Quote: James Baldwin

James Baldwin (Associated Press)

"Until my father died I thought I could do something else. I had wanted to be a musician, thought of being a painter, thought of being an actor. This was all before I was nineteen. Given the conditions in this country to be a black writer was impossible. When I was young, people thought you were not so much wicked as sick, they gave up on you. My father didn’t think it was possible—he thought I’d get killed, get murdered. He said I was contesting the white man’s definitions, which was quite right. But I had also learned from my father what he thought of the white man’s definitions. He was a pious, very religious and in some ways a very beautiful man, and in some ways a terrible man. He died when his last child was born and I realized I had to make a jump—a leap. I’d been a preacher for three years, from age fourteen to seventeen. Those were three years which probably turned me to writing."
--James Baldwin (born on August 2, 1924), from "James Baldwin: The Art of Fiction, No. 78," interviewed by Jordan Elgrably, The Paris Review, Issue 91, Spring 1984.

Poems: Shira Dentz + Robert Hayden

Shira Dentz

I first saw some of Claude Monet's (1840-1926) "Waterlilies" paintings on a school trip to the Art Institute of Chicago when I was junior high school. The trip was memorable--and I have written about it, in condensed form, in Annotations--not just because of the visit to the art museum and my encounter with examples of some of the finest European art of the late 19th and early 20th century, but also because of an unexpected moment, when my classmates and I spied a sailor making love to his girlfriend in a nearby window. This was before cellphones or even inexpensive cameras (beyond Polaroids) and video cameras, so it was a scene that, like the water lilies, I and they committed to the sole repository available: memory.

I am not suggesting that I associate Monet's "Waterlilies" paintings solely with this experience, but there is a sensuousness, a tinge of eros, in Monet's great Impressionist series of flowers and water and light and space, the colors and brushstrokes vibrant and shifting, the Giverney landscapes so alive that the paintings themselves seem to come to life, casting a spell over the viewer.  Over the years I have been discussing and occasionally writing about visual art, I have encountered opposition about particular artists I love (Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Lois Maillou Jones, Adrian M. S. Piper, etc.) and art works, like Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain" or Francis Bacon's portraits, but I have never heard a negative word about Monet's water lilies. (I have read some critiques, of course.)

Today's poems, then, summon Monet's late masterpieces. The first poem is by Shira Dentz, a poet I have known since my 20s; my friend the fine poet Amy Lemmon introduced us. Shira is a gifted poet as well and the author of four books, including Door of Thin Skins (2012), my favorite and a formal hybrid that manages to surprise and delight from start to finish. Her "Monet" poem appears in her 2010 collection, Black Seeds on a White Dish, whose title, as the poem below make clear, is drawn from this poem.

The title isn't literal, as Shira's poem shows; instead, as her work often demonstrates, it serves as a marker for a complex psychological exploration, in lyric form, that the reader pieces together. That "lilypad" is a metaphor she employs and plays with, the poetic speaker's relationship with her mother linked to their history together "that began before" the speaker was born, and continuing like the "tough rubbery vine" of which the lily pad is but a synecdochic, superficial component. Monet's waterlilies will not redeem things, but they serve as a means of understanding this relationship.

POEM FOR MY MOTHER WHO WISHES SHE WERE

A LILYPAD IN A MONET PAINTING

by Shira Dentz

We’re in a gray tree (you and I).
Lunging into an orange—not eating it.

I’d like nothing better than to come to another kind of

                                             arrangement;
mostly, though, we just don’t come apart.

’

Behold
a single contractual mark 
to possess and to withhold (contractions),
and the dialogue within the dialogue that began before it.

Black seeds on a white dish                     
…………………………… (pores)

         
The sound of your voice has always been a fragment

                     organized as a flower,
              a tin can cling-clanging upstream,

 the spaces between my heartbeats
              lengthening (like shadows);

You a part of the tough rubbery vine that expands on the

                                          skin of the pond.

Previously published in Black Seeds on White Dish (Shearsman, 2010) and Letters to the World: Poems from the Wom-Po Listserv, Leslie Wheeler, Rosemary Starace and Moira Richards, editors (Pasadena: Red Hen Press, 2008).

***

The second poem is by a different kind of lyric poet, Robert Hayden (1913-1980), whom I also hold in high esteem. One of the most important African American and American poets of the mid-20th century, Hayden produced a wide-ranging body of work, with noteworthy lyric and narrative poems, including one of his most famous, "Middle Passage," a masterful marriage of politics and poetry. "Monet's Water Lilies" also combines the political and lyric with concision and elegance, presenting the poet's encounter with one of Monet's beautiful works, which amidst the national and global strife, the violence and oppression produced by state-sponsored racism and wars of colony and empire, returns him to a state of grace, a recognition, despite our inability often to see it, of (our common) humanity.

Hayden is seeking balm in the midst of tumult, a social and political one producing emotional distress, but the paintings are not, as he indicates, a means of escape, but quite powerful sites of spiritual connection, restoration and transformation. "The seen, the known / dissolve in iridescence, become / illusive flesh of light"--the painting embodies this spirituality depth and transfiguration--"that was not, was, forever is"--that never existed because this is only an artistic image, that was the world that Monet painted, that will remain as long as the painting hangs and Hayden and others have the opportunity to see it." I particularly love the final stanza, where, through tears, Hayden is reminded of the auratic power of the artwork--pace Walter Benjamin--and in this exquisite human-made image of the natural world, "the shadow of" the "joy" of that world that we have lost.

Robert Hayden

MONET'S WATERLILIES



by Robert Hayden



Today as the news from Selma and Saigon
poisons the air like fallout,
I come again to see
the serene, great picture that I love.

Here space and time exist in light
the eye like the eye of faith believes.
The seen, the known
dissolve in iridescence, become
illusive flesh of light
that was not, was, forever is.

O light beheld as through refracting tears.
Here is the aura of that world
each of us has lost.
Here is the shadow of its joy.

Copyright © Robert Hayden, from Collected Poems, New York: Liveright, 1996. All rights reserved.

And here are the Art Institute's two paintings from Monet's water lilies series; the first comes from the third set, when he ceased to depict a horizon at all, peering instead into the water itself.

Claude Monet, "Water Lilies," 1906, oil on canvas, Mr. and Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson Collection, Art Institute of Chicago.  

Claude Monet, "Water Lily Pond, "1917/19 oil on canvas, Gift of Mrs. Harvey Kaplan, Art Institute of Chicago.

Poems: giovanni singleton

A few years ago, when her first book appeared, I shared two poems by giovanni singleton, a poet I've known and been a fan of for years. giovanni's collection ascension deservedly won the California Book Award and garnered a great deal of praise from fellow poets and critics, some of whom noted her ability to utilize silence to great affect, and the cumulative power of poems, which, once they set the book down, continued to fizz in their consciousnesses. I wholeheartedly agreed. To this day, I can remember the effect a very short, seemingly simple but powerfully erotic little poem entitled "the chair" had when I heard her read it years ago.

Another direction giovanni has taken, related to those earlier poems, was in exploring poetry's material and graphic qualities. In her most recent book, American Letters: works on paper (Canarium Books, 2018), she reproduces a number of poems that are as much works of art in a visual sense, which is to say, drawings in language, as they are poems made of language. This is not ekphrastic poetry in any of the ways I have presenting it. It is poetry as art, akin to concrete poetry and textual performance (think of the poems I shared by Doug Kearney).

In the case of the second poem-artwork below, it also seems related to asemic writing, though giovanni's calligraphic poem's words are real and do mean something, individually and together, even as they challenge our ability to read them, and bar any easy interpretation. American Letters' poems' sources include African American spirit writing, sacred sound, Tibetan meditation practice, giovanni's study of Japanese language and calligraphy, and the multiple traditions of visual poetry.

The first poem was featured during last year's National Poetry Month by Colorado State University, and as soon as I came across it online, I found myself studying it. One need not read the words to see what giovanni is up to, and yet it is necessary to read them--you can enlarge the image by clicking on it and pinching your trackpad or screen, depending upon what you're using, or even download it, to get a fuller sense of what the poem is doing. Note also how the title, with the marker "Untitled," is similar to many works of visual art.

Poems like "Untitled (Bird Cage)" and the second poem below, from American Letters: works on paper, raise the question of what kind of language is appropriate to discussing the poem, and how to read it. Or rather, it organizes our ways of reading it first, and we have to come to terms with it and how it resets our expectations. That is what poetry and art does, it seems these poems keep reminding us. We can't hear this enough, though.

and from American Letters: works on paper (II):

Source: Poetry (December 2016),

Poem: Rita Dove

Rita Dove, in 2017
(from Wikipedia.com)

One of the highlights of my youth was working across the hall from Rita Dove (1952-), one of the great contemporary American poets. At that time she was the Poet Laureate of the US, and though I did not work for her or study under her, I did have to periodically consult with her on matters concerning a literary journal for which she served as a senior editor and which I was managing. As much by observation as by osmosis, I learned little tips and grace notes about how to deal with editors and contracts, how to navigate in the shoals of academe, and what dedication to one's art and career, within the context of the university, might look like. She was always warm and kind toward me, and though I have not had many interactions with her since, I will always remember that moment, and her and her husband, the writer Fred Viebahn, with great fondness.

My first introduction to Rita's work was Thomas and Beulah, the book that received the Pulitzer Prize in 1987. I was a senior in college, and like many, was amazed that a young Black woman writer had just won the Pulitzer in poetry--she was only the second ever, after Gwendolyn Brooks--which led me straight to the Grolier Book Shop in Cambridge to buy as many books of hers as I could afford. Her second book, Museum (Carnegie Mellon, 1983), differed from the tightly organized structure in Thomas and Beulah, a perfect volume; it was more like a conventional collection of poems, more wide-ranging in its focus, and a bit more expansive in its forms, though the sure eye and pen Rita brings to every poem in every book were evident in this one too.

I was especially fascinated by Museum's cover image, which, it turns out was by the German painter Christian Schad (1894-1982) in the counter-Expressionist, early Weimar-era style known as the Neue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivity. Think Max Beckmann, Georg Grosz, Otto Dix, and Rudolf Schlichter; Rita ended the collection with a poem exploring Schad's painting, the artist's process, and the figures contained within it and its depiction of difference.

This final poem, "Agosta the Winged Man and Rasha the Black Dove" is also meta-commentary in part on process and experience in writing poems, including this one, and a metonymic exploration of art-making as well. Yet again as in previous poems I've posted, this one reminds us that it is the canvas--the ground of the artwork--and the art work's subjects themselves, whose gazes are "merciless"; they see and show what the artist does not and yet does, intuitively, in the creation of the painting, and transform the artist, and the viewer, in the exchange.

"Agosta the Winged Man and Rasha the Black Dove" is a lyric poem, but it also paints a portrait, as Rita's work often does, in quick, precise, vivid strokes. There is no excess here, and yet her skill creates an aesthetic surplus, as Anne Carson once put it, of meaning. The poem itself is a model of objectivity, mirroring Schad's stylistic approach--his sharpened realism pressed beyond the observable. Yet it swerves away from mere description with notable subtlety. It also gives glimpses of a world that was on the precipice; just a decade and a half later, Berlin, and Germany, would be at war, on the cusp of one of the most abominable horrors, the Nazi Holocaust, that the human race has ever exacted on itself, and the diverse world we see in miniature here--Russian aristocrats, a Malagasy immigrant performer, Agosta himself--would be swept away with a severity and violence the poem hints at.  Look, it is saying, look closely. And note who and what are looking back at you. Pay attention.

Rita Dove, originally in Poetry, November 1981, from Museum, Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon Classic Contemporary Poetry, 1983. All rights reserved.

The Schad painting:

Christian Schad, Agosta, the Pigeon-Chested Man, and Rasha, the Black Dove, oil on canvas, 1929, Tate Modern.

Poems: Doug Kearney

Douglas Kearney

Posting poems about art works and ones using ekphrasis has been illuminating, because one thing I've always known and even practiced myself but never really articulated publicly is how many different ways one can explore conversations between poetry, literature and visual and plastic art. (Seismosis, my collaborative book with artist and poet Chris Stackhouse does walk through various ways of initiating and sustaining the conversation.)

In his poems in response to the late genius artist and musician Terry Adkins (1953-2014), poet and performer Doug Kearney (1970-) shows yet another way to think and write about and with a fellow artist and the work of art. Doug is not just a brilliant, highly inventive poet, but an excellent performer as well. I don't mean simply that he performs his own poetry well, nor do I mean that he is a performance poet; rather, he understands in a profound way what performance can be, and elevates it to an art in conjunction with his poetry, which sizzles as poetry on the page but also serves as a graphic score, with latent possibilities that Doug activates when he is presenting his work live.

But back to this idea of graphic texts, concretion, and poems' visual components: Doug sees and often explores all of these, which is to say the materiality of the text alongside its semantic possibilities and the connections between the two. His "granted collaboration" with Adkins produced a score for a project entitled Freedom of Shadow, as well as poems that look almost all the ones I've shared on here so far. They started working together in 2013, yet Adkins sadly died but a year later, at age 60, of a heart attack. Doug decided to continue, and the result was a series of works that are as much visual art and poetry.

Doug discusses with moving insight the process of working with Adkins, and how he thought through a variety of approaches, only to lose his collaborator, at least in body, just a few months into the new (2014) year. The folio he presented in Poetry--and Adkins, who had created a persona named "Blanche Bruce," after the first black US Senator, from Mississippi, to serve a full term, during Reconstruction, did not want a "book" as the final product for their work together--is both a powerful tribute to Adkins and their thinking and working together, and yet another example of Doug's manifold gifts as a poet. You can read Doug's thoughts at Poetry's website. Below are the two of the drafts and final pieces (poems) that comprised Freedom of Shadow.

And, lastly, here is an image of Terry Adkins' "Muffled Drums," which spurred Doug's imagination, in conjunction with a different Adkins piece, as Lone Wolf, performing his "Muffled Drum Lynch," a sculpture recital about W. E. B. Dubois and his anti-lynching campaign while creating intelligent propaganda with the NAACP. (Via Atum53 on YouTube.)

Poem (Excerpt): Robin Coste Lewis

Robin Coste Lewis

One of the leading volumes of poetry published in 2015 was Robin Coste Lewis's debut, The Voyage of the Sable Venus (Alfred A. Knopf). A collection in the truest sense, it brought together Lewis's shorter lyrics with her pièce de résistance, the long conceptual, epic title sequence. To summarize it hardly will do it justice, but in essence, Coste Lewis detourned and transformed, with impressive vision and skill, the titles, catalogue entries and exhibit descriptions of a range Western art works that referred in any way to female figures of African descent (see below). Not unlike M. Nourbese Philip, she has shown us a new way to think about the poetics and practices of revision and resistance in relation to the (Western) archive.

Coste Lewis avers that her poem is narrative--and taken as a whole it is--one could also read it as a counter-lyric, engaging the objective alongside the subjective in its metonymic, externalizing gestures of drawing in thousands of years of history into the poem while also drawing the reader beyond lyric interiority, without resorting to strategies of documentation, non-lyric discourses, hybrid forms, and the like. Instead, as she details below, the titles, their framing, placement and relation to each other, the friction and conversation they produce in and through their proximity, procession and totality, achieve her goal.

"The Voyage of the Sable Venus" queers the possibilities of what narrative, conceptual and lyric poetry might look like, while also grounding these genres profoundly in a black-centered perspective; whereas those titles, catalogue entries and exhibit descriptions centered the European/white, hetero-patriarchal gaze, in its global colonialist and imperial formations as objective definitions of aesthetic artifacts, Lewis, by repurposing and transforming them, unsettles the foundations on which they draw their meaning. Moreover, in its articulation, Coste Lewis's long poem does not sacrifice poetry's emotional impact; the effects, instead, may be awe, astonishment, anger, and a profound appreciation for what she has achieved, the lost voices she has unarchived and restored to individual and collective subjectivity and expression, that she has invited into her chorus.

To put it another way, The Voyage of the Sable Venus presents a distinctive way of writing poetry about and in relation to works of art that runs against the grain of much of much of what you might learn in a workshop or a literary studies class. It also suggests other options for conceptual writing that challenge some of the orthodoxies of that method and approach, while also resuming a conversation about poetics, race, theory, art practice, and performance that conceptual art predecessors including Raymond Patterson, Yoko Ono, Charles Gaines, Adrian M. S. Piper, and others took up, but which have tended to be obscured or elided altogether in too many critical surveys and discussions of contemporary conceptual writing.

Given its length, I am presenting two sections that originally appeared on LitHub, on September 30, 2015. The first is her introduction to the poem, describing her methodPlease visit that site for more sections, and above all, if you can purchase a copy of the collection or at least borrow it from your nearest library, please do so. Robin has held a wide array of fellowships and received many awards, including the National Book Award in poetry from The Voyage of the Sable Venus. A fellow alumna of Harvard and NYU, and received her PhD from the University of Southern California, where she lives and teaches.

***

VOYAGE OF THE SABLE VENUS

And never to forget beauty,
however strange or difficult 

                 REGINALD SHEPHERD

Prologue:

What follows is a narrative poem comprised solely and entirely of the titles, catalogue entries, or exhibit descriptions of Western art objects in which a black female figure is present, dating from 38,000 BCE to the present.

The formal rules I set for myself were simple:

1) No title could be broken or changed in any way. While the grammar is completely modified–I erased all periods, commas, semi-colons–each title was left as published, and was not syntactically annotated, edited, or fragmented.

2) “Art” included paintings, sculpture, installations, photography, lithographs, engraving, any work on paper, etc–all those traditional mediums now recognized by the Western art-historical project. However, because black female figures were also used in ways I could never have anticipated, I was forced to expand that definition to include other material and visual objects, such as combs, spoons, buckles, pans, knives, table legs.

3) At some point, I realized that museums and libraries (in what I imagine must have been a hard-won gesture of goodwill, or in order not to appear irrelevant) had removed many 19th century historically-specific markers, such as slave, colored, or Negro from their titles or archives, and replaced these words instead with the sanitized, but perhaps equally vapid African-American. In order to replace this historical erasure of slavery (however well-intended), I re-erased the post-modern “African-American” and changed all those titles back. That is, I re-corrected the corrected horror to allow that original horror to stand. My intent was to explore and record not only the history of human thought, but also how normative and complicit artists, art institutions and art historians have all been in participating in–if not creating–this history.

4) As an homage, I decided to include titles of art by black women artists and curators, whether the art included a black female figure or not. Most of this work was created over the last century, with its deepest saturation occurring since the Cold War. I also included work by black queer artists, regardless of gender, because this body of work has made consistently some of the richest, most elegant, least pretentious contributions to Western art interrogations of gender and race.

5) In a few instances, it was more fruitful to include a museum’s description of the art, rather than the title itself. This was especially true for colonial period.

6) Sometimes I chose to include female figures I believed the Western art world simply had not realized was a black woman passing for white.

7) Finally, no title was repeated.

***

And what follows is but one section of this magnificent work.

CATALOG 1: ANCIENT GREECE & ANCIENT ROME



Here is your name
said the woman
and vanished in the corridor


                              ­MAHMOUD DARWISH


 

I.

 

Statuette of a Woman Reduced
to the Shape of a Flat Paddle

 

Statuette of a Black Slave Girl
Right Half of Body and Head Missing

 

Head of a Young Black Woman Fragment
from a Statuette of a Black Dancing Girl

 

Reserve Head of an African Princess
Statuette of a Concubine

 

Full Length Figure of a Standing
Black Woman Wearing Earrings

 

Statuette Once Supported an Unguent Vase
Vase with Neck in the Form of a Head

 

of a Black Statuette of a Female
Figure With Negroid Features

 

Figure’s Left Arm
Missing Head

 

of a Female Full-length Figure
of a Nubian Woman the Arms Missing

 

Bust of a Draped Female Facing Forward
One Breast Exposed   Black

 

Adolescent Female with Long Curls and Bare
Breasts Wearing a Voluminous Crown

 

Partially Broken Young Black Girl
Presenting a Stemmed Bowl

 

Supported
by a Monkey

 

Element of Furniture Decoration
[Two Nubian Prisoners Bound

 

to a Post] Protome [Probably
the Handle of a Whip

 

or Other Implement]
Oil Flask Back

 

View Head of an African Prisoner
Statue of Prisoner Kneeling

 

Arms Bound at the Elbows
Left Arm Missing      Bust

 

of a Nubian Prisoner with Fragmentary Arms
Bound Behind Funerary Mask

 

of a Negro with Inlaid Glass Eyes
and Traces of Incrustations

 

Present in the Mouth
Censer in the Form

 

of a Nude Negro Dwarf
Standing with His Hands

 

at His Sides upon an Ornate Tripod
and Supporting on His Head

 

a Small Cup
in the Shape

 

of a Lotus
Flower

 

Standing Female Reliquary Figure
with Crested Coiffure and Hands

 

Clasped in Front of Torso, Holding
a Staff Surmounted by a Human Head

 

Figure Has Prominent
Vagina Bended

 

Knees and Oversized Head
with Half-Open Eyes

 

and Semicircle Mouth
that Juts Out

 

from the Face Some
Fine Scarification

 

on Chest and Belly
Dark Brown Almost Black

 

Patina with Oil Oozing
in Several Places

 

Numerous Cracks
on Back of Head and Hole

 

on the Coiffure
One Nipple Appears

 

to Be Shaved Off
or Damaged Black Woman

 

Standing on Tiptoe
on One End of a Seesaw

 

while a Caricatured Figure    Jumps
on the Other

 

Copyright © Robin Coste Lewis, from The Voyage

of the Sable Venus, New York: Farrar Straus,

and Giroux, 2015. All rights reserved.

Poem: Derrick Austin

Derrick Austin

The first time I came across this poem at wildness by Derrick Austin, directed there via Twitter (and I think I retweeted the link before reading the poem, and am happy I did), I stopped and thought: wow! It is only one stanza, with a sonnet's brevity and length, but as only poetry can do, it achieves quite a bit, pointing our gaze both towards the Italian Renaissance painter Paolo di Dono, also known as Paolo Uccello's (1397-1475) work and life--"His name meant Humble Bird"--and beyond the poetic frame, to the absences in our knowledge about Uccello's and everyone's lives that imagination and emotion fill in, as well as that "grief and art" from somewhere just outside our ken that arrive sometimes when we expect them, but also when we do not.

Yet, as every poem reminds us, we have the aesthetic artifact itself as a gift, a form of proof, of consolation, however, brief, and the best poems, no matter how difficult or painful the subject matter, the themes or the content, are also little vessels of beauty. Also embedded in the choice of Uccello, I think, is his fame as a pioneer in the development of perspective in visual art; his mastery of depth of field was legendary, particularly in the paintings that the poet names, depicting the Battle of San Romano. That theme, perspective, is crucial to this poem.

So: this poem, is a work of speculation, and may be about work that does not exist, which is another component of its charm. Unlike the other works I have posted so far, for which there is an artwork or artworks (cf. Rilke and Aragón) to which we can refer as a source of sorts, a touchstone, in the case of Uccello, there are winged angels and dragons but from my cursory searches, as Austin's poem suggests, no birds. Into this negative space, Austin pens his beautiful poem, much as Giorgio Vasari had to fill out his sketch of Uccello's life beyond the facts and anecdotes that he could glean, the interpretations he could make based on the paintings themselves.

Derrick Austin is the author of Trouble the Water, which poet Mary Szybist selected for the 2015 A Poulin Jr. Prize and which was published by BOA Editions in 2016. A Cave Canem fellow and MFA graduate of the University of Michigan, he was the 2016-17 Ron Wallace Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing, and serves as Assistant Poetry Editor at Memorious. I follow him on Twitter and you can too, at @ParadiseLAust. You can also find more of his poetry, and other writings, at his Tumblr site, The Mad Scene.

PAOLO UCCELLO'S BIRDS


by Derrick Austin


It must have been about sacrifice,
a parable of sorts within the art. Why else
would Uccello, who so loved birds
as to have sketched their wings,
never paint one? His name meant Humble
Bird. No place for fluttering gloss
in rendering plain our linear perspective.
All recede into mathematical dark.
No space for swallows between lances
in The Battle of San Romano. So much tension
in all that Roman stillness: the banners
of nations and gold-plated weapons free of the gore
vultures will eat when they come
like grief and art from somewhere just outside our vision.

Copyright © Derrick Austin, 2018. All rights reserved.

Here is a Paolo Uccello painting with some birds:

Flood and Waters Subsiding, c.1447-48 Fresco, 215 x 510 cm Green Cloister, Santa Maria Novella, Florence

Poem: Tyehimba Jess

Tyehimba Jess

Several years ago, Tyehimba Jess (1965-), winner of last year's Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his innovative, rich and complex collection Olio (Wave Books), published the following poem on "Poem-a-Day." In it, he calls forth a sculpture by the famous 19th century African American sculptor Edmonia Lewis (see below), a pioneering figure in the world of Western art. Lewis was the first Black woman  artist and first woman artist of Native American ancestry to gain international recognition and acclaim, in no small part for artworks that depicted Black subjects, though often with the features tempered for her white patrons and audience.

Jess, a friend and fellow former Cave Canem grad and NYU alum, excavates American and African American history, often in relation to major and lesser known Black figures who are artists and performers, whether working in the fine arts or vernacular and popular forms. The poem below, while differing in form from the page-crossing sonnets in Olio, offers a sense of his poetics, particularly his skillful use of voice and imagery, which also are on vivid display in his award-winning first book, Leadbelly. What I also like about the poem below is how he merges ekphrasis and dramatic monologue; it is the sculpture, as well as Hagar, the Biblical figure serving as a metonymic stand-in for Black women, and Lewis, who speak through the lines, figuratively and literally bringing the art work to life.

HAGAR IN THE WILDERNESS


by Tyehimba Jess


Carved Marble. Edmonia Lewis, 1875
 


My God is the living God,
God of the impertinent exile.
An outcast who carved me
into an outcast carved
by sheer and stony will
to wander the desert
in search of deliverance
the way a mother hunts
for her wayward child.
God of each eye fixed to heaven,
God of the fallen water jug,
of all the hope a vessel holds
before spilling to barren sand.
God of flesh hewn from earth
and hammered beneath a will
immaculate with the power
to bear life from the lifeless
like a well in a wasteland.
I’m made in the image of a God
that knows flight but stays me
rock still to tell a story ancient as
slavery, old as the first time
hands clasped together for mercy
and parted to find only their own
salty blessing of sweat.
I have been touched by my God
in my creation, I’ve known her caress
of anointing callus across my face. 
I know the lyric of her pulse
across these lips...  and yes,
I’ve kissed the fingertips
of my dark and mortal God.
She has shown me the truth
behind each chiseled blow
that’s carved me into this life,
the weight any woman might bear 
to stretch her mouth toward her
one true God, her own
beaten, marble song.

Edmonia Lewis (1845-1907) was an African/Native American expatriate sculptor who was phenomenally successful in Rome.

Copyright © 2013 by Tyehimba Jess. All rights reserved. This poem appeared in the Academy of American Poetry's Poem-A-Day on December 26, 2013.

And Lewis's "Hagar," also known as "Hagar in the Wilderness," 1875, carved marble, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., 1983.95.178

Quote: William Melvin Kelley

'

William Melvin Kelley (1937-2017: RIP), from "My Next to Last Hit by 'C. C. Johnson'," in Blacks at Harvard: A Documentary History of African-American Experience at Harvard and Radcliffe, edited by Werner Sollors, Caldwell Titcomb, and Thomas A. Underwood, with an introduction by Randall Kennedy, New York: New York University Press, 1993.

(I only learned recently, thanks to an email from Chris Stackhouse, that Kelley had passed away. One of the most inventive and productive--during the decade from 1960 through 1970, when his last book appeared--Black writers of his generation, and the author of four published novels and a collection of stories, he should be read much more regularly as part of the 20th century African American literary canon. You can read a 2012 interview with him here.)

Tyehimba Jess, Colson Whitehead Win Pulitzer Prizes

Tyehimba Jess

CONGRATULATIONS to poet and friend Tyehimba Jess, who was awarded the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his new collection Olio (Wave Press)! Winner of numerous awards, including a Whiting Foundation fellowship, Jess is a fellow NYU graduate and graduate fellow of Cave Canem. He is an associate professor at the CUNY College of Staten Island. His collection, for which he developed a new poetic form, the syncopated sonnet, explores the lives of a cavalcade of key 19th century African American artists and performers, many clustered around the minstrel tradition. The title, "Olio," is in fact a term for the variety acts in a minstrel show, a component of such performances that carried over into Vaudeville and burlesque. Jess's collection manages to be both formally and visually innovative, and historically and culturally humanizing, and underlines his standing as one of the major poets writing today.

Congratulations also to fiction writer Colson Whitehead, who received this year's Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for his novel The Underground Railroad (Doubleday), which I am teaching this spring in my undergraduate literature class on history and myth in contemporary African Diasporic fiction. Whitehead's novel takes the concept of the Underground Railroad and transforms it, using the speculative mode, into a narrative that manages both to capture the essence of the fugitive system and  signify on a range of ideological nodes in US history, including state-sanctioned white supremacy, Progressive-era eugenicism, and precarious liberalism's inability to safeguard black life. Throughout Whitehead's skill, at every level of his prose, gleams, and his protagonist, Cora, as well as numerous minor figures, are not easily forgotten.

Colson Whitehead

Other winners this year in the arts and letters category include Lynn Nottage in the Drama category for her play Sweat; Heather Ann Thompson in the history category for her study Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy (Pantheon); Hisham Matar in the Biography category for The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between (Random House); Matthew Desmond, in the General Nonfiction category, for Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (Crown); and composer Yu Dun, in the music category, for Angel's Bone, a multimedia opera. In the news category, Hilton Als received a Pulitzer in Criticism for his reviews in The New Yorker.

Lynn Nottage

I may be wrong, but I believe this is the most Black--4!--Pulitzer Prize winners ever, and the most ever received by authors and journalists of color. I guess we'll see if this is but a temporary shift or a harbinger of the future. (One of the oddest selections, though, was Peggy Noonan, Ronald Reagan's former speechwriter and spinner of tissues of fantasy, in the Commentary selection. Perhaps this was supposed to reflect balance of some sort, but having read several of Noonan's columns this past year, I remain no less baffled than when I first heard the news.)

Noonan included, congratulations again to all this year's recipients, and please go out and buy of a copy of Olio, The Underground Railroad, and any of Als's books, and, before it closes and if you're in New York, catch Sweat! (I still have to myself.)

Paul Beatty Wins Man Booker Prize

(Photo by John Phillips/Pool photo via AP)

Congratulations to Paul Beatty, winner of the 2016 Man Booker Prize, for his novel The Sellout! Paul is the first Americanever to receive this prize, which the Booker Prize organization opened up in 2014 to all novelists writing in English, and is the second black writer in a row to receive the award, after Marlon James, who received it for his volume A Brief History of Seven Killings, and the third over all, with Ben Okri, the first black writer to receive the Booker back in 1991 for The Famished Road. Paul's novel is a hard-hitting, sometimes harsh satire about the United States, American history, slavery, segregation, and racism, and hardly relents from its blistering opening pages to its conclusion. 

I first met Paul over 25 years ago when he was among the initial readers at the Dark Room Writers Collective. He had just published his first book of poems, Big Bank Take Little Bank, and had recently won the Nuyorican Poets Cafe poetry slam. Each of the poems in that has narrative force, but it wasn't until Paul published his acclaimed novel White Boy Shuffle (1996) that the world, I included, realized he was not only a poet of originality and talent but a fiction writer to reckon with. He has since published another volume of poetry, Joker Joker Deuce (1994), as well as two more novels, Tuff  (2000) and Slumberland (2008), and as befits a master of satire, he edited Hokum: An Anthology of African-American Humor, in 2006. 

Congratulations again to Paul, and a hat tip to the Man Booker Prize jury for its excellent and unanimous decision!

Semester's End & Congrats to the Graduates

The Rutgers-Newark full commencement
ceremonies, at the Prudential Center

UPDATED: Rutgers-Newark held its Commencement ceremonies on Wednesday, May 18, 2016. The Commencement speaker was journalist and author Soledad O'Brien, and the honorary degree recipient was human rights activist and diplomat Radhika Coomaraswamy. I've included a few photos from the event. Congratulations to all the graduates and their families!

My absence from this blog is testimony to many things, one of which is the very busy semester I just concluded. Chairing, even a small department, is no joke, but many good things have happened, so I'm glad to have played a part in facilitating them. But back to more immediate things: Let me begin by congratulating all of Rutgers-Newark's 2016 graduates! Yesterday I had the tremendous honor of serving as the hooder for all 12 of our MFA fiction students who walked in the Graduate School's ceremonies. Our campus-wide ceremony will take place next Wednesday!

Our MFA graduates lining up before
our procession into the Essex Room
at Robeson Campus Center, Rutgers-Newark

Congratulations to all of these fine fiction writers, including the three phenomenal authors whose theses I advised, Mustafa Gatollari, Mel King and Anisa Rahim, and to all our graduating poets! I am glad I had an opportunity to teach many of them in workshops either last year or this one, and certainly will miss them!

Our MFA graduates and faculty (acting director
Rigoberto González is in the back row, at center,
and Brenda Shaughnessy is standing to his left/
viewer's right)

Congratulations also to my English department honors student Angelíc Forde, who completed a marvelous collection of poems entitled Limestone on My Feet, drawing upon her experiences as an immigrant from Barbados. It was always a pleasure to turn to Angelíc's poems, which included poems written in traditional fixed forms and ones drawn from the Bajan and African American traditions. (At Commencement exercises on Wednesday, I learned that Angelíc graduated summa cum laude, so even more kudos to her for a stellar undergraduate career!)

Soledad O'Brien giving her
Commencement address

Congratulations also to Tasha Hawthorne, now Dr. Hawthorne, on whose committee I sat, and who successfully completed and submitted her dissertation on African American pulp fiction at the very end of last year. Tasha will receive her Ph.D. in English from Northwestern University this June! Congratulations, Tasha!

Soledad O'Brien on
the big screen

Bomb Magazine 2016 Recommendation: Clarence Major

Recently BOMB Magazine offered me and other writers and creative types the opportunity to share my thoughts some of the many books we're looking forward to this upcoming year, so I selected poet, novelist and visual artist Clarence Major's forthcoming collection Chicago Heat and Other Stories (Green Writers' Press, 2016).

Major (b.1936 -) is the author of 8 novels, 14 collections of poetry (including the 1999 National Book Award finalist collection Configurations), 2 collections of short fiction (including this one), 8 works of nonfiction, and 4 anthologies, among them 1969's landmark The New Black Poetry. His essay "Necessary Distance," the title of an eponymous collection of nonfiction that Tisa B. turned me onto, is one of many compasses I periodically return to.

Despite his prodigiousness and originality--this is a man who wrote a novel based on the premise that a Connecticut law required husbands to carry their wives across thresholds at home!)--his work remains far too little known, and should be much more heralded, read and discussed, so I am particularly looking forward to this new book. For Bomb I wrote:

One book I’m eager to get my hands on is acclaimed novelist, poet, and visual artist Clarence Major’s forthcoming collection of short fiction Chicago Heat and Other Stories. Though far less known than he should be, Major, as original as anyone writing today, has been successfully experimenting with the formal possibilities of fiction for over four decades, and has developed a distinctive, accessible, and unforgettable style. I’m enthusiastic to read and learn from what he accomplishes in this new gathering of stories.

About the new book Major's publisher writes:

Chicago Heat and Other Stories by Clarence Major, employs a gorgeous purity and simplicity of language in a series of masterful analyses examining human interaction. Each narrative voice comes forward all at once, individual and complete, without obstacle or complication, enabling the reader to see the characters and feel their emotions. Major does not shy away from the bitter or the harsh; we get to hear it all. Like paint on an easel he blends lyricality with moxie and the blunt with the beautiful. The characters come together as easily as they part; people leaving, coming back, going, staying—it all sticks and fades like heat on your skin. The imagery is completely accessible and generously given. Toni Morrison comes to mind. His work is like jewels.

Based on what I know of Clarence Major's work, this description barely touches the surface. Check it out this year.

More book 2016 recommendations by Dawn Lundy Martin, Albert Mobilio, Alan Gilbert, Chelsea Hodson, Justin Taylor, Ander Monson, Ken Chen, and Lawrence Giffin at the BOMB Magazine site!