Dropping In + A Few Remembrances

It has been a while, a long while, since my last post, three weeks in fact, and unfortunately though I would like to say I'm better, it's probably best to say that I'm still facing some health challenges right now. I do want to thank everyone who's posted on the blog or sent private emails with good wishes, links to YouTube videos, and e-cards. I definitely appreciate all of them. I do hope some of the medical options I have work out, sooner rather than later, and that I can return to posting regularly, or at least semi-regularly. Until then, I'll keep reading your blogs and posting when I feel up to it. And again, thanks for your concern.

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I'd be remiss if I didn't post a few memorial links for some notables who've passed in recent days.

They include one of Cave Canem's sages and longest-lived Fellows, Ms. Carrie Allen McCray Nickens, with whom I had the very good fortune to be in a workshop back in 1999. Carrie was a font of talent, knowledge, experience, courage, and wisdom, and like everyone at CC, I will miss her voice, stories and emails, along with her generous spirit, tremendously. She was 95.

Poet and musician Kevin Simmonds, who often checked in on Ms. Carrie, sent along this poem she wrote to be read at her funeral. Would that we all head home with such a smile in our hearts.

Sing No Sad Songs For Me

Sing no sad songs for me
For I have heard the robin sing
And felt the rush of wind through my hair.

Sing no sad songs for me
For I have known the love of man for woman,
And heard the first birth cry of a newborn.

Sing no sad songs for me
For I have held the second and third generation
In my arms, and reveled in the continuity of family.

Sing no sad songs for me
For I have walked with my fellow man,
And been touched by God's abiding love.

So sing no sad songs for me
Sing songs of peace, love and joy
For I have been touched by God's gentle grace and gone home.

Copyright © Carrie Allen McCray Nickens, 2008.

Also, taken too soon, the comedian and Chicago native Bernie Mac (Bernard McCullough) who passed away in Evanston at age 50. I almost cannot believe the reports that he's gone. And the great musician, actor and soul-stirrer Isaac Hayes, whose music formed much of the soundtrack of my childhood and which I still listen to often today, died at age 65.

Here's a video of him singing "Shaft." Check out that outfit--the man was, as they used to say, baaaaaaadddddd!!!!


And Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the 1970 Nobel Laureate in literature, who was one of the foremost dissidents during the late Soviet period and whose novels recounted his and countless lives and deaths under that regime. Today, I learned that one of the most beloved poets of the Palestinians, Mahmoud Darwish, also died. He was 67.

Here's one of his poems, from the Academy of American Poets site:

I BELONG THERE

I belong there. I have many memories. I was born as everyone is born.

I have a mother, a house with many windows, brothers, friends, and a
prison cell

with a chilly window! I have a wave snatched by seagulls, a panorama
of my own.

I have a saturated meadow. In the deep horizon of my word, I have a moon,

a bird's sustenance, and an immortal olive tree.

I have lived on the land long before swords turned man into prey.

I belong there. When heaven mourns for her mother, I return heaven to

her mother.

And I cry so that a returning cloud might carry my tears.

To break the rules, I have learned all the words needed for a trial by blood.

I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them a

single word: Home.


From Unfortunately, It Was Paradise by Mahmoud Darwish translated and
Edited by Munir Akash and Carolyn Forché with Sinan Antoon and Amira El-Zein.
Copyright © 2003 by the Regents of the University of California.
Reprinted by permission of the University of California Press.
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.