On the (Writer's) Block: Fear

I can't go on. I'll go on. Samuel Beckett



As Joan Acocella pointed out in an article in The New Yorker, Writers Block in some ways began with Coleridge in the early 1800s, and developed into a wide spread disease in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. The romantic image of the Suffering Artist, struggling to reconnect with The Muse flourished. It didn't hurt that many American writers of the early 20th Century -- Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, etc -- were also prodigious drinkers (Tom Dardis' excellent The Thirsty Muse recounts some of their stories). There's nothing like being blotto to keep The Muse away, and destroy whatever artistic discipline they may have had. Interestingly, James Baldwin, not known for shying away from a good party, apparently also used to get up and write every morning, no matter what carousing he'd done the night before, and hungover guests would be awakened to the sound of him banging away on his typewriter.

I admire the dedication and work ethic of writers like Anthony Trollope who wrote a set number of words everyday before going to work in the post office, or Joyce Carol Oates, who can apparently write a novel while most of us are taking a shower and eating breakfast, or even Harry Potter's Mom, J. K Rowling, writing the seven title series at approximately 2 1/4 years per book. Me? I'm not mad at 'em, but, let's face it, I tend to be pretty lazy.

But I've been thinking about this subject, not so much because I'm blocked -- MY tendency is to do everything BUT write, rather than not being able to do so: I need to put in more Butt in Chair time -- but because it comes up from time to time whenever writers or artists get together. As always, I'm haunted by quotes: Samuel R. Delany's comment that "Not writing can be as much of a habit as writing" and Audre Lorde's command to her students to "Forget 'The Muse.' There is NO MUSE! You just sit down and work."

I wonder too, how much of our blockage (or my own hesitations) are based on Fear. Fear of failure, fear that we are exposing too much of ourselves in our work, even with names changed to protect the innocent and the guilty. Even a fear of success: I've often said to people who have hesitated before applying for positions or grants and the like, "What's the worst thing that could happen? You'll get it and then you'll be forced to do the work!" (Amazing how much easier it is to tell someone something than to do it yourself, huh?:)

And there is that very large fear that the work is not "just right" or "perfect." Waiting for it to be perfect, or working on something until it is 'Perfect' can be a huge stumbling block. I'm not referring to being slapdash or shoddy, what I mean is, to take a personal example, is literally changing just one word in a story at least ten times before thinking it worth while to be sent out. Perhaps I was channeling Flaubert!


John Shannon and Becky Schreiber of Schreiber Shannon Associates (link to their old website, soon to be updated) closed out the 2007 Maryland Library Leadership Institute with the following quote from Marianne Williamson. Parts of this I'd heard before, but it remains incredibly powerful, and resonates very, very deeply with me:



Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

Marianne Williamson from A Return To Love: Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles

So: What am I hiding by avoiding work? What 'old tapes' are playing in my head telling me I'm not worthy which stop me from writing, which hold me back from being my best? Interesting questions....

Eyes on Texas: The Redbone Press Revue

It's gonna be hot (and not just because the weatherman is calling for a weekend in the 90's!)


THE REDBONE REVUE: A READING OF BLACK LGBT WRITERS!
Sponsored by ALLGO

When: Friday, July 20, 2007
Time: Reading – 8:00 p.m. / Dance – 11:00 p.m.
Where: The Historic Victory Grill [1104 East 11th Street – Austin, TX 78702]
Cost: Donations Accepted!
Contact: Lorenzo Herrera y Lozano – (512) 472-2001 / lorenzo@allgo.org

For the first time ever, Austin will bear witness to a gathering of some of the most prolific LGBT Black writers in the country, the RedBone Revue. Hailing from across the United States, RedBone Press authors include: New York-based Samiya Bashir, Austin-based sharon bridgforth, Los Angeles-based Ernest Hardy, Baltimore-based Reginald Harris, New York-based G. Winston James, Austin-based Ana-Maurine Lara, D.C.-based Lisa C. Moore, and Oakland-based Marvin K. White.

A dance will immediately follow the performance with a live DJ spinning Hip Hop, R&B, Salsa, Merengue, Reggae and Reggaetón. So come prepared to experience a one-of-a-kind evening of artistic breadth and non-stop dancing until 2:00 a.m.

CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION ON THE ARTISTS!

Melvin Harris 1903-2007

(with Melvin in Annapolis, Thanksgiving 2005)

It's difficult for me to even begin to think about all the things I could say about my 'Uncle Melvin.' First off, to make it easier on myself and others I've been referring to him as my grandfather for a number of years. This is not accurate. He was, in fact, my grandfather's uncle-in-law, and married to my great aunt (i.e. my great grandfather's sister), Edna Harris. The explication of this blood tie, however, doesn't really do him justice because he and Edna were my main 'parents,' raising me here in Baltimore from when I was three years old. "Grandfather" while not to-the-letter true, comes closest to the mark. "Father" has some level of accuracy as well.

I would joke sometimes that underneath his somewhat gruff exterior -- a friend from high school still recalls the rough-voiced grilling he got from Melvin on the phone the first time my friend called our house -- was an equally gruff interior. Because under that, the man was a real pushover. In his later years his edges smoothed somewhat, so most people knew his softer side -- although he still had a tendency to ask you questions that made you uncertain if he was concerned or just wanted to get in your business.

To the end he looked to be in his 80's, perhaps 90. He always credited his religious faith for this (Heathen that I am, I feel moved to add that it's not clear how much credit for his being 'well preserved' should also go to his occasional shots of 100 proof Old Grand Dad as well). He managed to live on his own very well up to last fall, cooking his own meals, traveling on senior citizen bus trips to Atlantic City (where he'd spend his $10 in quarters, walk the boardwalk, eat at a buffet, and be ready to return home), complain about the Orioles and the Ravens. His wife of over 50 years, Edna, died a few years ago (at age 102), and he had a '90-something' girlfriend, whom he would talk to on the phone once or twice a day between their visits to each other's senior apartments. Many of the women in his building would cook for him: later after his move to a nursing facility where his great granddaughter works, all the women on staff there fell in love with him as well, calling him 'Pop Pop.' One of the last big events in Melvin's life was to meet his infant great great grandchild. He held her for a while, then both decided to take a little nap together.

Melvin decided to wait until after age 100 to become 'famous': he was part of an article on "Hack" cab drivers in the Baltimore City Paper; feted by the Pennsylvania Avenue Branch of the Pratt Library during their "Salute to The Avenue" for his reminiscences of that once bustling entertainment hub (I still remember him calling Billie Holiday, "That girl who used to live around the corner"!); appeared in a film on Baltimore Past and Present directed by teen members of the Wide Angle Youth Media program
; and, this past March, cut the ribbon to open Maryland General Hospital's Acute Care for the Elderly (ACE) Unit.



Melvin slipped away very quietly last Friday, July 6, 2007. The women at the FutureCare facility where he'd been living since February said they had gone in to check on him early that morning and he said he was fine. When they went back into the room, they thought he'd just drifted off to sleep. And so he had. Although 'expected' his loss was still a surprise for all of us. He seemed perfectly capable of going on and on forever

I cannot repeat Robert Hayden's famous lines from "Those Winter Sundays" here -- many of us were able to thank Melvin for all he had done and meant to us over the course of his many years. For that I am grateful. Things got a little tense around the time I came out to him in the '80s (some friends even questioned why I would do that, since people his age 'Wouldn't Understand'). Years later, as he became more comfortable with who I am, he told me that he considered my life-partner to be like 'another grandson' to him. I nearly cried.

I am also grateful to have grown up around someone from the Old School, even if I did hate it when I was younger, as well as someone who so easily navigated between the "Saturday night social and the Sunday morning service," to borrow a phrase from Albert Murray's Stomping the Blues, listening to jazz and pop on Saturday night (with a set up of scotch, braunschwager, Limburger cheese and crackers), then listening to gospel or going to church Sunday morning. This was the range of Life, and neither contradicted or canceled the other out. Quite obviously my continuing love of all forms of music comes in large part from him.

My sister sent this along after hearing of Melvin's passing:

Reggie,

When you called me this morning with the news regarding Uncle Melvin all I could do was smile. There is a feeling of peace and calmness that fills my heart when I think of his transition to the future.

He enjoyed GOOD MUSIC, GOOD FOOD, GOOD COMPANY, GOOD HUMOR, GOOD LIQUOR, AND GOOD WOMEN..........Uncle Melvin LIVED!
He truly shared his life with all of us and gave us "little pearls of wisdom" just when we needed them. Whether we thought so or not!

Uncle Melvin was the only person I know or will ever know in my lifetime with a total re-call from memory every street and intersection (including the Beltways) of the City of Baltimore. He took with him the grid to the City of Baltimore.. and I mean how it was back in the day and how it is today! I know this for a fact because I called him one day when I was downtown trying to find the Maryland Board of Nursing office that is located out near Baltimore County somewhere. I called "Unc", told him where I was, where I needed to be and he talked me through the city all the way out to where I needed to be.

I am humbled and honored to have known a man such as Uncle Melvin. My life has been enriched so much having known him. I thank God for the Father, Uncle, Griot, Confidante, and Friend. I will carry in my heart through eternity.

God has allowed me to hold court with a King and be in the presence of Royalty in my lifetime.

Marva.

A wake for Melvin Harris will be held on Thursday, July 12, 2007 from 4-8 pm at Miller's Metropolitan Chapel, 1639 N Broadway, Baltimore Maryland (410-327-2777)

Services will be held Friday, July 13, 2007, (wake at 10:30 am, funeral at 11 am) at Macedonia Baptist Church, 718 W. Lafayette Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland (410-669-5776). After the service, we'll be traveling to Annapolis to place Melvin next to Edna.

*****

Here's a 'Melvin poem' from 10 Tongues which I last read at the American Library Association Convention's Many Voices One Nation reading in Washington DC this past June:


The Reading

Words remain a mystery to him,
forced to turn from one-room school-

house to fields after Grade 8.
Words came from preachers,

God, some unseen
somewhere else.

And now this boy
approaching middle age,

reading him a poem
about the past:

the years of bouncing vans
across the South,

eating in the back of restaurants,
pissing in the woods,

sleeping in the truck or with strangers
while the white owner settled into a hotel;

the taxi driver playing ferryman
for others across the city,

called first Colored, then Negro, then
Black (he hated that),

now African-American -
(We are a People of Color he still insists);

the ones who never tipped,
the whites who called out Nigger from the window,

then turned and said, Oh,
I don't mean you;

the women gone:
mother lost to madness,

first wife lost to madness,
second wife consumed

by old age uncomfortably
like madness;

gone:
son in California,

daughters dead, grandchildren
seeds scattered on a shifting breeze.

One alone is left,
not even his blood,

her kin, dropped
on them like Isaac

on Abraham and Sarah past the age
when both could think of flowering,

one who returns
with increased infrequency,

to talk, cook,
watch a ball game,

half-listen to his stories,
the cast them later into lines upon a page -

for all his book learning
dumbstruck before the wisdom of this man

called illiterate
behind his back.

The voice reading quivers,
stops.

You write that?
A nod and shrug,

a whispered Yes. Pages fold
with a sound like cracking eggshells.

He nods and clears his throat.
Read another one, he says.

Carrying On

I am very pleased to be part of this project. It is our first attempt at a bibliography like this (so be kind!:) -- the next edition should be even better. At only $10 each, it's a real steal -- Get 'em while they're hot!

Carry the Word: A Bibliography of Black LGBTQ Books is a seminal reference work, featuring over 600 titles by and about black Same-Gender-Loving (SGL) and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer-identified (LGBTQ) writers and culture, as well as interviews and articles about black SGL authors.

A must-have for booksellers, librarians, academics, community-based organizations, book clubs and readers interested in black LGBTQ books and authors, all proceeds from sales of Carry the Word will benefit Fire & Ink, Inc., supporter and advocate for SGL writers of African descent. Carry the Word is co-published by Vintage Entity Press and RedBone Press.

Steven Fullwood and Lisa Moore talk about Carry the Word on GayRadio.com

Purchase the book (PayPal via Vintage Entity Press)

Dancin' Dancin' Dancin'!

The aspect of 'civilization' that is most hostile to festivity is not capitalism or industrialism - both of which are fairly recent innovations - but social hierarchy, which is far more ancient. When one class, or ethnic group or gender, rules over a population of subordinates, it comes to fear the empowering rituals of the subordinates as a threat to civil order...Ecstatic rituals still build group cohesion, but when they build it among subordinates - peasants, slaves, women, colonized people - the elite calls out the troops.

Barbara Ehrenreich -- Dancing in the Streets

I purposefully took a copy of writer Barbara Ehrenreich's new book, Dancing in the Streets, along when The Other Half and I went on a recent visit to Chicago, because I knew I would see its subject in action. In addition to catching up with friends and visiting a city we enjoy but had not visited in at least five years, the Other Half and I also went to attend the festivities surrounding the International Mr. Leather contest(Link NSFW) in general, and the Old School Dance hosted by the black leathermen’s group, Onyx, on Saturday night in particular.

Subtitled "A History of Collective Joy," Eherenreich’s book, looks at how Western cultures at first enjoyed large group celebrations, and their eventual suppression by forces both religious and economic. Although we see some outbursts of this kind of thing from time to time -- Carnival for example, especially in Brazil (and pre-Katrina New Orleans) and Junkanoo in The Bahamas -- it is a rare thing for those of us in the ‘civilized world’ to let our hair down and dance, frolic, play, with two or three hundred, or a thousand strangers, who by the force of the revels suddenly turn into our closest friends.

This Eherenreich feels is a shame, and possibly psychologically damaging. She notes the interesting correlation between the ‘birth of melancholy’ (what we now call depression) in Europe and the end of the feast days, saints days, and other group rituals brought on by various puritanical sects during the Reformation and afterwards. Now it seems that only at sporting events, football in the US, soccer (football) in the UK and elsewhere around the world, or large rock concerts, does that same level of group ecstasy reappear. And even in the world of sports, where collective actions both bad (‘Hooliganism’) and banal (remember The Wave?) have sprung up organically, with the rise in ticket prices and the continued rise in ticket prices ($25 - $65 for our woe-filled Orioles, unless you want to sit in the nosebleed section) and introduction pricey sky boxes geared more for corporate schmoozing than for watching a game, this outlet too appears to be endangered.

(Oddly enough, not long after coming back, I woke up to the sound of my partner watching clips of the tribute to Freddy Mercury on You-Tube. Watching a stadium filled with fans screaming and clapping in unison to “Find me somebody to love” – now that’s ecstasy.)

I’ve experienced such bursts of collective joy a number of times, and usually on a dance floor, surrounded by happy party goers, heartbeat taken over by the driving pulse of a wicked bass line. The only times I regularly see glimpses of Dr. King's 'Beloved Community' is on a dance floor.

Although Eherenrich makes only passing mention of it, gay men have developed a series of events of group ecstasy (in more ways than one), the much maligned Circuit Party. Although I’m not a White Party in Miami kind of guy, I have been to Montreal's amazing festival, DiversCite, where thousands of people gather around four stages erected in the streets at the edge of the city's "Gay Village" to dance and bounce to a range of musics.

While not an official ‘circuit party’ IML it does boast one of the grand dances of the year, the annual Onyx Men of Color Old School Dance Party on Saturday night. Dark, crowded, loud -- glorious -- it is always one of the highlights of the weekend, and M and I have a great time. Mid-way through the party we were surrounded by a room full of men (and some women) in various forms of (un) dress or costume/drag/fetish gear dancing, cheering, and pumping their fists in the air as the DJ spun a sampled Dr Martin Luther King Jrs. "I have a Dream" speech into a dance mix set to a throbbing house beat. ‘Free at last, free at last’ he said, as we chanted along, hands in the air, filled with what can only be woefully described as pure joy.

Did things get a touch...Excessive? Sure. All our friends ask us for salacious details from the event when we returned. A grin and the phrase, "What happens at IML stays at IML," is our standard response....We did see a couple of people that were far too high – one seemed to have his engines racing all weekend, so it was hard to tell whether he was naturally hyper or medically enhanced. One couple ran afoul of Palmer House hotel security, and, we believe, were escorted off the premises, as rumors of their having sex on the outdoor fire escape swirled around them. At least one ‘how much can you **** in one weekend?’ porn film was rumored to be filmed during the event. The gay porn industry also held an awards event during the same weekend, so various ‘stars’ were to be seen everywhere from dance floors to breakfast spots. And why is it that it’s never the people you want to see exposing themselves who invariably are wearing the least? But overall, the event was a model of, well, joy, and friendliness, along with more than a little playful erotic showing out. Backs were rubbed, butts were grabbed, nipples were pinched -- and these were just ways strangers would say 'hello' to each other....

The weekend (and Ehrenreich) also reinforced something that appears in David Nimmons' The Soul Beneath the Skin: The Unseen Hearts and Habits of Gay Men -- how amazing it is for thousands of men to gather and there be no fights, no shootings, and no violence. With all the alcohol (and drugs) available and flowing, with all the pumped up gym boys (did someone say steroids...I mean ‘supplements?’) if this were a straight crowd there would have been some kind of shoving, pushing, punching going on (sorry hetero friends, but you know it’s true). Shade was thrown, not punches. All acts involving fists were consensual. An old joke but perhaps true: gay men it seems really would rather F*** than fight.

And this is something we do all the time: as we were dancing with the leather boys in Chicago, Washington DC hosted its annual black gay pride, and there was a similar event in San Juan that same weekend. No one seems to notice or even mention when thousands of (gay, bi, lesbian, and transgendered) people of color gather peacefully. A few (usually straight, I'm sorry to say) black knuckelheads run amok, however, and it's a national emergency.

Have we perhaps hit on something? An ‘escape valve’ for our selves and our culture? I’m not sure: the LGBTQ community has a lot of problems, and Nimmons himself admits to glossing over the problem of drug use in his discussion of The Circuit. However I noted with interest that the protesters surrounding the recent G8 Summit ended their work with a free outdoor rock concert and dancing. And this Saturday 7.07.07, the Live Earth concerts hope to raise awareness surrounding issues of global warming and the environment. I always did like the quote attributed to 19th and early 20th Century anarchist Emma Goldman, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to join your revolution.”

Memorial Day 2007

Remembering, with particular thoughts of the men and women now buried in Section 60 of Arlington National Cemetary



Facing It
from Dien Cai Dau by Yusef Komunyakaa


My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn't,
dammit: No tears.
I'm stone. I'm flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night
slanted against morning. I turn
this way--the stone lets me go.
I turn that way--I'm inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
I see the booby trap's white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman's blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet's image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I'm a window.
He's lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman's trying to erase names:
No, she's brushing a boy's hair.




A clip from composer William Grant Still's In Memoriam: The Colored Soldiers Who Died for Democracy

RFK Redux

Many thanks to the usually poetry-oriented Great American Pinup Blog for bringing this speech back. Would that we could bring Bobby back as well

Robert Kennedy from a speech delivered to the Cleveland City Club on April 5, 1968 one day after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated...


Mr Chairmen, Ladies And Gentlemen

This is a time of shame and sorrow. It is not a day for politics. I have saved this one opportunity, my only event of today, to speak briefly to you about the mindless menace of violence in America which again stains our land and every one of our lives.

It is not the concern of any one race. The victims of the violence are black and white, rich and poor, young and old, famous and unknown. They are, most important of all, human beings whom other human beings loved and needed. No one - no matter where he lives or what he does - can be certain who will suffer from some senseless act of bloodshed. And yet it goes on and on and on in this country of ours.

Why? What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No martyr's cause has ever been stilled by an assassin's bullet.

No wrongs have ever been righted by riots and civil disorders. A sniper is only a coward, not a hero; and an uncontrolled, uncontrollable mob is only the voice of madness, not the voice of reason.

Whenever any American's life is taken by another American unnecessarily - whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of the law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence - whenever we tear at the fabric of the life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded.

"Among free men," said Abraham Lincoln, "there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and those who take such appeal are sure to lost their cause and pay the costs."

Yet we seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilization alike. We calmly accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far-off lands. We glorify killing on movie and television screens and call it entertainment. We make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire whatever weapons and ammunition they desire.

Too often we honor swagger and bluster and wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others. Some Americans who preach non-violence abroad fail to practice it here at home. Some who accuse others of inciting riots have by their own conduct invited them.

Some look for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear: violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.

For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is the slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter.

This is the breaking of a man's spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among other men. And this too afflicts us all.

I have not come here to propose a set of specific remedies nor is there a single set. For a broad and adequate outline we know what must be done. When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies, to be met not with cooperation but with conquest; to be subjugated and mastered.

We learn, at the last, to look at our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community; men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear, only a common desire to retreat from each other, only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force. For all this, there are no final answers.

Yet we know what we must do. It is to achieve true justice among our fellow citizens. The question is not what programs we should seek to enact. The question is whether we can find in our own midst and in our own hearts that leadership of humane purpose that will recognize the terrible truths of our existence.

We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of others. We must admit in ourselves that our own children's future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred or revenge.

Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land. Of course we cannot vanquish it with a program, nor with a resolution.

But we can perhaps remember, if only for a time, that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short moment of life; that they seek, as do we, nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and in happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can.

Surely, this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something. Surely, we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men, and surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our own hearts brothers and countrymen once again.

You call yourself ...what?

I think I have come not to a certain wisdom but perhaps to a certain sense. I think of myself as a writer. What does being a writer mean to me? It means simply being true to my imagination. When I write something, I think of it not as being factually true (mere fact is a web of circumstances and accidents), but as being true to something deeper. When I write a story, I write it because somehow I believe in it - not as one believe in mere history, but rather as one believes in a dream or in an idea.

Jorge Luis Borges, "A Poet's Creed" from This Craft of Verse.





I recently had the pleasure of teaching a workshop at Coppin State University, and one of the students in the class asked me a question. I answered it, but I’m not entirely sure I gave her quite the response she was looking for. The young lady’s question was:

“What makes you a poet?”

Now, this is what I think she meant (and the question I did not answer then): I think she meant, how come our teacher has brought YOU in here and said, “HE is a poet?” Is it because you have a book? Because you’ve been published in journals? By virtue of going to workshops? Winning awards and recognition from teachers and academics? How come you get to call yourself a poet?

I partially answered this question by saying I tend NOT to call myself a poet, although I do write poetry. If pressed, I call myself a writer, because I write in a number of genres, and also because ‘Poet’ does function for me as a kind of title, as something that one gets bestowed upon them (although I’m not entirely sure who would do this form of anointing or granting of knighthood/ ‘poet-hood’).

There are a number of people, particularly but not exclusively, on the spoken word circuit that call themselves poets, or have ‘Da Poet’ in their stage names. Teens and young adults fill notebooks with writing and rhymes, and consider themselves poets. Kinko’s, desktop publishing software, and on-line printing services has enabled anyone to put out a book or chapbook, enabling the world to consider themselves poets.

I suppose part of what separates the wheat from the chaff as it were is consistency, determination, stick-to-it-tive-ness, moxie, and doing the work, actually writing, and being serious about your work (if not necessarily about yourself) that allows you to self-declare. Having the work published in different venues, awards and accolades, mention by instructors may be considered the outward signs of that seriousness, the attention you pay to your craft, to the art. But I think all of us who write know of others whose work we admire who have difficulty getting published or the recognition they deserve. Yet we consider them fellow poets.

The answer I gave, which, as I said I’m not sure satisfied my young interlocutor, was that being a poet is as much a mindset as anything else. If prose writers love sentences, or the paragraph, poets love words. The texture of certain words, what happens when they are placed next to other words – even what happens if you reverse the order of how those words are placed together – these are the things that excite me into poetry. Since I do write in different forms, it a poem occurs as opposed to an idea for a story or article, depending on the aura of the event, image, or phrase that I encounter. Some images to me declare themselves immediately to be poems, others as stories, still others as something that demands further exploration and explication. And yes, there are others that could ignite the desire to use all these modes to explore them.

Poetry is something that happens internally, something that has occurred on a particular rung of the DNA ladder, that moves someone to cast specific words into lines across a page. Poetry is as much a way of seeing the world, a mindset that causes you to have certain visions of the universe and how to express those visions to others, as it is a matter of what someone calls you, how many awards you win, how many teachers bring you into their classrooms to stand in front of their students and declaim, and assist them in their own explorations.

I ended by quoting something Harryette Mullen said when asked to define poetry (and reminded the students that she meant this in all its connotations): “Poetry is words playing with each other.”

...or are you just glad to see me?

In honor of New York's 'Poem in Your Pocket Day' today, a poem by Pulitzer Prize Winner Natasha Trethewey, from her book Native Guard











South

Homo sapiens is the only species to suffer psychological exile. -- E. O. Wilson


I returned to a stand of pines,
bone-thin phalanx

flanking the roadside, tangle
of understory - a dialectic of dark

and light - and magnolias blossoming
like afterthought: each flower

a surrender, white flags draped
among the branches. I returned

to land's end, the swath of coast
clear cut and buried in sand:

mangrove, live oak, gulfweed
razed and replaced by thin palms -

palmettos - symbols of victory
or defiance, over and over

marking this vanquished land. I returned
to a field of cotton, hallowed ground -

as slave legend goes -- each boll
holding the ghosts of generations:

those who measured their days
by the heft of sacks and lengths

of rows, whose sweat flecked the cotton plants
still sewn into our clothes.

I returned to a country battlefield
where colored troops fought and died -

Port Hudson where their black bodies swelled
and blackened beneath the sun - unburied

until earth's green sheet pulled over them,
unmarked by any headstones.

Where the roads, buildings, and monuments
are named to honor the Confederacy,

where that old flag still hangs, I return
to Mississippi, state that made a crime

of me - mulatto, half-breed - native
in my native land, this place they'll bury me.

Native Guard:
Poems by Natasha Trethewey

Exits and Returns

One of the things I learned, the easiest of lessons, was that the better you do your job, often going against conventional mores, the less popular you are likely to be. (So, if you seek popularity, this is probably not the profession for you.) . . . .

There are a few things I would like to pass on to you as I come near to the end of my career.

One: It's not about fame. By and large, the more famous you are, the less of a journalist you are. Besides, fame does not last. At its best, it is about being paid to learn. For fifty years, I have been paid to go out and ask questions. What a great privilege to be a free reporter in a free society, to be someone whose job is a search for knowledge. What a rare chance to grow as a person. . . .


Nor for that matter, is it about prizes or awards, although these are very nice...Rather, the richness of the profession – and it has been an uncommonly rich life for me – has been in the wonderful collegial friendships I have, many from those Civil Rights and Vietnam Days, right through to the present, the friendship of so many people who care passionately about what kind of a country we are.

When I was young, I wanted to be a witness to important events. That’s one of the reasons I went to the South in the beginning. What I got was a great ticket to sit in on history, far better than I could ever have imagined, and above all, a life where I was never bored...

I want to leave you today with one bit of advice: never, never, never, let them intimidate you. People are always going to try in all kinds of ways. Sheriffs, generals, presidents of universities, presidents of countries, secretaries of defense. Don't let them do it. . . .

Never let them intimidate you. Never. If someone tries, do me a favor and work just a little harder on your story. Do two or three more interviews. Make your story a little better.

David Halberstam, Speech to the Columbia School of Journalism, 18 May 2005:


Again, the bitter sweeness of life: Days after the death of the great journalist David Halberstam, Bill Moyers returned to PBS with the resurrection of Bill Moyer's Journal.

The first show was like a bucket of cold water thrown in the face of those 'Beltway Guys,' the entrenched Washington press corps, delving into how they all seemed to miss the falsehoods and evasions of President Bush's justifications for war in Iraq (the video of the show, "Buying the War," and a transcript are on line). The show pointed out how, in the wake of 9/11, the press like the rest of the nation fell into almost blind patriotism and did not look deeply into the claims the administration was making about Iraq and Saddam Hussein. Later, most reporters seemed content to buy what the White House was selling, without questioning the sources or checking facts. Some -- particularly CNN -- seemed more afraid of being called non-patriotic by (and losing ratings points to) Fox News than they were interested in doing basics of reportage. It was a sad, but illuminating, report, and one I hope journalism schools make all their students watch.

My partner and I are ardent Moyers fans, starting back with his glorious talks with Joseph Campbel, through his time on Now, and the recent 'On Faith and Reason' episodes. So we're in Televised heaven right now, and looking forward to his next reports.




In memoriam, I close with some sharp, on target comments by David Halberstam on the state of the press today from Glenn Greenwald's blog on Salon.com

Those to whom the most is given, the executives of our three networks, have steadily moved away from their greatest responsibilities, which is using their news departments to tell the American people complicated truths, not only about their own country, but about the world around us. . . .

What I think is happening is something extremely serious,nothing less than a change in the value system in a very important part of the news business.

At the core of the old value system was a belief on the part of the men and women who worked in journalism that this was an uncommonly privileged life, that we did not do this for the money -- almost all of us could have made a great deal more money in some other field, but we were uncommonly privileged, free men and free women working for a free press in a free society, beneficiaries of exalted constitutional freedoms, willing, if need be on occasion, to report to the nation things which it did not necessarily want to hear.

What has changed is not the talent and idealism and passion of the journalists out there, but the value system which governs the way they work, and finally what gets in the paper or on the air. . . .

A number of things stand out in the change of values which has come about in the last decade or so. Because of its growing power and influence and because of the ever-greater competition, not just network against network, but network against cable show, the television executive producers have redefined what constitutes news -- often going for stories that television likes to cover, stories which are telegenic, because they have action or are sexy or are tabloid- or scandal-driven.

We have morphed in the larger culture from a somewhat Calvinist society to an entertainment society, and that is reflected in the new norms of television journalism -- where the greatest sin is not to be wrong but to be boring. Because boring means low ratings. And so altogether too many people at the top in the television newsrooms have accepted the new, frillier dictates of the men and women above them in the corporations.

But the quantum change had come with the coming of cable, and the fierce new competition generated by cable news shows, which were primarily about sex, scandal and celebrity. Or celebrity, sex and scandal. Soon, we began to see a willingness on the part of the networks -- their own audience fragmenting, their ratings down -- to embrace, particularly in their magazines, these tabloid values as their own....

Television's gatekeepers, at a time when a fragmenting audience threatens the singular profits of the past, stopped being gatekeepers and began to look the other way on moral and ethical and journalistic issues. Less and less did they accept the old-fashioned charge for what they owed the country.

The viewpoint seemed to be -- from their testing and polling -- that the American people did not want to know what was going on, so why bother them with unwanted facts too soon? So, if we look at the media today, we ought to be aware not just of what we are getting, but what we are not getting; the difference between what is authentic and what is inauthentic in contemporary American life and in the world, with a warning that in this celebrity culture, the forces of the inauthentic are becoming more powerful all the time.

Poetry Month: Wish List & Must-Read Favorites

Picked up the first half of this idea from Dr Peter Pereira's Blog; the second, complimentary listing I thought up on my own, based on books I read last year. Feel free to 'Tag' yourself and list your 'I gotta get that/You gotta read this' pairings as well.


Five poetry collections you may not have read but certainly must: The collections, for whatever reason, should be a bit off the beaten path.(...deliberately leaving out books by friends/people I know I've yet to get to)

As Elected: Selected Writing by Bp Nichol (Talonbooks)

The Black Reeds by Mark McMorris (University of Georgia Press)

Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved by Gregory Orr (Copper Canyon Press)

Killarnoe by Sonnet L'abbe (McClelland & Stewart)


Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry, edited by David Trinidad, Denise Duhamel, and Maureen Seaton (Soft Skull Press) -- Idiot that I am, I saw it but didn't buy it at AWP (and it was at a discount even!)



Five poetry collections you have read and think others certainly should read also: The collections, for whatever reason, should be a bit off the beaten path. (...again, leaving out great books by friends/people I know)

Acts of Love by Edgar Gabriel Silex (Curbstone Press)

The Heat Yesterday by Ian Iqbal Rashid (Coach House Press)

Immanent Visitor: Selected Poems Of Jaime Saenz, Forrest Gander and Kent Johnson, translators (University of California Press)

The Shine Poems by Calvin Forbes (University of Louisiana Press)

The Steam Sequence by Carly Sachs (Washington Writers Publishing House)


Rave Faves -- I'm pretty sure I'm going to be living with these two for a long time:

Every Goodbye Ain't Gone: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry by African Americans, edited by Aldon Lynn Nielsen and Lauri Ramey (University Alabama Press)


Open Field: 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets, edited by Sina Queyras (Persea Books)


Happy Reading!

Poem: "Ay ay ay de la grifa negra" by Julia de Burgos

Today's Poetry Month poem is from one of Puerto Rico's greatest poets, Julia de Burgos




Ay ay ay de la grifa negra

Ay ay ay, que soy grifa y pura negra;
grifería en mi pelo, cafrería en mis labios;
y mi chata nariz mozambiquea.


Negra de intacto tinte, lloro y río
la vibración de ser estatua negra;
de ser trozo de noche,
en que mis blancos dientes relampaguean;
y ser negro bejuco
que a lo negro se enreda
y comba el negro nido
en que el cuervo se acuesta.
Negro trozo de negro en que me esculpo,
ay ay ay, que mi estatua es toda negra.


Dícenme que mi abuelo fue el esclavo
por quien el amo dio treinta monedas.
Ay ay ay, que el esclavo fue mi abuelo
es mi pena, es mi pena.
Si hubiera sido el amo,
sería mi vergüenza;
que en los hombres, igual que en las naciones,
si el ser el siervo es no tener derechos,
el ser el amo es no tener conciencia.


Ay ay ay, los pecados del rey blanco
lávelos en perdón la reina negra.
Ay ay ay, que la raza se me fuga
y hacia la raza blanca zumba y vuela
hundirse en su agua clara;
tal vez si la blanca se ensombrará en la negra.


Ay ay ay, que mi negra raza huye
y con la blanca corre a ser trigueña;
¡a ser la del futuro,
fraternidad de América!


Cry of the Kinky Haired Girl

Ay, ay, ay, I am black, pure black;
kinky hair and Kafir lips;
and a flat Mozambican nose.

A jet black woman, I cry and I laugh
at the thrill of being a black statue;
of being a piece of the night, where
my white teeth flash like lightning;
and being a black whip
that is twistes on blackness
to shape the black nest
where the crow lies.
Black piece of blackness where I carve myself
ay, ay, ay, for my statue is all black.

My grandfather was the slave they say
the master bought for thirty pieces of silver.
Ay, ay, ay, my grandfather was the slave
that's my pain, that's my pain.
Had he been the slave master
that would have been my shame;
for among men and among nations,
if the slave has no rights,
the master has no conscience.

Ay, ay, ay, the sins of the white King,
let the black Queen wash them in forgiveness.
Ay, ay, ay, my black race is slipping away
with a buzz toward the white race it flies
to sink in its clear waters;
or perhaps the white race will grow dark in the black.

Ay, ay, ay, my black race is slipping away
running with the white race to become brown;
to become the race of the future,
fraternity of America!


Julia de Burgos, "Ay ay ay de la grifa negra," tr. by Claudette Williams from Daughters of the Diaspora: Afra-Hispanic Writers, edited by Miriam DeCosta-Willis (Ian Randle Publishers, 2003)

We are all Virginia Tech

Nikki Giovanni at the VT Memorial Convocation, 4/17/07

We are Virginia Tech.

We are sad today, and we will be sad for quite a while. We are not moving on, we are embracing our mourning.

We are Virginia Tech.

We are strong enough to stand tall tearlessly, we are brave enough to bend to cry, and we are sad enough to know that we must laugh again.

We are Virginia Tech.

We do not understand this tragedy. We know we did nothing to deserve it, but neither does a child in Africa dying of AIDS, neither do the invisible children walking the night away to avoid being captured by the rogue army, neither does the baby elephant watching his community being devastated for ivory, neither does the Mexican child looking for fresh water, neither does the Appalachian infant killed in the middle of the night in his crib in the home his father built with his own hands being run over by a boulder because the land was destabilized. No one deserves a tragedy.

We are Virginia Tech.

The Hokie Nation embraces our own and reaches out with open heart and hands to those who offer their hearts and minds. We are strong, and brave, and innocent, and unafraid. We are better than we think and not quite what we want to be. We are alive to the imaginations and the possibilities. We will continue to invent the future through our blood and tears and through all our sadness.

We are the Hokies.

We will prevail.

We will prevail.

We will prevail.

We are Virginia Tech.


Addenda 1 (To bring it back home): 76 people have been murdered in the City of Baltimore as of Tuesday March 15, 2007

Addenda 2 (To talk about what some have called the '800 pound gorilla in the room Nikki didn't have to mention, thanks to the presence of George W Bush in Blacksburg'): Tim Grieve of Salon.com's "War Room" notes this:

From Blacksburg to Baghdad

We know that Baghdad, Iraq, is a long way from Blacksburg, Va., and we don't mean to take anything away from the tragedy that struck this week at Virginia Tech. But still, we've got to ask: How much airtime will the networks commit -- how many convocations will George W. Bush attend -- to honor the lives of the 178 people who were killed in bombings in Iraq's capital today?

Pulitzer Prize Poetry and Music

As a counter to this week's horrific news (my thoughts and prayers are with family, faculty, staff and students at Virginia Tech) and last week's I-mess: Art and good news.



Poet Natasha Trethewey becomes only the 4th African-American to win the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry (joining Gwendolyn Brooks for Annie Allen (1950); Rita Dove for Thomas and Beulah (1987); and Yusef Komunyakaa for Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems (1994)), for her collection Native Guard. I read the book last year, and it's delicious(Another African-American woman, Cynthia Tucker of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, also won this year's prize for Commentary). Last May, she appeared on PBS' NewsHour, returning to post-Katrina Gulfport, Mississippi, to reflect and read some of her work.


As a long time jazz fan, I'm especially overjoyed to learn that John Coltrane received a *LONG OVERDUE* "posthumous special citation" (as did SF writer Isaac Asimov for his writing, a 'gateway drug' to the world of science writing and Science Fiction for many people, myself included).

Free Jazz giant Ornette Coleman won this year's music Pulitzer for "Sound Grammar," his first recording in 10 years, and the debut release on his own label of the same name -- a recording which I just bought last week (I particularly adore the version of "Sleep Talking" from the 1979 "Of Human Feelings" recording that's on here)

Guess I got that 'Pulitzer mojo workin' baby'...now to try it with the Lotto!


For a number of years, thanks to posts on blogs by Alex Ross and Greg Sandow, I've followed some of the grumbling by 'Classical' composers over the loosening up of the music category, an attempt to make up for their previous woeful ignoring of jazz and other forms of popular music -- started in part by complaints about the prize from the amazing composer (and past Pulitzer winner) John Adams (pictured at left) for ignoring "most of the country's greatest musical minds." Kudos to the highly respected and successful Adams for raising a ruckus -- but then what do you expect from someone with his own MySpace page?

The Pulitzer Board now accepts recordings, no longer requiring artists to send in scores of their music, although that it still 'encouraged.' (Sandow finds that 'encouragement' problematic, thinks it still means "We prefer Classical", and that perhaps they should just come out and say the prize is FOR Classical music and be done with it).

Not all composers were with John Adams. John Harbison for example let loose with this, "If you were to impose a comparable standard on fiction [comparable, that is, to the standard the Pulitzer board now mandates for music] you would be soliciting entries from the authors of airport novels."

Which to my ear is just this side of an up-market variation on Don Imus' recent empty-headed comments - particularly when most of us recognize that it would probably be a jazz musician that would likely wind up winning the prize (and look what happened -- "Ornette on Pulitzer!")


Justin Davidson on Ross' blog also provides an interesting note on Coleman's win -- no one nominated him!

"As jurors huddled for a weekend in March to go through the hundred-plus scores and recordings, someone noticed that despite the official desire for submissions in jazz, film music and other genres, Coleman's latest CD, "Sound Grammar," wasn't in the pile. [J]uror John Rockwell sent someone out to scare up a copy...."


Of course, it's not just in music where the Pulitzer Board has stubbed it's toe, as The Village Voices' Gary Giddens notes:


"Laughing Boy beat The Sound and the Fury and A Farewell to Arms; Years of Grace beat As I Lay Dying, The Maltese Falcon, and Flowering Judas; Now in November beat Tender Is the Night and Appointment in Samarra; and the board could find no worthy fiction at all in the years For Whom the Bell Tolls, Native Son, The Hamlet, The Adventures of Augie March, V, Idiots First, Losing Battles, and Gravity's Rainbow were eligible."

There was no 1974 Fiction award due to a disagreement between the Fiction Jury and the overall Prize Board: Gravity's Rainbow, which the jurors had chosen, but some members of the Board found obscene. This echoes how the music jurors were overruled in 1965 when they wanted to give the prize to Duke Ellington for his body of work and got overruled by the Board, pointing out that the award was supposed to go to a single work (as Giddens points out, they didn't correct their error by awarding it to Duke (and Billy Strayhorn) for the magnificent 'single work', 'The Far East Suite,' the following year).

No review of the Pulitzer would be complete without noting William H. Gass' gleeful demolition of the Fiction category and why writers should give the award a pass, Prizes, Surprises and Consolation Prizes" (called "Pulitzer, the People's Prizes" in his collection Finding a Form).


"...the Pulitzer Prize in fiction takes dead aim at mediocrity and almost never misses; the prize is simply not given to work of the first rank, rarely even to the second; and if you believed yourself to be a writer of that eminence, you are now assured of being over the hill - not a sturdy mountain flower but a little wilted lily of the valley."





Personally, I find something like Sweden's Polar Music Prize to be much more to my liking. Call it "The Odd Couple" award if you want (winners include Steve Reich and Sonny Rollins in 2007; Valery Gergiev and Led Zeppelin in 2006; Gilberto Gil and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in 2005; B. B. King and György Ligeti in '04...Dizzy Gillespie (left) and Witold Lutoslawski (pictured at right) in 1993!)



To my mind, this more accurately reflects the overall notion of 'excellence in music' than awards in just one category (and the winners list also looks a lot like my own music collection). And if they got the winners to play on the same stage...talk about one heck of a concert!

Au Revoir Phebus

Phebus Etienne at Gladys Knight and Ron Winan's Chicken and Waffles, Atlanta GA (photo courtesy of January Gill O'Neil)

I received the shocking news today that friend and poet Phebus Etienne passed on March 31, 2007, at the age of 41. I'm stunned, and feel a deep emptiness...I honestly can NOT believe that she's gone...

A fellow Cave Canem poet, her work appeared in a number of anthologies, including Making Callaloo: 25 Years of Black Literature, and her manuscript, Chainstiching, was finalist for the 2005 Tupelo Press poetry contest and semi-finalist for the 2006 Beatrice Hawley Award from Alice James Books.

None of this tells you about how glorious a person she was, the beautiful music of her soft voice, or how equally beautiful and strong her talent was. Warm, friendly, honest, and *human* in a way that so many of us aren't, I loved her smile, I loved her hugs, I loved and love her still.

Six of her poems can be found here on the Second Avenue Poetry website.

A clip of Phebus reading "Long Walk Home" at the Cave Canem Fellows Reading, Spellman College, Atlanta, Georgia, Friday March 2, 2007, from Amanda Johnston's Blog

The poem below, title poem from her manuscript, is from the anthology, The Butterfly's Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States, edited by Edwidge Danticat


Chainstitching

After I buried my mother, I would see her often,
standing at the foot of my bed
in a handmade nightgown she trimmed with lace
whenever I was restless with fever or menstrual cramps.
I was not afraid, and if her appearance was a delusion,
it only confirmed my heritage.
Haitians always have relationships with the dead.
Each Sabbath, I lit a candle that burned for seven days.
I created an altar on the top shelf of an old television cart.
It was decorated with her Bible, a copy of The Three Musketeers,
freesia, delphinium or lilies if they were in season.
My offering of her favorite things didn’t conjure
conversations with her spirit as I had hoped.
But there was a dream or two where she was happy,
garnets dangling from her ears,
and one night she shuffled some papers,
which could have been history of my difficult luck
because she said, “We have to do something about this.”

She hasn’t visited me for months.
I worry that my life is an insult to her memory,
that she looks in and turns away
because I didn’t remain a virgin until I married,
because my debts will remain unforgiven.

Lightning tattoos the elms as florists make
corsages to honor living mothers.
I think of going to mass at St. Anne, where she was startled
by the fire of wine when she received her first communion.
But I remember that first Mother’s Day without her,
how it pissed me off to watch a seventy year-old daughter
escort her mom to sip from the chalice.

Yesterday, as the rain fell warm on the azaleas,
I planted creeping phlox on my mother’s grace,
urging the miniature flowers to bloom larger next year
like the velvet petals of bougainvillea that covered our neighbor’s gate.
I crave a yard to plant lemon and mango trees as she did.
Tonight I mold dumplings for pumpkin stew,
add a dash of vinegar for spice as she taught me,
sprinkle my palms with flour before rolling the dough between them.
I will thread my needle and embroider a coconut tree on a place mat,
keep stitching her presence in my life.

Phebus Etienne


Blogging Poets and Writers remember Phebus:

John Keene

Jan(uary Gill) O'Neil

Tayari Jones

Oliver de la Paz

Mendi Lewis Obadike

Tara Betts



UPDATE:


The following arrangements have been made for Phebus:

Wake: Friday, April 13, 4-9 pm, with a service by Father Francis Gargani at 7:30 pm; Andrew Torregrossa & Sons Funeral Home, 2265 Flatbush Avenue (Between Filmore Avenue & Avenue R), Brooklyn, NY, 718.253.5900.

Funeral Mass: Saturday, April 14, 9:15 am ; Saint Gregory the Great Church, Saint Johns Place & Brooklyn Avenue, Brooklyn, NY, 718.773.0100.

Internment: Rosedale & Rosehill Cemetary, 355 East Linden Avenue, Linden, NJ 07036, 908.862.4990.

National Poetry Month: Theme and Variations

I know
I know...
long time -
no Blog

sorry
the weather has been
so warm and clear.

I will try
to do better
soon


In the meantime, and in honor of Poetry Month, two poems by one of my all-time favorites, Dr. William Carlos Williams, M.D. of Patterson, New Jersey -- with variations on them.


This Is Just to Say
by William Carlos Williams

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold


Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams
by Kenneth Koch

1
I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer.
I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing to do
and its wooden beams were so inviting.

2
We laughed at the hollyhocks together
and then I sprayed them with lye.
Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing.

3
I gave away the money that you had been saving to live on for the next ten years.
The man who asked for it was shabby
and the firm March wind on the porch was so juicy and cold.

4
Last evening we went dancing and I broke your leg.
Forgive me. I was clumsy and
I wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor!



The Red Wheelbarrow
by William Carlos Williams


so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.





The Red Cadillac
by Reginald O'Hare Gibson


Willie “Slick” Williams reads William Carlos Williams, then writes a letter to the producers of the TV makeover show Pimp My Ride, explaining why his car should be featured on the program.

so much depends
upon

a red cadillac
slick

with turtle
wax

beside the white
chicks