Tuesday Round-Up

Today WBEZ's Worldview devoted its program to the plight of displaced Afro-Colombians, who make up at least 1/3rd (or more) of that country's population and who are among the most severely affected by their government's and the rightist militias' battle with the leftist rebels. It was an excellent program, and the archive should post later today or tomorrow.

There's more information on the Association of Displaced Afro-Colombians
at: Chicagoans for a Peaceful Colombia.

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Tomorrow at 9 pm EST USA Today will air Dan Klores' and Ron Berger's Ring of Fire, on former world-champion boxer Emile Griffith (pictured at left with his son, Luis, in a photo by Clay Patrick McBride), who in 1962 pummeled Cuban boxer Benny "Kid" Paret in their third fight, after which Paret subsequently died. Griffith's in-the-ring fury, some commentators have suggested, was fueled by Paret's anti-gay epithets against him before that and previous matches. Gary Smith pens an illuminated and sympathetic article on Griffith's fascinating, complex and often difficult life in the April 12, 2005 edition of Sports Illustrated, and Klores talked to Susan Stamberg about the film, and Griffith, this past weekend on NPR's Weekend Edition. The site also includes clips of the final Paret-Griffith fight. (Incredible note: Griffith's adopted stepson, Luis Rodrigo, and Paret's son Benny Jr. work side-by-side.)

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The announcement of the new pope, the ultrareactionary Joseph Ratzinger, a former Nazi Youth member and the author of the virulently homophobic "The Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons" in 1986, pre-empted the regular programming on my local NPR station today. I was pissed by WBEZ's action, though I do understand them deeming this a newsworthy announcement, since the man will lead an global organization comprising some 1 billion people. The choice, as the German theologian Hans Küng noted, was "medieval"; Ratzinger, now fashioning himself Benedict XVI (ironic, of course, given that the last Benedict was a peacemaker), made clear his intentions in a homily this past Monday that denounced "Marxism, liberalism...libertinism...radical individualism, atheism and vague mysticism" and even other Christian faiths. And he presided over the half-hearted response to the priestly child sex-abuse scandals of several years ago. (Somewhere I read there were over 1,000 reports just this past year.) Finally it's unlikely he'll change the church's stand on condom use as one method of AIDS prevention, especially in parts of Africa, where it's been shown to be effective. Could there have been a more retrograde choice? Perhaps the cardinals themselves were being ironic; this choice could so totally backfire, driving more Westerners and Latin Americans out of the church and into others that the next pope would have to focus on the notions of evangelism, ecumenism and Christian "love"....

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Today is the 10th anniversary of one of the worst right-wing terrorist attacks on American soil, Timothy McVeigh's and Terry Nichol's bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. If you can, please honor those who were slain and their families by observing a moment of silence. I've never been to the memorial, but want to visit it someday.

Poetry Cavalcade: Pre-1800

So far in my poetry posts I've covered somewhat of a broad linguistic and geographical base, but outside of Whitman I've stayed almost completely in the 20th and 21st centuries.

So here are some poems I love from the more distant past (from the Metaphysical poets to the early Romantics, and including Wheatley and two of the greatest Japanese poets, Bashô and Issa) that I've encountered over the years.

The Triple Fool

by John Donne (1572-1631)

I am two fools, I know—
For loving, and for saying so
In whining poetry;
But where's that wiseman that would not be I,
If she would not deny?
Then, as th' earths inward narrow crooked lanes
Do purge sea waters fretful salt away,
I thought, if I could draw my pains
Through rhymes vexation, I should them allay.
Grief brought to numbers cannot be so fierce,
For he tames it that fetters it in verse.

But when I have done so,
Some man, his art and voice to show,
Doth set and sing my pain,
And, by delighting many, frees again
Grief, which verse did restrain.
To Love and Grief tribute of verse belongs,
But not of such as pleases when 'tis read;
Both are increased by such songs,
For both their triumphs so are published;
And I, which was two fooles, do so grow three;
Who are a little wise, the best fools be.

Sonnet 30 (When to the sessions of sweet silent thought)

by William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored and sorrows end.

Love (III)

by George Herbert (1593-1633)

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey'd Love, observing me grow slack,
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If I lack'd anything.

A guest, I answer'd, worthy to be here:
Love said, You shall be he.
I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
Who made the eyes but I?

Truth Lord, but I have marr'd them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
My dear, then I will serve.
You must sit down, says Love, and tast me meat:
So I did sit and eat.

Don't Imitate Me

by Bashô Matsuo (1644-1694)

Don't imitate me;
it's as boring
as the two halves of a melon.

Stay, Shadow of My Love

by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648-1695)

Stay, shadow of my love, untamed,
reflection of the charm I treasure most,
illusion beautiful by which entranced I die,
sweet fraudulence by which in pain I live.

If to the powerful magnet of your gifts
my breast becomes submissive steel,
why cast your coaxing spell on me
then teasingly take to heel?

No bending to your despotic sway
can nurse your swaggering content;
for though you mock the closest tie

that bonded your imagined form,
it little counts to dodge my breast and arms
when once you're in the irons my dream forged.

Translation © by Michael Smith

To S. M. a young African Painter, on seeing his Works.

by Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784)

To show the lab'ring bosom's deep intent,
And thought in living characters to paint,
When first thy pencil did those beauties give,
And breathing figures learnt from thee to live,
How did those prospects give my soul delight,
A new creation rushing on my sight?
Still, wond'rous youth! each noble path pursue,
On deathless glories fix thine ardent view:
Still may the painter's and the poet's fire
To aid thy pencil, and thy verse conspire!
And may the charms of each seraphic theme
Conduct thy footsteps to immortal fame!
High to the blissful wonders of the skies
Elate thy soul, and raise thy wishful eyes.
Thrice happy, when exalted to survey
That splendid city, crown'd with endless day,
Whose twice six gates on radiant hinges ring:
Celestial Salem blooms in endless spring.
Calm and serene thy moments glide along,

And may the muse inspire each future song!
Still, with the sweets of contemplation bless'd,
May peace with balmy wings your soul invest!
But when these shades of time are chas'd away,
And darkness ends in everlasting day,
On what seraphic pinions shall we move,
And view the landscapes in the realms above?
There shall thy tongue in heav'nly murmurs flow,
And there my muse with heav'nly transport glow:
No more to tell of Damon's tender sighs,
Or rising radiance of Aurora's eyes,
For nobler themes demand a nobler strain,
And purer language on th' ethereal plain.
Cease, gentle muse! the solemn gloom of night
Now seals the fair creation from my sight.

In This World

by Issa Kobayashi (1763-1828)

In this world
we walk on the roof of hell,
gazing at flowers.

The Presence of Love

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

And in Life's noisiest hour,
There whispers still the ceaseless Love of Thee,
The heart's Self-solace and soliloquy.
______________________

You mould my Hopes, you fashion me within ;
And to the leading Love-throb in the Heart
Thro' all my Being, thro' my pulses beat ;
You lie in all my many Thoughts, like Light,
Like the fair light of Dawn, or summer Eve
On rippling Stream, or cloud-reflecting Lake.
And looking to the Heaven, that bends above you,
How oft ! I bless the Lot, that made me love you.

Mutability

by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;
How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver,
Streaking the darkness radiantly! -yet soon
Night closes round, and they are lost for ever:

Or like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings
Give various response to each varying blast,
To whose frail frame no second motion brings
One mood or modulation like the last.

We rest. -- A dream has power to poison sleep;
We rise. -- One wandering thought pollutes the day;
We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep;
Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away:

It is the same! -- For, be it joy or sorrow,
The path of its departure still is free:
Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;
Nought may endure but Mutablilty.

On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer

by John Keats (1795-1821)

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific--and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise--
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Ada Halofsky on Hackett

A good friend and very talented scribe, Ada Lee Halofsky, often writes and produces short pieces for NPR-affiliated programs. Today she broadcast a short profile on the artist Hackett (at right, in a photo by Ada), which can be found online on Minnesota Public Radio's Sound Money "Day in the Work Life" site.

A while back, when browing the Artnet.com magazine pages, I'd come across Hackett's intense photo (taken by Mary Barone at a Deitch Project opening), and immediately saw that we favored each other, from the wild locks to the gray-threaded goattee to our bridgeless noses, though his gaze, particularly in that Barone photo, is a lot more penetrating (those eyes are sending out rays!) than my own. In short, as I my partner Curtis and I agreed, I was looking at my quasi-doppelgänger.

This recognition led me to look out for Hackett's work and learn more about him, but until Ada's audio piece, with its accompanying photographs, I hadn't seen any of it. Now I have. You also can see Hackett's work at the Madagascar Institute site, a Brooklyn-based art combine he belongs to. It's wild--check it out!

Saturday Links

I'm off to an Asian American Studies conference taking place this weekend, so in lieu of a post, here're two links to articles that caught my attention in today's New York Times (both articles require registration):

Carlos Villalon for The New York Times Brian Zuñiga, 12, has completed more than three years at Colegio del Cuerpo, a contemporary-dance academy in Cartagena.

"Kicking up Hope," by Juan Forero. This article looks at Colégio de Cuerpo, a modern/avant-garde dance school for poor, predominantly Afro-colombian children founded by dancer Álvaro Restrepo in Cartagena, a city on Colombia's Caribbean coast. Forero's article notes that the school is held in low regard by the Colombian élites, both because of its dance focus and because of the mostly poor, black student body drawn from a shantytown, containing many civil war refugees, called Nelson Mandela, but he goes on to show how it has made a tremendous impact--economic, social, artistic, psychological--in the lives of its participants and their families. Always the battle for our people, siempre la lucha!

"Door to Door Search for a Killer Virus in Angola" by Sharon Lafraniere and Denise Grady. This heartbreaking piece explores the terrible outbreak of Marburg virus in Uíge, Angola, and the struggles of the non-governmental health officials and workers to address the problem in the face of the Angolan government's ongoing inaction and indifference, and the local population's belief systems and deep distrust of outsiders. It's a tragedy that right now appears to have no end unless the leadership in Luanda, which has yet to recover from the decades-long UNITA insurgency, decides to make confronting the outbreak a priority.

Evelyn Hockstein/Polaris, for The New York Times Health workers decontaminated the body of Louiza Nevish Bati, 23, who died of the Marburg virus, and wrapped it in a protective shroud.

Booklist + Enlaces actuales + Cavafy Poems

¿Donde el tiempo? Today, dropping into one of my favorite Chicago bookshops, with Tan Lin, who was visiting the university and who gave an amazing talk and presentation on his ambient stylistics (Blip Soak 01, the video pieces, the generic long poem, the forthcoming novel), I found the following books, which I'm looking forward to reading:

• Cortijo's Wake/El entierro de Cortijo, by Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá, translated by Juan Flores (I grab anything I find by him, and this book, about Puerto Rico's most important 20th century bomba y plena pioneer, and by extension, the lives and culture of Afroricans, was one I couldn't dare pass up; I still want to translate Peloteros, which has a chapter titled something like "Dreaming of Bob Gibson")
• For Years Now: Poems by W. G. Sebald, Images by Tess Jaray (fluffy but pretty; Sebald obviously wrote these poems while in deep REM sleep, but so what?)
• Joseph Beuys: Early Drawings (I haven't yet grown tired of him)
• Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (Lakoff provided one of the emprical lingustic memes for the Democrats, and has been slapped about a bit as a result but his work is solid and this book called out to me from its shelf).

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On the New Statesman site, critic, inveterate Marxist, University of Manchester don and After Theory author Terry Eagleton keenly reviews Pascale Casanova's The World Republic of Letters, a volume I mentioned in my booklist last month. I've enjoyed reading it quite a bit, though one aspect of its argument is, unsurprisingly given that Casanova is Paris-based, too Francocentric to be convincing. Some of its analyses, however, particularly of writers from the periphery or margins, and their usefulness to various political or social arguments, are persuasive, and it has made me rethink to some extent the global nature of literature and how it functions.

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A few days ago I came across this cool omnibus site, Mark Rosenfelder's Metaverse, which has links of a vast array of things, from Jaime Hernandez's Love and Rockets to a model languge constructure kit to science and science fiction critiques, to an article on the nutty, still living Jean Baudrillard (who actually once did get things right with his theory of the simulacrum, though much else in his thought still strikes me as a bad, wet dream/nightmare about America that he hasn't been able to stop transcribing). How did he manage to outlast Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Raymond Aron, and Pierre Bourdieu?

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NEA Head Dana Gioia, whose poetry and politics usually turn my stomach, makes a sincere but not forceful enough plea, I think, in today's Boston Globe (which has just found itself in a Jayson Blairesque moment concerning a fake report on a seal kill) on behalf of increasing and nurturing readers, especially readers of literature among our fellow Americans. I previously had linked to the NEA's report on "Reading at Risk," which is grim, grim, grim, and something every imaginative writer and person who cares about society and humanity needs to take to heart. I wish Gioia had stated his remarks with more urgency, perhaps by saying that as a poet, he depended upon more current and future readers (with no aesthetic sense, but that's another story), and, more importantly, the lack of reading is endangering our society and helping the wackos clustered around the party he supports to flourish out there. If more of these people actually read, let's say, oh, the actual text of the four Gospels, for example, we might not see the hatred and bigotry that pass for righteousness among. (Well, it's doubtful, but what's a little optimism in a time of war?)

For example, the late Theresa Schiavo's vigilists might start with Matthew 6:5-7: "And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly. But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking." Even I remember having read and comprehended that much in theology classes (though in the Jerusalem Bible's modern version at Catholic school).

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Since MS mentioned Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933)--a poet I return to more and more as I get older--in his post on the Ashbery poem, I'll post two Cavafy poems for today.

HE CAME TO READ

He came to read --
He came to read. Two or three books
are open; historians and poets.
But he only read for ten minutes,
and gave them up. He is dozing
on the sofa. He is fully devoted to books --
but he is twenty-three years old, and he's very handsome;
and this afternoon love passed
through his ideal flesh, his lips.
Through his flesh which is full of beauty
the heat of love passed;
without any silly shame for the form of the enjoyment.....

Constantine P. Cavafy (1924)

REMEMBER, BODY

Body, remember not only how much you were loved,
not only the beds on which you lay,
but also those desires which for you
plainly glowed in the eyes,
and trembled in the voice -- and some
chance obstacle made them futile.
Now that all belongs to the past,
it is almost as if you had yielded
to those desires too -- remember,
how they glowed, in the eyes looking at you;
how they trembled in the voice, for you, remember, body.

Constantine P. Cavafy (1918)

Poems: Deguy's "Who What" + John Ashbery's "My Erotic Double"

More poems (hey, it is National Poetry Month, so I'm doing my part!), since I don't have time to post right now.

Two poets from parallel worlds, Michel Deguy, a Frenchman born in 1930, and one of the leading establishment figures in his country and in European poetry, and and John Ashbery, an American born in 1927, and arguably the most influential living American poet. Both poems have a bit of erotic bite, though the second is obviously more light-hearted playful.

First, Michel Deguy's

QUI QUOI

Il y a longtemps que tu n’existes pas
Visage quelquefois célèbre et suffisant
Comment je t’aime Je ne sais Depuis longtemps
Je t’aime avec indifférence Je t’aime à haine
Par omission par murmure par lâcheté
Avec obstination Contre toute vraisemblance
Je t’aime en te perdant pour perdre
Ce moi qui refuse d’être des nôtres entraîné
De poupe (ce balcon chantourné sur le sel)
Ex-qui de dos traîné entre deux eaux
Maintenant quoi
Bouche punie
Bouche punie cœur arpentant l’orbite
Une question à tout frayant en vain le tiers


WHO WHAT

For a long time you have been nonexistent
A face sometimes famous and sufficient unto itself
How I love you I don’t know For a long time
I have loved you with indifference I love you to hatred
By omission by murmur out of cowardice
Obstinately Against all probability
I love you losing you to lose
I who refuse to be ours dragged
From stern (a balcony jig-sawed on salt)
Ex-who dragged backwards between two waters
Now what
Mouth punished
Mouth punished heart pacing the orbit
A question to all vainly opening up third party

Copyright (c) 1973, Michel Deguy.
© Translation: 2004, Anne Talvaz.

§§§


Next, John Ashbery's

MY EROTIC DOUBLE

He says he doesn't feel like working today.
It's just as well. Here in the shade
Behind the house, protected from street noises,
One can go over all kinds of old feeling,
Throw some away, keep others.
The wordplay
Between us gets very intense when there are
Fewer feelings around to confuse things.
Another go-round? No, but the last things
You always find to say are charming, and rescue me
Before the night does. We are afloat
On our dreams as on a barge made of ice,
Shot through with questions and fissures of starlight
That keep us awake, thinking about the dreams
As they are happening. Some occurrence. You said it.

I said it but I can hide it. But I choose not to.
Thank you. You are a very pleasant person.
Thank you. You are too.

Copyright (c) 1981, 2005, John Ashbery, all rights reserved.

Poems: Thylias Moss's "Staking Territory" + Nancy Morejón's "Impressions"

Because I'm feeling overwhelmed today, and because I love their work, poems by two exceptional contemporary poets, Thylias Moss (1954-) and the Nancy Morejón (1940-).

STAKING TERRITORY

by Thylias Moss

My husband gives up and goes to bed without
me, leaving the windows, the only paintings we
hung, to myself. At night, I look out and see
endlessness that makes me crave the finitude that
really is mine. The best boxers train by punching
through plate glass.

My husband is graying at the temples, turning into
concrete, giving me a more solid foundation for
worship. At St. Paul's, the cracked walls testify
that a growing holiness is splitting the seams.
The lone dollar in the collection plate lacks a means
to amplify its testimony.

Men walk down the boulevard carrying sides of beef.
No one is without an escort. The tiems do not permit
private ventures. The roadway's after-rainfall sheen
says slick operation, scam, hustle. Only snakes
have tongues as long as this road. The sole of a big
inconsiderate shoe.

The bus stop is a metal lollipop. Accepting
this candy from an estranged city is wrong.
Just in time the bus comes, a metal loaf, and
not the chariot. The night is a great map, takes
you to any dark place you want to go.

Copyright (c) 2005, Thylias Moss, all rights reserved.

IMPRESSIONS

by Nancy Morejón

Cold penetrates our feet
and the rose’s urgency
moves us, being born.
We are in a large dam
and the papers of the universe
whirl before those
flame tree leaves
that shade us in summer.
Lovers, struck by sun,
fling themselves
to the floor of a boat,
breathing with valves
moistened by sea wind
from the South.
A timid breeze appears
and our ear, it laughs for eternity.

Copyright (c) 2005, by Nancy Morejón, all rights reserved.
Translated by Kathleen Weaver.

Exhibits & Performances Round-Up + O'Hara Poems

New York

Tomorrow, Art in General Gallery in Tribeca (79 Walker Street, New York, NY) will feature Federico Marandula, a DJ at Columbia University's WKCR radio station, performing selections from his soundwork "Radio Incorporea." Marandula is jointly producing the work with Brazilian artist Paulo Vivacqua, who's the current Audio in the Elevator artist at Art in General. The event is free.

At the Matthew Marks Gallery, till April 23, 2005, there's an exhibit of the artworld's chief explorer of the materialist uncanny, Robert Gober. Although Roberta Smith in her March 25, 2005 NY Times Review said that "Mr. Gober has turned the Marks gallery into a kind of church," he hasn't departed from his signature effects; "through the nearly closed doors of those chambers, we see the legs of a figure (male in one, female in the other) seated in a bathtub with water running from its handmade pewter faucet." Yikes!


Untitled, by Chris Ofili

On April 27, 2005, two new exhibits go up at the Studio Museum in Harlem (144 West 125th Street): Bill Traylor, William Edmondson, and the Modernist Impulse, and Chris Ofili Afro Muses. This is a sweet pairing of simultaneous exhibits: two "folk" artists, Traylor and Edmondson, being resituated within the context of modernism, and a rare solo exhibit of watercolors by one of the most important and controversial younger artists today.

Chicago

In Chicago this upcoming weekend, in the final AfroContempo performance of the season, Ronald K. Brown/Evidence will be dancing at the Columbia College Dance Center (1306 S. Michigan Ave). The announced works include the new Come Ye (set to a Fela Kuti and Nina Simone score), as well as his masterpiece Grace. I'm going to try to catch this if I can.

Also continuing through this weekend (through April 20, 2005) is the 21st Chicago Latino Film Festival, at various venues across the city. One of the films I want to see is Boricua, set and filmed right here in Chicago. Marisol Torres is the screenwriter and director. A film I've seen but wouldn't recommend is Carlos Diegues's Orfeu, a 2000 update of one of Brazil's best known films, Marcel Camus's 1959 classic Orfeu Negro. Diegues transposes the story to a Rio favela and has Cidade Negra star Tony Garrido in the lead role, but doesn't really figure out how to make the new setting, new plot or his actors work. It's brightly shot, though.

Secret Service Visit Chicago Gallery

Speaking of the Dreary City, in today's Sun-Times (a tabloid rag that gives the NY Daily News a run for its money), there's an article on a very disturbing story I heard today on NPR: the US Secret Service's overblown response to an artwork in a Columbia College Glass Curtain Gallery exhibit, "Axis of Evil: A Secret History of Sin." After a "citizen's anonymous tip," two Secret Service agents arrived before the opening of the exhibit and demanded to speak with the exhibit curator, stamp artist Michael Hernandez de Luna because of a work by Al Brandtner in the exhibit, titled "Patriot Act." The patriotic anonymous tipster thought the work was threatening the gopResident, W Ltd. Bush. (It depicts a sheet of stamps, with one them showing a gun to the W Ltd.'s noggin, and a detail is visible on the gallery site, linked above.) The Secret Service agents hyperbolically demanded the personal information of all the artists in the exhibit, and the Glass Curtain Gallery's director CarolAnn Brown refused to provide them, thankfully. But we know this mess isn't over. As for the dutiful, patriotic "citizen," well, s/he's probably making Erich Honecker's ghost pretty envious right now.... There's more in the Columbia College Chronicle, which details the pre-exhibit controversy as well. The exhibit runs through May 11, and I won't be missing it!

:: :: ::
:: :: ::

An appropriate accompaniment for the listings, poems by the great writer, critic and curator Frank O'Hara (1926-1966), another of my favorite poets and a true American original:

WHY I AM NOT A PAINTER

by Frank O'Hara

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,
for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

Copyright (c) 1966, 2005, the Estate of Frank O'Hara, all rights reserved.

CALL ME

The eager note on my door said "Call me,
call when you get in!" so I quickly threw
a few tangerines into my overnight bag,
straightened my eyelids and shoulders, and

headed straight for the door. It was autumn
by the time I got around the corner, oh all
unwilling to be either pertinent or bemused, but
the leaves were brighter than grass on the sidewalk!

Funny, I thought, that the lights are on this late
and the hall door open; still up at this hour, a
champion jai-alai player like himself? Oh fie!
for shame! What a host, so zealous! And he was

there in the hall, flat on a sheet of blood that
ran down the stairs. I did appreciate it. There are few
hosts who so thoroughly prepare to greet a guest
only casually invited, and that several months ago.

Copyright (c) 2005, the Estate of Frank O'Hara, all rights reserved.


Ashbery, O'Hara, Southgate, Berkson, and Koch
Photo © Mario Schifano, 1964
Image reproduction © Jacket Magazine

Poem: Aimé Césaire + Appomattox Court House + Cecil Taylor

For today an excerpt of one of the 20th century's greatest long poems, written by another of my favorite poets, the great 94-year-old Martinican former schoolteacher and politician Aimé Césaire (1913-), who with the poet and later first president of Senegal Léopold Sédar Senghor and the French Guyanese writer Léon G. Damas formulated the concept and movement of négritude in Paris in the 1930s, which materialized initially in the creation of the literary review L'etudiant noir.

Césaire, who coined the term négritude, completed Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to My Native Land) in 1939 (though it wasn't published in full until 1947); the poem immediately gained recognition as one of the significant poetic achievements of its generation; combining the aesthetic techniques of surrealism with an emphasis on African and Caribbean subject matter, with in a tone of furious lyric authority and oracular subjectivity that burns through the entire poem.

Césaire has subsequently published many other books of poetry, including a number of important politically charged collections, and, in 1955, Discours sur la colonialisme (Discourse on Colonialism, for which Robin D. G. Kelley wrote an outstanding introduction for the 2000 edition), which strongly influenced his former student Frantz Fanon. Édouard Glissant, one of the leading Caribbean intellectuals and theorist of post-coloniality and antillanité, was another of his students. In the late 1950s, he began writing plays, another genre in which he excelled; among his major plays include The Tragedy of King Christophe, on the Haitian leader; A Season in the Congo, on the late Zairean leader Patrice Lumumba; and a post-colonial adaptation of The Tempest. Césaire also served as Mayor of Fort-de-France, the capital of Martinique, and as a member of the French Assembly, from 1945-1993, using his position as a platform to demand improvements for the people of Martinique (Patrick Chamoiseau, the Martinican author of the magnum opus Texaco has critiqued the dependency this created) and for Third World liberation.

Now, to the excerpt from his poem, which I found online (I don't have my copy of the volume with me in Chicago), translated by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith, which I slightly altered:

From Notebook of a Return on My Native Land

At the end of daybreak. . .
Beat it, I said to him, you cop, you lousy pig, beat it,
I detest the flunkies of order and the cockroaches of hope.
Beat it, evil gris-gris, you bedbug of a petty monk. Then I turned
toward paradises lost for him and his kin, calmer than the face
of a woman telling lies, and there, rocked by the flux of a
never exhausted thought I nourished the wind, I unlaced the
monsters and heard rise, from the other side of disaster, a
river of turtle doves and savannah clover which I carry forever
in my depths height-deep as the twentieth floor of the most
arrogant houses and as a guard against the putrefying force
of crepuscular surroundings, surveyed night and day by a cursed
venereal sun.

At the end of daybreak burgeoning with frail coves, the hungry
Antilles, the Antilles pitted with smallpox, the Antilles dyn-
amited by alcohol, stranded in the mud of this bay, in the dust
of this town sinisterly stranded.

At the end of daybreak, the extreme, deceptive desolate eschar
on the wound of the waters; the martyrs who do not bear witness;
the flowers of blood that fade and scatter in the empty wind
like the screeches of babbling parrots; an aged life mendacious-
ly smiling, its lips opened by vacated agonies; an aged poverty
rotting under the sun, silently; an aged silence bursting with
tepid pustules,
the awful futility of our reason for being.

At the end of daybreak, on this very fragile earth thickness
exceeded in a humiliating way by its grandiose future--the vol-
canoes will explode, the naked water will bear away the ripe
sun stains and nothing will be left but a tepid bubbling pecked
at by sea birds--the beach of dreams and the insane awakening.

At the end of daybreak, this town sprawled-flat, toppled from
its common sense, inert, winded under its geometric weight of
an eternally renewed cross, indocile to its fate, mute, vexed
no matter what, incapable of growing with the juice of this
earth, self-conscious, clipped, reduced, in breach of fauna
and flora.

Copyright (c) 1939, 1947, 2005, by Aimé Césaire, all rights reserved.
Copyright (c) 2001, 2005, by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith.
<<|||>>


I missed that Friday marked the 140th anniversary of Confederal General Robert E. Lee's surrender to General-in-Chief of the Union Army Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House in Virginia, which officially put down the longest and largest organized treason in our country's history and officially ended the United States of America's Civil War (1861-1865). I would have loved to witness this event with my own eyes--in Union blue, of course, my blunderbuss tucked under my arm (though I probably wouldn't have made any of the paintings or photos, which all emphasize the nobility of the defeated Lee and the shambling modesty of great Grant--but none of the black Union soldiers or the "contraband" Negroes are pictured).

Were this country ever to truthfully reckon with its history, this day would be at the very least a national holiday. On his news blog, Steve Gilliard offers his commentary, as well as Democratic Leadership Council official and Southerner Ed Kilgore's thoughts on this momentous date. I recommend both.


Also, March 25, 2005 was the 75th birthday of one of my heroes, the poet and musician Cecil Taylor, an artist who ranks among the most original and significant figures in the American and African-American radical aesthetic tradition. His music, which he continues to create and perform, is the "Sound Structure of Subculture Becoming" (Matthew Goodheart).

Or to quote Fred Moten, "In Taylor float/drift/linger/cut are fresh in the improvised parlance of another architecture, another geometry" (from In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, p. 47.)

"I've always tried to be a poet more than anything else, I mean, professional musicians die. (Phone rings) /Then the music, the imagination from the music led into the words..."
(Cecil Taylor, Spencer Richards, liner notes, Cecil Taylor, Live in Vienna, Leo, 1988--from Moten.)

Belated Happy Birthday, CT!

<<|||>>

Also, congratulations to Bernie T. at Bejata, for completing his culinary studies! Marcus Samuelsson, Jacques Pepin and Alice Waters, watch out!

Sin City + Gallagher Take 2 + Fricasee

At Ryan C's urging, I went to see the Robert Rodriguez's film version of Frank Miller's graphic novel Sin City on Friday evening. I would recommend seeing it based on its remarkable visuals alone, but at the risk of sounding politically correct, it left a nasty aftertaste, both because of its remarkable fidelity to Miller's vision and because of Miller's heterosexist, machistic imaginary itself.

I am somewhat familiar with Miller's graphic novel work, especially Ronin, which a friend, Kevin K., hipped me to years ago, and his re-imaginings of Batman. I was less familiar with Sin City and Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, though I have browsed both in the comics store. But browsing and reading are two different things, and in any event, who can ever know what a director and screenwriter will do to a work? Of course had Rodriguez (and Miller, who was credited as a co-director because his graphic text underwent direct translation, like an elaborate storyboard, onto to digital video (DV)) changed or played with Miller's characterizations, particularly of the female characters, or blunted the Dionysian violence (rather than playing it up), fans would have been outraged and he'd have created a very different film. (A student did point out that since this film extends the gothic and pulp traditions, and I'd add the grotesque and noir ones, it sort of has to be, well, very violent.)

Moreover, you could argue that with all three main male characters, Miller scrambles things ethically in interesting ways--prosthetized Mickey Rourke's Marv gets his brutal due; Clive Owen's Dwight has to let the women take care of their own business; and Bruce Willis's Hartigan, well, I don't want to give the ending away, and yes, the band of women warriors have created a sovereign autonomous society in OldeTowne, a great feminist touch--but no matter how you roll it, Dwight's beloved warrior princess, played by the ever gorgeous Rosario Dawson in fetching BDSM get-up is, like all her fellow residents, still a prostitute (not that I'm condemning sex workers, but, hey, what about a bit more variation?), and Bruce Willis's heart-wrenching cop's self-sacrifice is for a virgin erotic dancer—Jessica Alba, who has never looked so beautiful as here--whom he saved when she was a little girl. The lone professional woman in the film, a lesbian, runs around without clothes and, well, let's just say she gets laid…low. The movie offers up woman's breasts and buttocks by the screenful, women's stuffed heads on plaques like wild game..., etc.

At one point in the movie, maybe when Brittany Murphy--a grating presence in almost everything since Clueless--had been on screen for too long, I thought: if I were 15-to-25 year old heterosexual guy, despite whatever progressive ideological leanings not only might I love this film and want to see it as often as possible, but I probably would have orgasmed at least twice before the final credits started rolling. (Jessica Alba's on-stage dance would have been enough for one little death, I imagine, Rosario Dawson's bound-up scene (though not the throat-biting turn) good for another.) And this was probably Miller's aim. Plus isn't this the ideal viewer sought after by Hollywood in general?

Saying all of that, there were things I did enjoy quite a bit:

• the sheer visual beauty of the movie, from start to finish, and the complete and deft integration of the CGI special effects, which reference everything from expressionist filmmaking of the early 20th century like Murnau, Wiene and Lang to Orson Welles, Ridley Scott, and David Lynch, to cartoons and animated features;
• the masterful use of black and white DV, with selective color (blood, eyes, the Yellow bastard's skin, etc.), the adroit handling of lighting and chiaroscuro effects;
• some of the acting performances, especially by Mickey Rourke, Clive Owen, Bruce Willis, Nick Stahl, and Benicio del Toro, which are appropriately larger than life;
• Elijah Wood's rivetingly creepy--no, scary--turn as the soul-devouring "Kevin";
  
• the narrative braid, which resolves, with some surprises and few bumps, at the end;
• the ethnic and racial diversity of the characters, especially the female characters;
• the humor throughout;
  
• the Tarantino-directed scene, which manages to be both horrifying and hilarious at the same time.

What I marveled at: the film's astonishing visual fidelity to Miller's strips, as if they'd been electronically mapped onto the video itself.

What I disliked:

• the retrograde (hetero)sexist politics;
• the excessive, gratuitous violence--maybe more scenes of the devastation from Iraq and Afghanistan might curb Hollywood of this fixation;
• some of the acting performances, by Brittany Murphy (cf. above, or under "metal shredder" in the dictionary) especially;
  
• the cliché-ridden moments in the monologues and dialogue, as well as the sentimentality of the plot at certain points, which work in a graphic text but less so in a film;
• the fact that the lone significant black male character, played by hulk Michael Clarke Duncan in a deliciously tight-fitting uniform (!), is a bad guy and gets killed off (yeah, I know, SamO SamO....).
  

I'm ambivalent about the moralism; usually it would turn me off, but here I think it served a purpose, tempering an utterly dark vision without blunting it. All in all, I'd recommend seeing the film, but I say be prepared for the hypergore and the sexual politics--that is, unless neither bothers you very much. If not, it's a total feast.

:: :: ::


I finally got to the Whitney Museum of American Art to see Ellen Gallagher's "DeLuxe" show [I can't link to my earlier post, but when I can I will], which was the best exhibit on the premises. At only 60 prints, though, it was too small! I wanted more, far more, perhaps more than was humanly possible—I wanted Gallagher to cover an entire wall with these fantastic creations, which online or print images can only partially and inadequately convey. You have to see them in person, and preferably up close, to appreciate the depth and breadth of Gallagher's technical achievement, as well as the work's variety, humor, irony, and strange beauty--its virtuosity.

On one wall facing the "DeLuxe" pieces, she (or the museum) lists all the techniques she employed—I missed this until I was on my way out, though many of them were apparent from just looking. Many of the pieces are reliefs, with the polychrome plasticene rising and extending from the surface of the collages, though in other works the recessions are visible. Some of the techniques I noted were abrasion, erasures, gouging, scraping, sculpting, rubbings, layering, though there were many more. The pieces I returned to more than once were "Isaac Hayes" (just stunning and my favorite!), "Snow White," "Josephine Baker," and the plate "Song Ideas," but there were many more.

In terms of content, "DeLuxe" is clearly, among other things, a critique of the history of black cosmetic self-(re)presentation and transformation. This is not art that seeks our disinterest: it wants us to and makes us look, engage, ponder. I read the heavily worked surfaces, the iris-less or whited out or cartoony eyes, the face-obscuring pompadours, pageboys and perms, the rhinestoned and painted garments as signs of the implicit economic, political and aesthetic material violence, both externally and internally imposed, upon black people. And yet the results of Gallagher's improvisations, her wall of palimpsests, drawn from the archive, are quite beautiful—which is, in truth, our truth. Primped, plucked, waxed, abraded, extensioned, bleached, conked--our self-voicings reduced or translated into (and eroticized as) bestial or imprecatory shrieks (Es) and moans (Os)—as we pass through the machinery of aryanist supremacy and American capitalism, till what's left, as on the template of Michael Jackson's face, is almost un(re)cognizable. But you could easily argue that it's not only black folks, but everyone, who feels these effects that Gallagher simultaneously literalizes and metaphorizes in her pieces.

I could go on and on, but though our humanity suffers, our beauty (and soul) endures. Like the work of many of Gallagher's peers, it also offers a visualization of a kind of futuristic, post-human black beauty—by taking us back, she's taking us to forward to those alien-nation places Drexciya and others have been mapping out sonically, and Delany, Butler, Hopkinson, and others have been writing about too. Ellen, I want more!

:: :: ::

My favorite overheard quote in the Whitney, at the Gallagher exhibit, uttered in a rising tone by a meticulously dressed and coiffed matron: "I don't hate it...."

:: :: ::

Upstairs on view was a retrospective of Cy Twombly's works on paper. As Ffactory Art's blog notes, Twombly's best pieces are the earliers, some of which draw their inspiration from classical mythology, and often comprise a successful union of his unforgettable scrawl-like imagery and graffitiesque text ("Apollo": Apollo, bow, lyre, tripod, laurel, palm tree, swan, hawk, etc.). I particularly liked the roughness and provisional quality of some of his preparatory studies, which giant are painted collages covered with equations, gestural scribbles, geometric shapes, notes and fragmentary phrases, and other scripta, for some of the early large-scale paintings. These have a fresh energy and counterbeauty that are missing from the later, brightly colored but mostly decorative floral pieces, which I would guess have found homes above the dining tables and desks of various very rich people across the globe.

On another upstairs floor, the "Landscape" exhibit, consisting of pieces from the Whitney's permanent collection, didn't cohere as much as it could have, though it contained many masterpieces, like Glenn Ligon's dense and obliterating coal painting "Stranger in the Village," which swallowed my gaze, drawing me closer and closer to its shimmering, sparkling, ever-expanding, ever-receding, undulating black surface. After staring at it for a while, I thought of the difficult discussions I'd led in my aesthetics class this past fall on the contemporary sublime and technosublime, and saw immediately that this painting embodied the former—rather than presenting an assimilable narrative--the accusatory Baldwin text beneath the thick coal dressing is rendered invisible--it forced me to confront its very presence, its formal indeterminacy and my own indeterminate response, not asking but asserting, you can't easily read me but "it is happening," as time fell away.

To heighten the irony, the curators had it cannily peering right across the room at an artifact of 20th century sublimity, a hovering red-and-yellow Rothko. Son semblable, sa soeur.

:: :: ::

Today it reached the high 70s in Chicago, at least in the sun. (It was jacket-cool in the shade.) After forcing myself to put down Derek Walcott's Collected Poems, I strolled down to the beach and took a few cell-phone shots. Lake Michigan really is like an ocean, with the gulls and the almost invisible horizon at midday, but without the rote or salty smell.

:: :: ::

His swing is back. I knew Tiger Woods was on pace to master this year's Masters golf tournament, having shot 7 straight birdies in this morning's conclusion of the third round and tying a course record to go 12 under par, but I didn't stay in and watch his eventual win in a playoff, which replays showed to be thrilling bit improvisation. This is his ninth major win, and, as is well known, at only 29 he's on pace to match and break Jack Nicklaus's record.

:: :: ::

Finally, why do cafés feel the need to have music tracks--and not just any songs, but TV program theme songs!--blaring in the background? Is it for the employees' benefit, in which case I'll stop bitching, or is it because they think that patrons can't function without a soundtrack? Haven't CD players (which can now be purchased for as little at $20, perhaps even less on the street), iPods and other portable, digital music devices solved this problem?

Isn't the music of unaccompanied voices and silence enough? Or is it just me?

Saturday Quote: Azar Nafisi

"I then began a schizophrenic period in my life in which I tried to reconcile my revolutionary aspirations with the lifestyle I most enjoyed. I never fully integrated into the movement. During the long and confrontational meetings between rival factions, I would often leave the room under different pretenses, and sometimes locked myself in the bathroom to escape. I insisted on wearing long dresses outside the meetings and refused to cut my hair. I never gave up the habit of reading and loving 'counterrevolutionary' writers--T.S. Eliot, Austen, Plath, Nabokov, Fitzgerald--but I spoke passionately at the rallies; inspired by phrases I had read in novels and poems, I would weave words together into sounds of revolution."
--Azar Nafisi, from Reading Lolita in Tehran, p. 86.

Poem: Julia de Burgos's "To Julia de Burgos"

Ever since I first read this poem years ago, it has been one of my all-time favorites. It's by Julia de Burgos (1914-1953), considered Puerto Rico's greatest female poet. A native of Carolina, PR, she later lived in New York City. Her feminism, use of irony, and self-conciousness approaches to lyric poetry prefigure subsequent generations of female poets across the Americas. And Burgos also wrote a number of famous poems about her African heritage, including "Ay, ay, ay de la grifa negra."

The poem below, however, is something else, an astringent, movingly truthful autocritique of the divided self, that is redolent, in the Spanish-language poetic tradition, of such pieces as Jorge Luis Borges's "Borges and I" and Jaime Gil de Biedma's "Contra Jaime Gil de Biedma." (The translation is by the poet Jack Agüeros, and is one of the best I've seen.)

TO JULIA DE BURGOS

by Julia de Burgos

Already the people murmur that I am your enemy
because they say that in verse I give the world your me.

They lie, Julia de Burgos. They lie, Julia de Burgos.
Who rises in my verses is not your voice. It is my voice
because you are the dressing and the essence is me;
and the most profound abyss is spread between us.

You are the cold doll of social lies,
and me, the virile starburst of the human truth.

You, honey of courtesan hypocrisies; not me;
in all my poems I undress my heart.

You are like your world, selfish; not me
who gambles everything betting on what I am.

You are only the ponderous lady very lady;
not me; I am life, strength, woman.

You belong to your husband, your master; not me;
I belong to nobody, or all, because to all, to all
I give myself in my clean feeling and in my thought.

You curl your hair and paint yourself; not me;
the wind curls my hair, the sun paints me.

You are a housewife, resigned, submissive,
tied to the prejudices of men; not me;
unbridled, I am a runaway Rocinante
snorting horizons of God's justice.

You in yourself have no say; everyone governs you;
your husband, your parents, your family,
the priest, the dressmaker, the theatre, the dance hall,
the auto, the fine furnishings, the feast, champagne,
heaven and hell, and the social, "what will they say."

Not in me, in me only my heart governs,
only my thought; who governs in me is me.
You, flower of aristocracy; and me, flower of the people.
You in you have everything and you owe it to everyone,
while me, my nothing I owe to nobody.

You nailed to the static ancestral dividend,
and me, a one in the numerical social divider,
we are the duel to death who fatally approaches.

When the multitudes run rioting
leaving behind ashes of burned injustices,
and with the torch of the seven virtues,
the multitudes run after the seven sins,
against you and against everything unjust and inhuman,
I will be in their midst with the torch in my hand.

Copyright (c) 2005, Julia de Burgos. All rights reserved.
Translation (c) 2005, Jack Agüeros.

Kamau Brathwaite & "Cowpastor Vandal"

I'm posting an e-mail note I received via the Cave Canem list from poet Tara Betts that the Bajan poet (and one of my former professors) Kamau Brathwaite sent to Marina Taitt concerning his current plight in Barbados.

I believe it concerns a road-building project that is destroying the land and eco-system near where he lives there. He doesn't say exactly who is behind it (the Barbadian government? business interests?--probably a combination of both) and how those who are interested in helping him might do so, but his contact information is at the beginning of the missive. His final statements sound pretty dire; Brathwaite is one of the greatest living poets, and while I don't think this is the "lass" of him, this battle (one of many he's had to wage over the years) is certainly wearing him down (cf. Zea Mexican Diary, Trench Town Rock, etc.). An e-mail or letter of support would probably be welcome.


Dear All:

Greetings!

I have just received an email from Kamau Brathwaite via Marina Taitt
describing his plight in Barbados. This has been something that Kamau
has been talking about for a long time, and it seems now that it has
coming true. I pass this along in the hope that all is not lost.

Blessings,
Geoffrey

Please circulate as wade as possible - let it wide in the water

Kamau Brathwaite kb5@nyu.edu
+ CowPastor, Wilcox Lands
Christ Church, Barbados
see also Hambone 17 (2004), 126-173

15 Mar 05/(!!) The Ides of March (!!)/CP 2:43am

The lass days of KB and CowPastor Vandal: My Emmerton 2005

Dear Andrea Nation and all Caribbean artists intellectuals cultural
workers & environmentalists w/in the sound of Marina

I sharing a letter i juss write to a wo at OUP who deals w/permissions payments to authors who want to quote yr
work etc. This wo and me - we don't kno each other - share a wonderful
sense of weather and the environment and at the end of my business
w/her this midnight, I describe and refer to (un)developments in my
life i thot you shd kno

w/the dust choking me from the destruction so that I can hardly eat -
the water that we drink returning to like its limestone white residual
- and have these DS(3s) and Beverley has already had to go the doc w/a
dreadful cough of corridor -

I've tried - in vain - to get an appointment w/the PS of the Housing &
Lands - a man i long respec & kno. . . and a letter of premonition &
desperation I senn in to yr NATION tho promise publication. . . has nvr
in fact appeared. . . I try contact Liz Thompson who when she was in
NYC sometime ago at an X/hibition of BaJam Wo artists, at which we
share both spoke, said yes i shd send her the details of my evident
concern. Nuffen of course followed from that. . . I tried lifelines to
Dame Billie and Mia - nuffen there neetha. And I note that whenever you
respond to me on this, you ask a whole series of Qs about 'what am I
doing' - as if I doin nothin!!

All I can in the end do - w/out community support - is set afire to
myself, as I've said before, on this very namsetoura pasture become the
criminal. and I don't really want to do dat, because my spirit flies so
high - so many dreamstories and ideas seem to flow & flow - altho of
course who's to kno if they gods not punishing mwe But I don't think
so, or lets say I arrogant enuff to think that I don't think so - which
of course is whe the danger lies. . .

I write to you now as I write earlier to that stranger. but w/the
difference that I have faith that as a wo of soul, there is something I
sure you can do, if is nothing more than persuade one of yr colleagues
who's still free and fearless - is there any such? - to come out to CP
and see whats happening. . . is there no voices in BaJam that can raise
can rise? It will be a shame if i hear people saying AFTER I GONE -
that Kamau use to talk about these things and no one lissen not a soul
do a ting. trapped - SURELY NOT FOR EVER - in our Mental Slavery

The plight of one person. the flight of one sparrow . is worth more
than all the kingdooms of this world. But very frew people can live this

What I saying is that my micro case here, is the macro case of us all.
The little done unto mwe, is the burden down upon us all upon us all

All night long, the trucks trundle & boom. Two mornings ago, to
destroy more duncks trees, so they cd swathe more space for the
tractors, they set fire to the slope under Thyme Bottom. if the Fire
Beegrade didn't come, that fire might have swept down into our yard and
run all the way down west to Parish Lands. It was a clear day and a
high wind

The destruction of CowPasture to put in an unnecessary and unethical
road - when there are two perfectly good xisting road in this quadrant
- for some new unxplained access to the airport, involves -

(1) the death of the three dozen cows and flocks of blackbelly sheep
that use to ruminate CowPasture

(2) the loss of rumination marks the end of peace & serengetti
beauty here and marks the arrival of vandalism. Abandoned houses
further pillage, and w/the blood up, even the duncks trees on the
pasture under pressure - their limbs & branches torn down this
harmattan for their plunder, not picked picked picked between the
thorns, as happily traditional

(3) the loss of pasture - here and all over Barbados and all over
the CARICOM Caribbean = also the closing down of the last sugar
production in St Kitts, and the verge of ditto in Barabados

(4) the loss of pasture - here and all over the island and all over
the CARICOM Caribbean = the decline of cricket. Sir Viv and Gary S come
from BayLands not from roundabouts, hotels and clogged up death-mark
highways

(5) the road here is unethical because of this and because it is an
offence not only to the people who choose to live here, who are/were so
fortunate to live here to love here - and dispossessed of pristine
coral; thru no fault of their own, but via a willful remote control
decision by Authorities too arrogant & high & mighty to discuss plans
that involve all our futures fortunes w/us 'out here', who are still
seen - MENTAL PLANTATION MENTAL SLAVERY - as chattel anti-heroes have
no voice - cannot afford to be admitted to out voice

(6) even as I write this, therefore, destruction going on - this old
plantation well, the little Lake (or Pond) of Thorns - the natural
water catchment for this area - filled in and flattened - hence future
floods. And near the well, a fledgling BEARDED FIG-TREE (shrine of
ancient African & Amerindian spirits) its cinnamon beards just showing.
a dear endangered species. cruelly unethically soon to gone . i cd go
on an gone . like all the people of Thyme Bottom already gone gone
gone. . .

(7) at 3 pm today, tractors break thru the last line of bush &
duncks between them and our house my yard. A noise as of bombing and a
great cloud of dust - FALOUJA - and now there's nothing left between
ourselves and them - the slave well nxt, the bearded fig- tree nxt -
today if not tomorrow. My eyes are full of grit and helpless scars, as
if I am the last person in the world the lost poet, really, in the
world. Rosina say this morning I shd write it down. But write it down
for who for what. . .

I walked out there towards the cloud of dust - the grit - my tears
- and my heart as if rebelled inside me, fit to burst w/grief & loss &
helplessness & pain

(8) I had also hoped, when we found this place, to found my nation
here - my maroon town, resistance palenque. Bring in my archives from
their shattered world - shattered in Jamaica since the Gilbert
Hurricane of 1988 - an archive stretching back now almost 100 years and
covering from Bay Street/Browns Beach/Harrson College days, thru
Cambridge, Ghana, SL, 30 years at Mona, the Caribbean Artists Movement
(London), Bim, BBC Caribbean Voices, Savacou, Carifestas, paintings,
sculpture (inc early postcolonial W Af, early Rastafari), Colly, Timmy
Callender, Broodhagen, jazz records, tape recordings from almost
ancient Ghana, from nearly every Caribbean voice of say or song

and all this a lament - the loss & dislocation of so much of
this in Gilbert (see SHAR.
see Carolivia Herron's 'SAVING THE WORD' hear ARK - these are
our documents
for our last our lost millennium - and still more loss from worm
and Ivan (2004) and a
terrible break-in (5 March 05) - VANDALL INVASION of our hopes
and consciousness

(9) The dream the vision was to in-gather the scatta archives (Ja &
NYC) here, try heal them and from this wound of miracle, set up a BUSSA
CENTRE for us all - enough peace & space & beauty surpassing any other
in the world - in a small sacred bless - to build a place to live to
love, a place for the LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA, a conference room,
performance outdoor places, chalets for writers, artists - that kind of
possible dream - because we had the dream we had the space we had the
means - destroyed by my own Govt - w/out DISCUSSION - and digging us
down and STRANGLING the holy past & constellation flute & future of
this place - the egrets gone because the cattle gone. the woo doves
mourn. I itch from deconstruction cement dust

I cannot even die here now. no strength to even burn myself upon
this pasture as I want to do. As I still may. Because my love, whe else
is there to go, to try to build again at 75? tho I not beggin for your
sympathy - tho that good too - I askin you to LISSEN . one mo Emmerton.
xcep unlike the Mighty Gabby song which sing & say far more than any
prose I prose can say, me na give up. me nvva will accept
unrighteousness, If this was SandlyLane wd we be treated so? again
today the tractors wheel an thump. I can't accept to so unfairly go


p/s I'm being told that all this is too late - that time & the
tide has pass me by - not enuff effort too late! if that be so, let me
then at least hope that you will allow at least my faint words -
faintly heard now on the pasture - be at least a verbal memorial to
mark the graveyard of this place