Lights, Macon Street, Brooklyn 2016

Two days ago I wrote this on FB: I live in a city where Arabic music plays on “new sounds”. where sirens rove the night air. where friends chat on sidewalks or take weeks to meet for 2 hours in a bar. i live in a city often characterized as cold and dark and and expensive and lonely and terror ridden. and for some this city lives up to these negatives. but i live in a city where i have a tea for my girlfriends. where i find beauty in unlikely places. where music good or bad is played on the subway platforms. where at times you can see real stars. and those stars are twinkling this night, so many talented people who lived in, danced in, made love in, laughed in and gave of their considerable gifts to this city left this plane for what is that higher realm. but the city has their traces and i live in the city where those traces surround me. I am thankful to be part of stardust.
Poet Patricia Spears Jones says farewell to 2016

but of course, there is more.  I am grateful for the many opportunities I had to share my work and collaborate with fellow poets and artists.  I traveled three times to California and read in places where my work was heard and honored.  I talked with young people and old people and many folks in between.  I wrote poems that grew from hanging out in Coney Island to ones dealing with the hangover of the Presidential Election.  I kissed and hugged and dreamed and dared to do things differently.  Sometimes it worked.  Sometimes it did not.  Many good people I know and love are gone.  But many remain.  And new ones are coming.  What was it that Laura Nyro sang:  “and when I die/there’ll be one child born to carry on.  So for Vertamae and Monica and Laurie and countless others, I hear those infants’ wailing.

PEACE

Christmas dinner, East Village, 2016

The past several days I’ve been going the East Side of Manhattan.  For good reason.  One was to hear famous and soon to be famous African poets read their work at the Ford Foundation–a reception organized by Elizabeth Alexander for the African Poetry Book Fund.  The Fund is the brain and heart child of Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani–also there was Matthew Shenoda.  I was invited through the other wonderful Patricia, Patrica Jabbeh Wesley, a great poet/scholar and exurberant force of all things positive in this world.  She was super dynamic, everyone was. But getting there meant taking the East side express which is super crowded and navigating Grand Central –at least I remembered how to get to the Ford Foundation, with the UN Building and Tudor City to its East.  A couple of nights later I had drinks and dinner with Major Jackson–who is writing great poems; teaching all over the joint and is now a distinguished professor at the University of Vermont–he’s also a proud papa and has found the wife he’s been searching for.  Good for him.

Then today, I joined Nita Noveno, a terrific Filipina-American writer who teaches at CUNY and who is just so smart and pretty and wise and we had lunch at the Asia Society (shivering) while outside the air just got thicker.  After the lunch, I suggested we go see the Diane Arbus exhibition at the Met Breuer–Nita was like what?  I explained that the Met has taken over the  uptown Whitney Museum space as the Whitney is all the way downtown–she was kind of skeptical.  I am glad we walk into the think air for a few blocks and found our way into the museum.  Here’s my thoughts on the Arbus exihibition:

The Diane Arbus exhibition at The Met Breur is really important. There’s something about looking at an artist’s work as it changes-the nuances, the sudden shifts. Arbus’ has been so analyzed and analyzed and that it is great to see things not seen before–the be in a fresh place with her. The city she encounters is no longer here and yet–the odd intimacy she captures; the “performing” children–they work in circuses, in vaudeville, as “city kids” showing off; the actual performers: singers, freak show actors, female impersonators; and the “ordinary” who are not so “ordinary” all in glorious black and whites and grays in small format (for these days). Indeed it is a shock to see the large format photographs-all famous in the last gallery. They seem not so much a step into the major leagues as a kind of huge shift away from something that could no longer be done or expressed–am not sure of how to say this. They did not seem like a culmination of practice, but a recognition that the practice no longer worked. Walking through, well actually meandering through the installation was a kind of treat. It reminded me of my first few years in the city, taking a new path, finding a new way to get from the East Side to the West; from Canal Street to 23rd, all by foot. Please see this exhibition. See if you can discern the beauty, the pain, the comic, the silly and the dream in her work.

On Bastile Day a truck drove into a crowd in Nice  France and killed 80 people (so far).  The driver is dead.  A man shoots policemen in Dallas, he is dead.  These suicides/murders seem to be proliferating–a tactic from the Middle East makes it way to Europe,then the U.S.  where does it stop–Mongolia?

I wish I were smarter or braver or could predict some way out of this time of violence, terror, and fear.  I cannot.  But no one can.  This kind of overwhelming volatility is outside ordinary thinking.  We need to accept that the West gave up on a generation of people and now that generation’s children are fighting back and they are as unkind unfeeling and dismissive as those who were unkind, unfeeling and dismissive oftheir kin.  They come out of the prisons “radicalized” which is another way of saying they come out of prison with skills to avenge whatever wrongs they felt were placed upon them and little in French or Belgian or American society is done to undermine these tendencies. It really is that reaping and sowing moment.

I am a poet.  I know that language matters.  The rhetoric in the American campaign esp. on the part of the right has left many people feeling unwelcome in their own country. The dismissal of criticism –oh that’s PC when something is the work of an anti-Semite or a racist (the KKK) or (YOU NAME THE SUBJECT) by the presumptive candidate for the Republican Party is one more way of allowing the worse of our actors onto center stage.  Language matters and questions matter.  Why are pollsters asking about trust?  Most people do not trust their family members so how is that 67% of Americans somehow trust Donald Trump?  Trust him to do what?  Why are pollsters asking what candidate has created legislation that supports you?  Or called for innovation in some way shape or form and do you agree with it?  I don’t trust politicians.  I do agree or disagree with policies.  But then I am an adult and I am not interested in adolescent responses.  I want to hear from people who are curious, look at facts and demand real answers.  I don’t want to wait from the avengers to come after the rest of us.