Book Reviews in Drunken Boat + The Chronicle Attack on Black Studies Grad Students

I often forget to post little things I've done or have been up to, but: the online (and print) journal Drunken Boat has published my review of two delightful books, Jorge Carrera Andrade's Micrograms (Wave Books, 2011), and Rosmarie Waldrop's Driven to Abstraction (New Directions, 2010). The reviews editor, poet Shira Dentz,  also asked last fall for five books I'm reading, so I imagine that'll post at some point soon. I'll just add that that I had no idea how important Carrera Andrade was to the history of 20th century Latin American letters, but it turns out he's a big deal, and Micrograms, translated by Alejandro Acosta and Joshua Beckman, is a superb introduction to his work.

+++

For a variety of reasons, not least because I am an affiliate faculty member of Northwestern University's extraordinary African American Studies Department and feel so close to its faculty and students I almost could not compose a calm response, I have held back on commenting on the vicious, ignorant, racist attack, in the pages of the Chronicle of Higher Education, on the dissertations of brilliant graduate students Ruth Hays, Keeanga-Yahmatta Taylor, and LaTasha Levy. Nevertheless a number of friends contacted me and pressed me to respond. As is widely known now, the attack followed a glowing piece, "Black Studies: Swaggering Into the Future," by Stacy Patton, which coincided with a conference, "A Beautiful Struggle: Transforming Black Studies in Shifting Political Landscapes--A Summit of Doctoral Programs," held at Northwestern on April 12-14, 2012, sponsored by Northwestern's African American Studies Department in conjunction with the Northwestern Graduate School. The packed conference brought together faculty, students and staff from the small number of American universities that offer Ph.D.-level studies in African American and African/Africana/Black Studies.

The conference was superlative, and brought people from all over the US. As my former dean, the distinguished sociologist Aldon Morris, told me with elation filling his smile, the Chronicle had positively written up  and even used the word "swagger" to describe African American Studies, underling what many across academe acknowledged, that it was now a mature and vibrant field. It is. Then came the hatchet job, NOT on faculty members--that would not be unexpected--but on vulnerable GRADUATE STUDENTS, and not only did the hack show utter disdain for the entire field, but she mocked these students' work without ever reading a single page of their dissertations, of any papers they'd written, of anything by them. She not only knew nothing about them or their work, but made clear that she didn't care to.

Many people have responded with eloquence to this attack, not least among them these students, who are so smart and impressive I cannot but praise them. But one thing I also noticed that was a few people who supported these students and Black Studies chose, in response, to pick other fields to ridicule. A prominent black blogger and pundit whose work I greatly admire decided to start signifying on Twitter about medieval studies. I responded to him, but I had earlier responded to friends who, in a private email, questioned whether there weren't works in other fields that could not be denounced as obscure, and so forth. In response I wrote the following, which I have adapted slightly to remove the names of the people I was responding to, but I think it expresses my thoughts about both the racist hack, and the larger game she was engaging in, which I wish people would try to keep in mind. It's not just about Black Studies, or these wonderful graduate students, who to this lazy, hateful hack were ready targets.

My note:

Yes to everything you, ___, and you, ___, and everyone who has spoken on behalf of Ruth, Keeanga-Yahmatta and LaTasha, and Black Studies (and Ethnic and Women's and Gender and Queer Studies), have said. This is a battle both inside and outside academe, it's ongoing and we're hardly post-ANYTHING, racism and white supremacy rear their heads daily, and people like Naomi Schaefer Riley, in their gross ignorance, do speak for many, but we can never let them have the last word.

One of the things we should always consider is the larger political economy in which such hateful rhetoric emerges, how it aims to shape the public and private discourse, how its insidiousness feeds into long-standing and continuing discourses that then erupt as political agendas and platforms, and public policies, that are always incredibly and disparately harmful to people of color, especially Black people; to women; to sexual and religious minorities and dissidents; to working-class and poor people; and so forth.

For every Naomi Schaefer Riley spewing this crap, there are hundreds of people working very hard to enact the empty beliefs and values, if they can be called that, behind what she's saying. And these enactors work in multiple ways, often in seemingly benign ones. So we should stand with these three brilliant graduate students and with everyone working in Black Studies and similar fields, but we should also not lose sight of the larger picture, which is that we are still in a pitched battle, and it's not about to end anytime soon, no matter how much many people want to hoodwink or lull us into thinking it will.

As colleagues across the country will attest, the humanities, the social sciences, and the arts, at all levels, but especially at public institutions, are under attack. Attacking graduate students in African American Studies was a no-brainer for this person, and the Chronicle knew exactly what they were doing (yes, the journal fired the hack and its editor issued an the apology for the hack's journalistic malfeasance) in allowing her to hack away. But we should all always keep in mind that similar attacks have been launched against ethnic studies in general and in specific (cf. the ban on Latino/a Studies in Arizona), on women's studies, on gender studies, on LBGBQ/queer studies (think of all the snark about queer studies papers at past MLA conferences, etc.), but alsothe most traditional fields in the humanities and social sciences, as well as the arts.

The vital work that humanities scholars and social scientists do, alongside that of artists of all kinds, is vital for the production of human knowledge and the survival of human societies. There are many out there who have little desire for this vital work to continue; they know that the more ignorant most people are, the great the power they, the powerful, can wield.  The hack who penned that Chronicle attack is on the payroll of these folks; we shouldn't ever forget that, or the danger that they pose. It's not about to disappear anytime soon.

April Poets on Poems Stats

One of the things I like about the new(er) version of Blogger is that it allows you to see all kinds of page and related stats easily, much more so than the earlier version allowed. Periodically I'll review the stats to see what posts garner the most page views, and from where, and since Poetry Month has officially concluded (though every month is poetry month), I have been curious to learn which poets and poems attracted the most viewers.

The tally so far:
1) Ishmael Reed - 89 views
2) Elizabeth Alexander - 83 views
3) Tess Gallagher - 80 views
4) Ana Cristina César (my translations) - 75 views
5) Robert Duncan & Sonia Sanchez joint post - 74 views
6) Tracy K. Smith - 73 views
7) W. H. Auden - 72 views

I cannot discern a pattern beyond the fact that the first and last posts received considerable attention, that Tracy K. Smith's Pulitzer also generated page views (and a Google +1!), and that the direct beauty of Gallagher's and Sanchez's posts also drew readers. With César, I' not sure what brought eyes into the theater; with Auden, perhaps it was the name and the poem.

As I noted before, there were a number of well-known poets and poems on poetry I tried to avoid posting (Stevens, Ashbery, Padgett, etc.) simply because they often do receive attention, and I wonder if those would have drawn more viewers. I did include a few, like Marianne Moore and Gary Snyder, both of whom finished in the middle of the poetic pack. I was surprised that Edward Field, an important but sadly overlooked queer poet, whose poems of the 1960s in particular really deserve greater readership and scholarly treatment, had among the fewest readers of all. Oh well, what can you do, but present the poems and let people make their way to them. Lastly, I was interested to see that one of the poets who received the fewest pages views, Denise Levertov, nevertheless received two comments, the most of any of the posts.

What poets writing about poems would have wanted to see? Do let me know.

France Elects Socialist Hollande + A Black, Gay Olympic Male Gymnast?

New French President François Hollande
with his partner, journalist Valérie Trierweiler (AP)

Leave it to France to show the world how it's done. Today, after 5 years of right-wing governance that helped to solidify the pro-austerity approach now ravaging Europe, the French people began the process of revolt, voting in their presidential contest's second round to send their globe-trotting, pro-US, plutocrat-enabling head of state, Nicolas Sarkozy, back to the wealthy suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine. In his place they elected the former First Secretary of the Socialist Party, François Hollande, as the 24th President of the French Republic (and Co-Prince of Andorra), with a vote of 52% to 48%. Sarkozy becomes only the second French President to serve one term in the last 40 years.

Where Sarkozy has maintained a non-stop narcissistic show and meddlesome razzle-dazzle within France and globally, punctuating it with extremist rhetoric and policies at times, Hollande has suggested he will remain "M. Normal," and has promised to take a more measured approach politically.  But he has proposed measures such as raising the federal marginal tax rates to 75%; reducing France's dependence on nuclear power in favor of renewable sources; recruiting 60,000 more teachers, as well as judges and police officers; push for full marriage equality; restoring the retirement age to 60 for workers who have contributed more than 41 years of labor; and building more public housing. These policies, as well as more centrist ones such as lowering the corporate and small-business tax rates and creating a public investment bank,  while not going as far as his last Socialist predecessor François Mitterand (whose radical, nationalizing, pro-worker policies in 1981 sent shockwaves throughout the country and continent), are all to the left of Sarkozy (or most of the leaders of Europe, the United States, or even Canada, for that matter).
 
Light in touch as he may hope to be, Hollande cannot proceed too slowly or at too far a remove on the global stage, for the Eurozone, especially the countries (Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Italy, and certainly Greece) on its periphery, its ill.  As President he has the power and platform to rethink the German-led fiscal and monetary approach that is strangling the periphery nations; whether he can persuade Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel to adopt a different approach or pressure the European Common Bank toward more effective monetary policies remains to be seen.  Too, his election, is only the first step; French voters next have the opportunity to elect their parliament, which has been under the control of the combined conservative parties, led by Sarkozy's UMAP party, but which will likely shift to the left, giving President Hollande a Prime Minister he can work with, and legislative power.  On economic issues his power could increase as well if  if Marine LePen's extreme-right National Front party, which now has no representatives either in the National Assembly (Lower House) or Senate (Upper House), cannibalizes seats at the expense of Sarkozy's UMAP.

As an aside or adjunct, it struck me that most of Europe, like many of the major industrialized countries across the globe, save in Latin America, either has been under the control of center-right or right parties or has fallen under their control, so France's shift is a dramatic one. But I also realized--and perhaps I am making too much of this--that the United States, having been under truly far-right control for 8 years, under George W. Bush, began the shift in 2006 by handing control of Congress to the Democrats, and cemented the shift in 2008 by electing Barack Obama by a 53%-47% margin over John McCain and returning the Democrats to power in both houses. Though the president, who has governed along the lines of Dwight Eisenhower, with an interventionist foreign policy and mini-wars, and phantasmally liberal social and economic policies adopted by his predecessors, has been repeatedly deamed a "socialist" by his opponents, the American voters, seeking changes in direction on the social, economic and political fronts in 2008 have gotten more continuity than they sought, which has meant a slow and stuttering economic recovery crippled to a great degree by de facto fiscal austerity, a glacial deescalation of the foreign wars, and increasing assualts on civil liberties. One might then say that US voters, having lived through the worst of the worst--though certainly Silvio Berlusconi ranks up there, and Jacques Chirac, another rightist politician, was no dance in a nightclub--sought but did not get what the French voters think they've achieved now. One can only hope that Hollande can secure a National Assembly (the more powerful of France's two houses) to support his vision and push it, and that President Obama, who looks like he will be reelected, and the Democrats in Congress, even if they only retain control of the Senate, as well as whatever remains of the moderate elements of the GOP, pay attention. Forward, yes, but change, absolutely!

Also: Here's Professor Paul Krugman on François Hollande's win, and the elections in Greece, in which voters drubbed the two major parties, the center-right New Democracy (Conservative) party and center-left Pasok (Socialist), selecting legislators from much farther to the left (Syriza--Coalition of the Radical Left, which finished second, after ND, and the Democratic Left) and to the right (the Independent Greek Party and the ultra-rightwing neo-Nazi Golden Dawn). An anti-austerity, anti-bailout coalition, led by Syriza, with rightist elements, very well could take power, sending the markets tanking and Greece out of the eurozone....

===

Robert G. sent this link to Cyd Ziegler Jr.'s article today on the Outsports site, which reported that the United States very well could, for the first time ever, have an out, gay gymnast on its Olympic men's gymnastic team. Who is he? Josh Dixon, a 2011 Stanford University graduate and seven-time All American, who yesterday finished second out of 72 competitors at the US men's qualifiers in Colorado Springs, Colorado, also tying for the top spot in two events, the floor exercise and the high bar. Oh, and Dixon is an African-American and Japanese-American adoptee who grew up in a multiracial, accepting home, which led him to feel comfortable coming out, an experience that his Stanford teammates, and fellow students, as well as gymnastic competitors, have nurtured through their support over the last few years.

According to Ziegler, his next challenge is the Visa Championships in June (7-10) in St. Louis; the top 15 finishers at that meet will proceed to the Olympic Trials, which run June 28 to July 1, in Dixon's hometown of San Jose, and he very well could be one of the 6 young men to compete for the USA. I just knocked on wood, and am wishing him the best.


Here's a YouTube video of Dixon during his sophomore year, in 2009, competing for the Cardinal in the floor exercises:

Christopher Cozier @ NU + Adbustered!

Christopher Cozier (b. Trinidad 1959). Tropical Night,
2006–present. Ink, pencil, stamps.
Two hundred drawings, each 9 x 7 in.
(22.9 X 17.8 cm). Courtesy of
the artist, from Brooklyn Museum site

Yesterday, under the auspices of the X and at the invitation of my colleague Krista Thompson, Trinidadian award-winning artist and curator Christopher Cozier (1959-).  A Senior Research Fellow at the Academy of the University of Trinidad & Tobago, Cozier is also an administrator and curator of the Alice Yard art space, located in Port of Spain, which he established with architect Sean Leonard, writer Nicholas Laughlin, and others, and serves the editorial board of the Caribbean critical/theoretical journal Small Axe. He visited Northwestern to talk about his recent projects, his curatorial practice and how the two informed each other.

I remembered his name--though I did not recall his work and hadn't heard him speak about it then--from a previous exhibit at the university, Out of Sight, which Krista Thompson and another colleague, Huey Copeland, organized in 2007 on the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery (1807-2007). As part of his presentation, which he divided into three parts, he talked about the evolution of his work over the last few years and how "curatorial enterprises" had shaped it and contributed to what he called its "moving locations." What became clear is that there are throughlines between the earlier work and more recent projects, with certain visual vocabularies, such as iconic or fragmented bodies; forms, such as flags; and discourses, such as the bureaucratic, repeatedly coming to the fore. Among the ironies he noted was that as a young educated Trinidadian one of his parents' hopes for him was a government job (which would have meant security in the old days), but he chose a career in the arts instead, yet has returned to symbols of bureaucracy, from his use of office furniture and implements, to his abiding interest in rubber stamps, over and over, which is perhaps more ironic in a post-colonial state.

He showed a number of pieces, such as a fenced in winners' platform that he debuted in Denmark, but then had to rethink when restaged in the context of Haiti, and which provoked very different interactions with participants, and the same was true of an installation piece/sculpture that involved Chinese rules strung from a line, which in Haiti also led to very different responses (such as, people borrowed/took the rulers). Other wonderful, simple-yet-fiendishly complex projects, which Cozier scales up and down depending upon the circumstances, included his Boxes of Fear (2006), which began as tiny boxes stamped with "FEAR" as if manufactured in the US, but which he expanded to a 2000-box installation, on pallets, ready for export, in a show in Puerto Rico. He also talked about a very recent project involving benches, which he drafted--he is a very gifted draftsman--and then turned into a rubber stamp, but which have since morphed into various kinds of benches, paper and otherwise, which can be assembled, transported, and rethought depending upon the context and circumstances.

Part of the delight in hearing him talk was seeing how he transformed each of these kernels of ideas and concepts, many as he noted originally created in his notebooks--his mobile studio--into various related projects. What was also fascinating to learn about was his work with Alice Yard and how that was informing his practice, both as an artist and as a curator, how he was rethinking the local in relation to Trinidad specifically, and the Caribbean more broadly, in relation to the global artworld and capital flows, how social media had become a new and powerful means for communication across the islands and the Diasporas (Caribbean, African, South Asian), but also for disseminating work. He described one digital catalogue he and others prepared for the Wrestling show, and how it was downloaded 33,000 times shortly after being posted. To quote him: "With the Internet  a whole new way of reading the work comes into being," and a new discursive space is inaugurated and formed. Also, as he said, with social media, the "eyeline" for the visual changes. I have been thinking around this in relation to the literary, but his statement crystallized something for me as I am now trying to write about the relationship between the digital and black literary practice.

Cozier talked about so many other things I cannot even hope to capture them here, but I'll end by noting that during the Q&A with Thompson and the audience, one of the points he focused on was "space" itself, both in terms of artistic practice and in terms of the space of Alice Yard as an exhibition and performance site. As with so much in the Americas the house and grounds, like the neighborhood and suburb, Woodbrook, where Alice Yard is located, have a history, and that is part of what Cozier and those affiliated with the center have been unearthing or reconstructing.  That is to say, there's a lineage and heritage, a cultural (and sociopolitical DNA) in this space, belonging to the family of Sean Leonard, that ties it to earlier and older artistic traditions. What Cozier also noted was that it is space suited to local arts and artists, as opposed to the sorts of sites that exist all over the globe, and which could be interchangeable, important as they are, for the global art trade. Instead, Alice Yard is, he pointed out, a space for social interactions, local, trans-Caribbean, trans-Atlantic, and yes, in some cases, global, but permeable, mutable, organic, which people of all kinds can enter and interact with. Key to all of this is the idea of action--action defines the space, which changes with it.

If you click on the Alice Yard link you can find out more about what's happening there and visit if you're passing through Trinidad. Cozier also blogs, at Visual Matters, and on there you can find lots of images of his work, as well as his critical thoughts. Small Axe is also a site to check out, for current critical Caribbean thought and practice in a range of media; Cozier oversees its sxspace blog platform, which features very up-to-date material on projects throughout the Caribbean and neighboring spaces (like Suriname). An artist, curator and thinker to follow, no doubt.
 

Christopher Cozier talking about his work

+++

On the personal front, C mentioned that we'd received a sizable number of the May/June 2012 edition of Adbusters' magazine, focusing on Regime Change. Though I agree with and support Adbusters' work, I wasn't sure what was going on until I remembered that they'd requested to use photo I'd snapped in the New York subway a summer ago and then posted to Flickr, and now it was appearing in this edition!

Oddly enough I'd seen this issue in a store, flipped through but had missed the photograph I took, which looks like it might serve as a lead into one of the magazine's sections. I told myself I'd buy it the next time I was in the store, but it appears I won't have to.

The cover

And here's the photo. (C snapped the photo below from the magazine, and texted it to me.)

My photo in the issue (© John Keene)

I still don't have a copy of the issue yet, but I look forward to flipping through it soon. I think this is a first for me, at least as an adult and with my permission, having a photograph featured in a magazine, and of all magazines, Adbusters no less. I won't be quitting my day jobs, but it is nice to see that even a snapshot can gain a wider audience now and then.

If you want to order copies of this or any issue of Adbusters or learn more about the organization, which played an initiatory role, in part, in the Occupy movements in the US and which seeks to do exactly as the image above says, to stop a system that forces people "to live like rubbish" by functioning as a "network of culture jammers and creatives working to change the way information flows, the way corporations wield power, and the way meaning is produced in our society," you can click on the links above, or visit here.

Locating African Diaspora: Mexico & Ecuador, at NU + Nathaniel Tarn Reads

Thursday was the joint. First, in the early afternoon, two leading scholars in the field of Afro-Latin American history, Ben Vinson III, the Herbert Baxter Adams Professor of Latin American History and the Director of the Center for Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins University, and Sherwin Bryant, who teaches in the departments of African American Studies and History at Northwestern University, spoke on "Locating African Diaspora: Exploring Blackness in Mexico and Ecuador" at the invitation of Northwestern's Colloquium on Ethnicity and Diaspora.  Rather than simply delivering standard scholarly talks, both Vinson and Bryant, whose work focuses on the materiality of the colonial-era Americas, engaged in a conversation, through a recounting of their research trajectories, presentations of their current research, and questions each posed for the other. Throughout they returned to a number of salient issues in contemporary Afro-Latin historical research, many of which underpin the anthology they recently co-edited, with Rachel Sarah O'Toole, Africans to Spanish America: Expanding the Diaspora (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012).

To simplify, and I must because though my interest in their work is great, this is not my field, for Vinson, who has been exploring the material and cultural history and function of castas (castes) in Mexico, three questions he has been asking include how do we define "race" and was it sufficiently explanatory as an interpretive tool; where does Latin American fit into the "Diaspora" and how do we read Afro-Latins in the African Diaspora in light of recent work on transnationalism and globalism; and lastly, what is the relationship of slavery to freedom, and how do modern understandings of both enslaved and free experiences shift our concepts of both.  With regard to race, he pressed the query of whether it was the best rubric through which to understand the some of the historical, social, political, and economic issues in the history of Afro-Mexicans, though he did note that other angles into understanding Afro-Mexican history by their nature might thus be ways of understanding "race" and related issues such as racial formation and identification. He talked about research on very specific and "extreme" castes in Mexico as a means of demonstrating how these categories proved mobile, useful, and habitable, and informed both local and national self-perceptions.

For Bryant, undergraduate and graduate level study drew him to his research, and in particular to the topic of slavery in the Americas. His subsequent research on Quito, Ecuador led him back to "slavery" as a key issue, not only as a way of understanding a deeply entrenched social system, but also of people of African descent as "political subjects" within the framework of slave societies and societies with enslaved people.  Recent archival research and study have led to deeper knowledge of slavery not just as an economic system but as a way of understanding systems of  "governance, sovereignty, display, and circulation of power."  One of the most powerful points he raised, about thinking of race in other ways (and he cited another colleague, Barnor Hesse) beyond its reducibility "to the body" or "phenotype," but in language, cultural practice, and so forth, sparked my thinking.  Another vital point he raised involving constructing a genealogy of the idea of race (and racial formation) before the rise of 19th century racial pseudoscience, which has continued to infect discussions of race up through today.

After their individual presentations, each pressed the other on unresolved issues, demonstrating for those present the very lively debates underway in the field. (I should note that it was particularly enriching for me to hear them talk about these strands in Mexican, Ecuadorian and Latin American history, since I think it's probably the case that in the US there is little public consciousness about blackness in either country, which affects governmental conversations and policies concerning both. I can recall Afro-Mexicans even importuning then-candidate Barack Obama for help, before he was elected, but as to whether he has ever responded to them or has ever broached any bilateral discussions with Mexico's government about their plight, I have heard and read nothing.) After their exchanges, Vinson and Bryant opened the floor to questions, which led to a number of insightful exchanges on their specific research projects and the larger topics they're engaging.

Ben Vinson III speaking on his research

Sherwin Bryant speaking on his research (Vinson at left)

+++

Afterwards, I hurried over to the English department so as not to miss Franco-British-American poet, critic, translator, editor, and antropologist Nathaniel Tarn (1928-), who was this academic year's final reader for the Poetry and Poetics Colloquium's reading series. I'd heard Tarn's name even before I came across his poetry, which with his works of criticism totals over thirty volumes, the most recent being Avia: A Poem of International Air Combat, 1939-1945 (Exeter, Shearsman Books, 2008), and Ins and Outs of the Forest Rivers (New York, New Directions, 2008), but I'd never heard him read.

After my colleague Harris Feinsod introduced Tarn, the poet read poems from Ins and Outs of the Forest Rivers as well as new poems, but not without expressing a deeply pessimistic view on the future of humankind who, he suggested, are moving inexorably toward self-destruction.  He leavened that grim pronouncement with his work, often dark but also demonstrative of language's ability to shape experience. Afterwards I had the opportunity to chat with him and he could not believe that I was honored to meet him, so let me underline that fact again. It was quite an honor, and I look forward to returning to his work soon. (I also had the opportunity to meet poet Joseph Donahue, who teaches at Duke University and who was traveling with Tarn for part of his reading tour.)

Nathaniel Tarn chatting with Harris Feinsod

Feinsod introducing Tarn

Tarn during the Q&A (Feinsod at right)

Dark Room Collective Reunion Tour Bumrushes DC

"Total Life Is (Still) What We Want"

"Bumrush the Show"

The Dark Room Collective's "Nothing Personal" Reunion Tour continued yesterday with a reading and reception (with booksigning) sponsored by the Folger Shakespeare Library as part of its O. B. Hardison Poetry Series, at the Lutheran Church of the Reformation across the street. The lineup for this reading differed a little from the one in Chicago a few weeks ago at the Poetry Foundation: in addition to Thomas Sayers Ellis, Sharan Strange (two of the Dark Room's co-founders with Janice Lowe), Major Jackson, Kevin Young, Natasha Trethewey, and yours truly, two other members, Tisa Bryant and this year's Pulitzer Prize laureate in poetry, Tracy K. Smith, also read, as did poet Monica Hand, and participated in a conversation afterwards, led by University of Texas scholar and poet Dr. Meta DuEwa Jones. Poet and Cave Canem grad fellow Teri Cross Davis made the event possible, and to her and the Folger Shakespeare Library, I offer many thanks. I won't try to recap the reading, but will instead send J's Theater readers to this link, a writeup by DC poet Abdul Ali, in the Washingtonian, which I should note gets my personal information a little wrong, but he does spell my last name correctly, so I'm not complaining.

Dark Room Reunion Gathering, DC
(Photo by Marlene Lillian Hawthorne)

A photo of the Folger's O. B. Hardison Poetry Series
broadsides of handwritten poems by
the Dark Room Collective Reunion writers

At any rate, after the reading, conversation and reception, we all headed to celebration, in part for Tracy's Pulitzer premiation, hosted by the generous and welcoming art patron and connoisseur Darryl Atwell, M.D., and sponsored by Dr. Atwell, Graywolf Press, Tidal Basin Review, and the American Poetry Museum.  We were incredibly fortunate to have poet and photographer Rachel Eliza Griffths, who was present in Chicago, as well as photographer Marlene Lillian Hawthorne, also present, and even FLAT LANGSTON joined the party, mutely and warmly watching on.  There was lots of swag (Dark Room buttons, free books and broadsides by the Dark Room writers, copies of the extraordinary Encyclopedia) and lots of amazing writers, including--and I am going to leave folks out, so forgive me!--Dark Room member Trasi Johnson, CC Massive grad fellows and poets Brian Gilmore (also a legal warrior), Brandon Johnson, and Kyle Dargan, younger poets like Ali and Diamond Sharp, and many others. It was splendifericent, though that word (i.e., in the process of making splendid--> splendid + feri = to bear, carry + icere = to be in the process of, etc.) barely captures the liveliness of the reading or the celebration, which included a ceremony such as only Thomas Sayers Ellis could have conceived, and a cake, pictured below. Take a mental slice and enjoy! Next stop, either Boston or New York, and, I hope, there'll be a fiction gathering as well (Tisa, Trasi, Bethany, Muhonjia, et. al.)!

Teri, Janice, Tracy, Sharan & Thomas

Tisa & Monica

Tracy & Natasha

Thomzilla (Hayes Davis at right)

Thomas, Natasha & Major

Natasha passing an award to Tracy (Major & Hayes at right)

Thomas, Marlene Lillian, Natasha, Major, Rachel Eliza, & Hayes

Janice (in red top), Flat Langston behind her

Brian (at center), Janice (at right), Brandon (behind her), Langston

The cake!

Poem: Ishmael Reed

Ishmael Reed (National Black Writers Conference)

We come to the end of Poetry Month. Since I began the month with a poem by a poet I know and have had the great luck to study with, I shall choose a final poem about poetry by another poet, of an earlier generation, whom I also had the good fortune to study with. This writer's poem "i am a cowboy in the boat of ra" was my favorite in childhood and for many years after, even though it took me years to fully understand what he was talking about. In fact, I would have chosen that poem, but it doesn't foreground thinking about poets or poetry as a medium in the way that the poems I've selected all month do, so I must pass it by, this time.  This poet first introduced me to the work of Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge (in person, no less); Adrienne Kennedy; and Jessica Hagedorn.  He also invited me to participate in the only reading I gave as a college student (which, it turns out, several of the Dark Room Writers Collective founders attended, though we didn't know each other then), and has over the years been an advocate. I know he is a controversial figure for many, but he was an excellent teacher, and, when I think of his work in prose fiction, in poetry, in playwrighting, in nonfictional and critical essays, and in lyric writing for musical accompaniment (whether it be jazz, hiphop, or other musical genres) I can only say that he remains one of the more original American and African American authors of his and subsequent eras.

He also has been a diehard champion of underrepresented perspectives in American literature, whether championing the work of Native American, Latino and Latina, Asian American, Arab American and mixed race writers, or founding Konch, which provided a venue for those writers, or editing over a dozen anthologies, such as From Totems to Hip-Hop: A Multicultural Anthology of Poetry Across the Americas, 1900–2001 (2003), featuring writers of all backgarounds, or establishing with others the Before Columbus Foundation and PEN/Oakland, which has given out the American Book Awards to writers whom the mainstream literary world often ignored.  His most frequent mode is satire, which often works very well, but sometimes not; but it has provided him with a means for engaging in one of the longest sustained critiques of of American exceptionalism, imperialism and structural racism of any American writer living. While producing this large and impressive body of work, he taught for 35 years at the University of California, Berkeley and elsewhere (which is where I encountered him). In 1998, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, perhaps considering not just his many literary works but his literary advocacy and community building efforts, honored him with their "Genius" Award.

Who am I talking about? I am talking about Ishmael Reed (1938-). And I will end this month with one of his best known--and, according to Gale Research, one of the most widely taught--poems in the curriculum. You may know which one I mean: "Beware: Do Not Read this Poem."  It is a masterful post-modern poem about poetry's seductive power, the satire undercutting the figurative and literal horror Reed invokes when he talks about the film's and the poem's voracious, anthropophagic appetite, but then cites the US Census figures on missing persons, a stat whose bureaucratic and ominous significance shifts through its connection to poetry.  Reed is saying, I think, through and amidst his satire, that poetry does have power, even if it might be rendered hyperbolic and linked to the obvious artifice of a "horror film" scenario and character.  It makes you laugh and think. Look at yourself, the poem says: not just the poem, but the poet and the readers themselves, have quite a bit of power. The power to devour each other, but of a voraciousness that might not be so bad. If you let it, if it lets you.

BEWARE: DO NOT READ THIS POEM

tonite, thriller was 
abt an ol woman , so vain she 
surrounded herself w/ 
          many mirrors

it got so bad that finally she 
locked herself indoors & her 
whole life became the 
          mirrors

one day the villagers broke 
into her house , but she was too 
swift for them . she disappeared 
          into a mirror 
each tenant who bought the house 
after that , lost a loved one to 
          the ol woman in the mirror : 
          first a little girl 
          then a young woman 
          then the young woman/s husband

the hunger of this poem is legendary 
it has taken in many victims 
back off from this poem 
it has drawn in yr feet 
back off from this poem 
it has drawn in yr legs

back off from this poem 
it is a greedy mirror 
you are into the poem . from 
         the waist down 
nobody can hear you can they ? 
this poem has had you up to here 
          belch 
this poem aint got no manners 
you cant call out frm this poem 
relax now & go w/ this poem

move & roll on to this poem 
do not resist this poem 
this poem has yr eyes 
this poem has his head 
this poem has his arms 
this poem has his fingers 
this poem has his fingertips

this poem is the reader & the 
reader this poem

statistic : the us bureau of missing persons re- 
         ports that in 1968 over 100,000 people 
          disappeared leaving no solid clues 
          nor trace     only 
a space     in the lives of their friends 

Copyright © Ishmael Reed, "Beware: Do Not Read This Poem," from New and Collected Poems, 1966-2006, New York: Carroll & Graf, 2006.

Poem: W. H. Auden

W. H. Auden
(Photo © Jill Krementz)

I mentioned him in yesterday's (or a recent) post, so here a poem by the one and only W. H. Auden (1907-1973), one of the lodestones of 20th century Anglo-American poetry, whose life and work really need no introduction.  The fifth line in this poem's second stanza is one of the most quoted by poets, though the fuller thought often is not. Ireland remains (even today) torn, and the Irish Republic finds itself saddled with one of the worst economic collapses in all of Europe (blame those bankers and their government enablers), so in that regard, as with the weather, Yeats' poetry might not have made anything happen, but on the other hand, it's clear that Yeats and countless other writers prepared the way, politically, culturally, socially, discursively, for the Free Irish State and the Republic that followed, and provided a framework through which an Ireland, no matter how governed, could imagine itself as constituting a(n even illusory) whole.

That was in part the aim of Modernism, shoring fragments up against ruin, to echo T. S. Eliot, trying to create a whole from the shards modernity, in its multifarious ways, had left behind.  Auden continues: "For poetry....survives/In the valley of its making where executives/Would never want to tamper, flows on south/From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,/Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,/A way of happening, a mouth." In effect, it does make things happen, by its every survival, which, he astutely noticed, passes right by the "executives" out of the mostly solitary conditions (this was in the days before MFA programs) of poets' affective and material labor ("busy griefs"), onto pages, into eyes and ears, through and out of every "mouth" that utters or imagines uttering a poem. So it was with Yeats's poetry, so it is with Auden's, so it will be with every poem that survives. There is so much more to say about this poem, a tribute, a memoriam, an elegy, an invocation, but I will leave it to Auden himself, one of the best rhetoricians of his or any age.

IN MEMORY OF W. B. YEATS   

I


He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree 
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

II

     You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
     The parish of rich women, physical decay,
     Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
     Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
     For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
     In the valley of its making where executives
     Would never want to tamper, flows on south
     From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
     Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
     A way of happening, a mouth.


III

          Earth, receive an honoured guest:
          William Yeats is laid to rest.
          Let the Irish vessel lie
          Emptied of its poetry.

          In the nightmare of the dark
          All the dogs of Europe bark,
          And the living nations wait,
          Each sequestered in its hate;

          Intellectual disgrace
          Stares from every human face,
          And the seas of pity lie
          Locked and frozen in each eye.

          Follow, poet, follow right
          To the bottom of the night,
          With your unconstraining voice
          Still persuade us to rejoice;

          With the farming of a verse
          Make a vineyard of the curse,
          Sing of human unsuccess
          In a rapture of distress;

          In the deserts of the heart
          Let the healing fountain start,
          In the prison of his days
          Teach the free man how to praise.

From Another Time by W. H. Auden, published by Random House. Copyright © 1940 W. H. Auden, renewed by The Estate of W. H. Auden. Used by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.

Poems: Nikki Giovanni

Nikki Giovanni
(www.afropoets.net)

Ah, Nikki Giovanni (1943-). When I was in junior high and starting high school she was my favorite poet. There was something about the directness of her address, the humorous way she dealt with frustration and rage (though she wasn't always so funny), her articulation of power in the face of marginalization, her truthfulness about what it meant and means to be young and black and living in the US (and she was at least a generation or two older than me, but everything she wrote spoke immediately to me), her sophisticated use of vernacular, all of it made her a poet I could not get enough of. There were other poets I adulated at this age, but alongside nearly all of them, Giovanni held pride of place until I turned 16 or so, and then I drifted away from her work.

I used to be able to recite "Nikki-Rosa," "Ego-Tripping," and some of her other poems by memory. Now I can only summon a few lines. But I have been fortunate to be able to teach her work in the intervening years, to junior high and high school students, and then to college students, and I marvel at how readily they take to her, how powerfully her work continues to resonate.  Among literary scholars, though, she doesn't make the same impact. I sometimes think it's because she's considered not especially profound or interesting or innovative, that she's read as too simple and not worthy of research beyond work on the Black Arts Movement. That may be just my misreading, but I would be hard-pressed to recall any discussion of I've had with folks teaching poetry and poetics, except those working specifically in African American literature, or with other creative writers, over the last 10 years, in which her name arose.

That is, outside of the moment when the tragic events at Virginia Tech thrust her back into public view. Yet this year at the Associated Writing Programs conference in Chicago, her public conversation with Thomas Sayers Ellis--which I couldn't attend because I was teaching at that hour--reportedly was packed.  Among the creative writing community she still is a draw. That results not only from her poetry, which speaks for itself, but from her work as a teacher, consciousness-raiser, and mentor, especially to younger writers. She has taught at Virginia Tech since 1987, where she is now Distinguished Professor, and has received many awards for her poetry, which can be found in more than two dozen collections. She also has published essays, children's book, and recorded her work on vinyl and CD.

Here are two early poems by Giovanni that capture some of what I described above. Both are also about being a poet and writing poetry, which is to say, about art, artists and their power.  As a young poet who saw the need for and participated in a social and cultural revolution, she was aware, even when expressing her doubts, that what she was doing had some value. Poetry does make things happen, pace W. H. Auden (whose poem in which this formulation, more carefully and fully stated, I probably should select for tomorrow), though not in the ways that poets might imagine and that others dismiss. What is clear is that good poems do survive, and their work continues long after they were written and for that we should always be thankful. So thank you to Giovanni, and here are two of her poems. Enjoy.

kidnap poem

ever been kidnapped
by a poet
if i were a poet
i'd kidnap you
put you in my phrases and meter
you to jones beach
or maybe coney island
or maybe just to my house
lyric you in lilacs
dash you in the rain
blend into the beach
to complement my see
play the lyre for you
ode you with my love song
anything to win you
wrap you in the red Black green
show you off to mama
yeah if i were a poet i'd kid
nap you

My Poem

i am 25 years old
black female poet
wrote a poem asking
nigger can you kill
if they kill me
it won't stop
the revolution

i have been robbed
it looked like they knew
that i was to be hit
they took my tv
my two rings
my piece of african print
and my two guns
if they take my life
it won't stop
the revolution

my phone is tapped
my mail is opened
they've caused me to turn
on all my old friends
and all my new lovers
if i hate all black
people
and all negroes
it won't stop
the revolution

if i never write
another poem
or short story
if i flunk out
of grad school
if my car is reclaimed
and my record player
won't play
and if i never see
a peaceful day
or do a meaningful
black thing
it won't stop
the revolution

the revolution
is in the streets
and if i stay on 
the fifth floor
it will go on
if i never do
anything
it will go on

Copyright © Nikki Giovanni, "kidnap poem" and "My Poem," from The Selected Poems of Nikki Giovanni, New York: William Morrow & Co., 1996. All rights reserved.

Poem: Qiu Xiaolong

Qiu Xiaolong
(Confucius Institute, UNSW)

This morning in the New York Times I came across an Op-Ed essay entitled "Intrigue in Chongqing," on the rise and precipitous fall of former "princeling" Bo Xilai, whose alleged corruption and spying activities doomed him, as did his wife's alleged involvement in the murder of a British citizen. I had read several stories on this case, which calls for novelistic, dramaturgical and operatic treatment, but I'd never heard of its author, who'd once suffered the indignity of having Bo steal his ping-pong racquet and, who, based on the details in his essay, is the son of a "capitalist" who'd been punished as a "counterrevolutionary"; writes detective novels; and is planning to include some of Bo's story in a future book, but also knows enough Chinese literature to quote from the ancient Chinese classic, The Book of Songs.  According to the Times, Qiu Xiaolong (裘小龙 1953-), "author of the forthcoming novel Don’t Cry, Tai Lake," penned this piece, and I learned via his byline that he's a resident of St. Louis. That made me even more curious, naturally.

So I searched and in seconds found his website, which announces that he is a "NOVELIST AND POET." I kept reading. The site offers a brief, thorough introduction:

Qiu Xiaolong was born in Shanghai, China. He is the author of the award-winning Inspector Chen series of mystery novels, Death of a Red Heroine (2000), A Loyal Character Dancer (2002), When Red Is Black (2004), A Case of Two Cities (2006), Red Mandarin Dress (2007), and The Mao Case (2009). He is also the author of two books of poetry translations, Treasury of Chinese Love Poems (2003) and Evoking T'ang (2007), and his own poetry collection, Lines Around China (2003). Qiu's books have sold over a million copies and have been published in twenty languages. He currently lives in St. Louis with his wife and daughter.

Wikipedia additionally informed he had raised money for the students who participated in the Tiananmen Square Revolution of 1989, thus he thought better of returning to China after a trip to the US for research on a book on St. Louisan T. S. Eliot.  Qiu has, it's clear, received a great deal of praise for novels, and at least one has been made into a movie. I checked out his poems. One of the first I came across is the one below; it's unclear whether he wrote it initially in English or it's a translation, but either way, it's pretty tight. (I would say that as hard as it is to write proper prose in another language, it's even harder to write do so with poetry.)  On the back cover of Lines Around China, republished now as Lines Around China: Lines Out of China, he even sports a blurb from Mona Van Duyn (1921-2004), the former Poet Laureate of the United States in 1992, and a highly lauded writer, who received the 1971 National Book Award for her collection To See, To Take (Atheneum, 1970), and the 1991 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her collection The Near Changes (Knopf, 1990).  I also know of her because when I was growing up, she was one of the famous writers living in St. Louis (the other local bigwigs of that era were William Gass, Stanley Elkin, Howard Nemerov, and Donald Finkel, most of them associated with Washington University in St. Louis, which is also where Van Duyn taught too).

I can't tell whether Qiu is affiliated with Washington University (though he did receive his MA and PhD in Comparative Literature from there, which makes me think he must have had some direct contact with Gass, at least), but a Mona Van Duyn blurb is the biz, and I do like this poem, which is a lighthearted poem about poetry, so I'm posting it. When I get the opportunity, I'll also read one of his mysteries. They do sound worth the while.

(Bonus: The Browser's "FiveBooks Interviews" with Qiu Xiaolong on Classical Chinese Poetry)

POETRY

Back home at 8:30
with five or six small fish in the pail
including the baby blue gill
which could hardly count,
a water snake, its triangular head smashed
into a rotten persimmon--still, not
a too bad day, I have to say, a sunburned nose
peeling under the scrutiny of my wife
who, discovering a China-like map
of mosquito bites on my bare back, snaps:
What's the point--nine hours
under the scorching sun, you have
to buy the gasoline, the drink, the bait,
two hot dogs, half a pack of Camels, and
now these tiny fish, three bucks' worth
in a market, you are really hooked.

An accountant, she sees no point
calculating a split-second
of catching the golden sun
in silver scales.

Copyright © Qiu Xiaolong, "Poetry," from Lines Around China: Lines Out of China, Saint Louis: CreateSpace, 2008. All rights reserved.

Kgositsile in Evanston + My Bookshelf

On Monday Keorapetse Kgositsile (1938-), the Poet Laureate of South Africa and a beacon in African and African Diasporic arts and letters, came to Northwestern to read his work. In lieu of a recap of his excellent reading, introduced by Reg Gibbons, and  graced by Douglas Ewart's pipe accompaniment on three poems, here are a few photos. I previously posted the itinerary for Kgositsile's travels throughout the rest of the spring here. His tour is winding down, and the dates and some of these final events may have changed so please check in advance, but I definitely recommend going to hear him if you can.

April 30th (Monday): Brown, 4:00 pm—arrive on Sunday the 29th and return to NYC on Tuesday

May 1st, with Chinua Achebe

Photos:

Kgositsile and Ewart (at right)

Kgositsile reading his poetry

+++

It's been a while since I posted what's on my bookshelf (including the books selected at right), but then I've had little time to read anything other than work-related material of late. These books, some begun a while ago, some recently brought into my personal orbit, are all for edification, education and enjoyment:

• Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games, New York: Scholastic Press, 2008.
• Samuel R. Delany, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, New York: Magnus Books, 2012.
• Qwo-Li Driskill, Walking with Ghosts, Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2005.
• Harmony Holiday, Negro League Baseball, Albany: Fence Books, 2011.
• Michel Houellebecq, The Map and the Territory, Gavin Bowd, translator, London: Heinemann, 2011.
• Michel Jouvet, The Castle of Dreams,  Laurence Garey, translator, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008.
• Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: complicity with anonymous materials, Melbourne: re-press, 2008.
• Edith Pearlman, Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories, Wilmington: Lookout Books/University of North Carolina Wilmington, 2011.
• Charles Rice-González, Chulito: A Novel, New York: Magnus Books, 2012.
• Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, New York: Crown, 2010.
• Justin Torres, We The Animals, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2011.
• Jesmyn Ward, Where the Line Bleeds, Chicago: Agate Publishing, 2008.
• Chris Ware, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, New York, Pantheon Books, 2000.

Poems + Translations: Ana Cristina César

Ana Cristina César (from http://tomzine24.wordpress.com)

Several years ago I came across the poetry of Ana Cristina César (1952-1983), and was immediately struck by how different they looked and sounded in Portuguese, to much of the Brazilian poetry I had been reading. Or they looked different primarily because I did not yet have a context for them. As I read more and studied up on César, I learned that there were, in fact, a number of poets (Cacaso, Chacal, Francisco Alvim and Paulo Leminski, among others) with whom and with whose work hers was in conversation, though that did not diminish the singular quality of her poems for me. I also learned that she was and is still considered one of the most important Brazilian poets of the 1970s era.  A native of São Paulo, she lived in Rio de Janeiro, studied and spent time in London, and later resided in Brasília. What I was detecting in the Portuguese was a poetry that, whether written in verse or prose, often unfolds like a conversation or dialogues, the intimacy enhanced and mitigated by Cesar's quiet, often irreverent, sometimes quite dark humor; a wide range of references, allusions and irony; and above all by her attentiveness to the power and limits of eros.  A queer, feminist poet, César produced poetry that represents a critique, in important ways, of the traditions, in Brazilian and more globally, of poetry as it has developed.  Sometimes her poetry doesn't look like poetry at all; it approximates what another poet I've am drawn to, Nicanor Parra, has called anti-poetry.  At the very least it raises the question of what is poetic, what is literary, and who has the power to designate it as such. American literature and culture was particularly important to her at one stage in her life, and one her strangest little poems comprises nothing more than an index of names of figures she considered significant to her life and art. It is, appropriately, titled "Index of Proper Names" ("Index onomástica"); I include it below.

As the dates above suggest, hers was a brief life, though she began publishing her poetry in childhood, and by the time she was in her 20s, she had gained public notice as an avant-garde pioneer, ranking among the best of the Poetas marginas (Marginal Poets). She was also queer, and her work espoused a discernible feminism. Her fame inside and outside Brazil has steadily grown since her death, by suicide, at the age of 31. During her lifetime she published several collections, including the acclaimed Luvas de pelica (Kid Gloves, 1980), and A teus pés (At Your Feet, 1982), as well as the prose work Literatura não é documentação (Literature Is Not Documentation), on the politics of documentary filmmaking.  I have translated a number of her poems, and featured a rough translation of one (with a companion poem by another Brazilian poet favorite of mine, Leminski), on this blog back in 2010.  Although there is a fine British selection of her poems, Intimate Diary, translated by Cecilia McCullough, Patricia E. Page, and David Treece (Boulevard Books, 1997), I don't believe an American one exists. A fellow translator told me the other day, however, that a very famous American poet is now translating Cesar, so her translations will probably appear in book form before any of mine do. At least I have this blog.

Here then are "First Lesson" and "Index of Proper Names," both of which I translated from a bilingual Spanish-Portuguese anthology of her work entitled Álbum de Retazos: Antología Critica Bilinguë, Ana Cristina César, edited by Luciana Di Leone; Florencia Garramuño; and Ana Carolina Puente, Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 2003. The first is overtly about poetry of a particular kind, the second about literature more broadly. Both press at the very limits of what lyric poetry is; are they--especially the second--even poems as we usually know them? Also it's Poem in Your Pocket Day; both of these poems are short enough to carry around in a pocket or your memory, whichever's easier.

FIRST LESSON

The genres of poetry are: lyric, satirical, didactic,
    epic, light.
The lyric genre comprises lyricism.
Lyricism is the translation of a subjective feeling, sincere
    and personal.
It is the language of the heart, of love.
Lyricism is also so named because in other times
    sentimental verses were declaimed to the sound of

    the lyre.
Lyricism can be:
a) Elegiac, when it treats sad matters, almost always death.
b) Bucolic, when verse about rustic subjects.
c) Erotic, when verse about love.
Elegiac lyricism comprises the elegy, the dirge, the

    threnody, the epitaph, and the epicedium, or funeral

    oath.
Elegy is poetry which treats dolesome topics.
The dirge is poetry in homage to a dead person.
It was declaimed beside a bonfire on which the corpse was
    incinerated.
Threnody is a poetry which reveals the heart's sorrows.
Epitaph is a short verse form engraved on tombstones.
Epicedium is a poetry which relates to the life
    of a dead person.
I look for a long while at a poem's body
until I lose sight of whatever is not body
and feel, separated between my teeth,
a filament of blood
on my gums

INDEX OF PROPER NAMES

Alvim, Francisco
Augusto, Eudoro
Bandeira, Manuel
Bishop, Elizabeth
Buarque, Helô
Carneiro, Angela
Dickinson, Emily
Drabik, Grazyna
Drummond, Carlos
Freitas F°, Armando
Holiday, Billie
Joyce, James
Kleinman, Mary
Mansfield, Catherine
Meireles, Cecilia
Melim, Angela
Mendes, Murilo
Muricy, Katia
Paz, Octavio
Pedrosa, Vera
Rhys, Jean
Stein, Gertrude
Whitman, Walt

All poems, Copyright © Ana Cristina César, 2006, 2012; Translations by John Keene, 2010, 2012. All rights reserved.

Poem: Kamran Mir Hazar

The US has occupied Afghanistan for a decade. The war, or something approximating one, grinds on; drones ply the skies over Khost; Afghan people, like the coalition soldiers, are still dying and suffering serious psychological and physical injuries; the government there teeters on...the brink? I would venture that most Americans know as little about Afghanistan today, save for the names of a few cities--Kabul, Kandahar, Mazari Sharif--and politicians--Hamid Karzai--than we did before the war began. About Afghan literature, I would imagine our knowledge remains as minimal as ever. I am not excepting myself. Today, then, I am posting a poem--about writing and so much more--by an Afghan poet [کامران میرهزار], Kamran Mir Hazar (1976-), who has garnered internatioal praise for his poetry, his journalism, and his political efforts to promote human rights and civil society in Afghanistan.

A member of the Hazara people, and poet and journalist in Dari and Hazaragi, Kamran Mir Hazar founded and has edited the websites Kabul Press and Refugee Face, the former of which the governments of Afghanistan and Iran block access to. Hazar also has served as a radio journalist and editor. For his journalistic and human rights projects he has won the 2006 Hellman/Hammett Grant from Human Rights Watch, and a 2007 Freedom Award from the Afghanistan Civil Society Forum. He has published two collections of poetry, Ketâb e Mehr (The Book of Mehr) and làhn-e tond-e àsbi dàr ezlâ'-e parvân-e sjodan (The Cry of a Mare about to become a Butterfly), as well as a literary critical book on Afghan literature. Of his most recent book, Johnny Cheung's translated introduction on the Poetry International Website says:

Mir Hazar’s most recent book, Censorship in Afghanistan, has recently been published by Norway’s IP Plans e-Books. It is the first book to explore the systematic suppression of free speech in Afghanistan, which has been a feature of its ruling authorities for hundreds of years.

Hazar now lives and works in Hønefoss, Norway. You can click here to read several Guardian articles on him. He also has a threadbare, multilingual website (including one English-language links) at kamranmirhazar.com.

I obviously cannot speak or read Dari or Hazaragi, so I cannot comment on the original poem, posted below, nor can I comment on the quality of the translation (though I did slightly change two things, transposing one nominal phrase ("crashed computer"), and changing a preposition ("on" for "behind" the "diesel-powered laptop," to make the language more idiomatic), but the story it tells is significant, and the questions provoked by the speaker--who is the lyric speaker here? where is s/he at the moment of this poem? how can our understanding of the poem's multiple ironies, its shifting discourses, its satire, aid us in locating her or him?--are ones that made me sit up and think, ask questions, reread the poem several times. That the medium cited is the net is also significant for this blog, which serves as one my means for connecting with people all over the world.  Too many viruses, of imperialism and militarism, authoritarianism and orthodoxy, of sexism and homophobia, of ignorance and indifference, mark humanity at this moment in time; this poem calls attention to them, at the local and the global level. "Just what is mankind up to?" someone asks a "Kabul sparrow," a term that has multiple meanings, and Hazar tells us the sparrow's answer. Whether a boom accompanies it and it's blown to smithereens is another question.

Nevertheless, we still have this poem, this poet, his and others' poetry. There is hope yet.

VIRUS WRITING


1.
Writing viruses
And electronic labyrinths
With a blackout and no computer
In a rented house, at seven thousand a month;
Kabul, the Afghan capital!
What silly poem is this?

You ask yourself, is poetry the same lonely words
    that wander in electronic corridors,
Cut off from their existence,
Thrown away, with no choice but to become a poem?
You watch imagination wandering through paths, over
    the paths,
You throw the leash at yet another word,
Trying to subdue this wild one,
And if you fail,
You stop functioning,
Like a crashed computer.

2.
There was someone, someone who wrote viruses
On a diesel-powered laptop
Looking for URLs and
An anonymous mail would be sent
Connecting you to a site, infected;
“I am from Florida, the USA, and 23 years of age,
Looking for someone to follow the link, and
    make happy”;
To open the mail and to make someone happy?
First, stop the programs;
Passing through security, typing 97, 98, 99,
Approaching the death of romance between zero
    and one.

A virus-writer drank half a beer bottle at once;
Then, computer deaths;
First to the east of Paris, a house,
Australia, three minutes more,
A man is waiting out the last minutes of
    an office shift
Needs to get home;
A party is starting in half an hour;
The Philippines, minutes later,
A 19-year-old girl
In a chat room,
Showing off a used body;
In Egypt, more or less the same time,
And the next morning, Kabul.

3.
You, and you, also you,
Yes, you and also you,
You are all arrested!

4.
They tell me, stop writing!
You write and we’ll show you Guantanamo
    at home,
You write, we’ll kill you.
Kabul, summer of ’07
Hands in handcuffs, feet tied up;
This is Afghanistan, and this here where it is
    going,
Dead bodies over dead bodies.
The poem has no choice but to stop writing
    itself.
This is prison.

5.
They asked a Kabul sparrow
Just what is mankind up to?
The sparrow considered this and died!

© Translation: 2010, Nushin Arbabzadah (with slight modifications)
Publisher: First published on PIW, 2010

And the original, in Hazara:

Copyright © 2010, Kamran Mir Hazar, Publisher: First published on PIW, 2010

Poem: Denise Levertov

Denise Levertov

Do students read Denise Levertov (1923-1997) in high school or college these days? Do high school teachers or college professors teach her work?  I never hear anyone mention her name, and it's a shame. It was in junior high that I first read a poem of hers, though I don't remember which; I made a faint impression, but an impression it did make. I decided to learn more about her when I started coming across books of hers from the 1960s and 1970s at used bookstores in Boston, and became curious about her poems, how they worked, why they worked--because compared to other poets I was reading a lot of then, they seemed deceptively understated, quiet, sometimes even casual, shorn of metaphor and allusion, often given to descriptions of objects, scenes, people, places--and then about her, her life, her relationship with the poets closely and loosely grouped about the Black Mountain school and her political stances, especially during the Vietnam War.

She wrote a number of poems about her opposition to this conflict and against war in general, especially in the volume The Sorrow Dance (1967) and The Freeing of the Dust (1975) and her progressive views on many different topics are evident in her poetry. Yet it is the poetry itself, limpid and lucid, proceeding often as if she were speaking but carefully shaped, full of internal music, that testifies to her importance in American letters.  Levertov was born in the United Kingdom, however; her father was a Russian Jewish immigrant who converted to Christianity, and her mother was Welsh. She served as a nurse during World War II, and came to the US only in 1948, a year after marrying an American writer, Mitchell Goodman. From then on, through her affiliation with the Black Mountain writers, on to her final works, which include more personal and sometimes overtly confessional lyrics, she published regularly and to considerable recognition, while taking stands on behalf of women's liberation and civil rights, and teaching and mentoring younger writers, including at Stanford University from 1981 to 1994.

Here's one of her poems, "To the Reader," which gives a sense of how effortlessly profound she can be. At first, she contrasts the experience of the reader with an almost generic scene occurring somewhere in nature (which of course could be and is, ironically, a scene in this book), which quickly becomes much more specific and memorable with that "saffron" (note too the subtle, but effective music here, born of deftly deployed prosody, consonance and rhyme), and then in the second stanza, she shifts to a more ambigious scene--where is it taking place, described as it is with evocative lyric precision--"lie among lianas: eyes of obsidian"--and then, only in the final paragraph, do we get a metaphor, the sea turning the pages of its waves, like the reader of the book, the final repetition both mirroring the action of the reader and the sea, while also inverting the action through personification so that it's the sea's "dark pages" that now have agency, turning the pages, of life and time; the natural world is set into motion by the work of art, this poem. Of course analogically these shifts are akin to what reading offers, what a good book, a great poem, can do: leaps of all kinds are possible, not just between stanzas, but between words, images, metaphors, or, as is the case here, metonyms and images, activating the world and life itself. I do hope readers turn to her from time to time; there is much to gain from doing so, and much to love.

TO THE READER

As you read, a white bear leisurely
pees, dyeing the snow
saffron,

and as you read, many gods
lie among lianas: eyes of obsidian
are watching the generations of leaves,

and as you read
the sea is turning its dark pages,
turning
its dark pages.

Copyright © Denise Levertov, "To the Reader," from The Jacob's Ladder, London: Jonathan Cape, 1965. All rights reserved.