Tag Archives: Steve Cannon

It’s been a while but my energy is getting louder

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My apartment is a swirl of piles: clothes, toiletries, documents—the stuff you need when you take a big trip.  And I am about to take a big trip, to Virginia for 4 months.   I have been appointed the Louis D. Rubin, Jr. Writer-in-Residence at Hollins University.  Dara Weir, whom I met at Hollins when I was a visiting poet; Natasha Tretheway, whose father taught there and other poetic luminaries are past appointees.  This is a big deal and it comes on top of many expected and unexpected professional achievements since 2014-15.  I am getting used to being a 4 decades overnight success.

Of course, these opportunities do not come helter-skelter. I’ve been published as a poet since my early 20s and have worked to become the best poet I can be and yes I am still growing as a poet and thinker and activist, and as I have grown,  the opportunities have come.  I am glad I stayed the course.

And that is is something I hope that many of us do as we are daily assaulted with lies particularly from the political right –you know the people who create Middle East Peace Plans that don’t exactly include all of the people who would have to make it work; the people who are now making legal immigration more difficult; the people who claim they can’t bake a cake for same sex couples because it’s against their religion (there’s no such prohibition in the Bible, there’s no Cake commandant.  And everyone is tired because the briber in chief constantly tweets stupid, mean and occasionally important stuff.  It really is hard to live in a morally  corrosive time and have like a desire for truth, beauty and justice. But hey, think of it as being against the mainstream which is corrupt.  The Right is running all but the House of Representatives (thank you Nancy Pelosi) and a few major institutions that think liberal and democracy are good things.  So we poets and artists have a very important role to play outside that mainstream.  And we ought to play it loud and louder.

Over the past two weeks, I went to 2 memorials (there could have been 3, but I could only do 2)-Jan. 19 for Kwame Shaw, whom I may have met in passing while hanging out in the experiemental jazz world of the 80s–I know his adopted daughter Klare and so I went for her and her mother, his ex-wife.  The event at St. Mark’s Church was all about music and remembrances.  Henry Threadgill, Amina Myers and during the repast, David Murray made us all understand why for Shaw, Jazz was a religion.  Then on January 26, what seemed like the entire downtown art world came out for John Giorno’s Memorial.  An elegant and beautifully staged event from the rose petals on the sanctuary stage to the perfect video loop and the musical offerings by Meredith Monk, Michael Stipe, Patti Smith and Lenny Kaye.  Linda Yablonsky, Penny Arcade, Lynne Tillman, Bob Holman were a few of the writers who read from Giorno’s memoirs.  The Black activist Jazz freak and the gay Buddhist poet had this in common: a powerful desire to make a difference in the world and the energy and ideas to make that difference happen. Shaw brought the powerful music of the AACM and other Black creative musicians to a larger audience as a way to build up the foundation of Black intellectual acuity.  Giorno worked tirelessly to bring gay eroticism into the mainstream, to allow poetry to examine his sexuality and explorations. Both were activists, serious activists–Shaw organized for SNCC, open doors for Blacks in the media, created JazzTracks and Giorno started a fund in support of the first victims of HIVAIDs–he literally saved lives or allowed those dying a measure of dignity.  He was a serious practioner of Buddhism.  Both men left behind unlikely and loving partners.  The memorial I could not make it to was Steve Dalachinsky who like his best friend and frequent nemesis Steve Cannon came to symbolized bohemian New York. and from what a year turned into a huge carnival of poetry, anecdote, music and cheer.  These men all were bohemians in NYC.  A New York that is quickly slipping away under the huge condos and corporate logos of these corrosive times. These men all lived LOUD lives and well we need to start matching that largeness with our own.  June Jordan would so agree with me.

St. Mark's Sanctuary, Giorno Memorial

Sanctuary, St. Mark’s Church, Giorno Memorial

So I will take my NYC energy South and do my best to do good work and maybe just maybe bring some ideas and provocations to bear in and out of the classroom.  Because when poets stop telling the truth, we all suffer.  I am a poet and I don’t like suffering.

https://www.hollins.edu/academics/majors-minors/english-creative-writing-major/louis-d-rubin-jr-writer-in-residence/

 

 

Forthcoming

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Morning Song

You wake up to the phrase “salt lick”

You realize you know not one thing

About salt licks—you know salt

And lick  but together? How does

The salt lick lick salt?

 

You know you are moving

To the land of word games

Or musical instruments

Unstrung, battered—too much play

 

Each day the gleaners walk side walks

In search of bottles. They separate

Already separated bags to find precious

Glass, that is plastic. They hate the cans

 

They know the places where beer

Overwhelms soda; where huge milk

Cartons say children, many children

Live here. They do not whistle when they

 

Work. They do not lick sweat

Off tired arms. They go about

The business of poverty with grace

And noise. Early morning dragging

The weight of others waste.

forthcoming in Tribes anthology with art work by Yuko Otomo

 

2014 LIVING IN THE LOVE ECONOMY/THE FUTURE IS IN OUR HANDS

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This is a year when airplanes dropped out the sky and just disappeared.  Where Russian troops in Crimea pretended to not be Russian troops in Crimea.  Where ACA almost died under the weight of lousy internet interface.  It is a year with news of horrific rape, murder and abduction and it ends with rape allegations against an aging comedian.  It  is a year when

a generation of poets, activists and actors in their 70s, 80s and 90s left us and where younger ones died by their own hand or via drugs.  It was a year that seem to to be like a over heated dressage-many obstacles to leap over; many traps to gallop through.  This is the year I learned to be used to be an orphan, a position I so do not like being.

All of those awful, terrible, scary things were backdrop to what may be one of my most productive and accomplished year:
I have a new chapbook, Living in the Love Economy from Overpass Books, young people who are graduates of Long Island University–they studied with Lewis Warsh, who was on of my first poetry instructors when I came to NYC in 1974!  The book launch at Berl’s was well attended and I was able to get Anselm Berrigan and Erica Hunt to share the spotlight.  I thank them all.

Chapbook from Overpass Books.

Chapbook from Overpass Books.

Poems were published in The Cataramaran Literary Reader, The Recluse from The Poetry Project and The Mas Tequila Review.

Serious literary interviews were made with me by  Lewis Warsh for The Otter and Rochelle Spencer for Mosaic and The Brooklyn Poets interviewed and featured me for the Brooklyn Poet of the Week (that was fun).  The most interesting interview was actually a dialogue with Afaa Michael Weaver for the Furious Flower Poetry Center’s archive. And after harrassing, well gently needling Metta Sama, she pulled together this extraordinary convo that Monica Hand, Tracy Chiles McGhee, Raquel Goodison and Ruth Ellen Kocher on women’s creativity, artistic production and well read it at http://theconversant.org/staging/?cat=782.

Rich Blint of Columbia University asked me to participate in a panel for the The Year of Baldwin portion of The Harlem Bookfair. Aimee Meredith Cox moderated the panel and I have to say again that she may have been the best panel moderator I have ever encountered.  It was a lively and fresh conversation between me, Christopher Winks and Kiese Laymon.  And earlier in the year I participated in the National Black Writers Conference at Medgar Evers College–that was fascinating esp. seeing Derek Walcott up close.

I blogged for the “Harriet” blog for the National Poetry Foundation in September.  What did I know that in September the #Ferguson protests would start up; that I would have some impact on supporting the work of activists or that I’d write up Maya Angelou’s Riverside Church Memorial or that I’d talk about Sonia Sanchez’ 80th birthday or have the chance to report on the Furious Flower Poetry Conference with a focus on what happened after the public events took place! Reading and participating at Furious Flower was important for me as a poet, esp. as a Black poet.  I also wrote literary reviews for books by Tony Medina and Yuko Otomo and arts reviews on Dawoud Bey and Carrie Mae Weems.

In August I had the great gift of 10 days at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts where I put together a next to final draft of my New and Selected Poems with the great help of the VCCA staff–thank you again.  I got to know Kelle Groom, Nichole Parcher, Joelle Wallach and other poets/composers, visual artists.  And in October, I was able to fulfil my duties as a Senior Fellow for the Black Earth Institute and share in the wonderful hospitality of Michael McDermott and Charlotte Taymor in Wisconsin. The BEI gave its first ever award to Joy Harjo who was skyped in for the event–ah technology.

And also at VCCA I completed a commission–a new poem for a literary supplement to the forthcoming re-installment of The Migrations Series, Jacob Lawrence’s groundbreaking work that will be shown at the Museum of Modern Art.  I thank Elizabeth Alexander for placing me in this august group.  I had written about Lawrence’s work in an earlier poem which Quincy Troupe published in Black Renaissance Noir.  It was a great opportunity and pretty scary-like will I pull this off?  I did.

And I also worked with Atim Oton who is bringing her CALABAR brand to my hood, Bed-Stuy and so for the popup I developed a reading series, WORDS SUNDAY and it was really successful,  But special shoutout to Janice Lowe who was in the first one, I want you back for a larger audience come Spring 2015.

And finally, I did readings for Paul Romero’s Bryant Park Series, most notably a “Lunch Poem” one with Jocelyn Lieu, Lydia Cortes, Jessica Greenbaum and Sharan Strange. And with Mark Statman for Neil Silbrerblatt’s Voices in Poetry series in Katonah.  Rowan Ricardo Phillips brought me to SUNY Stony Brook, where June Jordan and Cornelius Eady  advanced contemporary poetry.  Getting to know Rowan and his work has been a boon.  Also read “The Day Lady Died” for the Frank O’Hara Lunch Poem Publication Anniversary event at the Poetry Project.  And at the end of the year I read at KBG with Shanna Compton–it was a night rich with verbal fireworks and deep emotions.  There was more, but it’s cold.  It’s December 31. It’s time to sum stuff up.

I know that much of this year has been about violence, danger, death and protest.  I am sad about the danger, death and violence, but I am so pleased that protests are underway and not just here from Mumbai to Santiago Chile to Hong Kong to St. Louis, Missouri young people are awake and demanding their future–not one of fewer economic prospects, more debt; tyrannical police, environmental degradation; expensive consumerism and shoddy services–but one that may be more equitable, caring and creative.  The world has always been violent and dangerous, but cynicism simply keeps whoever is in power in power.  I thank young people for starting to say nada mas, no more.  Yes  #blacklivesmatter,  Yes #afutureisinourhands.  2015 HERE WE COME.