Good Poets in Hampton on Thursday, 6/4

Hampton Public Library has a great program called Writers On Writing On Thursdays and this week Toni Wynn and Indigo Moor will share the venue.

Toni's a VA rider by way of Jersey and Indigo is coming all the way from the west coast to take part.

If not for Toni's promise of a little get together after, come out to hear some fantastic poetry. Here are the particulars:

WHO: Toni Wynn and Indigo Moor

WHAT: Writers On Writing on Thursdays, Poetry Reading

WHEN: Thursday, June 4 at 6:30 PM

WHERE: Hampton Public Library -- Main Branch, 4207 Victoria Blvd.

Hampton, VA, 23669 Phone: 757/727-1154

And just to whet your appetite, here's a poem from Toni that would please most mommas, mathematicians and phrenologists alike:

from Cornrow Calculations

If I see your hands flying though my child’s hair

and I’m holding your baby and the telephone

is silent and the television is not on,

can we talk about what you’re doing? It starts

out regular, then whoops, turns science fiction—

the range of your skills is fantastic. The geography

of the head—you the cartographer

negotiating roads through these thickets.

We get to art (go ahead and smile),

which is where you were coming from anyway.

Then uh oh,

you’re at math, using an ancient matrix

and twenty-first century knowledge to make bank.

I pay you well because you know how it’s done

in formulas/soulscape/exchange,

living for living.

A power move putting braids in hair. A path to beauty.

Using the tools, the braider with sweet breath

and some laughter crowns a new queen.

Power glimmers, glides into vision

for seeing more, seeing deeper. We know

the promise of infinity

and you are the Plus One.

--Toni Wynn

Living/Writing for the Summer/Weekend

The long weekend and the unofficial beginning of summer is nearly upon us and the that means a little more free time to read, write and listen to my heart's content. I've been digging into some good books lately, namely Craig Werner's Higher Ground and Philip Schultz's Failure.

Higher Ground (a quick nod to one of Stevie's classics) is a book of connected critical essays about the rise and fall of American soul music. Werner highlights three of the all-time greats: Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin and Curtis Mayfield. I bought the book while I was at the Stax Museum in Memphis and couldn't put it down. Nothing like some brilliant and passionate non-fiction to make you re-think what you love about art and its message. If you think you know anything about these artists and their impact, and especially if you think you don't, you should absolutely run out and get this book.

Failure won Philip Schultz the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and it contains some of the clearest and most unaffected language I've seen out of the Pulitzer camp in years. Even clearer than Stephen Dunn, and I firmly believe Different Hours is a book the masses should be forced to read. There are some outstanding poems in Failure (two of my favs are "Husband" and "Kodak Park Athletic Association, 1954") but I did take issue with some of the characterization/dialect in "The Wandering Wingless" poem which makes up half of the book. Schultz excels beyond belief when recounting his own experiences, highlighting familiar failures, poverty and all it's havoc. But, despite the fact that there are numerous similarities in his upbringing and the circumstances of black men that he finds himself working with later in life, he creates caricatures of his workmates instead of fleshing them out the way he does all others in the book, even the animals he's come to love. It's a sad shift and especially disappointing because Schultz clearly possesses the skill and depth to paint meaningful, round, full-bodied portraits and, apparently, chooses not to do so in some cases.


Not really in any order, here are a few miscellaneous asides for the long weekend:

• Marilyn Hacker does a beautiful job of expounding on three of poetry's greats: Gwendolyn Brooks, H.D., and Muriel Rukeyser.

• Speaking of Rukeyser, isn't The Life of Poetry a classic??? I wonder why isn't it being used in more classrooms?

• I can't stop spinning Chrisette Michele's newest. Here's the video for the lead single:

• The guy making a cameo in the video might look familiar, but the real surprise is his flow. Is anyone else fascinated that this is the same person? That's what I get for watching TeenNick and listening to college radio stations...

And a poem for the road...Denise Duhamel is a beast on the page. I try to emulate her versatility and improvisation with form all the time. More often than not, I fail miserably, but she continues to surprise me with her take on various forms. Maybe I'll put her on deck for the weekend. Some good beach reading indeed! Here's her twisted sestina as a parting gift:


Delta Flight 659

—to Sean Penn

I'm writing this on a plane, Sean Penn,
with my black Pilot Razor ballpoint pen.
Ever since 9/11, I'm a nervous flyer. I leave my Pentium
Processor in Florida so TSA can't x-ray my stanzas, penetrate
my persona. Maybe this should be in iambic pentameter,
rather than this mock sestina, each line ending in a Penn

variant. I convinced myself the ticket to Baghdad was too expensive.
I contemplated going as a human shield. I read, in open-
mouthed shock, that your trip there was a $56,000 expenditure.
Is that true? I watched you on Larry King Live—his suspenders
and tie, your open collar. You saw the war's impending
mess. My husband gambled on my penumbra

of doubt. So you station yourself at a food silo in Iraq. What happens
to me if you get blown up? He begged me to stay home, be his Penelope.
I sit alone in coach, but last night I sat with four poets, depending
on one another as readers, in a Pittsburgh café. I tried to be your pen
pal in 1987, not because of your pensive
bad boy looks, but because of a poem you'd penned

that appeared in an issue of Frank. I still see the poet in you, Sean Penn.
You probably think fans like me are your penance
for your popularity, your star bulging into a pentagon
filled with witchy wanna-bes and penniless
poets who waddle toward your icy peninsula
of glamour like so many menacing penguins.

But honest, I come in peace, Sean Penn,
writing on my plane ride home. I want no part of your penthouse
or the snowy slopes of your Aspen.
I won't stalk you like the swirling grime cloud over Pig Pen.
I have no script or stupendous
novel I want you to option. I even like your wife, Robin Wright Penn.

I only want to keep myself busy on this flight, to tell you of four penny-
loafered poets in Pennsylvania
who, last night, chomping on primavera penne
pasta, pondered poetry, celebrity, Iraq, the penitentiary
of free speech. And how I reminded everyone that Sean Penn
once wrote a poem. I peer out the window, caress my lucky pendant:

Look, Sean Penn, the clouds are drawn with charcoal pencils.
The sky is opening like a child's first stab at penmanship.
The sun begins to ripen orange, then deepen.

--Denise Duhamel

Linking/Thinking...

The semester is (finally) coming to a close and I barely have time to breathe, but there are a few interesting things floating around that I wanted to spread the word about. The image above is the logo for this year's, almost lost Calabash Festival. It's the first link on my list:

• Calabash is back on and it you have any sense at all you will head down to Jamaica Memorial Day weekend to take part in a few days of love, literature and leisure. The man himself, Kwame Dawes, is one of the co-founders of the fest.

• Toure thinks Colson Whitehead is post-black. Everyone else seems to unsure of what post-black (as art? as social construct? as ideology? as political statement?) could actually, possibly mean...

• On to more solid news, Maxwell is really coming back this time! The proof is here and here and here. What a lovely summer :-)

• And back to reality, I don't know about you, but I've been having ongoing discussions with my colleagues about the sense of entitlement my students seem to have these days. Clearly--and sadly--we aren't the only ones thinking about this.

• Love Lucille Clifton? If you don't, you should. If you want more information about why she is one of our most celebrated and revered poets, I hear the Furious Flower Poetry Center at JMU still has a few open slots for their week-long seminar on Ms. Lucille that will be held in June. If you can go, do yourself a favor and be present. I know Ms. Lucille sure will be!

Here's one of Lucille Clifton's newest poems, from the Poets.org poem-a-day list, to wet your appetite:

sorrows

who would believe them winged
who would believe they could be

beautiful who would believe
they could fall so in love with mortals

that they would attach themselves
as scars attach and ride the skin

sometimes we hear them in our dreams
rattling their skulls clicking

their bony fingers
they have heard me beseeching

as i whispered into my own
cupped hands enough not me again

but who can distinguish
one human voice
amid such choruses
of desire

--Lucille Clifton

That's my dreamworld...

This is pretty fantastic prank a group of folks pulled off and it's taking the web by storm. All of the taglines are asking things like, "What would you do if you were waiting on train and a full-on musical number erupted around you?" Well, that's my dreamworld! I'd be the one trying to learn the steps and join in! How much would I have loved to be part of this choreographed madness (that's an oxymoron, just to reassure you that this blog is still about language some of the time...)

Sound of Music Train Station @ Yahoo! Video

Speaking of fantasy lives, here's another of my favorite all time musical scenes that I wanted to be a part of. I pray that anyone who actually had the privilege of going to a 'school for the arts' actually had this experience once of twice during their tenure there:





Musicals aren't the only things that fill my dreamworld, well-lit stages abound as well. Last night, I escaped from a bit of Spring semester madness and went to listen to one of my favorites croon about his "Dreamworld" among other things. Robin Thicke is always a vision and his voice was stellar last night. I do long for the B-sides from his first (wildly underrated) album, so my dreamworld would include the likes of him serenading the inhabitants with songs like this:





And because no dreamworld of mine would be complete without an abundance of poems, we'd stock the classrooms, libraries, syllabi, backpacks and bedposts with anthologies like this:


Every month would be National Poetry Month and each day we'd carry poems like this--one's in which we could find music everywhere, even in the everyday lilt of ordinary things--in our pockets and pass them around:

The Healing Improvisation of Hair


If you undo your do you would
be strange. Hair has been on my mind.
I used to lean in the doorway
and watch my stony woman wind
the copper through the black, and play
with my understanding, show me she could
take a cup of river water,
and watch it shimmy, watch it change,
turn around and become ash bone.
Wind in the cottonwoods wakes me
to a day so thin its breastbone
shows, so paid out it shakes me free
of its blue dust. I will arrange
that river water, bottom juice.
I conjure my head in the stream
and ride with the silk feel of it
as my woman bathes me, and shaves
away the scorn, sponges the grit
of solitude from my skin, laves
the salt water of self-esteem
over my feathering body.
How like joy to come upon me
in remembering a head of hair
and the way water would caress
it, and stress beauty in the flair
and cut of the only witness
to my dance under sorrow's tree.
This swift darkness is spring's first hour.

I carried my life, like a stone,
in a ragged pocket, but I
had a true weaving song, a sly
way with rhythm, a healing tone.


--Jay Wright

It's National Poetry Month! -- Readings/Workshops/Travels

April is National Poetry Month and there is good stuff galore. Here's what I have going on for the next few weeks:

There will be several National Poetry Month readings at Pretlow Library in April. I'll be reading at my favorite Norfolk library on Monday, 4/13, at 6:00 PM. I'll read some from Conversion and give the folks a taste of the new work. Please come out if you're in town! Contact info. for the reading coordinator, Ms. Abraham, is below:

Trinika Abraham

Library Assistant II

Mary D. Pretlow Anchor Branch Library

111 W. Ocean View Ave

Norfolk, Va 23503

757-441-1750

Trinika.Abraham@norfolk.gov

Next week, I'll be doing my part to make the wide world of academics think about poetry in new ways. At the ACTC Conference in Memphis, I'll be delivering a paper on Natasha Trethewey and highlighting poems from Domestic Work, Bellocq's Ophelia and Native Guard. The panel title alone should pique your interest--Poets and Poetry as the Core of America’s Future Memory--but we'll get deep into the reclamation and investigation of images in my paper, “Reclaiming Memory, Inventing History: Barthe’s Punctum in the Poetry of Natasha Trethewey.”

When I return I'll be hosting an Open Mic for the NSU Spartans (details to come) as well as continuing my Teen Poetry Workshop. We've done historical biographies, collage poetry, odes and we'll keep the words flowing for a few more sessions. Even if you're not a teen, you can come out to support poetry and pen some new verses with us. Here are the particulars:

WHAT: Teen Poetry Workshop -- Verse Biographies/Charting Our Own History

Activity Summary: For ages, poetry has been used as a means of charting our history in the world. It is a fast-paced art that pays attention to the minute details of our lives as well as the universality of human emotion. In this workshop, participants will engage in writing exercises that help generate poems that will tell their own stories and, ultimately, will become autobiographies in verse. No prior writing experience is needed. Students should, however, come prepared to write at each workshop and possibly share their work with others.

WHEN: Monday, 4/27, from 4:30 - 6:00

WHERE: Mary D. Pretlow Anchor Branch Library

111 W. Ocean View Ave.

441-1750 ext 323 or 324

Many fellow poets are engaging in a '30 Poems in 30 Days' project this month, I couldn't pull that off because I have so many other things going on. Even so, I'm enjoying reading the poems and have been going back to some of the greats to help my muse get her mojo going. Here is a beautiful poem that inspired me from Mary Oliver's New and Selected Poems: Volume One. I hope it inspires you too:

Sunrise

You can
die for it--
an idea,
or the world. People

have done so,
brilliantly,
letting
their small bodies be bound

to the stake,
creating
an unforgettable
fury of light. But

this morning,
climbing the familiar hills
in the familiar
fabric of dawn, I thought

of China,
and India
and Europe, and I thought
how the sun

blazes
for everyone just
so joyfully
as it rises

under the lashes
of my own eyes, and I thought
I am so many!
What is my name?

What is the name
of the deep breath I would take
over and over
for all of us? Call it

whatever you want, it is
happiness, it is another one
of the ways to enter
fire.

--Mary Oliver

Interweaving/Improv...

Watching Stevie get another much deserved accolade on PBS a few nights ago, I was reminded of the new brilliance of Esperanza Spalding...




and after watching Esperanza, I began thinking about improvisation and how we, as artists, are called on to re-create on a daily basis. Each day, I go to the page to write a poem that, in one way or another, is much like the poem a thousand other poets have already written. Often my task is much like Esperanza's here--to try to breathe new life into a work that has already reached its pinnacle. While I could be extremely biased here, no one will ever be able to re-do "Overjoyed" in any way that substanstially changes the imprint that Stevie Wonder has made with this particular piece of music. Even so, Esperanza found a way to make this song her own. She found a way to honor and uphold its brilliance while breathing her own life and rhythm and sound into a piece built on someone else's fierce life and rhythm and sound. And she did a bang up job of it. And made it look nearly effortless.

So watching Esperanza made me think about yet another Stevie tribute performance that me me think about not only improvisation, but the interweaving of voice and style. Here's a clip of a performance that brought together to very different vocalists, Kathleen Battle and James Ingram, to re-create another kind of sound:




...All this thinking about improv and interweaving made me think about one of my favorite poetry exercises. An exercise I used to use to break myself out of whatever mode I was writing (or not writing) in was to take a short (preferably less than twenty lines) poem by another poet, re-type it and literally write in between the lines to make not one, but two new pieces. First, the piece you create in conversation with another poet is new. Second, the new lines that you write, when separated, can stand on their own as a poem. The poet, then, is asked to improvise on a piece that already has its own life, tone, space, diction, etc. and find some way to break into the piece and create new points of departure within it. This exercise (much like the performances above) are often more useful if the writing style of the original poet and that of the current poet are divergent.


While thinking about this, I pulled some books of the shelf and flipped through until I found a poem that looked interesting on the page and was relatively short. I stopped somewhere in Erica Hunt's book, Local History. Here is her original poem:

Afterword


Curves are sharp and the
noises mysterious. I close my
eyes and I'm still coming around
the curve. Afterimage on retina
park. And I don't know what will
happen next. There is no guide to
context for this leap to land into.
Rigor of rope and railing, failing
that what parallel lines
we keep.


--Erica Hunt

Now, Erica Hunt is known to break the backs of words and sounds and not always in a linear fashion. This is not something I feel like I do much in my work. Therefore, I felt like I was entering new, odd space by trying to write in-between, but still around, Hunt's lines. Here's what I came up with after sitting with her poem (and the music above) for a few moments:

After/Fore/word

“…Over hearts, I have painfully turned every stone…” –Stevie Wonder


Limestone and granite
curves are sharp and the
underbelly, leaden and heavy, makes familiar
noises mysterious. I close my
body to the sound of his turning body, open my
eyes and I'm still coming around
though the sounds are mistaken. I swear I hear, I see
the curve. Afterimage on retina
his back, in reverse, everything backward. We
park. And I don't know what will
keep us from ending up on the underside of what might
happen next. There is no guide to
steer us, no boxes to be checked, no
context for this leap to land into
the curious fall. He says, Climb, but the
rigor of rope and railing, failing
is leaving too much to chance and I doubt
that what parallel lines
string together—the marble beams, unsteady ladder--
we keep. We tether,
but only for so long.

--Erica Hunt/Remica L. Bingham

And here's what I came up with when removing Hunt's lines and trying to create a cohesive poem of my own using the lines I wrote in-between her lines:

Fore/word

“…Over hearts, I have painfully turned every stone…” – Stevie Wonder

Limestone and granite
underbelly, leaden and heavy, makes familiar
to the body the sound of his turning body, open my ears
though the sounds are mistaken. I swear I hear, I see
his back, in reverse, everything backward. We
keep us from ending up on the underside of what might
steer us, no boxes to be checked, no
curious fall. He says Climb, but
leaving too much to chance I doubt
string together—the marble beams, unsteady ladder--
We tether, but only
for so long.

--Remica L. Bingham

This interweaving of words is a useful exercise because I think it helps us create something we never would have created otherwise. By thinking about ways to reside in someone else's artistic space, we probably stretch ourselves and our vision much more than we generally would when we come to the page with our own particular writing style in mind. The clips above are evidence that breaking something open and creating your own mold for it (while still having reverence, respect, maybe even awe) for the original being is a great way to discover what strikes you most about another's art and how you can bring your own unique rhythm to a canvas, then improv some type of harmony.

Since Chicago...

I've learned a great many things, since heading to the Chi for AWP. Here are a few links to pique your interest:

• Frank X. Walker will still get down on the dance floor even with a bum knee
• The Affrilachian Poets are not to be messed with
• Patricia Smith will put your sonnets to shame, even when you aren't in competition with her. And she won't even apologize for it
• Honoree Fanonne Jeffers isn't afraid to tell anyone the truth
• Everyone is always there just to see Ms. Lucille
• Free chocolate is a great way to promote a smooth, dark, long-playing poem
• I want to know Valzhyna Mort
• Natasha Trethewey is brilliant and she can rock a killer pair of boots
• Cuteness travels...and may come with a personal tailor
• Myron Michael Hardy can almost wish dreams into fruition
• Facebook is all about business
• You can find great new books at book release parties for other great new books
• Entering contests - $300; Possible money lost over a lifetime while daydreaming about poems - $1 million; Getting a book of your selected poems translated into Arabic - Priceless!

And here's a quaint little Tate poem that reminds all of us writers a thing or two we might want to remember about ourselves...or maybe not. Nevertheless, the Post might be fond of this one, too:

Teaching the Ape to Write Poems

They didn't have much trouble
teaching the ape to write poems:
first they strapped him into the chair,
then tied the pencil around his hand
(the paper had already been nailed down).
Then Dr. Bluespire leaned over his shoulder
and whispered into his ear:
"You look like a god sitting there.
Why don't you try writing something?"

--James Tate