Tag Archives: Fine Arts Work Center

Traveling lady Year 2018 and her shadow(s)

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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.

East End Books, P-Town

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.

What a spring, what a summer-Botanic Garden to National Seashore

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Tulips at BBG

Emperor Tulips, Brooklyn Botanic Garden

These tulips were in full bloom the day it was announced that I was the 2o17 recipient of the Jackson Poetry Prize.  Good friend and Bed-Stuy neighbor, Alicia Bleghens and I walked about the garden on a day full of sun and full of people.  Since then I feel as if much of my life is full of sun and full of people and filled with gifts, many insubstantial.   I sit in my apartment which is also my studio looking at books and art with the fan whirring and my belly a bit too full from an overlarge breakfast and feeling deeply grateful for my personal rewards, and deeply disappointed in the current political environment.

The Fourth of July really is a complicated holiday for Black Americans.  As someone whose family has been here several generations including the generation of enslavement, I so understand how necessary liberty and equality and justice is for full humanity and citizenship.  All of the white nationalists carrying on about “their” country makes me simply want to vomit.  But they are doing what their ancestors did: terrorize people and scar their own communities. Their own communities need to disown, dismiss and deeply disrupt their activities.  Alas racism remains a think strand in the American tapestry and will take a while, a long while to undo.

I say this with some kinds of optimism in my heart.  It could be that I just taught a workshop at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA where I worked with white people who are working hard to know more about writers and cultures outside of their own.  This is challenging work, but the work is being done and out of that comes more complicated, sophisticated poetics (I think).  When I asked them to recommend poets they read, the list included many contemporary writers of color.  I deeply admire the range.

Workshop recomendations FAWC, 2017

Since May, I have made a number of difficult decisions, but ones that I needed to make. I will not teach comp next year.  I do not want to do so.  I am working on a new poetry manuscript as new poems written between 2015 and now keep arising from my mind and heart. I look forward to teaching at Adelphi University. I am grateful for the many blessings I have received this year and I am so pleased to share what I know and learn new things.  It takes the sting from the ugliness, stupidity and bellicosity of the political environment.  It makes me know that in America change happens, sometimes for those who already have too much, sometimes for the rest of us.

One of the joys of my time in Provincetown was joining Susan Bee and Charles Bernstein who have been summering on the Cape since they were young newly weds–that was like 30 something years ago.  They heart heart heart the National Seashore and now so do I.  The Atlantic Ocean is powerful and inexorable and thanks to President Kennedy we can see this place much like the pilgrims who alas cut own the many beeches and left the coast as dunes.  Much is being done to hold off the erosion of the shore, but it’s beauty abides.  The National Seashore is a true treasure.  If you go to Cape Cod, you must see it.

National Seashore, Race Point, Cape Cod