April 2015 - Poetry Foundation

founded in 19 1 2 by h a r r iet monroe
April 2015
FOUNDED IN 1912 BY H ARRI E T M ONROE
volume ccvi • number 1
CONTENTS
April 2015
B R E A K B E AT P O E T S
don share
3Introduction
joel dias-porter
5
Turning the Tables
krista franklin
6
Manifesto, or Ars Poetica #2
francine j. harris
8
This Is a Test
t’ai freedom ford
10
how to get over (senior to freshman)
john rodriguez
12
At My Best
morgan parker
14
Let Me Handle My Business, Damn
chinaka hodge
15
Small Poems for Big
mahogany l. browne
18
upon viewing the death of basquiat*
britteney black rose
kapri
19
We House
fatimah asghar
20
Pluto Shits on the Universe
nate marshall
22
on caskets
jamila woods
26
Daddy Dozens
tara betts
28
Hip Hop Analogies
kristiana rae colón
30
a remix for remembrance
eve l. ewing
32
to the notebook kid
kevin coval
34
molemen beat tapes
angel nafis
36
Gravity
camonghne felix
38
Badu Interviews Lamar
kush thompson
40
This, Here
BLUEPRINTS
quraysh ali lansana
45
Art, Artifice, and Artifact
tara betts
50
Life Is Good: How Hip-Hop
Channels Duende
nate marshall
54
Blueprint for BreakBeat Writing
COMMENT
michael robbins
61
Equipment for Living
kenneth goldsmith
68
I Look to Theory Only When
I Realize That Somebody Has
Dedicated Their Entire Life
to a Question I Have Only
Fleetingly Considered
contributors
83
Editor
Art Director
Managing Editor
Assistant Editor
Editorial Assistant
Consulting Editor
Design
don share
fred sasaki
sarah dodson
lindsay garbutt
holly amos
christina pugh
alexander knowlton
cover art by julia goodman
“Gnoman I,” 2014
POETRYMAGAZINE.ORG
a publication of the
P O E T RY F O U N DAT I O N
printed by cadmus professional communications, us
Poetry • April 2015 • Volume 206 • Number 1
Poetry (issn: 0032-2032) is published monthly, except bimonthly July / August, by the Poetry Foundation.
Address editorial correspondence to 61 W. Superior St., Chicago, IL 60654. Individual subscription rates: $35.00
per year domestic; $47.00 per year foreign. Library / institutional subscription rates: $38.00 per year domestic;
$50.00 per year foreign. Single copies $3.75, plus $1.75 postage, for current issue; $4.25, plus $1.75 postage, for
back issues. Address new subscriptions, renewals, and related correspondence to Poetry, PO Box 421141, Palm
Coast, FL 32142-1141 or call 800.327.6976. Periodicals postage paid at Chicago, IL, and additional mailing
o∞ces. postmaster: Send address changes to Poetry, PO Box 421141, Palm Coast, FL 32142-1141. All rights
reserved. Copyright © 2015 by the Poetry Foundation. Double issues cover two months but bear only one number.
Volumes that include double issues comprise numbers 1 through 5. Please visit poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/
submissions for submission guidelines and to access the magazine’s online submission system. Available in braille
from the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped. Available on microfilm and microfiche
through National Archive Publishing Company, Ann Arbor, MI. Digital archive available at JSTOR.org. Distributed
to bookstores by Ingram Periodicals, Media Solutions, Ubiquity Distributors, and Central Books in the UK.
BR E A K BE AT P O E T S
don share
Introduction
Last October, the Poetry Foundation celebrated its annual Poetry
Day with a reading by Carolyn Forché and Jamaal May, both contributors to this magazine. It was a dynamic pairing of two masterful
poets of witness who are very different from each other. Forché’s
record of achievement extends across four decades; May’s first book
was published just a couple of years ago. And though May can properly be said to speak for both himself and Forché when he describes
his work as an exploration of “the uneasy spaces between disparate
emotions, and by extension, the uneasy spaces between human connection,” these are poets who are utterly distinctive, even to the
extent of having rather different audiences. This was made vivid as
I watched the audience for the reading enter the auditorium of
Chicago’s Harold Washington Library Center.
The diversity of the crowd who had gathered to hear one or the
other of these poets was striking and heartening, and I was especially
happy to see a great many young poets affiliated with the organization Young Chicago Authors (YCA) taking their seats. YCA is
known around the world for their Louder Than a Bomb program,
founded in 2001 as a way, its website states, “to celebrate the identity
of all people in a new and radically diverse public cultural space.” It
has become the world’s largest youth poetry festival.
When I was the age of these writers, poetry and rock and roll filled
a tremendous void in my life and in the lives of many others; for their
generation it has been poetry and hip-hop. Therein lies both a kinship and a difference. I always avoid the discussions about whether
hip-hop is poetry just as I didn’t care as a young person whether rock
lyrics were or not. We embrace music and poetry of various kinds
without contradiction: that’s the least negative capability can do for
us. And I’d say that our Poetry Day reading was the embodiment
of capaciousness and open-mindedness. Poets who had never read
or heard of Forché clicked their fingers and vividly vocalized their
enthusiasm for lines she read; and Forché fans, few of whom I daresay listen to much hip-hop, experienced the powerful and musical
delight of Jamaal’s work.
I myself made a new friend that evening: Kevin Coval, YCA’s
DON S H ARE
3
artistic director. As people were taking their seats, we had one of
those animated poetry conversations that can happen so unexpectedly and gratifyingly — and vowed to undertake projects to move
further forward this convergence of audiences. That is why this issue
of Poetry, timed for National Poetry Month, features a selection of
BreakBeat poets: in the pages that follow, readers will experience a
“new American poetry in the age of hip-hop,” a resounding allusion to
the resonant and groundbreaking 1960 anthology edited by Donald
M. Allen, The New American Poetry 1945–1960. In fact, our feature is
an excerpt from the book The BreakBeat Poets, published this month
by Haymarket Books, and edited by Coval with Quraysh Ali Lansana
and Nate Marshall. Like Forché’s, the work of the BreakBeat poets is
crucially alive to our present moment. As the anthology’s editors say,
this is work “for people who love Hip-Hop, for fans of the culture,
for people who’ve never read a poem, for people who thought poems
were only something done by dead white dudes who got lost in a forest, and for poetry heads.” In other words, it is for everyone.
41
P O E TRY
joel dias-porter
Turning the Tables
For Eardrum
First hold the needle
like a lover’s hand
Lower it slowly
let it tongue
the record’s ear
Then cultivate
the sweet beats
blooming in the valley
of the groove
Laugh at folks
that make requests
What chef would let
the diners determine
Which entrees
make up the menu?
Young boys
think it’s about
flashy flicks
of the wrist
But it’s about filling the floor
with the manic
language of dance
About knowing the beat
of every record
like a mama knows
her child’s cries
Nobody cares
how fast you scratch
Cuz it ain’t about
soothing any itch
It’s about how many hairstyles
are still standing
At the end of the night.
J OEL DI AS - PORT ER
5
krista franklin
Manifesto, or Ars Poetica #2
Give me the night, you beasts hissing over the face of this dead
woman, I climb into your eyes, looking. To those who would sleep
through the wounds they inflict on others, I offer pain to help them
awaken, Ju-Ju, Tom-Toms & the magic of a talking burning bush.
I am the queen of sleight of hand wandering the forest of motives,
armed with horoscopes, cosmic encounters & an X-Acto knife. My
right eye is a projector flickering Hottentot & Huey Newton, my
left eye is prism of Wild Style, gold grills, lowriders, black dahlias,
blunts & back alleys. At twenty-one, I stood at the crossroad of Hell
& Here, evil peering at me behind a blue-red eye. I armed myself
with the memories of Pentecostal tent revivals, apple orchards, the
strawberry fields I roamed with my mother & aunts in the summer,
& the sightings of U FO lights blinking in the black of an Ohio
nightsky. I am a weapon. I believe in hoodoo, voodoo, root workers,
Dead Presidents, Black Tail, Black Inches & Banjees. I believe in the
ghosts of 60 million or more & black bones disintegrating at the
bottom of the Atlantic, below sea level, Not Just Knee Deep. I believe
that children are the future: love them now or meet them at dusk
at your doorstep, a 9mm in their right hand & a head noisy as a
hornet’s nest later. Your choice.
Black, still, in the hour of chaos, I believe in Royal Crown, Afro-Sheen,
Vaseline, Jergens & baby powder on breasts, the collective conscious,
cellular memory, Public Enemies, outlaws, Outkast, elevations,
“Elevators” & Encyclopedia Britannica. Under my knife, El-Hajj Malik
El-Shabazz laughs with Muhammad Ali, a Lady named Day cuddles
with a Boxer named Mister after traumatically stumbling on strange
fruit dangling from one of the most beautiful Sycamores evah. Under
my knife, Marilyn Monroe enjoys an evening out with Ella Fitzgerald,
meanwhile, Life shows me a gigantic photo. I am a weapon. I chart
voyages of unlove, high on a man called crazy who turns nigger into
prince. I believe in Jong, Clifton, “Dirty Diana” & Dilla, paper, scrilla,
green, gumbo, coins, Batty Bois & Video Vixens. I believe that beads
at the ends of braids are percussive instruments in double Dutch.
In the reflection of my knife, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington &
61
P O E TRY
Thelonious Monk argue in a Basquiat heroin nod. I am a weapon.
I believe in goo-gobs of deep brown apple butter, alphabets, Alaga
Syrup, Affrilachians, A-salaam Alaikum, Wa-Alaikum-Salaam,
& African Hebrew Israelites. I believe in Octoroons, Quadroons,
Culluds, Cooley High, Commodores, Krumpin, Krunk & Burn,
Hollywood, Burn.
I am Sethe crawling a field toward freedom with a whitegirl talking
about velvet. I believe in tumbleweaves, hot combs & hair lyes, Chaka
Khan, Shaka Zulu, Mau Mau, Slum Village & Buhloone Mindstate:
“Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless. Like water.” I believe
in water. My body is pulp. I bleed ink. I believe in the Fantastic, Vol.
2, The Low End Theory, Space Is the Place & The Hissing of Summer
Lawns. Tucked in the corner of my right ventricle sprouts a Tree of
Knowledge, lives a Shining Serpent & a middle finger. I’m on a quest
for the Marvelous. My face is a mask of malehood, malevolence, one
big masquerade. Metaphysically niggerish, I am a weapon wandering
the forest of motives, a machete in one hand, a mirror in the other,
searching for the nearest body of water.
K RI S TA F RAN K LI N
7
francine j. harris
This Is a Test
All alone, you use kitchen
to investigate
wall
and tendency
to
twerk
and so
on spotify channel called
little ditties for strumpets
metal, and make
room
a petal, shake
doom and
bevel
it ain’t
81
P O E TRY
as easy — ro busta — as it looks : go gusta. you
have to work (and check the blinds) the rows (in
your mind) you know by heart. dropit. popit.
you have to fake it. some kind of take — topit
popit — or plan (shake shakeshake) make it growl
it until it aches. (shakeshakeshake) go on and
placate the age. boomboom with a move. do
it to it. make a mind up. do the makeup. brew
it/glue it. do the roundup (bumpit, bumpit)
to solution. smooth a dance. make a move. it’s
not too late. (bumpbump) to make a name up.
( grasswoman) to shake the blame up. strumpets
hump it. never too late (bumpbumpbump) to
shift a dime (take out the trash) to push a groove
(thaw a loing) until it rules. ( fix the dish drain) in
the mirror, blow the rules. (check the window).
(shakeshakeshake) screw the neighbors. pop the
blinds. drop it. hop it. don’t complain. do the
hound up. (butter on the list) from the ground
up (maple syrup). there is nothing left (left to
front : front to back : left to left : back to front)
in our humanity (shakeshakeshake) : /hard til
it pops/ : that doesn’t live (warm water soak)
in how we move (shakeshakeshake) so as girls
(sticky icky) around the world — boomboomboom
— we should erect our — boomboomboom — ungodly poses (take a scraper to it. take a. take
a. scraper to it) and fix our asses (bootybooty)
into disposition (awshitnow) our bodies for our
(shakeshakeshake) adoring gazes
on
our own.
F RAN CI N E J . H ARRI S
9
t’ai freedom ford
how to get over (senior to freshman)
pick the big bitch:
the chick who look like
she chew screwdrivers.
hunched at the lunch table copying homework,
shredding syllables with a mouthful of metal.
shush the rebel
in your throat, that ghost of punk funking
dark circles in the pits of your polo.
resist the impulse to shittalk your way
through ranch dressing and lunchroom throng.
bumrush: snatch
song from her ears, tangle of headphone
wires and tracks of mangled weave.
nevermind uglying her face
with nails or an armful of bangles.
she already a jigsaw puzzle
of scratch and scar, every exposed part
caked in vaseline. every fold of fat
fortified with that free-free — french fries,
chickenshit shaped like tenders, cheese sticks.
she will slip’n slide you
if you don’t come correct.
pick you up by your bookbag
till you feel fly, camera phone red eyes
winking your punkass almost famous.
but that ain’t your fame to claim.
pitbull her ankles till she drop,
till ketchup and corn splatter,
scatter abstract like technique
from our 5th period art class.
10P
P O E TRY
as she knuckles herself up
from chickenfeed, ain’t no need to run.
instead smile for the video,
that soul-clap in your chest
is your heart.
T ’AI F REEDOM F ORD
11
john rodriguez
At My Best
August is the cruelest month: never enough daylight, too much
heat, no holidays and nothing matters except September’s
dawning responsibilities, but the August of 1994 I was Holden
Caulfield, summer camp senior counselor for the junior trail
blazers, black and brown children two weeks shy of first, second,
and third grade. Nothing is as positive, as motivating a force within
one’s life as a school bus full of kids singing along to the local
radio station blazing hip-hop and R&B. (Imagine this cherubic
chorus riding upstate to Ini Kamoze’s “Here Comes the Hotstepper.”
[“Muuur-derah!”]) My workday is filled with hazards like chocolate
melted sticky swim trunk pockets, insistent sunburn, and the assorted
rah rah of parental unsupervision, but those bus rides back from
upstate water parks and pools were my favorite times working.
Have you ever ridden in a cheesebus with ashy children asleep
against you, staring at sudden trees — more numerous than project
windows — blurring along the highways like confusion giving way
to doubt, the heady smell of dried chlorine and musty towels
lulling you into the soft timbre of a Midwest falsetto? Tell me
what it is to fall in love with a lightskin girl covering the Isley
Brothers. I was not two weeks into 21 years old. I had yet
to wear a box cutter in my fifth pocket, or see a semi-automatic
aimed at my center mass, to feel its dumbness against my spine.
My life was uncertain, save for its unlikely length under my control,
like the pilot who falls short of what he says, what he says
12P
P O E TRY
he’s all about, all about. All my homeboys were still alive, just
like Aaliyah Dana Haughton, not yet an angel of the cruelest August,
begging a boy, who may not be in the mood to learn what he thinks
he knows, to look beyond his world and try to find a place for her.
J OH N RODRI G U EZ
13
morgan parker
Let Me Handle My Business, Damn
Took me awhile to learn the good words
make the rain on my window grown
and sexy now I’m in the tub holding down
that on-sale Bordeaux pretending
to be well adjusted I am on that real
jazz shit sometimes I run the streets
sometimes they run me I’m the body
of the queen of my hood filled up
with bad wine bad drugs mu shu pork
sick beats what more can I say to you
I open my stylish legs I get my swagger
back let men with gold teeth bow to my tits
and the blisters on my feet I become electric
I’m a patch of grass the stringy roots
you call home or sister if you want
I could scratch your eyes make hip-hop die again
I’m on that grown woman shit before I break
the bottle’s neck I pour a little out: I am fallen
14P
P O E TRY
chinaka hodge
Small Poems for Big
Twenty-four haiku, for each year he lived
when you die, i’m told
they only use given names
christopher wallace
no notorious
neither b.i.g. nor smalls
just voletta’s son
brooklyn resident
hustler for loose change, loosies
and a lil loose kim
let me tell you this
the west coast didn’t get you
illest flow or nah
had our loyalties
no need to discuss that now
that your weight is dust
that your tongue is air
and your mother is coping
as only she can
i will also say
that i have seen bed-stuy since
b.k. misses you
her walk has changed some
the rest of the borough flails
weak about itself
CH I N AK A H ODG E
15
middle school students
not yet whispers in nine sev
know the lyrics rote
you: a manual
a mural, pressed rock, icon,
fightin word or curse
course of history
most often noted, quoted
deconstructed sung
hung by a bullet
prepped to die: gunsmoke gunsmoke
one hell of a hunch
here you lie a boy
twelve gauge to your brain you can’t
have what you want be
what you want you black
and ugly heartthrob ever
conflicted emcee
respected lately
premier king of the casket
pauper of first life
til puff blew you up
gave you a champagne diet
plus cheese eggs, welch’s
you laid the blueprint
gave us word for word for naught
can’t fault the hustle
16P
P O E TRY
knockoff messiah
slanged cracked commandments, saw no
honey, more problems
a still black borough
recoiled, mourned true genius slain
the ease of your laugh
the cut of your jib
unique command of the room
truthfully biggie
what about you’s small
no not legend not stature
real talk just lifespan
yo, who shot ya kid
n.y.p.d. stopped searching
shrugged off negro death
well, we scour the sky
we mourn tough, recite harder
chant you live again
of all the lyrics
the realest premonition
rings true: you’re dead. wrong
CH I N AK A H ODG E
17
mahogany l. browne
upon viewing the death of basquiat*
i look into the noise
mouth paper thin
a scatter of forgotten belongings
my tongue
extinguishes the heat of home
*once, my mother plagued a painting
brown man in lower manhattan
in california
swept oceanic throughout the dreams of a
three years later
my name i forget my claim this kind of fire
spliff
clean
today, my mouth is a tomb
P O E TRY
I let the sun
set us afire
again
pipes large
of the things people
such a power my maw, this spill wonder, this rapture of psalm
way
18 P
that strikes black bodies into fever
cleaner, still ain’t no mountain of needles or glass
enough to tow away my body
forget
she sun rose
swan dove into an oblique woman there are days i forget my name
ain’t no
britteney black rose kapri
We House
House, as in abode, as in dwelling, as in crib, as in where your inhibitions go to rest. as in jack, loft, footwork. as in sweating out that press
and curl. as in yo momma steppin out tonight. as in yo daddy put on
his good shoes. as in this movement gradually getting Bigger Thomas.
as in Pump Up the Volume. House as in bull pen. as in Detroit stay
trying to claim our shit. as in we pledge allegiance to House Nation.
as in The Warehouse. as in Professor Funk in full regalia. as in Chris
Underwood on the 1s and 2s. as in The Chosen Few. as in Jackson
Park. as in Black kids reading poems at The HotHouse. as in Hands
Off Assata. as in shutdown. as in too many educated Black people
downtown. as in “shiiid, we still got The Silver Room.” as in the
Godfather himself teaching you how to pray with a beat. as in Rest
in Rhythm Frankie Knuckles. as in a sea of Black bodies. as in Black
bodies draped across poplar trees.
as in Black boys crumbling beneath white hands. as in we’ll never
forget you Eugene Williams. as in a city of Fire. again. as in “Can
You Feel It.” as in Stockyards. as in Hog Butcher of the World. as in
butchered Black boys. as in Mamie Till calling for an open casket.
House as in a Harold Washington. as in finally for the people. as in
“ha y’all niggas thought you had something.” as in our skin is not for
mourning. as in drum beats. as in we still don’t need to know the
same language to speak. House as in fusion. as in niggas spent they
whole time in this country making the best outta scraps. as in Shack
comma Harold’s Chicken. as in free breakfast. as in Black Panther. as
in lit candles and airbrushed RIP T-shirts for that kid down the way.
and that other kid. and that other kid. as in yo grandma’s cooking on
a Sunday after church. as in every week you live Black you’re served
a last supper. as in yo cousin doing hair in the kitchen. as in a fan in
the window cause “you bet not turn that AC on.” as in Your Love.
as in Chicago is my kind of town, unless I can see the niggas. as in
white flight. as in redlining. as in naming the train that separates us
the Red Line. as in “y’all ain’t even trying to hide that shit no mo.” as
in we ain’t going no where. as in we gone dance anyway. as in home
is where the House plays.
B R I T T E N E Y BLACK ROS E K APRI
19
fatimah asghar
Pluto Shits on the Universe
On February 7, 1979, Pluto crossed over Neptune’s orbit and became the eighth
planet from the sun for twenty years. A study in 1988 determined that Pluto’s
path of orbit could never be accurately predicted. Labeled as “chaotic,” Pluto was
later discredited from planet status in 2006.
Today, I broke your solar system. Oops.
My bad. Your graph said I was supposed
to make a nice little loop around the sun.
Naw.
I chaos like a motherfucker. Ain’t no one can
chart me. All the other planets, they think
I’m annoying. They think I’m an escaped
moon, running free.
Fuck your moon. Fuck your solar system.
Fuck your time. Your year? Your year ain’t
shit but a day to me. I could spend your
whole year turning the winds in my bed. Thinking
about rings and how Jupiter should just pussy
on up and marry me by now. Your day?
That’s an asswipe. A sniffle. Your whole day
is barely the start of my sunset.
My name means hell, bitch. I am hell, bitch. All the cold
you have yet to feel. Chaos like a motherfucker.
And you tried to order me. Called me ninth.
Somewhere in the mess of graphs and math and compass
you tried to make me follow rules. Rules? Fuck your
rules. Neptune, that bitch slow. And I deserve all the sun
I can get, and all the blue-gold sky I want around me.
20P
P O E TRY
It is February 7th, 1979 and my skin is more
copper than any sky will ever be. More metal.
Neptune is bitch-sobbing in my rearview,
and I got my running shoes on and all this sky that’s all mine.
Fuck your order. Fuck your time. I realigned the cosmos.
I chaosed all the hell you have yet to feel. Now all your kids
in the classrooms, they confused. All their clocks:
wrong. They don’t even know what the fuck to do.
They gotta memorize new songs and shit. And the other
planets, I fucked their orbits. I shook the sky. Chaos like
a motherfucker.
It is February 7th, 1979. The sky is blue-gold:
the freedom of possibility.
Today, I broke your solar system. Oops. My bad.
FAT I MAH AS G H AR
21
nate marshall
on caskets
After Suji Kwock Kim
1
decorating the dead is among the most basic
human instincts, to return the borrowed body &
acknowledge Earth as maker & home.
Neanderthals used antlers & flowers. Egyptians
had pyramids with peasants buried in the walls they
built. some niggas just get a pine box. hopefully
you get a hole or a flame. some only get a cold
cabinet in the morgue until somebody or nobody
claims them as a loss.
2
a permanent fixture on my to-do list
is research life insurance plans. pick
a good one with a fair rate & enough
money to buy a nice box.
3
everything gonna be all
right this morning & i contemplate
the implications of the statement for the night.
everything in Mississippi is too cruel to bury.
i wonder what that means if every body in Chicago
has red clay in its lineage. Chief Keef must know
in his bones ball like it’s no tomorrow from what
Muddy time-capsuled into the South Side ground.
22P
P O E TRY
4
when grandma died she left mama a notepad
with instructions. the one i remember was get
the casket you want. what you like. don’t be
pressured.
we wore blue at the service. we matched
the box & its glossy painted ribbons,
gold-flecked & light.
5
house slaves are responsible for preparing
the dead of the master’s house. they clean
& clothe. they dig the hole. they don’t
bury any black body really, only dispose.
one of the concessions won by slave riots
was the right to a funeral. whitefolk were
confused at how the Africans sometimes
wore white, smiled, shouted like joy.
they seen funerals. not homegoings.
6
my mother used to say my father loved
funerals. he worked graveyard shift & spent
the days & weekends visiting bodies.
running his finger alongside the box
& signing the greeting book.
N AT E MARS H ALL
23
the most decent thing you
can do is visit the funeral of
someone you didn’t know
for someone you do: sister’s coworker, lover’s friend
accountant’s mother, your aunt’s
high school rival.
7
black churches formed burial societies
after slavery. every week you chipped
off a piece of your pay to save for the shovel
& the rough hands that would lower you.
i know some black folks now buying
their plot foot-by-foot. saving for a
final mortgage.
8
it is día de los muertos & i have a check
folded in between the pages of a book about
genocide. i will send the money next week
to the other side of my family
& help bury grandma’s sister.
9
i can’t think of a black rapper who hasn’t
contemplated their own death on record.
ready to die, life after death, death is certain,
do or die, get rich or die tryin’, death certificate.
24P
P O E TRY
this is natural.
all my verses mention
boxes or holes.
10
once we lay this brother
down in the ground
we got work to do.
when i was a young boy
at the age of five
my mama said i gon’ be
the greatest man alive.
these children don’t
expect to live past 30.
they come to these funerals
& they represent.
they put themselves in
the place of the person
in the casket.
N AT E MARS H ALL
25
jamila woods
Daddy Dozens
My Daddy’s forehead is so big, we don’t need a dining room
table. My Daddy’s forehead so big, his hat size is equator. So
big, it’s a five-head. Tyra Banks burst into tears when she seen
my Daddy’s forehead. My Daddy’s forehead got its own area code.
My Daddy baseball cap got stretch marks. My Daddy pillowcase
got craters. His eyebrows need GPS to find each other. My Daddy
forehead lives in two time zones. Planets confuse my Daddy forehead
for the sun. Couch cushions lose quarters in the wrinkles in my Daddy
forehead. My Daddy so smart, he fall asleep with the movie on and
wake up soon as the credits start to roll. My Daddy so smart, he
perform surgery on his own ingrown toenail. Momma was not
impressed, but my Daddy got brains. My Daddy know exactly
how to drive me to my friend’s house without lookin at no map.
My Daddy born here, he so smart, he know the highways like
the wrinkles in his forehead. He know the free clinics like the gray
hairs on his big ass head. My Daddy so smart, he wear a stethoscope
and a white coat. My Daddy drive to work in a minivan only slightly
bigger than his forehead, that’s just how my Daddy rolls. My Daddy
got swag. My Daddy dance to “Single Ladies” in the hallway.
My Daddy drink a small coffee cream and sugar. My Daddy
drink a whole can of Red Bull. My Daddy eat a whole pack
of sour Skittles and never had a cavity. My Daddy so smart,
he got a pullout couch in his office. Got a mini fridge there too.
Got a cell phone, and a pager, and a email address where I can leave
him messages when he’s not at home. My Daddy’s not home.
Momma saves a plate that turns cold.
But when my Daddy does come home, he got a office
in his bedroom too. Computer screen night light,
Momma says she can’t sleep right, but my Daddy
got work, my Daddy at work, at home, in the attic,
with the TV on, in the dark, from the front yard,
through the windows, you can see him working, glass
flickering, my house got its own forehead, glinting, sweaty,
in the evening, while my Daddy at work, at home,
26P
P O E TRY
in his own area code,
a whole other time zone.
J AMI LA WOODS
27
tara betts
Hip Hop Analogies
After Miguel and Erykah Badu
If you be the needle
I be the LP.
If you be the buffed wall,
I be the Krylon.
If you be the backspin,
I be the break.
If you be the head nod,
I be the bass line.
If you be a Phillie,
I be the razor.
If you be microphone,
then I be palm.
If you be cipher,
then I be beatbox.
If you be hands thrown up,
then I be yes, yes, y’all.
If you be throwback,
then I be remix.
If you be footwork,
then I be uprock.
If you be turntable,
then I be crossfader.
If you be downtown C train,
then I be southbound Red Line.
If you be shell toes,
then I be hoodie.
If you be freestyle,
then I be piece book.
If you be Sharpie,
then I be tag.
If you be boy,
then I be girl
28 P
P O E TRY
who wants to
sync samples
into classic.
TARA B ET T S
29
kristiana rae colón
a remix for remembrance
For my students
This is for the boys whose bedrooms are in the basement,
who press creases into jeans, who carve their names in pavement,
the girls whose names are ancient, ancestry is sacred,
the Aztec and the Mayan gods abuela used to pray with
This is for the dangerous words hiding in the pages
of composition notes, holy books, and Sanskrit
This is for the patients who wait for medication,
for the mothers microwaving beans and rice at day’s end
This is for the marching bands and girls at quinceañeras,
the skaters and the writers whose moms are eloteras,
laughing “Cops don’t scare us, we sag so elders fear us
We will rewrite our textbooks in our own language if you dare us”
This is for the Sarahs, the Angelicas, and Shawns,
the Beatrices, Paolas, Danielas, and the dawns
we scribble sunlight in the margins of horizons with our songs,
for all the voices tangled with the silence on our tongues
Rivals in the parks, fireworks at dark,
tired shirts that sweat your scent on hangers in the closet
For the boys who fix the faucet while their sister fixes coffee
’cause mommy had to leave for work at 6 am and laundry
isn’t folded yet: you don’t have to hold your breath
You don’t have to behave: stage your own rebellion,
paint canvases with rage and religion and prayers for pilgrims
sleeping in the train cars at the border and their children
Filibust the Senate and bust markers on the Pink Line,
stain the prosecution’s case and force the judge to resign,
force the crowd the rewind the lyrics you invented
30P
P O E TRY
Speak away the limits to heights of your existence
Be a witness, be a record, be a testament, a triumph
Set your poems flying in the glitter of the planets
Feed open mouths with truth, the truth is we are famished
The Universe is starving for the symphonies you play
Clarinets and thunder and the syllables you say
are the instruments: you are infinite. Stretch your hands to heaven
Let your throat throttle the rhythms of all your fallen brethren
Your legacy is present, your history is now
You are the tenth degree of sound
You are the nephews of the sky
You are the bass line and the hi-hat and the snare drum and the cry
of red Septembers. You’re the architects of winter
You are the builders of the roads that you’re told you don’t
remember
You are
the builders of the roads
that you’re told
you don’t remember You are the builders
of the roads that you’re told you don’t
remember
Cast poems in the river and tell them you remember
Skate City Hall to splinters and tell them you remember
Send diamonds to your islands and tell them you remember
Find your God inside your mirror and tell Her you remember
K R I S T I AN A RAE COLÓN
31
eve l. ewing
to the notebook kid
yo chocolate milk for breakfast kid.
one leg of your sweatpants rolled up
scrounging at the bottom of your mama’s purse
for bus fare and gum
pen broke and you got ink on your thumb kid
what’s good, hot on the cement kid
White Castle kid
tongue stained purple
cussin on the court
till your little brother shows up
with half a candy bar kid
got that good B in science kid
you earned it kid
etch your name in a tree
hug your granny on her birthday
think of Alaska when they shootin
curled-up dreams of salmon
safety
tundra
the farthest away place you ever saw in a book
polar bears your new chess partners
pickax in the ice
Northern Lights kid
keep your notebook where your cousins won’t find it.
leave it on my desk if you want
shuffle under carbon paper
and a stamp that screams late
yellow and red to draw the eye from the ocean
you keep hidden in a jacked-up five star.
your mama thought there was a secret in there
thought they would laugh
but that ain’t it.
32P
P O E TRY
it’s that flows and flows and flows
and lines like those rip-roaring
bits you got
bars till the end of time
you could rap like
helium bout to spring
all of it
down to you
none left in the sun — fuelless
while the last light pushes from your belly
climbing your ribs
and you laugh into the microphone
and who is ready for that?
EV E L. EWI N G
33
kevin coval
molemen beat tapes
were copped from Gramophone.
cassettes jammed into a factoryissued stereo deck of the hoopty
i rolled around in. a bucket. bass
and drum looped with some string
sample, fixed. a sliver of perfect
adjusted. the scrapes of something
reconstituted. there was so much
space to fill. an invitation to utter.
Iqra- Allah said to the prophet
Muhammad (peace be upon Him).
a- to b-side and around again. a circle
a cipher. i’d drive down and back
in my mom’s Dodge for the latest
volumes of sound. i’d stutter
and stop and begin again. lonesome
and on fire. none. no one i knew
rapped. i’d recite alone on Clark St.
free, styling, shaping, my voice
a sapling, hatchling, rapping
my life, emerging in the dark
of an empty car.
•
there was a time when hip-hop felt like a secret
society of wizards and wordsmiths. magicians
meant to find you or that you were meant to find
like rappers i listened to and memorized in history
class talked specifically to me, for me.
•
& sometimes
you’d see a kid whisper to himself
34P
P O E TRY
in the corner of a bus seat & you
asked if he rhymed & traded a poem
a verse like a fur pelt/trapping.
some gold or food. this sustenance.
you didn’t have to ride solo anymore.
•
Jonathan was the first kid i met who rapped. he was Black
from a prep school, wore ski goggles on top his head & listened
to Wu-Tang which meant he was always rhyming about science
and chess. his pops made him read Sun Tzu. his mans was Omega
a fat Puerto Rican who wrote graffiti and smoked bidis.
& they’d have friends
& the backseat would swell
& the word got passed/scooped like a ball
on the playground. you’d juggle however long
your mind could double Dutch. sometimes you’d take
what you were given/lift off like a trampoline
rocket launch. sometimes you’d trip & scrape
your knees. tongue-tied, not quick. words stuck
on loop, like like words, stuck, like that. but break
thru, mind, knife sharp, mind darts
polished & gleaming we’d ride
for the sake of rhyming. take the long way
home or wherever the fuck we were going
cruise down Lake Shore & back, blasting
blazing. polishing these gems.
trying to get our mind right.
K EV I N COVAL
35
angel nafis
Gravity
After Carrie Mae Weems’s “The Kitchen Table Series”
i. the straw
Can you throw this away Maybe you should hire more Black staff
Where are you really from You’re not busy are you You look ethnic today
Where’s the African American section Can you turn the music down
Fasterfasterfaster Let me see those eyes Beautiful If you were mine
I’d never let you leave the house It’s like you went straight to Africa
to get this one Is that your hair I mean your real hair Blackass
Your gums are black You Black You stink You need a perm
I don’t mean to be
racist
But
You’re scarred over, I’m the one bleeding
You’re just going to rip apart whatever I say
You’ve said sorry only two times
We tacitly agreed
Then dead me
ii. the camel’s back
When you born on somebody else’s river in a cursed boat it’s all
downhill from there. Ha. Just kidding. I’d tell you what I don’t have
time for but I don’t have time. Catch up. Interrogate that. Boss. Halo.
I juke the apocalypse. Fluff my feathers. Diamond my neck. Boom,
like an 808. One in a million. I don’t want no scrubs. You don’t know
my name. Everything I say is a spell. I’m twenty-five. I’m ninety. I’m
ten. I’m a moonless charcoal. A sour lover. Hidden teeth beneath the
velvet. I’m here and your eyes lucky. I’m here and your future lucky.
Ha. God told me to tell you I’m pretty. Ha. My skin Midas-touch the
buildings I walk by. Ha. Every day I’m alive the weather report say:
Gold. I know. I know. I should leave y’all alone, salt earth like to stay
36P
P O E TRY
salty. But here go the mirror, egging on my spirit. Why I can’t go back.
Or. The reasons it happened. Name like a carriage of fire. Baby, it’s
real. The white face peeking through the curtain. Mule and God. I’m
blunted off my own stank. I’m Bad. I dig graves when I laugh.
AN G EL N AF I S
37
camonghne felix
Badu Interviews Lamar
Badu: This cyclone of good fortune.
You handling?
Kendrick:
Happy
blessing myself.
graduated
,
struggle
come
big
far
a blur .
Problem is
my bubble.
“You’re crazy
Tell me
by yourself,”
“Kendrick”
I’m in my
own world.
38 P
P O E TRY
let
everything consume me.
The other end,
has a
conception of who
what
comes from me, from within
no matter
passing
or playing ball.
Was a
hole
building
up for this
pen,
I wanted to be
the best
so I’m
taking it.
CAMON G H N E F ELI X
39
kush thompson
This, Here
This, we tiptoe.
This, we flower in euphemism.
The street has swallowed itself into border. Into railroad track.
This, where the bus line ends.
This, where little boys bike across curfew and into eulogy.
This, where board-slapped windows domino into mansions.
Runaway men into joggers.
This, where Oak Park River Forest alumni rep westside,
Redlands East Valley minstrels “Gangsta Day” during spirit week.
This, where the grass and the quiet
lull mothers to sleep.
This, where your heart is not yet
a restless telephone wire shackled to the ankle
of every one you have ever loved after sunset.
This, where the news stations tell you everything you know about
what lives across your street, outside of your living room window,
at the end of your driveway.
This, deliberate. This, abrupt.
This, sloppy stitching.
Here, you are exception,
urban, and articulate.
The black friend that let them poke pencils through your kink that one
time
while you curled a trembling smile, pretending not to be
token or voodoo doll,
half house, half field
a Susie Carmichael or Huxtable.
The black family in a White House
ran north and bought the plantation.
This all too familiar of being someplace but not.
You were raised on “twice as good.”
Mama left the westside when you were two.
You were raised into valley-girl accent.
40P
P O E TRY
Your voice lost all of its skyline until
you went to high school through metal detectors.
You were raised on ditches and division streets.
Here, where you were born before you were conceived.
Here, where your cousin lives in the basement.
Here is your first real boyfriend
the first tongue in your mouth, and first
call from the county.
Here is the splintered wall your back will know.
Here, where you are no bourgeois success story,
just lucky enough to slip through cracks and make it
to your front door each night.
Here is where your ashes will be scattered.
Here is your home 6 years from now.
Here is your home 50 years ago.
Here is your redemption skin.
Your corner store.
Your corner stone.
Here is your Gramma’s house and dusted porcelain
and stuffed bears on the living room walls.
Here, where everything grows without permission.
Here, where sunflowers rise from the potholes
each and every summer.
K U S H T H OMPS ON
41
BL UE P R IN T S
quraysh ali lansana
Art, Artifice, and Artifact
I was born in 1964 in small-town Enid, Oklahoma. The youngest of
six, I was immersed in Black Power politics and culture well before
I learned to read. My two oldest sisters, afros like small planets, integrated the Enid High School orchestra, my brother was likely among
the first Black students to play in the school band (trumpet, under
the influence of Miles Davis), and another sister led Black student
demonstrations. I was too young to understand most of this activity,
but was informed by it, as well as by the Nikki Giovanni and Amiri
Baraka poems taped to the walls of my eldest sisters’ room.
By third grade my best friend Zack, a full-blood Cherokee, and I
were obsessed with cars, basketball, and the etymology of language.
Phonemic reading strategies still fresh from first grade, we moved on
to question the logic of words: Why is that thing called chair? Why
is that a sofa? I was already fascinated with sound and symbol after
growing up in a house filled with my siblings’ music.
I was a chubby, wide-eyed Black boy wrestling with the transformative audacity of words and deeply affected by their myriad vehicles.
I quoted the comedian Flip Wilson, with the plan of becoming him
later in life, and by sixth grade I was on to Richard Pryor. I recited
scripture and performed in holiday shows with my cousins at church.
I, for about two years, hung out with a dude who cursed at his parents, which I found exhilarating and stupid at the same time. Then,
there was the ever-present electricity of violence in the house that
made me wince, made me quiet, and made me hide in syllables and
imagination.
Words and music were sanctuary and edification.
The sibling closest to me in age is the fourth girl child in the family.
Four years separate us, and though this chasm is no longer significant,
it was life changing when I was twelve. My siblings were ideas and
occasional visitors. I spent most of my teens alone in a house with
blue-green shag weary from aged footprints.
But they left their music.
Earth, Wind & Fire is why I picked up a tenor saxophone. Stevie
Wonder is why I picked up a pen. Grandmaster Flash, Kurtis Blow,
and the Sugarhill Gang put it all together for me.
Q U R AYS H ALI LAN S AN A
45
The first time I heard “Rapper’s Delight” unexplainable changes
occurred in my being that I did not fully comprehend for a decade.
The Sugarhill Gang furthered/reinforced a way of seeing I was stumbling to master — the teenage-male hormonal need to string words
together with a cleverness that produced laughter, swagger, or girls — sometimes all three, though usually not in that order of import.
I was a ninth grader at Longfellow Junior High School (all of the
middle schools in Enid are named after poets) when I first heard
“Rapper’s Delight” in 1979. Music and the ability to make others
laugh has remained, and likely will always remain, central to any
relationship I forge. My best friend Russ and I still, two years later,
had the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack on heavy rotation, in addition to our personal favorites: Russ — ABBA, Bay City Rollers, and
early seventies rock his older sisters inflicted on him; me — Kool &
the Gang, the Spinners, and always Stevie. Later that school year a
friend, the son of a university professor, would visit an older brother
in California and return with one hundred albums by bands with
the weirdest names he could find: Human Sexual Response, the
Legendary Pink Dots, the Police, etc. His shopping excursion indelibly informed our sleepy town lives. But, for me, not quite as much as:
I said, a hip hop the hippie the hippie
To the hip, hip hop, and you don’t stop, the rock it
To the bang, bang boogie, say up jump the boogie
To the rhythm of the boogie, the beat
Now what you hear is not a test — I’m rappin’ to the beat
And me, the groove, and my friends
Are gonna try to move your feet
— From Rapper’s Delight
That was it for me. Word as rhythm. Word as beat. Word in conversation with rhythm. Word as art, artifice, and artifact. We abandoned
the Bee Gees very quickly.
Almost as quickly I became the hip-hop pusher for teenage white
dudes drunk on 3.2 beer and curiosity. I still, to this day, have no idea
what happened to my copy of the eponymous Kurtis Blow vinyl. But
for a time I was the link to rap for a small group of middle-class white
dudes who dared not venture into “The Ville” to buy records.
The literal “other side of the tracks” in Enid is called “The Ville.”
This is the Black side, the “hood,” on Enid’s south side. The kids from
46P
P O E TRY
“The Ville” and the kids from my neighborhood attended Longfellow,
which was, and is still, considered the “thug school.” Enid’s apartheid was palpable. Blacks could only visit the skating rink on Sunday
nights, “Black Night,” until the seventies and my elementary school
was closed due to desegregation in 1975.
I wandered from hip-hop for a portion of the eighties in pursuit
of all things political, angry, and not made in the United States. My
disillusionment with the nation, its politics, and most of its culture
led me to Africa, the West Indies, and Europe. Though I kept in
touch with hip-hop, I was mostly elsewhere — Mutabaruka, Miriam
Makeba, two-tone ska bands from England. Grandmaster Flash and
the Furious Five’s “The Message” and other overtly political tracks
kept my attention, but I didn’t feel rap speaking to where my head
was in 1984. Many tracks in that moment felt like recycled disco, but
this also marked the emergence of Run-DMC, Whodini, and the
Treacherous Three. I just wanted emcees to say something that would
make Ronald Reagan vomit, and then disappear. I also wanted the
music to capture my imagination.
My prayers were answered in 1986 and it was on nonstop for a
long minute. The years between 1986 and 1996 constituted the first
significant era in my life, in terms of rap and personal growth. No
way to say this better than a sampling from my discography:
King of Rock — Run-DMC, 1985
Licensed to Ill — Beastie Boys, 1986
Criminal Minded — Boogie Down Productions, 1987
Paid in Full — Eric B. & Rakim, 1987
Yo! Bum Rush the Show — Public Enemy, 1987
By All Means Necessary — Boogie Down Productions, 1988
In Full Gear — Stetsasonic, 1988
It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back — Public Enemy, 1988
3 Feet High and Rising — De La Soul, 1989
The Cactus Album — 3rd Bass, 1989
Business as Usual — EPMD, 1990
Fear of a Black Planet — Public Enemy, 1990
Step in the Arena — Gang Starr, 1991
Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde — The Pharcyde, 1992
Can I Borrow a Dollar? — Common, 1992
93 ’til Infinity — Souls of Mischief, 1993
Midnight Marauders — A Tribe Called Quest, 1993
Q U R AYS H ALI LAN S AN A
47
Reachin’ (A New Refutation of Time and Space) — Digable Planets,
1993
Blowout Comb — Digable Planets, 1994
Blunted on Reality — Fugees, 1994
Illmatic — Nas, 1994
Ready to Die — The Notorious B.I.G., 1994
Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik — Outkast, 1994
Do You Want More?!!!??! — The Roots, 1995
Gothic Architecture — Rubberoom, 1995
Stakes Is High — De La Soul, 1996
Certainly there are many groundbreaking albums not on this list
(I hear my boy Adrian Matejka saying,“Where’s the Wu, Q?”). This
is simply the partial soundtrack of my movement from Oklahoma to
Chicago, my transition into manhood.
Hip-hop, in 1988, helped remind me who I was and that in which
I believed and held sacred. I moved to Chicago in 1989, leaving behind an ugly experience in broadcast journalism and, for nearly two
decades, contempt for the state of Oklahoma only natives can truly
appreciate. I was fired from my first professional gig in TV news in
Oklahoma City largely because life inside Babylon’s mouth involved
perpetuating a conservative right-wing agenda and sustaining an illfitting fear of African American men. My deep conviction to journalism serving as “the public’s trust” was met with a battle with my own
naiveté. I experienced the excitement of hearing Dan Rather voice
an international news scoop I helped initiate, while being assigned
the task of greeting the Grand Wizard of the state’s Ku Klux Klan
compound.
Chuck D sorted it out for me.
Public Enemy guided me toward self-worth, reclamation of history, and Islam. Though my belief in diversity and my background
did not completely jibe with the teachings of the Honorable Elijah
Muhammad or Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, PE led me to
discipline, faith, and a community of serious Black men. I liken my
years as a practicing Muslim to the military in many ways. I needed to
grow up and, after being fired from Channel Nine, discover a deeper
and sincere purpose for my life. It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold
Us Back and Fear of a Black Planet, along with the Holy Quran and
the teachings of El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X), were my
textbooks. I also returned to poetry, long since abandoned when
48 P
P O E TRY
I became more immersed in broadcast journalism.
One week after my twenty-fifth birthday, I arrived in Chi-town
with two suitcases, a folder full of poems, and dreams of becoming
a poet and cultural worker in the city that fed some of my guiding
lights: Haki R. Madhubuti and Gwendolyn Brooks. I received the
amazing blessing to have been mentored by these two giants.
Ms. Brooks possessed a guarded optimism toward hip-hop. She
appreciated rap as poetry, or at least as lyric. But, she found most of
the language unoriginal and the music mostly boisterous. Ms. Brooks
never employed profanity in her work. She considered swear words
a reflection of a poverty of ideas, which in turn would make most rap
Fat Albert’s junkyard. However, as she shared in workshop, if there is
no other word that will be as precise in communicating your concept,
then use that word. She believed in “exactness” and her enduring
poetry bears witness to this.
Though Ms. Brooks harbored some appreciation for emcees’
wordplay, her disappointment with the lack of political or social consciousness in most hip-hop affected her desire to mentor many young
emcees. This is not to suggest she turned anyone away who reached
out to her, as that is not the case. But Brooks and Madhubuti, unlike
Sonia Sanchez and Nikki Giovanni, did not actively embrace emcees
and the art. The one possible exception may reside in the son of our
former Chicago State University colleague and close friend, the late
Dr. Donda West.
I consider myself, for the most part, a direct descendent of the
Black Arts Movement (BAM), at least contextually. BAM doctrine
supported art “for, by, and about Black people.” This tenet was introduced to me via my siblings’ afros in 1973. It was reaffirmed by
hip-hop, furthered by my work in Chicago’s public schools, and
crystallized while raising four sons in what some people call a “war
zone.” Malcolm X said, “Pro-Black doesn’t mean anti-anything.”
Recently, my oldest son, Nile, and I watched the Time Is Illmatic
documentary on the creation of Nas’s masterpiece, one of my favorite records of all time. He paused the film often to ask questions about
many topics: the early beefs between the Juice Crew and Boogie
Down, and Nas and Jay-Z; was Brooklyn that violent when we lived
there in his toddler years; what happened to AZ? Illmatic, of course,
is on his required old school listening list. Though it may have been
another late night conversation for Nile, it is a moment I will cherish
for many a day. This is how I feed my sons. This, to me, is hip-hop.
Q U R AYS H ALI LAN S AN A
49
tara betts
Life Is Good: How Hip-Hop Channels Duende
When I discuss hip-hop these days, I am usually talking with my
youngest brother, who was one of the most talented rappers in our
hometown. Usually it is inextricably bound with how we grew up
and how we thought our friends would not go to college or live beyond high school. Then, there are those who did survive past college,
or past thirty. I talk to my best friend from high school who worked
two part-time jobs and collected disability for partial blindness. He
supported his mom and two younger siblings while we were both in
school, and sometimes all we had was a head nod to a beat to sustain
us — someone telling a story that looked and sounded a little bit like
us. Now, I talk to my friends who are grown and growing up, and
some of them are dying. We become aware of the mortality and vulnerabilities around us when they die of high blood pressure, diabetes
complications, heart problems, cancer, and substance issues, part and
parcel of racism.
I recently told my brother, while working on a thousand-piece
puzzle with my mother, “I am so grateful that you made it to age
thirty.” He asked me, “What you mean, Tar?” I said, “You always
ran up in those spots where people would get wild, and I would
have nightmares that someone would shoot you.” And we talk about
Joe Buck, who cut kids’ hair for free for the first day of school and
gave free haircuts for job interviews and how they robbed him and
shot him down for the small bit of cash that was on him. My brother
wrote a song for him, and it was then I knew that hip-hop was the
home for elegy, but it was also dangling on the precipice of duende.
So I was rereading Lorca’s In Search of Duende, looking for some link
beyond a contemporary continuation of the blues tradition that hiphop obviously echoes, when I read this:
Behind these poems lurks a terrible question that has no answer.
Our people cross their arms in prayer, look at the stars, and wait
in vain for a sign of salvation.
Whenever I encounter needless and inherently systemic loss, I think
of Lorca.
50P
P O E TRY
The duende does not come at all unless he sees that death is possible. The duende must know beforehand that he can serenade
death’s house and rock those branches we all wear, branches
that do not have, will never have, any consolation.
When I think of how death is looming and possible, it is not difficult
to see why Nas’s “I Gave You Power” personifies a gun, much like
Organized Konfusion’s “Stray Bullet,” or why Notorious B.I.G. had
albums with the titles Ready to Die and Life After Death, nor was it unusual to hear MC Lyte’s “Poor Georgie” or Nonchalant’s “5 O’Clock.”
Then I think of what mattered to my students at Westinghouse
High School on the West Side of Chicago who loved Nas’s “One
Mic,” and a young man named Xavier, who eagerly showed me his
copy of B.I.G.’s Life After Death as soon as it dropped. At least three
students died during my time as a teaching artist there: one in a
fire with her baby, one shot, and another hit by a drunk driver who
dragged her body for blocks before he stopped.
Then there was one of my students at Rutgers University who
wrote a letter to Notorious B.I.G. based on Langston Hughes’s
“Theme for English B,” because the Bed-Stuy legend taught him
something about writing before he came to my class. The opportunity to write about loss and trauma affirmed that they were survivors
with capacity, talents, and rights to survive and thrive. Even though
the affirmations in hip-hop were (and still are) reflected in material gains, fantasy is what sustains people in their most vulnerable
moments, which is why Lorde can sing “I cut my teeth on wedding
rings in the movies. And I’m not proud of my address. In the torn up
town . .. ” in the song “Royals.”
The magical property of a poem is to remain possessed by duende that can baptize in dark water all who look at it, for with
duende it is easier to love and understand, and one can be sure
of being loved and understood. In poetry this struggle for expression and communication is sometimes fatal.
But all of this brings me back to Nas, the emcee who grew up in
the Queensbridge projects. He had a mother who was a postal worker, and his father is a well-known musician named Olu Dara, but
the lure of dropping out of school and making illicit money was still
tempting until he found his pen. To me, Nas always sounded like
TARA B ET T S
51
your homeboy that you felt would eventually right himself and live
a long life, if he was careful . .. and lucky. Illmatic has just reached
the twenty-year mark as a hip-hop classic, but it’s been something
to hear him pen more confessional, grown-up work that mirrors aspects of my own life as an adult woman who has experienced the loss
of love through divorce. The cover of Life Is Good, where he holds
a version of his former wife’s wedding dress, speaks to me. Then
I think of what I said recently to poet Kyle Dargan: “Writing has
always saved me. When friendships and relationships disappear,
writing has always ensured that I have a place to land.” Hip-hop has
been that place for so many people, a solace trapped in the breakbeat,
between headphones, on linoleum, in fluid movement, behind turntables, in the arc of aerosol spray.
When I consider duende and hip-hop, I see how this culture has
become an outlet from the very systemic forces that attempt to invalidate marginalized people and how it constructs possibilities for
survival. When I hear Nas deliver his lyrics in “One Mic,” I am transported back to the video of him standing under a bare light bulb in
a dark, basement-like room. There are no fans, no bling, no swag,
no preposterous posturing. There is only Nas and his voice intoning
how he only needs one mic. Even as each verse escalates with a different violent act that rises in volume and intensity, when he comes back
to the chorus, Nas is calmly, softly telling us that one mic is solace and
balm. As Lorca says:
The duende’s arrival always means a radical change in forms. It
brings to old planes unknown feelings of freshness, with the
quality of something newly created, like a miracle, and it produces an almost religious enthusiasm.
This enthusiasm that he describes sounds exactly like the outlets of
hip-hop and its global reception that continues to permeate popular culture. So, I keep thinking life is good, and I have taken Martin
Luther King Jr. saying “longevity has its place” as more than a familiar phrase. There is always this pressure to live, but Nas leans back
as a grown man and says he is alive and financially secure while explaining how those very conditions that could have killed him made
him stronger and proud — not in the sense of Horatio Alger, but as a
person who is continually typecast as a criminal incapable of happiness, joy, or a nuanced, complex history. This is what I think when
52P
P O E TRY
I look at my youngest brother or when I consider J. California
Cooper’s novel Family. In Family, a mother attempts to poison herself and her children to avoid the relentless trauma of slavery. She
becomes a ghost who narrates the story of her children who are
unsuccessfully poisoned and are eventually flung all over the world.
There is joy in their surviving and the psychic weight gives them
ways of expressing themselves that she never imagined. So, when
Chrisette Michele sings the following hook in Nas’s “Can’t Forget
about You,” I think of my youngest brother and how we are both
proud that we’ve made it, even though death is inevitable, and often,
the very thing that impedes the lives of those we love.
These streets hold my deepest days
This hood taught me golden ways
Made me, truly this is what made me
Break me, not a thing’s gonna break me I’m that history
I’m that block
I’m that lifestyle
I’m that spot
. .............. That’s my past that made me hot
Here’s my lifelong anthem
Can’t forget about you.
TARA B ET T S
53
nate marshall
Blueprint for BreakBeat Writing
I was born in 1989 at the end of hip-hop’s infancy. By the time I
dropped into being, hip-hop had a Grammy and platinum records.
Reagan had already wreaked his brand of havoc on the American
underclasses and crack was well integrated into our communities.
By the time I came of age, much of the cultural context for hip-hop
was already in motion — drug war, mass incarceration, neoliberalism, post-Civil Rights respectability politics, urban divestment and
subsequent repatriating gentrification, zero tolerance schooling and
policing. I don’t have a particular moment when I “discovered” hiphop or saw it take over the world. For folks of my age bracket (born
in the late eighties to early nineties) hip-hop was a central part of
the zeitgeist; the rapper was just as viable a musical star as the singer.
I was a child when hip-hop surpassed country as America’s biggest
selling music genre. The centrality of hip-hop to cultural identity
isn’t an argument to me so much as it’s the up that is sky.
Hip-hop is an imperfect culture, reflective of an imperfect people.
Hip-hop, like the dominant worldwide culture, is cis-male-hetero
dominated. This is wack. This is a vital point to start with and one
that I will return to later, one that we all must return to in every
conversation.
Hip-hop music is an ecosystem. Hip-hop speaks to multiple artistic media and an entire shifting coda of language, dress, attitude,
and political thought. Hip-hop music also falls at the intersection between musical form and political/poetic speech because much of the
music is especially text heavy. Hip-hop is as much about what is being
said as it is about how it sounds. In traditional poetry we express this
spectrum as lyric versus narrative. While we recognize some rappers
as important because of their sonic genius rather than deep content
(Missy Elliot or Biz Markie), we recognize others as vital because of
what they had to say despite a limited sonic or rhythmic range (Tupac
or Chuck D). Each rapper carries elements of both properties but it
is important to point this out for critics who might question the level
of artistic value in some of hip-hop’s more textually simplistic figures.
But the central question of my work as an editor and poet remains:
What does any of this hip-hop shit have to do with poetry? The
54P
P O E TRY
answer is, quite simply, everything. W.E.B. Du Bois, when he writes
his early masterpiece, The Souls of Black Folk, takes up the task of
theorizing how black folks got over, how they made it to his early
twentieth century present day. His first answer and recurring refrain
is music. He positions the sorrow songs as central to the culture of
black folks through and rising out of slavery, and he points out the
direct tie between Black America’s artistic value and their ability to
educate themselves (e.g. The Fisk Jubilee Singers as the foundational
fundraising arm of Fisk University).
Du Bois wrote, “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the
problem of the color-line.” He posited that after the broken promise
of Reconstruction, the quandary of what to do with the new semifree black class of Americans would be the central question for the
country to answer. America answered. America’s answer to Du Bois’s
“problem of the color-line” was death. Economic, civil, sexual, psychic, and physical death were the strategies employed in that century
through sharecropping and debt peonage, ghettoizing and redlining,
lynching and rape, over-sexualizing and asexualizing, mass incarceration and police brutality, poll tax and offender disenfranchisement,
suburbanization and gentrification, etc.
However, the conversation between power and the disempowered does not end with America’s answer. Black folks responded
artistically and politically by asserting the importance of their lives.
This assertion of life is present in every major black artistic movement from the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts Movement to
the current movement of BreakBeat poetics. This assertion of life
may be best articulated in Lucille Clifton’s masterwork, “won’t you
celebrate with me,” where she says,
come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.
For Clifton, celebration is central as a non-white, non-male person
who defies the odds by continuing to draw breath. This declaration
of living and the resolve to celebrate that life is in direct opposition
to the dominant American agenda.
Hip-hop would pick up this mantle in full almost immediately because of its genesis as a party music of the divested urban underclass.
N AT E MARS H ALL
55
The Notorious B.I.G. insightfully raises this exact point when he borrows the ending of The Last Poets’ important composition “When
the Revolution Comes” to serve as the centerpiece of his early solo
track “Party and Bullshit.” In this song, Biggie describes the before,
during, and after of a hypothetical party scene as a means to contemplate his own mortality and the mortality of his peers. Biggie’s potential violence in this record is not senseless; it’s a strategy to preserve
his life and the lives of those he loves. The listener looking to dismiss
this song as shallow is not listening.
BreakBeat writers are the offspring of Clifton and Biggie. We are
the offspring of Nathaniel Mackey and Missy Elliot. Phillis Wheatley
and Lil’ Kim. Pablo Neruda and Rakim. Carl Sandburg and Common.
Frank Marshall Davis and Melle Mel. Essex Hemphill and Queen
Latifah. The Dark Room Collective and the Wu-Tang Clan. Carl
Phillips and MF Doom. James Baldwin and Tupac Shakur. Nikki
Giovanni and Kendrick Lamar. Li-Young Lee and MC Lyte. The
Native Tongues and the Nuyoricans. We are many.
We write to assert the existence of ourselves, to assert our right to
our own lives and bodies. These considerations influence not only
the subject matter but also the aesthetic approach to making poems.
I understand this influence to manifest itself in a number of ways:
1. We believe in the necessity for poems to live in multiple
media (page, performance, video, audio, various multi-genre
presentational forms).
2. We believe in work rooted in a democratic cipher of ideas
rather than privileging high intellectual or artistic pedigree.
For us everything is on the table and equally valid until proven
wack.
3. We believe in a foundational canon that is multicultural and
multiethnic by definition and that celebrates and elevates the
art and lives of people of color.
4. We believe in art that speaks to people’s lived personal and
political experience.
5. We believe in art that invites, acknowledges, and celebrates
the voices of poor people and other disenfranchised people.
6. We believe in art that samples, steals, and borrows to create
the most compelling and important work possible.
7. We believe in Ezra Pound’s charge to “make it new” and/or
Andre 3000’s revelation that “you only funky as your last cut.”
56P
P O E TRY
This list is not perfect, but it is intended to gesture toward the
foundational ethics that I’ve observed in my generation of makers
born directly into hip-hop. The poems we have worked to compile
are not perfect. Hip-hop is an imperfect culture, reflective of an imperfect people. The BreakBeat Poets, from which the poems in this
issue are taken, is an anthology edited by three cisgender, hetero
men who claim Chicago as their personal artistic capital. I think it is
important to name. I hope that by doing so we can continue the conversation and encourage others to add to the incomplete cipher we’ve
set forth. That is, for me, the ethic of hip-hop. The most primary
rule is that the cipher must expand and must stay current. Hip-hop is
shark art; when it stops moving it dies. We aim for this portfolio to
add to the conversation about hip-hop and literature and life. Most
of all, I aim for this writing to be an expansive invitation for all.
N AT E MARS H ALL
57
COMMENT
michael robbins
Equipment for Living
“A new thing appears,” Annie Dillard writes, “as if we needed a new
thing.” What are we doing with all these films and songs and novels
and poems and pictures? Why keep making them? Don’t we have
enough, or too much?
I find I can’t get away from my early reading of Harold Bloom,
who proposes that we ask of a text: “what is it good for, what can I do
with it, what can it do for me, what can I make it mean?” Things that
answer these questions — things that are good for something, that we
can do something with, that we can make do things for us, that we
can make mean something — we call equipment.
Hammers, for instance, are good for lots of things — building
birdhouses, bludgeoning ideological opponents, breaking down and
becoming present-at-hand. But a hammer is obviously designed in
such a way that certain purposes (driving nails) are more plausible
than others. For Kenneth Burke, poetry is designed for living:
Poetry is produced . .. as part of the consolatio philosophiae. It is
undertaken as equipment for living, as a ritualistic way of arming
us to confront perplexities and risks. It would protect us.
I like the notion that the aesthetic is conceived in response to threat.
Burke reminds us that implicit in the notion of protection is the idea
of something to be protected against. Risks and perplexities. The shit
that, in the vernacular version, happens.
What Burke does not mean by equipment for living is conveyed by
Kenneth Koch’s line: “People say yes everyone is dying / But here
read this happy book on the subject.” Poetry doesn’t kiss the booboo and make it all better. Burke suggests that poems be viewed as
“strategies for dealing with situations” (he doesn’t say this is the only
way to view them). The structural defects of our existence require of
us strategic thinking. Burke consults some dictionaries and discovers
that “strategy” has to do with the movement and directing of armies:
Surely, the most highly alembicated and sophisticated work
of art, arising in complex civilizations, could be considered as
MI CH AEL ROB B I N S
61
designed to organize and command the army of one’s thoughts
and images, and to so organize them that one “imposes upon
the enemy the time and place and conditions for fighting preferred by oneself.” One seeks to “direct the larger movements
and operations” in one’s campaign of living.
Burke rejects the “strategy for easy consolation” found in “popular ‘inspirational literature,’” art as uplift, paper armies raised on the
cheap. “All the redemption I can offer,” Bruce Springsteen admits,
“is beneath this dirty hood.” In The Triumph of Love, Geoffrey Hill
asks “what are poems for?”, and his answer, borrowed from Leopardi,
is not without its self-directed irony:
They are to console us
with their own gift, which is like perfect pitch.
Let us commit that to our dust. What
ought a poem to be? Answer, a sad
and angry consolation. What is
the poem? What figures? Say,
a sad and angry consolation. That’s
beautiful. Once more? A sad and angry
consolation.
The repetition of Leopardi’s phrase forms a call-and-response, with
the emphasis shifting as each adjective ends a line in turn. But as if
to underscore the unromantic tenor of Hill’s vision, the exchange
is hardly “Can I get an amen?” or “Somebody in the house say hell
yeah!” No one’s likely to get too fired up over “Once more?” “A sad
and angry consolation.”
But the words return, a refrain, as a trauma is repeated in Freud’s
Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and we are to commit them to the dust
unto which, Genesis tells us, we shall return (the dirty hood of the
grave). The mantra-like repetition of a sad and angry consolation
makes the words seem less clear, more in need of interpretation. The
question that forces itself is, of course, how something consoling can
be sad and angry, or how sorrow and anger can console, when they
would seem to be precisely the affects whose sufferers stand in need
of consolation.
Boethius would have understood: he composed De Consolatione
Philosophiae in prison, awaiting execution. According to one reputable
62P
P O E TRY
source, “a cord was twisted round his head so tightly that it caused
his eyeballs to protrude from their sockets, and ... his life was then
beaten out of him by a club.” Lady Philosophy does not console the
prisoner by freeing him or providing him with worldly goods or happiness, but by reconciling him to his fate. He comes to accept that all
things are ordered sweetly by God, and he aspires to achieve spiritual
freedom through contemplation of God. (Actual redemption is implied, but not easy consolation.)
Nietzsche saw art, and Lady Philosophy, as a benign illusion that
sustains us in the face of the awful truth, which would cause our eyeballs to protrude from their sockets. My understanding of poetry’s
consolatory powers has more in common with the concept of psychoanalysis as a way of fortifying the self through the acceptance of
perpetual unrest. Our wills and fates do so contrary run that even
our wills are not under our control. I wouldn’t be the first to see
psychoanalysis in this sense as a trope for poetry (or vice versa). In
Adam Phillips’s psychoanalytical version of Bloom’s pragmatism, a
text answers the question “what can it get you out of?” One thing it
can get you out of is the false hope that you can escape unrest.
“No one here gets out alive” is the best case scenario. Consolation
is not false comfort. Poetry’s a prophylactic, not a vaccine. One way
poetry helps you to accept perpetual unrest, to arm yourself to confront perplexities, is by reminding you that you’re not alone (a not
coincidentally common refrain in popular song). This just in: everyone you love will be extinguished, and so will you. But this can be
said of every person in the universe. You’re not special. Men and
women have been living and dying for a long time, and some of them
have left records. Those records won’t eliminate your fears; they
might help you to live with them. They might help you raise an army.
It isn’t only at the level of subject (what’s often miscalled “content”) that poetry operates as equipment for living. “Every atom
belonging to me as good belongs to you” teaches us that we are involved in mankind, but so does “Oh! Look what you’ve done to
this rock ’n’ roll clow-ow-own.” Yes, I assume that what Burke says
about poetry applies, mutatis mutandis, to the songs of Def Leppard,
though they are hardly alembicated at all. My justification for doing so is formal. Both poems and pop songs provide what Burke
calls “structural assertion”: “form, a public matter that symbolically
enrolls us with allies who will share the burdens with us.”
Which means what, exactly? Form’s notoriously hard to define.
MI CH AEL ROB B I N S
63
The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics: “The OED gives 22
definitions, with subcategory refinements and variations.” The traditional distinction between “form” and “content” doesn’t hold for
a variety of reasons. Form shapes meaning, so meaning shifts when
form does — in Peter McDonald’s phrase, form “is the pressing reality according to which metaphors and meaning must make their way.”
The relationship of form and content is more like that of space and
time than that of vessel and water. For my purposes, “form” means
something like: those features that make a given verbal act shareable.
As Burke notes, “Language, of all things, is most public, most collective, in its substance.” There’s no such thing as a private language;
language is a social fact. So is, because of its conditions of production
and consumption, pop music. A pop song is a popular song, one that
some ideal “everybody” knows or could know. Its form lends itself to
communal participation. Or, stronger, it depends upon the possibility
of communal participation for its full effect. Burke’s phrase “structural assertion” is a neat way of recognizing that form is involved in
any artifact — the tax code, for instance — but that the structure of
some artifacts (poems, pop songs) asserts itself more strongly, stakes
its claim on our attention more enticingly, and thereby possesses a
greater degree of shareability.
Form grounds us in a community, however attenuated or virtual.
My friend Jen writes that, on a summer night in Brooklyn outside
a club, “Rose and I were singing ‘We Can’t Stop’ to each other. She
would sing the la da dee da dee parts and I would sing this is our house,
this is our rules. It’s a beautiful song.” Jen and Rose are already allies,
but, sharing some words and a melody (Miley Cyrus’s, in this case),
they take their place symbolically among others who know the song,
who sing along. A passerby might join in for a few bars, exchanging
smiles with these strangers who are linked to him, however briefly,
through the public matter of form: an occasion for artifactual embrace. It’s magic (just a little bit of magic).
This is why the bus scene in Cameron Crowe’s otherwise risible
movie Almost Famous is so powerful. Everyone on the tour bus — the
band, the groupies, the rock critic — is pissed off at everybody else
for various reasons. Everyone’s got that stuck-in-a-confined-spacewith-people-I-want-to-kill stare. Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” comes
on the bus stereo, and for a while the band members continue to
glower, but finally the bassist starts singing along: “Handing tickets
out for Gah-awd.” Kate Hudson joins in on the next line — “Turning
64P
P O E TRY
back, she just laughs” — and most of the bus is smiling and singing by
the time Elton gets to “The boulevard is not that bad.” It’s corny, but
it’s true: everyone knows the lines by heart, everyone throws their
head back and closes their eyes and belts out the chorus:
Hold me closer, tiny dancer
Count the headlights on the highway
Lay me down in sheets of linen
You had a busy day today.
It works, I want to say, for the same reason the Kaddish or the
Mass works: it conveys comfort because it is a shared experience, one
that reinforces a sense of community, of “allies who will share the
burdens with us.” The entire congregation’s voices are lifted in unison, in supplication, in awe — the form is universal, known to all.
One church might be distinguished from others by its forms. The
televangelical JAY-zus, the sober Jesu Christe of the Latin Mass, the
radical Jewish peasant Yeshua of Nazareth of Guy Davenport’s translations, and the Gee-zuhhs Norman Greenbaum’s “gotta have a friend
in” are not the same sort of equipment. The difference between the
Eucharist and “Tiny Dancer” is the difference between God and
Gah-awd, between an abstract principle of general transcendence
and a practical occasion for transcendence as a shareable idiosyncrasy.
It is Gah-awd (rather than God) that recruits community into the
world specified by the “content” — in which the boulevard is not that
bad.
“Tiny Dancer,” on that bus, is a spell, an incantation, but a public
one, one that also connects the particular congregation to the thousands of like-minded others at diverse sites across the globe. Often
the votary will be found in a church of one, singing along with the
radio in her bedroom. She belongs to the broader church no less than
the desert hermit at prayer among his rocks; the forms link her to it.
The words she knows, the tune she hums.
Of course, popular music is democratic in a way poetry’s not and
probably can’t be (even if the reduction of Whitman to a democratic bonhommie helps to sell some jeans). “Public” does not equal
“everyone.” The Cantos, for instance, in their magpie hoarding of
borrowed song, stage or perform a shareable idiosyncrasy of culture
whose elitist ethos does not preclude the expansion of that public,
even as that public will lamentably remain foreclosed by accidents
MI CH AEL ROB B I N S
65
of class and education. (What must be democratized is the means
of access to art, not art.) In his great essay on Emerson, “Alienated
Majesty,” Geoffrey Hill mocks the trite notion that poetry’s “place is
to be supportive of self-improvement and broad ideas of social progress.” Do I need to say that by “equipment for living” I do not mean
“equipment for self-improvement”?
Frank O’Hara acknowledges the use he makes of poetry by
identifying it with his literal equipment for living: “My heart is in
my / pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy.” But most people don’t
seem to need poetry, and, you know, bully for them. Men die miserably every day for lack of clean drinking water and affordable health
care, not of what’s found in poems. And poetry, alas, can’t do a
damned thing against capitalism, even as it devotes its intellectual
and affective energies to it in a dialectical dance of opposition and
complicity. As Joshua Clover says about our claims — whether total
or qualified — for “the political force of poetry”: “It’s such bullshit,
isn’t it?” Pop is even worse off, a watermarked wing of consumer
capitalism structurally restricted to dreams of utopia.
But I take it that our having to ask ourselves what poems and
pop songs are for, and our compulsion to suggest answers, is a good
thing — that it’s the fields that are certain of their purpose and their
standing that lend themselves most to reified thinking. I mean principally the natural sciences, which shade now so easily into the most
preposterous scientism. Evolutionary psychologists will tell you that
the arts exist to — well, there’s only one reason any human endeavor
exists, according to evolutionary psychology. Phillips suggests that
it’s worth asking what poetry’s good for because science is always
providing answers to the question of what science is good for — vaccines, Google, drone strikes, showrooms filled with fabulous prizes.
And for Phillips, poetry — and pop, I’d add — provides a “cure for our
pervasive skepticism about whether language works.” Whether, that
is, the right words can, as psychoanalysis teaches, make us better off.
Phillips’s revision of Bloom, then, I might paraphrase as “What
can the right language set to music get you out of?” I’ve no doubt left
much undertheorized in this discussion — not least the distinctions
between poetry and pop as equipment for living (I’ve barely intimated the no-duh role music without words plays in pop). But I hear
Bob Dylan wonder “what price / you have to pay to get out of / going
through all these things twice.” Which is to say, to get out of the
compulsion to repeat, which is to say to get out of the death drive
66P
P O E TRY
(which Phillips glosses as Freud’s way of saying, “we want to die, and
whether or not we want to we will”). Dylan knows there’s no getting out of it at any price, and his song provides in some measure a
sad and angry consolation for this reality. In its strains, as in Freud’s
and Phillips’s and Hill’s, I hear the imperative: get out of wanting to
get out of it.
And since it would be a cliche to end an essay on poetry and pop
music with a Dylan quote, let me cite the words of Barry Mann and
Cynthia Weil, made famous by The Animals during the Vietnam
War: “We gotta get out of this place / if it’s the last thing we ever do.”
Which it will be. But the boulevard is not that bad.
MI CH AEL ROB B I N S
67
kenneth goldsmith
I Look to Theory Only When I Realize That Somebody Has
Dedicated Their Entire Life to a Question I Have Only
Fleetingly Considered
I used to be an artist; then I became a poet; then a writer. Now when
asked, I simply refer to myself as a word processor.
Writing should be as effortless as washing the dishes — and as interesting.
Hunter S. Thompson retyped Hemingway & Fitzgerald novels. He
said, I just want to know what it feels like to write these words.
Obama regularly copies his speechwriters’ work out in longhand on
legal pads in pencil: It helps organize my thoughts, he says.
If you’re not making art with the intention of having it copied, you’re
not really making art for the twenty-first century.
From producer to reproducer.
The internet is destroying literature (and it’s a good thing).
Plagiarism is necessary, Lautréamont insisted. Progress implies it.
Authenticity is another form of artifice.
It is possible to be both inauthentic and sincere.
The moment you stand up in front of people, you are no longer
authentic.
The telling of a true story is an unnatural act.
Conceptual writing is political writing; it just prefers to use someone
else’s politics.
68 P
P O E TRY
I always had mixed feelings about being considered a poet. If Robert
Lowell is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet. If Robert Frost was a poet,
I don’t want to be a poet. If Socrates was a poet, I’ll consider it.
A child could do what I do, but wouldn’t dare to for fear of being
called stupid.
Futurism made flesh, Barry Bonds is a lovechild of William S.
Burroughs (“We ourselves are machines”) and Warhol (“I want to
be a machine”).
reporter: How do you feel when you are greeted by a resounding
chorus of boos when you step on the field?
barry bonds: I turn it into a symphony.
Gravitas is obsolete.
Boring & long-winded writings encourage a kind of effortless nonunderstanding, a language in which reading itself seems perfectly
redundant.
The internet is of no relevance at all to writing fiction, which expresses verities only found through observation & introspection, said
Will Self.
Jonathan Franzen famously wrote portions of The Corrections wearing a blindfold and earplugs to reduce disruptions.
Jonathan Franzen is America’s greatest novelist . .. of the fifties.
The new memoir is our browser history.
Writers are becoming curators of language, a move similar to the
emergence of the curator as artist in the visual arts.
Sampling and citation are but boutique forms of appropriation.
Remixing is often mistaken for appropriation.
K E N N ET H G OLDS MI T H
69
Our poetry has eerily begun to resemble data trails.
Poetry is an evacuated and orphaned space, begging to be repurposed.
The new poetry will look nothing like the old.
The internet is the greatest poem ever written, unreadable mostly
because of its size.
An article in China Daily refers to a young worker who copied a dozen novels, signed his name, and published a collection of “his works.”
Alphanumeric code, indistinguishable from writing, is the medium
by which the internet has solidified its grip on literature.
The future of writing is the managing of emptiness.
The future of writing is pointing.
The future of writing is not writing.
The future of reading is not reading.
The human entity formerly known as “the reader.”
John Cage and Morton Feldman in 1966–1967. Feldman was complaining about being at the beach, annoyed as hell by transistor
radios blaring out rock and roll, and Cage responded, You know how
I adjusted to that problem of the radio in the environment? Very
much as the primitive people adjusted to the animals which frightened them, and which, probably as you say, were intrusions. They
made, drew pictures of them on their caves. And so I simply made a
piece using radios. Now whenever I hear radios — even a single one,
not just twelve at a time, as you must have heard on the beach, at
least, — I think, well, they’re just playing my piece.
The writers’ desk is beginning to resemble a laboratory or small business office rather than the contemplative study it once was.
A good poem is very boring. In a perfect world all sentences would
have that overall sameness, said Tan Lin.
70P
P O E TRY
Yohji Yamamoto: Start copying what you love. Copy, copy, copy.
And at the end of the copy, you will find yourself.
Cory Doctorow on copying: It’s not a bug. It’s a feature.
Bob Dylan on appropriation: Wussies and pussies complain about it.
The regulation of intellectual property is a euphemized form of corporate control — and a futile one at that, said Barbara Kruger.
They spoke of the idea that in China new books are written and inserted into extant canons. There are ten Harry Potter books in the
Chinese series as opposed to the seven penned by J.K. Rowling.
Individual creativity is a dogma of contemporary soft capitalism,
rather than the domain of nonconformist artists: fiction is everywhere.
We don’t need the new sentence. The old sentence reframed is good
enough.
Today’s plagiarism and copyright battles are to the twenty-first century what the obscenity trials were to the twentieth.
At Tony Oursler’s retrospective at the Williams College Museum
of Art, upstairs, buried deep within the galleries, the artist had set
up a microphone into which anyone could step up and speak. What
they said would be broadcast into the entrance atrium of the museum.
There were no restrictions on what you could say, only a small note
reminding the speaker to be sensitive of others and a gentle suggestion to refrain from swearing. When it was my turn, I said in my
clearest and most radio-like voice, “May I have your attention. May
I have your attention. The museum is now closing. Please make your
way to the exit. Thank you for visiting.” Although it was hours away
from closing time, I repeated the announcement again and saw, in
the video monitor that was provided, people streaming toward the
exit. Again, I made my announcement. At once, a frantic, elderly
guard came running up to me, grabbed my arm, and said, “You’re not
allowed to say that!” When I told him that there was nothing prohibiting me from saying it, he again told me that I wasn’t allowed.
K E N N ET H G OLDS MI T H
71
“Why?” I asked. “Because it’s not true,” he replied. “You must stop
saying that right now.” Of course I repeated my announcement once
again. This poor man was really struggling with what to do with me.
He knew that while I wasn’t breaking any real laws, by questioning
the institution’s authority I was breaking an unwritten social contract.
There are no “correct” readings. Only reproductions and possibilities.
Literary criticism is too closely intertwined with newspaper journalism. Book reviewers are usually newspapermen who fancy themselves literary critics. Obsessed with journalistic notions of verifiable
sources and verity, it’s no wonder that the writing world’s notions of
plagiarism in the digital age are so stuck.
Being well-enough known to be pirated is a crowning achievement.
Most artists want first and foremost to be loved and secondly to make
history; money is a distant third.
Information is like a bank. Our job is to rob that bank.
The idea of recycling language is politically and ecologically sustainable, one which promotes reuse and reconditioning as opposed to the
manufacture and consumption of the new.
We don’t read anymore; instead, we skim, parse, bookmark, copy,
paste, and forward language.
We spend much more time acquiring, cataloging, and archiving our
artifacts these days than we do actually engaging with them. The
ways in which culture is distributed and archived has become profoundly more intriguing than the cultural artifact itself. As a result,
we’ve experienced an inversion of consumption, preferring the bottles to the wine.
Interest has shifted from the object to the information.
People insist upon self-expression. I really am opposed to it. I don’t
think people should express themselves in that kind of way.
If you do something wrong for long enough people will eventually
72P
P O E TRY
think of it as right.
The necessity of bad transcription: working to make sure that the
pages in the book matched the way the high-school typist had transcribed them, right down to the last spelling mistake. I wanted to
do a “bad book,” just the way I’d done “bad movies” and “bad art,”
because when you do something exactly wrong, you always turn up
something, said Andy Warhol.
The act of moving information from one place to another constitutes
a significant cultural act in and of itself. Some of us call this poetry.
Toward a disengaged poetics: writing books without the need to have
any relationship with the subject that we’re writing about.
Our writings are now identical to writings which already exist. The
only thing we do is claim them as our own. With that simple gesture,
they become completely different from the originals.
I am a dumb writer, perhaps one of the dumbest that’s ever lived.
Whenever I have an idea, I question whether it is sufficiently dumb.
I ask myself, is it possible that this, in any way, could be considered
smart? If the answer is no, I proceed. I don’t write anything new or
original. I copy pre-existing texts and move information from one
place to another.
Quantity, not quality. With larger numbers of things, judgment decreases and curiosity increases.
Words now function less for people than for expediting the interaction and concatenation of machines.
In China, after I had finished giving a lengthy talk about conceptual
poetics, plagiarism, and writing in the digital age, an elderly woman
in the audience raised her hand and said, But Professor Goldsmith.
You didn’t discuss your relationship to Longfellow.
Translation is the ultimate humanist gesture. Polite and reasonable,
it is an overly cautious bridge builder. Always asking for permission,
it begs understanding and friendship. It is optimistic yet provisional,
K E N N ET H G OLDS MI T H
73
pinning all hopes on a harmonious outcome. In the end, it always
fails, for the discourse it sets forth is inevitably off-register; translation is an approximation of discourse.
Displacement is rude and insistent, an unwashed party crasher: uninvited and poorly behaved, refusing to leave. Displacement revels in
disjunction, imposing its meaning, agenda, and mores on whatever
situation it encounters. Not wishing to placate, it is uncompromising,
knowing full well that through stubborn insistence it will ultimately
prevail. Displacement has all the time in the world. Beyond morals,
self-appointed, and taking possession because it must, displacement
acts simply — and simply acts.
Unfortunately “creative writing” is very much alive, but I’m doing
my best to try to kill it.
The beauty of misfiling.
A new ecstasy of language has emerged, one of algorithmic rationality
and machine worship; one intent on flattening difference: meaning
and nonsense, code and poetry, ethics and morality, the necessary
and the frivolous. Literature is now approaching the zero degree of
blunt expediency — a thrilling, almost Darwinian opportunism in action. Writing, it appears, at this scale at least, is dead.
Easy is the new difficult. It is difficult to be difficult, but it is even
more difficult to be easy.
The reconception of art as networked power, not content, is the true
death of the author.
At this point in time, it’s hard to verify authenticity, singularity, or
proper sources for anything. Instead, in our digital world all forms of
culture have assumed the characteristics of dance music and versioning, where so many hands have touched and refined these products
that we no longer know, nor care, who the author is — or was.
At the Iowa Writers’ Workshop recently, they were experiencing a
crisis. The remoteness of the location traditionally offered the writer
two choices: either look into thy heart or look to nature. But once
74P
P O E TRY
they had the internet, they began looking into the screen, thereby
able to escape the confines of their binaries.
The idea of celebrities adopting art strategies. They are so bored with
their “creative” acts that they’re ready to be uncreative.
The recent durational performance pieces by Jay-Z, Tilda Swinton,
and The National are making boring mainstream. Soon, we’ll have to
find another line of work.
Acting is plagiarism.
I had never heard of Shia LaBeouf until the he started quoting me
extensively on the web, claiming my words as his own, claiming me
as his collaborator.
Normally when these kind of scandals break what we see is a James
Frey — going out and apologizing; he’s shamed and everybody’s
shamed. LaBeouf plagiarized and instead of apologizing, he decided
to tap into the vast body of strategies around free culture that have
been developed really over the last hundred years, and used that as
a defense.
Today, we face what I will call the LaBeoufian moment: the limiting
point at which all art based on questioning authorship is pointless.
But what must it become? What is art post-LaBeouf?
Just before a reading at the White House, Obama passed through the
green room where we were sitting. He stopped, looked at us, pointed
a finger and said smilingly, “You guys behave.” Suddenly, the voice
of god boomed, “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United
States.” As he was about to take the stage, he turned heel and popped
his head back into the room, stared at us and said, “No. You guys are
artists. Misbehave.”
Nam June Paik said once that the internet is for everybody who
doesn’t live in New York City.
I always joke with my students that poetry couldn’t possibly be as
K E N N ET H G OLDS MI T H
75
hard as they think it is, because if it were as hard as they think it is,
poets wouldn’t do it. Really, they’re the laziest, stupidest people I
know. They became poets in part because they were demoted to that
job, right? You should never tell your students to write what they
know because, of course, they know nothing: they’re poets! If they
knew something, they’d be in that discipline actually doing it: they’d
be in history or physics or math or business or whatever it is where
they could excel, said Christian Bök.
Getting it wrong is a privilege that happens only after you get it right.
There is freedom on the margins. We’ve become interested in practices that exist on the edges of culture where there is little light, those
which revel in the unpoliced freedom of what’s permitted to happen
in the shadows, where few people bother to look. Why would artists
rush to the hot white center?
Auto-tune your next book of poems.
Overwhelmed by so many requests to blurb books, I began a system
of conceptual blurbing. I say to an author, write or steal the blurb
of your dreams and sign my name to it. I don’t wish to see it until I
receive the book. That way, I can be surprised just like anyone else by
what I’ve “written.”
Love art. Hate the art world.
The art world is cleaved between the market and the academy. A
third way: become your own self-invented institution.
When the art world can produce something as compelling as Twitter,
we’ll start paying attention to it again.
The gallery and museum world feels too slow, out of touch with the
rest of culture, like an antiques market: highly priced, unique objects
at a time when value is in the multiple, the many, the distributed, the
democratic. In this way, the art world is quickly making itself irrelevant. Soon, no one will care.
Sometimes I feel that guys sitting in cubicles understand contempo-
76P
P O E TRY
rary culture better than most curators and critics do.
To construct a career based on the ephemerality of the meme is at
once thrilling and terrifying.
What if the poetic has left the poem in the same way that Elvis has
left the building? Long after the limo pulled away, the audience was
still in the arena, screaming for more, but poetry escaped out the back
door and onto the internet, where it is taking on new forms that look
nothing like poetry. Poetry as we know it — the penning of sonnets
or free verse on a printed page — feels more akin to the practice of
throwing pottery or weaving quilts, artisanal activities that continue
in spite of their marginality and cultural irrelevance. Instead, meme
culture is producing more extreme forms of modernism than modernism ever dreamed of.
Artists may be crazy or terribly uninformed about their practices, but
they are never wrong.
When artists become accountable for ethics in their practice, they
fall under the same scrutiny — and are held to the same moral standards — as politicians and bankers, a regrettable situation.
If I raised my kids the way I write my books, I’d have been thrown
in jail long ago.
In the digital age, how odd that many prefer to still act like original
geniuses instead of unoriginal geniuses.
Before going on the show, Stephen Colbert stopped into the green
room to chat. His mother had recently passed away, and the night
before, he went on the air and became so overwhelmed with emotion that he couldn’t speak. So he just sat there in complete silence
for what seemed like an eternity. When I mentioned how moving
and how unusual his use of silence was, he stated how important it
was to employ dead air in media. He recalled hearing an innovative
radio show when he was a child that aired a full hour of dead silence,
most likely as a prank. But it changed his life, he claimed, and he became dedicated to using silence in mainstream media. He then told
me how much he enjoyed my book and the uncreative writing that
K E N N ET H G OLDS MI T H
77
was used to construct it. He paused for a moment, cocked his head,
and said, referring to himself, But that guy out there on the set is
going to hate it.
Short attention span is the new silence.
Every word I say is stupid and false. All in all, I am a pseudo, said
Marcel Duchamp.
Beckett in 1984 on Duchamp’s readymades: A writer could not do
that.
I recently was in a public conversation with my dear friend Christian
Bök. If I am the dumbest poet that’s ever lived, then Christian is the
smartest. His projects are very complicated, taking years to complete. During our talk, Christian went on at length about a project
he’s been working on for the past decade, one which involves basically giving himself a PhD in genetics. In order to compose two
little poems, he had to learn to write computer programs which went
through something like eight million combinations of possible letters
before hitting on the right ones. And then he injected these poems
into a strand of DNA, which was ultimately designed to outlive the
extinguishing of the sun. The whole thing involves working with
laboratories and has cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Christian
is super-articulate — really more like a robot than a person — and
had the audience’s head spinning. When my turn to speak came, all I
could muster was: . .. and I transcribe traffic reports.
There’s nothing that cannot be called “writing” no matter how much
it might not look like “writing.”
All text is used, soiled, and worn. All language presenting itself as
new is recycled. No word is virginal; no word is innocent.
Bertolt Brecht said, I wish that they would graft an additional device onto the radio — one that would make it possible to record and
archive for all time, everything that can be communicated by radio.
Later generations would then have the chance of seeing with amazement how an entire population — by making it possible to say what
they had to say to the whole world — simultaneously made it possible
78 P
P O E TRY
for the whole world to see that they had absolutely nothing to say.
Any paper today is a collective work of art, a daily “book” of industrial man, an Arabian Night’s entertainment in which a thousand and
one astonishing tales are being told by an anonymous narrator to an
equally anonymous audience, said Marshall McLuhan a half century
ago.
My muse is the fluorescent tube. It is cold and affectless; unflattering
and functional; bland and neutral; it flattens all it touches; it is harsh
and ugly; industrial and efficient; cheap and economical; ubiquitous,
universal, and global.
Like morality, politics seems an unavoidable condition when engaging in the reframing of language and discourse.
Innovate only as a last resort, said Charles Eames.
Writers try too hard to express themselves. We’re working with loaded material. How can language — any language — be anything but
expressive?
In a time when cultural materials are abundantly available on our
networks, there is no turning back: appropriation and plagiarism are
here to stay, but it is our job to do it smarter.
Choosing to be a poet is like choosing to have cancer. Why would
anyone ever choose to be a poet?
I had gotten in the door when no one was looking. I was in there now
and there was nothing anybody could, from then on, do about it, said
Bob Dylan.
interviewer: In an interview with Michael Palmer, he testifies that
he prefers writing by hand over typing because the former is a more
intimate physical experience. How do you feel about doing everything by computer?
goldsmith: I honestly think Palmer’s statement is the most idiotic
thing I’ve ever heard. He must be living in a cave.
K E N N ET H G OLDS MI T H
79
Writing on an electronic platform is not only writing, but also doubles as archiving; the two processes are inseparable.
Linearity is prescriptive; lineage is subjective.
After giving a reading in Los Angeles, another reader on the bill came
up to me and exclaimed, “But you didn’t write a word you spoke
tonight!” It was true.
The author’s biography, the back jacket copy, the publisher’s list, the
acknowledgments, the dedications, and the Library of Congress information are all more interesting than the part of the book that’s
supposed to be read.
Somehow during Christmastime in a small house crammed with extended family, reading the Sunday paper is acceptable, but reading a
book is considered antisocial and rude. Many times I’ve been asked
while reading, “Is everything alright?”
Driving down a Los Angeles boulevard, a billboard was legible from
a half-mile away. It said one or two words. In Los Angeles, people are
used to reading single words, very large at far distances, and passing
by them very quickly. It’s totally the opposite in New York where we
get our information by reading a newspaper over somebody’s shoulder on the subway.
Pointing at the best information trumps creating the best information.
Pre-loading — constructing a flawless writing machine before the
writing starts — alleviates the burden of success or failure, mitigates
the ego, and annuls the small-mindedness of authorship that invariably comes with more conventional modes of writing.
The moral weightlessness of art.
Many years ago, on the way to England to work on a museum project,
I was seated in the plane next to a young man who was a classical lute
player. We got to talking and I asked him what he was listening to
on his Discman. He showed me the CD and began to talk about the
8 0P
P O E TRY
music. It was a collection of a minor composer’s music played from
transcriptions of broadsides that were sold on the street for pennies
in the Middle Ages. The composer, however, was clever and included beautifully hand-drawn images on his scores. Over the ages, they
were framed and preserved, not so much because of the music, but
because of how beautiful and distinctive they were as objects. While
his peer’s music — printed and distributed in the same form without
decoration — vanished, this composer’s scores remain as the only examples of the genre. By default, they are now considered classics.
We don’t really seem to believe that copyright exists, nor do we particularly care.
If you make something good and interesting and not ridiculing someone or being offensive, the creators of the original material will like
it, said Christian Marclay about not clearing any permissions for The
Clock.
W.G. Sebald’s advice to creative writing students: I can only encourage you to steal as much as you can. No one will ever notice.
A new metric for poetry: text by the square inch.
A new metric for literature: not the line, sonnet, paragraph, or chapter but the database.
A new metric for appropriation: not the object, but the oeuvre.
How much did you say that paragraph weighed?
Contemporary writing is a practice that lies somewhere between
constructing a Duchampian readymade and downloading an MP3.
Poetry is an underutilized resource waiting to be exploited. Because
it has no remunerative value, it’s liberated from the orthodoxies that
constrain just about every other art form. It’s one of the great liberties of our field — perhaps one of the last artistic fields with this
privilege. Poetry is akin to the position that conceptual art once held:
radical in its production, distribution, and democratization. As such,
it is obliged to take chances, to be as experimental as it can be. Since
K E N N ET H G OLDS MI T H
81
it’s got nothing to lose, it stirs up passions and emotions that, say,
visual art hasn’t in half a century. There’s still a fight. Why would
anyone play it safe in poetry?
Life can only imitate the web, and the web itself is only a tissue of
signs, a lost, infinitely remote imitation.
When asked at the end of his life how it was being an artist, Jean
Dubuffet said, I feel like I’ve been on vacation for the past forty years.
8 2P
P O E TRY
c o n t r i bu to r s
fatimah asghar* created Bosnia and Herzegovina’s first spoken
word poetry group, REFLEKS, while on a Fulbright. Her chapbook
Medusa, They Would Sing (YesYes Books) is forthcoming.
tara betts* is the author of Arc & Hue (Willow Books, 2009) and
the chapbook THE GREATEST!: An Homage to Muhammad Ali
(Winged City Chapbook Press, 2013).
mahogany l. browne’s* most recent books are Smudge (Button
Poetry, 2015) and Redbone (Willow Books, 2015). She directs the poetry program of the Nuyorican Poets Café.
kristiana rae colón’s* play Octagon received Arizona Theater
Company’s 2014 National Latino Playwriting Award and will have
its world premiere in London this fall.
kevin coval* founded Louder Than A Bomb and is the Artistic
Director of Young Chicago Authors. His most recent book is Schtick
(Haymarket Books, 2013).
joel dias-porter* (aka DJ Renegade) is a Cave Canem Fellow and
Haiku Slam Champion.
eve l. ewing* is a doctoral candidate at Harvard University and the
managing editor of Kinfolks: a journal of black expression.
camonghne felix’s* first chapbook, Yolk, is forthcoming from
Penmanship Books.
t’ai freedom ford* is a New York City high school English teacher and Cave Canem Fellow.
krista franklin is a literary and visual artist who lives and works
in Chicago.
kenneth goldsmith teaches poetry and poetics at the University
of Pennsylvania. Some portions of this essay appeared in “Postlude: I
love speech,” published in The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound,
edited by Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin, published by University of Chicago Press © 2009 by The University of Chicago.
CON T RI BU TORS
83
julia goodman’s* “Gnoman I” is handmade beet papyrus from
her series The Root of Scarcity, which is included in the DePaul Art
Museum group exhibition, Rooted in Soil.
francine j. harris is the author of allegiance (Wayne State University Press, 2012) and the forthcoming Play Dead (Alice James Books).
chinaka hodge* writes poetry, plays, and essays, as well as works
for TV and film, and teaches in public classrooms.
britteney black rose kapri’s* first chapbook is Winona and
Winthrop (New School Poetics, 2014). “We House” was written after
Krista Franklin’s definition of funk.
quraysh ali lansana’s* most recent books are The Walmart Republic with Christopher Stewart (Mongrel Empire Press, 2014) and
reluctant minivan (Living Arts Press, 2014).
nate marshall is coeditor of The BreakBeat Poets: New American
Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop (Haymarket Books, 2015). His book
Wild Hundreds is forthcoming (University of Pittsburgh Press).
angel nafis* is the author of BlackGirl Mansion (New School
Poetics, 2012).
morgan parker* is the author of Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me
Up at Night (Switchback Books, 2015) and the forthcoming There
Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé (Coconut Books).
michael robbins is the author of the poetry collections The Second
Sex (2014) and Alien vs. Predator (2012), both published by Penguin.
He teaches creative writing at Montclair State University.
john rodriguez* (1973–2013) was a poet, writer, and scholar. His
work appeared in phati’tude, One Word, Home Girls Make Some Noise,
HOKUM, Days I Moved Through Ordinary Sounds, and Bum Rush the
Page. He held a PhD in English from the CUNY Graduate Center.
kush thompson* is a poet, womanist, and teaching artist for
Young Chicago Authors. Her debut chapbook, A Church Beneath the
Bulldozer, was recently published by New School Poetics.
jamila woods* is a poet and vocalist, a member of the Dark Noise
Collective, and a Pushcart Prize nominee.
* First appearance in Poetry.
8 4P
P O E TRY
new from
pitt poetry series
THE REPUBLICS nathalie handal
“The Republics is a massively
brilliant new work. It’s
gripping, harrowing, and at
times horrific, while its form
paradoxically is fresh,
luscious, and original. Handal
has recorded, like Alice
Walker, Paul Celan, John
Hershey, and Carolyn Forché,
some of the worst civilization
has offered humankind and
somehow made it art.”
—SAPPHIRE
88 pp. • Paper • $15.95
UNIVERSIT Y OF PIT TSBURGH PRESS
upress.pitt.edu
800.621.2736
WORKSHOPS IN POETRY,
FICTION, AND PLAYWRITING
JULY 21–AUGUST 2, 2015
THE UNIVERSITY OF THE SOUTH
SEWANEE, TENNESSEE
Accepting applications through April 20
Thanks to the generosity of the Walter E. Dakin Memorial Fund,
supported by the estate of Tennessee Williams, every participant
receives assistance. The Conference fee reflects but two-thirds of
the actual cost to attend. Additional funding is awarded to fellows
and scholars.
FACULTY &
READERS
Daniel Anderson
Richard Bausch
Tony Earley
B.H. Fairchild
Adrianne Harun
Andrew Hudgins
Randall Kenan
Maurice Manning
Charles Martin
Jill McCorkle
Alice McDermott
Erin McGraw
Dan O’Brien
Tim O’Brien
Wyatt Prunty
Mary Jo Salter
Christine Schutt
A.E. Stallings
Paula Vogel
Sidney Wade
Allen Wier
Steve Yarbrough
VISITORS &
LECTURERS
Julie Barer
Paul Bone
Georges and Anne
Borchardt
Valerie Borchardt
Michelle Brower
Sarah Burnes
MaryKatherine
Callaway
Polly Carl
Barbara Epler
Gary Fisketjon
Mary Flinn
Emily Forland
Rob Griffith
Gail Hochman
Roger Hodge
931.598.1654 | [email protected]
sewaneewriters.org
Celise Kalke
Mike Levine
David Lynn
Max Gordon
Moore
Speer Morgan
Kathy Pories
Elisabeth Schmitz
Don Share
Charise Castro
Smith
Anna Stein
Philip Terzian
N.S. Thompson
Liz Van Hoose
Michael Wiegers
Amy Williams
Robert Wilson
David Yezzi
Renée Zuckerbrot
Wake Forest University Press
Forthcoming Titles
The Shack: Irish Poets in
the Foothills and Mountains
of the Blue Ridge
A celebration of American life
in poetry and prose by eleven
of Ireland’s finest writers.
With lush watercolors and art.
March 2015 • $15.95
ISBN 978-1-930630-71-0
Goat’s Milk:
New & Selected Poems
Introducing Frank Ormsby
to an American audience
for the first time in a
volume spanning 40 years
of his work.
April 2015 • $15.95
ISBN 978-1-930630-74-1
Frank Ormsby
“Frank Ormsby belongs to that extraordinary
generation of Northern Irish poets… He is a poet
of the truest measure.”
–Michael Longley, from the Introduction
Dedicated to
Irish poetry
wfupress.wfu.edu
336.758.5448
[email protected]
Study poetry at the home of Robert Frost in the
beautiful White Mountains of New Hampshire.
Visit www.frostplace.org for this year’s faculty and details.
Conference on Poetry and Teaching - June 21 - 25, 2015
Dawn Potter, Director & Faculty
Teresa Carson, Associate Director & Faculty
Faculty: Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, Marcus Jackson
Conference on Poetry - July 12 - 18, 2015
Martha Rhodes, Director & Faculty
Faculty: Gabriel Fried, Joan Houlihan,
John Murillo, Patrick Phillips
Poetry Seminar - August 2 - 8, 2015
Patrick Donnelly, Director & Faculty
Faculty: Joan Larkin, Gregory Pardlo
www.frostplace.org ~ [email protected] ~ 603-823-5510
On Elizabeth Bishop
Colm Tóibín
“Colm Tóibín—a sensitive critic
as well as a novelist—has written
an almost ideal introduction
to the poetry of Elizabeth
Bishop. This could become the
introduction to Bishop for
people who intend to read her
for pleasure.”
—Stephen Burt, author of
Close Calls with Nonsense
Writers on Writers
Cloth $19.95
See our E-Books at
press.princeton.edu
There’s a long history of writing women
(writers) off. It’s time to right that
wrong, to get relevant not relegated.
Visualizing is for the work. Galvanizing
is for getting the work out there. We
can see your words here. So can
publishers, agents + scholars. Can you?
Until it’s just about the art.
Submit your literary work now.
www.penandbrush.org
April_2015_Events_full_page_Ad_Quark9.qxp_v1 2/18/15 1:51 PM Page 1
T HE PO ETRY FO UNDATI ON PR E SE N T S
April
Events
Reading &
Lecture
Poetry on
Stage
Book Release
Children’s
Poetry Day
The Open
Door Readings
Bagley Wright Lecture Series on Poetry
Terrance Hayes
Thursday, April 2, 7:00 PM
Anthem for Doomed Youth
Wednesday, April 15, 7:00 PM
The BreakBeat Poets
Thursday, April 16, 7:00 PM
A Poetry Menagerie
Saturday, April 18, 10:00 AM – 1:00 PM
Northwestern University’s Averill Curdy
& Concordia University’s Peter Kahn
Tuesday, April 21, 7:00 PM
Reading
Fifth Wednesday Journal:
African American Poets in Review
Thursday, April 23, 6:30 PM
Reading
Dana Gioia
Saturday, April 25, 2:00 PM
Cindy Pritzker Auditorium
Harold Washington Library Center
400 South State Street
P OE TRY FO UN DAT IO N
61 West Superior Street, Chicago, IL
(312) 787-7070
www.poetryfoundation.org