Olive Senior - literary crush of the week

it takes diggin' in the crates, late nights and early mornings
spending the set-aside, essential creative time for precious projects
on web-surfing, google, bing, etc... but when you come across
that previous nugget-of-the-dark-unknown™ then it all seems worth it.

(at least until the people you're beholden to wanna know what's up with your deadlines!)

Olive Senior... why do we not know who she is on the education circuit?

check her out... her work is canonical.

tongues of the ocean is another good site to check out... this link takes you to Olive's poem there.

"change the style" - wordemup!

and now, for your listening and viewing pleasure,
i present to you... ...son of bazerk; vintage 1991. enjoy.

"my students are full of shit"

branford marsalis speaks the truth...

"shadeism"

Shadeism from Shadeism on Vimeo.
This short TV documentary is an introduction to the issue of shadeism, the discrimination that exists between the lighter-skinned and darker-skinned members of the same community. This documentary short looks specifically at how it affects young womyn within the African, Caribbean, and South Asian diasporas. Through the eyes and words of 5 young womyn and 1 little girl - all females of colour - the film takes us into the thoughts and experiences of each. Overall, 'Shadeism' explores where shadeism comes from, how it directly affects us as womyn of colour, and ultimately, begins to explore how we can move forward through dialogue and discussion.

stronger than silent 'e'

baby's asked me to create a new flier for her and i started thinking about using an image of letterman (electric company, not david) for it... but then i got to thinking: shit, like today's students would even know who letterman is!
so i'm gonna settle on watching these classic videos for now til i think of something else -

 





and then there's this one... just cause the sista is so fly...

until the real thing comes along...

no, not the song... just talknabout the next blog i'm wanting to write.
until then, this will hafta do...

disintegration of america's black neighborhoods

eugene robinson on npr

we're slowly getting to the point where we can openly speak about the negative side-effects
of integration on the black community. eugene robinson touches on a few points of interests,
but i think he sidesteps acknowledging the main component plaguing the legitimacy of
empowerment for african americans - i'm talking about 'integration' itself.

not saying integration is bad; it's just that african americans were badly integrated.
we didnt step headlong into 'the great american project' hauling our culture with us; for the most
part, that culture was what we were wanting to get away from - slavery, jim crow, stereotype,
disenfranchisement, poverty, ridicule, self-hate, etc... the only thing is we also abandoned
the positives that go along with thriving within your own culture as it battles outside forces
to maintain its dignity, relevance and reverence to the world at large: community, pride-in-self,
accomplishment, solidarity, social inclusion.... all the things currently coming up short in
black communities across the american nation; the dwindled social aspects that caused
mr. jello (bill cosby) to launch into his tirade about the perception of social malfeasance
existing not only in our neighborhoods, but in how our images play out in the media and beyond.

400 years of second class (on a good day!) citizenship has intrinsically damaged our self-esteem
and yet 'post traumatic slavery syndrome' is a laughed at phenomenon. and yet we treat
children held hostage over night by irate family members, lovers, co-workers, etc... we treat
soldiers who spend any amount of time in active combat situations (whether weapons are fired
or not). and yet african americans have had to deal with the legacy of being the offspring of
those violently taken from their homes and loved ones, we have all come of age living with
this banner of supreme victimization and yet america expects us to shrug it off/get over it/accept
their somewhat-welcoming and not-all-together-immediate embrace...
we probably COULD get over it if our medical practitioners hadnt abandoned us in our mad rush
to join in with the mainstream - black communities where left with the void of business
professionals rushing out in attempts to earn gainful employment where financial reward was
more likely to equate to their experience, know-how and cognizant abilities. ask any black
person over 50 and they'll recount tales of neighborhoods thriving with black businesses -
bakeries, restaurants, dry-cleaners, lawyers, doctors, teachers, etc... black professionals who
worked within the borders of the communities in which they lived. this is called 'being invested'.

and in the mainstream of america, our white counterparts had already called dibs on the goods
and services we once provided. this is how a black doctor under segregation becomes a factory
worker at general electric. of black elders who believed the grass was always greener on
the other side, so they'd comment that 'white doctors are better than black doctors', exposing
the 400 year legacy of being victims in a harsh environment. not that we all individuals suffered,
but as a black collective, which is what mr. robinson's article addresses.

we'll get it straight one day; i know that about us. but it will take bolder language out in the open
than what currently exists at this time. eugene does an excellent job in adding this subject to
the national discussion...

it's time our artiststs and writers to back him up; for our work as individuals to reconnect us
to our cultural heritages existing before melting-pot-theories watered us down. its not america's
pollutants that have pulled us down, its the dilution of our cultural fabrics that have splintered
us the most.

(and where's the 'black newspaper app' for our smartphones? ...damn!)

time to kill (and the sacred desk)

i love days like today, when me and crys are on the same creative schedule,
where we're not rushing our own individual projects and each other 'making time'
before rushing beyond our doorways appeasing the projects of other people.
days like today are good. we get to lounge, catch up on tivo, cradle each other,
wash clothes/dishes/behinds (or not!), make grocery lists and other day-in/day-out
activities at our own leisure. even when we both retreat to ten paces away from
each other to work or play on our computers the actions are casual. there is a pleasure
at not being pressured to surf the web when on a time-line... being in the same room
while surfing the internet is relaxing. i'm left to wonder what the percentage is of
internet users who feel a high level of anxiety just from being 'connected'. i know
such an activity, over time, affects our cognizant abilities - how is it affecting our
physical health? maybe it doesnt and its just the on-going battle being waged within
us as our old-school upbringing resists the lure of technological advancements...

anyway, what i'm saying is: today i get to surf the web more slowly and with a bit
more sense of purpose/less the sense of urgency... i came across this video about
the way we use our workspaces, real and imagined. having crys nearby without
the invasion of 'work' hanging above our heads has me able to process the trillions
of daily websites i stumble across on a daily basis. the posting of this video reflects
the peace of mind i'm currently aware of...
tomorrow is back to the grind; but we're grown...
so even if stressed, we know that tomorrow will hold its own type of beauty.



Desk - Music and Sound Design from Aaron Trinder  Film:Motion:Music on Vimeo.

canonical black lit

there are many factors shaping the aesthetics and acceptance of the black creative in this modern era.
mostly, we are affected by the loss of a common, communal plane of existence to house our muses.
in this overly-assimilated era we've lost our own cultural mt. olympus from where our creative gods
held fish-fries, rent parties, and shot dice before heading to church.

to fit into 'the mainstream' america asks its subcultures to streamline their baggage. if you can not
fit your heritage into a carry-on (or is over 2 megabytes of memory), then you have to get from
here to there all on your own (not impossible to do, but once you arrive you'll find no welcoming
reception). so, if a black creative is to ride the uncle-sam-express he's less the history of his people.
or if not 'less' then at least very simplified. you can not enter their boxcars with your convoluted
community ties. come 'clean and articulate' or not at all.

you can opt for 'not at all', but there are no publishing houses or exhibit curators flipping through
their rolodex searching for your contact information. black narratives no longer seem to channel the
communal black experience before being funneled into the wide open world. we sieve our creativity
through the institutionalized avenues of acceptance: art schools, mfa programs, the assembly lines of
writing collectives.
when's the last time a completely 'unknown' forced his or herself onto the social scene?
because our avenues for success are now narrowed by academia our creative geniuses are no longer
recognizable to the common people: popular black writers and artists are no longer marketed to
the black communities where legacies are fostered. black creatives chase after 'legitimacy' which is
now the sole-property of higher institutions. 'legitimacy' is what pays the bills. unless you ply your
trade in coffeehouses and cafes, no one leaves a legacy to inspire the common people in their own
homes.

now, i know this is not exclusively the problem for black creatives. i'm not saying it is.
all i'm doing is discussing how the monopolizing of the creative process has specifically hindered
our cultural progressions. if you are over 40 years old, then you grew up at least knowing about
such writers as langston hughes, james baldwin, toni morrison, sonia sanchez, etc...
but ask someone under 25 to name their favorite black literary writers... 9 times out of 10 they'll give
you those exact same names. ask them to name someone under 30, they stumble for answers.
unless you participate in creative workshops and classes, you'll stumble to name any also.
you might luck up and get a saul williams or jessica care moore. maybe someone will say jill scott
or mos def or some other frequent flier on the cable tv spokenword circuit. tyler perry might even
be mentioned; not knockin' his hustle - we all need one.

... (stops to take one long pull from an inhaler) ...

what books are the coffeehouse audiences carrying with them? are they the same ones being used to
teach black creativity in academic classrooms? audre lorde, langston hughes, james baldwin, toni
morrison, richard wright... all extremely venerable in the pantheon of black literature. but how long
can they carry the load for us? at what point do we champion their successors to carry on the legacy?
and whose job will it be to do so? it's been nearly 25 years since chuck d. said "our heroes dont
appear on no stamps" - well, some of them are now, but who writes letters these days?
we have to find our voices, our new icons and hold them dear no matter the advancements to
technology, education, and society tempting us to pull away. when america places its seal-of-approval
on 'the next new thing' it needs to be because the masses put that person in position to be honored;
this is how we as a whole become invested in the world at large. otherwise, america will prop up
'the new thing' like a foreign dictator and when his or her usefulness has expired then so does the
resources once available to that person. 'the new thing' returns home, angry that we can not support
his 15 minutes of fame... we shrug at his anger because, shit, we're angry too, asking him "and who
did you say your mama was? ...pfft! you didnt come up through us anyway."

every black writer can tell their own authentic black stories, but in this day and era where
the institutionalized whole is more important than the communal parts, what's that mean to the black
society at large still trying to fit in? has black legacy become the woolly mammoth frozen in a glacier
or has it moved beyond the scope of our community elders once chosen (hand-picked or self-assigned!)
as our keepers of the flame? an extremely limited coven of black literary artists create work that is
canonical to the black experience, working equally on universal and marginalized plains of existence.
can anyone now do so effectively? should we even expect our geniuses to attempt so?

black trees fall in our forests everyday... 'hearing' them or not is not the question; the question is:
how do we even get people back into the forests to begin with?

ps:

and if you drop by the house unexpectedly
and hafta use the restroom then dont come
calling on me to hand you a roll of toilet paper
if it runs empty. you are welcome in my home,
but uninvited visitors are not 'a guest' - i am not obliged.

thank you.

- the mngmt.

ibid scribbled at the bottom of my tombstone made a totem turnt a temple

how much scab could a hermitcrab grab if a hermitcrab could grab scab?

ok. i admit to being off my rocker today, but off-my-meds is where i need to be at every day of my life.
creative types shouldnt have to reel themselves back in for the sake of appearances... i, too, wanna walk around with my draws showing, not like the younger generations with their pantses sagging, but like our daddies used to do walking through their own houses in a t-shirt and boxers and a can of pabst in one hand, porn in the other, on the way to the bathroom while mamas were entertaining the jehovah's witnesses dropping through to talk about organized salvation.
(and yes, i said "pantses" - stfu!)

i want my art and poems to grow from a crevice. from the forgotten pot of beans in the back of the fridge that now has a rain forest growing in it. i want ... the hell if i know ... something. different. older than where we are now as a people but still future-forward. reverse-sankofa. an un-diversed dissertation on total damnation written from the hands of some dawn-dead zombies and have it be a poem of love and affection. thats what i'm wanting. to be so fkn retro its original. to sit on the Great Porch built by the hands of those forced into serving me. to be an overseer. shotgun across my lap, marcus garvey and kwame nkrumah on my ipod. reading franz fanon on my ipad. whipping my fieldhands, the scarification on their backs my folk-art; telling toby his new name is achebe.
(and yes, muhfkr, i said 'lissen'... no, wait. no i didnt. i deleted that part.
but i'm not sorry for callin you a muhfkr. live with it.)

its not that i'm antisocial (because i am), its just... i'm just not counter-cultural enough. i think.
the status quo has tainted what it means to living-up-to-your-responsibilities. i love doing what others expect of me, as long as what's expected of me is based on the name i've created for myself and not by the stereotypes associated with 'black/art/literature'.

you probably dont understand.

its not just a black thang.

its a blacker thing.

i would give anything

to own the truck currently used in my banner. that is the dopest thing on 4 wheels. i could be driver/curator for the black-apothecary-traveling-splinter-art-and-broken-lit-splitters-show...
like a new-era bingo long!

have a bell, like the old-fashioned ice cream trucks used to have. (god, how i miss ice-cream trucks! not popsicle  truck, ice-cream! remember how they useta swirl vanilla and chocolate double-barreled from the side? simply beautiful.)

my daughter calls me weird.

i dont deny it.

ding, ding, ding... we have a new champion!

and the winner by tko is
(ref lifts the arms of.... ) .... ... ... ... ... the people's champion!

okay... i can be simple and direct. i'm not always so theatrical.

i'm talknabout the blogsite AUNT JEMIMA'S REVENGE! they are holding it down!

"O" is for...

its sad when one of the freshest things in hiphop isnt actually hiphop but a homage to it...

there are exceptions, but exceptions are usually fleeting.


O from Daniele Manoli on Vimeo.

Daniele Manoli - check out his entire alphabet on vimeo.

elder solomon lightfoot michaux

"an african and an irish walk into a holler..."

black southern heritage and appalachian culture

abbey lincoln

abbey lincoln - the man who has the magic/where are the african gods?

some real good feel good...

8 goals for africa -

summer reading list 2010

(when not reading poetry submissions for mythium)

anthills of the savannah, chinua achebe
the woman of the dunes, kobo abe
fledgling, octavia butler
the electric koolaid acid test, tom wolfe
african short stories, achebe & c.l. innes
flight to canada, ishmael reed

up next:

naked lunch, william burroughs

thinking outloud online part 1

every couple of years i gather up the 20 plus years of badly written poetry, focusing on the last ten years in particular, with the intention of 'getting published'... so i read, reread and do some editing, siphon a million bad similes into 70 pages and shout to the heavens how THIS IS IT! my voice shaking the shit outta the firmaments... but then the transient taste of satisfaction and sense of accomplishment fades and i shrug; toss the manuscript back into dry-dock and go on about my business of being indifferent, literary-speaking.

i know for a fact that i'm a decent poet, but tho i consider my poetic approach 'scholarly' i have never once considered myself an 'academic'. i've spent a great deal of time studying the writers who've influenced me, but never while in a classroom setting... i've been encouraged to get an mfa in writing but again to what purpose? to teach? to sharpen the shape of my nose as i preach 'form' to the 'unlettered'? for vanity? for 'just because that's the way its done'?

certainly receiving my mfa would potentially add weight to my credentials as i talk to 'genuine' publishers about accepting my collections, but then what? i dont particularly need the approval of a publishing house to know i'm better than what passes as an average writer (and despite that last sentence, i am quite humble in this fact/even if it only exists in my own mind) - but unless i win a substantial prize, the role of 'poetry writer' is cupboard-bare skill once fully accomplished.

but i do want to publish my work. but #2, i dont want to self-publish. writing in my own journals is self-publishing all by itself, why would i want to spend my own money expanding the look and feel of my own poetic journal entries, especially since i can only name 10 people that might be interested enough to purchase one! better to just turn my manuscript into a pdf file and just send it to them via email for free, right? but such a hassle seems too much like an inept type of hustle to me. i'm not a mic-type writer standing outside the coffehouses pushing my wares... my dilemma is this: i write for both academia AND for the non-academics. i want one word to reach them both and be equal in standing.

this means self-publishing is most definitely out. or is it?

shit. its almost 2 in the morning... wtf was you expecting from me at this hour, an epiphany?!?!?!

go to bed and forgetchu was e'en herre.

or if you're reading this after breakfast/lunch/dinner/etc, then please proceed to vomit at the commencement of this sentence.

(watch the shoes!)

siblings...

its funny how much me and my sisters have in common but yet still know very little about each other and whatever it is that motivates us... i'm the youngest and the only boy amongst 5 girls (2 sisters from mama's previous relationship, 2 from daddy's previous relationship, then me and a sis from their union)...
there is off and on tension from a sister on my father's side who i think feels 'neglected' (or annoyed) by daddy's 'new' family. i think she feels like we enjoyed vast advantages of a loving home (which we did and then sometimes we didnt - its all relative to your own individual demons)
my other sisters think i enjoyed some 'loving, common bond' with daddy, as if i adored him and had a close relationship with him (which didnt exist and has never existed. as mentioned in the previous post i had much emotional acrimony towards daddy and not until he had lost the use of his legs did he seem to have much use to stay connected with me)...

i think 3/5ths of my sisters are extremely narcissistic. one would doubt it and turn it back on me, one would say 'yeah, and?' and the other would roll her eyes and hit me in the back of the head...
(one sister is a complete angel and we would never exchange cross-words with each other...
then again, maybe i just dont her that well... and the other sister, i just dont know her that well; daddy's funeral was the first time i'd seen her since i was a pre-teen - just found out she's been living within 5 blocks of mama and daddy's house for the last 2 years!)

anyway, we all have issues and are bound to have the wrong adjectives (see previous post) placed on one another's obituary pages when those appropriate times arise...

you always want more time...

the newly began chronicling of my relationship with my father has transcended the traditionally predictable rants of father/son angst and anecdotes into something remorsefully surreal...

yes, my sentences ramble in the most awkward of badly poetic ways, i'm sorry, that caint be helped, i eschew proper school-learning, especially regarding the academics of slang - slang is my shield, my
slang-blade...

anyway, i'm avoiding the actual reason for this inarticulate post - not wanting to say it...

my father passed away in his sleep the saturday morning of July 3rd, 2010.

my last conversation with him was the friday morning before, when he called me crying; not wanting
to return to the nursing home he had been rehabilitating in. i felt his pain and sorrow, but more than that i understood the actual origins to that pain and sorrow - information he had shared with me during the 18 months (plus the 3 years since then) in which i lived with him and mama acting as his human crutch and personal errand boy (a position i held with great honor and esteem, hoping it would at last earn me a morsel of respect in his view of me) ((those issues he shared with me will be addressed in later posts/probably))...

but the man who never seemed to hold much affection for me as a child or as an adult has passed away (not to be confused with 'love' because i knew he fully loved us all, he just was reluctant or just didnt know how to show it in ways that mattered on deeper levels, at least to me) - i think he came to trust me, at least 'value' me as his sounding board, but still i didnt feel his respect for me as his son and as a man... not that such a thing is ever a requirement, its just something nice to keep stored in your self-esteem when growing into a functioning adult. esteem should grow from feelings of familial love and not from the need to prove one's self as a valuable commodity to his closest kinfolk.
how can you empower your communal ties when you keep a chip on your shoulder at all times?

forgive me. this blog might be about me, but this immediate post is in honor of my father. i didnt intend to rant on about any preconceived misperceptions about manhood and family-ties.

i've lost my father. it was hard to like him and not always easy to love him - but i did both (at least after abandoning my long-seated bitterness and hatred towards him/strictly undeserved and entirely harvested from my own emotional aesthetics) - my sisters affectionately placed the phrase 'mean and surly' in his obituary in attempts to adequately sum up his most frequent disposition - traits in which we all have, either by blood or social osmosis! - and i've inherited my fair share of those characteristics.

but i also maintain a deep-rooted sense of overpowering love and the need to visibly express it; traits i thought i had created of my own volition... and the truth i came to understand was this: these, too, were traits i had directly inherited from my father. deep within him was an overflowing well of love, one that had been capped in life by intimate reasons i may never fully know (or openly express online, at least not yet).

for so long i had misunderstood my father... but the truth became extremely clear as i had began understanding myself: if i too am 'mean and surly' by blood and against my will, then perhaps everything i feel about love and intimacy should be attributed to him as well - what reason or right had i to conclude otherwise? if visibly and by temperment daddy and i were just alike, then he too held great desires to love and be loved equally in return...

daddy's 'negative' traits were exacerbated when the life he lived proved it impossible to fully express himself through his positive traits...

or maybe he and i are just full of shit, i wont rule it out... at any rate, i found myself when going through my father just as i found him when going through myself: he was the theatrical 'dark knight' and i was just the campy ol' televised 'batman' - our origins are the same. only the cinema was different.
"mean and surly" - i know its said with affection, but to me it represents 'the unknown (and maybe now unknowable) reflections of his past' - not who he actually was but more reflective of the things in his life that made being 'mean and surly' his most adequate armor protecting whatever softer underside he may have had... in those inner-realms of himself is where my true daddy resided... reserved and calculating every single acquaintance by those conditions of an unknown extenuating circumstance - the iceberg tip to his emotional titanic.

the more i got to know daddy, the more i realized that he was soft, had grown insecure of his life choices and was badly in need of a hug, acceptance and understanding... things he was now unable to express since his mean and surly armor had long ago become the prison by which he was now held by and most commonly viewed through, condemning him to live out his last precious moments as a characture of himself to those he needed the most support and understanding from.

rother davis
1937-2010.

- in love and obedience.

daddy issues part one

my father is a hard, unaffectionate man (unless you are a friend or a cb buddy, then he is warm, exchanging blue-colored languages joyfully with them - i am so jealous!)

as a child i would side up to him while he was under the hood of the family car (motor oil was a body fluid for him) - but he would always push me back, very gruff, saying i was getting in his way; would tell me to go play somewhere else... it's sublime at first, but after awhile you look out into the garage and wonder how long it would take you to go get help if the jack slipped, trapping him beneath the pontiac he was working on. not "run off in a panic" for help... i'm talking about "IF i ran off..." would i go to the candy lady first, get a bag of pop-rocks and a pickle before returning home to tell mama "mama, i think daddy is stuck under the car."

this is bitterness. i wasnt an evil child. this is one of the many negative emotions that will eventually surface when you instill ... what's the word? ... "detachment" ... when you instill detachment in children. which still isnt the most correct term, because the bitterness you feel is most definitely attached to the person who helped nurture it!

but you grow up. i understood that daddy didnt not love me, he just didnt show it in socially recognizable terms. so, i didnt not love him in the exact same way the he didnt not love me...

i also swore blood vows to the heavens that i would NEVER love my wife and children in such a manner once i was old enough to indulge in the arrangements of adulthood! my children still might not like me, but dammit, they will sure as shit know that i love them above all else!

(let me smoother my loved ones with love... or else, let me smoother them in their sleep. their choice.)

this lovelessness-as-an-act-of-love i was shown as a child would not be permitted in my home as an adult. it has shaped the way i am now emotionally connected to the friends and family willing to fully express their love respectfully and openly. al green said, "love and happiness" -  that man was a goddamn genius. i have no time in my life for loveless, unhappy people - not just because they are a drain, but also because their very existence trudges up the emotionless-void stuck in orbit between resentment and bitterness (metaphor for the relationship between a father and his son).

at times, i have hated daddy. deeply. not the angst-ridden "i wish you was dead/i had never been born" overly dramatic, cinematically dysfunctional type of hate. just a good ol' fashioned clean, angry hate.
("if you wasnt so much taller than me, i'd fuckn kick your ass!")

 i guess this is normal for many folks. but what happens to you, as an adult, when the ancestral link begins to claim you and you find yourself FEELING, ACTING AND BEHAVING in the same exact vein as the person you abhorred?!?! - - - in my mid-20's began the realization that i was becoming my father!

not in temperament. but... well, yeah... in temperment! some damn genetic switch was thrown and the traits in my father had begun to metastasize in me!

NOT HIS HABITS! not the way he expressed himself (not entirely, anyway) but a deeper understanding, appreciation and acceptance of why he was the way he was.  temperamentally i was wired the exact same way as he was... the switch had been thrown. or maybe it had always been there and i was just becoming aware of it. but at any point, it took being in a successfully joyless relationship for me to understand my connection to my father:

acts of lovelessness was a self-defense mechanism to hide the pain and failure of not having/living the life you wanted deeply for yourself. you love your family to no ends, but you accept the stifled confines of an unhappy relationship and simply make the best of it. i can see how having a loving, happy child running his hot wheels collection around your feet while you hide  your head inside an engine block can ruin the spa-effect of your powertool-based escapisms... once i'd understood this about daddy (though maybe not completely accurate in my own unlettered analysis) the love i had been stifling for him came rushing back into me. and in doing so, i was able to fully love the parts of me that reminded me of him; insight and perspective had freed me from that foolishness... i became calm. began talking to my gods again. understood not just what 'a good love' was, but understood how to avoid the actions in a relationship that can lead or push you away from that same 'good love'...

al green wasnt just a genius, al green is my jesus! in love and happiness i am saved.

hallelujah, aché, show you right!

fresh! for twenty-ten...

after four years of work, my Tangerine Tubman poem is 99.99013745% finished...
this has been one of the longest ongoing literary projects i've undertaken in the 20+ years
i've been writing... i am thoroughly pleased with this final result!

now to cut the cord, smack it on the ass and send it out into the world to fend for itself.
initially, i was gonna make it available as pdf file and sell it for $3 online (plus $10 for a poster
of its cover)... but most magazines consider pdf files (as well as blog posts!) the equivalent to
an electronic chapbook/self-publishing.

im wanting to avoid any unnecessary hassles, at least until (and 'if') the poem is sufficiently
rejected by the publishers im sending it to. if that happens, then i'll make the pdf available for
purchasing via my paypal account.

below is 'the cover' and also a piece of collage incorporating a couple of lines from it;
surely thats okay with any panel of judges, right?

legba walks into a bucket of blood

its my nature to swallow seeds
to have them ferment in the soils within my skull
to birth themselves from daydream/their daylight bursting
from the inseams of forehead/my whole head a calabash
uncollapsing... the daylight strands a dreadlock each,
potential breaching virtue. new gods from a nappy gourd.
the guardian at the gate of dreams draped in gonesh

and gunsmoke... his guitar smoking/his black hand
stroking the 'nations sack under his suit coat.
ask him to tell you your future...watch and see
if he dont sing/maybe he will swallow you; the seed
in my head shorn from thunder/born under a bad blues,
a Conqueroo, becoming/how how how how ------- whoa!,
babe.

upfromsumdirt, 2010

nigerian oil spills

africanliteraturenews.blogspot.com

the nigeria delta region has had the equivalent of 1 exxon valdez oil spill A YEAR for the last 50 years!

Anene Ejikeme has written a very informative opinion page letter to the New York Times concerning this seriously under-publicized ecological disaster....

follow the above link back to African Literature News and Review blog or
click here to go to the NYT article.

poefrica

african poetry blog to check out next time i get some time...

this one too!
(afropoem)

recent inspirations

1. african short stories, edited by chinua achebe and cl innes
2. flight to canada, ishmael reed
3. anthills of the savannah, chinua achebe
4. kiss my black ads blogspot
5. the jazz baroness, a documentary detailing the relationship of thelonious monk and pannonica rothschild.

how to make a book (if you lived 60 years ago)

new wimmins in video...

joi

the best videos for visual artists needing creative inspiration - part 1

 kid koala


olmecha supreme


mf dood/madvillain


killer mike


outkast

springgun press chapbook contest

• click here:
    springgun press
     - a new online and print journal.

some other people's journals

diverse voices quarterly

ryga

weave

cerise press

southeast review 

concisely

phati'tude

poetry submissions/contests

ZONE 3


FUGUE

Aimé Césaire 1913-2008

Out of Defeat

Aimé Césaire’s miraculous words
Colin Dayan

from the boston review 2008
 
When Aimé Césaire died in Fort-de-France, Martinique on April 17, 2008, Ségolène Royal and others called for him to be buried in the Panthéon in Paris, alongside Rousseau, Hugo, and Zola. Away from the land of his ancestors, the acclaimed poet and long-time mayor of Martinique’s capital Fort-de-France could be claimed for France. But the obituaries make clear that Césaire’s legacy is both powerful and troubling.

The writer who once celebrated Haiti as the country where “black men stood up in order to affirm, for the first time, their determination to create a new world, a free world,” stood by, a powerless politician, as his own country turned into an acquiescent neo-colony. He had hoped to make the former colony a full partner in the economic and social benefits of the post-war metropole. It did not work. Harsh economic inequalities, reflected in de facto segregation by color and status no less effective for lack of legal sanction, remained. As late as 1973, Edouard Glissant noted that in Fort-de-France a cinema boasted “la salle de l’élite.” Even now Fort-de-France stagnates in its ongoing role as accommodating child of Mother France, while passive consumerism and cultural dependency stifle local initiative.

I first met Césaire in the mayor’s office of the old Hôtel de Ville in Fort-de-France in 1980. Ten years before, I had discovered Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to My Native Land) (1939), his best-known work, when I began translating the Haitian poet René Depestre’s Un arc-en-ciel pour l’occident chrétien (A Rainbow for the Christian West), the “vodou mystery poem” about the gods’ descent into the violent “Dixie-pit” of a judge’s parlor in Alabama. I became obsessed by Césaire’s language; the peculiar reality of his Martinican landscapes, lethargic, flat, and festering, yet always ready to awaken into beauty. I translated his collection Les armes miraculeuses (The Miraculous Weapons) (1946) and found in his “Les Pur-Sang” a sensuous terrain that recalled Mallarmé’s sterile winters, wounds bleeding like open pomegranates, and lace disintegrating in the light.

Césaire always surprised me. He seemed so calm. No bitterness, no anger. I had just seen the cruise ships in the blue harbor. I saw the high prices in the supermarkets, French yogurt that cost more than in Paris. The rot and neglect of shanties in the shade of luxury hotels. The packaging of the “local” as folklore. I had read his definition of negritude in an interview in the ’60s as a “resistance to the politics of assimilation,” a confrontation with the “ideal” imitation—“a French person with black skin.”

In his journey through language, Césaire had to pick through a pile of names—for blacks, for slavery, for gods, for trees—surviving in his island like unwanted things, the waste of empire.

Césaire once quipped that anyone confused by his politics should seek it in his poetry. He seemed, at times, an advocate of poésie pure, a follower of Mallarmé’s craft of absence and elimination, especially in Les armes miraculeuses. But his poems also bear witness to the harsh realities of life in a colonial outpost under Vichy rule. He meant the “miraculous weapons” to be arms for the struggle against colonialism, as well as, in and of themselves, poetic annunciation. Behind the flames, grasses, guava, and hibiscus of his impossible landscapes, one catches sight of the lashing of bodies and rotting flesh, the stench of slave ships, the postures of sanctimonious politicians.

* * *

Born in 1913 at Basse-Pointe in the north of Martinique, Césaire lived in the shadow of Mt. Pelée, a volcano that had erupted eleven years earlier, annihilating the capital St. Pierre. He moved to the new capital Fort-de-France for schooling at the Lycée Schoelcher, named after the abolitionist Victor Schoelcher. There he met the assimilated middle classes. He always felt that he brought something else to the classroom, a past he once told me was like “some other kind of blood” that had nothing to do with the classical French literature he studied.

Césaire spent most of the 1930s in Paris, as a scholarship student first at Lycée Louis-le-Grand, then at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. While in Europe he began the Cahier, which André Breton would later call “the greatest lyrical monument of our times.” Césaire wrote:

So much blood in my memory! In my memory are lagoons. They are covered with death’s-heads.

They are not covered with water lilies.

In my memory are lagoons. On their shores no women’s loincloths spread out.

My memory is encircled with blood. My memory has its belt of corpses!

If in Paris Césaire found writing and Africa (he confessed that until he left Martinique in 1931 he did not know what it meant to be black), in Haiti he found something quite different. Césaire arrived in Haiti in 1944 a poet and returned home later that year a politician. At the time Haiti was still the only independent black republic in the Americas. The people of Jamaica, Barbados, and the West Indies still served the King, learned English history, celebrated the Empire, and knew the beauty of daffodils not breadfruit. Martinique itself had supported the colonial regime and Vichy after France’s collapse in World War II until a U.S. naval blockade in 1943 forced the island to transfer its allegiance to the Free French.

Called “Black France” by one nineteenth-century observer (Jules Michelet), “France with frizzy hair” by another (Maxime Raybaud), and a “tropical dog-kennel” by Thomas Carlyle, Haiti had always goaded imagination high and low, between the extremes of idealization and debasement. Eight hundred miles from Martinique, Haiti’s peasantry still lived off the land in the 1940s, a heady time of Marxist student revolts, a return to vodou, and, for young writers there, surrealism. For Césaire Haiti meant revolution, a heroic history for the Caribbean.

Césaire returned to Martinique at the end of 1944, and after giving lectures on Haiti was asked to run on the French Communist ticket for mayor of Fort-de-France and for the new French National Assembly. Not yet thirty-two years old, he won by a landslide in the May 27, 1945 election. Césaire would remain mayor of Fort-de-France for nearly fifty-six years, until 2001, and serve as a deputy in France’s National Assembly until 1956 and again from 1958 until 1993. He would also in these years continue to write poems, plays, and his 1950 anti-colonial manifesto, Discours sur le colonialisme (Discourse on Colonialism).

In this world where the French language meant domination, to gain a voice—to be a writer—was no easy matter. In his journey through language, Césaire had to pick through a pile of names—for blacks, for slavery, for gods, for trees—surviving in his island like unwanted things, the waste of empire, the refuse of colonization, remnants of a history gone wrong. Discours sur le colonialisme helped me to know politics, to understand the impurity of places that constructed themselves by projecting dirt onto others. It was Césaire’s vision of the bourgeoisie as “a receptacle into which there flow all the dirty waters of history” that stayed with me.

Yet the troubling contradictions between his writing and his political life remain. In any attempt to understand Césaire, and to know why Césaire matters—or should matter—so much to us now, we must ask one question: how did the call to “decolonize our minds” square not only with his political life, but also with his use of French and not Creole, the language of the “mother country” and not that of the black majority in Martinique?

He described negritude as ‘a concrete awareness’ of what it meant to live in ‘the atmosphere of rejection . . . conditioned to feelings of inferiority.’

Frantz Fanon began Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks) (1952) with Caliban’s curse (“the red plague rid you / For learning me your language”), and an aside: “We are trying to understand why the Antilles Negro is so fond of speaking French.” To acquire a civilizing language means to lose your identity, or at least to enter into a devil’s wager. To speak is to exist absolutely for the other, “to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.” The more one mastered the French language, the whiter one became, closer, in Fanon’s words, “to being a real human being.” Years before in 1931, the Haitian poet Léon Laleau lamented “this anguish like none other / To tame with words from France / This heart received from Senegal.”

Whether from the English or the French Caribbean, writers educated into literature faced “a divided self” or became “the mulatto of style,” as Derek Walcott wrote. Yet the cure of culture was nowhere more effective than in the French colonies. Cultivation and eloquence were the keys to assimilation. In Paris Césaire met Léopold Senghor and Léon Damas, and the three founded the journal L’étudiant noir (The Black Student) in 1935. Césaire coined the word “negritude,” transforming the word “nègre,” a term of abuse, into the rallying cry of a movement. He proclaimed his blackness. He became a poet.

Unlike Senghor, Césaire never used negritude to mystify or mythologize. The return to Africa, the invocation of “primeval unity” or “the truth of essentials,” an authentic or innate blackness, was not enough. Instead he described negritude as “a concrete awareness” of what it meant to live in “the atmosphere of rejection . . . conditioned to feelings of inferiority.” Rather than counter racism with visions of past glory, he returned to the history of prejudice and the suffering it had wrought. “No, we’ve never been Amazons of the King of Dahomey, nor princes of Ghana with eight hundred camels,” he wrote in the Cahier. “I may as well confess that we were at all times pretty mediocre dishwashers, shoeblacks without ambition.” Many writers would later condemn negritude for its essentialism; Wole Soyinka quipped that the tiger doesn’t have to proclaim its tigritude. But Césaire never wholly abandoned the charge to reclaim a real history that had been disfigured or obliterated. And for him the French language was essential to this project.

In the Cahier, history is Césaire’s subject: his personal history, as well as the history of his island. But what happens when the poet who has been told his country has no history sits down to write an epic? Detritus is the source of his vision. The fragments of foreign civilizations, the residue of imposed cultures, the medley of traditions, all contradictory and clashing, inspire the poet. The ritual of recovery depends on a landscape suffused with spirits, trash, and mud. Here is Césaire’s “essential landscape,” splendidly translated by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith:

And they threw stones at him, bits of scrap iron, broken bottles, but neither these stones, nor this scrap iron, nor these bottles . . . O peaceful years of God on this terraqueous clod!

and the whip argued with the bombilation of the flies over the sugary dew of our sores.

The Cahier marks Césaire’s “descent into a real hell,” the plunge necessary to heal the wound of assimilation, what Fanon called “lactification” or whitening. As Césaire explained in 1967:

It’s true that superficially we are French, we bear the marks of French customs; we have been branded by Cartesian philosophy, by French rhetoric; but if we break with all that, if we plumb the depths, then what we will find is fundamentally black.

Imagine a poem that forces history, psychoanalysis, ethnography, and revolution to coexist. The Cahier stages the uneasy alliances between the monumental projections of empire and its abject underside: populations looted, cultures trampled, slaves reduced by terror and regulated by force. Alternately strident and elegiac, Césaire pits the ongoing myths of inferiority against the lure of “civilizing” language. The relics and scraps of bodies, the slaves who had been called “ebony wood,” “pieces of the Indies,” or “heads of cattle,” return as ancestor spirits, caught in the evil that created them.

What these metamorphoses have in common is a secret pact with the banal. Césaire plied his words as if they were ritual incantation, and he knew that the magic of ritual lay in its ordinariness, its way of reiterating the simplest, least gilded things. The sacred had to be concrete in order to transform, palpable, never abstract. The bond between colonizer and colonized, the mutual adaptability, as Hegel had it, of master and slave, gained substance through these meditations on mimicry, adaptation, and appropriation. Resistance for Césaire is not just political, but psychic. Repression is not only a history of mutilation and torture. It is also the buried and forgotten. The revolution must be “internal,” a complete overhauling of consciousness, what he called “une rencontre bien totale.”

In the effort to understand the relation between Césaire’s art and his life, between tradition and revolution, his plays are also instructive. He turned to drama in much the same way Eliot did, not to replace the poems but to supplement and enlarge upon them. They are not just history plays, but analyses of the colonial problem, the perils of revolution and the difficulties of decolonization. One of his tragedies, among the many that dogged his life, was the recognition of his plays in Senegal but not in Martinique.

In 1963 Césaire published La tragédiedu roi Christophe (The Tragedy of King Christophe); in 1965 Une saison au Congo (A Season in the Congo), about the fall of Patrice Lumumba; and in 1969 Une tempête, what he called his “adaptation” of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. I recall asking Césaire why he wrote a play about Christophe and not about the other two revolutionary leaders Toussaint or Dessalines. He liked to linger sometimes in the negative, he said, in what was irretrievable—or did he say unsalvageable? Christophe is a black Prospero who loses his magic as soon as he takes up his crown. Unlike Caliban who cuts through the illusions of Prospero’s speech, Christophe faces a history of loss: “In the past they stole our names / Our pride / Our nobility.” So instead of the stigmatizing “Pierre, Paul, Jacques, Toussaint” he invents a nobility, “his Grace the Duke of Limonade, the Duke of Marmalade.”

The magic of the hybrid—the beauty, the heat, the odors and music, the luxuriance and excess of the tropics—is much more attractive to publishers and critics than the grueling realities of racism and violence.

In writing these plays, Césaire made it plain that he was honest enough to declare an end to his dream of decolonization. But he was brave enough to write Toussaint Louverture: La Révolution française et le problème colonial(1961). Haunted by revolution, living in the torpor of Martinique, and perhaps remembering his first visit to Haiti long before, Césaire proposed to answer the question, “why did the whites fail . . . why did the mulattoes fail . . . and why did the most destitute social group, the negroes, the group with the ‘greatest grievance’ succeed?” How paradoxical and vexing proved the language of “inalienable” human rights when used by the free in the name of the bound. It was Toussaint, according to Césaire, who “took the Declaration of the Rights of Man literally,” who gave life to a principle. But the black masses made the revolution. They understood, as Césaire demonstrates, that nothing could be expected from Paris, that formal promises would not be fulfilled, and, most of all, that freedom must be won through conflict.

Eventually, those black-brown masses did win their freedom, and in doing so turned Dessalines, the first leader of independent Haiti, into a god. This link between religious practice and political change, between vodou and resistance, is a consistent theme in Haitian history, but Césaire was never comfortable talking about vodou, or quimbois, its attenuated equivalent in Martinique. Though statistics indicate that 75 percent of Martinicans are Roman Catholic, that does not say very much. In Haiti, where le mélange, or mixture, is a fact of life, vodou practitioners boast in words that are by now proverbial, “I am Catholic, and I serve the gods.”

Even though blood-suckers, revenants, evil spirits in the form of dogs, and loupgawou walk the night, Césaire, like Toussaint, refused to recognize—at least openly—these powers. Yet a glance at the poetry, early and late, at the landscape infused with life, stones made animate, and all kinds of commingling of persons and things, suggests what is so deeply felt that it cannot be said. Césaire’s reticence, which I first took as coldness, I later understood to be respect for the unknowable, a grace that refused to use or tamper with what gave life to the trees, lived in the waters, and, I think now, inspired him. The spirits found voice in his art.

But what kind of voice was possible for the poet born in the Caribbean, educated into French literature, who wanted to break out of the fetters of colonialism? Césaire once said:

I don’t deny French influences within myself. . . . But I want to emphasize very strongly that—while using the elements that French literature gave me as a point of departure—at the same time I have always strived to form a new language. . . . I wanted to create an Antillean French, a black French.

He always refused to be enshrined as one of the splendid results of French colonization. He defied its gifts of eloquence, dislocated French into something new, and expressed what he called “this self, this black, creole, Martinican, West Indian self.” No one wrote French like Césaire. From the Cahier and Les armes miraculeuses to such works as Soleil cou coupé (Beheaded Sun) (1948), Corps perdu (Lost Body) (1950), Ferrements (1960), and Cadastre (1961), he coined neologisms and introduced archaisms and popular and scientific etymologies, while tearing apart syntax and word order. Obsessed by terminology, he exhumed old words, plundering Latin and Greek and remaking the ancient world on the soil of Martinique.

The challenge was to forge a new register of communication out of the données of the colonial “mother tongue.” For some Caribbean writers, however, the attempt was doomed to failure: to be an exile in your own land. In Eloge de la créolité (In Praise of Creoleness) (1989), Raphaël Confiant, Patrick Chamoiseau, and the linguist Jean Bernabé oversimplified the ambiguities of Glissant’s Le Discours antillais (Caribbean Discourse) (1981). They advocated a return to creole, the language of the “djobeurs” and “the vegetable markets of Fort-de-France.” Creolity, along with such terms as “nomadism,” “cross-cultural circulation,” and “mestiza consciousness,” entered the academy, offering a chance for professors fashionably to embrace the “other.” Creolity became exotic, an easy trip to the supermarket of diversity goods where everyone could pick up a bit of local color. It was supremely apolitical. Suddenly, the Caribbean became emblematic of the world we live in, as in James Clifford’s realization that “the whole world is evolving toward a condition of creolization.” But these Caribbean hybridities were achieved at a price.

Césaire never forgot these costs. He never forgot history or politics. Perhaps that is why Confiant and Chamoiseau are so much more popular in Paris today. The magic of the hybrid—the beauty, the heat, the odors and music, the luxuriance and excess of the tropics—is much more attractive to publishers and critics than the grueling realities of racism and violence. Césaire’s French holds on to the parts of the self that most of us would like to conceal. Stark and compelling, it ruptures empty pieties. Take, for example, these lines from “Ibis-Anubis” : “à l’avance j’éructai une vie / j’ai tiré au sort mes ancêtres une terre plénière / mais qui blesse qui motile / tout ce qui abâtardit le fier regard” (in advance I belched a life / I drew lots for my ancestors for a plenary earth / but one that wounds that mutilates / anything that bastardizes a proud gaze). He became a poet by renouncing poetry. It was only in this rejection—achieved through the very materials that confined him—that he made his break with the “langue de culture.”

He made his life, just as he made his language and his poetry, out of what others judged defeats.

Césaire recognized that the dream of a return to Africa was as much a symptom of deracination as the myth of assimilation with France. His honesty was brutal. But only with his singular and hard-won French could he keep his voice true, held between the lure of an idealized past and the dangers of a restrictive present, between poetry and politics, lyric and prose, Paris and Africa. He never feared controversy. He was dreadfully consistent. In 2005, when he refused to see future French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who had supported the law forcing teachers and texts to teach the positive effects of colonialism, Césaire insisted, “I am anti-colonial. I have never changed. I am inflexible.”

* * *

Césaire lived the tragedy of a present that kept repeating the past. He had hoped in the auspicious days after World War II that colonial atrocities would end. It was in this spirit that in the French National Assembly on March 19, 1946, he pushed for Martinique, along with the other “vieilles colonies” —Guadeloupe, French Guiana, and Réunion—to become a department: no longer a colony, but an equal part of France alongside Alpes-Maritimes, Paris, or Dordogne. Yet he found himself humiliated as he watched new forms of oppression—economic exploitation and cultural dependency—take root in a neocolonial Martinique. Laws concerning unemployment benefits, social security, and equal salaries, for example, were passed in Paris but not applied in Martinique. Before the Assembly on December 29, 1947, Césaire condemned “the caricature of assimilation” offered by France, who had reneged on her promise of equality. “We asked you for . . . the rights of man and the citizen,” he said. “What you offer us instead are truncheons and riot squads.” He watched his fellow deputies acquiesce in the massacres of the Malagasy during the nationalist uprising in Madagascar in 1947. Three years later, in Discours sur le colonialisme, he described scenes of “cannibalistic hysteria” in the Assembly, with “cries of ‘Kill! Kill!’ and ‘Let’s see some blood,’ belched forth by trembling old men.” Discours marked his confrontation not only with the barbarism of the “respectable bourgeois,” but with a language that blinds, manipulates, and deadens. He looked to an Africa that finally shook off the colonial yoke only to see independence become nothing more than a cover for new forms of domination. “The flotsam of any Ancien Régime,” he reminded me, “has a strange staying power.”

He made his life, just as he made his language and his poetry, out of what others judged defeats, or as V. S. Naipaul put it, “nullities.” If Naipaul’s recurrent nightmare was to awaken and find himself back in Trinidad, Césaire lived again and again the return to Martinique. Not just in his Cahier, where return is the only ritual that matters, the only way to reclaim the self, but in his double life as mayor in Martinique and deputy in Paris. He never turned his back on what divided him.

I visited Césaire before the publication of moi, laminaire . . . (me, laminaria . . .) (1982), as he approached seventy. The promise of “unheard of whitenings” in Les armes miraculeuses, the pleasure in obscurity had thirty-five years later become muted. More an elegy for what did not happen than a summoning of the possible, these poems are quiet in their strangeness. The prose epigraph concludes: “time also to settle one’s account with a few phantoms and ghosts.” The old influences, Lautréamont, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, and Claudel, are gone. The laconic voice and cool irony accomplish something more honest and more difficult. Offering no easy compromise or magical fantasy, Césaire presents his island, his vision, and his art as “avatar / of a version of paradise absurdly spoiled / —it is much worse than a hell— /” .

Vulnerable now to disappointments that over such a long time had not been dislodged, he realized that no words of his, no matter how miraculous, could save him. In the image of the laminarian algae clinging to a rock in the Caribbean, Césaire reflects on how “the atmospheric or rather historic pressure / immeasurably increases my afflictions / even if it makes some words of mine luxurious.” Césaire selected these closing lines of “Lagoonal Calendar” to be engraved on his tombstone in the cemetery of La Joyau where he was buried on April 20 after a long journey through the streets of Fort-de-France, lined with tens of thousands, some of whom sang in Creole, “Papa Aimé, mesi” (“Papa Aimé, thank you”), as if he were a god.

Prayer to Masks by Léopold Sédar Senghor

Black mask, red mask, you black and white masks,
Rectangular masks through whom the spirit breathes,
I greet you in silence!
Any you too, my lionheaded ancestor.
You guard this place, that is closed to any feminine laughter,
   to any mortal smile.
You purify the air of eternity, here where I breathe the air of
   my fathers.
Masks of markless faces, free from dimples and wrinkles,
You have composed this image, this is my face that bends
   over the altar of white paper.
In the name of your image, listen to me!
Now while the Africa of despotism is dying - it is the agony
  of a pitiable princess
Like that of Europe to whom she is connected through the
   navel -
Now fix your immobile eyes upon your children who have
   been called
And who sacrifice their lives like the poor man his last
   garment
So that hereafter we may cry 'hear' at the rebirth of the
   world being the leaven that the white flour needs.
For who else would teach rhythm to the world that has
   died of machines and cannons?
For who else should ejaculate the cry of joy, that arouses
   the dead and the wise in a new dawn?
Say, who else could return the memory of life to men with
   a torn hope?
They call us cotton heads, and coffee men, and oily men,
They call us men of death.
But we are the men of the dance whose feet only gain
   power when they beat the hard soil.



Léopold Sédar Senghor

SEMBENE OUSMANE!

i've got a used copy of XALA on hold at my gig at morgan adams bookstore... me and Crys
rented the film from netflix a few months ago and i'm eager to check out the literary version.

the film below is the first installment of
a work in progress by jason silverman - http://vimeo.com/9708864 - featuring
Sembene Ousmane as the subject... it's incomprehensible to me how black art and literature
can be discussed in america without mentioning the works of our african counterparts either
living on the continent or living elsewhere... but to paraphrase what the video is about and
what i'm always saying to every ear that will listen:

more than with guns, whoever controls a peoples' narrative controls that people.



SEMBENE! chapter 1, 2-20-10 version from jason silverman on Vimeo.

cave canem book prize

taken from Poets & Writers

Cave Canem Foundation

Poetry Prize

Deadline:

April 30, 2010

Entry Fee:

$15

Web site:

www.cavecanempoets.org

E-mail address:

camillerankine@ccpoets.org

A prize of $1,000 and publication by University of Georgia Press will be given annually for a first poetry collection by an African American poet. Elizabeth Alexander will judge. Submit two copies of a manuscript of 50 to 75 pages with a $15 entry fee by April 30. Call, e-mail, or visit the Web site for complete guidelines.

Cave Canem Foundation, 20 Jay Street, Suite 310-A, Brooklyn, NY 11201. (718) 858-0000. Camille Rankine, Contact.

TAGS:

African American

Back to Writing Contests Database Listings

sigh-ku, volumes 1 and 2

this entry exists
by shear will of extreme
laziness - a poem.

...

if only i blogged
as brilliantly as i com
ment on other blogs.

does my red black and green liberation jumpsuit make me look fat?

the activist in me (if only in mind) has been on mute waaaay too long for my liking.


crystal once told me about a brother back in the day who walked into a crowded restaurant
raised his fist in black power salute and shouted "AFRICA, MOTHERFUCKER!"
then left.

i so wish that had been me.

there was a time that would have been... but i've since allowed the cultural malaise that seriously
affects the region i live in to become my excuse for surrendering 'the cause' for hermitage,
seclusion and isolation. i accepted the fact that the people i create art and word for no longer
exist in this modern era... at least, not on the streets where we can share anger, joy or secrets
eye-to-eye.

i live in a vacuum, i understand that... but why have i allowed a vacuum to live within me?

i used to joke that i had several split personalities living inside me: a prankster, but conscious.
a romanticist, but conscious. an elitist, but conscious. a villain, but conscious. a preacher, but
conscious. a politician, but conscious. a patriot, but conscious... a hustler, but conscious...

but somewhere along the way, i grew sick and tired of those who had become sick and tired of
being culturally responsible. folks who i thought would sing the blues with me forever began to
snap their fingers and dance a jig to showtunes i knew nothing about (metaphors for 'providing
a better roof over their heads than what previously been allotted to them) - - - i firmly undersood
that "PROGRESS" happens, i get that and deeply accept it... i expect it!
but how progressive is it if the action of doing so takes you away (against your will or by agreement)
from the philosophical positions on live and liberty you once so thoroughly delivered to anyone
who would listen?

if the progress that feeds your belly also purchases the hunger within your soul, then shouldnt the
reward for such also be of benefit to your mind and spirit?  if a pound of steak feeds your conscious
questionings better than the rice and ramens did, then your questions about who you were as a person
wasnt about shit to begin with...

forgive me... ive been walking around my soapbox for so long, that i'd forgotten that it DOES actually
support my weight... at what age did fear of falling become inbred?

sigh... anyway... i'm not going to address all of my inner-issues all at once at this exact time. instead,
i'm going to post a link to the blog that got me riled up again, plus my reply to it below the link.
it's a good site... i'm adding the sister's link to my blogroll...

acts of faith


there are many facets to this issue, a major one being our focus on 'how we've progressed since slavery' - but 'progression' isnt the issue, it's 'power'. those who controlled power 100 years ago still control power today, it isnt as much about race as it is about society, wealth and privilege (issues which once included doctrines of racial superiority, but but now focus on primarily on class - where issues of race are embedded, but are easily side-stepped by those controlling media, business and education)

america has decided that its okay for its 'minorities' to openly protest, but what it prohibits is ORGANIZING because knowledge with a physical mass is a threat to structured power.
the poor, black and disfranchised can blog and post videos to their hearts' content while tangible knowledge is removed from our communities: black bookstores, black laundromats, black newspapers, black schools and any other independently owned black business or agency has vanished from our neighborhoods reducing the influence they could have on our younger (and older!) generations.

african americans today have more access to education and financial ability than we have at any other time in our past... as a whole, we are the wealthiest segment of black people on earth - even our poverty levels far exceed the annual incomes of black folks anywhere else on the planet. we have freedom, but we no longer have cultural independence - an aspect lost as we assimilated into 'the melting pot'.

the system that once shunned us now controls how we view and celebrate black history; there are no longer any newspapers thrust into our hands detailing our status in america, we must now stumble upon it online to be linked to and debated about but STILL online. where do we go to meet outside of our homes to discuss who we are and what we want? the huffington post can write an online editorial and then have someone physically address someone else face-to-face for comment or rebuttal
while those who are disenfranchised take their outrage to facebook or blogger.

avatars have replaced activists, which suits the holders of power (white or black) just fine.

in this day and age of black presidents and oscar winners, million dollar athletes and talk-show hosts, we have PROGRESSED about as far as being powerless will allow us.

now, its up to some of us to take a few steps back,
see what worked and what hasnt and then formulate a way to put knowledge into action.

this wont alleviate all our social ills, but it will definitely give us a better landing place to start from when discussions of who we are as a people rage out of control only to be worked out in resolution centers we do not own or operate.

lucille clifton...

of the 3 poets who have shaped my approach to writing,
alongside ishmael reed and haki madhubuti, mother lucille clifton
has always been the one to best balance message, emotion and craft: the 3
strongest elements, to me, defining 'black poetry' - an artform that has
recently shifted away from those core strengths in favor of
mainstream poetry's predominant aesthetic... ((clears th'oat))

i've never been one to to say the right things at the right time...
i usually cut straight to the point during the times when pointlessness
is the most expected sought after type of literary foreplay (when i do talk
too much i ramble/painfully obvious right about now)...


this is the poorest damn eulogizing ever!!!!!


i never met ms. clifton, but she remains an entity that i will carry forever within.
the act of pouring libations and setting up ancestral altars is for the remembrance and
continued acknowledgment of those most venerable to who we are and how we choose
to live - a recognition of those we deem the most worthy of being so-honored...

ms. clifton will always be welcomed in our home.

this is my favorite of her poems, and perhaps my most favorite of all poems:

"if i stand in my window"

if i stand in my window

naked in my own house

and press my breasts

against the windowpane

like black birds pushing against glass

because i am somebody

in a New Thing

and if the man come to stop me

in my own house

naked in my own window

saying i have offended him

i have offended his

Gods

let him watch my black body

push against my own glass

let him discover self

let him run naked through the streets

crying

praying in tongues

ky blues

african booty scratcher!

African Booty Scratcher-Short Film by Nikyatu Jusu from Nikyatu Jusu on Vimeo.

this week on the bbc

king tut had malaria, a bone disorder, a cleft lip and a club foot.

lady gaga wins big on brit music awards.

still fictitious