Ntozake Shange and Patricia Spears Jones photo by Coreen Simpson
UP DATE: Earlier this year, I recorded my favorite Gwendolyn Brooks sonnet for the Library of Congress. It was supposed to have been posed in April, but there were some issues with approval from Ms Brooks’ Estate. Finally, that happened and the poem is posted. Like Pauli Murray, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Margaret Walker, Alice Walker, Ms. Brooks’ work looms large in my psyche. And it is great to see the generation that I am part led by the now late Ntozake Shange, Thulani Davis, Akua Lezli Hope, Marilyn Nelson, the late Monica Hand, Elizabeth Alexander, Claudine Rankine, Erica Hunt have continued to explore the power and poignancy of Black women’s lives and examine Black women’s thought. In my post, I include my elegy, meditation on Akilah Oliver, who was an extraordinary poet. Where straight or queer, we are poets of imagination, innovation, and cultural constancy. I thank Gwendolyn Brooks for her fierce foundation for us and Akilah Oliver for her experimentation and her joy–both are truly misssed.
Early October I gave a keynote at LIT TAP and and it allowed me to think about culture, privilege, power and how we as Black women poets often provide import ways to think in words. The link is at the end of this post.
Now two powerful women writers and thinkers and innovators in this culture: Ntozake Shange and Maria Irena Fornes have passed. Shange was an extraordinary writer and performer. She perfected the use of choreopoem, a performance trope that was in full sway at the start of the 70s esp. by women poets and dancers. As a member of the audience at the premiere of For Colored Girls at the Public Theater with my best friend Debbie Wood, who knew the composer, I can always claim being at what was truly a new and powerful moment in the theater and for Black women. And we needed something new. We needed that play. We still do. Not everything Shange wrote is as distilled and life altering, but her work in total is now part of world literature and she gave every Black woman poet an idea of what it means to be so terribly successful and how difficult it is to maintain artistic vision, integrity and health. Maria Irena Fornes was a queer Latina who created her own version of theater. She also taught two-three generations of theater artists including my good friend Lenora Champagne. She was 88 and had had Alzheimer’s for several years. At least the downtown theater world has continued to produce her work and watched over her. Zake was only 70 and she had been ill for several years. Even so, she recently published a new bilingual collection to much acclaim.
Women writers, artists, poets, thinkers are often overlooked, neglected, misrepresented or dismissed. And yet, we persist because we have voices and we just gonna sing.
Everyone laughed at the impossibility of it,
but also the truth. Because who would believe
the fantastic and terrible story of all of our survival
those who were never meant
to survive?
Joy Harjo “Anchorage”
Sort of quick update and an even more sense of urgency: Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony, the backlash and out right lies made towards her and about her. The elevation of a mediocre jurist to the Supreme Court are shocking but not surprising. Power and privilege by wealthy white people are on full display. The presidency which was a minority election means that all of the people making policy for this nation were not elected by the majority of voting Americans. We are really in an awful state. But as Joy Harjo’s poem reminds us we “survive.” Indeed, we can thrive, but we gotta fight for that nurture.
This is a very crucial year for this Republic. We have a chance to put into place new and different Representatives, governors, et al in the Congress. But that will not happen if people are not registered or do not vote.
I am from Arkansas and I still remembered the many roadblocks placed in way of voting by Black people. Folks died across the South trying to exercise a right of Citizenship, the right to vote. It is also telling that once acquired, Blacks begin to exert serious political power and once that happened the Republicans began to use every trick in the book to undermine that power. We are where we are now because Black and Brown people have been “legally” removed from voters’ rolls. Voter suppression is a wound in this nation’s governance. A serious one. Russians have not done as much to harm the electorate as state legislators from Wisconsin to Georgia.
On 9-29-2018 I joined women poets including a trans woman to read in an event to raise $$ for the Democratic Party. I tend to see myself as independent, but I am a registered Democrat and this year that makes me know that I am on the side of civil and human rights; gender equality; environmental protection; education; and health and the protection of Social Security.
There is little poetry in politics, but if the political culture changes even more, and sooner or later poetry will be at the core of politics–why not dream.
VOTE as if your life depended on.
Cutthroat Journal pub this amazing collection 2-2017. Proceeds go to ACLU
Today I received this beautiful broadside from Kelly Writers House, for my program on April 21. The poem, “Self-Portrait with Shop Window” is in A Lucent Fire: New and Selected Poems. It is one of the poems that was not published, indeed it was rejected several times. But I knew that it was a powerful poem and represented my work at its most complicated and so Dennis Maloney agreed that it should be in the collection And now, it is in Best American Experimental Writing 2o16 from Weslayan U. Press–http://www.wesleyan.edu/wespress/bax/ edited by Charles Bernstein and Tracie Morris.
Sometimes you have a poem, a song, a play, a book that seems to find no love in the current marketplace. It could be that your ideas are just ahead of or seemingly behind everybody elses. Who knows. But if you really think that poem, song, play or book is worth the talent, the time, the effort it took for you to make it–well that’s where perseverance is what you have to have. Poetry, art making may be easy for those who are clever, but for most of us it is challenging, enthralling, mind enhancing or mind blowing depending and you just have to honor that crazy love for your work and keep on pushing.
I enjoyed the way the Kelly House artists selected parts of the poem and highlighted its fragmentations. Now my home has a large and beautiful broadside of this complex poem. I love where it is placed in A Lucent Fire. I love that it will be in Best American Experimental Writing. I loved the poem has legs.
Music Now! At Poetry/Jazz
w/Spiritchild XspiritMental, Ras Moshe Burnett, et al & open mic
The Brooklyn Commons
388 Atlantic Ave. btwn Hoyt St. & Bond St.
Brooklyn.
A,C to Hoyt-Schemerhorn/Any train to Atlantic Ave.
February 5 RESPOND at Smack Mellon
DUMBO FIRST THURSDAY
“Don’t shoot” curated by Samuel Jablom
w/ Anomalous who, Steve Dalachinsky, Joyce LeeAnn Joseph,
Yuko Otomo, and Peter Rugh
7:30 p.m.
SMACK MELLON
92 Plymouth Street @ Washington
Brooklyn, NY 11201
Free
JANUARY 2015
January 1, The Poetry Project New Year’s Day Benefit
Organized by The Poetry Project
w/ a cast of hundreds
2 p.m. to midnight
St. Mark’s Church on the Bouwerie
131 E. 10th Street
Manhattan
Donation: $20
January 3, First Saturday at Brooklyn Museum
Poetry Popup in Crossing Brooklyn
Organized by Alan Felsenthal
w/ Corinna Copp, Ricky Laurentis, and Charles North
Eastern Parkway
Brooklyn
Free w/ Museum Admission
DECEMBER
December 1, KGB Monday Night Poetry Series
Organized by John Deming
w/ Shanna Compton
7:30 p.m.
E. 4th Street
Manhattan
NOVEMBER POETRY EVENTS
November 11, Poets@Pace
w/ Monica de la Torre
Organized by Charles North
Pace University
Once Pace Plaza
Manhattan
6-7:30 p.m.
FREE
OCTOBER POETRY EVENTS
October 12, AiPO POETRY SCULPTURE
w/Christine Malvasi, Sophie Malleret,Najee Omar, &Nikhil Melnechuk
Organized by Samuel Jablon
1-2 p.m. UNION SQUARE
Manhattan
FREE
SEPTEMBER POETRY EVENTS
September 13, Greenpoint Branch
Brooklyn Public Library
Organized by Melanie Nielsen
w/ Kristen Gallagher
107 Norman Ave @Leonard Street
Brooklyn, NY
718-349-8504
September 24-27, Furious Flower: Seeding the Future
Of African-American Poetry
James Madison University
Furious Flower Poetry Center
Organized by Dr. Joanne V. Gabbin
Harrisonburg, VA 22807
www.jmu.edu/furiousflower
JUNE POETRY EVENTS
June 19, Lunch Poems, Word for Word Series
Organized by Paul Romero
w/ Lydica Cortes, Jessica Greenbay, Jocelyn Lieu & Sharan Strange
12:30 p.m.
Free
BRYANT PARK Reading Room
Sixth Avenue and 42nd Street
Manhattan
June 29, Voices of Poetry
Organized by Neil Silberblatt
w/ Chivas Sandage, Vivian Shipley, Mark Statman & Bianca Stone
4 p.m.
$15/$10 students
26 Bedford Road
Katonah, NY.
