subtleties of language's possibilities that can recut the edges on a copper. In "You Ever Notice How," from his 2000 collection It Was the Singing, Baugh writes

 And is always the same, check me again
 tomorrow night, same time, same square,
 different set of players, different
 colour costume, but the same script,
 different maximum, but the same
 two left feet missing the beat. 

And, in "Words," a heart-breaking poem about his mother's illness and how she shaped his own love of language, from that same collection, he writes:

                         She sits
 rigid with pain, too proud to ask
 if there is any word of relief.
 In the silence between us
 you can hear the metastases multiply.

These are words that do profound work, revealing for and reminding us of poetry's many powers, one of which is portraying the world around us, while another is to reveal what lies deep inside it, and us. 

Copyright © 2015, John Keene

Here are two brief poems by Edward Baugh, one rather light and one quite serious, from his most recent collection, Black Sand. They offer only a glimpse of his work, which I recommend, so do consider adding Black Sand to your collection. He is the author of three collections of poetry, including A Tale from the Rainforest and It Was the Singing. His other publications include Derek Walcott: Memory as Vision and Frank Collymore: a Biography, as well as the edited volumes Critics on Caribbean Literature; Derek Walcott's Another Life (ed. with Colbert Nepaulsingh); and Derek Walcott's Selected Poems.

ON BEING MISTAKEN FOR EDDIE BRATHWAITE, THERE BEING OF COURSE NO SUCH PERSON, AND WITH APOLOGIES TO J. ALFRED PRUFROCK

No, I am not
Eddie Brathwaite
nor was meant to be
and anyhow
he's Kamau now
while I remain
just plain
Eddie

***

NIGHTWALKER

When they asked James Meredith
what it was like to be
the first black student at Ole Miss,
he replied: "It's like you walk in the dark
and a bird flutters in the bush.
I have walked in the dark
and bird is always fluttering."

Both poems copyright © Edward Baugh, from Black Sand: New and Selected Poems (Peepal Tree Press, 2013). All rights reserved.

Recent Travels/Book Tour

In Pratt Library's window

It is hard to believe we are nearing the end of the semester, but in a few weeks Thanksgiving will arrive, followed by the last few classes and final papers, and the term will be a wrap. Like prior falls this one has raced by, but the speed has assumed a barreling quality because of the trips to promote Counternarratives, with body underneath the fast-moving cask. Now whenever I get on a plane I wonder in all seriousness how I ever commuted for ten years to and from Chicago, though I must add that when I first started at Northwestern, which was in the immediate post-9/11 moment (2002), dealing with airport security and TSA was nowhere as enervating and exhausting as it is today. It has nevertheless been a joy and honor to be able to read from and promote the book in different cities.

The beach in Santa Cruz

Those giant redwoods on
UCSC's campus

Karen Tei Yamashita tagging
in the restaurant

At the utterly chaotic LAX

In late September, I headed to Baltimore and Washington. In Charm City, Judy Cooper hosted me at the Enoch Pratt Free Library for a reading and Q&A, so many thanks to her and everyone at Pratt (including past Prattizen Reggie H. who made the reading possible). I drew a small but enthusiastic audience, met a number of people, including broadcaster Melvin Lewis, and sold and signed books. Judy and everyone at Pratt were a joy to work with from start to finish. The next day at the invitation of Dr. Meta DuEwa Jones, a professor of English at Howard University, I read to and spoke with one of her classes. It was so encouraging to receive the warm reception and I got to meet several budding writers studying with Meta, a scholar and writer I deeply respect and admire, as well as some of her great colleagues. She was the consummate host from the time I arrived at Union Station until she dropped me. This was an Amtrak trip, and I give it the highest ratings in every category. (Years ago, from 2001-2, I commuted via Amtrak and Greyhound, so I've seen both at their best and worst too.) If only, I thought as I often do when I experience a smooth train ride, we had a real high-speed trans-national rail system. If only!

Steve Dickison

Reading at the Poetry Center at SFSU

With Tan Khanh Cao at City Lights

Three weeks later, after the trip to Detroit for Fire & Ink IV: Witness, I headed to the University of California-Santa Cruz to read at the invitation of the utterly brilliant and dear poet and critic Dr. Ronaldo V. Wilson, as part of their "Living Writers Series." Again I was fortunate in my host, as Ronaldo made sure things ran very smoothly, including deputizing one of his talented undergraduate writing students, Oscar Del Toro, to meet me at San Jose Airport. As part of the visit I met with Ronaldo's poetry class, who shared their poetry with me, before we discussed Seismosis and writing in general. As part of the visit I read from Counternarratives, and sold and signed books, always a pleasure. Ronaldo, who was a delight to hang out with, gave me a little driving tour of Santa Cruz, whose giant redwood trees I cannot get out of my head, and one of the highlights of the visit was meeting the great Karen Tei Yamashita and her Brazilian husband, Ronaldo, as well as other colleagues of Ronaldo's like Chris Chen, his smart and friendly graduate students, and some of the writers who had traveled down from the Bay Area to attend the reading, like Jaze. I also thought about Angela Davis and her presence on this campus while I was there. We also had the experience of a black staff person stopping Ronaldo and me as we walked down a hallway to comment on how rare it was for her to see two black men walking together on campus, so that she had to note this. I appreciated that moment of recognition and connection. A wonderful trip, especially because I of how much fun I had with Ronaldo, and I have promised myself I will not blather on about how beautiful Santa Cruz is. But it is--go see it!

You know where

C and Tonya

At Green Apple Books

Tan, I and Stephen introducing us

Offering an answer

The following week C and I headed to San Francisco for several events,   under the auspices of the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University. Though I had never read in their series I actually had interviewed aeons ago--shortly after I received my MFA--at San Francisco State, so it was wonderful to be able to return almost two decades later with a new book to share there. Our host was poet and professor Steve Dickison, who from the time he met us at the airport was a shepherd of the best kind. Our first night we stayed in a gentrified neighborhood right on the edge of Golden Gate Park, then we moved to a hotel in downtown San Francisco, right on Union Square, which allowed us to do a little sightseeing and shopping. I had a desire for tunic-style shirts and sweatshirts, and San Francisco was able to oblige me. The reading on Thursday at the Poetry Center drew a full crowd, including Maxine Chernoff, whom I hadn't seen since that interview in the 1990s; Paul Hoover, with whom I once broke bread in Rhode Island and whom I would see from time to time in Chicago; the warm and talented Robert Ricardo Reese; and one of my favorite people, Tonya Foster, who now teaches at the Californi College of the Arts in SF. I also got to meet some local writers and poets, including Brandon Brown and George Albon, who shared with me a copy of his book Fire Break (Nightboat Books). I am leaving out several other people, so I apologize, but it was an afternoon I won't forget for a while.

A full house

Tan

Signing books and chatting
with one of the booksellers

That night Steve, Tonya, C, and I went out to House of Nanking, a restaurant I'd hoped one day to return to, because the food was so good. It is still standing around the corner and down the street from City Lights Books--where we stopped in after our meal and dessert--and just as yummy. Ask for the special menu too! At City Lights, I finally got to meet Tan Khanh Cao, a consummate bookseller, artist and brilliant person inside and out, with whom I would be in conversation the following night at Green Apple Books. I loved meeting Tan, and got such a good vibe that I knew things would go well at Green Apple. Of course I had to be disabused of the notion that the store was in Oakland (???), but we got there without a problem via Uber, spending a little time with Tan, Steve, Susan Gevirtz and others (including Paul from City Lights) before the reading. At Green Apple the room was packed, and the audience was truly enthusiastic. Among those present were Green Apple's Stephen Sparks, who introduced us and who has been a champion of Counternarratives from day one; Brad Johnson, from Oakland's Diesel Books, who wrote one of the best reviews of the book; one of my most amazing former students, Tai Little; translator Katrina Dodson; and the dazzling critic Aaron Bady, whom I knew from Twitter. I didn't get to say hello to my former college poetry classmate, Joseph Lease, and his wife Donna de la Perrière, becuase they jetted as I was signing books, but I was so glad to know they were there (I spotted Joseph's nimbus of hair from a distance). The dialogue with Tan flowed easily and was such a pleasure; I believe it's on tape and will be live soon, so I'll post a link when that happens. There were even two St. Louisans present, a lovely young couple whom I got to ask the St. Louis question, "Where did you go to high school." (SLUH and Nerinx Hall, and she was from Webster Groves too--go figure!) Afterwards a large group headed to a local bar and had a great time. While we were in San Francisco C and I got to see my former colleague, the extraordinary Jennifer DeVere Brody, who is flourishing and made our day. I returned to JC and classes a little tired but also still soaring from the wonderful trip.

At the bar, with Aaron Bady, Brad (at left),
Stephen (in the plaid shirt) and others

Paul and others

C smiling (Katrina Dodson directly
in center at back)

To ALL my hosts, to all who made these readings possible in any way, to all who came out for the readings, to all who have bought and read copies of Counternarratives or given them as gifts, I offer my DEEPEST THANKS ALWAYS! Thank you, thank you, thank you!