Monday Notes

Many thanks to Joshua Marie Wilkinson and his colleagues at Loyola University of Chicago who hosted the talks + reading that I was fortunate to participate in last Friday. Joshua, who opened the event by reading one of Barack Obama's poems, invited six of us to speak about poetry and something else we were doing that inflected our work, and my co-speakers offered great remarks. Jennifer Karmin spoke about poetry and activism; Robyn Schiff (I miss her!) spoke about poetry and publishing; Abraham Smith spoke about poetry and performance; Quraysh Ali Lansana (Q!) spoke about poetry and history; and Lisa Fishman spoke about poetry and farming. I read some remarks on collaboration in relation to my work, extending it to my translation projects (another form of collaboration, and one in which this blog has played a great part), and some art stuff. (Dear collaborators...hint, hint....)

After a delicious lunch, we all read briefly, and then I had to go catch a plane, missing what was billed as a "snow storm." I was very glad to see so many local poets and students there (a group from the university came down), and to see them really getting into the poetry as well.

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Rapturous reviews of Roberto Bolaño's final, unfinished magnum opus 2666 (FSG, 2008) have been appearing over the past week. The persnickety Adam Kirsch says that it has the "confident strangeness of a masterpiece." (Francisco Goldman's summer 2007 review of a portion of Bolaño's collective oeuvre, including the Spanish version of 2666, can be found here.) The Spanish version graced my carrel at the library this summer, though I wasn't able to get far in it. Would that there were a parallel vein of time.... But the English translation, by Natasha Wimmer, who deserves an award, is out, and although I have only grazed a few pages, I can say, as I did in an email to Reggie H., that it confirms for me that Bolaño will join that cadre of exception writers since 1900--Rilke, Proust, Tolstoy, Hughes, etc.--who are among the finest in the literary tradition but never received the Nobel Prize. You can get the book in one hardcover volume or a boxed three-volume set; I bought the box. Bolaño originally suggested five volumes, but his heirs and executors wisely, it seems, kept the entire work (mostly) together.

Also receiving rhapsodic treatment is Toni Morrison's new novella, A Mercy (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008). Reviewer after reviewer discusses its exploration of slavery's early form and praises its poetic language, tautness, haunting qualities, and links it to Morrison's masterwork, Beloved (1987). Even the nation's toughest critic, who hasn't spared Morrison harsh criticism in the past, is jumping on the bandwagon. If you missed her reading selections from it on NPR, you can hear it here. It's on my list, for the winter break...

One of the books that recently crossed my desk is Asher Ghaffar's Wasps in a Golden Hum Dream a Strange Music (ECW Press, 2008). It looks gorgeous, from cover to cover, and I've also added it to my list!

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One of the most dismaying bits of recent news was the horrific school collapse in Pétionville, Haiti, just outside the capital, Port-au-Prince. More than 94 children and adults have died, and the international search and rescue effort, which did pull 4 surviving children from the rubble on Saturday, will now likely turn to a recovery of bodies. Up to 250-300 people were thought to be in the building at the time of its collapse. (Above left, a woman in anguish for her missing child is assisted by relatives at the site of the collapsed the church-run school, La Promesse, in Petion-ville, Haiti on November 10, 2008, AFP/Getty Images.)

It now appears that the school's owner, Pastor Fortune (Fortin?) Augustin, who had voluntarily turned himself in, is being charged with involuntary manslaughter; when the building collapsed, workers were adding an additional floor, and the pastor is alleged to have constructed the building without engineering help. Haiti is still trying to recover from the quartet of devastating storms which have battered the Caribbean islands since the late summer. Haiti lost 2/3rds of its crops and entire neighborhoods still remain under water.

If you are able to, you can contribute relief funds here or here.

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I'm not going to speculate on President-Elect Barack Obama's transition team or his putative cabinet picks, though I found this short New York Times piece on Valerie Jarrett quite illuminating. Really, I think we should just wait and watch. Despite the right's claims that he was the second coming of V. I. Lenin (yeah, right!), and the desire among some in Washington for the second coming of Dwight Eisenhower (whom the contemporary Republicans have banished from their roster, along with other decent Republican presidents like Teddy Roosevelt and Calvin Coolidge, who was Ronald Reagan's favorite), he has mostly been a center-left legislator, both in the Illinois State Senate and the US Senate. This maps closely onto what I read as his ideological orientation, which is center-left, with the emphasis on the center. Obama isn't and hasn't ever been a left radical, though he often announces leftist intentions and demonstrates progressive tendencies. But he will likely govern from the center-left, perhaps further to the left, because he received a greater popular vote mandate, than any of his previous three predecessors. He is, nevertheless, going to appoint DLC-prototype folks like Rahm Emanuel and his ilk to high posts, bring in a host of Clintonistas, and draw upon the University of Chicago braintrust he hung with for quite some time, and not just the progressive ones.

Some of the early news we're getting, such as his team's careful review of Bush's executive orders and his plan to reverse many of them and his intention to close the abomination at Guantánamo Bay, more than balance out his accommodating stance towards someone like Connecticut's independent senator, Joe Lieberman. Uggh!

Now, can anyone scare up some inauguration tickets for C, me, and family members? (Former classmates...help!)

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Speaking of Obama, poet John Murillo sent along a link to an article noting the President-Elect was recently spotted carrying a copy of Derek Walcott's Selected Poems (Edward Baugh, ed., FSG, 2007) as he was dropping his daughters off at school. I noted to the CC folks that "So much marvelous work in this collection that I'm sure hits Obama at a very deep level," and posted the poem I'd posted on here a month ago, "As John to Patmos." Given that he's already alluded to Langston, Alice Walker (tell me you knew that!), and others, I thought that we might hear snippets of Walcott and many others from our literature in his speeches, including his inaugural. Get your ears and eyes ready!

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One of the greats to remember and honor: Miriam Makeba. Singer, actress, activist-fighter, visionary, "Mama Africa": beautiful. She was 76.

Congrats to Kearnizzle + Intl Writers + 1968+40 + Condolences

Congratulickations to Cave Caneiste Doug Kearney (photo, The Other Project Blogspot), who received a Whiting Foundation Award for his sustained, exemplary and ongoing poetic magification. Doug is a poet, performer, librettist, educator, professor, a high performance lyric man-machine, with one of the hairiest chests of any wordsmith I've ever known (one notices these things). If he comes to your corner of the great American literary showgrounds, catch him because he and his work are definitely worth seeing. He levitates and makes words do so too. Really, he does.

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This weekend four writers came to town for two events through the good graces of the International Writers Program at the University of Iowa, my colleagues Reg Gibbons and Stacy Oliver, the university's Center for the Writing Arts, and the Guild Complex in Chicago. They were Leila Al-Tarash (novelist and media producer, Jordan); Tarek El-Tayeb (poet, playwright, fiction writer, essayist Austria and Egypt); Yael Globerman (poet and fiction writer, Israel); and Gutierrez "Teng" Mangansakan II (poet, fiction writer, film producer and director, Phillippines). The first was a classroom conversation at the university. As they did last year, the writers spoke on Friday to an audience of our students and faculty members, talking about their lives and work in the context of their societies. A few highlights include El Tayeb's discussion of his start as a storyteller when very small as a means of self-protection and enchantment of a wilder, older schoolmate, and his belief that his work was an attempt to write about something he'd lost; Laila al-Atrash's exploration of the censorship of her work regarding its religious content, though once sexually taboo material is permitted, and of the necessity of having had to balance a full-time career in the media with her writing, which she's been able to devote much more time to; Yael Globerman's commentary on the waves of immigration that have marked Israel and Israeli literature, and her sense that the silence about what had happened in Europe--the Holocaust--had been broken by David Grossman first and then increasingly addressed by subsequent generations of writers, as was the case with the silence about Arabs in Israel, which was also now part of Israeli literature; and Tang Mangansakan's disquisition on moving from the geographical periphery (Mindanao, in the south) to the cultural center, in Manila, and writing in English, one of the colonial and now predominant languages in the Phillipines.

One moment that particularly interested me was the somewhat contentious but good-spirited back-and-forth between al-Atrash and Globerman over the issue of immigration, home and the Other in Israel; al-Atrash was a native of Palestine, and her perspective differed from Globerman's, though they came to agreement with al-Atrash's comments about the great fear of the Other, the sense that the person whose life was in so many ways similar and geographically close but fundamentally unknown was monstrous, terrifying, a grave threat, and yet, over the years, that sense of Otherness had broken down, though not without a great toll levied through the years. Their dialogue was, if I may sound somewhat trite, symbolic of the dialogue that is ongoing. Another moment that particularly caught my ear was when Teng Mangansakan talked about his own blogging (his site is Funktional Schizophrenic), which he saw as a means and form of writing, and of building audience. Through review of his site counter, he learned that about 60% of his readership was in the US, and he not only was making money as a blogger, but also selling books through the medium. He also mentioned his video essay Jihad, about his own personal jihad as a queer Muslim Filipino, and I do hope to see it and more of his work if and when they appear at one of the local film festivals or on DVD.


Reg, Tarek, Yael and Laila at the Friday morning event

On Saturday, along with Chicago-area writers Tony Trigilio and Paul Martínez Pompa, I joined them on a panel discussion, entitled "Migrating People, Migrating Literature," that was part of the Chicago/International Writers Exchange. It was hosted by the Guild Complex at the Chopin Theater on the edge of Wicker Park (Real World Chicago!) and Humboldt Park (you've got it, Saul Bellow's old stomping grounds). Many thanks to Reg Gibbons, Michael Puican, Ellen Placey Wadey, and everyone affiliated with the Guild Complex who staged this event. I believe it was taped and will be available soon via audio, so I'll post the link when I have it. We had to write short pieces about migration before the event, but we mostly discussed other things, ranging from translation to politics and writing and the politics of writing to the various ways you might study literature to various kinds of authenticities. It was a joy to meet Tony and Paul, and converse publicly with the visiting writers, and I only wish they didn't have to head back to Iowa so soon. Below are a few photos from both the second event.


Tony, Teng and Yael before the conversation

Laila and Paul after the conversation

Paul, Tarek and Yael

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Also this weekend, the university held a conference commemorating the courageous protests, led by Black students enrolled 40 years ago, which led to the establishment of the now renowned African American Studies department, increased admissions of Black and especially poor and working-class Black students, more Black faculty (because of them I have my job!), and number of other changes that have made the campus more hospitable to Black students and other students and faculty of color.

One of the highlights was hearing poet and fiction writer Angela Jackson, whom I'd previously written about when my colleague Ed Roberson held a mini-conference last year on the Black Arts Movement in Chicago, read from her forthcoming novel, Where I Must Go, about that episode and related events. It will be published by Northwestern University Press next July, and if the excerpt I heard, which involves a number of the university's Black students visiting a revolutionary on the South Side of Chicago and having their eyes opened, figuratively and literally, by his critique of them, their education, and their belief systems, is a harbinger, this will be a remarkable work. Angela is a poet of true grace and wit, and the selection she read showed she had recaptured that era vividly and distilled it, deploying her abundant lyric and dramatic talents in the process. It will be interesting to read this novel's likely critique of the Black bourgeoisie's and the revolutionaries' sometimes intersecting, sometimes conflicting aims, especially in light of our current era, when their convergence has taken the symbolic and material form of a nationalist and post-nationalist dream likely to come true in the form of Barack Obama. What I was so aware of, as I listened to the notes of recognition among the audience members, so many of them alumni or the heirs of that era, was that this current would not have been possible without them, and it was part of their vision, even if different what they envisioned.

They are all my heroes.


Angela Jackson reading from her forthcoming novel Where I Must Go


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Earlier today I saw the very sad news that Madelyn Dunham, Senator Barack Obama's grandmother, passed away today. She was 86 and lived in Hawaii. He had lived with her during his high school years, and had just gone to visit her a few weeks ago when she became gravely ill. My offer my sincerest condolences to Senator Obama and his family, and I wish she could have lived to see the outcome on Wednesday, because I strongly believe he will that he'll be victorious tomorrow.



Here's a link to Ta-Nehisi Coates's thoughtful and moving Atlantic Monthly commentary on and tribute to Obama's grandparents.

Senator Obama's comments on his grandmother are here (in text and video form).



My condolences also to the family of Illinois's senior Senator, Dick Durbin, whose 40-year-old daughter, Christine passed away after a lifetime struggle with heart disease. My thoughts go out to him and his entire family. I should also note that Senator Durbin is running for reelection, and has been one of the few consistently outspoken liberals in the Senate. He is on track to return to the Senate with a very large margin of support.

Tuesday Mulligatawny

This summer before I got sick I'd hoped to catch up with Sarah Schulman (left), a writer whose writings and activism I really admire, and who gave me (and others) some very useful advice years ago up in Vermont. I wasn't able to, but I have been following one of her recent moves, which, according to Patricia Cohen in the New York Times, has been to co-organize a town hall meeting (it took place Monday night) to protest the paucity of female playwrights on Off-Broadway and non-profit New York stages.

The gathering was organized by the playwrights Sarah Schulman and Julia Jordan, who have rallied their colleagues to the cause, contending that their male counterparts in the 2008-9 season are being produced at 14 of the largest Off Broadway institutions at four times the rate that women are. More than 150 playwrights appeared at a meeting last month to discuss the issue, and all 90 seats at New Dramatists, the playwriting center where Monday night’s meeting is scheduled, are already spoken for, and there is a long waiting list.

I'm curious to see what comes out of this and prior meetings. Will there be concrete proposals on the part of theaters' artistic directors and boards to address the disparity? Will female playwrights be given more and equal opportunities to have their works staged and enjoyed? I'm also curious to know if this is a problem elsewhere, and if there have been similar discussions and gatherings in other major cities, like the second theater capital of the US, Chicago.

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It was gone for a little over a year, but now it'll be back: regresará one of New York's finest Spanish-language bookstores. But only online.



As I wrote at the time of its closing last fall, Que nunca se la olvide, que siempre se la recuerde.

Will Macondo return in virtual form as well?

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Who says pro athletes aren't into the arts? Literature? Poetry, to be exact? Yes, that's a leading question and no, I don't just mean the kind that comes wrapped in memorable melodies and beats (i.e., hiphop, r&b, rock, etc.), but the kind that follows in the wake of 20th century Modernism and warms the hearts of so many? Meet New Jersey's own Obama-supporting Fernando Pérez, of the Tampa Bay Rays:

Are you staying away from heavy plots during the playoffs?

Actually, what helps me a great deal right now is poetry, like Robert Creeley and John Ashbery.

But of course! Now, what would get your and your teammates backs swinging again?

(H/t to Reggie H.)

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Perhaps the only thing better than The Wire starting a new season and surprising the hell out of all its fans is seeing its actors together again, for a good cause.



A colleague mentioned that it was somewhat startling to see Marlo Stanfield (Jamie Hector) and Chris Partlow (Gbenga Akinnagbe), two of the most psychopathic characters not on a reality show to grace recent TV, supporting Obama. I guess I initially saw the actors as themselves, and then I considered that all these characters had some serious ethical and personal flaw--well, the psychopathic duo were really on the outer fringes, to put it mildly--and probably would send Obama running if they were the ones giving their endorsement. I mean, he's not anywhere in the general vicinity of Kwame Kilpatrick, is he?

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Does the global financial crisis demonstrate that Libertarianism as a practical and practiced ideology is dead? (Admit it, you're hoping the answer is yes, even as a struggle rages at the ground zero of its late high priest, Milton Friedman.) Jacob Weisberg thinks so. Ultrarandian Mr. Irrational Exuberance Alan Greenspan appears a mite chastened. And yet, we are on the verge of electing--shhhhh, don't tell the McCainiacs, Palindrones and sad old members of the GOP--a Communist socialist libertarian paternalist, right? I don't think so, and certainly not in light of the mess he'll have to clean up...but Cass Sunstein very well could end up on the federal bench nevertheless.

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And don't say I didn't warn you....

(H/t to Christina Springer)

Poems: The Sixth Dalai Lama

Two short love poems by the Sixth Dalai lama, Tsangyang Gyatso (Tsangs-dbyangs Rgya-mtsho 1683-1705), translated by Nathan Hill with Toby Fee, from the Winter 2008 special translation issue of the Harvard Advocate.

(50)
Our tryst in the dense woods
of the southern valley
a parrot only knows,
all else are ignorant.
O parrot, please do not
repeat our secret words.

(65)
Behind me a demon.
Who cares if he's fearsome?
I saw a sweet apple
and was compelled to pluck.

Copyright © Nathan Hill with Toby Fee, The Harvard Advocate, 2008.

Poem: Derek Walcott

I haven't posted a poem in a long while, so here's one of my favorites, by (at left, from Derek Walcott, Dead White Males), which I first came across when I was a teenager.

No exigesis necessary, I think; as is the case with so many of his poems, from the earliest, of which this is one of the finest examples, to the most recent, it speaks powerfully for itself.

AS JOHN TO PATMOS

As John to Patmos, among the rocks and the blue, live air, hounded
His heart to peace, as here surrounded
By the strewn-silver on waves, the wood's crude hair, the rounded
Breasts of the milky bays, palms, flocks, and the green and dead

Leaves, the sun's brass coin on my cheek, where
Canoes brace the sun's strength, as John, in that bleak air,
So am I welcomed richer by these blue scapes, Greek there,
So I shall voyage no more from home; may I speak here.

This island is heaven--away from the dustblown blood of cities;
See the curve of bay, watch the struggling flower, pretty is
The wing'd sound of trees, the sparse-powdered sky, when lit is
The night. For beauty has surrounded
Its black children, and freed them of homeless ditties.

As John to Patmos, in each love-leaping air,
O slave, soldier, worker under red trees sleeping, hear
What I swear now, as John did;
To praise lovelong, the living and the brown dead.

Copyright © 2007, Derek Walcott, from Selected Poems: Derek Walcott, edited by Edward Baugh, New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, p. 4. All rights reserved.

Things and Whatnot

I've been away from here for nearly a week, but this time I have an excuse: kidney stones. Once again I'm weathering a bout of them, and as anyone who's ever experienced them knows, they are among the most painful illnesses anyone can encounter. In addition to totally immobilizing you at the first signs of attack because of the excruciating pain, which I have likened variously to having someone powerdrill through your lower back, plunge a knife repeatedly down the side of your groin, and inflate a portion of your stomach and intestines until they're near bursting, there's the matter of their passing out of your system. That is, if they do; if they don't, they have to be broken up, zapped, laser, sometimes even extracted. I've never had to endure any of these last few treatments, but I can say that there's no shortage of pain at any point. I think I'm past the worst part, but I probably will be posting only intermittently over the next week or so as I recover.

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I've been intending to note the appointment of a new Poet Laureate of the United States. This year's new American lyric pied-piper is Kay Ryan, a native Californian who, as far as I know, has never been much of a public figure or a proselytizer for her art. Her brief, often wry, enjambed and rhymed, usually lyric poems, which have appeared in periodicals over the last four decades and in six collections, have many admirers, though until a few years ago, I don't think she received much recognition from the major contemporary critics. She has, however, been lauded by the Poetry Foundation and other arts institutions over the last decade. It'll be interesting to see what sort of approach she takes to the post; I've tended to think that the people appointed to this post really ought to have a history of working in at least a few different communities (and not just academic ones) and one or two concrete outreach plans for the post. The late Gwendolyn Brooks was an exemplary example. But that's just my take.

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Thomas Disch, the 68-year-old polymathic speculative fiction writer and poet, died by his own hand a few weeks ago. I first learned about Disch's work via the writings of the one and only Samuel R. Delany, and though I've only read a few of them, I can agree with many of the appraisals that he was an extraordinarily smart man. I may be one of the few people who has read more of his poetry than his fiction, and though I'm not great fan of the poetry, he was certainly clever, and could combine dark subject matter with fixed forms sometimes to striking effect. His science fiction novels, however, which stood among the New SF work of the 1960s and 1970s, will remain his forte. Disch also produced notable work in other genres, including a computer novel, opera librettos, and children's literature, one of the last of which, The Brave Little Toaster, became a Disney film. According to the obituaries I've seen, he'd faced a series of successive traumas, including losing his partner, Charles Naylor, of many years; health and financial problems; and potential eviction from his New York home. He did, however, publish his final novel earlier this year, a satire entitled The Word of God: Or, Holy Writ Rewritten.

Poem: Claudia Rankine

I've highlighted her books before, but I don't think I've ever posted a poem by Claudia Rankine, so let's get this lovefest started right! I think she's producing some of the most fascinating and distinctive poetry--or work in and around that particular signifier--out there today, and her last book, Don't Let Me Be Lonely, was one of those books I carted around me with me for months, reading in it snippets of amazement at what she's achieved. (I did the same with Plot, which became one of my constant companions for months in Providence.) I haven't yet taught it because I haven't had the opportunity to do so, but one of these days, one of these days. (And then there's the eternal dream, of bringing so many of the poets I know and admire to the university....)

I thought of typing out one of the poems from Rankine's most recent book, but then I found the following poem on the Dia Center for the Arts's old poetry site, which occasioned a moment of nostalgia before I decide to copy the poem over here. (I do recommend folks head up to Beacon if they get the chance, because the town itself is a gem, but the disappearance of the old Dia sites in Soho and Chelsea, and that incomparable poetry series, with Brigde Mullins's grand introductions and the readers' sometimes complementary, sometimes clashing performances, will never be matched again.) Plot is, among other things, a book about assemblage, about the construction of lives, of domesticity, of subjectivity and interiorities, within a lyric--and one could say a narrative--field. Or a plot. The follow poem, then, enacts this idea.

THE ROOM IS A FOUNTAIN IN EXPERIENCE

Though a previousness, cushioned by dark, aggregates the room
(for there is no disparity),

a room is brought into existence, the activity of--

Here Liv is letting herself feel as she feels, her will yielding to
streams, the lyric field of her everyday depths.

Her presence is. It's come along, is lost, is loss, is wallside
reconciling: can I love now please?

Or in inclusion she bursts into a hood of tenderness: the body's
anguish and flesh and all reflected in the absorbed atmosphere
soaking her being,

then the self feels deeper the depicted insistence engaged, its
essential nest, its scape--

And always and each contiguous thought, approaching the
distance, augments. Viewed against, the mind reshapes and here
is refuge without its tent.

All that's resolved plots against her dividing self, binding her as
if any intervening space is recess for

her grave, an equivalence overlaying presence. Can I love now
please?

Copyright © Claudia Rankine, from Plot, New York: Grove Press, 2001.

Thoughts + Poem: Claude McKay

Just some incoherent and incomplete thoughts: two days later, and I still don't have words to talk about the horrific Sean Bell verdict; not that I didn't think it would turn out this way, because when it comes down to a judge issuing a verdict about an unwarranted and insane police attack on Black men or people of color or poor folks, my first thought is that the judge, as this one did, is going to side with the cops. They usually do. That doesn't make it any easier, though.

I've been at a loss for words about this verdict and the long history, a litany, of miscarriages of justice, the injustice and anti-justice, against Black people in this country, against people of color, against women, against sexual, ethnic and religious minorities, against working-class and poor folks, about the structural impediments to change, the ways that the people in power maintain their power through various forms of violence and oppression, and make it diffuse, naturalize it, discursively and materially, how they attempt to and often succeed in industrializing our consciousnesses to accept it, to expect it, to participate in it, in part through silence...

Friday night I listened to Jeremiah Wright on Bill Moyers's PBS show Now, having to defend himself against the smears and distortions the Right Wing and establishment media have been propagating, to destroy the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama, the electoral chances of the Democratic Party, and Black religious faith and traditions in general. I haven't been able to post since as a result, and even now, I really don't even have a free second to catch up with the missed posts, a number of which are still in half-finished form. (The school year's end is still more than a month away....)

So here's one poem by Claude McKay, about the kind of violence from an earlier period in our national history that just keeps playing out in different forms (50+ bullets vs. a noose on a tree limb or post), despite the many changes, which still are too few....

If you'd like information on the Sean Bell case from those seeking justice on his behalf, consider going to Justice for Sean.

Update: Here's Bernie's much more articulate take.

The Lynching

His Spirit in smoke ascended to high heaven.
His father, by the cruelest way of pain,
Had bidden him to his bosom once again;
The awful sin remained still unforgiven.
All night a bright and solitary star
(Perchance the one that ever guided him,
Yet gave him up at last to Fate's wild whim)
Hung pitifully o'er the swinging char.
Day dawned, and soon the mixed crowds came to view
The ghastly body swaying in the sun
The women thronged to look, but never a one
Showed sorrow in her eyes of steely blue;
And little lads, lynchers that were to be,
Danced round the dreadful thing in fiendish glee.

Copyright © Estate of Claude McKay, 2008.

Poem: Augusto de Campos

(Completed post.) I would remiss if I didn't include some other kinds of poetry, especially of the sort I admire and have learned a great deal from. One poet whose work I admired and took a pointer from is Augusto de Campos (1931-), one of Brazil's major 20th poets, and one of the international pioneers in the genre of concrete poetry (poesia concreta). With his brother Haroldo de Campos (1922-2003) and others, he launched the literary journal Noigandres, which marked the beginning of the Brazilian contribution to concrete poetry. He has since gone on to create works in a variety of media, including online forms, and has also translated numerous other writers, published a number of critical essays on his and others' works and aesthetics, and also written on music. In fact, his earliest concrete poems were inspired by the Second Viennese school composer Anton Webern.

One of the best online places to check out de Campos's work is on his UOL website, which is only in Portuguese (except for those works, like the early poem "lygia fingers," which is multilingual), but because of the poetry's graphic style and beauty, you can admire them even if you don't speak the language, and you can even hear him read some of them (but you'll need Windows Media).

Below's his 1975 poem "o pulsar," from UbuWeb's historical archive. The common Portuguese vowels "o" and "e" flicker out as dots and stars, leaving only the pulsing of consonants and other vowels, a metaphorical pulsar likened to a kiss that no sun heats up (abraço que nenhum sol aquece) and which the black hole hides (e oco oscuro esquece). You could also read it as pulsations recording a morse-like code with this same idea; in either case, "pulsar" can be both a noun (a pulsar, a pulsation) and a verb (to pulse, pulsate, throb)...

Poem: Robert Lowell

Another poet we'll be looking at next week is Robert Lowell (1917-1977). When I was in junior high and high school in the 1980s, Lowell was still considered one of the most important poets of the era, though I'm not so sure that's the case these days; his presence and influence, as a versifier, as a teacher and mentor, and as a public poet and figure, were all still fresh, and his linguistic and lyric fluency, his personal and public aesthetic transformations, his larger-than-life personae and voice were all invoked by my teachers as models of what an American poet might be.

We read "For the Union Dead," of course, one of his greatest poems, and "Skunk Hour," and a a number of his other poems, and we talked about "confessional poetry," which was then somehow still controversial, rather than normative and passé--does anyone even blink an eye these days when poets put all their business on the page or screen, and thus in the (virtual) street?--though Lowell had been angling at confessionalism from the very beginning, with his family, one of the most prominent in New England and 19th century America, as his starting point. By the 1990s, though, Lowell's multiple marriages and lifelong nuttiness were the story, rather than the poetry. I sometimes wonder if he's taught or discussed as he once was. (When I suggested adding him to my syllabus, one friend, a scholar, seemed a bit chary.) One of my senior colleagues did tell me that in a graduate course on 19th and 20th century American poetry she recently taught, Lowell (like Gwendolyn Brooks and Elizabeth Bishop) was one of the post-WW II poets she looked at (the others were Allen Ginsberg and John Ashbery); is this the case elsewhere?

One of the poems we'll be looking at is one of my favorites by Lowell, from Life Studies, which captures his voice public stance and voice so perfectly, "Memories of West Street and Lepke." The poem recounts his reflection, from the vantage point of the 1950s in Boston, of the year he spent as a conscientious objector in a New York jail. Every beat and every image in the poem carries the charge of irony, of the deflation of middle age and unsettled retrospection that would blossom some years later in the even more candid lyrics of The Dolphin and similar books. (Of course there were certain things he would never confess, such as the fact that one of his most outrageous episodes of madness, at Yaddo, might have been provoked in part by his sleeping with a notable Black Chicago painter, Charles Sebree.)

I also think of Lowell's letters to Elizabeth Bishop (tomorrow!), which I taught several years ago in another class, and how dismissive and horrified he was of the "passionate" young poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, who paid a visit to his Boston home--they were, in their teeming filthiness and enthusiasm a bit much, a connection that could not fully occur, for the always-to-the-end haut bourgeois Brahmin. Now, the poem:

 
Memories of West Street and Lepke
 
 Only teaching on Tuesdays, book-worming
in pajamas fresh from the washer each morning,
I hog a whole house on Boston's
"hardly passionate Marlborough Street,"
where even the man
scavenging filth in the back alley trash cans,
has two children, a beach wagon, a helpmate,
and is "a young Republican."
I have a nine months' daughter,
young enough to be my granddaughter.
Like the sun she rises in her flame-flamingo infants' wear.

These are the tranquilized Fifties,
and I am forty. Ought I to regret my seedtime?
I was a fire-breathing Catholic C.O.,
and made my manic statement,
telling off the state and president, and then
sat waiting sentence in the bull pen
beside a negro boy with curlicues
of marijuana in his hair.

Given a year,
I walked on the roof of the West Street Jail, a short
enclosure like my school soccer court,
and saw the Hudson River once a day
through sooty clothesline entanglements
and bleaching khaki tenements.
Strolling, I yammered metaphysics with Abramowitz,
a jaundice-yellow ("it's really tan")
and fly-weight pacifist,
so vegetarian,
he wore rope shoes and preferred fallen fruit.
He tried to convert Bioff and Brown,
the Hollywood pimps, to his diet.
Hairy, muscular, suburban,
wearing chocolate double-breasted suits,
they blew their tops and beat him black and blue.

I was so out of things, I'd never heard
of the Jehovah's Witnesses.
"Are you a C.O.?" I asked a fellow jailbird.
"No," he answered, "I'm a J.W."
He taught me the "hospital tuck,"
and pointed out the T-shirted back
of Murder Incorporated's Czar Lepke,
there piling towels on a rack,
or dawdling off to his little segregated cell full
of things forbidden to the common man:
a portable radio, a dresser, two toy American
flags tied together with a ribbon of Easter palm.
Flabby, bald, lobotomized,
he drifted in a sheepish calm,
where no agonizing reappraisal
jarred his concentration on the electric chair
hanging like an oasis in his air
of lost connections....

Copyright © Robert Lowell, 1959. All rights reserved.

Poem: Gwendolyn Brooks

After a week and a half of fiction, we're back to poetry in my American literature class, and one of the poets we're reading next week is the one and only Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000; how could I not introduce students to her work?), so I thought I'd post one of the poems we'll be looking at is "downtown vaudeville," from Annie Allen, one of her marvelous collections and the first work by an African-American author to win the Pulitzer Prize.

Though I never forget how important she is and these poems are, and though I love to return to them for pleasure, I sometimes forget how radical they are, how sharp amd piquant Brooks's critiques, how rich and variegated her portraits of post-war black and white Chicago, wrapped as they are in traditional verse forms and prosody that, as in the case of one of my favorite poems in the book, "They love the little booths at Benvenuti's," are also charged with the cross-beats of jazz and soul. (Just read that poem aloud or listen to Brooks read it, and you'll get my drift.) Reggie H. posted it some months back when Bill O'Reilly spouted off about how the Negroes up in Harlem were actually civilized, proving how prescient Brooks was and how ignorant O'Reilly...well, I don't need to finish that thought.

Brooks gave one of the best poetry readings I attended, at the first Furious Flower Conference, which took place at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. She read with Rita Dove, who I believe either was still the Poet Laureate (one of the best we've had) or had just stepped down from the post. The hall was packed, and Rita gave a marvelous reading, as she always does. And then Brooks came on, and read some of her best known poems, including "we real cool," which, if you've ever heard her read it, differs from how most readers think it sounds. She brought the house down. I only wish I'd had the chance to meet her and get to know her personally!

At any rate: downtown vaudeville....

downtown vaudeville


What was not pleasant was the hush that coughed
When the Negro clown came on the stage and doffed
His broken hat.  The hush, first.  Then the soft

Concatenation of delight and lift,
And loud.  The decked dismissal of his gift,
The sugared hoot and hauteur.  Then, the rift

Where is magnificent, and heirloom, and deft
Leer at a Negro to the right, or left--
So joined to personal bleach, and so bereft:

Finding if that is locked, is blowed, or proud.
And what that is at all, spotting the crowd.

Copyright © Gwendolyn Brooks, 1949. All rights reserved.

Catching Up + Poem: Loren Goodman

I am trying to get back to posting, . The past two weeks have brought the usual saltmine's worth of work, projects, duties, and so forth, but things are going a lot more smoothly than last fall. First, the huge lecture class is turning out to be considerably more enjoyable than I imagined. The TAs are terrific, and the students are responding to the readings with what I register as real enthusiasm (and some bafflement, but we're talking about pre-Modernism and Modernism so far), they answer questions in class and sections, and pose good ones of their own. Some even chat after class about topics of interest or queries they have about my in-class lectures, so I know they're connecting with what's going on. And today, it appeared that nearly all of them submitted their first papers on time. So although the class is a lot of work and I am still waking up an hour before the alarm goes off, I am really enjoying it.

This morning I awoke with the pangs of what I recognized were kidney stones, which tormented me tremendously in the past, most recently in late 2001 and early 2002. In fact, I once rode back from Providence to New York City in extreme agony, barely able to sit down or stand, because I was passing a stone, which is one of the worst feelings I've ever experienced and, from what I can tell anecdotally, ranks high up there on the pain scale. This little bout seems to be under control, but I'm trying to manage it by following a specialist's recommendation from several years ago: drink lots of water, and especially lemon-water, and make sure I get enough calcium (ironically). I do wish I knew what caused them.

This weekend, however, was wonderful. C was in town, and on Friday we attended my cousin's wedding here in Chicago. She'd beautifully planned out every aspect of the ceremony, which was a joy to witness. Congratulations Raquel and Walter!

On Saturday, I attended the 17th Annual African American and Latino(a) Adult Education Research Symposium at Northeastern Illinois University, to participate on a panel organized by one of the graduate students I've worked with, author Wendy Musto. The panel also included playwright, author and activist Judy Veramendi. We discussed Wendy's short story "El Cruce" (The Crossing), which depicts the passage across the Rio Grande of an anxiety-ridden, undocumented Mexican migrant and his young family. At right is a photo from before the event that C took. Wendy's on the right.

I'd never met Judy before, though I'd heard of her work--she has a highly regarded play, The Empty Chalices, that was staged in Chicago and other cities several years ago--and it was a real pleasure to engage with the audience around Wendy's story and the larger issue of immigration.

I also replaced my old laptop, my iBookG4, because the screen was starting to fail. I didn't think I would get so attached to a piece of electronic hardware, but that little computer was a mainstay for several years. The new one, however, also a Mac, is quickly winning me over.

But on to poetry:

A poet whose first book I found incredibly charming was Loren Goodman. I can't recall how I came across it, but Famous Americans, one of the funner and more playful books of poetry you'll find out there, was selected by W.S. Merwin as the 2003 winner of the Yale Younger Poets' Prize. Some of Goodman's poems are like extended experiments, while others perhaps work best as conceptual projects, but throughout all there's a ludic quality that I think he captures in the following brief poems, "Ambition" and "Yeast." So take it away, Loren Goodman!

AMBITION

When music moves away
  from dance, atrophy sets in

When poetry moves away
  from music, atrophy sets in

I want one of those
  trophies

and

YEAST

I am Yeast, a great poet
I live in Ireland
Some say I am the greatest
Poet ever

My poetry makes bread grow
All over Ireland and the world
In glens and valleys, bread rising
In huts, clover paths, and fire wood

There will always be critics
Who deny Yeast
But you can see
The effect of my poetry
Through the potato fields
And the swell of the Liffey.
The amber coins and foaming black ale

Copyright © Loren Goodman, from Famous Americans, Yale, 2003. All rights reserved.

Poems: Gertrude Stein

(One of the posts I couldn't post at first.) One of the first poets we looked at this quarter is one of my favorites, and her work remains as revolutionary today as it was when she was publishing. You know whom I'm talking about, right?

Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)!

The one and only. I won't recap my lecture, but let it suffice for me to say that the strangeness and difficulty of her work--and its exciting beauty--isn't lost on the students. I'd heard of Stein growing up, but it wasn't until I took a class--conned my way into it, to tell the truth--with Joel Porte that I encounted Tender Buttons, which worked like a charm on me. I couldn't put the book down. Now it's online, so everyone can enjoy it. I'll just say that when I read the first piece aloud to the students, I suggested that they substitute common words they knew for words that sounded like some of the words in the poem, and then see what they came up with. I think that was as useful as my larger discussion about how her work and vision related to and was in conversation with Cubism, how it deployed some of the ideas of William James, her teacher at Radcliffe, how it elevated the objects and elements of the domestic world to the realm of poetry, how she focused on the prosaic with her x-ray like vision, rethought and destabilized the patriarchal language and lyric that was her and every other poet of her era's inheritance, and so on.... But I also stressed the idea that we should luxuriate in the language itself, in the sensuous and delightful play of phonemes, and enjoy meanings and associations the words, the rhythms, the syntax, the concatenation of sounds and images produced.

About 2-3 years ago, a fellow poet asked why anyone would read Stein. I was a little taken aback, but tried to lay out some thoughts about why Stein is still so important. One could trace several different geneologies from her work, not only in poetry, but in prose, drama, nonfiction, performance, and so on, which would stack the decks in any argument for her importance, but I talked specifically about Tender Buttons, which prefigures so much of what was to come later by half a decade....

And so, two selections from Tender Buttons:'s first section, "Objects":

A CARAFE, THAT IS A BLIND GLASS.

A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement
in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference
is spreading.

and

A BOX.

Out of kindness comes redness and out of rudeness comes rapid
same question, out of an eye comes research, out of selection
comes painful cattle. So then the order is that a white way of being
round is something suggesting a pin and is it disappointing, it is not,
it is so rudimentary to be analysed and see a fine substance strangely,
it is so earnest to have a green point not to red but to point again.

Poem: Imtiaz Dharker

(Finished post.) Recently, I came across a book by Imtiaz Dharker (b. 1954-), The Terrorist at My Table, at a local used bookstore I like to frequent, and after flipping through it I found it hard to put down, so I purchased it, and I've been looking around for some of her other books as well.

I don't know much about Dharker or her work, but according to the Poetry International website, from which I've taken this poem, I've learned she's also an artist and filmmaker, and was born in Lahore, grew up in Glasgow, and now shuttles between London and Mumbai. She's the author of three books, and, according to all I've found online, they take up themes of home, exile and displacement, freedom, citizenship, and gender politics, among other ever-salient topics.

Here's one poem from an earlier collection, entitled I Speak for the Devil, which I check out soon (when I have a free moment): "They'll Say: 'She Must Be From Another Country."

THEY’LL SAY: ‘SHE MUST BE FROM ANOTHER COUNTRY’


When I can’t comprehend
why they’re burning books
or slashing paintings,
when they can’t bear to look
at god’s own nakedness,
when they ban the film
and gut the seats to stop the play
and I ask why
they just smile and say,
‘She must be
from another country.’

When I speak on the phone
and the vowel sounds are off
when the consonants are hard
and they should be soft,
they’ll catch on at once
they’ll pin it down
they’ll explain it right away
to their own satisfaction,
they’ll cluck their tongues
and say,
‘She must be
from another country.’

When my mouth goes up
instead of down,
when I wear a tablecloth
to go to town,
when they suspect I’m black
or hear I’m gay
they won’t be surprised,
they’ll purse their lips
and say,
‘She must be
from another country.’

When I eat up the olives
and spit out the pits
when I yawn at the opera
in the tragic bits
when I pee in the vineyard
as if it were Bombay,
flaunting my bare ass
covering my face
laughing through my hands
they’ll turn away,
shake their heads quite sadly,
‘She doesn’t know any better,’
they’ll say,
‘She must be
from another country.’

Maybe there is a country
where all of us live,
all of us freaks
who aren’t able to give
our loyalty to fat old fools,
the crooks and thugs
who wear the uniform
that gives them the right
to wave a flag,
puff out their chests,
put their feet on our necks,
and break their own rules.

But from where we are
it doesn’t look like a country,
it’s more like the cracks
that grow between borders
behind their backs.
That’s where I live.
And I’ll be happy to say,
‘I never learned your customs.
I don’t remember your language
or know your ways.
I must be
from another country.’



© Imtiaz Dharker
From: I Speak for the Devil
Publisher: Penguin Books India, 2003
ISBN: 014-303089-2

Poem & RIP: Aimé Césaire

It's been a busier week than usual, so I haven't been able to complete the daily poetry posts I began, but I'll try to finish as many of them as I can so that I cover all 30 of April's slots. I also do want to post a squib on the Race Sex Power: New Directions in Black and Latino/a Sexualities conference at the University of Illinois-Chicago, which I attended and spoke at last weekend.

But today, let me note the passing of one of Martinique's greatest gifts to the world Aimé Césaire, one of the most important figures in 20th century Black Diasporic and francophone literature.

I wrote the following little blurb on the CC list:

Evie, many thanks to you and Reggie for posting on Césaire's passing, and on this excerpt from his masterpiece. He once said: «Je suis de la race de ceux qu'on opprime»--I am of the race of those who are oppressed--and he devoted his life and work to challenging that oppression through his art and civic activism, and to creating and celebrating black caribbean, translatlantic and diasporic culture.

Reggie H. sent the following obituary link, from the International Herald Tribune.

And Evie sent this snippet (originally from her partner Stéphane) from Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal:

and here at the end of this daybreak my virile prayer
that I hear neither the laughter nor the screams, my eyes
fixed on this town which I prophesy, beautiful,
grant me the savage faith of the sorcerer
grant my hands the power to mold
grant my soul the sword's temper
I won't flinch.  Make my head into a figurehead
and as for me, my heart, do not make me into a father nor a brother
nor a son, but into the father, the brother, the son,
nor a husband, but the lover of this unique people.

Poems: Kwame Dawes

Late in 2006 I posted about a reading poet Kwame Dawes gave at Naïeveté Studios, and also referenced him when I wrote about poet Uche Nduka, whom I finally got to meet at this year's AWP conference. Kwame (b. 1962-) whose site bills him as "the busiest man in literature today," is a remarkable figure on many levels, not least because he manages to do contribute a larger portion of his time to community-based activities, not only in South Carolina, where he lives and teaches, but also in Jamaica, where he grew up.

One of the important and extraordinary projects in Jamaica he's been involved with for several years now is Hope: Living & Loving with HIV Jamaica, commissioned by the Pulitzer Center, which describes its various components.

Poet and writer Kwame Dawes travels to Jamaica to explore the experience of people living with HIV/AIDS and to examine the ways in which the disease has shaped their lives. The journey brings him in touch with people who tell their stories, share their lives and teach him about resilience, hope and possibility in the face of despair. Some are living with the disease; others have committed their lives to HIV/AIDS care.

Hope: Living and Loving with HIV in Jamaica is a multi-media reporting project: an extended essay by Kwame Dawes for The Virginia Quarterly Review (Spring 2008), two short documentaries for the public-television program Foreign Exchange, a collection of poetry inspired by his reporting, a performance of the poems set to music by composer Kevin Simmonds, and LiveHopeLove.com, an interactive web presentation that synthesizes audio and text versions of the poems, the Foreign Exchange videos, additional video interviews, the music, and photography by Joshua Cogan.

I can't copy any of the poems directly, so please click on the image below to read them and also hear Kwame Dawes read them, see the accompanying photographs, and learn about the people, stories and experiences behind them.

Poem: Elizabeth Alexander

I'm feeling a little brain-spent tonight; I gave a talk that no one beforehand told me was limited to 15 minutes, so I wrote a 15-page paper--but I had the good sense to excerpt it extemporaneously, and did not come in over the clock. Actually, I'm glad I wrote the paper. Now I just need to clean it up and publish it. But since when I'm not reading creative work I work off notes (though I write out 7-8 pages of lecture notes twice a week) from which I talk/riff, I should have just gone to my usual default. It always does feel better to have written out a paper, though, strangely enough, even if it is in very rough form. (For several weeks before I had to give this talk/paper, my hip ached, and then this morning it felt fine, go figure.) It also made me realize that if you have a good research assistant (I don't) or two, you probably could write a lot of critical books!

So even though I'm tired, I am going to type out a poem by one of my favorite poets, Elizabeth Alexander. I have sung her praises more than once on this blog. The first time I met her and heard her read her work was when she came to the Dark Room in 1988 or 1989, and she sparkled, as she always does. I remember looking through her book afterwards--her first, Venus Hottentot--and just standing there with my mouth open in astonishment. How could someone so young have written poems so beautifully turned, so full of brilliance, so funky? And in volume after volume (and she also writes criticism), the poems never disappoint. (One thing I always look for in her poems is her use of epizeuxis; she's up there with Shakespeare on that account, good company if you ask me.) These days students at Yale get to partake of her expansive gifts as a teacher, her prodigious talents as a poet, and her incredible warmth as a person. Here's her "Ars Poetica #13: The Idea of Ancestry," from American Sublime (Graywolf, 2005).

Ars Poetica #13:  The Idea of Ancestry

Ralph Ellison's house is underground
next door to my house.  Somehow we
buried it during the renovation.
The stream of which he wrote, the lullaby
sung softly by its banks is the one
my children sing, in tongues.

Ralph Ellison had an outside child--
shh--it is whispered, but when
will someone tell me the full story?
We buried his house under cast-off
sheetrock, beams, and broken appliances.

Walk in my flowering peony bed
and you'll find it, a TV antenna
made from a bent wire hanger:
what's left of Ralph Ellison's house.
It picks up mysterious whispers.

Copyright © Elizabeth Alexander, 2005, 2008, from American Sublime, Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, all rights reserved.

Poem: Joseph Legaspi + Seismosis News

Today, I'm featuring a poem I found online, in Shampoo (31), by a poet I've known and admired now for a little over a decade, Joseph Legaspi (at right, from mipoesias.com). Joseph and I were in graduate school together, though in different genre tracks, but Joseph is one of those down-to-earth people whose unaffected friendliness and kindness means that you look forward to running into them, and I often would, he, and fellow poets and classmates Jan Gill (now O'Neil) and the late Phebus Etienne, a lively and amiable trio, and I can say without hesitation that I never left them without a good though, good feeling, and a good sense that these were three writers to watch out for. Joseph published his first collection of poems, Imago, with CavanKerry Press earlier this year, so check it out, and enjoy this little philosophical "postcard" of a poem. Yes, it literally was a postcard (see below, from Shampoo), from an issue devoted to them!

The universe has no edge or center.
Yet we who traverse in it do so
along perimeters, always, man-made,
conceptual and defined.  Try and pin-
point the center, and we go there.  Or is
it where we are at a given moment?
We are bound by boundaries: arms length
or under the hot sun of a horizon.
Trace edges, visible and invisible; place me in a box as I walk around in
circles.  Or is it equilibrium we seek: like the mallard bobbing on the Hudson
River, afloat, content, afloat.

Poem and image, Copyright © Joseph Legaspi, 2007, 2008, All rights reserved.

***

Some more good news about Seismosis: it received another very fine and perceptive review, by poet Frances Richard, in the most recent issue (March/April, I think) of the Poetry Project's Newsletter (the newest issue isn't up yet). I'll post the link to the new issue when they post it.

And...it received one of the 10 Fellowships for distinguished first poetry collection from the Pan African Literary Forum, which will hold its first conference this summer in Accra, Ghana, from July 3-July 18, 2008! I don't think either Mr. Stackhouse or I will be able to attend (sponsors, anyone? :-)), but this is a wonderful honor for the book, and we graciously thank the PALF's board of directors, who adjudged it worthy of this honor.

Poems: Sonia Sanchez

Let's try something different. Here are two pieces by Sonia Sanchez: the first is her reading a tribute list, a "calling on living and ago resisters," at an event in support of Mumia Abu-Jamal, in that way that only Sister Sonia can. The list is transformed into, becomes, is a poem.

The second is her reading her poem "Our Voice Is Our Vision," during Def Poetry Jam's 5th season. She ends the poem with the lines, "That's what we all need, courage." So true. One of my favorite people, thank the gods for her.

Junot Díaz Wins Pulitzer Prize + Poem: Forrest Hamer + Review: Dos Caras de Jano/Two Faces of Janus

What great news came down today: Junot Díaz was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, roughly a month after receiving the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. As I've said on here before, this one of the best novels I've read in some time, particularly one of the best contemporary novels, and it's also one of the important contemporary works on the issues of Dominicanidad, nation, history, Diaspora, immigration, class, race and, in particular, blackness, that I've come across. Many of the reviews I've read lose sight of this, but it's all there in this remarkable book. Díaz's articulation of Diasporic nerd-dom also is incredibly fresh, as is his use of a postmodern formal structure and his often plangent realism, which makes the stories of the characters so vivid that their sufferings break your heart, not just figuratively, but by the end of the book, literally. It took Díaz 11 years to complete this novel, and it's one of the best responses to the notion that any writers--poets, playwrights, fiction writers, creative nonfiction writers, anyone--should be churning out work like paper airplanes. Like any lover of great art, I'm grateful, very grateful, that he published this book when he and it were ready, and I'm delighted to be able to congratulate him on this extraordinary honor. As I wrote of the lovely and extremely talented Natasha Trethewey and her collection, The Native Guards last year, the honor went to a truly deserving writer and work.

‰‰‰

Forrest Hamer's most recent collection Rift (Four Way Books, 2007), a past Book Choice here, is so full of great poems, possessed of tremendous lyric force and philosophical depth, that it's hard to choose one to feature this month. So I think I'll choose one of the ones that I keep coming back to, a poem written in a style I would venture is Forrest's own, which is to say, a poem whose title, highlighted, nests in the body of the poem. This small but substantial gesture reorients the eye and mind when reading the poem, making you think about, among other things, embodiment itself, the relation between the poem and how the poet names it, how it functions in terms of the body of the lyric. Forrest, who's a trained and practicing psychoanalyist, is very interested in and writes with great skill about the mind and body, bodies, his, others, ours, but also, without the freight of religion or an established metaphysics, about soul. He was on a panel at this year's AWP that I heard was great, and I wish I could have heard it, and him. He's a poet you don't want to miss. So here is one of several poems titled "Someone I Know." Enjoy!

A woman late in her eighties began once more to feel desire.  She said a
fever came over her so strong at night she would not sleep: she would imagine
all sorts of men, and some women, and all of them left her the sense she
probably was dying, the flushes one last rally to keep her self intact.

Some people can feel full only when passion is strong, so they provoke
others into making them feel.  Others can feel only themselves when feeling
is calmed or seems gone.  And there are others whose sense of being comes
from not being selves at all.  Someone I know doesn't yet know what there
is to tell, and I spend hours with him waiting for the song there is when I hear
best:  sung by me in a language I do not recognize, listening fills me with the
closest I have come to being satisfied.

I would not be beautiful, for that would be another curse; nor would I be on
fire.  The first curse, of course, is knowing.

Copyright © Forrest Hamer, 2007, 2008, from Rift (New York: Four Way Books, 2007), all rights reserved.

‰‰‰

On Saturday afternoon I eagerly traipsed down to the Chicago Latino Film Festival to catch Las Dos Caras de Jano (The Two Faces of Janus), Edmundo H. Rodríguez's film based on Puerto Rican anti-colonial activist and progressive author Wilfredo Mattos Cintrón's fourth novel of the same name. I'd first heard about the film's screening on Blabbeando (mg/ Andrés), and the plot, focusing on a serial killer of gay men in San Juan and a black Puerto Rican detective investigating them, or at least one, was enough to bring me to the theater.

So what's my verdict? Perhaps I should begin by filling in the plot a bit more. The film really comprises two storylines: the background one focuses on the grisly serial murders of gay, mostly middle-class men in San Juan, by an unknown but extremely disturbed "Angel of Bachelors," and the viewer learns about 3/4ths of the way through who the killer is, as he commits one of them, along with the likely motivations behind them. But the foreground story, which links to this larger, more disturbing narrative, centers on a formerly closeted and now openly gay man, whose murder also appears to be part of the serial spree. A friend of the murdered man asks handsome but often-frowning detective Isabelo Andújar Jr. (Modesto Lacén, above right, after the screening) to investigate, and he quickly homes in on the trio of close friends, from university days, of the murdered man. One is a wealthy, pompous, and unabashedly racist banker (who refers to Andújar at one point as "Buckwheat"); the second is a Marxist university professor; and the third is a DL architect. Andújar also looks at the boyfriend, a former student of the murdered man; a male hustler who, we learn, is servicing a powerful member of the Puerto Rican Senate; and the murdered man's ex-wife, who is a prime but not very convincing suspect. Along the way, Andújar also has a discussion on gay identity, being out, and self-hatred with a young gay male employee of the pharmacy where his girlfriend, a blonde Puerto Rican woman, works, that keys him in to the film's title and the idea behind it; for closeted men, their existence is like the two faces of Janus, one turned towards the light, the other one, hidden, towards the darkness. Ultimately, through a series of revelations, about the sorts of accommodations that married couples make and the nature of the closet in Puerto Rico's machismo society, Andújar identifies the killer, with even more tragic consequences.

I appreciated the many themes and topics the film addressed or attempted to address. It dealt with class, race and racism, sexual orientation, identification and gender roles, internalized violence and sexual repression and oppression, the power of social and political capital, failed political dreams and accommodation, and so much more. In the short space of the film, Rodríguez (and the screenwriter Gilberto Rodríguez, drawing from Mattos Cintrón's work), portrayed a fairly rich portrait of contemporary San Juan, showing it to be more diverse and cosmopolitan than I might have imagined, while also portraying some of the longstanding retrograde attitudes that still exist. The portrayal of Andújar captures this. While he evidently harbors residual homophobic attitudes--he cannot not bring himself to say the word "gay," choosing instead, as others in the film did, to say "homosexual," until he was corrected by a gay man--his general outlook was portrayed as somewhere between benign and indifferent. Even when he's being aggressively macked by the murdered gay man's boyfriend, his response is to deflect it, and not, as might be the case elsewhere, to go plumb loco. Ultimately, we see that he grasps the true sadness and sorrow at the core of the murderer's actions, but he doesn't grasp the despair, which tips over into sentimentalism and melodrama, that has led to the crime. It's also apparent that he, nor anyone else, for that matter, appears to care about the more extensive series of murders that have occurred; ultimately the film ends with a scene of domestic bliss, in which the black detective and his white girlfriend--both Puerto Rican, of course--can finally come together and find a place within this society, while gay men, we gather, will continue to be killed off, without any recourse to anything beyond partial acceptance and the threat of violence.

Rodríguez, following Mattos Cintrón, draws a parallel between the social hostility and actual and symbolic violence against gays and the various manifestations of racism. One of the film's running jokes is that some people, fellow Puerto Ricans, including some who are visibly of African descent, do see the very dark-skinned Andújar (Lacén at right, with Rebecca Hazlewood, as Chandra, photo from Rojo Tomate) but don't really seem him, except as an alien, an outsider, or a stereotype of one sort or another. But in the case of the latter, not the kinds we might first imagine. In one case, he's mistaken for a babalawayo (santero); in another, a child thinks he's the wise man and king Melchior; in yet another moment, he's thought to be a caddy, a scene that could easily appear in a mainstream US film. In yet another moment, a little boy is terrified just by the sight of this black man, something I've personally experienced in the US more than once, though thankfully it doesn't happen that much any more. Andújar mostly parries this racism, but in an argument with his girlfriend, he articulates his frustration, both with religion and Christmas, but also with the ignorance he has to deal with, noting that the black king he's been mistaken for is actually Balthazar, and that, when his girlfriend offers to celebrate Hannukah and even Kwanzaa if that will inspire some holiday spirit in him, he rejects both, citing the latter as an "American" invention, inauthentic and no remedy for the malaise in the heart and soul he's carrying around. Just as Andújar is the antithesis of racist stereotypes of blacks, the film's portrayal of gay men mostly avoids stereotypes as well, though the narrative of self-loathing resulting in violence and melodrama, though based on a real story, harkens back to deterministic, pre-liberation narratives of gay male life.

While the digital video cinematography is admirably crisp, the filmmaking itself feels little clumsy at times, with shots and effects not really adding up as they could and the editing not as tight as it could be. The gauzy flashbacks are a particular problem. Another issue is the acting: many of the actors over-emote, or act a bit more stagily than is necessary, which I take to be an issue of direction rather than anything else. One example is Mr. Tagore (Vik Kumar), the DL South Asian (see, I said the film showed San Juan as cosmopolitan) storeowner, who klieglights his closetedness fairly quickly, or rather his wife's obvious unhappiness, in combination with his theatricality, does so. Just a little more restraint would have gone a long way. Lacén unfortunately has to spend a good deal of the film trying to look and act as glum, disaffected and serious as is humanly possible, but when he's got something to work with, he's great, and he's a glory to look at, a force field of beauty at the center of the film. What I told C when I recounted my thoughts on the film was this: while there are some obvious faults with the acting, directing and script, the overall ideas and freshness of the story outweighed them for me, and I was glad I saw the film and suggest others do to if it comes through where you are. As one of the producers, Iván de Paz, who was present with Lacén after the screening noted, the film tackles issues that are still very controversial in Puerto Rico (not just homophobia, but also classicism, racism, and "interracial couples," to use his words), in a fairly direct way.

At the top of this review is a photo I took of Modesto Lacén, chatting with someone who was in the screening and afterwards was talking up black film festivals in California. If you want to see Lacén these days, catch the off-Broadway production of Celia: The Life and Story of Celia Cruz, in which I believe he said he plays the great salsera's husband, Pedro Knight (photo at left from the NY Post, Xiomara Laugart, at left, as Celia Cruz and Modesto Lacén, at right, as her husband.) I hope he gets on the Diasporic bandwagon and gets even more roles both in PR and on the mainland: he's a winner.