Traveling lady Year 2018 and her shadow(s)

Posted on July 8, 2018July 8, 2018 by admin

Airport, North Carolina

Just got back from Provincetown, from Tampa, from Chicago, Winston-Salem or Sanibel Island or St. Petersburg, Florida, that is. Just got back from (soon France). I’ve had my share of travels, but the past two years, I have seen many air ports, train stations, bus stations, people’s messy cars, taxi cabs, even an Uber or Lyft. It is not thrilling, mostly it is for the business side of poetry–readings, keynote addresses, panel member. I do my best to provide a good speech or reading or serve well on a panel–at this point I love that I am a true professional. Not sure about where I am in the game, but I am in it.

But it is not easy. It is not easy for any writer really. It is not that we are all introverts, more we are all used to our own company. So when you’re to be on the dais, at a dinner, by the pool, under a spotlight, no matter how well-organized or supported, there is that strain. I thank all of the people who have made my trips bearable. Arts adminisrators, bookstore proprietors-thanks Jeff Peters at East End Books, and readers, who tell me how important a poem is or that my work gave them guidance or inspiration. So I was happy to be put me up in nice hotels, have them chauffer me when I needed to get around. Glad for their kindness when I got ill. The entire staff at the Rauschenberg Residency are like the platinum standard–they gave me all I could wish for and more. But also Juliet Emanuel at College English Association or Paolo Javier from Poets House at AWP or the lovely administrators at Rutgers Summer Program, Michael Slosek at Poetry Foundation in Chicago, and Kelle Groom and Dawn Walsh at Fine Arts Work Center–all of you get serious thanks. And I am thankful that I joined the roster of illustrious writers at Leslie Shipman’s new agency https://www.theshipmanagency.com/. Her professionalism makes things so much easier.

Jeff G. Peters, proprietor, East End Books, P-Town

Next I go to France for a month under the auspices of The BAU Institute–will I write many new poems or chapters for my memoir; will I drink too much wine; will I dance a fandango–who knows, but in a few days I will get on an airplane and go off into the wild blue yonder and hopefully land easily in a very volatile world. I think about Anthony Bourdain because he seemed to have found that balance between openness and quiet–when he was eating, he was eating. And listening. Maybe he heard too much. We will never know. But I hope to eat well and listen and bring back a bit more of the world to my humble abode in Brooklyn. Who knows maybe I will fall in love. I love casting a large shadow. Here’s the one from Provincetown made on the 4th of July.

Returning to Fine Arts Work Center

Posted on June 13, 2018June 13, 2018 by admin

I will be teaching WEEK 4 for FAWC’s Summer Program. Sophie Cabot Black and Ada Limon will be there too. And its July 1-6, so I’ll celebrate the Fourth in Provincetown! Here’s the information.

http://web.fawc.org/summer-program/basic-and-bold-poetry-workshop-0

June is way too chilly

Posted on June 9, 2018June 9, 2018 by admin

Garden on fence, Macon Street Brooklyn

The virtual wake for Anthony Bourdain continues even as I write. His loss hits so many different kinds of people–am convinced he had no idea of the good he was doing, of the lives he made more interesting. Plus, like many a woman poet of the hetero variety, I was like totally smitten. He was that handsome, smart, vibrant, testosterone charged male of my dreams. It is good to have standards. And alas, the standards have been mighty low given the ongoing dispatches from #MeToo. I sort of understand the old dogs and their tricks, but it is these new ones–who raised them is what I keep asking myself since wolves are better behaved.

We live in such harrowing times, we really have to learn more than “self-care”. We must truly care for each other as family as friends and in our community. Just because we are governed by corrupt and mendacious people does not mean that we have to be corrupt and mendacious and unkind and crude (unless crude is the only way seen or heard) with each other. Mother Shelley, our rector a few Sundays ago talked about what it meant to be “Beloved” and to be part of a “Beloved Community”. You do not have to be a Christian or any religious person to be beloved. You just have to be. We are responsible as humans for planetary health. We are really doing a terrible job and Pele in Hawaii is letting us know that.

But often love is not enough. And while there is much said about celebrity and the challenges faced by them, the CDC has pointed out in a recent student that suicide has increased ACROSS ALL SECTORS. I have friends who have committed suicide. I have friends who told me they were seriously thinking about it. I’ve not gone that far, but any person can be a point where the challenges, anxieties, terriblenesses of the day, the week, the month, the year can overwhelm. To deny that is to not deal with our capacity as humans to take lives, starting with our own.

But death in its physical finality has overwhelmed our poetry and literary community over the past few months–am still so very sad about Barbara Barg, Jewish, punkrocker, Southern–we grew up in the same hometown–she was an activist, fearless, a total radical. She is no longer in pain, but had her medical team been more vigilant, she might still be alive. Damn the anti-ACA people. Paul Ryan, et al there are so many curses on your persons and homes and the deaths of friends like Barbara adds to them.

For all this sad talk, there is always (so far, for me) light. Teaching workshops for Rutgers University Summer program; performing with Jason Hwang for the Vision Festival at Roulette, prepping for works at Fine Arts Work Center. But first, the mourning of good people both known to me and known world wide must take place.

Sunrise, Captiva Island, FL Feb. 2018

I AM AN AMERICAN POET –American Poets Congress launches

Posted on May 1, 2018May 1, 2018 by admin

Dog Tags by Jane Hirshfield on tree in “the Jungle”

Heard on NPR an Edward Hirsch’s poem read by Shaquille O’Neill that Kwame Alexander discusses early in the morning. The poem is about basketball and life and of course O’Neill would love it. It is old school, the whole setup. Populist Black American poet talkes POETRY with slightly bewildered, slightly awe-struck NPR hostesss. 50 years ago it could have been Langston Hughes chatting somebody up and say Mickey Mantle intoning Carl Sandburg. Media representation of poetry, American poetry continues this odd desire to make all things plain and clear as if the masses can’t look up a work on their dictionary.com app. Glad that O’Neill and many athletes read and write poetry. But you don’t have to be a celebrity to add value to poetry. You have to care about language, culture and the work required to make even the simplest seeming poems profound.

On Sunday, April 29, American Poets Congress presented 15 poets reading work at Poets House where Lee Briccetti noted that poets are the unelected legislators of the world, and in which each of us said our names and then I AM AN AMERICAN POET. The poets intoning are Amanda Deutch, Anne Waldman, Cecilia Vicuna, Cynthia Kraman, David Henderson, Edwin Torres, Erica Hunt, James Sherry, Michael Broder, Patricia Spears Jones, Pierre Joris, Purvi Shah, Tai Allen, Tan Lin and Vincent Katz. James Sherry, Vincent Katz and I co-curated this and what a line up.

Co-cuarators I am an American Poet reading at Poets House, 4-29-18

It was our way of standing on a ground that feels like our home and not the one that is promoted out of the damaged and dangerous minds of party in political power. Poets, what can we do?

We write. We think. We ask questions. We answer them, but not often. Some questions remain unanswerable. But the questions keep us searching for that answer say to ending racism, ending injustice, promoting fairness and honesty, offering succor and candor and compassion. When do we do these things, how do we, what are the words. Working with two white men on this project was challenging to them and to me. Working with men who are use to directing ordering guiding even as they seek to be progressive and collaborative is challenging. But you know what I learned to deal with the challenges –if we are to begin to build another way of looking towards the future then working with and challenging privilege is going to be very important. Dismissing people because of their lack of political purity or their unenlightened attitudes means having to find others to replace them who may or may not be better. You don’t change unless you’re put in a situation where change has to take place or you don’t progress. Americans do not want to be seen as mean spirited, hateful, killer cops on every corner, but until Americans remove the killer cops on every corner, and stop backing mean-spirited and hateful policies, well that is what America is to most of the world right now.

But poets know this and poets write about language, how it is used, abused, trampled over, and made to build up mean spirited, hateful and poisonous policies that ultimately will make us poorer, sicker, our air and water toxic, our understanding of safety, security and defense enablers of militaristic fantasies. Yup, this is a bad era for Americans, for the world given the drift to the right.

Mural-San Antonio

But poets being poets keep language alive. We keep making those questions, whether we are bards or beats or Black Arts devotees, we know that every phrase that damage, the psyche, scars the culture must be overmatched with language that heals, that thrills that poses a fresh way of seeing and being.

POETS ARE THE BEST, but I would say that because I am a poet and this is the last day of National Poetry Month. And it is great to know that whether you’re Black White, HIV negative or positive, Asian, Latinx, Native, queer, gender nonconforming, lover of animals or only lover of flowers or you speak 5 languages or only one-if you still work language to find the truth there in, I SALUTE YOU. Oh and we can write about basketball, drone warfare, police brutality, love affairs, sleepy Sundays, capitalism, poverty, music, tea, the genome, etc. If there are words, there is poetry.

leaving the bubble–Rauschenberg Residency 29

Posted on February 14, 2018February 14, 2018 by admin

On Friday, I return to New York City, to Brooklyn after 5 weeks on Captiva Island in Florida. The Rauschenberg Residency has been an enormous gift to my mind, my spirit, my writing and creativity. The staff is so open and helpful and skillful and happy to be working in a place that is all about allowing artists to make whatever work they can while here. I stayed in the Print House with an International Artist , Minouk Lim,

on North Captiva–boat trip day

who has started to make huge waves in the art world. I met dance theater people who have worked or known people I’ve known from the theater and dance world. One of the artist is disabled but makes super huge sculptures. One of the writers here was working on the first major book on Norman Lewis. Every residency I’ve done reminds me of how many amazing poets, painters, dancers, composers, actors, scholars, etc there are and how this culture allows a few of us to be part of places designed to take care of our needs, our desires. RR29 has lived up to all it has set to be be. A place where the staff will help you do what you want to do or show you that you can do it. Amazing. I wrote new poems. Drafted essays on June Jordan and poetics. Read Angela Jackson’s bio of Gwendolyn Brooks, Eudora Welty’s wonderful book One Writers Beginnings and of course We’re On: A June Jordan Reader (Alice James Books), a must have for serious students of American poetry. And Laura Penny murder mysteries. With fellow residents I saw The Post where Meryl Streep chewed up some lovely scenery and journalism is celebrated.

Now I have to leave this beautiful bubble and return to the “real world” but of course this too is the “real world” just not the one we get to hang around in too long.

patio The Print House

Dog Tags by Jane Hirshfield on tree in “the Jungle”

Beach House writer’s studio

sunset spectacular

beach front

beach

the Jungle

The sun is in Aquarius-chaos abides and so does beauty

Posted on January 22, 2018January 22, 2018 by admin

At least in the seat of power, where chaos has abided since January 20, 2017. However, I am not in chaos. I am in a writing studio at the Rauschenberg Residency in Captiva, Florida. The sun is bright, the air cool, there are shells found on the beach in front of the famous Beach House, where my studio resides. Last year one of the gifts received was this residency. I am now into my 2nd week and am working on prose and poetry, revising and starting new work. I am also listening to my fellow residents, many are visual and performance artists and one is a art historian working on a book about the great Black artist, Norman Lewis.

Gates to Main Studio, Captiva, FL

I left New York at the end of a cold spell (cold snap was totally not apt) but filled with great energy. The past few months have been about revisiting my life as a poet and writer, but also forging new projects and gaining new friends, not back for a sexagenarian. Over the past year I’ve worked to create a group of poets and cultural workers who are deeply interested in wresting the ideas and ideals of American identity from the current crop of crooks who claim it–good way to use alliteration. We have much to do. At this point we are calling it the American Poets Congress and we will be rolling out programs and activities that explore the concept, but also actively support Voter Registration and progressive candidates and agendas. The #Resistance has many elements and we are but one. It is good to part of efforts to combat not only this current noxious political climate, but to really think through the many ways that American ideals have lifted up citizens and people worldwide. I am mindful that the original pledge of allegiance was written by a socialist (without the in god we trust bit put in by the Eisenhower people) and the Memorial Day was organized by former bonds people to honor the Union Dead. Our national history is complicated and often violent, but when I think about the labor organizers who fought against child labor, when I seen the children of Birmingham, they were my age or older at the time, when I think of progress and forward thinking I see these great efforts from the Left and we need name and claim them and often. I grew up in the Delta in one of the poorest counties in the United States, I know what poverty looks like. I know how racism works and who is advantaged by it. What is happening now is the culmination of decades of ideological build up with all the stereotypes, bad ideas on top of White Supremacist thinking rolled into one ball of bad behavior i.e. our president. Sad, but we must work to gain and sustain power at the local and state as well as national level. It’s going to very very difficult. But as many women who marched this week noted “we are in it for the long haul.”

And I am a poet who has been in it for a long haul and I am pleased that some of my efforts have been recognized, even celebrated. Here where the Gulf shimmers and the Bay shines, it is beauty that makes me happy to be alive and working. Today is Richie Havens, Lord Byron and Sam Cooke’s birthdays-my kinda men. Beauty.

beach, sea, Captiva, FL

HAPPY HOLIDAYS–leaving the ROOSTER Year

Posted on December 23, 2017December 23, 2017 by admin

Joy Harjo and me, off site reading, 2017 AWP DC

This has been one of the most amazing years in my whole life. I read at venues that deeply connected me to the American poetic tradition: The Walt Whitman Birthplace; the Poetry Center of Passaic Community College; the UA Poetry Center; the Fine Arts Work Center. It has taken 4 decades of work to get to these places, but I am the poster child for persistence and persist I did. I thank all of the organizers and audiences for their hospitality and generosity and embrace of my work. In February, I was at AWP on a panel about capitalism! And I read from TRUTH TO POWER from Cutthroat Journal, one of my fine volumes emanating from political turmoil of these times. But more importantly, I got to hang out with Joy Harjo-we have known each other for 4 decades and this year she received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the most prestigious for American poets and then I received the Poets and Writers Jackson Prize–little did we know that on the day before my birthday in February.

Selfie with Lee Briccetti, dir. of Poets House

In May I celebrated with many of the bestest friends over 3 generations at the20th Century Association in mid-town on day of perfect weather and with my face composed by the lovely lady at the Saks Lancome counter to receive the $50,000 Jackson Poetry Prize. What an amazing gift –the dollars help, but the recognition was the most important thing. And it was a joy to share the moment with so many people who just wanted to celebrate. This on top of the gift of a residency from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. It seems that people found me and decided that it was my turn to get some of the glittering prizes. I worked hard for these gifts. I am pleased to have them.

And I have to say it was amazing to hear Bill Murray read my poem “Life Lessons” at the Poets House Gala.

I’ve used Walt Whitman as a way to engage writers to think about the current political situation through the lens of Whitman’s prose! It works. It worked at FAWC; it worked at Gemini Ink; it worked at the Poetry Center. I will continue to use Democratic Vistas as a piece to argue with and utilize.

And I used it as a way to enter teaching a graduate poetry workshop at Adelphi University, where I was treated with respect and where resources were presented to me. I had wonderful students and easier (but more expensive) commute.

Anthology honoring Gwendolyn Brooks-so glad to be in this.

Because of my work since the 1970s with a range of poets and artists, I too have embraced the necessity to organize against the current cultural political stance as clearly seen in conservative politics and media. So I’ve been quietly organizing a group of poets to start the real serious work of insisting on what American identity is. We need to take identity back from these narrow minded bigoted and greedy racist, sexist, homophobes who now run way too many things and claim their Americanness. So look out for projects from American Poets Congress, we are going to do some serious things in conjunction with the many powerful things that are happening in this nation. #Resistance is importance, but our Insistance on what should be American ideals, mythologies, identity–that’s going to be the fight for our future.

I thank you for your encouragement, your talent, your fierce belief in the better in us. I was so glad to see my family in May–my brother, sister and I visited our mother’s grave for the first time together since 2013 when we laid her to rest. My siblings are accomplished and spiritual and loving and hard working–we are our mother’s children. They are blessings in my life.

Mama”s grave, Forrest City Ark. Memorial Day, 2017

I have great faith in my Church Community, the members of Saint John’s Church in Park Slope have opened their hearts to many who are truly down trodden and broken. There has been much healing there. But I really have great faith in the poetry and arts community. We do important things just by demanding language that speaks truth. May you and your family have love, light and laughter in this year’s end. May we all have renewed strength to do the work we need to do as creative and compassionate people in 2018.

New York is very much alive

Posted on November 4, 2017November 4, 2017 by admin

At CUNY Grad Center, Victor Hernandez Cruz, David Henderson, Ammiel Alcaly

Empire State, Halloween

New York City is very much alive. While 8 people died from a terrorist attack even as tiny ghouls, smurfs, pirates, heros and sheros walked about with huge bags demanding candy. Meanwhile those with little or nothing on shivered in the chilly Halloween weather.

New York City is very much alive. While the mayoral race is on, many people are learning what they can and cannot do politically. Politics in this state must change-new people should be allowed to run; new voices need to be heard. Too much is done as if this was the 19th century.

New York City is very much alive. At the CUNY Grad Center Victor Hernandez Cruz read from his latest book and one of his oldest and best poems to a group of grad students, fellow poets like Don Yorty and me and then he sat down for a public interview. It was fun.

New York City is very much alive and moving and dealing with possible deaths and awful disruptions and yet the masks and costumes; the candy and liquor; the poets and critics were all out and about. Truck drivers, shoe bombers, radicalized racists won’t stop the music of any great city.

good bye John Ashbery

Posted on October 3, 2017October 3, 2017 by admin

sign, St. Mark’s gate

It seems fitting to post this picture of a humble sign placed on the gates in front of St. Mark’s Church. Today’s morning sky was BRIGHT as in BRIGHT and the air a soft chill. Adam Fitzgerald, Emily Skillings, Eileen Myles and the staff at The Poetry Project organized an informal, intimate farewell in the church’s austere sanctuary. A place where John had sad many a time. The last time I went to an event like this was the one organized for Amiri Baraka, which I chronicled in an earlier post. Since it was early and I live in Brooklyn, I got there about half hour into the proceedings just in time to hear David Shapiro, shaking and frail, tell anecdote after anecdote, mostly it seemed about himself, but really about the relationship he had with Ashbery. He read a letter Ashbery sent to him when he was 15! He read a beautiful poem. He made me want to just sit him down. I did not cry. But I think Emily did as she played an audio of John reading from a recent poem–every once in a while he would cough, but then his voice would regain vigor–that performance thing that kicks in no matter what. I had not realized that Emily was one of Ashbery’s many assistants.

Marcella Durand talked about his inscriptions–they were often lines from specific poems in the books and she read the inscriptions and then the excerpts from the poems. Fred Moten told us he never met John, but had some words to say and so he said them–it was a fine salute. Dorothy Friedman talked about being part of Ashbery’s first class for the Brooklyn College MFA program back in 1974. Her voice boomed out and she noted that a week or so after Ashbery’s demise, she got a letter from him (the post office is really getting slow) thanking her for her review of his recent art show. Todd Colby also talked about that program, but by the time he got to Brooklyn John had left–that MacArthur grant made a huge difference.

I think that because John travelled, wore suits on occasion and was a most courtly of gentlemen poets, some folks thought him rich–he was not. He worked hard all his life and you could see the range of that work in the kinds of pieces poets used. Bob Holman talked about creating a performance script from Girls on the Run, Ashbery’s booklength poem based on the Henry Darger art work. And he read a fine tribute poem. Jeff Wright told a joke that John liked to tell. And Paul Muldoon read the final poem Ashbery published in The New Yorker.

I was going to read from The Vermont Notebooks, which is not the most sophisticated of Ashbery’s ouvre but maybe the most fun–it’s the collaboration with Joe Brainard. And there they are on the cover looking super masculine-lots of hair, work clothes oh so 70s! Oh before AIDS. Anyways, I left the book in my living room and well basically said I represented all the Black poets (Fred included) who really loved John’s work and also the ones who knew him. And I read my poem for John’s 90th birthday: “Le Tribute

Le Tribute

Funny you request 90 words for 90 years

Okay the thing about Ashbery

Is that he makes us

unsure of which direction is the direction home

But, there is always home in Ashbery’s work, now isn’ t there?

Home & fame’s odd wit.

John tells me about seeing Marlon Brando Boston tryout

in A Streetcar Named Desire. A new masculine norm.

The abstracted beauty of it all & odd tempered music

and the ears ready to hear.

That he has

Something to say

and will just

Say it. So there.

Then Adam Fitzgerald gave story and anecdote and quip and love in the form of stories, anecdotes, quips expressing his deep love for his mentor and friend. I did not hear John sing Old Man River–that might have been too much, but I got back for le restroom to hear Rachmaninoff-Ashbery’s favorite music. Tres romantic.

Walking out into the bright mid day–I knew that a mass murder took place in New Orleans, that our President seemed to have an inability to communicate with people who are not White, rich and male, that there are more people sleeping on subway benches and that the subways frequently breakdown and the sun will set and it will rise as we humans regard:

“The climate, the cities, the houses, the streets, the stores, the lights, people.” John Ashbery, The Vermont Notebooks.

He’s got many friends in Poetry Heaven–I bet the party has started.

ijustcan’t even

Posted on October 1, 2017October 1, 2017 by admin

First I am deeply honored to be a featured guest of the University of Arizona’s Thinking in Presence (TIP) conference–here’s the link: https://www.thinkingitspresenceconference.com/

That’s like the really good news. There are other personal and spiritual things that are really good too, but the heart of America is rotting by the minute. A President who instead of finding better ways to assist the peoples of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, where actual American citizens live, tweets nasty remarks about the mayor whose resources are at best limited. Is the President over the age of 10? Is he?

There is so much more, but what has been great is that the literary, performing and arts community across racial and ethnic lines have stood with the people of Puerto Rico. We understand that a man who so easily picks and chooses the winners and loosers from NATURAL DISASTERS is not to be respected or trusted. Whatever dignity the office confers upon him is gone.

So really & truly Ijustcan’teven say his name or wish him well. Ijustcan’t.