Remembering MLK Jr. + Poem: June Jordan

This is the 43rd anniversary of the assassination of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968), one of the most tragic events in a year and era of horrors. His murder was a terrible blow to the African-American Civil Rights movement and to the push for equality for all Americans, of all races and ethnicities, genders, sexualities, religions, classes, but it also challenged those whom he had led, with whom he had walked, for whom he had fought, to keep going, and our society was irrevocably changed for the better because of him.  Rev. Dr. King was shot in cold blood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, where he had gone earlier in the spring of 1968 to support striking black sanitation workers, who were pushing for equal pay and conditions. I AM A MAN. In his final months, Dr. King stood and marched with the working people, with his brothers, who were only asking for fairness, decency, equal treatment. That struggle, like so many others, continues as I type this entry. It was during his return visit in April 1968, the day after he had spoken to the Mason Temple, the world headquarters of the Church of God in Christ, that he was killed. But I'm not saying anything most readers here do not already know.

The great poet June Jordan (1936-2002), whom I first encountered in my college years, awed and later got to meet and hear read several times, including towards the very end of her life when she also participated in a remarkable conversation at NYU with Toni Morrison, wrote the following poem in tribute and memory to Dr. King.  I am not alone in considering him to be one of the greatest figures ever to have emerged from this society, and one of the most extraordinary people in history, for his vision, his bravery, and his courage, and I think that June Jordan captures this in the most boiled-down form, almost a distillate of thought and feeling, that pours and then rills, like tears, down the page. June Jordan, the daughter of Jamaican immigrants, was a native of New York and attended Barnard and the University of Chicago. She published her first book in 1968, and went on to publish nearly 30 more books. She taught at a number of colleges and universities, and when I first encountered her work, she was a professor at SUNY Stony Brook, but she went on to teach at the University of California-Berkeley. She was beloved as a teacher, but also deeply admired for her political outspokenness and her bravery in coming out. I can recall more than a few poems of hers that did not stint in telling it like it was, whether the issue was the dreadful governments of the time, or the contours of her private life.

In 1991 she founded the highly acclaimed Poetry for the People program, which, as its website says, "continues to pursue Martin Luther King Jr.'s vision of a beloved community for all."  One visionary, writing in tribute to another.

POEM
In Memoriam: Martin Luther King, Jr.

I

honey people murder mercy U.S.A.
the milkland turn to monsters teach
to kill to violate pull down destroy
the weakly freedom growing fruit
from being born

America

tomorrow yesterday rip rape
exacerbate despoil disfigure
crazy running threat the
deadly thrall
appall belief dispel
the wildlife burn the breast
the onward tongue
the outward hand
deform the normal rainy
riot sunshine shelter wreck
of darkness derogate
delimit blank
explode deprive
assassinate and batten up
like bullets fatten up
the raving greed
reactivate a springtime
terrorizing

death by men by more
than you or I can

STOP


II

They sleep who know a regulated place
or pulse or tide or changing sky
according to some universal
stage direction obvious
like shorewashed shells

we share an afternoon of mourning
in between no next predictable
except for wild reversal hearse rehearsal
bleach the blacklong lunging
ritual of fright insanity and more
deplorable abortion
more and
more

June Jordan, “In Memoriam: Martin Luther King, Jr.” from Directed By Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2005). Copyright © 2005 by The June M. Jordan Literary Trust. Reprinted with the permission of The June M. Jordan Literary Trust, www.junejordan.com.

Source: The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (1997)

RIP + Poem: Carolyn Rodgers

This weekend, a friend at AWP passed on to me the sad news that Carolyn M. Rodgers  had passed away. She was either 65 or 69*. A few years ago, in the fall of 2007, I wrote about a mini-symposium that my colleague Ed Roberson had hosted at the university focusing on the Chicago branch of the Black Arts Movement. One of the revelations for me and others at that event was Rodgers, whom Ed described as one the BAM's "metaphysical" poets. Rogers had studied with Pulitzer Prize-winner Gwendolyn Brooks, and had helped to found the Third World Press, before starting her own press, Eden Press, some years later.  A graduate of Roosevelt University and the University of Chicago, she had taught at a number of schools in the area, including Malcolm X and Harold Washington Colleges, and Columbia College Chicago. Though less well known than many of her peers, she was an accomplished poet, and published 9 books, including Paper Soul, Songs of a Black Bird and how I got ovah.  At John Murillo's book party, poet Randall Horton told me he was working with Rodgers on putting out a new chapbook of her work, and spoke of how excited she was that and other, future projects.

According to the Huffington Post, there will be a memorial celebration for her on May 4 (6 p.m. , at the eta Creative Arts Foundation, 7558 S. South Chicago Ave., Chicago), during which poets will read her work, and I hope to attend it.



*Though one obituary lists her age as 69, this site lists her birth year as 1945.

In honor and memory of her, I'm posting one of her poems below. Like so many of her poems, it focuses on the lives and experiences of black women, speaking directly about and to them. As the poem suggests, the pressures on black women are tremendous, and one of the results is a refrain of the poem, "we are lonely"; this isn't news, but Rodgers' skill endows it with power and beauty, undercutting the pain with sly humor and a cold recognition that one answer to this plight is acknowledge of the pain, of the stresses and struggles, the coping behavior and its results--one answer is knowledge, and recognition, that this is what so many black women go through, and it's that knowledge that Rodgers's work so often imparts, in its distinctive way. And so:

Poem for Some Black Women

i am lonely,
all the people i know
i know too well
   
there was comfort in that
at first but now
we know each others miseries
          too well.
 
we are
          lonely women, who spend time waiting for
          occasional flings
we live with fear.
we are lonely.
we are talented, dedicated, well read
          BLACK, COMMITTED,
 
we are lonely,
we understand the world problems
Black women’s problems with Black men
          but all
we really understand is
          lonely.
 
when we laugh,
we are so happy to laugh
we cry when we laugh
          we are lonely.
we are busy people
always doing things
fearing getting trapped in rooms
loud with empty…
                              yet
knowing the music of silence/hating it/hoarding it
loving it/treasuring it,
          it often birthing our creativity
                              we are lonely
 
being soft and being hard
supporting our selves, earning our own bread
soft/hard/hard/soft
knowing that need must not show
                              will frighten away
knowing that we must
walk back-wards nonchalantly on our tip-toeness
          into
happiness,
          if only for stingy moments
 
we know too much
we learn to understand everything,
to make too much sense out
of the world,
of pain
                              of lonely…
 
we buy clothes, we take trips,
we wish, we pray, we meditate, we curse, we crave, we coo,
we caw,
 
                              we need ourselves sick, we need, we need
we lonely we grow tired of tears we grow tired of fear
we grow tired but must always be soft and not too serious…
                              not too smart not too bitchy not too sapphire
                              not too dumb not too not too not too
a little less a little more
                                        add here detract there
                                                  .lonely.

Copyright © Carolyn M. Rodgers, 1992, 2010. All rights reserved.

Tell CNN, No Propaganda + AWP Doings + Poem: Yusef Komunyakaa

I'm at the AWP Conference in Denver, and have been listening, learning, reading, thinking, writing, meeting, greeting, signing, notetaking, photographing, reconnecting, remembering, laughing, buying (too many books), acclimating, eating, sleeping, draggling, and walking--lots of walking, through, as I count it, five distinct neighborhoods of the Mile High City. I have several entry stubs I plan to post soon, but let me note before I do that or complete this entry that, to shift gaits (as opposed to gears--recall, I've been walking):

Once again, CNN is considering participating in a scare campaign to gut Social Security. They are planning to run IOUSA, a testeric deficit-fright documentary funded by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. Recall also that when George W. Bush was president, Vice President Dick Cheney famously stated that "deficits don't matter." They never do when Republicans are running the country, into the abyss. Now that we once again have a Democrat in the White House and Democratic control of Congress, the deficit frenzy is approach and surpassing the same pitch as it did in 1992, when Bill Clinton was in office. (Yes, it happened then.) Clinton left the country with a surplus, which Bush-Cheney promptly burned through like kindling, before amassing a $1 trillion+ deficit to underwrite unfunded tax cuts, his wars, and so much else. Unfortunately, Obama seems both prone to listening to the Washington echo chamber and to splitting the difference at every step, meaning that he appears to have bought into this frenzy. CNN, trying its best to mimic Fox News (and shedding viewers in the process), is also striving to do its part. But let's join the Campaign for America's Future and tell CNN, nope, you aired IOUSA once; we don't need this propaganda disseminated anymore. We have more than enough pressing problems, and while the deficit isn't the least of them, it's also not the most important either.

Since Obama and the Democrats will not make the basic argument--intuitive though it is, and economically sound--that the more people who're employed the more quickly the deficit will drop, because employed people PAY TAXES--the rest of us will have to make to everyone who is unaware of this basic fact. There is no need to gut or slash Social Security, or privatize it using casino financial system typified by Wall Street and much of the global economy. Medicare will undergo necessary restructuring as a result of the recent health insurance reform bill. So, please, tell CNN, no thank you. Please also urge others you know to do the same as well.  We all owe the USA, but the deficit scare project isn't the answer or one we want them to contribute to.



+++

This morning I went to two panels, the Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry panel. (I wasn't able to wrest myself out of bed to make the Conceptualism vs. Flarf fest at 9 am.)  The anthology, edited by poet Camille Dungy, is a trove of poems written, as the title suggests, over the last four centuries (from Phillis Wheatley forward), by black poets, and today's panel, organized by Cyrus Cassells, featured G. E. Patterson, Amber Flora Thomas, Greg Pardlo, and Janice N. Harrington, all of whom appear in the volume.  All of the panelists spoke about their work and the poems of others in the volume, Gar Patterson evoked the "poetry of the subjunctive" in speaking of the work of several poets, Evie Shockley, Ed Roberson, and others in the anthology, that he particularly admired.  Amber read several poems that drew upon her experience growing up in a rural environment; one focused on the killing and skinning of rabbits, which, she suggested and showed through the poem itself, deeply shaped her ars poetica. Cyrus cited one of Janice's poems to talk about the "permission" that black poets often confront in writing about certain subjects, including nature, and asked her to read her poem, "The Colored Woman Cannot Speak," which she did, before he invited Gar to read one of his poems in the volume, and then he read one of his own, based in the Georgia Sea Islands. It felt like a perfect panel to experience being in Denver, where, at least for me, the natural world is so evident, its forces so apparent, in my body.  While I'm no longer as winded or tired as I was the first full day I was here, my body still feels different, I feel different, and its nature's power that's the source. Just before slate of sessions ended, I slipped into the Translations of Contemporary Poetry from Latin American panel, chaired by Kristin Dykstra, which featured Urayoán Noel, Monica de la Torre, Daniel Borzutzky, and Juan Manuel Sánchez, who were answering the last few questions posed. One that I caught involved the possible tension between Latino writing and Latin American writing, and whether one threatened the other. All of the writers who responded argued that this was not the case, and Mónica went on to note that as a multilingual writer working in and out of several traditions, she felt that these two categories weren't exclusive, that the idea of a "mother" tongue was problematic for her, and that translation ultimately was about desire (a point raised in our panel the previous day), and thus all sorts of translations were and should be possible.  To a question about Spain still be the hub of Hispanophone publishing, Daniel responded that the writers on the dais, and many others, were challenging and changing this notion, with multiple sites of publication and dissemination occurring all the time.  After this panel, I went and purchased my copy of Black Nature, which some of the poets featured signed, and a few more books (by Joshua Marie Wilkinson, John Beer, Annie Finch, Dorothea Laskey, and others), then walked Duriel Harris to her appointment and am now prepping to head back to Chicago.  At the first panel, Amber mentioned Yusef Komunyakaa's (1947-) poem "Yellowjackets," which I'll post here.  I've previously featured Yusef on this blog, adore him and his work, and, because he needs no introduction, here is his poem. Enjoy.

YELLOWJACKETS

When the plowblade struck
An old stump hiding under
The soil like a beggar's
Rotten tooth, they swarmed up
& Mister Jackson left the plow
Wedged like a whaler's harpoon.
The horse was midnight
Against dusk, tethered to somebody's
Pocketwatch. He shivered, but not
The way women shook their heads
Before mirrors at the five
& dime--a deeper connection
To the low field's evening star.
He stood there, in tracechains,
Lathered in froth, just
Stopped by a great, goofy
Calmness. He whinnied
Once, & then the whole
Beautiful, blue-black sky
Fell on his back.

Copyright © Yusef Komunyakaa, from Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, Camille Dungy, editor, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010. All rights reserved.