Poems: John Ashbery (RIP)

John Ashbery
(from KCRW Bookworm.com)

One of the greatest poets in contemporary American literature, John Ashbery, passed away this past week (1927-2017). Ashbery's work has been one of my enduring inspirations, and I have blogged about him numerous times, including on his 90th birthday this past July, when I reviewed Karen Roffman's biography of his youth and early career.

As a memorial tribute, I am posting two of my (many) favorite poems by him, "My Erotic Double," from his 1979 collection As We Know (I had previously posted it on this blog some years ago), and "Street Musicians," from Houseboat Days, which he published 1977.

MY EROTIC DOUBLE

He says he doesn’t feel like working today.
It’s just as well. Here in the shade
Behind the house, protected from street noises,   
One can go over all kinds of old feeling,
Throw some away, keep others.
                                     The wordplay
Between us gets very intense when there are   
Fewer feelings around to confuse things.
Another go-round? No, but the last things
You always find to say are charming, and rescue me   
Before the night does. We are afloat
On our dreams as on a barge made of ice,
Shot through with questions and fissures of starlight   
That keep us awake, thinking about the dreams
As they are happening. Some occurrence. You said it.

I said it but I can hide it. But I choose not to.   
Thank you. You are a very pleasant person.   
Thank you. You are too.

John Ashbery, “My Erotic Double” from As We Know. Copyright © 1979 by John Ashbery. Reprinted with the permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc. for the author. Source: As We Know (Viking Press, 1979)

STREET MUSICIANS

One died, and the soul was wrenched out   
Of the other in life, who, walking the streets   
Wrapped in an identity like a coat, sees on and on   
The same corners, volumetrics, shadows   
Under trees. Farther than anyone was ever   
Called, through increasingly suburban airs   
And ways, with autumn falling over everything:   
The plush leaves the chattels in barrels   
Of an obscure family being evicted
Into the way it was, and is. The other beached   
Glimpses of what the other was up to:
Revelations at last. So they grew to hate

                         and forget each other.

So I cradle this average violin that knows   
Only forgotten showtunes, but argues
The possibility of free declamation anchored
To a dull refrain, the year turning over on itself   
In November, with the spaces among the days   
More literal, the meat more visible on the bone.   
Our question of a place of origin hangs
Like smoke: how we picnicked in pine forests,
In coves with the water always seeping up, and left   
Our trash, sperm and excrement everywhere, smeared   
On the landscape, to make of us what we could.

John Ashbery, “Street Musicians” from Houseboat Days. Copyright © 1987, 1979 by John Ashbery. Reprinted with the permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc. on behalf of the author. Source: Houseboat Days (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1977)

"No Angel" (Poem for Michael Brown)

Though the motivation often arises in me, especially when certain types of major events occur, I seldom am able to write immediate occasional or topical poems. Today after reading New York Times African American (!?) reporter John Eligon's piece "Michael Brown Spent Last Weeks Grappling With Problems and Promise," however, in which he includes the following paragraph--

Michael Brown, 18, due to be buried on Monday, was no angel, with public records and interviews with friends and family revealing both problems and promise in his young life. Shortly before his encounter with Officer Wilson, the police say he was caught on a security camera stealing a box of cigars, pushing the clerk of a convenience store into a display case. He lived in a community that had rough patches, and he dabbled in drugs and alcohol. He had taken to rapping in recent months, producing lyrics that were by turns contemplative and vulgar. He got into at least one scuffle with a neighbor.

--and in particular, the unnecessary and noxious "Michael Brown...was no angel," subjectively singling out this teenager, whose life was tragically cut short when he was shot dead by policeman Darren Wilson in cold blood, in a way I have almost never see or read for any other major public figures with any life issues, including long histories of drug use, criminal activity, and worse, I became enraged. Yet rather than just stifling or sublimating it (and Eligon's piece provoked a brouhaha, including considerable backlash, all across social and traditional media), I stopped what I was doing at the New York Public Library and wrote out a poem directly on Twitter, titled "No Angel."

Since not all of J's Theater's readers are on Twitter, I am sharing the poem here, edited and with an additional stanza). It is a tribute in and of the moment, to Brown, but I think it works on its own, and the relationships between and among the chain of metaphors and metonyms, as well as the ironies contained within, should be clear enough. To his memory and many others in his situation: RIP.

"NO ANGEL"

No angel?
no god?
no cherub?
no seraph?

no saint?
no deity?
no divinity?
no lord?

no king?
no prince?
no noble?
no peer?

no master?
no idol?
no leader?
no icon?

no star?
no notable?
no hero?
no worthy?

no baby?
no toddler?
no youngster?
no boy?

no brother?
no nephew?
no uncle?
no son?

no ally?
no buddy?
no sidekick?
no friend?

no somebody?
no character?
no nobody?
no fellow?

no being?
no soul?
no mortal?
no individual?

no man?
no person?
no sovereign?
no human?

RIP Michael Brown
© 2014

Copyright © John Keene, 2014. All rights reserved.

Remembering Chinua Achebe @ United Nations

It doesn't seem as if it has been that long since Chinua Achebe passed away, but March 21, 2013 was nearly a year ago. I had planned a little tribute on here to Achebe, one of the leading lights of contemporary Nigerian, African, Anglophone, and global letters, but such are the best-made plans during a steamroller of a semester. I believe there have been various tributes to Achebe in and around New York City, but I was not able to make one until recently. Thanks to talented poet and fellow Rutgers educator Darrel Alejandro Holnes, however, I finally did get to experience a loving, public tribute to Achebe the writer, thinker, visionary, and advocate for peace. Representing event co-sponsor Rutgers University Writers House, Darrel, along with Bhikshuni Weisbrot, President of the United Nations SRC Society of Writers, which also co-sponsored the event with the United Nations SRC Film Society, offered a warm welcome to a packed room of Achebe fans, former students, family members, and UN officials and visitors.

I actually had never been inside the United Nations complex, so this was a special treat, and because of construction and, I surmise, security requirements, other attendees and I had to take a long, circuitous route to the Dag Hammarskjöld Library where the event took place. I am often snapping photos, but I kept my camera in my suit pocket as we walked along the UN's East River promenade, which I must say is one of the more picturesque views you will get in Manhattan. After what felt like a journey along an almost Kafkaesque (or Borgesian) trek, we reached the library, and the event began. Among the speakers were Nigerian Ambassador Usman Sarki, Deputy Permanent Representative of the Federal Republic of Nigeria; author and priest Uwem Akpan; Chukwuma Azuonye, a professor of African American and Africana Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, who called for the UN to pass a resolution for an "International Week of Peace" in Achebe's honor; Frederick Douglas Academy VII High School teacher and Afro Heritage publisher Olutusin Mustapha; and Rutgers-New Brunswick scholar, poet and Chair of Women's and Gender Studies Abena P.A. Busia, who read her poem "A Poet Daughter's Farewell: Still Morning Yet".

Darrel Alejandro Holnes and Bhikshuni
Weisbrot, with a large photo of the
late Chinua Achebe at left

Also speaking or performing were Darrel himself, who talked about first reading Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart while in middle school and Panama, and being empowered tremendously by it, before he shifted to a discussion of teaching Achebe's work and the trove of insights his students gained from it; singers from the Sri Chinmoy: the Peace Meditation at the United Nations, who sang a poem Sri Chinmoy had written specifically for Achebe; saxophonist David Engelhard, who performed a solo piece entitled "Things Fall Apart"; Bahula Boring, President of the UNSRC Film Society, who introduced a short film clip of a 2008 interview with Achebe at his home on the Bard College campus; and, among the afternoons highlights, Chochi Ejueyitchie, Achebe's granddaughter, who spoke endearingly of the chief lesson he taught her, "humility." As she spoke I thought about this in relation to the fact of Achebe as a pioneering and best-selling of African writers and literary artists, as a brave figure who put his life repeatedly on the line on behalf of the state of Biafra, as a critic who risked ostracization by his colleagues when he openly critiqued the racism of Joseph Conrad in the 1970s, and as a "gentle" man who persevered after the 1990 accident that paralyzed him from the waist down. Humility: this is one of the supreme human and spiritual virtues, and a central aspect of ethical personhood.

In the film clip several of Achebe's quotes really struck me, particularly in reference to sitting in a room in the United Nations, the reality of the debates about immigration in the US and elsewhere, the status of refugee and stateless people, xenophobia, neocolonialism, imperialism, racism, and ethnocentrism, and the various kinds of supremacies that still are too prevalent--and deadly: "Because we are one we are entitled to move from place to place," he said, in relation to his experiences living in Nigeria and the United States, which he followed up with "you are entitled to the world." These are the words not just of a great writer, thinker and visionary, but, as Professor Azuonye said, of a "weaver of myths to live by," the King of Masks, Ijele himself, and his presence was in that room, and, let us all hope, stays with us all always. As always, photos from the event, below.

Part of the packed audience

Uwem Akpan

Darrel Alejandro Holnes

Ambassador Usman Sarki

Olutusin Mustapha

Professor Abena P.A. Busia

The singers from the Sri Chinmoy: The
Peace Meditation at the United Nations

David Engelhard

Achebe's granddaughter,
Chochi Ejueyitchie

Attendees, departing the UN complex

RIP Édouard Glissant

Édouard Glissant (1928-2011),

among the greatest intellectuals,
artists, critics, creators, thinkers
to emerge from the 20th century
Caribbean, passed away today
in Paris at age of 82.
A poet, fiction writer, essayiste,
philosopher, he brought these
different genres together
in conversation, around and to
a meal at which they spoke
at length and freely with each other.

When I was in graduate school I debated trying to finesse my schedule in order to take a class with him at the CUNY Graduate Center, but couldn't swing it. I nevertheless did hurry to any and all talks he gave, and was very glad to have seen him in the fall of 2009, when NYU's Institute of African American Affairs sponsored four conversations under the title One World In Relation, that explored aspects of Glissant's work. The four panels were "Opacity, Stupidity and the History of Unintelligibility: The Right to Opacity as a Prerequisite for Politics and Philosophy" (Oct. 27); Diversity in the Black Night: Chaos, Créolization and Metissage" (Nov. 4); "Roots and Imaginary Offshoots: Ecstatic Difference" (Nov. 18); and "De-capitalization and the Way of the World: Religion, Secularism and Multiplicity" (Nov. 30). 

I caught the third event, which featured François Noudelmann, Mary Ann Caws, Fred Moten (who brilliantly opened his presentation with a clip from John Coltrane's "Giant Steps," which opened a parallel vein of conversation, that rarely happens at such events), Manthia Diawara, Emily Apter, and Avital Ronell. The highlight of the evening, in addition to Moten's presentation, Diawara's film clip, and Glissant himself, was the tribute to him by poet Kofi Anyidoho, who entered the room and, breaking the usual hierarchical exchange that occurs between those on stage and the audience, strolled down the main aisle, singing and poetizing, gathering in his lyric embrace Kamau Brathwaite, another of the great figures of the 20th century Caribbean-African-Diasporic-America who was present; Diawara; and ultimately the entire audience. It appeared to shake some of the panelists up, but Glissant appeared delighted. He could see, I knew, in Anyidoho's performance some of his own theories being enacted, embodied, in play. I was glad I caught that event and sorry that I had to miss several others, including one at which the poet and translator extraordinaire Nathanaël, who beautifully translated Glissant's Poetic Intention (Nightbook Books, 2010), participated. At the bottom of this post are some photos of the event.