Two Poems for Black History Month

It has been a while since I posted poems for Black History Month, but this year Rutgers-Newark made it fairly easy by inviting me to tape several of my poems for their annual Black History monthly commemoration, with the understanding that they would create videos for them. 

Here are the two poems with videos we taped, featuring my poems "Jackie Robinson in Sportsman's Park, 1949," and "Martin de Porres." 

The first invokes the pioneering Black baseball player who needs no introduction, and the second brings to life the Black Peruvian saint who particularly fascinated me in childhood. Both appear in my collection Punks: New and Selected Poems (The Song Cave, 2021).

I've attached two images, both copyright © Rutgers University-Newark, from the videos, which you can find at the links.

"Jackie Robinson in Sportsman's Park, 1949"

"Martin de Porres"

Brazilian Notes: Quilombo Decree Upheld + Borba's "Black is Beautiful (#BLVCKSBTFLL)"

The signs read, "Brazil is quilombo residents;
not one less quilombo"

All over the Americas, when fugitive slaves had the opportunities to escape and set up maroon (marrons in French, cimarrones in Spanish, maròn/mawòn in Kreyol/creole, etc.) communities, beyond the administrative and military grasp of the settler-colonial and slave system, they did so. These communities took different forms in different parts of the hemisphere, but their legacies continue, sometimes in name (palenques in Spanish, maroon towns or free towns in English), sometimes in traces and foundations that are mostly forgotten but still inspire the descendants. In Brazil, these communities were often known as quilombos, the most famous of which remains Palmares, in the interior of the northeastern state of Alagoas, north of Bahia, established by a group of fugitive slaves and warriors led by the great Imbangala (Angola)-descended Zumbi (1655-1695).

Quilombos, from the Kimbundu word kilombo, dot rural areas far from the major metropoles across northern and northeastern Brazil. As anti-colonial and anti-imperial, black-centered zones of resistance, they were targets of the Portuguese and later Brazilian governments in the colonial period, and the state's administrative, bureaucratic, legal, social, and economic war against them has not relaxed in the 20th and 21st centuries. From attempts to seize title to quilombo land to the murders of quilombolas (residents of the quilombos), these communities have had to engage in continual struggle to stay whole, and free. A ruralist coalition of lawmakers, some allied with agribusiness and other powerful interests, has repeatedly attempted to gain control of the increasingly valuable quilombo territory. In 2003, however, then-President Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva signed a decree that expanded the quilombolas' rights to title and demarcated their land, empowering the residents to gain legal title in order to keep them.

Brazil's current president, the profoundly unpopular Michel Temer, took office after a soft 2016 coup in which he and the Brazilian Congress impeached and ousted popularly elected president Dilma Rousseff, Lula's successor, over technical budgeting violations. Temer subsequently began instituting a range of neoliberal policies, under the aegis of pro-market rhetoric, yet Brazil's economy has continued to sputter, and the once expanding lower middle class of the Lula years has increasingly tumbled back into poverty. Among Temer's actions that threatened the quilombos was an order to suspend the titling process for the quilombos, which are supposedly protected by the Brazilian Constitution, until the Brazilian Supreme Court (Supremo Tribunal Federal, or STF) could rule on the validity of the decree Lula signed, which the conservative Democratic Party challenged.

After over five years in court, an overwhelming majority of the justices voted, 10-1, to uphold the decree, finally leading the Democratic Party's leader, Senator Agripino Maia, from the northeastern state of Rio Grande do Norte, to end his opposition. The STF ruling represents a major victory for the quilombo communities and Afro-Brazilians in general, as well as for indigenous Brazilians, who have seen their lands seized and rights threatened, and a significant defeat for the powerful conservative rural interests, and their allies, including overtly racist, homophobic leading far-right presidential contender Jair Bolsonaro (of Rio de Janeiro state), who have strongly supported Temer.

As Black Women of Brazil blog reported (translating a report from the Brazilian media site iG):

Members of the National Coordination of Articulation of the Quilombola Rural Black Communities (Conaq) celebrated the [decision].”This is a first step in the recognition of the debt that the Brazilian State has with the quilombolas, as it also has with the natives,” said Denildo Rodrigues, a member of the association at the end of the trial.

Conaq was one of many associations engaged in lobbying the STF in voting. Among other actions, it organized the undersigned “Not one less quilombo”, which had more than 100 thousand signatures requesting the maintenance of Lula’s decree.

“There is no motive, reason or circumstance today for the policy of titling quilombos to be or remain paralyzed. What is expected now is for the public administration to continue and complete the regularization processes,” said Juliana de Paula Batista, a lawyer at the Socio-Environmental Institute, also involved in the case.

It would be foolhardy to believe that this successful ruling will completely halt outside interests' attempts to gain control of the quilombolas' land, but it does give them an even stronger legal foundation to defend themselves in the courts, even as they battle ongoing violence and other forms of predation.

* * *

Photo © Thiago Borba

Black Women of Brazil Blog (BWBB) is always a trove of current, informative news about Black Brazil. One recent article I enjoyed featured the work of Bahian-born and based photographer Thiago Borba, whose current project, "Black Is Beautiful," so appropriate for Black History Month, is featured at Revista Trip. On that site, in an article entitled "A coisa tá preta" (The thing is black), writer Giulia Garcia discusses Borba's route to the project, which uses the respective English title and hashtag Black is Beautiful (#BLVCKSBTFLL). After turning to photography in 2006 and studying in Spain, Borba could find no jobs in Bahia, so he pursued a commercial career in São Paulo to make ends meet.

Photo © Thiago Borba

In 2016, however, he reconnected with an earlier interest in exploring the topic of blackness in relation to beauty, still so fraught in Brazil, and started a photographic project entitled Paraíso Oculto (Hidden Paradise), melding images of black beauty in human form and natural landscapes. As BWBB regularly points out, contestations over beauty, and valorization of Eurocentric standards, constantly play out not only in interpersonal and intrafamilial spaces, but in the Brazilian public sphere. A number of spectacular, overtly racist incidents, involving denigration of Afrobrazilians' hair, features, color, style, and intelligence, have occurred over just the last year. One irony in all of this is that Afrobrazilians now constitute a numerical majority in the country, with sizable populations in Brazil's north, northeast and southeast.

Photo © Thiago Borba

He returned to Bahia from São Paulo last year, and began focusing on images of Afrobrazilians, particularly darker-skinned ones, who remain the most discriminated against in Brazil--not unlike in the US, where colorism within black communities, and within the larger US society, persists. Bahia is the traditional African heart of Brazil, with the highest percentage of self-identified black ("negro") and brown or mixed race ("pardo") residents, but hierarchies of color, class and ancestry exist there as well. As the Brazilian saying goes, "Quanto mais preto, mais preconceito sofre" (How much blacker you are, the more prejudice you suffer"), as true in Bahia as in pats of Brazil far smaller black populations, like Santa Catarina, in the far south.

Photo © Thiago Borba

Photo © Thiago Borba

The new project centers "pretos retintos" (dark-skinned blacks), those people who are "mais preto," amid a range of hues; Borba draws his subjects mostly not from the ranks of models, but from his personal and broader social network. (Looking at the photos, though, any of these subjects could or should model, and some, like Vanderlei Nagô, clearly are modeling!) Borba began posting the images on his Instagram page, and from there they gained wider notice and were selected for the state of Bahia's Novembre Negro (Black November) campaign. (November 20 is Dia da Conciência Negra, a holiday celebrated since the 1960s and officially established as a legal holiday in 2003 to honor the death, in 1695, of none other than Zumbi do Palmares, mentioned above. In Bahia, the entire month is beginning to assume the cast of honoring black Brazilian history.)

Photo © Thiago Borba

According to BWBB and Revista Trip, one of the images was even promoted on billboards, on buses and in the metro, among other public spaces. For Borba, this expanded reach was important in helping to amplify, in the eyes of minds of Afrobrazilians and all Brazilians, the representation and representativeness of black people in Brazilian society. It is a battle we continue to fight in the US, in similar and different ways.

Photo © Thiago Borba

Photo © Thiago Borba

Black History Month/Langston Hughes Day + Poems: Nicolás Guillén & Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes in Harlem,
1959. (The LIFE Picture
Collection/Getty Images)

Happy Black History Month! February ushers in the month on the US calendar when the history, culture, and experiences of people of African descent, African Americans and all other Black peoples, in America and across the globe, occupy the foreground. As readers of J's Theater know well, every day, every month, every year here offers an opportunity to highlight the artistry, past and present experiences, and rich cultures of Black people, and to the extent that I can do so this month as every month, I intend to.

February 1 is also the birthday of arguably the greatest and most prolific African American poet, (James) Langston (Mercer) Hughes (1902-1967), a Joplin, Missouri native whose poetry transformed Black American and American literature, and who was one of the central figures in the Harlem Renaissance and a link to many of the Black American and non-US literary traditions that followed. One of the many aspects of Hughes' career that has deeply influenced me is his work as a translator; he brought into the English the drama of Spain's Federico García Lorca, the poetry of the Afrocuban luminary Nicolas Guillén, and the prose of Haitian writer Jacques Roumain.

I've previously posted one of his translations of Guillén's poems from Motivos de Son (1938), the collection that made the Cuban poet's reputation. I shared it in conjunction with my trip to Cuba,  which though 9 years ago feels like it was just yesterday. Hughes visited Cuba three times, in 1927, 1930 and 1931, before the Revolution, and as Ervin Dyer discussed in a CBS News piece, the American poet played a role in helping the country connect to its African roots, engaging in conversations with and championing the work of Afrocuban artists and writers at a time when racial discrimination there, as in the US, was rife. One of the poets he met and whom he encouraged was Guillén, who interviewed him for Diário de Marina, according to Dyer. Many stars aligned: Hughes was already famous and being translated in Cuba, Guillén's career was ascendant, and the newspaper had a page dedicated to fighting racism. Hughes would go on to translate Guillén's poetry and cultivated their friendship to the end of his life. At the same time, his presence in Cuba and his art continued to galvanize an array of Afrocuban artists working across genres.

Here is Hughes' translation of Guillén's "Little Song for the Children of the Antilles," which I screenshot from The Translations: Federico García Lorca, Nicolás Guillén, and Jacques Roumain, by Langston Hughes, edited and with an introduction by Dellita Martin-Ogunsola, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003.

And here is a poem Dyer mentions in his article, one of Hughes' tributes to Cuba, "To the Little Fort of San Lázaro on the Ocean Front, Havana." It is also a humorous and sarcastic critique of capitalism, especially of the predatory US kind, which had reached its tentacles deep into Cuba before Fidel Castro and the Revolution hacked it away.  We also might think of it as a fitting epigraph for a good deal of what gentrification and global capital are laying waste to today.

TO THE LITTLE FORT OF SAN LÁZARO

ON THE OCEAN FRONT, HAVANA

by Langston Hughes


Watch tower once for pirates
That sailed the sun-bright seas —
Red pirates, great romantics.

  DRAKE
  DE PLAN,
  EL GRILLO

Against such as these
Years and years ago
You served quite well —
When time and ships were slow.
  But now,
Against a pirate called
THE NATIONAL CITY BANK
What can you do alone?
Would it not be
Just as well you tumbled down,
Stone by helpless stone?

From The Collected Works of Langston Hughes: The Poems, 1921-1940, edited and with an introduction by Arnold Rampersad, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001. All rights reserved.

New York Times' "Unpublished Black History"

A young Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor, Jr., high school
basketball star at Power Memorial Catholic during
the Catholic High School Athletic Association Championship, in 1965, 6 years before he became
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (Don Hogan Charles)

I have been checking the New York Times every day to see what photographs and stories will be featured as part of its "Unpublished Black History" series, which it debuted this year for Black History Month. In essence, it is a catalogue of material, often newsworthy in some way, that nevertheless failed to make it into the paper. In some cases, the Times editors approach candor about why they did not publish the images or stories, but in other cases, some quite fascinating, they do not.

It's hard to know, lacking documentation of some sort (notes, audiotaped material, etc.) or the direct comments of the editors, writers and photographers themselves, why some of these key moments were passed over, but it also underlines the fact that even today, and not just with Black History, editorial choices of various kinds shape what makes it into the mainstream news and what gets complete passed over. As I view the photographs and read the brief entries, I keep wondering, what led to this story being skipped and others receiving coverage? This would be a great subject for the Times to devote one of its roundtables to.

A few images from the series, which you can find here (in reserve chronological order, going back to February 1):

Run-DMC performing at Madison Square Garden
in 1986 for an anti-crack benefit (Chester Higgins, Jr.)

Several photos (one by Allyn Baum at left) from the
unpublished Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. trove

Scholar Kenneth B. Clark at home in 1969, with his wife
and family, in Hastings-on-Hudson (Eddie Hauser)

Martina Arroyo, in 1965, during her run
in Verdi's Don Carlo (Sam Falk)

Some of the many photos, taken in 1972 by
Jack Manning, of James Baldwin;
only one of which ended up in the New York Times 

Protesters confronting police during
a 1964 march in Jackson, Mississippi, in
response to the assassination of civil rights
leader Medgar Evers (Claude Sitton)

Happy Black History Month & Langston Hughes Day

Langston Hughes by
Carl Van Vechten, 1936

Happy Black History Month!

February 1 is also the birthday of Langston Hughes (1902-1967), who needs no introduction. As in past years, in honor of his birthday and of Black History Month, I'm posting a Langston Hughes poem. (One of the joys of my life these days is that I always was able to memorialize and celebrate him for posterity in my story "Blues," in Counternarratives.)

Below is Langston Hughes's tribute to the late Jacques Roumain (1907-1944), one of Haiti's greatest poets, whose work, including Gouverneurs de la Rosée (Masters of the Dew) Hughes translated. The friendship, dialogue and political affinities between the two poets was significant, in part because of the links Roumain had made with African American writers during his period of exile from Haiti. Hughes, like many of his peers, mourned the death of the brilliant, anti-imperialist, Communist-affiliated ethnographer, poet and fiction writer Roumain, at age 37, in 1944.

In fact Hughes published the memorial elegy to Roumain, a Communist, in the October 2, 1945 issue of New Masses. I don't think it's Hughes' best work, but am fascinated by its tenderness and the ways in which Hughes invokes the Diaspora and links black--and Haitian vodoun specifically--culture to politics ("Erzulie to the Pope, / Damballa to Lenin / Haiti to the universe) throughout. The dialogue, Hughes suggests, continues even after death.

Black History Month/Langston Hughes Day + Poems by Langston Hughes

February 1 always marks the start of US Black History Month, as well as the birthday of one of the greatest poets this country gave the wider world, James Langston Mercer Hughes (1902-1967). I think I've alternated in the past by celebrating one or the other, but today, in tribute to the month and to Hughes, here are a few of his poems, all taken from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, Arnold Rampersad and David E. Roessel, Editors (New York: Vintage, 1995).

The first is a poem drawn from Hughes's time on the sea; Sekondi, part of Sekondi-Takoradi, is a port city in Ghana. Note the ironic play on fog and the swift punchline-like turn at the poem's end.

FOG

Singing black boatmen
An August morning
In the thick white fog at Sekondi
Coming out to take cargo
From anchored alien ships,
You do not know the fog
We strange so-civilized ones
Sail in always.

***

Here are three queer poems drawn from Hughes's collections up to 1936. I reread all the poems in these volumes in preparation for my story "Blues," which involves a (fictional?) meeting between Hughes and the Mexican poet Xavier Villaurrutia, who had already translated some of Hughes' work into Spanish.

In his first three or so collections, Hughes has, among a wide array of poems in which a male voice addresses a female beloved; a female voice addresses or speaks of a male beloved; and gender-ambiguous poems, many invoke nocturnal imagery (because we all know what goes on in the dark).

SONG

Lovely, dark, and lonely one,
Bare your bosom to the sun.
Do not be afraid of light,
You who are a child of night.

Open wide your arms to life,
Whirl in the wind of pain and strife,
Face the wall with the dark, closed gate,
Beat with bare, brown fists--
And wait.

HARLEM NIGHT SONG

Come,
Let us sing the night together,
Singing.

I love you.

Across
The Harlem roof-tops
Moon is shining.
Night sky is blue.
Stars are great drops
Of golden dew.

Down the street
a band is playing
I love you.

Come, let us roam the night together
Singing.

DESIRE

Desire to us
Was like a double death,
Swift dying
Of our mingled breath,
Evaporation
Of an unknown strange perfume
Between us quickly
In a naked
Room.

***

Lastly, Hughes was a poet who did not shy away from political and social commentary, but he had a gift for figuring out how to express it without it (for the most part) sounding like propaganda. Part of his success hinges on his use of humor, part on his careful use of rhyme, rhetoric and rhythm, part on his inclusion of vernacular and the viewpoint of the subaltern, and part on his skillful deployment of irony. The parodic tone and collage quality here point in the direction of post-modernism.

"Advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria" appeared in 1931 in New Masses magazine, and later in Hughes's aubiography, The Big Sea, and is considered a masterpiece of Popular Front aesthetics. I checked the Inflation Calculator, and $10,000/year in 1931 would equal $155,747.37/year in 2014 dollars. That would come to about $12,978/month, which, it turns out, was about the price of the lowest end rentals in the Waldorf Towers in 2011 (I can only imagine that it has risen by several thousand dollars as the price of high-end real estate keeps rising.) To put it another way, Hughes was prescient, and not for the first time!

Excerpt from ADVERTISEMENT FOR THE WALDORF ASTORIA

EVICTED FAMILIES

All you families put out in the street

   Apartments in the Towers are only $10,000 a year. (Three

   rooms and two baths.) Move in there until times get good,

   and you can do better. $10,000 are about the same

   to you, aren't they?

Who cares about money with a wife and kids homeless, and no-

   body in the family working? Wouldn't a duplex high above

   the street be grand, with a view of the richest city in the

   world at your nose?

"A lease, if you prefer, or an arrangement terminable at will."

All poems Copyright © Estate of Langston Hughes, 1995, 2015. All rights reserved.

Happy Black History Month

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X
(Ralph Abernathy in the backgorund)

Happy Black History Month! I find myself deeply immersed in Black History these days in part because of my courses, both of which focus on differing moments but which eventually overlap (the longer period of Reconstruction to the present day in the intro class, and the shorter time span from the Harlem Renaissance to today in the "Black Arts Movement" class), but as I have posted on this blog and stated elsewhere many times, while I champion devoting an entire (though the shortest) month to celebrating Black History (in the African-American and broader senses of the word), I also strongly urge that people incorporate the history and achievements of Black people, as with all people, more fully into every aspect of the "mainstream" as well. It may seem as though this occurs, but to pick an area I feel very familiar with, academe, I can say without hesitation from my experiences in over a decade and a half in academe that this isn't happening,  not in literary studies, not in comparative literary studies, not in English and American literature, not in many fields. Some scholars and writers have made the leap, but far too many still do not, even when it's clear that they are cheating their students and themselves by doing so.

I had the experience, just a few weeks ago, of a friend forwarding me the proposed syllabus, by a very famous younger black woman writer, for a literature course on "sensibility" and "style," she was going to be teaching a prestigious local university. On her syllabus, there was not a single writer of color, let alone black writer, and only a precious few women. For an undergraduate course on a broad subject for which one could easily field an entire syllabus comprising writers of color, women or both, in 2013; this was and is appalling, and yet it is less uncommon than many people think. Not only is she reinforcing a narrow, Eurocentric, sexist view of her subject and the field, in effect erasing not just a vast body of work, a vast corpus of writers, but herself. I mention this not to focus solely on this particular person, but to say that we have lived with centuries of this erasure and self-erasure, and it's tiresome and needs to end. Black History Month, as Carter G. Woodson imagined of its predecessor, "Negro History Week,"which debuted in 1927, and as writers such as George Washington Williams, W. H. Crogman, William T. Alexander, and W. E. B. DuBois all imagined in their important works of the later 19th and early 20th centuries, would serve as both a spark to expanded consciousness about black history and lives, and as a growing archive from which to draw upon. In 2013, let us honor Black History Month, as we will Women's History Month, LGBTIQ History Month, Latino/a History Month, and other such tribute months, but let's also strive, as much as we can, to open up our understandings of the world so that our approach, across a range of fields, many far beyond academe, is richer, deeper, fuller, and truer to the realities around us.

Langston Hughes Day (Black History Month Begins)

Pastel drawing of Hughes
by Winhold Reiss

Today is the first day of Black History Month, one of many gifts that Carter G. Woodson gave to the United States. I've said before that every month should be black history month, and latino history month, and women's history month, and lgbtq history month, and so on; we should always be acknowledging the diverse and plural contributions of everyone who has created the world we live in, but unfortunately, as I need not detail, the reality is quite different, so this month still has an important role to play.

Today is also Langston Hughes's birthday. Born James Mercer Langston Hughes in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri, he went on to become one of the greatest poets in the American and African American traditions, dying in 1967.  Perhaps half a decade ago, I read and reread a large selection of Hughes' poetry with a student who was preparing for graduate oral exams, and what struck me in a way I had forgotten was not just the thematic wealth and formal breadth of Hughes's poetry, but its political ferocity, its consistent statement of resistance, its capacity for wresting beauty out of some of the ugliest moments in history, while still making sure that readers did not forget that ugliness.  Years ago when I taught junior and high school students, Hughes was one of the poets they most readily responded to. He would, I can imagine, have been proud that he was reaching young people and also helping to pave a graduate student's road to a doctorate.

Hughes's poetry well suited for today, even though the historical moment in which most of it was written is now past. The next time I participate in a Human Micropoem event I intend to read one or two of his poems, which are well suited for the public repetition style the Human Mic requires. But it's also the case that his poetry remains so salient and so relevant because so much of what it portrays, describes, invokes, and evokes, sometimes with lacerating grace, is still with us, has not yet fully passed. The struggles for bread and equality here, for freedom and democracy overseas, for communities bridging the numerous barriers that divide us, have hardly ceased. We have a ways to go. Hughes was aware of that. His poetry is aware of this and can make us aware of this. His aegis is one that poets and politicians and everyone else today would do well to acknowledge.

Hughes with students in Atlanta
during Negro History Week 1947
(Photo: Griffith J. Davis)

Here are several very short Hughes poems, which still pack a punch:

History

The past has been a mint
Of blood and sorrow.
That must not be
True of tomorrow.

Enemy

It would be nice
In any case,
To someday meet you
Face to face
Walking down
The road to hell...
As I come up
feeling swell.

Go Slow

Go slow, they say-
while the bite
Of the dog is fast.
Go slow, I hear-
While they tell me
You can't eat here!
You can't live here!
You can't work here!
Don't Demonstrate! Wait!-
While they lock the gate.
Am I supposed to be God,
Or an angel with wings
And a halo on my head
While jobless I starve to dead?
Am I supposed to forgive
And meekly live
Going slow, slow, slow,
Slow, slow, slow,
Slow, slow,
Slow,
Slow,
Slow?
????
???
??
?

All poems Copyright © The Estate of Langston Hughes, 2011. All rights reserved.

Bob Marley Day

(Nesta Robert) Bob Marley was born today in 1945, in Nine Mile, Saint Ann, Jamaica, and died on May 11, 1981, in Miami, Florida. It goes without saying that he was and remains one of the most influential musicians, artists, political figures, in 20th century black diasporic and global history.  It's almost hard to believe that nearly 30 years have passed since he did.  In tribute, here are a few videos of his work, which, like his words and spirit, continue to inspire, enlighten, empower, and entertain.

Get Up Stand Up, Live, in Dortmund

Zion Train

Concrete Jungle

Is This Love?

Redemption Song, Live, in Dortmund

Jamming

Natural Mystic

Happy Black History Month & Langston Hughes Day (Poems)

Today begins Black History Month, which is celebrated throughout the month of February in both the United States and Canada (in UK it occurs in October). It became an official US celebration in 1976, though its origins date back to scholar-activist Carter G. Woodson's establishment of Negro History Week in 1926. It is also, happily, Langston Hughes's birthday (1902-1967). I have posted more than a few Langston Hughes poems on this blog, and relish any opportunity to do so.

A draft of Hughes's "Old Walt"

Here are of two of his most famous poems, from Montage of a Dream Deferred (Henry Holt, 1951), both in direct conversation with each other. Note the light, jazzy, celebratory but ultimately critical tone of the first contrasting with the graver and more somber tone of the second, which I had to memorize and recite as a child (ah, the 1970s!). Both also might be read metonymically in relation to African America as it was in his day, and our own.

GOOD MORNING

Good morning, daddy!
I was born here, he said.
watched Harlem grow
until colored folks spread
from river to river
across the middle of Manhattan
out of Penn Station
dark tenth of a nation,
planes from Puerto Rico,
and holds of boats, chico,
up from Cuba Haiti Jamaica,
in buses marked New York
from Georgia Florida Louisiana
to Harlem Brooklyn the Bronx
but most of all to Harlem
dusky sash acros Manhattan
I've seen them come dark
wondering
wide-eyed
dreaming
out of Penn Station--
but the trains are late.
The gates open--
Yet there're bars
at each gate.
What happens
to a dream deferred?
Daddy, ain't you heard?

***

HARLEM

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode? 

Both poems © Copyright, Estate of Langston Hughes, 1951, 2011. All rights reserved.

Blogging On + On Publishing + Black History Month/Langston Hughes Day (Poem)

Over the last year I've gone through alternating or oscillating waves of planning to end this blog and feeling energized enough to continue it. The paucity of responses, especially since 2007, has only exacerbated my sense that blogging may be a waste of time, though I do enjoy it, and yet, at the same time my "followers" have increased, so I guess things aren't as dismal as I sometimes think.

I know that the rise of other social media--Facebook, where many longtime fellow blogging friends post anything and everything they find of interest; Twitter, where I'm now fully chartered (with about 1,800 or so tweets); YouTube; old standbies like Yahoo!, Hi5, Myspace, and yes, that now hoary gathering space Friendster; more specialized social media spaces; and parallels of these sites--have siphoned off interest from all but the most lively and focused blogs (like Rod 2.0, who's as sharp and hot as a laser always). Also, I acknowledge that my own postings have shifted, from the early art and lit-focused eclecticism to politics, which I know turns (some) readers off, especially if you can get much of the same, often with more in-depth reportage or more interesting slants, elsewhere. Moreover, I'm quite aware, as my few readers also are, that the Law of Diminishing Returns has taken hold here with each successive year (can that also be analogized to entropy?), with fewer posts ever year since 2005. So far in 2010 I've managed to make 22 out of January's 31 minimum daily posts, or achieve about a 70% posting ratio for the month, my highest January total since 2006, which I take as a positive sign, so I think I'll try to hang on for a little longer.

Posting is very difficult during the academic year; whereas I once had a bit of breathing room, things are less free these days, and I'm so often overloaded with classwork (I'll have 2.5 classes this quarter), and other work-related tasks, about which I cannot post at all for obvious reasons, but I do love blogging, so if you're willing to keep dropping in here, I really appreciate it.

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Speaking of classes, I wanted to share a photo of today's blackboard from my English 392: "The Situation of Writing" class, which is required for all senior-year creative writing major. Today, we were concluding our discussion of the publishing section of the class (once labeled the "Doom & Gloom" unit, things have changed considerably since I began teaching this class), which included reading Jason Epstein's The Book Business: Publishing: Past, Present and Future of Books (W.W. Norton & Co., 2001)* and I thought that as I've done in the past, I'd go over how you publish a book. I do use the computer in my classes (the students are Tweeting each week, and I post most class-related materials to Blackboard regularly), including this one, but I do love turning to the blackboard from time to time. And so it was with this rough flowchart. "A," at the far left, was our fictional writer of "mystery fiction," a genre one of the students suggested; the rest is, I think, self-evident if a bit illegible. If you are unclear about how books have tended to reach to readers, it's yours to review.


*Reggie H. suggested this book, which I hadn't read before considering it for this class; in the past I've tended to teach André Schiffrin's The Business of Books: How the International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read (Verso, 2001), a polemic which turns on a narrative of steady decline, with a direr, more caustic tone, but I thought I'd try something new this year, and Epstein's volume is very informative and useful, even if it also at times is both disturbing (he worked for the CIA, he openly admits) and unguent in his unacknowledged privilege.

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It's officially Black History Month. I personally like to think of every month as Black or women's or Latino or queer or straight or Asian-American or working-class or immigrant or any possible identification history month, which is to say, all of these identifications should be in play always when we think about this society, its history, our collective and individual pasts, but given the realities in which we live, we still must take a lighthouse approach to guiding people along different paths other than the oblivion-laced mainstream one, which these identitarian-focused months provide. Certainly Black history--the Black history that is part of American history and the histories of the Americas-- remains a mystery to many (black and otherwise) as it always has, despite years of education. The discourse about Haiti's pre-earthquake political and social malaise, and the current lack of media discussion of the dangers of the US's presence there, show that only so much has seeped in over the years.