Poem: Imtiaz Dharker

(Finished post.) Recently, I came across a book by Imtiaz Dharker (b. 1954-), The Terrorist at My Table, at a local used bookstore I like to frequent, and after flipping through it I found it hard to put down, so I purchased it, and I've been looking around for some of her other books as well.

I don't know much about Dharker or her work, but according to the Poetry International website, from which I've taken this poem, I've learned she's also an artist and filmmaker, and was born in Lahore, grew up in Glasgow, and now shuttles between London and Mumbai. She's the author of three books, and, according to all I've found online, they take up themes of home, exile and displacement, freedom, citizenship, and gender politics, among other ever-salient topics.

Here's one poem from an earlier collection, entitled I Speak for the Devil, which I check out soon (when I have a free moment): "They'll Say: 'She Must Be From Another Country."

THEY’LL SAY: ‘SHE MUST BE FROM ANOTHER COUNTRY’


When I can’t comprehend
why they’re burning books
or slashing paintings,
when they can’t bear to look
at god’s own nakedness,
when they ban the film
and gut the seats to stop the play
and I ask why
they just smile and say,
‘She must be
from another country.’

When I speak on the phone
and the vowel sounds are off
when the consonants are hard
and they should be soft,
they’ll catch on at once
they’ll pin it down
they’ll explain it right away
to their own satisfaction,
they’ll cluck their tongues
and say,
‘She must be
from another country.’

When my mouth goes up
instead of down,
when I wear a tablecloth
to go to town,
when they suspect I’m black
or hear I’m gay
they won’t be surprised,
they’ll purse their lips
and say,
‘She must be
from another country.’

When I eat up the olives
and spit out the pits
when I yawn at the opera
in the tragic bits
when I pee in the vineyard
as if it were Bombay,
flaunting my bare ass
covering my face
laughing through my hands
they’ll turn away,
shake their heads quite sadly,
‘She doesn’t know any better,’
they’ll say,
‘She must be
from another country.’

Maybe there is a country
where all of us live,
all of us freaks
who aren’t able to give
our loyalty to fat old fools,
the crooks and thugs
who wear the uniform
that gives them the right
to wave a flag,
puff out their chests,
put their feet on our necks,
and break their own rules.

But from where we are
it doesn’t look like a country,
it’s more like the cracks
that grow between borders
behind their backs.
That’s where I live.
And I’ll be happy to say,
‘I never learned your customs.
I don’t remember your language
or know your ways.
I must be
from another country.’



© Imtiaz Dharker
From: I Speak for the Devil
Publisher: Penguin Books India, 2003
ISBN: 014-303089-2

Poem & RIP: Aimé Césaire

It's been a busier week than usual, so I haven't been able to complete the daily poetry posts I began, but I'll try to finish as many of them as I can so that I cover all 30 of April's slots. I also do want to post a squib on the Race Sex Power: New Directions in Black and Latino/a Sexualities conference at the University of Illinois-Chicago, which I attended and spoke at last weekend.

But today, let me note the passing of one of Martinique's greatest gifts to the world Aimé Césaire, one of the most important figures in 20th century Black Diasporic and francophone literature.

I wrote the following little blurb on the CC list:

Evie, many thanks to you and Reggie for posting on Césaire's passing, and on this excerpt from his masterpiece. He once said: «Je suis de la race de ceux qu'on opprime»--I am of the race of those who are oppressed--and he devoted his life and work to challenging that oppression through his art and civic activism, and to creating and celebrating black caribbean, translatlantic and diasporic culture.

Reggie H. sent the following obituary link, from the International Herald Tribune.

And Evie sent this snippet (originally from her partner Stéphane) from Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal:

and here at the end of this daybreak my virile prayer
that I hear neither the laughter nor the screams, my eyes
fixed on this town which I prophesy, beautiful,
grant me the savage faith of the sorcerer
grant my hands the power to mold
grant my soul the sword's temper
I won't flinch.  Make my head into a figurehead
and as for me, my heart, do not make me into a father nor a brother
nor a son, but into the father, the brother, the son,
nor a husband, but the lover of this unique people.

Poem: Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge

Here's a fairly recent (2003) poem by a poet, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge (1947-, photo, Upenn.com) whom I was introduced to in college (via her book The Heat Bird, which might also have been the first time I saw a Burning Deck Press volume. I remain a huge fan of their list). Her work entranced me then as now. Many poets attempt the sorts of poems she writes, but none sound quite like her. A few years ago she came to the university and I finally had the chance to meet and gush like a schoolboy. We even walked over to the beach in Evanston, she, I and a colleague, though I sort of remember it being too cold to sit down or do much more than look out at the lake-that-is-like-an-ocean.

At any rate, there are various ways to write a poem that is more or less overtly political--well, all poems are political, so I should say, which places political issues and discussions, or political discourse, out front--and the poem below, "Audience," is one example.

Audience

1



People think, at the theatre, an audience is tricked into believing it's looking at life.



The film image is so large, it goes straight into your head.



There's no room to be aware of or interested in people around you.



Girls and cool devices draw audience, but unraveling the life of a real human brings the

outsiders.



I wrote before production began, "I want to include all of myself, a heartbroken person

who hasn't worked for years, who's simply not dead."



Many fans feel robbed and ask, "What kind of show's about one person's unresolved

soul?"





2



There's sympathy for suffering, also artificiality.



Having limbs blown off is some person's reality, not mine.



I didn't want to use sympathy for others as a way through my problems.



There's a gap between an audience and particulars, but you can be satisfied by

particulars, on several levels: social commentary, sleazy fantasy.



Where my film runs into another's real life conditions seem problematic, but they don't

link with me.



The linking is the flow of images, thwarting a fan's transference.



If you have empathy to place yourself in my real situation of face-to-face intensity, then

there would be no mirror, not as here.





3



My story is about the human race in conflict with itself and nature.



An empathic princess negotiates peace between nations and huge creatures in the wild.



I grapple with the theme, again and again.



Impatience and frustration build among fans.



"She achieves a personal voice almost autistic in lack of affect, making ambiguous her

well-known power to communicate emotion, yet accusing a system that mistakes what

she says."



Sex, tech are portrayed with lightness, a lack of divisions that causes anxieties elsewhere.



When I find a gap, I don't fix it, don't intrude like a violent, stray dog, separating flow

and context, to conform what I say to what you see.



Time before the show was fabulous, blank.



When I return, as to an object in space, my experience is sweeter, not because of

memory.



The screen is a mirror where a butterfly tries so hard not to lose the sequence of the last

moments.



I thought my work should reflect society, like mirrors in a cafe, double-space.



There's limited time, but we feel through film media we've more.





4



When society deterritorialized our world with money, we managed our depressions via

many deterritorializations.



Feeling became vague, with impersonal, spectacular equivalents in film.



My animator draws beautifully, but can't read or write.



He has fears, which might become reality, but Godzilla is reality.



When I saw the real princess, I found her face inauspicious, ill-favored, but since I'd

heard she was lovely, I said, "Maybe, she's not photogenic today."



Compared to my boredom, I wondered if her life were not like looking into a stream at a

stone, while water rushed over me.



I told her to look at me, so her looking is what everything rushes around.



I don't care about story so much as, what do you think of her? Do you like her?



She's not representative, because of gaps in the emotion, only yummy parts, and dialogue

that repeats.



She pencils a black line down the back of her leg.



A gesture turns transparent and proliferates into thousands of us doing the same.



Acknowledging the potential of a fan club, she jokingly describes it as "suspect".



She means performance comes out through the noise.





5



At the bar, you see a man catch hold of a girl by the hair and kick her.



You could understand both points of view, but in reality, no.



You intervene, feeling shame for hoping someone else will.



It becomes an atmosphere, a situation, by which I mean, groups.



In school we're taught the world is round, and with our own eyes we confirmed a small

part of what we could imagine.



Because you're sitting in a dark place, and I'm illuminated, and a lot of eyes are directed

at me, I can be seen more clearly than if I mingled with you, as when we were in high

school.


We were young girls wanting to describe love and to look at it from outer space.


From Nest by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. Copyright © 2003 by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Kelsey St. Press. Special thanks to Conjunctions where the poem first appeared. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Poems: Kwame Dawes

Late in 2006 I posted about a reading poet Kwame Dawes gave at Naïeveté Studios, and also referenced him when I wrote about poet Uche Nduka, whom I finally got to meet at this year's AWP conference. Kwame (b. 1962-) whose site bills him as "the busiest man in literature today," is a remarkable figure on many levels, not least because he manages to do contribute a larger portion of his time to community-based activities, not only in South Carolina, where he lives and teaches, but also in Jamaica, where he grew up.

One of the important and extraordinary projects in Jamaica he's been involved with for several years now is Hope: Living & Loving with HIV Jamaica, commissioned by the Pulitzer Center, which describes its various components.

Poet and writer Kwame Dawes travels to Jamaica to explore the experience of people living with HIV/AIDS and to examine the ways in which the disease has shaped their lives. The journey brings him in touch with people who tell their stories, share their lives and teach him about resilience, hope and possibility in the face of despair. Some are living with the disease; others have committed their lives to HIV/AIDS care.

Hope: Living and Loving with HIV in Jamaica is a multi-media reporting project: an extended essay by Kwame Dawes for The Virginia Quarterly Review (Spring 2008), two short documentaries for the public-television program Foreign Exchange, a collection of poetry inspired by his reporting, a performance of the poems set to music by composer Kevin Simmonds, and LiveHopeLove.com, an interactive web presentation that synthesizes audio and text versions of the poems, the Foreign Exchange videos, additional video interviews, the music, and photography by Joshua Cogan.

I can't copy any of the poems directly, so please click on the image below to read them and also hear Kwame Dawes read them, see the accompanying photographs, and learn about the people, stories and experiences behind them.

Poem: Elizabeth Alexander

I'm feeling a little brain-spent tonight; I gave a talk that no one beforehand told me was limited to 15 minutes, so I wrote a 15-page paper--but I had the good sense to excerpt it extemporaneously, and did not come in over the clock. Actually, I'm glad I wrote the paper. Now I just need to clean it up and publish it. But since when I'm not reading creative work I work off notes (though I write out 7-8 pages of lecture notes twice a week) from which I talk/riff, I should have just gone to my usual default. It always does feel better to have written out a paper, though, strangely enough, even if it is in very rough form. (For several weeks before I had to give this talk/paper, my hip ached, and then this morning it felt fine, go figure.) It also made me realize that if you have a good research assistant (I don't) or two, you probably could write a lot of critical books!

So even though I'm tired, I am going to type out a poem by one of my favorite poets, Elizabeth Alexander. I have sung her praises more than once on this blog. The first time I met her and heard her read her work was when she came to the Dark Room in 1988 or 1989, and she sparkled, as she always does. I remember looking through her book afterwards--her first, Venus Hottentot--and just standing there with my mouth open in astonishment. How could someone so young have written poems so beautifully turned, so full of brilliance, so funky? And in volume after volume (and she also writes criticism), the poems never disappoint. (One thing I always look for in her poems is her use of epizeuxis; she's up there with Shakespeare on that account, good company if you ask me.) These days students at Yale get to partake of her expansive gifts as a teacher, her prodigious talents as a poet, and her incredible warmth as a person. Here's her "Ars Poetica #13: The Idea of Ancestry," from American Sublime (Graywolf, 2005).

Ars Poetica #13:  The Idea of Ancestry

Ralph Ellison's house is underground
next door to my house.  Somehow we
buried it during the renovation.
The stream of which he wrote, the lullaby
sung softly by its banks is the one
my children sing, in tongues.

Ralph Ellison had an outside child--
shh--it is whispered, but when
will someone tell me the full story?
We buried his house under cast-off
sheetrock, beams, and broken appliances.

Walk in my flowering peony bed
and you'll find it, a TV antenna
made from a bent wire hanger:
what's left of Ralph Ellison's house.
It picks up mysterious whispers.

Copyright © Elizabeth Alexander, 2005, 2008, from American Sublime, Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, all rights reserved.

Poem: Joseph Legaspi + Seismosis News

Today, I'm featuring a poem I found online, in Shampoo (31), by a poet I've known and admired now for a little over a decade, Joseph Legaspi (at right, from mipoesias.com). Joseph and I were in graduate school together, though in different genre tracks, but Joseph is one of those down-to-earth people whose unaffected friendliness and kindness means that you look forward to running into them, and I often would, he, and fellow poets and classmates Jan Gill (now O'Neil) and the late Phebus Etienne, a lively and amiable trio, and I can say without hesitation that I never left them without a good though, good feeling, and a good sense that these were three writers to watch out for. Joseph published his first collection of poems, Imago, with CavanKerry Press earlier this year, so check it out, and enjoy this little philosophical "postcard" of a poem. Yes, it literally was a postcard (see below, from Shampoo), from an issue devoted to them!

The universe has no edge or center.
Yet we who traverse in it do so
along perimeters, always, man-made,
conceptual and defined.  Try and pin-
point the center, and we go there.  Or is
it where we are at a given moment?
We are bound by boundaries: arms length
or under the hot sun of a horizon.
Trace edges, visible and invisible; place me in a box as I walk around in
circles.  Or is it equilibrium we seek: like the mallard bobbing on the Hudson
River, afloat, content, afloat.

Poem and image, Copyright © Joseph Legaspi, 2007, 2008, All rights reserved.

***

Some more good news about Seismosis: it received another very fine and perceptive review, by poet Frances Richard, in the most recent issue (March/April, I think) of the Poetry Project's Newsletter (the newest issue isn't up yet). I'll post the link to the new issue when they post it.

And...it received one of the 10 Fellowships for distinguished first poetry collection from the Pan African Literary Forum, which will hold its first conference this summer in Accra, Ghana, from July 3-July 18, 2008! I don't think either Mr. Stackhouse or I will be able to attend (sponsors, anyone? :-)), but this is a wonderful honor for the book, and we graciously thank the PALF's board of directors, who adjudged it worthy of this honor.

Poem: Abdel-ilah Salhi

I'm procrastinating about writing/finishing a talk I have to deliver later this week, so in my tours through the web, I came across this poem, by the Moroccan poet Abdel-ilah Salhi (1968-), amid Poetry International's online mini-anthology of Moroccan poetry, translated by Norddine Zouitni. The translator says this about Saleh:

Since 1987, Salhi has been published widely in several magazines. Two collections of his poems, one in French and the other in Arabic will be published shortly.

Although the poetry of Abdel-ilah Salhi has varied extensively over the past years, it has kept some of its main characteristics, such as the celebration of everyday experience, the tone of humor which turns desperate situations into brilliant poetic moments, and the narrative tendency which dominates most of his poems. Indeed, Salhi is a brilliant storyteller whose friendship and hospitality are highly recommended. He is considered by many as the mouthpiece of the Moroccan “new poetry” in France, and Europe as a whole.

Salhi earns his living as a journalist and radio correspondent in France.

Here's one that stood out. (You can go to this page, where the long lines aren't cut off.)

***

THANKS GILLES DELEUZE

They were quoting you
Murmuring your name like a prophet coming from afar
From whose mouth a unique music issues

My own French was not good enough even to purchase
     bread decently
But the ring of your name
In the sidewise discussions had a special magic
Which for long put my extreme ignorance to shame

Migration is a sacred right, you said once
Nobody said that before you, and no one dared say it after
In this country which we married for love
I, Mohamed, Abdelkader, and Fatima
And other Arabs whose dusty names this poem is too narrow
      to contain.
Until now I haven’t met anyone who could explain the mysteries
     of your obscure expression
Laws say the opposite from one government to the other
And the caretaker is French of Portuguese origin
Yet he looks down on philosophers

I was in the subway stealing glances at a newspaper
     someone was reading
When I saw your name printed in bold, and the headline
      your death
It seems you threw yourself from the window
But why all those who love you to blindness
Love life more than anything else
I felt ashamed of my ignorance once again
And hated myself in plain Arabic
Despite the grumblings of the coloured owner of the newspaper

Migration is a sacred right
An expression which is enough it was once said
For me every morning to pursue my own sacred right
Seeking your protection O Gilles Deleuze

© Translation: 2004, Norddine Zouitni

The Arabic:

Poems: Sonia Sanchez

Let's try something different. Here are two pieces by Sonia Sanchez: the first is her reading a tribute list, a "calling on living and ago resisters," at an event in support of Mumia Abu-Jamal, in that way that only Sister Sonia can. The list is transformed into, becomes, is a poem.

The second is her reading her poem "Our Voice Is Our Vision," during Def Poetry Jam's 5th season. She ends the poem with the lines, "That's what we all need, courage." So true. One of my favorite people, thank the gods for her.

Junot Díaz Wins Pulitzer Prize + Poem: Forrest Hamer + Review: Dos Caras de Jano/Two Faces of Janus

What great news came down today: Junot Díaz was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, roughly a month after receiving the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. As I've said on here before, this one of the best novels I've read in some time, particularly one of the best contemporary novels, and it's also one of the important contemporary works on the issues of Dominicanidad, nation, history, Diaspora, immigration, class, race and, in particular, blackness, that I've come across. Many of the reviews I've read lose sight of this, but it's all there in this remarkable book. Díaz's articulation of Diasporic nerd-dom also is incredibly fresh, as is his use of a postmodern formal structure and his often plangent realism, which makes the stories of the characters so vivid that their sufferings break your heart, not just figuratively, but by the end of the book, literally. It took Díaz 11 years to complete this novel, and it's one of the best responses to the notion that any writers--poets, playwrights, fiction writers, creative nonfiction writers, anyone--should be churning out work like paper airplanes. Like any lover of great art, I'm grateful, very grateful, that he published this book when he and it were ready, and I'm delighted to be able to congratulate him on this extraordinary honor. As I wrote of the lovely and extremely talented Natasha Trethewey and her collection, The Native Guards last year, the honor went to a truly deserving writer and work.

‰‰‰

Forrest Hamer's most recent collection Rift (Four Way Books, 2007), a past Book Choice here, is so full of great poems, possessed of tremendous lyric force and philosophical depth, that it's hard to choose one to feature this month. So I think I'll choose one of the ones that I keep coming back to, a poem written in a style I would venture is Forrest's own, which is to say, a poem whose title, highlighted, nests in the body of the poem. This small but substantial gesture reorients the eye and mind when reading the poem, making you think about, among other things, embodiment itself, the relation between the poem and how the poet names it, how it functions in terms of the body of the lyric. Forrest, who's a trained and practicing psychoanalyist, is very interested in and writes with great skill about the mind and body, bodies, his, others, ours, but also, without the freight of religion or an established metaphysics, about soul. He was on a panel at this year's AWP that I heard was great, and I wish I could have heard it, and him. He's a poet you don't want to miss. So here is one of several poems titled "Someone I Know." Enjoy!

A woman late in her eighties began once more to feel desire.  She said a
fever came over her so strong at night she would not sleep: she would imagine
all sorts of men, and some women, and all of them left her the sense she
probably was dying, the flushes one last rally to keep her self intact.

Some people can feel full only when passion is strong, so they provoke
others into making them feel.  Others can feel only themselves when feeling
is calmed or seems gone.  And there are others whose sense of being comes
from not being selves at all.  Someone I know doesn't yet know what there
is to tell, and I spend hours with him waiting for the song there is when I hear
best:  sung by me in a language I do not recognize, listening fills me with the
closest I have come to being satisfied.

I would not be beautiful, for that would be another curse; nor would I be on
fire.  The first curse, of course, is knowing.

Copyright © Forrest Hamer, 2007, 2008, from Rift (New York: Four Way Books, 2007), all rights reserved.

‰‰‰

On Saturday afternoon I eagerly traipsed down to the Chicago Latino Film Festival to catch Las Dos Caras de Jano (The Two Faces of Janus), Edmundo H. Rodríguez's film based on Puerto Rican anti-colonial activist and progressive author Wilfredo Mattos Cintrón's fourth novel of the same name. I'd first heard about the film's screening on Blabbeando (mg/ Andrés), and the plot, focusing on a serial killer of gay men in San Juan and a black Puerto Rican detective investigating them, or at least one, was enough to bring me to the theater.

So what's my verdict? Perhaps I should begin by filling in the plot a bit more. The film really comprises two storylines: the background one focuses on the grisly serial murders of gay, mostly middle-class men in San Juan, by an unknown but extremely disturbed "Angel of Bachelors," and the viewer learns about 3/4ths of the way through who the killer is, as he commits one of them, along with the likely motivations behind them. But the foreground story, which links to this larger, more disturbing narrative, centers on a formerly closeted and now openly gay man, whose murder also appears to be part of the serial spree. A friend of the murdered man asks handsome but often-frowning detective Isabelo Andújar Jr. (Modesto Lacén, above right, after the screening) to investigate, and he quickly homes in on the trio of close friends, from university days, of the murdered man. One is a wealthy, pompous, and unabashedly racist banker (who refers to Andújar at one point as "Buckwheat"); the second is a Marxist university professor; and the third is a DL architect. Andújar also looks at the boyfriend, a former student of the murdered man; a male hustler who, we learn, is servicing a powerful member of the Puerto Rican Senate; and the murdered man's ex-wife, who is a prime but not very convincing suspect. Along the way, Andújar also has a discussion on gay identity, being out, and self-hatred with a young gay male employee of the pharmacy where his girlfriend, a blonde Puerto Rican woman, works, that keys him in to the film's title and the idea behind it; for closeted men, their existence is like the two faces of Janus, one turned towards the light, the other one, hidden, towards the darkness. Ultimately, through a series of revelations, about the sorts of accommodations that married couples make and the nature of the closet in Puerto Rico's machismo society, Andújar identifies the killer, with even more tragic consequences.

I appreciated the many themes and topics the film addressed or attempted to address. It dealt with class, race and racism, sexual orientation, identification and gender roles, internalized violence and sexual repression and oppression, the power of social and political capital, failed political dreams and accommodation, and so much more. In the short space of the film, Rodríguez (and the screenwriter Gilberto Rodríguez, drawing from Mattos Cintrón's work), portrayed a fairly rich portrait of contemporary San Juan, showing it to be more diverse and cosmopolitan than I might have imagined, while also portraying some of the longstanding retrograde attitudes that still exist. The portrayal of Andújar captures this. While he evidently harbors residual homophobic attitudes--he cannot not bring himself to say the word "gay," choosing instead, as others in the film did, to say "homosexual," until he was corrected by a gay man--his general outlook was portrayed as somewhere between benign and indifferent. Even when he's being aggressively macked by the murdered gay man's boyfriend, his response is to deflect it, and not, as might be the case elsewhere, to go plumb loco. Ultimately, we see that he grasps the true sadness and sorrow at the core of the murderer's actions, but he doesn't grasp the despair, which tips over into sentimentalism and melodrama, that has led to the crime. It's also apparent that he, nor anyone else, for that matter, appears to care about the more extensive series of murders that have occurred; ultimately the film ends with a scene of domestic bliss, in which the black detective and his white girlfriend--both Puerto Rican, of course--can finally come together and find a place within this society, while gay men, we gather, will continue to be killed off, without any recourse to anything beyond partial acceptance and the threat of violence.

Rodríguez, following Mattos Cintrón, draws a parallel between the social hostility and actual and symbolic violence against gays and the various manifestations of racism. One of the film's running jokes is that some people, fellow Puerto Ricans, including some who are visibly of African descent, do see the very dark-skinned Andújar (Lacén at right, with Rebecca Hazlewood, as Chandra, photo from Rojo Tomate) but don't really seem him, except as an alien, an outsider, or a stereotype of one sort or another. But in the case of the latter, not the kinds we might first imagine. In one case, he's mistaken for a babalawayo (santero); in another, a child thinks he's the wise man and king Melchior; in yet another moment, he's thought to be a caddy, a scene that could easily appear in a mainstream US film. In yet another moment, a little boy is terrified just by the sight of this black man, something I've personally experienced in the US more than once, though thankfully it doesn't happen that much any more. Andújar mostly parries this racism, but in an argument with his girlfriend, he articulates his frustration, both with religion and Christmas, but also with the ignorance he has to deal with, noting that the black king he's been mistaken for is actually Balthazar, and that, when his girlfriend offers to celebrate Hannukah and even Kwanzaa if that will inspire some holiday spirit in him, he rejects both, citing the latter as an "American" invention, inauthentic and no remedy for the malaise in the heart and soul he's carrying around. Just as Andújar is the antithesis of racist stereotypes of blacks, the film's portrayal of gay men mostly avoids stereotypes as well, though the narrative of self-loathing resulting in violence and melodrama, though based on a real story, harkens back to deterministic, pre-liberation narratives of gay male life.

While the digital video cinematography is admirably crisp, the filmmaking itself feels little clumsy at times, with shots and effects not really adding up as they could and the editing not as tight as it could be. The gauzy flashbacks are a particular problem. Another issue is the acting: many of the actors over-emote, or act a bit more stagily than is necessary, which I take to be an issue of direction rather than anything else. One example is Mr. Tagore (Vik Kumar), the DL South Asian (see, I said the film showed San Juan as cosmopolitan) storeowner, who klieglights his closetedness fairly quickly, or rather his wife's obvious unhappiness, in combination with his theatricality, does so. Just a little more restraint would have gone a long way. Lacén unfortunately has to spend a good deal of the film trying to look and act as glum, disaffected and serious as is humanly possible, but when he's got something to work with, he's great, and he's a glory to look at, a force field of beauty at the center of the film. What I told C when I recounted my thoughts on the film was this: while there are some obvious faults with the acting, directing and script, the overall ideas and freshness of the story outweighed them for me, and I was glad I saw the film and suggest others do to if it comes through where you are. As one of the producers, Iván de Paz, who was present with Lacén after the screening noted, the film tackles issues that are still very controversial in Puerto Rico (not just homophobia, but also classicism, racism, and "interracial couples," to use his words), in a fairly direct way.

At the top of this review is a photo I took of Modesto Lacén, chatting with someone who was in the screening and afterwards was talking up black film festivals in California. If you want to see Lacén these days, catch the off-Broadway production of Celia: The Life and Story of Celia Cruz, in which I believe he said he plays the great salsera's husband, Pedro Knight (photo at left from the NY Post, Xiomara Laugart, at left, as Celia Cruz and Modesto Lacén, at right, as her husband.) I hope he gets on the Diasporic bandwagon and gets even more roles both in PR and on the mainland: he's a winner.

Poem: Zahra Yusri

A site I check out from time to time is Banipal, a British-based journal that features literature from across the Arab world in English translation. A few issues ago (Banipal 25, Spring 2006, the journal focused on New Writing from Egypt, and one of the poets featured was Zahra Yusri (1974-, at right). According to the journal bio, the Cairo native studied Arabic literature and language and has published four collections of poetry since 1997, the most recent being Hayat Iftiradhiya (Virtual life), published by Dar Sharqiyat of Cairo. Here is Yusri's poem from the issue, "It's Night." Its movement, imagery, and social commentary, on contemporary Egyptian society (the wars that are being fought but not being fought, etc.) drew me right in.

IT'S NIGHT

On one foot
like a humiliated beggar I limp
past all the swinging doors
and the flags that are taken down from their masts . . .
The sidewalk was never my friend
but it embraced me those times
when the crying was tough and bitter

In my country
soldiers go to a war
where they never fight
In every coffeehouse or square
under the feet of the sick, the sad and insane
you can glimpse the trace of a rose
thrown into the arms of nurses
in lonely rooms inhabited by wailing,
a rose drawn in blood.

I cannot believe the car has yet to stop
that I fell out of it
like a scream
I know the lift attendant
never jumps off the fences
and that rocks keep wounding me
even though I’ve roamed for too long.

On one foot
death will come
and raise its head
Facing it, I will embrace this man strongly
and strangle all the poems in his hands
I will crush my bones under his hot breaths
My lungs are becoming two tubes
my feet like a battlefield
my heart a noose.
Am I really dead?
Only a while ago
I was smelling that homeland.

* * *


In those empty streets
even dogs are afraid to cross
You will cross
empty-handed
with a shadow that doesn’t accompany you
and a backbreaking love
You will talk about your parents
the shock of sudden death
and the added light
which never lessens loneliness
When my eyes well up
and my pants are wet
as I stand before you
you will take a newspaper from your chest
and a mirror from your eyes
so that I may look into them
and know
that now I can go out.

* * *

Into one of those swamps
left by an old flood
the kind that drowns entire villages
I will jump like a bird
with broken wings –
a bird’s looking for a merciful killing

The bird which loved the behinds of every hen
can no longer fly
or spit
as is his wont every time he mounts
his eyes can neither close in sleep
nor let a tear fall
But all the birds agree
he does shut them every now and then
although no one knows for sure
if he does it out of pleasure or out of pain
for a sad bird like him
can only dream
of a long darkness

* * *

Every time I think of my own death
someone else dies
and the poem keeps
writing itself

* * *

I embrace no one
my steps pass without me
the hand of the house burns me
The one who sleeps in my history
never wakes
his steps crush me at night
In the morning
I wake up scared, on his chest
He tells me
what I was not

He smokes his cigarette
like a returnee from war
He knows the precise number of its victims
and I, between stolen looks
and the sounds of his breathing,
know there was a lost letter from him.

Translated by Sinan Antoon
from the author’s collection
Warda lil-Ayam al-Akhira (A Rose for the Last Days), Merit, 2003

Copyright © Zahra Yusri, Sinan Antoon, 2003, 2008, All rights reserved.

Poem : Aurora Levins Morales

Many years ago when I was working on a journal issue devoted to Puerto Rican women writers and their writings, I became acquainted with the work of Aurora Levins Morales (1954-), the daughter of a famous Nuyorican/Boricua poet and activist, Rosario Morales (1930-), whose work I also came to appreciate at that time. Levins Morales has been publishing her work for several decades, and one of its distinguishing traits in addition to its diverse stylistics and forms is its negotation between an overtly political public address and its exploration of Levins Morales's personal history, which entails all facets of her life and identifications as a Jewish Puertorriqueña Latina feminist progressive activist curandera.

Levins Morales has published several important volumes of poetry and work in other genres, including Getting Home Alive, with her mother Rosario Morales, (Firebrand Press, 1986), Medicine Stories (South End Press, 1998), Telling To Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios (Duke, 2001), and the multigenre Remedios: Stories of Earth and Iron from the History of Puertorriqueñas (Beacon Press, 1998, South End Press, 2001), which encompasses poetry, story, history, myth, metaphysics, and spirituality. Hers is a poetics of deep engagement, with the ills and possibilities of contemporary society, in PR, in the US, across the globe, and with the possibilities that a progressive, holistic perspective might offer in viewing our life-worlds clearly and making them anew and better for all of us.

I copied the following poem, "Baghdad Birthday," from a 2004 issue of Poetry Magazine (not Poetry, in which Levins Morales was the featured poet.

Baghdad Birthday

Someday a thousand children of Baghdad will ask
why they all have the same deadly birthday, why
they all came into the world on the last day of peace,
and their mothers will tell how they raced against the calendar of war,
how they crowded into hospitals demanding labor
demanding to start the clocks of their bodies
as the planes took off from bases half a world away.

The will say that they rode wave after wave of contractions
as the targeting systems honed in on everyday life,
how they bore down and pushed while nurses and doctors
rushed around trying to prepare, without supplies, without medicine,
for shrapnel wounds and broken bones,
for everything torn and shattered and burned
for the shocked and wailing people who would have the next turn
to lie these beds crowded into hallways,
how you crowned as the moon rose over the river.

You were born, they will tell them, into the last quiet hour
such a small chest, such little legs, arriving weeks before your time,
and I hid your tiny face in my swollen breast
so the terrible fire wouldn't scorch your tender eyes.
Your first lullabye, they will say, was when I sang you my grandmother's
song
and the second was the screaming of missiles ripping low across the city,
and then came the shockwaves and everything was falling.
My darling, my dove, you were born in the nick of time.

We left the hospital to the wounded who kept coming, the mothers will say,
to the little girl in her father's arms, blood leaking from her ears
to the woman clutching her boy, both of them full of metal splinters,
and we walked until we found our street with the houses still standing.
The walls shook around us, the windows shattered, the dreadful wind
knocked dishes from the shelves, and we covered your ears against the
roaring sky.
The first night of your lives we lay down in our beds and held you
a thousand moist sweet unfurling rosebuds forced into early bloom
a thousand passengers on a single train running on the timetable of death
set by criminals lusting for conquest in their air conditioned rooms.

A thousand roses opening just before dawn, a thousand babies born alive
in the teeth of invasion,  a thousand thorny branches amidst the smoke
yes, we snatched you from the dark and the body counts
and pulled you into a world on fire and the smell of burning.
We were afraid and we were strong and we were trembling,
all around us Baghdad was dying
but remember this, when you crowned between our legs
we were singing.

Copyright © Aurora Levins Morales, 2004, 2008, from Poetry Magazine.

Poem: G. E. Patterson + Chicago Latino Film Festival + 40 Years Ago, MLK Jr.

One of the many Cave Canem poets I haven't seen in a while but whose work I cherish is G. E. "Gar" Patterson. Gar's first book, Tug, received the Minnesota Book Prize, and his newest book, To and From (Ahsata Press, 2008) continues many of the concerns of that first volume, though in a strikingly different formal language.

The new book comprises quasi-sonnets crafted from a wide array of quotations, which Gar carefully culled and then shaped into a flexible lyric that embodies the (post-)post-modern even as the poems, in their openness and indeterminacy, evoke an intimacy, a personal and public sensibility, that is redolent of poetry from the pre-post eras. Here is one I basically copped directly from the Ahsata Press page, and its almost elegiac tone and pastoral imagery reminds me of John Ashbery's work (in The Double Dream of Spring) of the late 1960s and early 1970s, or Ralph Angel's poems, from Neither World. It's a lovely one.

“Here and there . . . .”
—T.S. Eliot

             “ . . . for a particular point of view—”
                            —Lyn Hejinian

It May Happen
as though it doesn’t matter what is real

              “ . . . something almost . . . with asking.”
                           —Brenda Hillman

According to their signs we’re in the country
Far off things are being put on the record
Where it may not matter to anyone
If the shadows hide themselves behind rain
The canal opening below the sky
Daytime moving in swirls the painted colors
Or the idea wind sometimes stops and starts
What we might more properly call nostalgia

If we wanted to we could follow later
Without giving up his place in the world
A color postcard folded in our pockets
The light informing us it’s afternoon
When what we feel is we remember feeling
Not long ago it was the time before

Copyright © 2008 by G.E. Patterson

===

Tonight the Chicago Latino Film Festival begins. The site seems a bit harder to search than in past years, but a bit of surfing around the calendar shows that there'll again be some unusual and compelling films screening at various sites across the city. Two I wished I'd caught today include Vanessa Goksch's 2006 feature Frekuensia Colombiana / Turning in to the Colombian Hip Hop Movement, a documentary on traditional forms Colombian music and its relation to Hip Hop, which won't be screening again, and Sanpachando (San Pacho es pa’l que lo goce) / Sanpachando (St. Pacho is for the revellers), a 2006 documentary by Daniel Mosquera and Sean Ferry on the afro-ethnic, religious, and cultural meaning of a festival honoring Saint Francis of Assisi, in Chocó, Colombian.

I am planning to see, Edmundo H. Rodríguez's 2008 feature film, Las dos caras de Jano / The two faces of Janus (photo at right), which explores a serial killer amidst Puerto Rico's gay community. Another is Vinicius, Miguel de Faria Jr.'s 2005 documentary on the multitalented Brazilian cultural figure, Vinícius de Morães (1913-1980), the internationally famous lyricist of Bossa Nova hits like The Girl from Ipanema, and the playwright whose whose stage play became Marcel Camus's 1959 touchstone, Black Orpheus.

One I'm debating is José Enrique Pintor's 2007 film Sanky Panky, whose name rings familiar to anyone who's visited DR or dropped by the DR1. It naturally tells the story of a colmado owner who feels his life has become a cage and takes up the Sanky profession. The Chicago Reader appraises it like this:

This crass musical comedy from the Dominican Republic stars the annoying Fausto Mata as a loutish grocery-store owner whose desperate search for a sugar mommy takes him to a posh beach resort. Hired to entertain the guests’ children and forced to wear a chicken costume, he doesn’t have much luck with the ladies until he meets a sympathetic cutie from New Jersey. Writer-director Jose Pintor mines broad slapstick and class stereotypes for laughs but also relies heavily on Mata, who comes across like an extremely hostile Chris Tucker. Bring your earplugs.

"An extremely hostile Chris Tucker"? Yikes! Maybe I'll have to see it just to verify that comparison.

===

40 years ago....



And 41 years ago, his speech on the war in Vietnam:

Poem: Brigit Pegeen Kelly

Last night at the university I heard the poet Brigit Pegeen Kelly (at right, © New York Times) read the following poem, and once I got home I checked online to see if she'd published it in a journal, since it doesn't appear in any of her books (which include the award-winning volumes To the Place of Trumpets, Song, and The Orchard. As a colleague noted, it turns out it appeared in one of the least likely places: The New York Times, as one of several poems in "Closing Time," a rare, full-page end-of-the-year collection of poetry. Other poets on the page included Yusef Komunyakaa, Carl Phillips, Seamus Heaney, and Sarah Arvio.

It is, to put it mildly, astonishing. Enjoy.

ISKANDARIYA

It was not a scorpion I asked for, I asked for a fish, but
maybe God misheard my request, maybe God thought
I said not “some sort of fish,” but a “scorpion fish,” a
request he would surely have granted, being a goodly
God, but then he forgot the “fish” attached to the
“scorpion” (because God, too, forgets, everything
forgets); so instead of an edible fish, any small fish,
sweet or sour, or even the grotesque buffoonery of the
striped scorpion fish, crowned with spines and
followed by many tails, a veritable sideshow of a fish;
instead of these, I was given an insect, a peculiar
prehistoric creature, part lobster, part spider, part
bell-ringer, part son of a fallen star, something like a
disfigured armored dog, not a thing you can eat, or
even take on a meaningful walk, so ugly is it, so stiffly
does it step, as if on ice, freezing again and again in
mid-air like a listening ear, and then scuttling
backwards or leaping madly forward, its deadly tail
doing a St. Vitus jig. God gave me a scorpion, a
venomous creature, to be sure, a bug with the bite of
Cleopatra’s asp, but not, as I soon found out, despite
the dark gossip, a lover of violence or a hater of men.
In truth, it is shy, the scorpion, a creature with eight
eyes and almost no sight, who shuns the daylight, and
is driven mad by fire, who favors the lonely spot, and
feeds on nothing much, and only throws out its poison
barb when backed against a wall — a thing like me,
but not the thing I asked for, a thing, by accident or
design, I am now attached to. And so I draw the
curtains, and so I lay out strange dishes, and so I step
softly, and so I do not speak, and only twice, in many
years, have I been stung, both times because,
unthinking, I let in the terrible light. And sometimes
now, when I watch the scorpion sleep, I see how fine he
is, how rare, this creature called Lung Book or Mortal
Book because of his strange organs of breath. His
lungs are holes in his body, which open and close. And
inside the holes are stiffened membranes, arranged
like the pages of a book — imagine that! And when the
holes open, the pages rise up and unfold, and the blood
that circles through them touches the air, and by this
bath of air the blood is made pure . . . He is a house of
books, my shy scorpion, carrying in his belly all the
perishable manuscripts — a little mirror of the library
at Alexandria, which burned.

Copyright © Brigit Pegeen Kelly, 2005, 2008, all rights reserved.

Poems: Tao Lin

I keep seeing this poet's name in online and print journals and in emails: Tao Lin (at right, PEELSeriesNYC). I know the brilliant Tan Lin, and Tan's work, pretty well, but not Tao. Then I see his book in the book store, and I ask myself, am I misreading or hallucinating that there's a Tao Lin? I pick it up ad it's clearly not Tan's book.

Then my friend and colleague Dorothy W. tells me I should read Tao Lin's book of stories, Bed, which is really good. So I decide to buy Bed, and almost buy the novel Eee Eee Eee, but hold off because I want to get out of Bed first. The Dorothy tells me that Tao Lin's also a poet, and she describes his work in such a way that I want to go out and read it right away. (That's called excellent description/criticism.) So I'm trolling the web and what do I find but his blog sites, which include You Are a Bit Happier Than I Am (the title of his first collection) and Reader of Depressing Books, which is the up-to-date one.

Here are, then, two poems by Tao Lin. I chose the first selected because it's wry and was filed under "jersey city guidebook" on his site. They both make me want to read a lot more of his poetry. And soon.

walking home in cold weather

i give money to a homeless man
there is another homeless man
i give him money
there are two homeless people and i give them money
the street has snow
i cannot play; or build an igloo
there are enough homeless men to have a snowfight
i am not charismatic enough to organize a snowfight
it is january
it is raining not snowing
i am not a little boy afraid of sharks when gurgling salt water
i am detached from whatever i am about to think
inside my room i walk to my bed
i should have cartwheeled to it
i dream that people who get speeding tickets are irresponsible
i am detaching the cop's arm from his body
he was punching me in the face
i will kill anyone who hurts my emotions
'i will kill you!' i scream at a scared little boy
i will monitor his email for the rest of his life

And here is "a stoic philosophy based on the scientific fact that our thoughts cause our feelings and behaviors," which is such a good title I had to post it as today's poem. It originally appeared in coconut nine.

a stoic philosophy based on the scientific fact
that our thoughts cause our feelings and behaviors

we have our undesirable situations whether we are upset about them or not

if we are upset about our problems we have two problems: the problem

and our being upset about it; with thoughts as the cause of emotions

rather than the outcome the causal order is reversed

the benefit of this is that we can change our thoughts

to feel or act differently regardless of the situation

i need to win a major prize to shove in people's faces

note the similarities with buddhism

a buddhist who has achieved nirvana is not sad

primarily because it does not know the concept

of sad; the sole problem of an undesirable situation

is the absence of a philosophy allowing it to be desirable

the cessation of desire in western civilizations

often coincides with the onset of severe depression

a cessation or increase of suffering in relationships

often effects increased focus on work or art

let's compare the person shot with a rifle

who worries about who manufactured the bullets

rather than staunching the wound

with the person shot with a rifle

who distances himself from the situation

until the focus is on the distance itself

turn to page forty-eight of your workbook and read it aloud in a quiet monotone

focusing intensely on the meaning of each word, phrase, sentence, and paragraph

based on the historical fact that after i express anger, frustration, or disappointment

you treat me more considerately, then gradually less considerately

until again i am 'triggered' to express anger, frustration

or disappointment i think we may have achieved something

like the buddhist concept of the cycle of birth and rebirth

let me conceive a temporary philosophy to justify

my behavior involving the dissemination of literature

while maintaining and strengthening our identities

we should be aware that identity is a preconception

the purpose of that is yet unknown at this point

i felt a little sad this morning but was able to block it out

and now i feel better; implicitly we trust that once we discover what it is we are doing

we will return to let ourselves know; the realization of what we are actually achieving

will manifest from an as yet unoccupied perspective, a perspective with no metaphysical

temporal, or physical connection to our current situation

with the understanding that thoughts are the cause

of emotions, pain, and the experience of time

and that thoughts can be extinguished

with other thoughts or states of thoughtlessness

we become wholly irrelevant to what already exists in the universe

all of which can be valuable tools in recovery

Copyright © Tao Lin, 2006, 2007, 2008, All rights reserved.

Schoolery + Gardening + Good Review + Poem: Narlan Teixeira

Back to business, or classes, as it were. The new quarter started yesterday, and I'm teaching a huge lecture course, so I'll probably be blogging even more infrequently until late June (mainly, as I can already see, because I'll be answering student emails nonstop until then). But I'm going to aim to post a daily poem (by someone other than myself, of course) since this is Poetry Month (I'm leaving off the "national" part), and as we all know, we cannot live on bread and water and news of the Obama-Clinton battle alone. We must have POETRY. So please see below.

◊◊◊

During the break week, which involved more working than breaking or braking, I did hit the garden a little. The mild New Jersey winter, along with the saucer magnolia tree's fallen leaf-carpet, which I finally removed, preserved a number of the herbs and vegetables, so the rosemary, thyme, strawberries (regular and Alpine), African sage, and the brussel sprouts and red cabbage are all either already growing or set to return. The lavender also survived and is thriving again (lime in the soil), and the blackberry bushes, like the honeysuckle, look ready to return to full flower too. Some shoots have crept all the way underneath the lawn to where the rose bushes are. I did buy another blueberry plant, because the first one only produced a few (maybe 4?) blueberries last year, so perhaps this one will turn out to be more fruitful, and when I'm back, if I can find another fig tree, I'll try that once again.

Among the plants that are ready to blossom, the saucer magnolia has giant furry buds, the lilac bush is also budding, and the rhododendron, which has never properly flowered (though all our neighbors' do), also has gigantic buds. Only a few plants have already bloomed: in back, a few hyacinths from buds I bought at the Garfield Park Conservatory in Chicago continue to reappear, in brilliant and colorful form every year, and the crocuses in the front of the house, near the ever-shedding sycamore tree, have started to blossom and are beautiful, so I'll ask C to take some photos of those and I'll try to remember to post them.

◊◊◊

I also cleaned up my computer hard drive, and so I can no longer access many of my old digital photos, which are saved on a backup drive (at home) or on CD (at home). Why is this worth mentioning? Because last spring, I'd taken a number of photos of architect Jean Nouvel's arresting Institut du Monde Arabe (at right, imarabe.org) in Paris, a building I'd wanted to visit for years, and dragged C to when I realized we'd happened upon it. For that building and others, Nouvel has been awared the 2008 Pritzker Architecture Prize. I was a little surprised he hadn't already received it. One building of Nouvel's that I'd like to see is the phallic Torre Agbar building in Barcelona (below, Barcelona City Tourist Guide 2008) which didn't exist when C and I visited there many moons ago. (But I also imagine the people have seen so many black people at this point that they also don't stare--politely--in the subway either.)

For every honor there must be a critic, and so Witold Rybczynski registers his dissent at the bestowing of the prize on just one person--the architect--rather than the team of people and forces that bring buildings like the Arab World Institute into being. I take his point, though I view the Pritzker Prize as a recognition of artistic vision more than anything else. There are constellations of architects, patrons, engineers, construction workers, government and local stakeholders, and so on, that together end up throwing up hideous buildings every second (I know, they dot the landscapes of Jersey City and Chicago like impetigo), but it takes a truly extraordinary aesthetic sensibility, luck, determination, charm, guile, bravado, and nerves of tungsten to ensure that a building like the Arab World Institute will turn out as Nouvel envisioned it.

◊◊◊

From the poetry of large structures to the poetry of little books that are available by clicking on the links at left, Seismosis has received a wonderful review, as has our fellow press family member, Shin Yu Pai, whose Rozanova Prize-winning collection Sightings is a must-have.

◊◊◊

And finally, a poem, by a young Brazilian writer, Narlan Matos Texeira (b. 1975, at right, Jornal de Poesia) whom the outstanding poet Tyehimba Jess introduced me to several months ago. Narlan, a native of the interior Bahian city of Itaquara, is a graduate of the Federal University of Bahia and the University of New Mexico, and is now studying for a doctorate in the US and has spent time as a writer-in-residence at the University of Iowa's prestigious International Writer's Program. His collection No Acampamento das Sombras (In the Camp of Shadows) received the Xerox Prize of Brazilian Literature. Narlan writes in Portuguese, but also speaks fluent English, and, I believe, Slovenian.

This is his poem "Elegy to the New World," which he says he wrote several years ago, and which was translated while he was at the University of Iowa. According to Madame K's site, it also received an award from the University of Illinois.

ELEGIA AO NOVO MUNDO

Tu me perguntas meu amigo
Onde eu estive durante meu longo silêncio
Estive na açucena das canas e na amargura dos canaviais
onde as folhas tremiam de medo dos homens
Os canaviais me sussuraram em gritos horrendos
o sangue amargo que lhe adocicou a boca
As mãos ásperas que lhe enxugaram a face
O canavial que morria de fome antes de completer 27 anos de idade
Das vozes sem estrela que embalavam ao longe línguas estranhas
Ó canavial verde, de que cor é meu sangue vermelho ?
Meu sangue tem medo da morte do açoite da noite
Meu sangue tem medo de mim
Tu me perguntas meu amigo
Onde eu estive durante meu longo silêncio

       Eu estive nos navios negreiros mercantes

que mercaram meu destino até a América até agora

       beberam minhas lendas como se bebe um barril de rum podre
       mercaram cada estrela do céu e do mar infinito
       cada pássaro cada pluma de meu cocar
       e desenharam mapas com meu sangue
       e ergueram totens sobre minha tribo
       e atearam fogo nos campos sagrados do meu povo
       e suas lanças me repartiram as veias em continentes distantes

Tu me perguntas meu amigo
Onde eu estive durante meu longo silêncio

       Estive pelas escumas dos mares nunca d’antes
       Por onde vieram a pólvora a baioneta o espelho a tuberculose a siflis
       Por onde vieram a espada e o elmo
-           As nuvens jamais se esquecerão disso !

No atlântico negro
Nos tombadilhos de velhos navios piratas
Nos cababouços da crueldade humana
Nas prisões da Serra Leoa – que ainda doem em alguma dobra do meu corpo
Em Angola
Na Guiné-Bissau
No Senegal
No Benin

Estive no reino da Guatemala
E na provincia de Yucatán
E na provincia de Cartagena de las  Indias
E nos grandes reinos e grande provincia do Peru
E no novo reino de Granada
E nas ilhas de Cuba e Trinidad
E nos reino dos Aztecas
Onde espadas de brutalidade fenderam meu corpo nu
Onde os cães de caça dos barões das índias se alimentavam dos braços e das pernas de crianças indefesas

Tu me perguntas onde eu estive meu amigo
E somente agora posso quebrar meu silêncio:
Eu estive comigo.


ELEGY TO THE NEW WORLD

You ask me, my companion
Where had I been during my long silence

I was in the sweetness of the sugarcane and in the bitterness of the sugar cane   plantation
Where the leaves trembled of fear of mankind

The sugar cane plantation whispered in violent screaming
  The sweet blood that has sweetened its mouth
The stern hands that dried its physiognomy
The sugar cane plantation that died of malnourishment before the age of 30
The voices without stars that rocked it to the distance strange languages
Oh, green plantation! What color is the wine in my blood?
My blood is scared of death of the whipping of the night
My blood is scared of me

You ask me, my companion
Where had I been during my long silence

I was in the merchant ships
   That traded my destiny to the Americas
Drank the legends of my people just like a barrel of rotten rum
Traded every star in the sky and in the infinite sea
Each bird each feather in my cockade
And drew maps with my blood
And erected totems over my tribe
And set fire in the sacred fields of my people
And their lances split my veins into different continents

You ask me, my companion
Where had I been during my long silence

I was by the foam of the seas never sailed
From where gun powder bayonet mirror tuberculosis and syphilis came
From where the sword and the elm came
- The clouds will never forget that!

In the black Atlantic
In the calaboose of old pirate ships
In the calaboose of human degradation
In the prisons of Sierra Leona – which still ache somewhere in my body
In Angola
In Guinea Bissau
In Senegal
In Benin

I was in Guatemala
And in the Yucatan Province
And in the Cartagena de las Indias Province
And in the Great Kingdom and Great Province of Peru
And in the New Kingdom of Granada
And in the Islands of Trinidad
And in the Kingdom of the Aztecs
Where swords of gold and mud split my naked soul
Where the hunting dogs of the barons of the Indies were fed with arms and legs of native children

You ask me, my companion
Where had I been and only now I can break my silence:
I was with myself.

Copyright © Narlan Matos Teixeira, 2003, 2008.

MLB Season Opens (Ho Hum)

The Major League Baseball season is underway, and, perhaps for the first time since the 1994 strike, I'm not particularly excited. I will follow the Saint Louis Cardinals' (and a few other teams on the semi-ups, like the Yankees, Mets, Tigers, etc.) play throughout the season. They look to be as middling as they were in the 1970s and 1990s. I'll probably try to go to some baseball games in Chicago, since I'll be teaching through June, and, if I can get my act together, set foot in either Yankee or Shea Stadium when I'm back in the New York area. But my interest has, to put it mildly, dimmed substantially. Maybe it's just that I'm getting older and increasingly feel I don't have the mental or emotional space to devote to retrograde, monopolistic, social, secular opiates like professional baseball (or even college sports--I hadn't realized the NCAA and NIT basketball playoffs had begun until friends on a sports list started posting about and C asked me about the "brackets"). But I do think another part of my disaffection comes from the lingering steroid/performance enhancement scandal, which hasn't been fully addressed, by any of baseball's major players. MLB, including its administration and the owners, and the Players Union have bandied about punitive Band-Aids, when not demonstrating that they're in denial, and Congress's entry into the debacle was just a lot of bad spectacle. So what did we learn? That lots of players were using performance enhancers, but only a few, like Barry Bonds, have been pilloried. That some high profile players like Roger Clemens probably also were doping, but have lied about it, or maybe they haven't. That José Canseco, of all people, is turning out to be one of the most honest people in this whole mess, and he's even fingered the gazillionaire Adonis himself, A-Rod (A-Roid?). The reality seems to be that countless other players from the late 1980s onwards were probably using steroids and performance enhancers, that MLB and the union probably knew, and looked the other way, and that they want to condemn and punish players who got caught, without taking any responsibility for their action in abetting the situation, or admitting that it was beneficial for their bank accounts, which is what it all comes down to in the end, no? With 28 million people just getting by on food stamps these days, who has time for truculent, whining, lying multimillionaires? Well, maybe a few, if they're named Albert Pujols (at top), or José Reyes (at right), or Derek Jeter, or Johan Santana....

•••

And now, for a little nostalgia. 40 years ago, a St. Louis Cardinals baseball player turned in a season-long performance that is unlikely ever to be challenged. I'm talking about Hall of Famer Bob Gibson's astonishing season, when he registered a modern era-record low ERA of 1.12. The league ERA was 2.90. The 32-year-old Gibson's overall numbers were equally remarkable. He threw 28 complete games, 13 shutouts, surrendered only 198 hits in 304 2/3rds innings, and struck out 268 batters. Perhaps his weakest stat was his win-loss total: 22-9, which presses the question, how on earth did this eventual Most Valuable Player award and Cy Young winner lose 9 games?

Derrick Goold offers some answers in his recent St. Louis Post-Dispatch article: Gibson's teammates weren't getting a lot of hits against his pitching opponents, who included some of the other great pitchers of that era: Juan Marichal, Don Drysdale (who pitched 58 2/3rds consecutive scoreless innings, a record that stood for decades), Tom Seaver, Ferguson Jenkins, and Gaylord Perry. To quote Goold:

In his first 10 starts that season, Gibson was 3-5 despite a 1.52 ERA, mainly because opposing starting pitchers had a 1.34 ERA against the Cardinals.

His teammates scored two or fewer runs in eight of Gibson's losses that season and twice he lost 1-0, once when Gaylord Perry twirled a no-hitter.

Eleven of Gibson's 34 starts that summer were opposite another Hall of Fame-bound pitcher. He went 5-5 with a 1.45 ERA in those games.

"We wish we could have done more on his behalf," Cardinals Hall of Famer Lou Brock said. "Not just the ERA, but the victories. He could have won 30. ... As a hitter, you make it a goal to destroy the pitch before it destroys you.

"You could not do that with Bob. You could not destroy his pitch. You don't have a lot of time to come up with a plan to destroy something you can't see."

One of the results of that season was that Major League Baseball lowered the pitcher's mound, shrank the strike zone, and clamped down on trick and illegal pitches. Gibson's record in 1969? 20-13, with a 2.18 ERA, and 269 strikeouts. Only 4 of his 28 complete games that season were shutouts. These days few leading pitchers, who throw fewer games and fewer innings because of the 5-man starting rotations and ample relief corps, ever approach 10 complete games, let alone 4 shutouts or ERAs under 2.00; last year's ERA titlist, Padre Jake Peavy, came in at 2.54; last year's shutout leader, Arizona's Brandon Webb, posted 3; and last year's complete game top finisher, Roy Halliday, only posted 7. The AL Cy Young winner C. C. Sabathia, managed only 4 complete games, 1 shutout, and a 3.21 ERA, while the NL Cy Young winner, Peavy, had no complete games and no shutouts. Both pitchers also only won 19 games. A different game indeed.

Sonic Fragments @ Princeton

If you're in and around Princeton this weekend, check this out (h/t to from Audiologo):

Sonic Fragments: Narrative and Mediation in Sound Art
A two-day festival and symposium
March 28-29, 2008
Princeton University, Princeton, NJ

Free and open to the public

Princeton’s Sonic Fragments Festival to Explore Sound Art

Princeton, New Jersey, March 9, 2008 – For two days in March, Princeton University graduate students will play host to an international group of scholars and practitioners who are gathering to explore the roles of narrative and mediation in art practices that engage sound as a material. The symposium will consist of three panel discussions as well as an exhibition of audio-works for portable music players made expressly for the geography, architecture, and social spaces of the Princeton University campus.

“As technology becomes more portable, artists are able to explore work that bridges the gap between public and private,” says Sonic Fragments co-organizer Seth Cluett, “making the sonic equivalent of the sketch, the landscape painting, and the hastily scribbled note available for the sound artist.”

The exhibition will begin the festival on the afternoon of Friday, March 28th. Thirty
iPods and corresponding maps will be made available for check-out from the Mendel Music Library Circulation desk in the Woolworth Center for Musical Studies. After participants have had time to explore the audio-works, opening comments and a panel comprised of artists and musicians will start the symposium. The first panel will consist of musician and sound artist William Basinski, whose melancholy minimal electronic music has achieved critical acclaim; artist Jon Brumit, whose Neighborhood Public Radio project is featured in this year’s Whitney Biennial; multimedia artist Brenda Hutchinson, who will lead sunrise and sunset bell-ringings throughout the festival; as well as sound artist Michael J. Schumacher, founder of New York’s Diapason Gallery for Sound Art.

After more time Saturday to explore the site-specific audio-works, the second panel will take up the notion of narrative as it relates to sound practices. Kristin Oppenheim’s spare and hypnotic sound installations invoke layers of personal memory, while Stephen Vitiello’s work transforms incidental atmospheric noises into mesmerizing soundscapes that alter our perception of the surrounding environment. Mendi + Keith Obadike collaborate on interdisciplinary projects investigating race, history and identity, and Thomas Levin, a curator and cultural theorist, focuses on sound technologies and issues of surveillance in media practices.

The symposium’s third and final panel will address issues of mediation in sound art.
Rubén Gallo will talk about Mexican sound artist Taniel Morales's Pirate Radio. Ed Osborn will present his kinetic and audible sound installations, while Camille Norment will discuss her artistic practice, which extends the fine arts into extra-disciplinary realms such as scientific research, city planning, and interaction design. Tianna Kennedy, program director of Brooklyn’s free103point9 transmission arts network and a participating artist in the festival, will discuss issues related to transmission, participatory practice and social sculpture.

“We hear long before we see,” says Sonic Fragments co-organizer Betsey Biggs, “and
throughout our lives we move through a world of sonic fragments which are mediated by our bodies, memories, environments and technologies. Through these interventions, sounds assemble themselves into hazy narratives which each of us filters in a slightly different way. Sonic Fragments will explore the ways in which contemporary artists use sound, narrative and mediation to create meaning in their work.”

Sonic Fragments is sponsored by the Princeton University Department of Music, The Peter B. Lewis Center for the Performing Arts, The Graduate School, The Sound Lab research group in the Department of Computer Science, The Aesthetics and Media Track in the Department of German, The Program in Media and Modernity, The Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies, and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.

For more information, visit http://sonicfragments.artdocuments.org or email us at sonicfragments@gmail.com.

# # #

seth cluett
sound - theory - practice
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http://www.onelonelypixel.org

Also:

• Friday, March 28 + Saturday, March 29, 2008 •
Friday: March 28, 11am - 4pm
Saturday: March 29, 9am - 12pm
Princeton University, Princeton, NJ

Ringing, O' Tongues of Freedom (5:07mins) my sound art piece at the Sonic Fragments: Narrative and Mediation in Sound Art, A Symposium and Festival at Princeton University. My piece is a "hushed contemplation of memory, freedom, loss, and hope during a time when select men and women claimed The Battle of Princeton as insurance towards their eventual freedom. Featuring nighttime field recordings of the 1844 Bell and the Battle Monument, renderings of the Monument inscription, and digitally processed voice." I was fortunate to have vocal contributions from Steven M. Adams (Biological and Life Sciences Librarian and Interim Psychology Librarian), and Joshua B. Guild (Assistant Professor of History and the Center for African American Studies).

This is part of a sound art tour of various locations on the Princeton Campus and surrounding areas. The works and a map of the tour locations will be available on the symposium website, as well as on iPods made available at the Mendel Music Library during the Symposium. The Symposium itself features the participation of some truly dynamic and compelling sound artists and sound/narrative/new media thinkers including: Stephen Vitiello, Camille Norment, Mendi + Keith Obadike, Tianna Kennedy, and Princeton's own Ruben Gallo (Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures) and Thomas Y. Levin (Associate Professor of German)
For more information check the Sonic Fragments website: http://sonicfragments.artdocuments.org/

AUDIOLOGO's piece!
• Thursday, May 1, 2008 •
Taplin Auditorium
Fine Hall
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ
8:00pm

You Are Most Beautiful When... my live performance piece for the Composition Program's General Exams Concert. Despite the somewhat dry title, this concert promises to be a quite exciting affair with new works from my compatriot Graduate Fellows in Composition, Mark Dancigers, Anne Hege, and Andrea Mazzariello (as well as myself). Each of us has written work in response to a particular composer's work. My piece is a response to Der Doppelgänger by Austrian composer Franz Schubert (1797-1828) as performed by legendary contralto Marian Anderson and her long-time accompanist, pianist Franz Rupp. The theme of my response is gratitude, creative collaboration, and friendship, and features the participation of MuthaWit's Boston Fielder (I plan to make use of his reported 5 octave range!) along with other special special guests, plus dance, and video. This is the second requirement of my 4-part General Exam. I hope to see you there!

For Directions to Princeton and information about parking (no campus parking permits required after 5pm, and meters are free after 7pm) and trains (NJTransit) check this link: http://www.princeton.edu/facilities/conference/visiting_the_campus/