Amiri Baraka

Image by Sharon Harris

The many faces of Amiri Baraka – there is no way I could ever do them justice in a short introduction like this. His work spans such a vast terrain - from his early Beat years in the 1950s and early 60s in Greenwich Village, where he co-edited the literary magazines Yugen and The Floating Bear, to his Harlem-based years after the death of Malcom X in 1965 which saw his involvement in Black Nationalism; and finally his turn to a more multicultural, Marxist approach in the 1970s.

Baraka’s impact on the American literary scene has undoubtedly been very great. As Arnold Rampersad wrote in the American Book Review:

“More than any other black poet […] he taught younger black poets of the generation past how to respond poetically to their lived experience, rather than to depend as artists on embalmed reputations and outmoded rhetorical strategies derived from a culture often substantially different from their own.”

In addition to his numerous works of poetry, Baraka worked extensively as a playwright. He also published essays, short stories, and novels and wrote about African-American music. He died last year at the age of 79.

Links:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/amiri-baraka
http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/amiri-baraka
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/baraka/baraka.htm
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jan/09/amir-baraka-playwright-poet-dies

My below response is loosely based on his Political Poem.



~ - ~

Love Political

It runs with reason and piles of heavy volumes

full force over the back of your hand

till the sinews quake

and you wonder how anyone was ever able

to hold on like this

in the dusk of intimacy

intimidation and third hand dreams

on tape in beat cardboard boxes

long before anyone resolved such history

into code and hung it to a cloud like childhood

summer showers

sweet and short and wet wet wet

It runs with reason

{ as reason like a rusty nail in the flower pattern

holding my great-grandparents’ wedding picture

in a faraway house

(blurry black and blurry faded)   }

and the kind of grand

words we always hoped would adorn our

withered skin one day

pale like parchment paper bleeding significance

and stubborn in each sans-serif line

like possibility and justice

and worst of all what they call liberty

It runs with reason as it runs with passion

the spot on my neck where they both entwine

your kiss the conception of a good life in books

and coarse ground coffee

the twelve pound subscription to the LRB

your head on my hip

your thoughts and ideas’ deep rest in my soft tissue

when Eva said there are many kinds of knowledge

(she bit the apple)

and intellect is just one of many more

I wanted to tell her yes you are right

but this is political

Keith Waldrop

As Ron Silliman points out in his blog post in response to Keith Waldrop’s 2009 National Book Award: “Keith Waldrop is a wonderful writer […] and a beautiful human being, one of the true good guys of poetry, who has spent a lifetime building resources for the poem in every way conceivable.”

Waldrop’s writing technique is mainly collage. He uses other texts to create his poems, which are at once philosophical and personal, and is able to link romantic tendencies with formal experimentation. As A.L. Nielsen has said of Waldrop’s poetry: “Keith Waldrop has concerned himself with the topology of the world of writing more consistently and valuably than any poet I can think of since the late Paul Celan.“

In addition to his numerous books of poetry, Waldrop has also published two longer prose books – most recently his autobiography Light While There Is Light (1993), and translated the works of Claude Royet-Journoud, Anne-Marie Albiach, and Edmond Jabès. He has been named Chevalier des arts et des lettres by the French government for his lifetime contribution to the French literature in 2000. With his wife Rosmarie Waldrop he edits the Burning Deck Press and has taught at Brown University since 1968.

Links:
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/waldropk/
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/keith-waldrop
https://www.brown.edu/academics/literary-arts/keith-waldrop
http://ronsilliman.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/she-was-youngest-winner-ever-of.html
http://www.ucpress.edu/blog/738/keith-waldrops-transcendental-studies-is-2009-national-book-award-finalist-poetry/
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Waldrop-K.html



~ - ~

Annual Review Process

Thoughts

This section includes some broad questions

client centred and driven

by building positive

as personal & commercial

as up to date to expert deal

Performance

This section is more

use your skills

use your adding not simply

as communication agencies

Achievements

This section is about reflecting

your excellent inter-personality

as we’re planning to being

as with no ego thinks & acts

Future

This section is about agreeing

and recognises

your personal purpose

adheres to system

Sign here

This section is important

keep momentum

going following

any further you need

Life and art

Life and art are getting in the way of this little blog project this week.
Due to a short trip to the Highlands and the start of an exhibition which will feature one of my sound pieces, I will not be able to stick to the usual rhythm of this project. There will be no poetic posts this week.
The usual pattern will be resumed early next week.

Meanwhile I extend a cordial invitation to anyone living in Scotland to come to Edinburgh to see the Time to Change Art Project exhibition at Tent Gallery from 13th to 21st June, where my sound piece Straining My Voice will be on display.
http://www.timetochangeartproject.com.

Eileen Myles

The New York Times once called Eileen Myles “a cult figure to a generation of post-punk female writer-performers”. What I can say, she is an amazing poet and I am a huge fan.

Myles joined the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s in New York City in the 1970s after leaving behind her native Boston. A few years later she was working as the assistant of James Schuyler – an influence which is still tangible in her work, as Hoover puts it:

 “Myler’s offhandedly personal and lyrical poetry has an affinity with the work of James Schuyler; this is most evident in her diaristic style of composition, narrative ease, and use of short, enjambed lines.”

Myles’ first major collection, Not Me, was published in 1991. Since then there have been many more, including more procedural work like her 2001 volume Skies, which set the constraint of including only poems which include the sky in some way.

Her versatile work of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction is really compelling and inspirational for any poet. The striking directness of her words and the way she works with the notion of autobiography really draws me in. I highly recommend having a look at her website which is full of poetry and also has a few videos of performances which are wonderful.

Links:
http://eileenmyles.com/index.php
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/eileen-myles (very short bio, but also a few poems)
http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/eileen-myles
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/myles/
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Myles.php

My below response is a (for me rather unusual) attempt at something more personal and lyric. Have a read.

~ - ~

Memento mori

Somehow we ended up

in the cemetery,

like one would

I suppose,

eventually,

on a hot spring day

on a walk

through the woods. At

the end of the trail

where I hesitated

like Dante in a summer dress, you

followed me through

the gap in the cast

iron fence and trampled

shrubbery into

forgotten parts

of stone memory grounds. We

followed the lines

over May grass looking

down on distant

names on rain-washed

rock wondering. Daisy-

lined final resting place.

Memento mori, you said

and I reached for

your hand while we

were walking. I wanted

you more then, than

in the forest’s calm leafy

shade or on the bridge over

the brook’s gurgling waters. I

wanted you then, and when I

knew you were no longer

walking my way.

Victor Hernandez Cruz

Victor Hernandez Cruz was born in Puerto Rico and moved to New York City with his family in 1954 at the age of six. Even though he didn’t start learning English until about two years later, he soon began writing poetry and publish his first collection of poems when he was only 17 years old. Since then he has published more than a dozen books of poetry and was awarded fellowships from both the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

His work frequently mixes English and Spanish and often reflects about the experiences of Caribbean and Puerto Rican immigrants in the US, in a particularly inclusive, almost Whitmanesque manner. As Jose Amaya wrote in the San Francisco Review of Books in 1991, “Cruz experiments with the vast linguistic and cultural possibilities of ‘indo-afro-hispano’ poetry and comes up with a strong vision of American unity.” – A unity which shines through particularly in poems like “Latin Music in New York” and “Red Beans”.

As a co-founder of both the East Harlem Gut Theatre in New York, the Before Columbus Foundation and a former editor of Umbra Magazine, it is safe to say that Cruz is one of the most important figures and driving forces of a Hispanic literary movement in the US.

This is also reflected in the comments of the judges for the International Griffin Poetry Price, which he was awarded in 2002:

“Victor Hernández Cruz has long been the defining poet of that complex bridge between the Latino and mainland cultures of the U.S. [His collection] Maraca: New and Selected Poems 1965-2000 proves the extraordinary range of this great, enduring poet, whose articulately persuasive humor and intelligence bear persistent witness to a meld of peoples.” 

Links:
http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/victor-hern%C3%A1ndez-cruz
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/victor-hernandez-cruz
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Cruz.php

My response below is a reflection of my own situation in comparison with a writer from a minority background like Cruz. It considers the notion of privilege and its effect for me as a poet.


~ - ~



intersectionality

white

middle-class

educated

female

handsome

tall

european

migrant

straight

cisgendered

able-bodied

WRITER

a jagged line runs through my life

runs through my thoughts

runs through my words

as speaker both and listener

i strip bare in front of those who doubt

the need for words that charge

and words that change

and words that

will not let you rest at night

that spark the fight -

my privilege most of all:

my voice.

Stephen Rodefer

Stephen Rodefer is recognised as one of the founders of the Language poetry movement. As a student of Charles Olsen, Rodefer shares Olsen’s thematic concerns for the urban sphere, yet it is his particular interest in the de/composition of language in poetry which places him firmly in the centre of the Language school. His most famous piece is probably Four Lectures (1982), which is also the work which appears (at least in parts) in the anthology.

The work starts with a powerful piece of poetics, demanding for a new kind of poetry which is able to respond to the multi-faced nature of the modern city. As Rodefer puts it:

“A poetry painted with every jarring color and juxtaposition, every simultaneous order and disorder, every deliberate working, every movement toward one thing deformed into another. Painted with every erosion and scraping away, every blurring, every showing through, every wiping out and every replacement, with every dismemberment of the figure and assault on creation, every menace and response, every transformation of the color and reforming of the parts, necessary to express the world. Even the words and way of language itself will suffer the consequent deformity and reformation.”

A great challenge indeed.

Links:
http://rodefer.ms11.net/
http://eclipsearchive.org/projects/FOUR/four.html (Four Lectures online)
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Rodefer.php
http://jacketmagazine.com/15/brady-rodefer.html (review of his 2000 collection Left Under A Cloud by Andrea Brady)
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2014/09/stephen-rodefers-four-lectures-annotated-ongoing/ (a short piece about an essay with annotations for Rodefer’s Four Lectures)

My response to Rodefer also focusses on the urban environment, particularly looking at the history and architecture of the tenement houses which were built during the Industrial Revolution in cities like New York, Berlin, or Glasgow. These aspects are juxtaposed with the current debate about the housing crisis in London.



~ - ~


tenements


I – Def.

Any house, building,

or portion thereof, which is rented, leased, let,

or hired out to be occupied

or is occupied, as the home

or residence

of more than three families living independently

of one another and doing their

own cooking upon the premises,

or by more than two families upon a floor,

so living

and cooking

and having a common right

in the halls, stairways, yards, water-closets,

or privies,

or some of them,

II – Exp.

of all the bathrooms

rent caps and protests

and water closet

tenants in a position

outside the door,

to share rooms by sky-high

to the individual

to property,

rents and none.

renting in some 540

direct window twice as

facing the trapped

in 1,000 and 97 a month.

significantly those having hutch property

windows to  and on the increasingly

a high instance of fraught.

a year’s rent often left the architect

being to have

being to forced affordable

to rent a shared only public,

a stranger with bedrooms to be.

11 had arrangements for light rent rise as social housing closed itself.

housing converted to significantly

here that is in affordable

here that is in landlord.

these few occasions for renting room

buildings were only entered

on all fitted with a mechanical door.

affordable fours and all entry system

significantly, housing crisis

had stair head windows how to build.

thus allowing more

for generation

for thought

for rent control plans

the fresh air - the absence here.

finally explained

the high price

which having been of affordable

much lamented at by the city

officials of 1860.

IT'S WAR. 386 had arrangements

as desperate tenants

for ventilation

bidding direct to the street.

thinking of buying or close this. could

to rent take the format while still renting

a bathroom over big trouble in

a scullery with the two?

chinatown as sharing the same

rent window opening to either

rises force the front or rear significantly.

studio flat for examples also of provision

rent. WHERE YOU CLIMB A LADDER ON THE

FRIDGE TO GET TO BED between the bathroom

rents rise allowing borrowed light affordable.

as tenant numbers outstrip the air was

provided significantly.

affordable supply directly from the outside.

meet the new layout as it was in 1893.

class with 8 bathrooms in the building

of landlords

all having windows

profiting from generation property.

rent rises another three. closes

evictions and on this occasion

homelessness :

with light water, why i'm joining

closets to the rear.

and the latter building for homes

having only internal london's

buy water closet with no to

let rents lighting or ventilation

double that of rest.

none of these of says

affordable flats were built with

significantly lender.

period sky-high is the importance:

why not rent of discrete toilet facilities -

get a home on the remained

cheap and live like a lord.

Philip Whalen

The Poetry Foundation describes Whalen as an “an ally and confidant of the major figures of the Beat Generation” such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac – but also as a significant poet in his own right. He was among the poets who famously read their work at the Six Gallery in San Francisco in 1955 and was a strong influence in the San Francisco Renaissance as a whole.

The essayist Paul Christensen writes about Whalen in the Dictionary of Literary Biography:

"Whalen's singular style and personality contribute to his character in verse as a bawdy, honest, moody, complicated songster of the frenzied mid-century, an original troubadour and thinker who refused to take himself too seriously during the great revival of visionary lyric in American poetry." 

A view which is also confirmed by Paul Hoover, who notes in the anthology’s introduction to Whalen’s work: he “embraces the world with a Whitmanesque openness and gentleness. Yet the wit of Whalen’s writing reminds […] of eighteenth-century satirists Alexander Pope and John Dryden.”

Like many other artists of this period, Whalen’s life philosophy and work was strongly influenced by Zen Buddhism and he became an ordained Zen monk in 1973. He lived in various Zen centres across New Mexico and California until his retirement in 1996. Whalen died in 2002 at the age of 78.

Links:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/philip-whalen
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/whalen/
http://jacketmagazine.com/07/whalen-clark.html (review of his Selected Poems volume)
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Whalen.php

My own response to Whalen’s work has its root in his poem “The Slop Barrel” which is included in the anthology. Whalen’s use of the image of a tiger made my consider and dive deeper into my own thoughts and feelings about tigers. The below piece is stylistically and thematically highly indebted to the amazing Juliana Spahr.


~ - ~

As Tigers Go

We always thought it would have been cool if we had been born in the year of the tiger. We always thought it would have been much more glamorous. It was just an idea. We never told anybody. We didn’t believe in that kind of thing anyway. It was just that we were a cat person. We liked to think of us that way. 1972: 37,350

We stared at the back of Kellogg’s carton every morning before school. We asked our mum if she could buy the sweet ones. The great ones. The ones with the smiling tiger cartoon. It seemed so much more fun. 1979: 31,600

We went to the zoo with school where they were pacing behind glass. We had cheese sandwiches in the wildcat house. Some of kids started knocking against the windows. We just watched. They were big. They were real. 1984: 26,900

We saw them on TV but someone always wanted the other channel. We just shrugged and watched MacGyver. We still wondered about them occasionally. 1989: 23,450

In school they taught us about the rain forest. We thought about the jungle. We remembered watching the Jungle Book when we were small and knowing all the words to all the songs and never liking the tiger. We thought about giant trees and orchids and lianas. We thought about their yellow fur among the undergrowth. 1993: 12,000

We laughed about the waiter stumbling over the head of the tiger rug in a New Year’s slapstick comedy sketch on TV every year. It was an old black and white broadcast and we never even thought about the skin as an animal. We laughed and listened to the church bells at midnight. We watched the fireworks sparkle over the rooftops although we had learned how damaging and expensive they were. 1997: 7,500

We read William Blake’s The Tyger. We learned it by heart because we liked it. We learned to recognise its heavy trochee meter in other poems and read loads more of Blake and Poe and Shakespeare and we liked them all. We walked in the dark and heavy steps of poetry through puberty. We liked the books more than the forest. We stayed indoors. 2001: 5,250

We went to uni straight after school while others went away to travel. We had political ideas and voted left. We considered recycling important but we liked to fly to other European cities for short holidays. 2005: 4,850

We never really thought about the rain forest. We declared we weren’t great with plants anyway. We wanted to get a cat. We wanted to write and make a difference. We thought about poetry a lot and moved to a different country where it rained more and there were stronger ties to India. 2006: 4,300

We saw a few illustrations in the museum and thought they looked not really like tigers. We remembered the small status of tigers which used to stand in the living room of an old school friend, who’s father travelled to China regularly. The remembered always thinking of them as very odd and not at all like the tigers we had seen on the telly. We thought about art and culture and how things were different where the tigers lived from where we lived. We were curious and wanted to know more but we never got around to it. We thought about people with tiger tattoos sometimes. 2010: 3,500

We thought about giving a tiger adoption to our newborn nephew but then decided for a dinosaur shirt instead. We started giving to Greenpeace and liked the WWF on Facebook. We felt guilty about printing out too many emails. But we stuck to the 4-ply loo roll. We sometimes stared at the “mixed source” paper certificate on the packaging wondering what it meant but we never got around to looking it up. Greenpeace sent an appeal in the post. We glanced over the brochure and it somehow ended up between the takeaway menus in the kitchen drawer. A tiger in the drawer with the direct debit form.  2014: 3,050

Epilogue:

Bengal tiger, endangered, current population less than 2,500, declining trend. Indochinese tiger, endangered, current population 600-650, declining trend. Sumatran Tiger, critically endangered, current population 441-679, declining trend. Siberian Tiger, endangered, current population 331–393, declining trend. Malayan tiger, critically endangered, current population 250-340, declining trend. South China Tiger, critically endangered, no confirmed presence, possibly extinct. Javan Tiger, (1980s) extinct. Caspian Tiger, (1970s) extinct. Bali Tiger, (1940s) extinct.