Fall Classes Underway + Congratulations All Around

UPDATE: The Edward Baugh reading, scheduled for October 31, 2014 at Rutgers-Newark, has been canceled. I send Dr. Baugh my very best wishes for a swift recovery.

***

A few weeks month (!) ago I had a wonderful lunch with a senior colleague who was visiting the New York area. He teaches on the quarter system and so has had not yet begun his own fall schedule, and he asked how my classes were thus far, which made me realize that unlike in previous years, I haven't posted on or around the first day about the term's classes. As I noted a few posts ago, I have had a health challenge this summer that spilled into September, but I am feeling increasingly better, and do hope to post more regularly.

I am again serving as the Acting Chair of African American and African Studies, an enjoyable post, and having undertaken this post once, it is a lot easier and smoother the second time around. On of my favorite aspects of it involves planning events for the upcoming year, and thus far we have several events on the schedule, including the visit of the great Jamaican poet and scholar Edward Baugh on October 31 (it's Halloween, yes, but it worked best for his overall travel plans to the US), and next semester, scholar, poet and performer Rosamond  S. King on February 4 and the Kùlú Mèlé Dance & Drum Ensemble on February 11, 2015.

My course for the fall is my first graduate fiction workshop at Rutgers-Newark; thus far I have only taught undergraduate and graduate literature, reading and writing, and African American studies courses, so it is exciting to again be working directly with the MFA writing students, who are sharp, talented and hard-working. Each will be writing four stories, so I've geared my eyes up for a lot of reading. Our class discussion focus will be on short-story cycles/novels-in-stories/composite novels, so we're perusing stories, chapters and excerpts by a wide range of authors that include Sherwood Anderson, Sandra Cisneros, J. M. Coetzee, Jennifer Egan, Louise Erdrich, Karl Taro Greenfield, Ayana Mathis, David Mitchell, Gloria Naylor, and Nami Mun, to name just a few. It took me a few years to internalize all the novella reading-and-writing, so perhaps a novel-in-stories will be a possibility in the future, who knows?

***

Congratulations are in order to so many colleagues and friends on recent awards. I probably will be missing someone, so forgive me in advance.

Congratulations to my Rutgers-Newark colleague Rigoberto González on winning the Academy of American Poets' 2014 Lenore Marshall Prize for his highly praised and belauded collection Unpeopled Eden (Four Way Books, 2013).

Congratulations to my fellow Dark Room Collective member, Tracy K. Smith, on receiving the Academy of American Poets' 2014 Fellowship in poetry, adding her to a distinguished list of major American poets.

Congratulations to fellow CC poet Terrance Hayes on receiving a 2014 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Fellowship for his acclaimed poetry and future promise.

Congratulations to fellow CC poet Ruth Ellen Kocher on being one of two winners of the 2014 PEN Open Book Award for her collection domina Un/blued (Tupelo Press, 2013); Nina McConaghy also won for her book Cowboys and East Indians (FiveChapters Books).

Congratulations to fellow CC poet Rickey Laurentiis on becoming the newest winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize; his collection Boy with Thorn was selected by Terrance and will be published in 2015 by the University of Pittsburgh Press.

and for two awards in which I had a hand:

Congratulations to poet Ed Pavlić, whose powerful manuscript Let's Let That Are Not Yet: Inferno I selected for the 2014 National Poetry Series, to be published in 2015 by Fence Books.

A belated congratulations to fellow CC poet and Chicagoan Ladan Osman, who received this year's Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets from the African Poetry Book Fund. Her beautiful début collection The Kitchen Dweller's Testimony will be published by the University of Nebraska Press and Amalion Press in Senegal.

Congratulations also to poets Fred Moten and Claudia Rankine for making the National Book Award in Poetry long list! I'm sure there'll be many more congratulations for these and other friends soon!

The Hiatus

Well, September is nearly over, and I haven't blogged for weeks. A huge part of that has been returning to Chicago and Evanston to teach, part of it derives from ongoing projects (writing, university-related activities, etc.) that have left little time to do anything beyond tweeting, email, and reading others' blogs, and part of it is not being able to keep up with the fast-barreling train of current events, many (most?) of which I want to write about, but.... At any rate, I hope to start blogging a bit more soon.

Board after my first class, Topics in African-American Literature: 20th and 21st Century Black Avant-Gardes, last Tuesday

Signal On + Memorials + Debate #1 + Brazilian Poets in Chicago

I'm back in the Chi, classes are underway. This fall's load looks to be a little lighter than the past few years, since I'm teaching only a graduate workshop and an undergraduate honors seminar, and I'm supervising just a few undergraduates and graduates, all of whom are sharp and talented as they come, so it should be an enjoyable quarter.

***

In the time since I last posted, nearly a month ago, so much has happened on many fronts out there in the wide world, but I do want to note a few things, starting with the passing of a few important people: the first is Reginald Shepherd, a poet I knew, though not well, but whose poetry and criticism I grew to appreciate a great deal. His early and untimely death still shocks me. On the CC list I wrote the following:

I remember his essay, "On Not Being White," in Joseph Beam's anthology In the Life, which annoyed me for a good while until I reread it and made an effort to understand where he was coming from.* I also remember when Reginald's first book came out and all the buzz around it, and how I excited I was to meet him for the first time back at one of the old OutWrite conferences in Boston, in the late 1990s.

He could be, to use Shakespeare's and everybody else's phrase, a piece of work, but he was certainly a brilliant poet and a lively critic. His passing is a real loss for Black, Black LGBTQ, and American poetry, but I hope he finds real peace.

His lyrical facility, the deep and relentless exploration of desire and yearning for love and acceptance that surged through his stanzas, his skill with metaphor and a particularly deft gift for the music of rhyme are all hallmarks I register when I think of his work. Without hesitation I can say that Reginald was easily one of the most important Black/gay poets to emerge over the last 25 years, and I'm very sorry that we have lost his voice. He was only 45, and leaves his partner, Robert Philen, and many family members.

Also, Edgardo Vega Yunqué, the Puerto Rican/Nuyorican author, also passed away earlier this month. I met him once, at a reading featuring some of New York's important Latino writers that I helped coordinate at one of my former jobs. I wasn't at all familiar with his work, but hearing Vega Yunqué read and talk about his life and work, he struck me as a real treasure. Original, funny, feisty, cantankerous, and like so many, deserving of greater honors and attention than he ever received. After the reading I went and found some of his work, which reminded me in many ways of Ishmael Reed, not least in its caustic humor and social criticism. Like Ishmael, Vega Yunqué was a social activist, and played a key role in building and nurturing Puerto Rican/Nuyorican/Latino letters and arts in New York; he was one of the founders of the vital arts center Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural Center on the Lower East Side. He was 72.

Then there was the news of the tragic death of one of the most celebrated writers of the contemporary era, David Foster Wallace. I've taught his work a few times over the years, and consider his story "The Girl With Curious Hair" to be a comic masterpiece. I'm less a fan of his novel, Infinite Jest, which I admit I advanced only about 300 pages into, but whatever my thoughts about that work, I must say that Wallace was blindingly talented and offered one of the most influential, ironic takes on our society to be found in recent literature. A huge loss.

And then yesterday I read about the passing of one of the consistently superb actors--and activists--of the last half of the 20th century, Paul Newman, at 83. Very sad.

***

I watched the debate between Senators Barack Obama and John McCain last night. My own thoughts about the contest aren't important, because it appears that Obama achieved what was most necessary: positive reviews by many in the influential establishment media, and very positive reviews by independent voters and in quick post-debate polls. While I will definitely be watching the Vice Presidential debate between Joe Biden and the walking disaster known as Sarah Palin, I'm not sure if I can bear another Obama-McCain talkfest, especially if Obama, however successful his tactics, refuses to challenge McCain more and if McCain's rage and contempt have him seething like an old and overheating radiator.

***

One highlight of this week was the series of readings in Chicago by four noteworthy contemporary Brazilian poets, Maria Esther Maciel, Virna Teixeira, Paulo Henriques Britto, and Sérgio Medeiros. The poets, from Belo Horizonte, Fortaleza by way of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Matto Grosso do Sul via Florianópolis respectively, all appeared in the Brooklyn-based literary journal Aufgabe's issue no. 7 (2007), which featured a special section on Brazilian writing, edited by poet and translator Ray Bianchi. Ray also organized the readings, with Aufgabe editor E. Tracy Grinnell, and they took place at three different venues across Chicagoland: the university, the University of Chicago, and at Chicago's main branch Harold Washington Library in the Loop. Colleagues at the university, along with Litmus Press, the Chicago Poetry Project, and the Consulate General of Brazil in Chicago, all sponsored the events.

I attended the first reading, at the university, which my colleague, prodigious author and translator Reg Gibbons, had helped to coordinate and which he introduced. All four of the poets read either excerpts from longer work or a few short poems in Portuguese, and either they or Ray followed with English translations. One of the things that intrigued me was that two of the poets, Henriques Britto and Teixeira, both wrote in English as well as Portuguese; for Henriques Britto it resulted from his having spent part of his youth in Washington, DC, and he later told me that his first poetic language was English. Teixeira told me that she wrote in English when she was living for several years in Scotland, though now she wrote almost always in Portuguese. In the case of both poets, the English was idiomatic and lyrical, with Henriques Britto's more discursive and assured in its handling of rhyme, and Teixeira's grounded in concise and evocative imagery.

With regard to their Portuguese texts, I noted and asked about the differences during the question and answer session. Medeiros, who told me about a new language melding Portuguese, Spanish and Guaraní that was developing in southern Brazil (where he lives), read from a long poem that was both fragmentary and composed along the lines of what I would identify as the Language poetry movement's "new sentence." Maciel's briefer poems drew upon the rich homophonic, rhyming polysemous possibilities of Portuguese, which she contrasted with a few visually grounded prose poems. Teixeira's short poems moved from image to image, and, as became clear soon enough, were often inspired by works of art. The fourth poet, Henriques Britto, read poems in fixed forms: sonnets, a half-sestina, and a full villanelle. They sounded as adroit and nimble in Portuguese as in English.

When the writers spoke about influences, they listed many of the best known names in 20th century Brazilian poetry: Carlos Drummond de Andrade, João Cabral de Melo Neto, the two de Campos brothers, Augusto and Haroldo, and Cecília Meireles. They also mentioned English-language authors such as Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, and the great modernists Wallace Stevens and, from a later generation, Elizabeth Bishop. In reading the poetry in the special section, I wondered about more recent national and international trends and influences, because a number of the writers are in conversation with them. Other questions during the Q&A touched upon the contemporary literary landscape in Brazil, national vs. regional trends there today, the presence and influence of literary journals (which Ray does touch upon in his introduction to the special section), and the problem of a readership for poetry. Three of the writers, I believe, are also university professors, though I didn't gather that any of them taught creative writing per se; that is, it seems, a peculiarity thus far of the English-speaking world (mainly the US, Britain, Canada, and Australia). Teixeira mentioned that she was a medical doctor, and the precision of her work, in retrospect, bore this out.

I attended a second round today at the Harold Washington Library, and got to hear all the writers read more of their work. Maciel read one of my favorite poems from the special section, a poem consisting only of a litany of single words separated by commas, which ends with "palavra" (word). It was titled "Palavras preferidas" in Portuguese, and "Favorite Words" in English. The translator managed to capture some of the richness of the original's sonorities and playfulness, but there is nothing like hearing "ferrugem" (iron) or "ruido" (noise) or "arara" (arara!) pronounced by a native Portuguese speaker, Brazilian or from Europe or Africa. It's almost as if paper's crinkling in the mouth as a song emerges. Lovely: amável!

The event was heartening on many levels, but I also hope it's a signal that more such events will be possible in the future.

Summerfall in Chicago + This and That

SUMMERFALL
When I left Jersey City last week, autumn had arrived. Cool days and cooler evenings filled my final week at home. In Chicago, however, it's still summery. Actually mid-summery. Every day the thermometer's crossed the 80°F threshold, and today it's so warm (90°F) I'm finding it difficult to believe that classes are about to start and October is just around the corner. Rather than calling this Indian summer, it's basically Summerfall. Or Sutumn. Or Faummer.

JENA 6 RALLYING LAST WEEK

From Los Angeles Times: Chris Graythen / Getty Images

Last Thursday I wasn't able to head down to Texas to participate in the Jena Six protest and rally nor was I able to participate in the local demonstrations, so I signed up to call Louisiana state officials to urge justice in the case, in which six African-American teenagers were arrested, and one convicted as an adult, for an attack on a White schoolmate. The attack on the White student was the culminating event in a series of clashes that began White students decided to hang a noose from a tree, as an racially inflammatory affront to Black students who'd decided to sit under it (and to Blacks in Jena more broadly), and received only token sanctions as a result, their action being labeled a "prank." The case has rightly sparked international outrage, and last's week's public protest drew many thousands of participants.

Since I'm shy and not especially comfortable on the telephone, I was a little nervous about calling, but ColorofChange provided scripts and numbers, and I set to dialing. I can report that of the actual human beings I actually reached, all were unfailingly polite, some even apologetic, and one sounded exasperated, especially after I said that I was calling from Chicago, Illinois. (I think C said she probably was thinking "Damn Yankees!") This same person also said she would put me "on the list," which I assumed meant a list to be presented to the state official to whom I was lodging my protest, but then I also considered that the same list might end up in the hands of scary right-wing types (even though I realize we may be undergoing wiretapping, which I say with no little amount of horror and rage), so while I gave my name, she at least got a dummy phone number.

I do not for a minute think that my telephone rallying matched the commitment and courage of those who were present at the marches and rallies, or the bravery of the young defendants. I also think that one response by some of the officials involved will be what it was in before, during and after the Civil Rights movement: defiance, though they have been served a wake-up call, not only by the longstand Black leadership, but by a new generation of activists who are fed up by the persistence of racism in its most grotesque and spectacular forms.

Louisiana's officials probably will respond to the threat of economic boycott, but they also probably realize that many of the supporters of the Jena Six are also strong supporters of those who suffered from Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, and cutting off the state of Louisiana could harm New Orleansians just as readily as racist district attorneys in rural parts of the state. So it strikes me that one of the best positions to take is to keep the pressure on, publicize the miscarriages of justice far and wide, and not let Louisiana's officials of whatever party off the hook. The Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Director of Tourism, top judicial officials, and everyone else in power should know that last Thursday was not the last hurrah--that won't come until all of the Jena Six are fully cleared, and there is a public apology and investigation into everything that occurred.

And, now that the New York Times has abolished Times Select, you can read Paul Krugman's take on the protests and on the electoral corner the Republican Party, through its Southern, a/k/a racist strategy, has painted itself into. (I would add that the Democratic Party and politicians also engage in racist discourse when they feel--wrong--the need to do so.)

And as Metta Sama noted in a recent email she sent, "it ain't just a Southern thang."

And as Reggie notes, the issue of Black on Black violence, and Black male violence against women, deserves a similar nationwide demonstration and rally.

HASTA, LIBRERÍA LECTORUM
Sic transeunt ruae Novi Eborici.

Herbert R. wrote Reggie and me to pass on an article from Críticas saying that the landmark Librería Lectorum, the major Spanish-language bookstore in New York, has closed. Founded in 1960, the store can no longer afford the burgeoning rents on its strip of West 14th Street--that's right, rents are exploding on West 14th Street!--and ironically, the landlords are the sons of the store's founder, Argentinian Gerome Gutiérrez. The heirs no longer own the business, which was sold along with the Spanish-language publishing arm, Lectorum, to the publisher Scholastic, which now plans to shift the entire outfit to the online world, though there's a slender--nonexistent--possibility that they will find another storefront in New York.

Lectorum Publications president Teresa Mlawer says that street traffic has plummeted and the neighborhood has been gentrifying for years, but 14th Street between 6th and 7th Avenues was still fairly gritty when I walked it many times this summer, although it has changed somewhat even from last year. Still, it's no SoHo or Chelsea, at least not yet, and ousting the store will only help speed the gentrifying process. It's a major loss for New York's Spanish-speaking community and for the city's culture, on multiple levels, not least because of the disappearance of an important venue and meeting place for Spanish-language authors from across the city and globe, and because of the ongoing dismantling of 14th Streets's longstanding cultural economy, which is set to shift into another mode altogether.

I realize New York, like all vibrant cities, is always changing, and that from its origins it's revolved around commerce, but it still painful to acknowledge the loss of yet another key institution like this. I also think the Gutiérrez brothers ought to be ashamed, but is that even a valid emotion in our contemporary society? I visited the store several times this summer, primarily to look for books in Spanish by the late Roberto Bolaño, and I also recall one of the first times I went there, back in the 1990s, and found a book by the Dominican fiction writer and scholar José Alcántara Almánzar, and the woman at the registered, noting his back cover and glancing up at me, asked me if I was he! Given how bad my spoken Spanish was then and that I was flattered into speechlessness, I had to deny it with a headshake.

Neither of the two articles mentions that one block west, another Spanish-language bookstore, Macondo, remains, though it long has hand only a fraction of the texts as Libreria Lectorum, and on occasion I've almost had to wake the attendant who was working in there. I wonder how much of a lease and life it'll have as the relentless march of luxury condos and stultifying chain stories continues across every square inch of Manhattan's grid.

The New York Times's article on the store's closing is here.

Que nunca se la olvide, que siempre se la recuerde.

AHMADINEJAD IN NEW YORK
Re: the brouhaha surrounding the visit by the decidedly wacko, authoritarian, Israel-hating, democratically elected, figurehead president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to New York to attend the opening of the UN General Assembly, and his "roast" (to use C's apt term)/conversation/free-for-all today at Columbia University (which should not be punished by New York State politicians for hosting the talk), I came across a great quote from the comments section after Glenn Greenwald's post on this topic:

"History teaches that grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure."--Thurgood Marshall

In light of the events this year and the past seven years, that "urgency" deserves scare quotes, BTW.

UPDATE: Here's a New York Times report on Ahmadinejad's bizarre riffs today, including his claim that there are no gay people in Iran (though they're persecuted, like the Baha'i and other religious, social and sexual minorities, and hanged there) and that the Holocaust was theoretical rather than actual (though Iranian TV is featuring a very popular miniseries on this topic). He did get in a few knocks at his questioners and at his chief antagonist, W, though he said little of substance, whether about the appalling heinous human rights record in Iran, its support of Hamas, or its connection to the corrupt and ineffectual quasi-government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki.

WHERE DID THE TV GAYS GO?
There are fewer gay characters (and Latino characters) on network TV, but more on cable. So says a new Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) study. According to GLAAD's report, most of the network gay characters--all 6 of them--are on one channel, ABC, with the other one appearing on NBC; there are no gay characters on CBS, Fox, or CW. The last channel has the largest percentage of characters who're people of color. CW used to be the WB, and snapped up content from UPN, both ghettos for neo-minstrelsy, right?

(BTW, what categories does Wentworth Miller fall into? Racial, that is, for the survey purposes. Just asking.)

I'm not sure what the mainstream network folks are thinking, and I'm not suggesting there's a conspiracy so much as the usual oversight, indifference and neglect, but given the high gay quotient both in Hollywood and New York, it makes you wonder.

No word on how many of the few remaining network gays, lesbians, bisexuals, or transgenders or their cable kin have lots of melanin, though. And the lone show featuring lots--a whole cast full!--of Black and Latino gay people, Noah's Arc, problematic as it was, is off LOGO, so I'd imagine the numbers aren't great on cable either. It's not just on Queer as Volk that queers of color don't exist....

UAW SAYS STRIKE
GM wants to cut costs while to compete with foreign automakers. The United Auto Workers want to keep jobs in the US. GM says, No. The UAW says no more more work until they get a guarantee. Health care costs and liabilities are a major aspect of the negotiations. But if we had a single-payer national health care system, GM and the UAW wouldn't have haggle over this issue. Would they?

DEMOCRACY IN MYANMAR
Finally, this is what I'd call religious, moral and ethical leadership.