dance dance dance!

rita d. drops knowledge on craft:

"Poetry is a kind of dance already. Technically, there's the play of contemporary speech against the bass-line of the iambic, but there's also the expression of desire that is continually restrained by the limits of the page, the breath, the very architecture of the language--just as dance is limited by the capabilities of our physical bodies as well as by gravity. A dancer toils in order to skim the surface of the floor, she develops muscles most of us don't even know we have; but the goal is to appear weightless. A poet struggles to render into words that which is unsayable--the ineffable, that which is deeper than language--in the hopes that whatever words make the final cut will, in turn, strike the reader speechless."

rita dove on post-racial literature

there are a few different ways to complicate this, though i identify with the heart of what she's saying. while it would certainly be easier if black reference points were universally understood and valued and the notion of "mainstream" was expanded to include all types of references, there's definitely something valuable in writing from a culturally distinct standpoint. more than simply insisting upon their presence, i think black arts movement writers did invaluable and necessary work to affirm a black aesthetic at a historically critical point.

its frustrating to me that she finds it frustrating to have to explain black reference points in a poem, and even more frustrating that she thinks she has to explain them in the first place.

when it comes to writing--our love work-- easier can't be the goal. instead, work that's informed by honesty, whatever that truth ends up being, is the only way forward.

and, co-sign: of course "we" haven't had the conversations about race and privilege. i'll take her "we" to be a "they," and what they look like, crazy? they definitely aren't tryna undo all this on GP. even when there exist such flowery phrases as "post-racial," freddie d's wisdom still stands: power concedes nothing without a demand.

june jordan throwbacks

from "white english/black english: the politics of translation," 1972 in civil wars:

"I am one among a growing number of Black poets and writers dedicated to the preservation of Black language within our lives, and dedicated to the health of our children as they prepare themselves for life within this standard, white America which has despised even our speech and our prayers and our love. As long as we shall survive, Black, in white America, we, and our children, require and deserve the power of Black language, Black history, Black literature, as well as the power of standard English, standard history, and standard literature. To the extent that Black survival fails on these terms, it will be a political failure: it will be the result of our not recognizing and not revolting against the political use of language, to extinguish the people we want to be and the people we have been. Politics is power. Language is political. And language, its reward, currency, punishment, and/or eradication--is political in its meaning and in its consequence."

bed-stuy's standard for a poet-activist gets her shine on.

here's the bangin audio of "A Poem about Intelligence for My Brothers and Sisters"

A Poem about Intelligence for My Brothers and Sisters

A few years back and they told me Black

means a hole where other folks

got brain/it was like the cells in the heads

of Black children was out to every hour on the hour naps

Scientists called the phenomenon the Notorious

Jensen Lapse, remember?

Anyway I was thinking

about how to devise

a test for the wise

like a Stanford-Binet

for the C.I.A.

you know?

Take Einstein

being the most the unquestionable the outstanding

the maximal mind of the century

right?

And I’m struggling against this lapse leftover

from my Black childhood to fathom why

anybody should say so:

E=mc squared?

I try that on this old lady live on my block:

She sweeping away Saturday night from the stoop

and mad as can be because some absolute

jackass have left a kingsize mattress where

she have to sweep around it stains and all she

don’t want to know nothing about in the first place

“Mrs. Johnson!” I say, leaning on the gate

between us: “What you think about somebody come up

with an E equals M C 2?”

“How you doin,” she answer me, sideways, like she don’t

want to let on she know I ain’

combed my hair yet and here it is

Sunday morning but still I have the nerve

to be bothering serious work with these crazy

questions about

“E equals what you say again, dear?”

Then I tell her, “Well

also this same guy? I think

he was undisputed Father of the Atom Bomb!”

“That right.” She mumbles or grumbles, not too politely

“And dint remember to wear socks when he put on

his shoes!” I add on (getting desperate)

at which point Mrs. Johnson take herself and her broom

a very big step down the stoop away from me

“And never did nothing for nobody in particular

lessen it was a committee

and

used to say, ‘What time is it?’

and

you’d say, ‘Six o’clock.’

and

he’d say, ‘Day or night?’

and

and he never made nobody a cup a tea

in his whole brilliant life!

and

[my voice rises slightly]

and

he dint never boogie neither: never!”

“Well,” say Mrs. Johnson, “Well, honey,

I do guess

that’s genius for you.”

“The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does.”

--allen ginsberg

so poets are superheroes after all, just as i suspected.

and its our month!

so there is much to celebrate!

including the fact that it's spring even though winter tried to suck all the juices from us.

i feel pretty good that i get april to formally celebrate my identity as a poet, and february cuz i'm black (too black too strong) and march cuz i'm a G.

just kidding, i celebrate every month.

see?

won't you celebrate with me

by Lucille Clifton

won't you celebrate with me

what i have shaped into

a kind of life? i had no model.

born in babylonbabylon Once a great city in Biblical times, see Psalms 137; also used as a dismissive term in western Black cultures for “anything to which the Black consciousness represents the degenerate or oppressive state of white culture” (OED)

both nonwhite and woman

what did i see to be except myself?

i made it up

here on this bridge betweenbetween / starshine and clay Compare to John Keats’s “betwixt damnation and impassion’d clay” in “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again.”

starshine and clay,between / starshine and clay Compare to John Keats’s “betwixt damnation and impassion’d clay” in “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again.”

my one hand holding tight

my other hand; come celebrate

with me that everyday

something has tried to kill me

and has failed.

a real G!

i was recently forced to move from my beloved apartment of two years due to some excessive slumlording conditions that came to a head. over our heads. look for the post about hundreds of dollars worth of water-damaged books, no heat, and no electricity in january coming soon. but the beauty in that misfortune, aside from the oodles of natural light streaming through my new living room, is the rinky dink library i moved next door to.

the brower branch of the brooklyn public library system is a goldmine, precisely because it's a one-story building with seating for 38 adults and 20 children.

their poetry collection is bananas, literally overflowing with black classics!
they had two copies of a wreath for emmett till. one in hardcover!

i found my girl gwen breezy in there, chillin. shinin. delightin and crowd excitin.



so, here's my birthday present to you:
excerpted from mama gwendolyn brooks' "the third sermon on the warpland" in to disembark:

West Madison Street
In "Jessie's Kitchen"
nobody's eating Jessie's Perfect Food.
Crazy flowers
cry up across the sky, spreading
and hissing This is
it.

The young men run.

They will not steal Bing Crosby but will steal
Melvin Van Peebles who made Lillie
a thing of Zampoughi a thing of red wiggles and trebles
(and I know there are twenty wire stalks sticking out of her head
as her underfed haunches jerk jazz).

A clean riot is not one in which little rioters
long-stomped, long-straddled, BEANLESS
but knowing no Why
go steal in hell
a radio, sit to hear James Brown
and Mingus, Young-Holt, Coleman, John, on V.O.N.,
and sun themselves in Sin.

However, what
is going on
is going on.

Fire.
That is their way of lighting candles in the darkness.
A White Philosopher said
"It is better to light one candle than curse the darkness."
These candles curse—
inverting the deeps of the darkness.

GUARD HERE, GUNS LOADED.
The young men run.
The children in ritual chatter
scatter upon
their Own and old geography.

The Law comes sirening across the town.

here comes the sun

a few weeks ago, i was fortunate enough to travel to new orleans for a few days of patois: the 7th annual new orleans international human rights film festival. i sat on a panel about housing and displacement with staff and members from my job, and other housing activists from miami and new orleans. the festival was phenomenal, and i learned a lot about the specifics of state-sanctioned displacement and gentrification in new orleans.

it was worse than i suspected.

to make a long, awful, though resistance-laden story short, new orleans' city council voted to destroy virtually all of the city's public housing before katrina even hit. months after the storm, when many public housing residents hadn't yet returned, all of the public housing developments were boarded up and since then, all but one has been destroyed. even the ones that hadn't suffered any damage from the storm--which was the majority of them. what this effectively did was ensure that even if those low-income, primarily of color, displaced new orleanians made it back to new orleans, they would literally have no place to live.

despite the grim outlook, there was some sunny business:

1. mayday new orleans rocks. they're one of the kick-ass organizations down there doing amazing work to prevent the demolition of the last public housing development. bonus: the head of that org's name is samuel l. jackson. and he's the best kind of local celebrity.




2. sunni patterson. she functions as the cultural mouthpiece of nola. born and raised in new orleans public housing, she's one of the most respected spoken word poets up in that piece. i got a chance to see her perform and she killed it! or, brought it back to life. she's also mad fly and super pretty. black girls keep rockin it...

a jerk named jamie

just came back from louderARTS' weekly slam joint. typically they'll have an open mic, a slam, and a feature poet. tonight, the feature poet was a jerk named jamie. that's jamie dewolf, formerly jamie kennedy. he's from the east bay, white guy, about 30, buncha tattoos, and he prefaces his first piece with: where are all my perverts at? ok, i thought, a poem about sex. not a problem.

not ten seconds into the piece, he starts explicitly referencing hitting his girlfriend, tying her up, choking her, punching her in the face, holding a gun to her while "fucking her from behind"

he manipulated not only the venue, but the art itself, not to mention the fact that he had a perfect setup, rapport with the hostess, and a willing and overall well behaved audience to push his fucked up personal and private preferences into a space to contribute to an environment that was unsafe for women। period. my fantastic partner, who has good sense said: let's get outta here.

we dipped in protest. but why would someone sully such a sacred space in the first place?

"the news is making you dumb"

read the ads on the train. and they were right. recently the new york post's cover story read "vile oj...". here's the thing about subjectivity: its inevitable. and that's just the way its going to have to be as long as we continue to be humans and not robots or aliens or chairs or whatever. but that doesn't mean you can't at least try to be objective. attempt to give an unbiased account of actual events. i know, it's just racism, what am i getting all worked up over?

birthday poem

for oj

juiced black dress
was all the rage

at the nightclub,
where my loved

ones drank
and danced

and not a single
one of us

managed
to brandish

anything
but teeth.

kara walker

my super awesome someone copped me this kara walker book for my birthday, and its fantastic. she uses civil war era inspired parody drawings and paintings to give a critical reading of race, sexuality, violence and representation. and she is quite attractive. a little understated. fresh. looks a lil like erykah. just saying.

the essence of it

this past weekend i went to a conference in bethesda, md that brought folks from all fields together to engage with one another about how to get behind the cycle (of incarceration) and other wonderfully progressive things. on the first night, susan taylor spoke, mainly about the mentoring program she founded to address the crisis of de block yoot. (there was no way to write that phrase without using jamaican patois). its an awesome program and its even more awesome that susan taylor is still so actively engaged in important work post essence.

but! dwarfing that awesomeness is this awesome fact:

susan taylor is 62 and looks like she's maybe 45.

its important for you to feel me on this one. what susan taylor's existence ultimately does is reinforce the "amazing black woman" truism. this is distinct from the myth of the "black superwoman," so scratch that one.

but its true: smart, beautiful, generous, straight up visionary black women abound! they're fresh and alive and enduring!

love love love!!!

love harder? yes!! that's the only way to stop haters. they get confused by it. give hugs. give kisses.

here's a piece by awesome poet ross gay. and the audio.

Two Bikers Embrace on Broad Street

Maybe, since you're something like me,

you, too, would've nearly driven into oncoming traffic

for gawking at the clutch between the two men

on Broad Street, in front of the hospital,

which would not stop, each man's face

so deeply buried in the other's neck--these men

not, my guess, to be fucked with--squeezing through

that first, porous layer of the body into the heat beneath;

maybe you, too, would've nearly driven over three pedestrians as your head

swiveled to lock on their lock,

their burly fingers squeezing the air from the angels

on the backs of their denim jackets

which reminds you the million and one secrets exchanged

in nearly the last clasp between your father

and his brother, during which the hospital's chatter and rattle

somehow fell silent in deference to the untranslatable

song between them, and just as that clasp endured through

what felt like the gradual lengthening of shadows and the emergence

of once cocooned things, and continues to this day, so, too,

did I float unaware of the 3000 lb machine

in my hands drifting through a stop light while I gawked

at their ceaseless cleave going deeper,

and deeper still, so that Broad Street from Fairmount

to the Parkway reeked of the honey-scented wind

pushed from the hummingbirds now hovering above these two men,

sweetening, somehow, the air until nectar,

yes, nectar gathered at the corners of my mouth like sun-colored spittle,

the steel vehicle now a lost memory

as I joined the fire-breasted birds in listening

to air exchanged between these two men, who are, themselves,

listening, forever, to the muscled contours of the other's neck, all of us

still, and listening, as if we had nothing

to blow up, as if we had nothing to kill.

hate hate hate!!!

surprisingly, there are some number of white people upset about obama's election. but not just regular angry.

they're so angry (how angry are they??!)
they're SO angry, they've been taking out their aggression on black people.
(who?!)
BLACK PEOPLE!!

okay, so maybe it's not surprising at all.
some white people (mainly in the south, AP would have us believe) have been feeling like they lost something with this election. like something's been taken away from them. like they suddenly lost all of their magic white privilege powers. i'd argue however, that the only thing taken away from them was the privilege of being able to see a president with the same color skin. thats a big one, as it affects all types of esteem and confidence levels, but it amounts to less when you consider the fact that the country's institutionalized racist structures remain intact.

so white people, easy on the hate crimes.
think about how differently we all might be feeling if jesse jackson was our president-elect.
imagine here some type of reverse slavery...

black people, maybe a return to arms?

kidding!

give peace a chance.

peace peace peace

still though, i'll offer you this, in honor of haters everywhere.

another take on progress

or, how to make it happen. let's say it's a call for direct action. by my main damie, nikki giovanni, an OG. published in 1970.

For Saundra

i wanted to write
a poem
that rhymes
but revolution doesn't lend
itself to be-bopping

then my neighbor
who thinks i hate
asked – do you ever write
tree poems – i like trees
so i thought
i'll write a beautiful green tree poem
peeked from my window
to check the image
noticed that the school yard was covered
with asphalt
no green – no trees grow
in manhattan

then, well, i thought the sky
i'll do a big blue sky poem
but all the clouds have winged
low since no-Dick was elected

so i thought again
and it occurred to me
maybe i shouldn't write
at all
but clean my gun
and check my kerosene supply

perhaps these are not poetic
times
at all

on progress

since i'm still not ready to vomit out all of the obama analysis i'm holding inside in any coherent or useful way, here's a little note on progress.

i was reading an opinion piece in the times today that attempted to capture some of the responses to the upsetting anti-lgbtq ballot initiatives that passed on election night in four states.

of course, many people in the lgbtq community are outraged that their civil rights (the right to marry, and in some cases, to adopt while in a civil union/domestic partnership) are still being so explicitly denied, especially in the wake of this huge progressive victory with obeezy.

but the piece exposed some dangerous analysis and comparisons:

"It wasn’t that she [Jeanne Rizzo, a married white lesbian] begrudged Obama his victory. It was just that his historic triumph made the insult to her community all the more painful. An awful thought came to her that night: Now we’re the designated cultural outcasts. “It’s almost like we’re the last group you can be openly bigoted about,” she told me."

it's important to understand the analysis that informs this point of view. this idea that with the election of a black president, racism is no longer a formidable obstacle. or that somehow, the term "cultural outcasts" suddenly applies to a single group.

it's absolutely unproductive in every way to attempt to compare oppressions. people who belong to the lgbtq community experience structural oppression in a way that is distinct from the way that people of color experience it. it is not more or less, but different. the other important thing to take away from this is the obsolete nature of single-identity analysis. no one is merely gay, or simply black, just a woman, or only middle class. people have complex identities that leave them privileged and oppressed in different ways. take for instance the wealthy black gay male, who is at once privileged by his maleness and class status but oppressed by a racist and heterosexist culture...

just saying.

perhaps progress isn't so simple a thing to quantify, what with all the two steps forward, one step back rhythm we have going these days.

maybe that old adage is spot-on, and a loss for any segment of humanity means a loss for all.

"no one is free when others are oppressed."
-author unknown

nahimean?

found poetry, #1

poets.org defines found poetry this way:

Found poems take existing texts and refashion them, reorder them, and present them as poems. The literary equivalent of a collage, found poetry is often made from newspaper articles, street signs, graffiti, speeches, letters, or even other poems.

A pure found poem consists exclusively of outside texts: the words of the poem remain as they were found, with few additions or omissions. Decisions of form, such as where to break a line, are left to the poet.

so here's a lil something for ya:

while romantics
claimed paul died

of a broken heart,
the death

certificate listed
tuberculosis.

"found" in Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow: The Tragic Courtship and Marriage of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Alice Ruth Moore by Eleanor Alexander.

this book is bananas, by the way.

historical perspective

due to all the recent excitement surrounding a certain black man, i've been particularly introspective, spending lots of time pondering the meaning of such a historical trajectory. i anticipate some prolific writing taking place around this general idea, so stay tuned.

for now, the new york times has provided me with a mo' fun take on history. or at least, more easily digested. three takes, actually:

1. on November 13, 1956, the Supreme Court struck down laws calling for racial segregation on public buses.

think about how unimportant it feels today whether or not you sit in the front or the back of the bus. usually i find myself heading straight for the back, since there tends to be more breathing room and less hassle, and i don't want to crowd up the front in case any senior citizens or physically struggling people board. see how over time, the significance of a space can transform completely?

2. on November 13, 1955, Whoopi Goldberg was born.

just saying. i wonder what her childhood was like. can you imagine baby whoopi making civil rights jokes??


3 . on November 13, 1997, the Disney musical "The Lion King" opened on Broadway.

hands down the best broadway show ever. have i seen enough broadway shows for that to be a factually accurate statement, despite its subjective nature? absolutely not. still though, the animals were so real!

the "p" word

i'm a poet after all. what? here's a piece of sweet potato pie from allen ginsberg that i recommend reading out loud:

America

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twentyseven cents January
17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I
need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not
the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back
it's sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical
joke?
I'm trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday
somebody goes on trial for murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid
I'm not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses
in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.
I won't say the Lord's Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle
Max after he came over from Russia.

I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let your emotional life be run by
Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner
candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility. Business-
men are serious. Movie producers are serious.
Everybody's serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me.
I haven't got a chinaman's chance.
I'd better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of
marijuana millions of genitals an unpublishable
private literature that goes 1400 miles an hour
and twenty-five-thousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of
underprivileged who live in my flowerpots
under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers
is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that
I'm a Catholic.
America how can I write a holy litany in your silly
mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as
individual as his automobiles more so they're
all different sexes.
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500
down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Com-
munist Cell meetings they sold us garbanzos a
handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the
speeches were free everybody was angelic and
sentimental about the workers it was all so sin-
cere you have no idea what a good thing the
party was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand
old man a real mensch Mother Bloor made me
cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody
must have been a spy.
America you don't really want to go to war.
America it's them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen.
And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power
mad. She wants to take our cars from out our
garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Readers'
Digest. Her wants our auto plants in Siberia.
Him big bureaucracy running our fillingsta-
tions.
That no good. Ugh. Him make Indians learn read.
Him need big black niggers. Hah. Her make us
all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in
the television set.
America is this correct?
I'd better get right down to the job.
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes
in precision parts factories, I'm nearsighted and
psychopathic anyway.
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

Berkeley, January 17, 1956

popped bubbles and such

today, in a fairly long conversation with my super awesome boss, i discussed (this is new for me) politics. specifically, politics in relation to the work we do (drug policy reform in communities of color). even more specifically, we had a lengthy back and forth about the current political climate and how we could use it to advance our own (ingenious!) agenda. we agreed that we were wallowing in peculiar waters given the unprecedented national air of optimism occurring simultaneously with some of the most depressing statistics in history. and i mean that across the board: incarceration rates, unemployment rates, infant mortality rates, etcetera.

surely though, optimism can't be the worst of our troubles, can it? of course not. the trouble is the real shit. feeling good about the way things are going when everything is bad is like using cocaine (of course, coke can be replaced in this context with any other drug that offers a high) to escape the pressures of life. you feel good, sure, but your circumstances remain the same, and bc you've opted to not proactively address them, they will likely even worsen.

thats right, hope plus no change in action = cracked out.

so the task at hand here in the strange political place in which we've found ourselves, is to galvanize all those bright eyes and bushy tails into action and remind them that feeling good simply isn't enough when things are so very bad.

also, nothing wrong with a little mary jane.