Work in the World...

Lots of good things happening in my writing life and I figure it's time for me to do some self-promotion, mostly because I'm so grateful for all the interest in poetry that keeps returning...


Podcast on Phillis Remastered:




The ever-sassy Honoree Fanonne Jeffers has a series called "You Gotta Read This" on her blog and she invited me to take part in the program. She also convinced the wonderful Rachel Eliza Griffiths to slip her the photo up above. We talked about Conversion, spirituality as well as my journey as a writer and generally just had a good 'ole time :-) Feel free to listen here or you can subscribe to the Phillis Remastered podcasts on Itunes!


Scholarship Speech at Old Dominion University:

I began teaching a poetry workshop at my alma mater, ODU, this term and was asked to also venture back to speak at their annual scholarship luncheon. The speech is about the fact that all good things find their way back to us in time. You can watch it below:






Black Nature Anthology:

Hard-working poet and editor, Camille Dungy, has helped birth another beautiful anthology that was released in December. Black Nature spans four centuries of writing and includes work from heavyweights and newcomers alike. In celebration of the anthology, I'll be on a panel with Camille Dungy and contributors E. Ethelbert Miller, Greg Pardlo, Thomas Sayers Ellis and Mark McMorris at the Split This Rock Poetry Festival in Washington, DC next month. Click here to get more details on the anthology and don't miss Split This Rock!

100 Best African-American Poems Anthology:

I am honored to have been selected to have work in Nikki Giovanni's newest editing endeavor. The anthology is being published this spring by Source Books. I'm especially proud to have had my poem "Mercy Killing" chosen by actress Novella Nelson to be read as a part of the CD that will accompany the anthology. Pre-order your copy here!

All this seems proof positive that hard work does eventually make its way into the world and good people make their way into your life with each turn. Now, I'm looking forward to all that's coming...

Full post can be found at: http://www.remicalbingham.blogspot.com/

...if we just let it be

So much going on in the world...we lost another powerhouse voice. Teddy Pendergrass, of his own and Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes fame, passed away. Radio has been playing old interviews and I think clips (like the one above) that feature his voice in its purest form are the best testament to his gift.

Listening to "Wake Up Everybody" this morning, I couldn't help thinking about those in Haiti. It's always difficult to tell who can help and how we can do something but there are are few links swirling around the web, so I'll post them here:

American Red Cross

Doctors Without Borders

Save the Children - Donate to help the children of Haiti.

Partners in Health - One of the largest nongovernmental health care providers in Haiti.

Yele - Grammy-Award winning musician, humanitarian and Goodwill Ambassador to Haiti Wyclef Jean founded Yéle Haiti in 2005.

Lambi Fund of Haiti - The fund channels financial and other resources to community-based organizations that promote the social and economic empowerment of the Haitian people.

Event: Bowery Poetry Club's Haiti Earthquake Relief Fundraiser
Start Time: Saturday, January 16 at 10:00pm
End Time: Sunday, January 17 at 4:00am
Where: The Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery (Between Houston and Bleecker) F train to 2nd Ave, 6 to Bleecker
mail@bowerypoetry.com 212-614-0505


I've recently begun teaching another poetry workshop and part of my task this term will be to try to convince my students that poetry is a necessary entity in all our lives. In times of love, in times of distress, in times of fear, in times of elation, everyone turns to poetry. This morning, I've begun re-reading the poems of my friend Phebus Etienne who passed away a few years ago. She was born in Port-au-Prince and wrote often about heritage, family, home. Her attention to detail is what always strikes me the most. I think--in the wake of the uncontrollable and in these last days--more often than not we are forced to piece together what minuscule details we have of those we've loved and lost:


Preparations for the Afterlife

In the doorway of an attic, a daughter stood between guilt and uncertainty. How could she exit, eliminate rent income to an uncle, multiply distance from few living blood relations?Her mother had not been prone to doubt. She had packed for diaspora in one suitcase and left Port-au-Prince with warning to none.

Sirens drowned creaking eaves, but she heard her mother’s voice giving precise direction. Cotton on Main Street should handle the arrangements. Red petals are for the joyful, unprepared to leave. No reception after the funeral. The bedroom set should go to someone in need. Keep the white sheets I bought for last days in Haiti.

Mandates were delivered with panorama of slights and rivalries. Her mother tallied debts owed, resolving, For any good I did, for being caretaker, no regrets. Her exhausted eyes mirrored the future like a sage reading bones. Mwen pa vlé kité ou pou kont ou. Yo pap aidé ou. The daughter did not accept this prediction of aloneness until divisions solidified, until some became angry when nothing was left in their names, until she embraced legal threats for unpaid medicals, until she listed what was worth selling, until visitor passes to her sick room idled at a front desk while staples burned a horizontal scar on her uterus. You have been present and useful, so love for you will be measured by conditions. Viv tankou moun ki pa gen fenmi.

She played her mother’s last instruction like a favorite ballad. She parceled clothing, unworn shoes to a Miami ministry and hauled mattress and box spring to a friend in Brooklyn. The daughter sealed embroidered linen in plastic as if afraid they would dissipate like clouds. Movers loaded belongings unto a truck and as the October wind rattled oak leaves to the path at her heel, she began saving her own life.

Mwen pa vlé kité ou pou kont ou. Yo pap aidé ou. - I don’t want to leave you alone. They will not help you.

Viv tankou moun ki pa gen fenmi. – Live like someone without a family.

--Phebus Etienne

Seriously...

Can it get any better than this???



from www.remicalbingham.blogspot.com

Word/Art:Words/Arc

It's been a long time since I had a few moments to reflect on poetry and the way things converge in the world of poetry, as I've been happily busy thinking about the future for the past few months. But this morning, I ran across the picture above of a woman with a Bukowski poem tattooed on her arm and it sparked thoughts of other poems and poets that muse about words made flesh.

In the spring, I'll be teaching the book Fire Wheel by Sharmila Voorakkara in one of my classes and she has a sonnet about what it means to carry someone else with you in perpetuity:

For the Tattooed Man

Because she broke your heart, Shannon's a badge—
a seven-letter skidmark that scars up
across your chest, a flare of indelible script.
Between Death or Glory, and Mama, she rages,
scales the trellis of your rib cage;
her red hair swings down to bracket your ankles, whip
up the braid of your backbone, cuff your wrists. She keeps
you sleepless with her afterimage,

and each pinned and martyred limb aches for more.
Her memory wraps you like a vise.
How simple the pain that trails and graces
the length of your body. How it fans, blazes,
writes itself over in the blood's tightening sighs,
bruises into wisdom you have no name for.

--Sharmila Voorakkara

Re-reading Voorakkara's poem put me in the mind of another piece about body art and how it can create a kind of communion. Marcus Jackson published the poem below last year in the New Yorker:

Mary at the Tattoo Shop

She counted her money
before we went in,
avenue beside us anxious
with Friday-evening traffic.
Both fourteen, we shared a Newport,
its manila butt salty to our lips.
Inside, from a huge book
of designs and letter styles,
she chose to get “MARY”
in a black, Old English script
on the back of her neck.
The guy who ran the shop
leaned over her for forty minutes
with a needled gun
that buzzed loud
as if trying to get free.
He took her twenty-five dollars
then another ten
for being under age.
Back outside, the sun
dipped behind rooftops,
about to hand the sky over to night.
Lifting her hazel hair,
she asked me to rub
some A&D ointment
on her new tattoo;
my finger glistened in salve
as I reached for her swollen name.

--Marcus Jackson

As poets, we seems to be fascinated with scarring and remembrance. We embrace not forgetting. I think this is why so many of us are enraptured, in our lives and in our art, with marking the body. Case in point: poet John Murillo, whose forthcoming book Up Jump the Boogie is an homage to the battering urban dwellers receive each time they brave the world around them.

Trouble Man

--after Brandon D. Johnson

It’s the bone of a question

Caught in your throat,

The first sighs of the next

Day’s traffic, shoulders

Made fists under the skin.

And say it’s raining

This morning. Maybe a car

Lingers at the stop sign

Outside your window.

And maybe you know

This song. How long since

A man you called father

Troubled the hi-fi, smoldering

Newport in hand, and ran

This record under a needle.

How long since a man’s

Broken falsetto colored

Every hour indigo. Graying

Beard, callused hands, finger-

Nails thick as nickels. You

Were the boy who became

That man without meaning

To and know now, a man’s

Life is never measured

In beats, but beat-downs,

Not line breaks, just breaks.

You hear Marvin fading

Into a new day, and it caresses

You like a brick: Marvin, and men

Like him, have already

Moaned every book

You will never write.

This you know, baby. This

You know.

--John Murillo


Of course, looking at these candid portraits of Marcus and John made me think of the photographer. Rachel Eliza Griffiths, an intensely beautiful poet and photographer, is also fascinated with capturing us, scars and all. She honors our true light and terrible beauty with her lens. I've no doubt that she was ecstatic when capturing John's ink since it honored their mentor and brilliant poet, Martin Espada. Espada does the same arduous work that illuminates the fragility of lives and bodies, then makes art of what can and will or has become of us. It's only fitting, then, to let him have the final word here, a praisesong for the unsuspecting shadows that will forever mark us:

Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100

for the 43 members of
Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees

Local 100, working at the Windows on the World restaurant,

who lost their lives in the attack on the World Trade Center

Alabanza. Praise the cook with a shaven head
and a tattoo on his shoulder that said Oye,
a blue-eyed Puerto Rican with people from Fajardo,
the harbor of pirates centuries ago.
Praise the lighthouse in Fajardo, candle
glimmering white to worship the dark saint of the sea.
Alabanza. Praise the cook's yellow Pirates cap
worn in the name of Roberto Clemente, his plane
that flamed into the ocean loaded with cans for Nicaragua,
for all the mouths chewing the ash of earthquakes.
Alabanza. Praise the kitchen radio, dial clicked
even before the dial on the oven, so that music and Spanish
rose before bread. Praise the bread. Alabanza.

Praise Manhattan from a hundred and seven flights up,
like Atlantis glimpsed through the windows of an ancient aquarium.
Praise the great windows where immigrants from the kitchen
could squint and almost see their world, hear the chant of nations:
Ecuador, México, Republica Dominicana,
Haiti, Yemen, Ghana, Bangladesh.
Alabanza. Praise the kitchen in the morning,
where the gas burned blue on every stove
and exhaust fans fired their diminutive propellers,
hands cracked eggs with quick thumbs
or sliced open cartons to build an altar of cans.
Alabanza. Praise the busboy's music, the chime-chime
of his dishes and silverware in the tub.
Alabanza. Praise the dish-dog, the dishwasher
who worked that morning because another dishwasher
could not stop coughing, or because he needed overtime
to pile the sacks of rice and beans for a family
floating away on some Caribbean island plagued by frogs.

Alabanza. Praise the waitress who heard the radio in the kitchen
and sang to herself about a man gone. Alabanza.

After the thunder wilder than thunder,
after the shudder deep in the glass of the great windows,
after the radio stopped singing like a tree full of terrified frogs,
after night burst the dam of day and flooded the kitchen,
for a time the stoves glowed in darkness like the lighthouse in Fajardo,
like a cook's soul. Soul I say, even if the dead cannot tell us
about the bristles of God's beard because God has no face,
soul I say, to name the smoke-beings flung in constellations
across the night sky of this city and cities to come.
Alabanza I say, even if God has no face.

Alabanza. When the war began, from Manhattan and Kabul
two constellations of smoke rose and drifted to each other,
mingling in icy air, and one said with an Afghan tongue:
Teach me to dance. We have no music here.
And the other said with a Spanish tongue:
I will teach you. Music is all we have.

--Martin Espada

And just in case you've never been blessed to hear Espada sing these praises aloud and rattle us with the terribly beauty tattooed across our histories, watch the clip below to see why his words inspire so many others to craft light:

Dwayne Betts is the Man...

My friend and fellow poet, Dwayne Betts, is having a very good year. So many wonderful things are happening with his work and I just wanted to post a few links in case you've been living under a rock and haven't heard any of the buzz:

• Dwayne in Essence: Essence Magazine highlights some of Dwayne's achievements by way of another wonderful writer, Abdul Ali.

• Dwayne on Tavis: Tavis Smiley was so impressed with Dwayne and his memoir that he invited him to be a guest on his radio show and on his television program. Watch the full television interview here.

• Dwayne in the Washington Post: Check the Post for Dwayne's story about being saved by literature and read a review of his book, A Question of Freedom.

• Dwayne as Poet Extraordinaire: Shahid Reads His Own Palm, Dwayne's first book of poetry is already award-winning and will be published by Alice James Books in 2010.

• Dwayne in the news: See what parts of Dwayne's story CNN has been tracking.

• Dwayne's space: Check out his personal website for reading dates, reviews and more ways to keep track of all his success.

If you haven't read Dwayne's memoir, do yourself a favor and get with the program. It's poignant, honest, and makes you re-evaluate how fortunate we are to be given second chances.

Sweet Suite...

This weekend, I spoke at length with poet Lamar Wilson about the way he's been moved by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers' third book, Red Clay Suite. Later, while deep in conversation about the past with another sweet, sweet man, I couldn't help hearing the echo of one of my favorite pieces from the book ringing in my ear:




Lexicon
for my mother


This is the end for you two, though he doesn’t see
it or that he’ll be dead in four years,
heart just stopping, but not this day

when he sits in the armchair
which sags under his will, reads a book.
You speak a simple word to him—

we are leaving for good this time—
but I lose what it is,
so quick to be gone.

Something to indicate that we won’t be coming back,
no last chances
like his assuming he can show up at the shelter

or drive further down south
to Grandma’s house to collect us.
Or, I get the moment wrong and he goes down

to the basement first, puts on a record
—Rachmaninoff, loud—
walks upstairs, and then he sits down,

opens up his book, ignores you,
stops, cocks his head in the fine, sensitive
way that I continue to adore, ignores you some more,

tries to find blues in that European music.
A paradox,
but that is my father, kind to strangers,

slapping one of us upside our heads
at home, searching for beauty
in everything except his family

or his own reflection,
not bothering to plead with you
like he has the other times,

I’m sorry, baby.
Don’t go. Please don’t go.
The way a man is supposed to in the best songs.

I want you to toss something hard at him.
I’m scared we will return.
I’m scared we won’t return.

I’m so angry with you and I haven’t yet learned
how much weaker than a girl a woman can be.
How silly I am to assume you are stronger than he.

How arrogant I am to assume you are not.
The point is that I live, you live,
whether my father’s music plays or doesn’t play,

and we are driving off in the truck,
Mama,
leaving him turning the pages of his book.

What is that word? Forget about it.
We leave him there.
We left.



--Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

The first thing that arrests me here is "the armchair/which sags under his will." This could just be a simple surface image, but since it is clear from the poem's first line that this is the end of a relationship, the final end of whatever was or could have come, the image is indicative of what has been the plight of this man's household. Everything here has been distorted, re-shaped, maybe even broken, "under his will."

Next, this idea of the missing word, some forgotten lexicon, is a subtle push throughout the poem. The speaker can't remember exactly what the final word was or how it was said, but none of this is of any importance. That small detail escapes but the fact is that, regardless of what was spoken, things were different this day in the familiar house. Much like the few words the mother spoke to ensure their leaving, they, too, would be "so quick to be gone" once she'd decided this was the end.

I can't help but imagine the missing lexicon is a piece of the puzzle that might explain the paradox of the man depicted here. He contradicts himself in the speaker's memories--at times he is silent and at other time he finds that pleading works best. Maybe he reads the mother the way he does the books that reappear in his hands. Maybe he plays her the same was he spins a record, dropping the needle gently then leaving it be.

The tone of this poem, especially the speaker's longing and regret coupled with fear and admiration, is its most compelling layer. This is the human way--fear a man and love him just the same; watch a woman leave, even get indignant, then beg her back as soon as you think she'll stay. The fact that the speaker loves her father and finds him beautiful even when he is being hurtful, when he "cocks his head in that fine, sensitive/way that I continue to adore, ignores you some more," is the inexplicable part of our selves. It's the accusation and condemnation of oneself just as it is the accusation and condemnation of the father for all his wrong doing. The mother here is condemned too for waiting so long, for being begged back again and again. This is the quiet, difficult work of the poet: to illuminate our simple, awful human beauty and ugliness too.

By the time we reach the poem's last stanza, the speaker still can't recall the word that got them where they are, "driving off in the truck...leaving him turning the pages of his book." But none of that matters. What does matter, however, is that they have broken free of him, despite this twisted love and hate, despite themselves.

Red Clay Suite is poignant, sharp and fierce, must like its author. "Lexicon" is only one gem among the many housed in the book. If you haven't read it, do yourself a favor and pick it up. It's tragic that there are no YouTube clips of Honorée reading, as she is one of the most brilliant and compelling forces I've ever seen on stage. If you're in the Kentucky area, don't miss her at the Kentucky Women Writers Conference next month. The whole line up, in fact, is incredible (you won't want to miss Affrilachian Empress Nikky Finney or Inaugural Poet Elizabeth Alexander, just to name a few).

When I'm trying to piece together the past, I'm always reaching for this kind of vividness and clarity. I think Lamar was right, poems like these help you write your own story. Poets like Honorée help make clear how complex we really are...

The Wondrous Work We Do...

REVISION re⋅vi⋅sion  
–noun
1. the act or work of revising.
2. a process of revising.
3. a revised form or version, as of a book.

Origin: 1605–15; <>revise ) + -iōn- -ion

Related forms:
re⋅vi⋅sion⋅al, re⋅vi⋅sion⋅ar⋅y, adjective

Synonyms:1. alteration, correction, emendation.

Dictionary.com Unabridged Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2009.


Revision, or re-vision, to re-see something, to re-learn, to find another way to say or say it more clearly, clarification, clarity. This is the work that poets (all writers!) do. This has been my only work for the past few weeks. This morning, my work is finding the best word to suit a particular phrase in a line. One early search went like this:

• Find a word to replace "unravels" (because this word is used at a pivotal point in another poem in the manuscript and that annoys me tremendously, especially when there are so many other--perhaps more fitting--words to be used)
• Go to the Dictionary/Thesaurus
• Look up "unravel" and look up the noun it became an adjective/verb for in the poem
• Decide "unravels" works but there are other alternatives
• List other alternatives: unwind, loosen, untwine, untwist, shake loose, come undone, free, unfold, uncoil, unfurl, untie, slacken, lax, withy-cragged (okay, that one made the list just because it tickled me...)
• Narrow the list, then try each suitable alternative in the poem
• Read the poem aloud twice using each word
• Listen for assonance
• Listen for discordance
• Listen for rhythm and internal rhyme
• Listen for meaning
• Listen for meaning
• Read for meaning
• Listen for rhythm and meaning again
• Think about layering and denotative/connotative meanings of each word (i.e. "untwist" works because the noun literally untwists but it sounds playful and the line highlights a rough action taking place, therefore, "untwist" works sonically and denotatively but not connotatively, so it's out of the running to be the replacement word...)
• Work with the three words that make the cut (loosen, unwind, untwine)
• Shuffle the iPod (selections from Erykah Badu's Worldwide Underground have served me nicely thus far, now it's on to Fall Out Boy)
• Start the search process again using only the three words that made the cut

So clearly the revision process for one word, in one line that makes up one phrase, in one couplet of one poem, can take hours, days, weeks. This is the work we do. There is nothing lazy, haphazard or accidental about decent writing. Oh and did I mention all of this work is going into a poem that has already been published and that I considered "finished" nine months ago? This is the work we do: laborious, tedious, fierce, exacting, hard work. We hunt for clarity, every day, over and over again.

Here's the lesson: the next time you read a great article, stand in awe of a pristine poem or get your hands on a real page-turner, imagine how much hard work went into the piece,then do the author a solid and spread the word about its beauty.