Annotations Playlist (by Keith Ridgway)

One of the joys of the internet, and of Twitter--horrible social media platform though it sometimes can be--is the serendipity of coming across positive public notes and links, among them responses others might have to your work and you that you might otherwise not see. I appreciate these especially at a time when letters and even emails are less common than they once were. (I have never received many letters from readers, positive or negative, let alone emails, concerning my work, at least without something else being involved, like an invitation to read or a request for a blurb.)

The other day, after signing on to Twitter, I saw that I had about 8 notifications, and once I clicked on the button, I saw the following post, by the great Irish author Keith Ridgway, whose Hawthorn & Child (New Directions, 2013) I thought was one of the best and most original novels of that year. It is an anti-detective novel in the best way, and exquisitely written, with sections of such striking strangeness I had to read them again. For whatever reason--its freshness? its queerness?--it did not receive the attention it deserved when it appeared. (Perhaps some forward-thinking British director will make it into a feature film, with David Oyelowo, David Gyasi, Daniel Kaluuya, Ashley Walters, Aml Ameen, Gary Carr, David Ajala, or Jimmy Akingbola, to name just a few the talented British actors out there, starring as the eponymous Child, and Max Rhyser, Simon Woods, Jeremy Sheffield, Kieron Richardson, or Andrew Hayden-Smith, to name some of their counterparts, as Hawthorn.)

Scrolling through the thread, I saw he'd posed a prior question:

As he realized, no one had recently--I seem to recall someone doing many moons ago, perhaps in the mid-00s?--so he compiled one himself, on Spotify, the streaming music service I have to admit to having never signed up for. (I only signed up for Last.fm among the more recent streaming services, and, some years back, Naxos, which basically streams album clips of classical European and American art music with some jazz.) He culled most of the musical references, and this is the marvelous playlist he came up with:

You can access it here even if you aren't signed up for Spotify.

Keith Ridgway expertly includes references from the direct mentions of standards, like Ahmad Jamal's "Poinciana" and Thelonious Monk's "Pannonica" to more subtle ones like "Afro Sheen," which is both the hair product and a song, as he shows, by Stephen Sechi. Another reference he susses out is "Dance of the Infidels," by Bud Powell, and he selects Josephine Baker's stirring "De Temps En Temps" in response to a reference to Baker in the text. (She was a native St. Louisan.)

There are some not on the list, like John Coltrane's "Naima," though "Ruby, My Dear" is here, and the R&B references, to Marvin Gaye and The Stylistics, are also in the mix alongside all the jazz. Reading his list and listening to the snippets was almost surreal, as it carried me back to my father's immense record collection when I was growing up in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, the exact time span of Annotations. It also gives deeper insight into the sound- and cultural world of the novel-memoir, and for that, I offer my deepest thanks to Keith Ridgway, and urge Spotifiers to check it out!

RIP Michael S. Harper

Yesterday I learned that Michael S. Harper (March 18, 1938 - May 7, 2016), one of the major poets of his generation, a profoundly influential teacher and mentor, and the Kapstein University Professor Emeritus at Brown University, had passed away, surrounded by his family and the music of one of his favorite musicians, John Coltrane.

Michael was, first and foremost, a poet of tremendous skill, whose poetry often fused a precise contemporary lyric style, profoundly informed by the African American tradition, with subject matter drawn from his personal life, as well as the vaster tapestry of black history and culture. Though he emerged in the wake of the Black Arts Movement and developed a poetics informed by it, he was not a polemicist, and his later poems suggested ways to bridge the racial divide. He was in particular a master of the occasional poem.

Michael published fifteen collections of poems, was twice nominated for the National Book Award, edited several important anthologies, including (with Robert Stepto) Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Art, and Scholarship, and Every Shut Eye Ain't Asleep: An Anthology of Poetry by African Americans since 1945 (with Anthony Walton); served as the first poet laureate of Rhode Island; and received many honors, including the Melville Cane Award of the Poetry Society of America and the Frost Medal for lifetime achievement from the Academy of American Poets.

As any of his students might attest, Michael was a proselytizer for the cause of poetry in general, and of black poetry in particular. He urged those who studied with him as well as fellow poets to delve more deeply in the black American poetic past. Accounts of how he would send a budding poet, who came to his office to chat about poems with him, into the archive to do background work in preparation, are legion. His own personal stories about figures like Sterling Brown were legendary, and he trained a number of major writers during his long tenure at Brown.


My own interactions were Michael were few, but memorable. The first came during a National Black Arts Festival and involved assuring him that I had a distinct identity from my boss, a literary editor, at that time. It took a while, and the intercession of another academic figure, to convince him of this. The next came several years later during my first year at Cave Canem, I found myself no longer needing an alarm clock, as Michael's early morning efforts on his typewriter in the room next door more than sufficed in waking me up early. Very early. Then there was the experience of walking alongside him and as we chatted he listed in my direction and eventually had me flat against the wall, all the while recounting a series of insights I can no longer remember. (I remember that experience of being against the wall!). He was a towering figure, literally as well as figuratively, so I believe I squeaked out a "Professor Harper" to free myself, and return us both to our journey down the hallway.

In my second year at Cave Canem I lucked out in having Michael as one of my workshop leaders. I'd been waiting for this experience for years, since I'd never attended Brown and had missed him in the round-robin rotation of faculty members the year before. As part of his workshop, he had us memorize poems, and I chose Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays," one of the masterpieces of 20th century African American and American poetry, a poem I had read more than once but had not fully internalized. One of the pleasures of memorizing that Hayden poem, in addition to integrating it into the very fiber of my being, was witnessing all the other poets in Michael's workshops that summer learning their chosen poems by heart. And recite them we did. To this day, I can still recite that poem, and, despite the fact that he wasn't so fond of the poem I wrote in his workshop, can recall many of the lessons Michael taught about rigor and concision and listening to one's ear.

During the year I taught at Brown I never saw Michael, but we communicated a few times via notes. I have retained one of the notes he left for me, typed out on a standard index card, and the little message unfolds like poetry. I knew he had gone through a great deal and recognized the toll that academe had taken on him; that was another lesson I tried to learn, that our colleague Aishah Rahman tried to make sure I understood. He was a poet to the core, and one of my hopes is that readers return to his work and find the many treasures in it. I also hope that his students carry on the best aspects of his teaching, including sending students to the archives to read and read and read some more, and to be as exacting with their own work as is possible. Read the greatest writers, learn how they do what they do, listen to their stories and share them with others, and push yourself. Push yourself. You can't fake the funk.


Here is one of my favorite poems by Michael S. Harper. When he read during my first year at Cave Canem, as all the faculty do, I tried to send him brain waves to read it. He went through poem and poem and then announced, "A Mother Speaks..." and I turned to Toni Asante Lightfoot and said, I willed that poem! Perhaps it was telepathy, or just him deciding on one of his masterpieces, as relevant, sadly, today as it was when he wrote it in the 1960s. For this and all his work in the world, I think him. RIP, Michael S. Harper.

A MOTHER SPEAKS: THE ALGIERS MOTEL INCIDENT, DETROIT

It's too dark to see black
in the windows of
Woodward or Virginia Park.
The undertaker pushed his body
back into place with plastic and gum
but it wouldn't hold water.
When I looked for marks or lineament or fine stitching
I was led away without seeing
this plastic face they'd built
that was not my son's.
They tied the eye torn out
by shotgun into place
and his shattered arm cut away
with his buttocks that remained.
My son's gone by white hands
though he said to his last word--
"Oh I'm so sorry, officer,
I broke your gun."

Copyright © Michael S. Harper, from Dear John, Dear Coltrane,
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1970.

Trane's LI House Needs $ + Roscoe Mitchell, Hidden Chi Treasure

Are you a music fan? A rich one? Or one blessed with carpentry and masonry skills?  Rich and skilled enough to help restore and preserve a ramshackle ranch house on Long Island where one of the greatest works of the jazz canon was written and first performed? Where its composer lived, raised a family, and recovered from personal struggles that threatened to overwhelm him, to ultimately create the most transcendant art?

The house has been empty for about seven years. Ravi Coltrane, the musician's youngest son, visited his childhood home.
Credit: Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

If you are, please contact a jazz enthusiast named Steve Fulgoni, who in 2003 was able to purchase John Coltrane's former home in Dix Hills, which is falling down, saving it and its surrounding acreage from the jaws of local developers. The house has nevertheless continued in its state of dilapidation. Abandoned by human habitation for 8 years to raccoon residents, now gone, it still has termites devouring its timber and cracks snaking up its sides. "A Love Supreme" alone isn't going to revive it.

According to an editorial in today's New York Times, the National Trust for Historic Preservation has already put the home on its "Most-Endangered List." If it were to become a cultural site of importance, it would be among the few focusing on Long Island's long African-American presence. Fulgoni for his part is seeking assistance to turn the home into the sort of museum that Louis Armstrong's former home in Queens has become, and think needs about $1 million total to rescue it fully. I would imagine 10 times that amount, to ensure a small endowment as well, would be the way to go.

So, do you or do you know anyone who can help a jazz fan out?

***

Back in December I featured a photo of composer and musician Roscoe Mitchell from the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians' (AACM) 45th anniversary, which took place at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art. I assumed J's Theater viewers would know who Roscoe Mitchell is. But if not, artist/archivist Plastic Crimewave at the Chicago Reader's Secret History of Chicago Music site has drawn a tight little graphic to clue you in. Click here to see the image at full size. I hope Roscoe Mitchell is hipped to it too.

Roscoe Mitchell is now the Distinguished Milhaud Professor at Mills College.  His university biography is here.  Mitchell's Art Ensemble of Chicago page is here. His AACM page is here.