The Best American Poetry

Mike Fontaine, guest author April 13-17

Michael and Lola

This week we welcome Mike Fontaine as our guest author. Mike is Professor of Classics at Cornell University, in the heart of New York State's Finger Lakes wine region. He specializes in wine, swine, mind, and a good laugh. He is translator and editor of How to Drink (Princeton, April, 2020). Michael grew up in New Orleans, blogs at Psychology Today, and gets his exercise, always among friends, at Ithaca’s celebrated FLX Fitclub. How to Tell a Joke, his next book, comes out in 2021.

Welcome, Michael. 

-- sdl

 

"We just do what we have to do." When tedious work is pleasurable [by Stacey Lehman]

Face masks, ready to be washed before inserting ties.

This was supposed to be the season of sewing my summer wardrobe. I'd picked the patterns and purchased the fabric to make breezy cotton dresses, linen jumpsuits, gauzy blouses. Then came you-know-what. Here in Ithaca, the head of a loose organization of home-sewists put out a call for face masks, first to be worn by health care workers in senior citizen centers, hospice, and the like, and more recently for bus drivers and the employees of the food co-op and an area soup kitchen. We shared notes on patterns, lamented the shortage of elastic, and got to work. The first batch of 167 homemade masks was delivered to Hospicecare on March 26; we're working on an order for an additional 350. 

I contributed about 15 masks to the effort before getting sidetracked by making masks for family and for  friends in "hot" zones. Now I'm working on a supply of 30 or so for the employees of the New York City building where David and I maintain a small apartment. The first 15 will be ready to go on Saturday. 

The process is simple and can be managed by anyone with a few supplies and basic sewing know-how. Once I got the hang of the pattern, I was able to streamline production by reducing it to a series of steps that move smoothly and quickly. Still, I want those who wear these masks feel good about them so I'm taking my time to make them look as professionally made as possible. Once I exhausted my supply of appropriate scraps left over from other projects, I cut into a length of high-quality lightweight denim for the outside and am using a soft white cotton for the lining, made with a pocket to hold a filter, if any can be found. I'm proud of how they're turning out. All of the effort I've put into improving my sewing skills over the past couple of years has come to fruition. When the call for masks went out, I thought, "I can do this." 

Sometimes, while sewing, I listen to classical music and enter the state of "flow," described by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihaly in his seminal work on the subject as the period when one is "completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost." 

At other times, the work is downright tedious and it is then that I'm reminded of Thomas Merton's observation in The Springs of Contemplation about the value of boring work:

If I insist that my work be rewarding, that it mustn't be tedious or monotonous, I'm in trouble. . . . Time after time it fails to become so. So I get more agitated about it, I fight with people about it, I make more demands about it. . . . It's ridiculous to demand that work always be pleasurable, because work is not necessarily pleasing; sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. If we're detached and simply pick up the job we have to do and go ahead and do it, it's usually fairly satisfying. Even jobs that are repugnant or dull or tedious tend to be quite satisfying, once we get right down to doing them. . . . One of the routine jobs I get every once in a while comes from putting out a little magazine. You have to sort the pages. It's a simple, routine, mechanical sort of job. . . . I never realized that this would be one of the most satisfying parts of the whole thing, just standing there sorting pages. This happens when we just do what we have to do.

-- sdl

It was 90 years ago today. . .

Ninety years ago, the stock market crashed. It was on the 29th of October, a Tuesday, as it is this year. A little known fact is that the poet, professor and scholar John Hollander was born October 28, 1929, when the market fell thirteen per-cent. On the 29th, it lost another twelve percent, and the rout -- and panic -- was on. -- DL

<<<
Black Tuesday hits Wall Street as investors trade 16,410,030 shares on the New York Stock Exchange in a single day. Billions of dollars were lost, wiping out thousands of investors, and stock tickers ran hours behind because the machinery could not handle the tremendous volume of trading. In the aftermath of Black Tuesday, America and the rest of the industrialized world spiraled downward into the Great Depression.

During the 1920s, the U.S. stock market underwent rapid expansion, reaching its peak in August 1929, a period of wild speculation. By then, production had already declined and unemployment had risen, leaving stocks in great excess of their real value. Among the other causes of the eventual market collapse were low wages, the proliferation of debt, a weak agriculture, and an excess of large bank loans that could not be liquidated. >>>

for more, link here.

Poet Spotlight: Karyna McGlynn [by Kristina Marie Darling]

 

This week, as Guest Author, I will be spotlighting innovative work by women poets in the form of new writing and review-essays.  Today I'm delighted to share a new poem by Karyna McGlynn.  Karyna McGlynn is the author of Hothouse (Sarabande Books 2017), I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl (Sarabande Books 2009), and several chapbooks including The 9-Day Queen Gets Lost on Her Way to the Execution (Willow Springs Editions 2016). Her poems have recently appeared in The Kenyon Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Witness, Georgia Review, New England Review, and The Academy of American Poet’s Poem-A-Day. Karyna is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Christian Brothers University in Memphis. She’s an avid collagist and is currently working on a new book, 50 Things Kate Bush Taught Me About the Multiverse. Happy summer, and enjoy!  

 

 

A New Poem by Karyna McGlynn

HOW TO TALK THE MANIC AWAY

I used to be so mad—I had daggers coming out
of my puffed sleeves. I decorated Easter baskets
with the plastic daisies of my Fury & mounted
them on Playtex-pink three-speeds.
Every bike I ever owned suffered
a spectacular death: hit by a grey Grand Am,
tossed like a stone into the quarry, snatched
through a broken window, found mangled
in a ditch.  I shook my swampy sobs
out of their frames & ironed my playbills
for breakfast. I mounted my miscues
on the walls of a rocket. I covered
my mistakes in neon & called it Art.
I charged people to listen to me scream.
I moved to the desert because I'm supposed to
be capricious like that. Some people said
my hubris would be better in the mouth
of a dinosaur, or as the silhouette of
a disgraced news anchor. In a West Texas bar,
some girl asked if I'd seen the Marfa Lights.
I stood up whiskily on my stool & said,
“Bitch, I AM the Marfa Lights!”

I used to collect lace collars & white gloves
made for the Nervous & the Consumptive.
I stalked old ladies’ estate sales.
Some of still had boxes of seamed stockings
wrapped in tissue paper
& lavender water & bakelite hair combs.
None of this stuff ever fit or endeared me
to others. Imagine going through life
with white cotton seams around
your fingers. Imagine the Whole World
saying, “Don't Touch.” Still, in several
nightdresses I clambered over
a field of sods. There was a desk
in the distance with one light in its
Top Drawer. The night was open to me.
I took out my loudest shears
& cut a hole in the landscape
to make a space for the Silence
I was immediately accused of violating.  
My afterlife was a trial of ill-
fitting hats, spilled sugar & Little Girls
who loved their pet bunnies too much.
So much, they squeezed their lights out,
nestled their bodies in the doll carriage.
What shall I paint for the mourners:
an old schooner marooned in a field
of clover? A corpse that stinks its way
to the Truth? A bottle of warm
poppy milk? A dumbshow? Shall I
keep up appearances even though
I am slowly losing my sawdust
through an open seam? I know:
I should.

Poet Spotlight: Dora Malech [by Kristina Marie Darling]

This week, as Guest Author, I will be spotlighting innovative work by women poets in the form of new writing and review-essays.  Today I'm delighted to share a folio of poems by Dora Malech.  Dora Malech is the author of three books of poetry: Shore Ordered Ocean, published by The Waywiser Press in 2009; Say So, published by the Cleveland State University Poetry Center in 2011; and, most recently, Stet, selected by Susan Stewart for the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets and forthcoming from Princeton University Press in September 2018. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including The New Yorker, Poetry, The Best American Poetry, Poetry London, Tin House, Lana Turner, The New England Review, and The Kenyon Review. She is the recipient of awards that include an Amy Clampitt Residency Award from the Amy Clampitt Foundation, a Writer’s Fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland, where she is an assistant professor in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.  Happy summer, and enjoy!  

 

A Folio of Poems by Dora Malech

 

Essay     as yes,

begged off bad beginnings, false starts of a star-sat self, her benched head cartoon bird spun, stunned out a long season. I came to claim I wouldn’t burden you with the trailed-off scrap heap of all the times I tried to explain (plain) already, but even without evidence of wadded paper, snowdrift of not that, it is those attempts that act as apologia, sense in absence, itinerant iterations’ cairns at the crossroads, hobo code in chalk or coal, worlds not long for these words. In other words: in other words, diary’s everyday no entry, inverse relationship between clarity and efficacy. I needed forms that could flail, fail, lists listing back toward their not-so-fresh catalysts, sepsis of afterbirth still lodged in the body, that which once nurtured lingering malignant.The I, just talk: just like that. Same went for the you(s): free on what messy out. I didn’t want to spill it—it meaning guts, etcetera, but mostly guts—because they weren’t all mine to spill, those two tin cans strung from the ends of viscera, the what-we-listen-to and where-we-feel-it, so to speak. In my belly, twisted sum [sic] sine in test. It’s an old story, sure, and came in waves. I left my name at the front desk. I waved. I left. Abbreviation: sin. The take lodged in to speak that leaves us P.S., postscript as remaindered O, sighed apostrophe to what we turn away (from).

Even some years later, when the nurse explained the blood test, I felt the familiar flush as something else made sense. Material released: information that circulates in the bloodstream. To point to the center and say there wasn’t quite right after all. There were bits of the story flowing through me. In fact, the old imperative, echo of act in the sense of what’s done. Is done. What is, in a manner of speaking, riveted to the text? In his anagram notebooks, Saussure said God(s) and named names. Of this, the scholar writes, “Language’s tokens make sense because they cor-respond.” Raise your hand if you’re who here can’t hear the heart.

Under wraps, rapture, sous rature’s insistent autocorrect. The trace createth (archaic ache) Zürn’s “old, dangerous fever,” Mackey’s “exegetic sweat”: open (source, sesame, letter, book). Pen, stain one mouth [and] the mountain opens. Bromine cant: recombinant. The lab in labial, the utter in, well, utter. Late tale: I hold the same old doll as me. Not a simulacrum left that the bad birds haven’t pecked up, antipathetic, now violet night, violent insight. Cite anti-path as no road home, lips lit [to] spill it.

It turns out, it doesn’t matter what we want to want because the spell still (ill saint) outs us, solves for scar in viscera where viscera is crave, cavity-crammed. Still an I, I was trying to write a beginning and an ending at once, using the only words my tongue could touch. Muddle and middle. The writing on the wall was a tunnel under cell-scratched time. Say law [of] always: simultaneous is nauseous limits. They weren’t all mine to spill, and even their spooled length unfurled and measured didn’t feel like all at all. Totality of utterance reduced to trance, to tatter.

Note burden’s sense, too, as refrain, as what we carry singing down the road. Love me little, love me long’s the bindle shouldered by that us that must end anonymous, bound to the stone of a song. With, across, after: referred myself to a different doctor, wielded the old ax in ask, metathetic. Closed eyes and metalept: hung for a moment in the air from where the bridge I burned once was. The best I could do was an embarrassment, crying for do-over blushes reread, reacts in redactions. Or is it that the space was always there, and necessary, not absence but aperture, artery’s foramen, foreman speaking for the jury?

Waved, left: laved weft, crosswise threads of a cloth washed and wrung, hung to dry on an over-under. An old story, spun whole cloth: blue banner shook upstage to make the sea’s surge billow back the act. The sine was swell and sag. The sine was pregnant, pause, pregnant, pause. Called hum [sic], hone [sic], a song sharpened in the singing, then ground to gone. Sic transit authority (see [sic] changes in signage): mind the [God of the] gap[s]. I always forgot the second I in liaison, and the screen scratched its red line ragged below our best in trysts [sic] (something in us) as I tried to make a dance of distance, move on. Something thumb sings of tapping into: the smallest screen’s green flame, time-stamped out but still smoldering, or, hinge-stung, the rise in bruise as blood’s chorus roars out its resistance. It’s not exactly the same seam, but remove or rearrange and the trace remains, asks after, echoes back into and of its origins—

 

_____________

 

I do

            After Meg Ronan

 

Never meant, never meat, never met.
Try a break. Buckle up. Weary query
gut put after all. A last jab, haze, hex.
Beneath the mattress, guns. Stutter.
Stumble, crazy easy. Keep just a fuck,
bequeath the rest. Laws vex, amaze –
all next level parlay. Bet a jester’s last
laugh. Full cuff freeze, luck up a sleeve,
squats, lunges. But we came bulletless.

 

_____________

After Plath: Metaphors I

            [I’m a riddle in nine syllables,]

Stealing a safe view, interstate
still a smooth read, nothing in
mirrors, not need or glint, not even
a least glimmer in the rims of a coupe
so far. An on ramp's best offer is belief,
yes, spell an easy does it and I bite,
finally sing assent, an infinity.
Big rig, add a deep rumble now,
the true coup down the highway.

 

____________

 

After Plath: Metaphors II

            [An elephant, a ponderous house,]

Not to faint at blood, a creeping
up in the syringe, I avert my eyes then
run, or else. I'll feint so at a mind's
view, my unlit corners. My wild
ape meat is a treif menu in a red pen.
I’d eat. I see a starting pistol's first
green shoot, a bean's beginning in
a fêted barrel, a flash and slosh,
swim of a goldfish bowl on the go.

 

______________

 

After Plath: Metaphors IV

            [O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!]

Aviary, apiary, one warm swarm
and flutter. Bubble tea, puff pastry,
lit fuse, ore. I reel, dine asea.
Greeting card sentiments, honey
dripping into the moss-lined nest
of a loon, wings riled in the offing.
Motor revs, then idles. A magician's
assistant, smiling to be sawed in half,
saying I'll be the one, the one too.

_____________

 

After Plath: Metaphors V

            [This loaf’s big with its yeasty rising.]

A nature documentary. Opening
shot, pan, a narrator’s measured
tone intent on saying stab, storm,
life, flap, ash, bone, tool, till, life,
death. So yes, as I listen, I begin
to believe I’m the whole sorry
shebang, finding my mess the stained
sign of an entire paradigm. I, inverted
flower we call fruit, fig wasp inside.

____________

 

After Plath: Metaphors VII

            [I’m a means, a stage, a cow in calf.]

Mob's all thumbs in the Colosseum,
meat thrown to a dull roar as gears
engage, meat in a trendy blender.
A spy in internal affairs, other shoe
dropping, in me, it's pints of rennet
in a stein, gift pony, baloney sandwich
with a side of live wires, eel's vitals,
fine dust, fine lines—fine. I'm
a gag order to go. Bye. Ate it.

Poet Spotlight: Virginia Konchan [by Kristina Marie Darling]

 

This week, as Guest Author, I will be spotlighting innovative work by women poets in the form of new writing and review-essays.  Today I'm delighted to share a folio of poems by Virginia Konchan.  The author of a poetry collection, The End of Spectacle (Carnegie Mellon, 2018), a collection of short stories, Anatomical Gift (Noctuary Press, 2017), and two chapbooks, including That Tree is Mine (dancing girl press, 2018), Virginia Konchan's poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Boston Review, and elsewhere.  Happy summer, and enjoy!  

 

 

A Folio of Poems by Virginia Konchan

 

Spring

Out of view, more galaxies.
Out of time, more light. A naturalist
or archeologist can decipher symptoms,
messages engraved in the flesh
of ordinary things. When the engine begins
to purr again, the crowd applauds.
Lord of tissue, lord of hieroglyphs
and a puzzle full of theological quibbles,
it’s prettiness that counts in china dolls. 
Lord of allegory, of hidden meanings,
of radical fissures in the heart of rain,
I have a skeleton underneath my skin, 
I am serious. I careen through the house
like a killer. Lord knows I tried, like a dove,
to mate for life. I failed. It was the trash,
the detritus, I adored. No images but in things.
No things but in images. There could have been
so many versions of us, why this one?
Love will creep where it cannot go,
through the eyes of the dead horse
that burns slower than my hair.
It’s spring—meta chirp, meta chirp,
goes the bird, philosopher’s stone.
It is a conduit between what was,
will be. It is, like everyone, alone.

 

_________

 

Guiding Light

I wasted my life on language
and other soft constructions,
held the clammy hand of death
as if death was the snot-nosed kid
last to be picked for any team
where skill actually matters.
I could be a bride, and was,
was bridled, harnessed, and
groomed. Now I live in, and by,
a burning timetable, abetting
the landfill crisis by buying
ream after ream of paper.
The bright white paper.
The laser paper.
The paper whose opacity
rivals that of God.
I indicate I would like
the dessert menu by pointing to it
with my bony finger.
When it comes, I order a financier.
As The World Turns, I remain still,
Mona Lisa’s resting bitch face
blunted only by my silky curtain of hair.
Throw it all in the cauldron, I don’t care.
People keep mistaking me for a doll
when in fact I am a cyborg,
surrounded by The Young & Restless
snorting coke and drinking corpse revivers
in the General Hospital—downward,
I mean backward, glance of Orpheus
softening my every blow.
My fantasy for this script is simple:
I just want to edit out the boring parts,
the parts where I forgot to scream.
Guiding Light is my real life:
the world around me is the dream.

 

______________________

 

Meridian

I’ve been in this body so long.
My ace in the hole body, my one
bird in two hands body, my rut.
What does it mean to understand?
I count the syllables on my hand. I don
my leisure suit and stroll the boardwalk.
O bituminous coal. O indiscriminate
hulk. My Ikea bookshelf body
is bookended by equine statuettes.
The world is full of tall strangers
and I haven’t seen a face
that loves me for days.
O moon, you are a hangnail.
O moon, your hair’s a fright.
Note bene, this product has been
enlarged to show texture.
The cure’s a subtle realignment
between one’s inner monster
and the line of longitude that scores
the earth. I thought beauty would
save me. No, I really thought
beauty would save me.
I’ve been in this body so long;
I’ve forgotten how to flee.
Objects in the mirror may
be closer than they appear:
they too ache with unknown
want, dumb weight of destiny.

 

_______________

 

Epistemology

The bleeding title has bled like the idea of triumph,
white flag manifesting on the top of a summit or heap,
and the church bells sounding from the home’s interior
are in fact part of a discontinued sitcom, blaring from the TV.
Doubt takes over. What if there is no outside, no other side?
Dread takes over. How can the subject cross the divide?
Descartes curls up into the safety of his stove, while you
tightrope walk the abyss, or go through contortions
to deny it is there. Any way you twist it, the moon is a cop
and you can’t afford a vowel so as to spell it out, carefully:
with all certainty, nothing. Any purported solution
is smoke and mirrors. I am the planet Pluto in a play.
I mime the grief economy. The death economy.
The libidinal economy. There are so many kinds
of poverty, and the body is a kind of forgetting.
There is no magical leap across the chasm.
There is no way to make it disappear, either,
with a flourish of the metaphysical wand.
The sun, in this equation, is a ticking bomb,
and the lawn is a field where a field once was.
My desire is to be your shape, your data, your
blind spot, your moan. Ashes to ashes, art to art,
object to object. Now let us pray. Now let us
differentiate between the knower and the known.

Quote of the Day: Kafka

"Let the bad remain bad, otherwise it will grow worse." 

Russian Absurd: Daniil Kharms's Women (Belated Happy Valentine's Day!) [by Alex Cigale]

From ON UNIVERSAL BALANCE

...And, having returned home, Nikolay Ivanovich said this to his wife:
“Do not be afraid, Ekaterina Petrovna, and do not worry. Only there isn’t any equilibrium in this life. And the mistake is only off by some kilogram and half for the entire universe, but still, it’s amazing, Ekaterina Petrovna, it is simply remarkable!”

THE END.

[September 18, 1934]

From Russian Absurd: Daniil Kharms, Selected Writings (Northwestern University Press, World Classics series; officially published on February 17, 2017)

∞

First of all, my apologies for the delay in posting this: I must again excuse myself by repeating that, like so many of us, I've only just returned from DC and the AWP. And so, dear reader, please accept this, my belated Happy St. Valentines's Day wishes to us all: may each of us seek to daily find within ourselves those inner resources that enable us to feel and express our love. Yesterday, I was helped on this occasion, during a particularly difficult personal time and in this unsettling historical moment, by going to see a film with two people I care about very much. While Lion is far from a perfect picture, what else is there in this world that can better evoke in us those cathartic and complex feelings of pity and empathy more than the innocence of a child?

I also wish to say that I had all the relevant selections from the book ready to go before I got on the road, but, to quote E. M. Foster: "How do I know what I think until I see what I say?" What I want to tell you about today is an experience of censorship I had with the Russian Absurd, Daniil Kharms Facebook page I had started, intended to promote the book with a series of selections, including the poem that follows here. The response I received to it was: "Your ad wasn't approved because it doesn't follow our Advertising Policies for adult products or services. We don’t allow images or videos that show nudity or cleavage, even if it’s portrayed for artistic or educational reasons." While I appealed the decision repeatedly, including finally to a live person, explaining that the post contained neither nudity, nor cleavage, nor certainly any videos, it got me exactly nowhere.

The situation became only more absurd, when Facebook's response to a prose piece in tomorrow's follow up post, "Daniil Kharms on Spirit," that I thought not only innocuous but genuinely elevated and uplifting was: "Your ad wasn't approved because it calls out to specific user attributes (ex: race, religion, age, sexual orientation, gender, disability or medical condition, financial status, membership in a trade union, criminal record, ethnicity, name). Such ads may offend users and lead to high negative sentiment." To make this already far too long introduction shorter: to put it mildly, Kharms, like so many of us today, had a "complicated relationship" with all of mankind, and even with God "himself".  I hope you will read on for yourself, and I will only add here the following words from my introduction to the book: 

"Humor and horror, Eros and Thanatos, degradation and sadomasochism jostle one another, side-by-side, in these stories and poems. Kafkaesque and Chekhovian situations and motifs from Pushkin and traditional Russian fairy tales are recognizable in Kharms’s sparse prose, yet they appear diseased, stripped down to their bare essentials, as if contorted by the terror of impending arrest and doom." And we might add, "by the terror of love gained and love lost". And now, most of the rest of this, I would like to be in Daniil Kharms's own words.

∞

You can sew. But that’s all bunk.
I’m in love with your pudenda;
it’s moist and smells abundantly.
Another man would peek, let out
a squeak, and, sealing his nose, scram.
And wiping your fluids from his hands
would he return? Oh, what a question;
suddenly, there can be no other.
Your juices are to me sheer joy.
You think my words are an excrescence
but I’m prepared to lick your cunt
without break for breath and swallow
the delicious squim of your mallow
until I begin to burp and grunt.

(Daniil Kharms, 1931)

"Joseph Brodsky once quoted Anna Akhmatova, about an improbable Kharms sentence: 'Only with Kharms could that ever work. Never with anyone else.'" (From Ian Frazier's group review of all the books heretofore available in English translation in The New York Review of Books, which includes his own very personal experience discovering, translating, and failing in the attempt to communicate to Anglophone readers how and why Daniil Kharms's works are "funny".)

∞

From “Thoughts about a Girl”

And when she passes by aflutter,
As if on air, not a word do you utter;
And when with a knowledgeable hand
She makes contact— you understand.

And when she lightly, as though dancing,
Sliding her lovely foot across the floor,
Proceeds to offer her perky breast for
You to kiss— then it is impossible not

To shout out loud and lovingly blow
From her firm breast a dust mote,
And recognize how touching your lips
To her youthful breast is pointless.

January 21, 1935

 

In every church bell there is spite
In every red ribbon there is fire
In every young woman shivering
In every young man his own steed.

[1936]

 

March 20, 1938

Came to the window naked. In the house across the street someone must have taken an exception, the sailor’s widow, I think. A policeman came barging in, with the yard sweeper, and someone else in tow. They declared that I have been disturbing the neighbors across the street from me for over three years already. So I have hung some curtains. What is more appealing to the eye, an old woman wearing nothing but a chemise or a young man, buck-naked? And for whom is it less acceptable to show themselves au naturel?

∞

This was my own "working" version of the book's cover. Being a very visual and concrete person, as I was developing and completing the book, being able to see both the "big picture" and the individual pages helped me in doing so. Here, I had "cut" and reversed what I believed to be a double "wedding portrait" of Daniil Yuvachev and Esther Rousakov. Kharms's first wife, she was the daughter of Jewish Russian-French “expats,” and part of the "reverse immigration" that had returned to Russia after the Revolution.

From the Notebooks. July 27. Who could advise me regarding what I should do? Esther brings with her misfortune. I am being destroyed along with her. What must I do, either divorce her or . . . carry my cross? I was given the choice to avoid this, but I remained dissatisfied, and asked to be united with Esther. I was told yet again, do not be married! But despite “having caught a scare,” I still insisted, I still tied my fate with Esther’s, till death do us part. I myself was to blame for this or, rather, I did it to myself. What has happened to the OBERIU? Everything vanished as soon as Esther became a part of me. Since that time, I have ceased to write as I ought to and have only brought misfortune upon myself from all directions. Is it that I can’t be dependent on women, no matter which one it is? Or is the nature of Esther’s character such that she brought an end to my work? I don’t know. If Esther is filled with sorrow, then how can I possibly let her go....

Kharms developed a highly personal and involved symbology, mostly involving an almost kabbalistic play with the letters of her name (his symbol for her as a whole person was the window). Esther Rusakov (née Ioselevich), was repressed, along with her entire family, in 1936.

Before I enter, I will knock on your window. You will see me in the window. Then I will walk through the door and you will see me in the doorway. Then I will walk into your house and you will recognize me. And I will enter you, and no one, except you, will see me and recognize me.

You will see me in the window.

You will see me in the doorway.

[1931]

∞

The woman in the following picture is Alice Poiret, another of "Kharms's women;” both she and his first wife, Esther, have most often been literally cropped out of the few surviving photos of Kharms that have come down to us. Kharms had dedicated a number of poems to Alice, including the following:

Before me hangs a portrait
of Alice Ivanovna Poret.
She is as gorgeous as a fairy,
devious, worse than a snake,
she is cunning, my Alice,
cunning as Renard the Fox.

[ January 7, 1933]

∞

October 16, 1933

Petersburg

Talent grows, destroying, building.
The sign of stagnation is well-being.

Dear Klavdia Vasilyevna,
You are a remarkable and genuine person! As much as it grieves me not to be able to see you, I won’t be inviting you to the Children’s Theater or to come to my city. How heartwarming it is to know that there still exists one human being animated by dreams! I don’t know what word one can use to express that force which so delights me in you. I usually call it simply p u r i t y. I have been thinking about how wonderful it is, that which is primal...

… I’m genuinely delighted that you take your walks like so, in the Zoological Garden. Especially if you take walks there not just for the sake of walking, but also to observe the animals— I will fall in love with you even more tenderly.

Daniil Kharms

October 20, 1933

I have studied women for a long time now and can definitively say that I know them with flying colors. First and foremost, a woman likes to be attended to. Let’s say she is standing right in front of you or is about to, and you make it seem as though you’re hearing and seeing nothing, and act like there’s no one else in the room; this inflames female curiosity. And a curious woman is capable of practically anything.
The next time I will intentionally stick my hand deep in my pocket with a quizzical appearance, and the woman will plant her eyes on me, like, what’s going on here? And I will slowly draw out of my pocket some sort of spark plug. Well and good; the trap has been sprung, and the fish is in my net!

July 1935

One of the principal sources of divergence of human paths is the matter of preference for either skinny or plump women. I propose we reserve alleys in public gardens for quiet strolling, with two-seat benches distributed two meters away from each other; furthermore, thick bushes should be planted between the benches so that those sitting at one bench are not able to see what is happening at another. On these quiet pathways, the following rules must be enforced:
1. Entrance is forbidden to children, both alone and accompanied by a parent.
2. All noise and loud conversation are strictly prohibited.
3. Only one woman may take a seat next to a man, and only one man next to a woman.
4. If the person seated on a bench is resting their hand or some sort of other object on the free seat, you may not join them. Alleys should also be reserved for walking in solitude, with metal armchairs for single people. Between the armchairs, bushes. Entry is forbidden to children; noise and loud conversation are prohibited.
— —
As a rule, pretty women do not stroll around in gardens.

September 28, 1935

One personage, wringing her hands in sorrow, was saying, “What I need is an interest toward life, and not at all money. I am seeking enhancement, not advancement. I need a husband, and not a rich man but a true talent, the director Meyerhold!”

The Sensual Woodsman

When in the distance flashed saws
And the axes had started ringing,
My girlfriends all became dearer.
I’m in love with them ever since.

Oh, girlfriends, my dear girlfriends,
So pleasant to sense you with my hands!
You’re all so smooth! All so solid!
One more wonderful than the next!

It’s so pleasant to touch your breasts,
Brush my lips the length of your legs.
Oh, help me people, dear people.
Oh, help me God, my dear God!

August 24, 1938

From An Obstacle (August 12, 1940) Previously published in Narrative Magazine (free registration required)

Pronin said, “You have very pretty stockings.”
Irina Mazer said, “So you like my stockings?”
Pronin said, “Oh, yes. Very much.” And he ran his hand down her leg....

From A Lecture (1940)

Pushkov said:
“A woman is the lathe of love.”
And he immediately got punched in the face....

From “The Power of...”

Faol continued: “Take, for example, love. It may be for better or for worse. On the one hand, it is written: you must love . . . but on the other hand, it is said: do not spoil . . . Perhaps it is better not to love after all? But it says: you must love. But if you do love, you will spoil. What to do? Perhaps go ahead and love but in some other way? But then why is it that in all languages, the same word is used to designate both this and the other love? So, this one artist loved his mother and this one plump young girl. And he loved them each differently. He handed over to the girl the larger part of his salary. The mother often starved while the girl ate and drank for three people. The artist’s mother slept in the hallway on the floor, and the girl had at her disposal two very adequate rooms. The girl had four coats and the mother just one. And so, the artist took from his mother her one coat and had it altered into a skirt for the girl. So that, in all respects, the artist spoiled the girl but his own mother he didn’t spoil, but loved her with a pure love. However, he did fear his mother’s death, but the death of the girlfriend he feared not, and when his mother died, the artist cried, and when the girlfriend fell out of a window and also died, the artist didn’t cry but found himself another girlfriend. And so it seems that a mother is prized as one of a kind, as though she were a rare stamp that cannot be replaced with another....”

September 29, 1940

You can read the rest of this powerful late "fiction" in the selection of seven prose pieces I had previously published in International Quarterly.

∞

Daniil Kharms’s second wife, Marina Malich's (Durnovo) memoirs were recorded and published by the literary historian Vladimir Glotser in his book Moi Muzh Daniil Kharms (My Husband Daniil Kharms; available only in Russian).

From the Notebooks. May 26 [1938]

Marina stays in bed all day in a foul mood. I love her so very much, but how harrowing it is to be married.
I am tormented by my “sex.” For weeks, and sometimes months, I have not known a woman.
1. There is one purpose to every human life: immortality.
1a. There is one purpose to every human life: achieving immortality.
2. One pursues immortality by continuing his bloodline, another by accomplishing great mortal deeds in order to immortalize one’s name. And only the third leads a righteous and holy life in order to achieve immortality as life eternal.
3. A man has but two interests: the mundane— food, drink, warmth, women, and rest; and the celestial— immortality.
4. All that is earthly is a confirmation of death.
5. There is one straight line upon which all that is mortal lies. And only that which is not plotted on this axis may serve as confirmation of eternity.
6. And for this reason man seeks a deviation from this earthly road and considers it beautiful or brilliant.

And, last but not least:

From Symphony No. 2

...Well, to hell with him. I will tell you about Anna Ignatievna instead.
But to tell you about Anna Ignatievna isn’t so simple. First of all, I know practically nothing about her and, second of all, I just fell off the stool and forgot what I was about to say. Better I tell you about myself.
I am tall in height, not stupid, dress colorfully and with taste, don’t drink, don’t patronize the horses, but do like the ladies. And the ladies do not avoid me. In fact, they love it when I accompany them. Seraphima Izmailovna has invited me time and again over to her place, and Zinaida Yakovlevna also told me that she is always happy to see me. And with Marina Petrovna I had this amusing episode, which is the one I want to tell you about. The episode is really quite ordinary, but still very amusing, because Marina Petrovna turned, owing to me, entirely bald, like the palm of your hand. It happened this way: I came over to Marina Petrovna’s and she “boom!” and turned completely bald. That’s it.

June 9– 11, 1941

Surrealist Comforts [by Anna Maria Hong]

Over the last few days, I have been thinking about poetry as a source of consolation in the face of devastating circumstances, thinking again of our friends, loved ones, and fellow poets in France—and of an earlier generation of French poets, the Surrealists, who knew a great deal about mass violence, displacement, and senseless suffering, having lived through the First and Second World Wars in Europe.

I love the Surrealists for many reasons including their emphasis on collaborative processes of making poetry and art, gathering together nightly in Paris to play verbal and visual games of chance that often yielded startling rich results, and for their attempt to achieve states of mind in which “life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions,” as their leonine poet-manifestoist André Breton, declared.

I like that the movement was founded and led by a poet but encompassed many painters and sculptors, and that it was international. Most of all, I like the language of Surrealist works, which fluidly incorporates strangeness into the everyday in a way that makes sense to me. I like the bleak humor and wit and the defiant activation of levity to puncture despair. There is much to loathe as well about the Surrealists with their embracing of violence, casual sexism, Eurocentrism, and misogyny, but when I read the poems, what I like is the working from and toward a place where destruction, sorrow, and fear can become something manageable, with the pain of experience still foregrounded.

Everyone who turns to poetry for consolation has a different idea of what a comforting poem looks like, and naturally what one seeks depends on the situation, but since the oughts, I have often turned to poems in this mode for a little pick-me-up, that feeling of nicely startled recognition as in oh, yes, of course, that’s how it is. Why didn’t I see that before?

My favorite of the French Surrealist poets is Max Jacob, who grew up in Quimper in Celtic Brittany and died in a Nazi concentration camp in 1944. His life story is nearly unbearably sad, though his prose poems will always make me smile.

Here are two poems by Jacob, the first translated by Andrei Codrescu and the second translated by Armand Schwerner. 

The Wallpaper of Mr. R.K.

The ceiling of hell was fastened with thick gold nails. Up above was the earth. Hell is all fountains, big, luminous and twisted. For the earth there is a little slope: a field of wheat cut smoothly and a small sky in onion rinds through which passes a cavalcade of mad dwarves. On each side there is a pine forest and an aloe forest. You are now appearing, Miss Suzanne, before a revolutionary court for having found a white hair among your many black ones. 

Miracles Real Miracles

Nice, old priest! After he’d left us we saw him fly over the lake, just like a bat, his thoughts absorbing him, not even understanding that this flight was a miracle. His cassock, the hem of his cassock is wet! That amazes him. 

And here are two poems by contemporary American poets. I’m not sure if they would consider themselves surrealist or not, but I feel the influence of the surreal uncanny in their poems, which I have long admired. The first is by Larissa Szporluk from her collection The Wind, Master Cherry, The Wind published by Alice James Books. 

               Hippocampus

A bell is gonged,
the body of a girl
curled up inside it,

a town grown wild,
dogs sniffing skyward—
gong, gong. 

They listen all night
for the girl to fall,
her stomach to growl,

or is it a foot
in a mindless gallop,
snorts of delight 

as the gods take up
the virgin-offer,
or is it a weird 

and beautiful gargle,
the lovemaking sound
of a deep-sea diver

The next poem by the poet and translator Don Mee Choi speaks to the aftermath of the Second World War and the Korean War in Asia, as well as other large forces of history and American poetry, including a phrase from Dickinson (Emily). The poem is from her collection The Morning News Is Exciting published by Action Books.

from Twin Flower, Master, Emily

4 Dear Master,

I do! Autogeography, I do! Deeply lobed, in defiance of pretentious form, I push a petal from my Gown. An orator, born from jets, never met a translator. Orator, map out a wasteland between the front and the Chinese border. Such is—neocoloniality. I do! Autotranslation, I do! History can confront napalm. Sister’s madness is as good as mine. We make the biggest picture in the world. Shallow and spiked, nodding in air, we endure barbed wire. Daisy Cutter can touch us, cut us, demolish our petals. Our gown can stain like a drape. Translator for hire! Hire me. See you at the DMZ!

Yours, Twin Flower

Blues #4 [by Cleis Abeni]

It’s one thing to suggest the opposite of what you mean—classic verbal irony.

But, what if two different statements suggesting the opposite of their meaning follow each other in tandem.

Then, what if these statements were followed by others whose subtle meanings were deliberately scrambled.

And, further still, what if the entire scenario—the overall meaning itself—runs counter to what the statements suggest.

Well, this complex experience represents one of the most powerful formal characteristics of the blues.

I call this, “ironic juxtaposition” and it is one of three formal attributes that I discuss today.

Ironic Juxtaposition

The prototypical irony of the blues is that dejection is not only dejection, but something else: it could be rage, vindictiveness, or hope. The blues dramatize this root irony within their subtly clashing statements.

Let’s examine a 1951 song called “The Thrill Is Gone” by Roy Hawkins and Rick Darnell made famous by the iconic blues musician, B. B. King, as an example of ironic juxtaposition.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by Roland Godefroy, 1989, public domain

King’s work has been fresh on my mind because he died this summer.

Hawkins was himself an incredible black blues musician and his original version of the song is as much a revelation as King’s rendition.

And don't get me started on Aretha Franklin's 1970 version!

Take in mind that many versions of the lyrics and score of this song exist because each blues person adapts it for her or his own purposes. But the essential ironic juxtapositions remain.

After the first repeating statements, you’d think that the “The Thrill Is Gone” is a simplistic lament that only shares sadness.

Yet, as the statements progress, we gradually learn that the song is a rebuke of a malevolent lover who wronged the singer and, even more than a rebuke, the song threatens the beloved, suggesting that rather than the singer only being dejected and lonely for losing the beloved, the beloved will instead be sorry for the loss.

These subtle ironies keep commingling and soon, by the time we get to the song’s final lines, which often convey something to the effect of “I’m free from your spell,” we realize that the lament is, in fact, an acknowledgement that the thrill is very much alive: the wonder comes in the singer being rid of the beloved and living to testify about it.

Thus, the song itself is an anthem masquerading as a lament—a terrific form of situational irony.

Midway through Franklin's version, the chorus is sung by backup singers who splice into the song the great civil rights anthem rooted in the spirituals, "Free, free at last, thank God almighty I'm free at last!" 

Franklins' interpolation becomes the pinnacle of ironic juxtaposition for me among all the adaptations of this song.

Fractious Allusion

Even in the late 1980s, I was telling folks in my life that the music and poetry of the blues and jazz constitute Modernism just as much as the poems of extremely well-documented virulently racist poets who we are often taught heralded Modernism like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. For an in depth exploration of T. S. Eliot's awful cultural bigotry, I highly suggest reading Anthony Julius' T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form, and even though Allen Ginsberg "forgave" him, and many apologize for him, Pound's bigotry was appalling.

In middle school, high school, and college poetry classes, youth are often taught that these problematic individuals are the kings of Modern poetry. Yet, so much of the time, black blues and jazz traditions are excluded from the annals of Modern poetry and that has bothered me since I too was taught a version of "high Modernism" that consistently left out home-grown black American folk artistry.

One of the most fabled hallmarks of poetic Modernism is the complexity of allusion to prior elite literary texts within "great modern poems." These allusions are said to represent the highest forms of greatness and the public must unlock the key to these references with arduous study.

But high modern poems by white men like Eliot, Pound, and Hart Crane are not the only sophisticated artistry that weaves allusion. The blues frequently depend on complex allusions to black cultural life, and, without exaggeration, these allusions require just as much penetrating study as those within poems like "The Waste Land."

I called this hallmark "fractious allusion" because, in fact, one of the enormous impediments to understanding the intelligence of the blues is their contemptuous over-simplification, and this dismissal is bread in an undervaluing of the very lives referenced in the work. That's why I took the time to say that the blues are a kind of Black Lives Matter movement this week.

If you did not understand the allusion of "free, free at last" in Aretha Franklin's rendition of "The Thrill Is Gone" then your understanding of the formal ingenuity of the work is seriously compromised. 

Yet, these allusions within the blues are fractious because they also raise issues of access, power, and privilege. Many of the allusions in the blues point tropes of low-to-no income black life, including lots of inside references to popular figures and social traditions spawned within rural and urban jookin' joints, speakeasies, and nightclubs. These references are often invisibilized by a mainstream public that may only encounter very limited, watered down or white-washed versions of these figures and traditions in the most commercialized popular songs and music videos.

Improvisation As Composition

This last hallmark is simply expressed: composing is improvising in the blues, and ongoing structuring and invention is endemic to blues form. (This contention—that improvisation is composition—is examined in relation to black vernacular dancing in this essay.)

Next up: I close with a discussion of a blues lyric by Bessie Smith.

Blues #3 [by Cleis Abeni]

Ever heard the stereotype that blacks in the United States talk too loudly at movie theaters? Needless to say, blacks aren’t the only folks to shout out phrases at the cinema like, “Don’t go in there, fool!” as one wonderful man hollered during a moment in an easily forgettable scary movie that I watched around Halloween last year.

Yet, these provocative participatory moments encode a terrific hallmark that I would like to highlight and, while these moments may annoy some people—yes, the very same people who become surreptitiously alarmed by even the sight of a group of blacks in public or who become fearful by just the sight of a lone black man around them when walking in the city—these moments indicate a remarkable formal hallmark of the blues.

Provocative participation is the first of six elements of blues form that I discuss today and tomorrow. Take in mind that, as with most artistry rooted in the centuries-old folkways of enslaved Africans and their descendants in the African Diaspora, there is no separation between sound, language, and movement in the blues. These spheres interpenetrate even while the blues manifest differently on the page, on the stage, in song, in oratory, and in dance. For definitional context, visit the Internet’s many encyclopedic entries to learn about the basic history of the blues’ origins in the rural American South and its adaption of spirituals, field hollering, work songs, and ballads by enslaved Africans and their descendants.

Often when devotees explain hallmarks of artistic forms rooted in the African Diaspora, respondents say comments like these: “But European music uses antiphony all the time!” or “But all music matters not just the blues!” Mind you: deflection is a kind of bias. Indeed, many artistic forms engage the hallmarks discussed here. This fact does not obscure the particular ways that the blues configure these formal characteristics or the specific manner in which the blues matters within the cultures through which it proliferates.

And one final caveat: discussing general hallmarks should in no way suggest that the blues are not diverse. On the contrary, these general characteristics are always varied and contested throughout centuries of development. But, that I and others can point to these formal traits indicates the cultural strength and distinctiveness of the blues.

Provocative Participation

Like the man who shouted out in the movie theater last year, the blues contain a variety of provocative participation that is more than static call-and-response. My students within the jazz dance and music class at the semi-rural university (mentioned in yesterday's entry) often heard the refrains within the blues as inert, meaningless restatements. Inviting them to see beyond this assumption and understand repeated phrases from a different cross-cultural perspective was often challenging.

Repeated phrases in the blues provoke a both tense (strained) and intense (excited) relationship with the previously established theme. This provocation can be insinuation, rebuke, or alarm—as if the repetition elevates the concern implicit in the preceding statement. Polite, high bourgeoisie cultures sometimes demand quiet acquiesce: don’t participate, don’t react, don’t protest, and don’t be too provocative. Not so with the blues.

In the blues, repetition provokes reassessment, redirection, or even critiques of prior statements in a way that enlivens a conversation. Repetitions also strike out against the suggestion that the original statement may not have been entirely or rightly heard or understood. That may be why repetitions in the blues are so often coupled with improvised riffs in the form of vamped interrogations, nods (recognizing or affirming phrases), invectives (snippets of curses), and invocations (parts of prayers) like “I’m tellin’ you,” “Sure enough,” "What you say?" "Night and day!" "Have mercy,” “Y’all hear me?” or “Amen!”

These refrains also set up the ironic twist in the closing line of grouping of phrases. On the page, the AAB rhyme scheme of three-line blues stanzas organize this set-up. This set-up creates the effect of the entire group of phrases turning in on one another. When understood as a whole, the phrases reveal unexpected shifts in meaning that are best expressed through cascading provocative participation—like many voices calling out at the screen in a cinema.

The second line in this three-lined blues stanza by yours truly performs the basics of this provocative participation:

She swears her feet are daggers & her body ain’t free
I tell you, she swears her feet are daggers & her body ain’t free
Have mercy, she sure feels vicious when she walks over me

Counterfactual Progression

A blues scale—a pentatonic scale—-runs counter to the traditional scale of European-descended music—or the diatonic scale. A blues note is sung or played in a bent way, with a nonstandard pitch, or a slurred, melismatic style. The counterfactual progression of the blues scale and the blues note comprise the bedrock of jazz, rock, R&B, and most of the way popular music is composed and performed, however cursorily.

Here is a seven-note blues scale in C sung by yours truly (and I will be the first to admit that I was never a “great” entertainer, just a good study and a serviceable performer, so don’t expect a miracle within this quickly prepared recording by a very exhausted night creature):

A rough indication of a blues scale

Compare this blues scale to the traditional do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-do scale sung by Julie Andrews in the Rodgers and Hammerstein song "Do-Re-Mi" from the musical and film The Sound of Music.

Shifting Vocality

One of the effects of provocative participation in the blues is that we are not always certain who is speaking to whom. Further still, we become uncertain as to whether the speaker is a unitary lyric voice, two voices contending against each other, or a chorus. Often these tensions rise in the blues quickly from one line to the next, creating a sense of heightened, ongoing dissociation. Refrains steady this shifting vocality, providing landmarks within the shifting voices. Later in the week when I talk about Bessie Smith’s blues song, “Gimmie A Pigfoot,” I hope to illustrate this formal attribute.

Tomorrow I will discuss three other formal hallmarks:

• Ironic Juxtaposition
• Fractious Allusion
• Improvisation As Composition.

 

 

Blues #2 [by Cleis Abeni]

Today, I share key overarching ideological truths about the blues. To begin, let me journey back to a time many years ago when I taught jazz dance and music (as well as writing) for a year at a large semi-rural Midwestern public university. On the first day of the class at the start of the year I asked my students to bring pictures to class for the next session of what they thought the blues represented. Most of my students were white, middle class young men and women. The largest group of students of color were Asian-descended and Latina (six, if memory serves). Two blacks were in the class. Demographically, the students represented what many Americans think of when they invoke “the mainstream.” 

Almost all of the students' pictures depicted an older black man placidly strumming a guitar like the image below (this photograph by Jean-Luc Ourlin from 2005 depicts the great blues musician John Lee Hooker and it is in the public domain): 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And about a fourth of the students' images depicted a white parody group called the Blues Brothers, which was created by the comedians Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi as part of a musical sketch on Saturday Night Live in 1976 (this publicity still of the comedians appears here under fair use guidelines):

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I asked the students to articulate the thinking behind their selections, and I encouraged them to word-associate (to write down individual words or short phrases) if they could not quite put their thoughts into complete sentences. I stressed that no one’s thoughts were wrong because all of their images are part of our perceptions of the blues. Rather than discounting their representations, my goal was to affirm them, study them, and expand on them with deeper and more trenchant reflection.

I still have my notes from my lesson plans. Most of the students wrote words like “sad,” or phrases like “down in the dumps.” Some wrote “cool” or “funny” and a few wrote “SNL,” referring to the late night TV show where the Blues Brothers group was created. One person wrote “old black guys singing about being sad” and another wrote “black slaves singing when they feel sad.”

During our discussion, the students elaborated on their articulations and soon they acknowledged that, overwhelmingly, their assumptions about the blues were that it was a tradition represented by either old black men who sing slow, mournful, downbeat songs about their sadness while playing the guitar or cool, hip, middle aged white men with dark sunglasses and black suits who sing funny, upbeat songs that parody the sadness of the old black men.

At one point in our discussions, two students debated the ways that each scenario suggested a kind of melancholic yet entertaining passivity, a willful sense of dejection (whether actual or ironized) and an inert experience of the easily-dismissed downtrodden. One of the students likened the downtrodden people that came to his mind when he thought of the blues to the homeless panhandlers that he saw in Chicago who ask for money when they busk around the entrances of public transportation. This student even said, at one point, that he first heard the blues from just such a panhandler and when another student laughed and jocularly asked if the student gave the homeless panhandler money, the student replied “no,” because the man smelled like alcohol and he feared that the man would just use the money to buy more alcohol.

Over the course of the first unit of the class, along with sharing the history of the blues’ origination and proliferation and learning a few blues, ragtime, and jazz dances and songs (and I will selectively share a little of this history soon this week), I tried to expand and redirect the students’ assumptions while also acknowledging that those assumptions are rooted in subjective versions of the truth (just as my own witness here is a subjective version of the truth). There is indeed sadness in the struggles of the blues and the blues have indeed been seemingly endlessly coopted by whites to the point where they are often considered to be a kind of inconsequential cliché of outdated black melancholia.

Yet, I continually found myself pushing back against the notion that the blues are a washed-up American cliché, an outmoded endeavor of diminished black personhood. So engrained was this assumption that my students found it hard to accept that the blues, as I argued, contain the ingenious hallmarks of high Modernism; that they are the transformation of melancholic stories of disadvantage into enactments of bawdy, sly resistance; that however mournful the music and lyrics may sound, they are about bearing active, ebullient witness to struggle; and that personal disclosure of the struggles and joys of folk life become political witness when shared to a world that often refuses to care about the particular lives of marginalized people.

These arguments were as difficult for some of my students to embrace as my other contention: that the blues were represented by just as many women as men, and just as many LGBT people as heterosexuals and cisgender (or non-transgender) people. This contention is borne out by the evidence of the lives of pioneers like Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Lucy Hicks Anderson (1886-1954), a black trans woman who helped run a network of underground Midwestern and Southern bordellos with other entrepreneurs like Ruby Taylor that showcased the most ribald blues and R&B entertainers. But, at the same time, the outspoken bawdy nature of the blues did not seem foreign to the students who discussed their constant exposure to rock and rap songs and dances, which seemed to be far racier. I was so glad  that the students weren't alarmed by the blues' insistent, frank examination of sex, death, illicit practices, and the recreational consumption of substances.

After the class was over I found myself journaling about my experience. So deep was that journaling that I often return to reflecting on these arguments every year. Key to my arguments is the truth that the blues are personal and the personal is political.

For me, along with black Americans’ sorrow songs (the so-called “spirituals”), the blues constitute the original artistic wing of a centuries-old Black Lives Matter movement in America expressed in musical and poetic form. In fact, one way of understanding the current Black Lives Matter movement is to see it as part of a long tradition of radical action that seeks to draw attention to the truth that the personal is political.

Within the blues, the personal is political because there are some people whose life experiences are devalued or vulgarized: their stories are not considered with the same wealth as others. At its worse, this devaluing leads to unjust violence, incarceration, and maiming, and at its least it leads to chronic disrespect, neglect, hostility, and contempt. Yes: that’s the blues.

The blues often make people uncomfortable in a similar way as the Black Lives Matter movement makes some people immediately deflect from black people’s experiences (failing to embrace and confront such experiences directly) in favor of saying, “all lives matter” in a dismissive hope that expression of black disenfranchisement will just go away.

Sadly, just talking openly about marginalization, just singing the blues, just ironizing struggle, just creating platforms for resistance--just doing any of these things makes some people uncomfortable despite the fact that most Americans are suffering gravely with high rates of income inequality, terrible access to quality healthcare, vicious patterns of violence, frequently polarizing contact with governmental services, and all manner of disenfranchisement. 

Disenfranchisement rests on a seemingly banal notion. This banal, false notion goes like this: “The life experiences of the most marginalized have no real relevance to the powerful or the favored.” This is a false notion because, invariably, the marginalized often do the under-acknowledged work that makes it possible for the powerful to be favored. The television shows that screen daily stories of marginalization and pathology literally depend on those stories for their wealth. Thus, in this false, banal notion, unless there is a proverbial riot, marginalized experiences can be ignored at the very same time that they are consumed and commodified. So deeply held is this notion that it infects both the powerful and the marginalized alike. Yes, those who are marginalized try to ignore the forces that constitute their own suffering just as much as the powerful ignore those same forces.

But, the blues puts it all out there right in our eyes and ears. The terms by which the marginalized and the powerful operate are wildly different: the marginalized are often apathetic or acquiescent just to survive because resources, opportunities, and capacities for action are so deeply limited and even actively constrained. But, for the powerful, there is little excuse for apathy in the face of suffering when possessed with outsize power and privilege: resources, status, opportunity, wealth, and access.

Most of all, the blues dispel the highfalutin, sidity, upper bourgeois, religious anxiety of the “confessional” bred within European-descended cultures--with all the trappings of shame and repression that are still dominant within “polite” societies--since Augustine wrote the Confessions around 400 AD. Rather than confessing, the blues provocatively testify and bear witness without the guilt, without shame.

These are the ideological truths of the blues. 

Blues #1 [by Cleis Abeni]

Like most poets, I understand the world in forms. In this multipart essay, I hone in on the form that most typifies my understanding of the world. That form is the blues.

A brilliant, complex, multifaceted network of musical and poetic structures, the blues are black Americans' gift to the country that enslaved us or our ancestors and that often continues to deny many of us economic, racial, and gender justice. Given the form's often under-recognized proliferation within many country's contemporary music and rhetoric, the blues are one of black Americans' greatest and most intelligent gifts to the world. At the same time that the blues chronicle everyday struggles, they also describe resilience, ingenuity, and a remarkable capacity to slyly bend circumstances for the better, critique problems, and structure elements with winsome intricacy.

I remember when I first heard the blues. For a brief time when she was a teenager, my mother moonlighted as a chorus girl and a wardrobe attendant on “Black Broadway,” as the singer Pearl Bailey called it, a section of Washington, D.C. around U Street where Duke Ellington was raised and where the Howard Theatre and the Lincoln Theatre still sit. I did not learn about this part of my mother’s hidden history until the months before she died when she explained many things to me, including why she pushed some of her children into the entertainment business (she was trying to capture her lost dreams). From her involvement in entertainment, my mother knew scores of performers, producers, managers, agents, poets, and musicians. One of these was a black Native American jazz musician and smalltime D.C. impresario named Cherokee Honi. Ms. Honi’s Logan Circle house was filled from floor to ceiling with memorabilia and knick knacks from black music history: records, costumes, programs, and instruments. When my mother went to visit, Ms. Honi always had music on her old record player.

The first time I accompanied my mother to a visit to Ms. Honi’s house was around the bicentennial year in the 1970s. As soon as I entered I heard a song that Ms. Honi was playing on the record player. I marveled at its almost hieroglyphic, bawdy jauntiness. When I inquired what the music was, Ms. Honi replied, “Oh, honey, that’s the blues!”

Turns out that the song was a 1933 blues lyric by the incredible black husband-and-wife blues team of Wesley Wilson (aka Kid Wilson, Sox Wilson or Socks Wilson) and Coot Grant made popular by the equally brilliant black blues singer Bessie Smith called "Gimme a Pigfoot (And a Bottle of Beer)." 

Click here to listen to the original November 24, 1933 recording of the song.

This blues lyric exemplifies the formal hallmarks that I will reflect on later in this essay. Before we examine the lyric itself, let's discuss the writers, composers, and the entertainer who made the song popular. Coot Grant and Kid Wilson. Much has been written about Bessie Smith, a sensational musician, so bear with me while I focus on less well-known persons.

Grant was a woefully now-overlooked, pioneering blues entertainer whose artistry overlapped with the older Ma Rainey (a giant herself of the blues) and presaged Bessie Smith's invention. Grant and Wilson wrote over 400 songs together, toured all over the world (including Africa), and their composing and performing form a much-neglected bedrock of the urban turn in the blues. The duo's compositions and their versatility as songwriters, poets, and musicians touched the lives of countless entertainers in vaudeville during the Harlem Renaissance, and they recorded with giants like Louis Armstrong and Fletcher Henderson.

At their height, during the same year that they composed "Gimmie a Pigfoot," Wilson and Grant appeared together in Paul Robeson's 1933 film The Emperor Jones. Alas, sexism within the industry frequently gave Kid Wilson top billing in their stage performances.

You can examine surviving memorabilia like programs and posters to track how these entertainers were billed and read accounts of their artistry in the press that documented vaudeville to understand how they were promoted and valued within their times. That's the historical sleuthing that leads ethnographic journalists like me to claim sexism, and I don't use such words lightly.

After 1948, from press reports, we know only that she retired due to ill health while her husband continued to perform and compose songs throughout the 1950s. I record this history here because I want readers to understand the collective creation within blues. Each song, each poem, each dance is the work of multiple creators and only emphasizing Bessie Smith's interpretation of Grant and Wilson's song would tell little of the story.

 

Coot Grant (left) and Wesley "Kid" Wilson (right at the piano)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now, let's encounter the language in full:

Up in Harlem every Saturday night
When the highbrows get together it's just so right
They all congregate at an all night hop
And what they do is Oo Bop Bee Dap
Oh Hannah Brown from way cross town
Gets full of coin and starts breaking 'em down
And at the break of day
You can hear ol' Hannah say
'Gimme a pigfoot and a bottle of beer.
Send me again.I don't care.
I feel just like I wanna clown.
Give the piano player a drink because he's bringing me down!
He's gotta rhyme, yeah!When he stomps his feet.
He sends me right off to sleep.
Check all your razors and your guns.
We gonna be arrested when the wagon comes.
I wanna pigfoot and a bottle of beer.
Send me cause I don't care.
Blame me cause I don't care.
Gimme a pigfoot and a bottle of beer.
Send me again, I don't care.
I feel just like I wanna clown.
Give the piano player a drink because he's bringing me down.
He's got rhyme, Yeah, when he stomps his feet.
He sends me right off to sleep.
Check all your razors and your guns.
Do the Shim-Sham Shimmy 'til the rising sun.
Give me a reaper and a gang of gin.
Play me cause I'm in my sin.
Blame me cause I'm full of gin.

 

How does this blues song exemplify six formal attributes endemic to the blues—provocative participation; counterfactual progression; shifting vocality; ironic juxtaposition; fractious allusion; ad improvisation as composition? Well, let me try to answer.

The pigs’ feet invoked in the title and refrain of this blues song invites provocative participation. Pigs' feet are a still-prevalent delicacy for many black Americans derived from rural Southern life. In the over 150 years since blacks were emancipated from enslavement, our foodways have come to represent stereotypes of deprivation. The accursed online “Urban Dictionary” (imprecated because it often sensationalizes the very same stereotypes that it exposes) defines pigs' feet as “a semi-offensive way for a white person to refer to a stereotypical black person, or to express just how stereotypically black a situation is.”

In fact, the deprivation symbolized by pigs' feet comes from the historical fact that often enslaved Africans and their descendants in the United States were consigned the worse possible foodstuffs. This bigoted, systemic tradition continues even today in predominately black rural and urban neighborhoods where grocery store chains refuse to open stores leaving black residents to rely on the cut-rate wares of bodegas and sundry shops or travel distances just to obtain quality, healthy food.

When I think of pigs’ feet I think of my tap dance classes with James “Buster” Brown when I was a kindergartener. He would teach us how to “pat Juba,” or hambone—a very old, black-created, enslavement-era musical and dance tradition often relied upon to teach child dancers and musicians how to coordinate hand claps with foot stomps (or upper body gestures with lower body actions). That's how I learned to pat juba—Dr. Brown, as everybody called my tap teacher, wanted us to coordinate and syncopate. Patting juba was made famous in the 19th century by a black transatlantic entertainer who I consider to be the grandfather of tap dance, William Henry Lane aka Master Juba (1825-1853), a man widely credited with all-but inventing the roots of tap dance and, through his tours in North American and the United Kingdom, spreading the ingenuity of African-descended, black-adapted vernacular dancing. The first verse of the centuries-old traditional lyrics that accompany patting juba (sometimes called “Juba This, Juba That”) go like this:

Juba dis and Juba dat,
and Juba killed da yellow cat,
You sift the meal and ya gimme the husk,
you bake the bread and ya gimme the crust,
you eat the meat and ya gimme the skin,
and that's the way,
my mama's troubles begin

The lyrics invoke a terrible lot: even though blacks made the cuisine (“sift the meal”) they were given the “husk”—the worse parts—and that's where "my mama's troubles begin." Pigs’ feet are not the prime cut of the pig, to say the least. Yet, when seasoned and pickled they acquire a taste made even more provocative by the history of oppression inscribed in their still lingering culinary existence.

For the singer of "Gimmie a Pigfoot" to say give it to me is, then, a very provocative act because it announces a bold preference for the very same thing that has been so complexly and symbolically repudiated and marginalized in the history of black life in the United States.

[continuing soon]

 

"Coming to America" — the Egyptian Version [by Yahia Lababidi]

I thought I was immune to culture shock. Attending American schools, K-12 (albeit in Kuwait and Egypt) meant I was familiar with the lingo. Even though I spoke some Arabic at home, I never formally studied it at school, which translated into reading, writing, and dreaming, in English. What’s more, I had gone to college in the United States - so I didn't really expect much of an adjustment period when, around ten years ago, I made the US my home.

But, my college years in (in Washington, DC) were a kind of reactionary blur, where I’d spent most of the time with my nose buried in a book, experimenting with things like philosophy and silent fasts instead of taking in the New World around me. Seasons came and passed without my noticing, and I would go back home anyway at the end of each semester. So, when I decided to move stateside I was, for all practical purposes, living in America for the first time - the same way they say that you never know someone till you live with them.

Thus, in spite of all my early Americanization, landing in Miami airport, in early 2006, I felt like an untitled and near penniless version of Eddie Murphy’s African prince character in the 1988 hit comedy, Coming to America. A series of cultural confusions during my first year of disorientation, featuring my then-college-crush and soon-to-become wife, convinced me I was still “off the boat” and that Project Integration was very much underway.

Coming to America, Eddie Murphy

Sure, America had changed, and I had too, since those college years (this was the tail end of the Bush Years, and pre-financial crisis) but somehow I had not wrapped my mind around the basics last time I was here: like the credit system. So, when Diana(my spouse-to-be) disclosed to me the amount of her mortgage ($115K) I was genuinely scandalized. After I candidly told her I thought such debt was criminal and she should do time for it, I gave her another piece of my overwhelmed mind. “In Egypt, we have a saying” I volunteered:  'extend your legs to the extent of your blanket.'  Meaning if your blanket/means are limited, no need to stretch/splurge.”  She heard me out, patiently, and brushed the whole thing off, assuring me I was over-reacting.

As a fledgling poet, I used to send out countless packets of my work to magazines across the country, like quivering arrows, in hopes a lucky few might hit their target. One day, Diana brought back an envelope to me. “You need to include the state and zipcode,” she said. “I did,” I replied. “No, you didn’t,” she continued matter-of-factly, “you just wrote Portland.” “Oh no,” I shot back, rather smugly. “I read that one very closely, my dear. It clearly stated either Portland or the zipcode; and the ‘or’ was even written in caps!”  Very slowly, as though addressing a small (dim-witted) child, she let me know that OR stood for Oregon.

Meantime, I was looking for work and without much success, when I came across what seemed like a plum position. I could hardly contain my excitement. “Dianaaa,” I nearly hyper-ventilated into the phone “come over, this instant, and check out this job!” She tumbled into the room, also breathless, like a happy puppy. “Where, where, let me see…”

“You’re going to need to sit down for this,” I warned, presenting her with the job description. As she scanned the form, I volunteered: “I know, I know, it’s a military job… But, I’m willing to swallow my principles [I’m a die-hard pacifist ] for a salary like that… I'll just sell my soul to the devil for a short period, in order to buy my long-term freedom.”

“What are you talking about?” she ventured, cautiously. “Keep reading, please.” I bounded across the room and pounced on the page, forefinger landing on the key paragraph: “There!” I exclaimed. “401K,” I mouthed it like a miracle. “Can you imagine, for an editorial job? I’ll do it for a couple years, then quit! Plus, they can keep that extra one thousand dollars…” She gave me a look - half incredulous, half pitying - then burst into a fit of uncontrollable laughter.

Author collage (shortly after arriving to Florida) with his wife, Diana C. Restrepo

 

*I was soon to learn, a 401(k) is a standard type of retirement savings account in the United States, and has absolutely nothing to do with my fantasies of fortune and early retirement.

I Will Not Surrender to History, and Other Promises [by Marty McConnell]

Something I have been wondering: would I give up my whiteness to be Black? The answer is yes, but Walter Scott would still be dead. Would I give up my whiteness to be Black? The answer is yes, but let’s not mistake it for sacrifice or pretend Walter Scott would not still be dead. I spend time in Black spaces, in Black family, amid Black love, I know Black genius and have known Black bodies and know just about nothing of what it is to be Black but I would be it, would surrender my whiteness to be it and Walter Scott would still be dead.

Something I have been wondering: what would happen if whiteness as we know it disappeared? What if whiteness carried on its broad pale back the unbearable weight of enslavement, of three-fifths, of Jim Crow and Tuskegee and the prison capitalist industry and the long and unqualified failure of Brown vs. the Board of Education? What then for my blue-eyed nephews, my pastel godson? Would Walter Scott still be dead? Would my father? My grandfathers? Theirs? In trees? Behind trucks? In fields? As experiments? On ships? In rebellion? Running away?

I can tell you I would not exist. My mother’s mother met my grandfather during the Great Depression; he was driving a boat and she was swimming off the family’s lake house pier. My mother met my father at a dance in the same lily-toned summer community. Remove skin privilege and the stories fall apart, my DNA a rope unraveling.

Make fate stronger than this, make them meet in bread lines or protest rallies and I exist, but who am I? Shift the locus of my birth, shift the solidity of my public schooling, shift the capacity of my parents to pay for college, shift the easy slip into employment, shift my safe white walk through everywhere – turn it all on its head, an inversion, and name me someone else. Because I am white, which is indivisible from privilege.

And what if tomorrow it all were different. If in an instant, skin became no indication of whom to kill or kidnap or fire or disdain or dismiss or enslave or arrest or detain or shrink from, clutching one’s expensive handbag on the subway. Would we find another marker for target, and construct a new national horror story on that? It would need to be visible, like skin. Be inherited, generationally unshakable. Who would be Walter Scott then, be Michael Brown, be Tamir Rice, be John Crawford, Mariam Carey, Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell, Alberta Spruil? Who’d be dead?

So much conjecture, and Walter Scott is still dead for nothing. Dead for nothing but his pure skin. And my father is alive, and my nephews and my godson being raised into good men. And my grandfathers died of old age and cancer and I can’t surrender or abandon or strip off this whiteness any more than I can bring back the dead.

But I can ask this question: what does it require for a human to be seen as human in any skin?

How many Coast Guard photos, how many sweet-faced senior pictures, how many Black boys leaning into their father’s good shoulders, how many hands up, how many face down, how many can’t breathe, how much footage of cops handcuffing newly dead humans do we need? These are bodies, living or once living. These are human, human, human bodies.

Billie Holiday on repeat, you know the song, the poplar tree, white bark, white branches, indivisible from its history, white like bones white like teeth and flags of surrender tied to branches and bayonets Walter Scott, I surrender. I am sorry. Michael Brown, I surrender. I am sorry. Ferguson, I surrender. I am sorry. Dear living dear living dear living, I can’t take the white from my body but here is my white mouth, here are my white hands. I will not surrender to history. I will speak. I will try to put them where there is need.

 

The Only Way to Stop the Ascot-Graspers, or: Unacknowledged Privilege Makes Poetry Matter Less [by Marty McConnell]

Given: We cannot write outside our time. We are invariably and inextricably in and of the times in which we live.

Given: The expansiveness with which we define “our times” and the ways in which we include the experiences of people other than/othered from ourselves in our work is variable and generally well within our conscious control.

Given: The practice of recognizing and including in our art the experiences of people marginalized or threatened in ways that are different from the ways that we ourselves are marginalized or threatened (if we are at all), is a personally, politically, and artistically risky act. The very real dangers of co-optation, appropriation, and/or reinforcing otherness are always present.

Given: We need to do it anyway.

The we I’m speaking of here, in particular, is we the privileged. Those of us with any combination of skin privilege, class privilege, gender privilege – that we.

And there lies a primary challenge: if there’s a we, there’s a they. And it feels dangerous to think in terms of us and them, because that way lies segregation and supremacist thinking -- it would be so much lovelier and rosier just to think and speak of a grand us, a human us.

But to do so is to deny the very real fact that groups of human beings, particularly in our United States, move through the world with vastly different threat types and threat levels, and some conversely with vastly different levels of protection and opportunity. And denying that in our art makes us liars, and contrary to some people’s belief, liars do not make great poets.

So if we’re going to tell the truth of our times in our poems, we need to recognize and examine our privileges and marginalizations, as well as our human connections and commonalities.

To be clear: this is not a call to “give voice to the voiceless” or any of that patronizing artist-as-savior business. People without or with less privilege have voices, make no mistake. Nobody needs us to speak for them.

This is, however, a call to dig deep into the personal and cultural histories that inform and platform and buttress our privilege, and expose those to the world’s bright eye. To examine the intersections between our privileged lives and the lives of those held outside that, particularly where those intersections do not cast us in flattering light. To practice the subtle and necessary balancing act that is speaking up and out in ways that expand the platform for other voices rather than usurping, speaking in place of, or silencing them.

Given: We’re going to fuck this up.

As long as we’re writing out of our own immediate, personal, experience, pretty much the worst we’re doing to do is write a bad poem. No harm, no foul. But the moment we step outside that, things get dangerous.

And well they should: nothing crucial is safe. And safety is a privilege denied to many. It is precisely because we could choose to write within the bubble of our privilege that we must step outside it.

How we do that is up to each of us, and is a topic for another blog. But for now, I’ll say this: all those ascot-grasping essays on “Can Poetry Matter” and “The Death of Art” will continue apace until the poetry that insists on speaking to and of its grimy, shameful and still sometimes tenaciously glorious time, insists on grappling with all the dark and needful complexities of our era, takes a solid, rightful and well-lit place center stage and cover page.

Communities of difference, communities of care [by tree turtle]

My posts this week on The Best American Poetry blog have all been about what it means to build writing communities of difference and writing communities of care. I am deeply grateful for this opportunity. Voices like my own (black, LGBT, Buddhist, and from working poor worlds) are underrepresented in mainstream literary venues. Tonight my friend and fellow author, Kathy Jones, taught me that I am not just a survivor, but an "overcomer" and reading and writing makes me so. 

The Best American Poetry community is an intentionally, regularly integrative and inclusive literary institution. Yet, elsewhere, despite notable efforts, we still write and read within very culturally and aesthetically segregated worlds. Not all of our institutions are consistently, demandingly polyvocal, polyvalent, multigenre, cross-style, and inclusive. Moreover, quiet as its kept and difficult as it may be to hear, some perform diverse representation on the surface (through fleeting, occasional tokenism) while seething with toxic power plays underneath that undermine the spirit of true inclusion.

And so, for my final blog post this week, I ask for your help on behalf of a friend who is a remarkable writer. Alexis H. Allen is an elder black Southern writer, an ordained minister, a teacher, and a survivor of domestic violence who is writing a book called In Pew Pain about alienation within spiritual communities. If the quotation from an excerpt from her book piques your interest, then will you please suggest publishing venues for either a longform essay adapted from her book or for the book itself? You may visit my website and email me at the address listed on the righthand side of the homepage. Or you can leave a comment at this post. Here's the excerpt (included here with her permission):

From In Pew Pain by Alexis H. Allen

It was 1980 in Fort Knox, Kentucky. I was living with my husband, a non-commissioned officer stationed at this military army base. I attended church services at one of the chapel. The service as called the “Fort Knox Gospel Hour.” Wednesday evening Bible Study at the chapel was a highlight of the week. I needed words of inspiration and “some church,” as we say colloquially, to give me a lift until Sunday.

That Wednesday I made certain that the house sparkled and that the best dinner possible was prepared. The family was served, everything was fine and there were no excuses for me to stay home. It was time to go to Bible Study. There were no problems until I started to leave out of the door. As I picked up my Bible and my purse, my husband grabbed me by the arm and quietly but harshly said, “If you go to that church, I am going to come there, drag you out and stomp a mud hole in your ass.”

As I drove off, I trembled so uncontrollably that it seemed that the steering wheel would be rattled from it’s place. My greatest fear was that someday my husband would carry out his threats, attack me unmercifully, or kill me and the children as he said he would.

The acts of domestic violence that occur inside the walls of faith communities are represented by staggering, terrifying statistics. The legendary Christian leader Chuck Colson (1931-2012) once said that, "Tragically, studies reveal that spousal abuse is just as common within the evangelical churches as anywhere else. This means that about 25 percent of Christian homes witness abuse of some kind."

I safely arrived at Bible Study that evening and sat on the front row of the church. I found it hard to concentrate on what was being taught. I saw the Pastor. He gestured for me to come. He asked, “Why are you crying, Sister Allen. It can’t be because of Bible Study.” I told him about the threat that my husband made. He responded with, “Get your purse and your Bible. Go home. Have you seen the size of his feet?”

I appreciate your advice for Alexis H. Allen, and I deeply appreciate your openness and acceptance of my writing at The Best American Poetry blog.

What good are our literary efforts if we are dead? [by tree turtle]

I taught myself to read as a toddler to be close to my momma. My momma loathed me. I was, as she described me, her "sissy child" or the "changeling." Any admiration she had, arose from guilt. She was more business manager, army general, and torturer than momma. Which was worse: her violence against me (verbal, physical, sexual) or the violence that she allowed others (including siblings and my theatrical manager) to exact on me? Still, strangely, I loved her. Most of all, I did not want her to be hurt. I would hide underneath her sewing machine under the castoff cloth when my father would beat her.

One time after he beat her through the window out onto the roof, I holed myself so far under the sewing machine that my hand got caught in what turned out to be a secret compartment where she kept two of her most treasured books: Heidi by Johanna Spyri and Imperial Woman by Pearl S. Buck. Both novels are about orphan girls. My grandmother (a ruthless prostitute and madam despite coverups told by some in my family) disowned my momma: my grandmomma placed my momma on a Pullman Porter's car on a train out of Philadelphia and shipped her to live at a private black children's orphanage in Washington, D.C. My momma's favorite novels (and I still have the exact copy of Imperial Woman today) told tales of brutal girlhood and womanhood about which she inimitably understood. By the time I was three, relying foremostly on those novels, I could read.

I was aided by a special ability: eidetic memory. Eidetic memory is the capacity to intensely recall phenomena only seconds or minutes after exposure. The ability actually decreases as a child moves into adulthood. The first book I ever held in my hands was a copy of the King James Version of the Bible. At church, I would hold it open and when the deacon read aloud the passages to which the preacher referred, I connected the text with the orality and remembered entire passages. That's how I came to learn almost all of the Psalms. A brother and I were briefly tutored by a religious couple named the Morgans. Mrs. Morgan was shocked to discover that I could already recite long Biblical passages from memory. She gave me thrift copies of "classic" books and poems to "test" my recall. At three I was also unusual in that I spoke in complete sentences. But, my speech went deeper. My eidetic memory empowered my structural recognition of language. I wanted to know how it all ticked. I began to understand the language that I recalled as vocabularies set within sentences.

My goal was to learn vocabularies and glean the mechanics of sentences. I taught myself vocabularies using the Britannica encyclopedias and thick bound dictionaries in my home. My immediate family was poor, violent, and lacking in college education, but they were intensely literate, especially in Christian texts. I began to understand the weight of simple, independent subject-verb declarative statements when I honed in on Psalm 23: "The Lord is my shepherd. He leads me in paths of righteousness. I will fear no evil. I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever." I reached a milestone when I was able to differentiate between the present tense of "The Lord is my shepherd" and the future tense of "I will fear no evil."

I recognized verb tense by figuring out the intelligibly within the preacher's reference to Psalm 23: the Lord's care of us meant that, in the future, we would be blessed without fear and homelessness. I connected meaning with recalled oral images, and recalled oral images with texts. By the time I tackled Heidi and Imperial Woman, I knew vocabularies and sentences. I then proceeded to move beyond the basics of declarative, imperative, interrogative, and exclamatory states from the Bible into a style of expression that seemed limited in that Christian text: descriptive expression. At their best, whether nonfiction or fiction, stories thrive on vivid narrative description. The Bible's religiosity seemed governed by a different order--less storytelling and more rumination, exaltation, questioning, imprecation, vituperation, invigilation, and praise.

Then, just after turning three, I began journaling. I used pieces of paper torn from the legal pads on which my momma wrote out monthly bills, organized chores, and kept track of her menses. My first instinct was to document the systematic burning done to me by a sibling so that I could show my pediatrician, Dr. Margaret Mary Nicholson, a piece of paper that described the atrocities in lieu of speech. My momma beat me and made me swear never to utter what my elder brother was doing to me or anything else in our family. Writing seemed a means to express my struggle without disobeying my momma's commands.

As you may know full well by now, I was no ordinary toddler, and I felt very close to death. I thought that there may surely come a time when my momma or any family member might actually kill me. So I was very conscious of mitigating my behaviors so as not to cross them while still exercising my own will. My eidetic memory posed a threat to my momma. She warned me repeatedly that if I told what I remembered (with the enormous precision and depth that it came to me) that I would be responsible for the break up of my family. "You could go to an orphanage," my momma threatened. "Or we could be homeless." All of these horrors did indeed befall me: soon I would be removed from my mother's care and placed in foster facilities. Soon I would be homeless. Our family would indeed be broken up and it is a testament to my good mental health as a person today that I have moved beyond the castigating guilt that I once felt for simply telling the truth about the violence. 

And then it came to pass that my momma discovered my journals. She also discovered that I had been removing, reading and then returning her novels to the secret compartment in her sewing machine. She dragged me into the upstairs hallway by the bathroom and struck me again and again in my face. Then she handed the novels to me and told me to go downstairs and put them on the bookcase shelf in the den because they were obviously no longer a secret. I stood at the top of the steps, collecting myself before descending. She berated me for taking too long at the top of the staircase. Then, with a tap on my back, she pushed me. I tumbled down the steps like a rag doll. I knew I had injured my head as soon as I hit the bottom step. This was the first of a series of concussions that I endured through violence over the course of my childhood. My momma lied to Dr. Nicholson about the true source of my injury from that day. She lied about most of my injuries. As a toddler, I taught myself how to read and write. But at that moment, at the bottom of the steps, I began to cloak my reading and hide my writing. What good were my literary efforts if I was dead?

When the flesh is husk, does the spirit speak? [by tree turtle]

Are the dead still with us? When the flesh is husk, does the spirit speak? Can a love be everlasting? Can a hurt be overlong? After a predator dies, are his crimes still wrong? When the nightclub closes, do the splintering floors still dance? How many balls are just memory? How many illnesses took lives? I've heard hundreds of eulogies, yet I am not wise. What survives? Why bereft? Spirit-speaking? Spirit-listening? Smoldering ash? Life-theft?

And you, dear Eriq, are you with me? Do you still commentate at spirit-balls? Do you remember the time when we were five years old at Aunt Jackie's house when we first met Mr. Yardley, the predatory man who became our theatrical manager? We were not siblings, but we bled the same blood. AIDS covered you in blisters. You raged through your last hours. "But," you cried through fevers, "I thought I was resistant." Then death was a hiss. Years ago, Mr. Yardley told his new child charges arraigned that day at Aunt Jackie's: the only role that we would truly play as child entertainers was the part of a child. We learned to be cherubic: to smile with our eyes, with our teeth, with our cheeks pinched and puffed. What kind of death attends an abused child who plays innocent for money? What did it mean to perform childhood yet never be a child? Now that you are spirit, Eriq, are you finally a child?

And you, dear Jimmy, are you with me? Do you still dance at the spirit-Show Palace in a ghost-Times Square? Do you still run your hands across your litheness, lick your teeth, blink your eyes, cooing, "Everybody wishes they could have this puertorriqueño skin, this puertorriqueño hair." You were Apollo when you burlesque-danced at the Show Palace, and I was just the nightshift domestic who cleaned the wall-to-wall mirrors (and an occasional fill-in dancer, shockingly homely, weak in gathering tips). Do you remember the night you hauled me to Jerome Avenue in the Bronx while you scored Gutter Glitter from your supplier? I told you that I would never, ever let anyone put me in danger like that again. You replied, eyes dancing with Zip: "If not for Baysay, I would love you." Does the deathplace have Weasel Dust and Bubble Gum and Brooklyn Pearl and DC-Dust? Nothing was free, right? After I asked to crash at your tiny sublet and told you I had no money, you still demanded I write a poem for you each day. Of course, I complied. "Life is about something for something," was what you would say. So, then, what is death? And do you still read Apollo poems in the sprit-night?

And you too, Woody, the standout former Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company dancer. Long legs, terrific ballon, alert mind, warm-hearted, off stage and on: a black crane, a swan in human lace. We met at the Paradise Garage. I was sitting in the corner on the floor and you urged me to dance. Then you took me to the round-walled Better Days on West 49th and the cramped Buttermilk Bottom on Franklin Street. And when you came to D.C., we went to the Bachelor's Mill where the cunning catch dates in their fists. And just before you started teaching as a dance professor in Texas, we talk on the phone and you sigh: "What's fame, what's money, what's life without love?" And, oh, you adored the metaphysical poets and house music and gospel songs and soft-spokeness and warm ocean waves. In the 80s, your favorite group was Ten City--you let me listen to their song "Devotion" on your Sony Walkman. "Don't come to Texas, baby," you told me when you were dying, "I don't want you to see me like this. I'm so weak." Are they still singing, "I wanna give you devotion?" Or, "When you're short on cash/I've got your length/when you're weak/I'll be your strength"?

It is well, it is well with our soul [by tree turtle]

Serious writers must sometimes explain that writing is not a hobby, not a leisure pursuit, and not a luxury. Rather, it is the most essential practice of our lives. Audre Lorde said it best: "Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," one of my dearest former poetry students said to me many years ago. "But what do you really mean when you say that writing is not a luxury?" It was just a few weeks after the beginning of my poetry class. He could not understand the notion that some serious writers' very survival depends on writing. It all seemed like romantic claptrap: for him, writing was a luxurious choice, not an austere calling. He was a wealthy white student at a small, private liberal arts college who had always dreamed of being a famous, award-winning, bestselling writer. But, as he shared on the first day of class when we all introduced ourselves, if he did not achieve his ambition, he was going to be okay because he could rely on being comfortable. Then he said, "After all, writing is just something that I do on the side."

During a conference in the middle of the semester, he told me that he did not know what he was going to do after the first week of my class because he had never had a black teacher before, much less an LGBT Buddhist teacher. I affirmed my former student that day in our conference and I affirmed him every other day throughout our rapport in the years to come. (And I have received his permission to write about him with the understanding that I not reveal his name.) His honesty was one of many starting places for true learning between us. True learning is frequently uncomfortable: we must break to reveal. If you think that I was in the slightest bit upset with him for his honesty, then you may need to read my thoughts about bias. In fact, he was doing everything right: he was trying to work-through the influence of his upbringing as he came to terms with my searing, discomfiting poetry lessons.

I sensed that he was covering up pain. The tragedies of my own life helped me to see a darkness engulfing him, a darkness so encompassing that he could not fathom its encroachment upon him. I suspected that my former student was a drug addict a month after meeting him. Unlike most teachers at the school, I have lived through the harshness of the streets and I know its struggles. I have never been an addict. But, some of my dearest friends have struggled with addiction. My office at the time was on the far, backside of the campus in a dorm. When I was working late, I would often see him when he was high: stumbling, nodding with a glazed, deadened gaze and an ashen pallor about his skin.

One day his drug supplier came on to campus to drop off a shipment. Yes, along with being an addict, he was a dealer. I saw them conversing furtively behind the dining hall as I made my way to the bus stop late at night to go home: the white young man of privilege and the black young man of disadvantage connecting through drugs. Then they both turned to look at me, the black LGBT Buddhist teacher from the working poor world of the streets and I broke the spell of their secret, painful rapport by calling out, "Be safe! I'll see you in class next week!"

Soon my former student's substance abuse and drug dealing came to the attention of the authorities at school. An incident occurred about which I still do not know the details. He stopped coming to class. It would not be long before his problems would force him leave the school. But, while he did not formally complete my poetry class, he continued his education with me.

One night I received a call from him at 3 a.m. in the morning. "Please," he weeped, "Come help me. I think I am in Druid Hill Park. I don't know where to turn." Without hesitation, I hopped on a bus and then walked past the abandoned buildings and trash strewn thoroughfare to the cross streets where he said that I would find him huddled under a street light. He was shivering. He seemed to have lost some of his clothes. He wore only one shoe. I gave him my jacket. "Aren't we going to hop a cab?" he asked and I told him, "Absolutely not. We are going to catch a bus." As long as I did not alert his parents or the school, he agreed to let me help him.

He fell asleep on the bus without asking where we were going. It was only when we arrived at a 7 a.m. meeting of Narcotics Anonymous that he understood my designs. I lived blocks away from the venue where that early morning Narcotics Anonymous meeting took place. When I walked to the bus stop in the mornings, I passed by the meeting folk lingering outside, smoking cigarettes. That morning after the meeting, over breakfast at the Paper Moon diner in Baltimore, I suggested that it was time for him to rewrite his life. And so began my former students' true writing education.

Five years later, the poems started coming: vital, brutal, brilliant poems about being a rich kid on Woo-Woo (heroin laced marijuana smoked in a cigarette), Belushi (heroin laced with cocaine), and Cheese (heroin laced with cold medicine). He once told me, "I'm an asshole." I then encouraged him to "write like an asshole until you come to a place in your life when you can cover up your behind."

Ten years later, I am pleased to say that he has rewritten his life and, whatever happens, he has the tools to keep doing so. His very life depends on writing. I told my former student who is now my friend that I was blogging this week and I wanted to feature one of his poems to introduce his artistry to the world. At first he agreed, but then, just before midnight, he called to say that he was not ready. Instead, he suggested that I link to an old hymn called "It Is Well With My Soul" that I once sang to him over the phone five years ago that begins: "When peace, like a river, attendeth my way,/When sorrows like sea billows roll;/Whatever my lot, Thou has taught me to say,/It is well, it is well, with my soul."