HeatStrings

TAYARI JONES AT PENN STATE

2012-01-25T20:10:00.000-08:00

Novelist Tayari Jones was just in here sharing a couple chapters from Silver Sparrow. We're looking forward to seeing her again soon at CLA in Atlanta.

MLA Off-Site Poetry Reading 2012

2012-01-12T17:55:00.000-08:00

With great thanks to the local organizers (with an assist from SPD) the poets gathered at Seattle's Town Hall Downstairs. Records for brevity were set. Vanessa Place read silently to herself, to us. There were drinks and books and friends and links. I finally got to see Niko. Kansas was in the house.

The audio recording of the evening can be found at Penn Sound by clicking here.

There will be videos on YouTube one day.

MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION - SEATTLE 2012

2012-01-11T19:30:00.000-08:00

My own paper at this year's MLA was not scheduled till 8:30 AM on the final day, an odd time for a panel on transnational jazz, as 8:30 AM earlier in the week seemed an odd time slot for a panel on home town boy made good Jimi Hendrix. Maybe they thought the music people would all still be up at breakfast time. But all was well. You can view abstracts from the transnational jazz panel here.

The poetry division sponsored two fine panels this year: one on Robert Duncan's H.D. Book and another on women poets in the wake of modernism.

The Seattle MLA featured a series of "creative conversations," including one that featured my colleague Linda Selzer interviewing novelist Charles Johnson.

Watch this blog for photos from the Off-Site poetry marathon --

GIL SCOTT-HERON'S LAST HOLIDAY

2011-12-31T08:46:00.001-08:00

I'll have much more to say about this in other venues, but I wanted to post a quick note here on the publication of Gil Scott-Heron's long-awaited memoir. I first heard of this book when Scott-Heron mentioned the manuscript to a reporter; like many others I was eagerly looking forward to this new book when I saw an announcement that it was forthcoming from Canongate -- but then it continued not coming forth, with no explanation. The book is finally out as a posthumous production, but it's important to keep in mind that Gil was not on the scene to make final decisions about the text. The American edition is from Grove, who are all too coy about matters editorial. While I certainly didn't expect a critical edition or a full scholarly apparatus, the publishers should tell us a bit more than we learn from the one line on the copyright page acknowledging Tim Mohr's editorial efforts.

This book is the traditional "good read." Gil uses the tour he did with Stevie Wonder in support of the HOTTER THAN JULY album and the cause of getting a national holiday in honor of Dr. King as a framing device, and this is effective. (Gil's own new album of the time was REAL EYES.) I think many readers will be surprised to learn that even after having a hit record with THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE TELEVISED, Gil's primary ambition was as a writer, and that he formulated a plan to become a university professor of creative writing even as his songs were taking off. (He talked his way into a fellowship at the Johns Hopkins creative writing program.)

The Last Holiday will frustrate readers on some scores; Scott-Heron really tells readers very little about some of the most important relationships in his life. We learn nothing about the parting of ways with his long-time song-writing partner Brian Jackson, or about what happened with his marriage. Then again, when readers get to the heart-breaking last chapter they will learn something of the possible cause of that reticence, and they will also see that this book is in many ways a testament to his mother. While the book goes on past the tour with Stevie, those final passages gloss over a decade without revealing much, and there is little to warn of what was in store in the artist's final two decades. The book is strongest on Gil Scott-Heron's school years and on the era of the seventies. At several points in the narrative the author breaks from standard prose and gives us couplets; you can almost hear Scott-Heron reciting these against a musical background.

This is a compelling book with much to teach us for all its elisions.

Canongate has posted an audio recording of Gil reading from an early version of one chapter, recorded in the 90s, a chapter telling of the night on tour when word came of the killing of John Lennon. You can listen to it here.

Nathaniel Mackey and Mark McMorris at ASA

2011-12-10T10:29:00.000-08:00

Where I'd been pleasantly surprised to find so much poetry at the Guelph Jazz Festival, I was dismayed at how small a role poetry had to play in the 2011 American Studies Association conference.

But the reading placed on the last night of the program more than made up for that, as Nathaniel Mackey and Mark McMorris read together to an enthusiastic audience. Mackey presented work from his brand new book, Nod House. McMorris read from his "Dear Michael" series. Evie Shockley presented a critical response to the readings and the poets generously participated in a wide-ranging discussion with the audience.

Click here to hear Mark McMorris reading from "Dear Michael."

And to hear Nathaniel Mackey's "Day after Day of the Dead" give this s pace a click.

AMERICAN STUDIES 2011

2011-12-02T07:25:00.000-08:00

BEFORE THE FALL . . . I went to the meeting of the American Studies Association, where I saw many colleagues and friends: Priscilla Wald and Joseph Donahue, Larry Jackson, Gene Jarrett, Mark Anthony Neal, Brent Edwards, so many others. Among the many panels I got to, one on new work on Frederick Douglass, a great digital humanities conversation, the panel I chaired presenting novel approaches to cultural studies of music . . . But by far the best was the saddest, a memorial tribute for Clyde Woods. Clyde had organized a session on post-Katrina arts of New Orleans when the ASA met in D.C. a few years back, and several of those artists and presenters were on hand at this memorial along with Clyde's family, colleagues, friends and even just people who admired his work. I had known Clyde first at Penn State, and then he turned up at the other end of my commute in Santa Barbara. The last time I'd talked to Clyde had been at a summer party to honor Geoffrey Jacques's book of criticism, which Clyde, I note, purchased and got autographed. He was always a great supporter of other people's work, and so many of us benefited from his generosity and encouragement.

R.I.P Obrycki's

2011-11-24T18:05:00.000-08:00

I was never there for Thanksgiving dinner, but I wish I could have been. This month, what was easily one of the best sea food restaurants in the world closed after decades on the same street in Baltimore. These photos were taken on earlier visits (mostly while waiting for friends to get there -- I'm always early and friends are always late), as I went there for dinner nearly every time I was in Baltimore.

Having been born in Nebraska, I found the whole idea of eating a crab, or even seeing one, foreign when my family moved to the D.C. area, but it wasn't long before my friends overcame my initial reluctance (well, those friends who weren't trying to scare me off with tales of "dead men's fingers" and "mustard"), and soon enough I was making runs to places like Ernie's Crab Shack or down to the D.C. Marina to get steamers. Once my brother Dennis and I decided to get steamers; then decided to go to the movies. My apartment had no equipment for crabs -- we left them in the bathtub when we went to the movies, then had to recapture them upon our return. I had no crab pot, so we used a roasting pan -- you get the sorry picture.

But Obrycki's easily had the best crabs, crap cakes, scallops, shrimp you could ask for, and it was always a fun place to be. I'll miss it on my next trip to B'more -- though there will be a smaller version at the airport where, it is promised, we will at least be able to get good crab cakes.

Institutional Failure

2011-11-13T09:56:00.001-08:00

In the wake of the breaking news of the Penn State disaster I have learned that as long ago as last March the Harrisburg newspaper carried revelations of the fact of the grand jury investigation in progress into complaints about serial child abuse by former coach Sandusky. I confess that I do not read the Harrisburg papers, or even the State College paper; a negative effect of my commuting life.

But two things are immediately evident. Schultz, Curley and Spanier all knew that a grand jury investigation was in progress, and so far as I can tell did nothing to prepare Penn State for the horrible revelations that were sure to come. And I am certain that there are people in our university administration who follow the news from the state house and environs as part of their job responsibilities. What did they make of this news? Why was no action set in motion to meet the day when the grand jury report would be released? Why was our institution left so exposed and so vulnerable?

I have no idea if such questions will be included in the investigation now under way by the trustees, but they should be.

Our Students Show Their Colors

2011-11-12T09:07:00.001-08:00

It's a sea of blue at Penn State's football stadium today as our students show their support for the victims of Jerry Sandusky, and all victims of child abuse.

I don't know if there was anything to the TMZ story last night -- As the players were getting off the bus, I saw only one knucklehead (not a player) walking with his sweat shirt lifted up to expose a white shirt -- Everybody else was prayerful and wearing blue --

Thanks to the students who organized this way to show what we really feel this weekend.

Pre-Game Jitters

2011-11-11T17:36:00.000-08:00

We take solace where we can find it. This week, one of the only sources of pride I've been able to find at Penn State has come from the students. Several groups of students, entirely on their own initiative and prior to the decisions of the Trustees, began organizing a drive for students attending tomorrow's Penn State/Nebraska game to wear blue rather than the usual white, as a symbol of their support for the victims of child abuse. I don't have tickets for the game; still, I'll be wearing blue all day.

But now I read this on the TMZ web site:

"Multiple sources connected with the football team tell TMZ ... coaches held a meeting with players today and told them their friends and family should show support for ousted coach Joe Paterno by wearing white to the game on Saturday."

TMZ has been wrong about things before; I pray that this report proves unfounded. If it is true, though, the entire coaching staff should be fired, before the game.

I'm sorry, but there is no excuse for seizing upon this moment and wresting it from the good-hearted students who are trying to bring a modicum of dignity back to our university.

Tonight? I'm taking my candle and walking out into the darkness of the campus night, looking for an honest man.

IS THIS THE KIND OF SCHOOL PENN STATE IS?

2011-11-09T19:44:00.000-08:00

After watching the broadcast of the Penn State Trustees press conference a few minutes ago, I turned to CNN -- I'd seen their truck parked at the base of campus earlier today and knew that they were on hand. Sure enough, they had cameras and reporters on the scene as students began gathering outside Old Main in response to the news that both President Spanier and Coach Paterno had been dismissed.

I'd been worried this morning when I saw the photo of Coach Paterno on the front page of the Daily Collegian, surrounded by supportive students last night outside his home. I appreciated the emotions of the students; I understood why Paterno would be grateful to those students. But I knew that the image of a smiling Coach Paterno with his arm raised in the midst of the crowd was precisely the wrong image for Penn State to display to the world in the unfolding scandal of sex abuse of children on our campus.

Tonight on CNN I see an outpouring of support for Coach Paterno outside Old Main, and I have to think this is the wrong way to show that support. And what I am hearing from the journalists underscores that concern.

As the camera showed shouting students holding up signs, the anchor asked the on-scene reporter for help understanding what we are seeing. The anchor implored the reporter to help viewers wrap their heads around the seemingly inexplicable mood of the crowd. Why, she wondered, this mood, this spirit, when the events at the heart of our troubles are the rapes of young boys on our campus and the utter failure of our trusted leaders to respond to those events appropriately. Is this the kind of school Penn State is?

That was her question. I hope our community will quickly show that the answer is "no."

JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN AT PENN STATE

2011-11-07T14:25:00.000-08:00

BEFORE the stream of bad news began breaking over the once Happy Valley, we enjoyed a wonderful visit from John Edgar Wideman. The novelist spent several days in residence, working with our graduate creative writing students, and he gave two readings. The first was from what appears to be the new novel in progress, an intriguing further meditation on fathers and sons following the earlier Fatheralong, incorporating materials from the court case and news coverage surrounding the murder of Emmett Till. This included as well material concerning Till's father, who appears twice in Pound's Pisan Cantos. At the second reading Wideman presented a work of short fiction in progress. As busy as he was kept by our creative writing folk, Wideman found time to have a dinner with graduate students working in African American literature, during which he generously gave of himself in a far-ranging discussion.

CLICK HERE FOR A SHORT SAMPLE OF WIDEMAN'S COMMENTS INTRODUCING HIS SHORT FICTION.

Out Back

2011-10-17T12:16:00.000-07:00

This morning's visitor --

MSA Buffalo III

2011-10-16T10:14:00.001-07:00

There was no blood on the floor at the session on Postmodern Poetry: Fact or Fiction? -- though the next day's panel on "degrees of oppositional rhetoric" included a devastating critique of the promotional literature surrounding "conceptual poetries" from Richard Owens.

It's been so many years since I'd been on a yellow school bus that I was caught off guard by the "body fluid cleanup kit" I saw clamped to the front of the bus over the driver -- Maybe something like this would be useful in performance poetry venues --

My own panel, taking up the subject of how some infrequently read moderns read modernism (William S. Braithwaite, Alfred Kreymborg, etc.) held down an 8:30 AM slot, but had an attentive audience none-the-less. Other standouts for me included a roundtable on poetic innovation and Kaplan Harris's talk on Larry Eigner. I chaired a panel on Modernist Revivals and the Politics of Appropriation with presentations by Leif Sorensen, Todd Carmody and John Connor.

That evening I spent with the Buffalo cousins. While waiting for dinner I spotted a fellow who was really enjoying this summerish weather and had climbed with his glass of wine to a perch atop a building across the street from where I was dining. The cousins (thanks guys!) then took me to Buffalo's African American Cultural Center on Masten Avenue, where the Paul Robeson Theater was mounting a production. I had no idea what was in store for me till we arrived at the theater, when I discovered we were about to see "Cool Blues," a play based on the last days of Charlie Parker by Bill Harris. A few years back I had read a selection of Harris's plays and other writings in the process of a promotion review for Harris at Wayne State University. It was a pleasant surprise to find that the cousins had, without knowing they were doing so, taken me to a play with which I had an unanticipated personal connection.

Next - On to ASA --

MSA in Buffalo 2011 Part II

2011-10-15T16:49:00.001-07:00

Friday I rolled out of bed for a morning panel on "The Eros of Innovation," which sounds more a late night topic but was handled well by Jeanne Heuving, Rob Halpern and Robin Tremblay-McGaw. I spent the rest of the day in panels on "Race, Ownership & Censorship in Modernist Print Culture," "Modernism and the Black Bourgeoisie" and "Innovative Black Poetry." After an interlude in the Century Grill across the street, we trooped over to Hallwall's Contemporary Arts Center for a group poetry reading. A recording of that reading is available at the Heat Strings page of Penn Sound. Click here.

MODERNIST STUDIES 2011 - Buffalo I

2011-10-14T11:25:00.000-07:00

Thirteen years after the first Modernist Studies Association conference at Penn State, the tribes gathered again in Buffalo under the banner of "Structures of Innovation." My afternoon started out with Jed Rasula's panel on the poetics of metropolitan modernity, where Jed was joined by Tim Conley and Tim Harte. A lot of Tim for one panel. In part, the panel explored the works included in the new anthology Burning City: Poems of Metropolitan Modernity, a volume full of surprises and timely reminders.

The first plenary of the conference was given over to Michael Davidson's talk, "'Living in the same place . . . and different places': Cosmopoetics in and after Modernism," which began and ended with intriguing reflections on Davidson's experiences of Buffalo and San Diego.

We all piled into yellow school busses to go over to the Karpeles Manuscript Museum (which Steve McCaffery had told me about on a previous visit to Buffalo), where our reception unfolded against the backdrop of an exhibit of Oulipo memorabilia. Somehow the museum's display of the works of Conan-Doyle seemed appropriate in the Oulipian context -- I could well imagine Holmes giving himself to the contemplation of rigorous but forgotten forms.

Then, being gypsy scholars, we retired to the hotel bar.

DAY TWO - CELEBRATING AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE

2011-10-11T17:03:00.000-07:00

Yes, this time all the other gypsy scholars joined us in our encampment in central Pennsylvania. Our second day kicked off with a keynote from Charles Nero, who turns out to have been a friend of the late poet Essex Hemphill, who had been a fellow student with me at Federal City College. Essex had gone on to found the literary journal Nethula with Kathy Elaine Anderson, a journal well worth rereading today. Marci Blackman offered a reading in the second session before we all devolved into our panels again. It was a panel on the Harlem Renaissance that was the occasion of another reunion for me. I hadn't seen Jacqueline Jones, now of Francis Marion University, since she had gone to Africa some years ago. We first met back in my Silicon Valley days, and it was wonderful to catch up with her family news and just to see her again. An afternoon panel included a paper on J.J. Phillips's novel Mojo Hand, which I first heard of from Ishmael Reed -- It's a wild novel that needs recovery. A final plenary roundtable brought reflections on the conference and its themes from L.H. Stallings, Sharon Holland, Trudier Harris, Robert Reid-Pharr and Magdalena Zaborowska.

But it was the after dinner performance I'd been looking forward to all weekend. I got to introduce what was billed as a "reading/performance" by Duriel Harris. At our last African American literature conference, Howard Rambsy had speculated that Maryemma Graham might be more than one person. Duriel brought an entire cast to the stage as she enacted several pieces from her two books of poetry, fully inhabiting the personae of those poems.

Then it was off to Buffalo for Modernist Studies -- I'll be back with postings from that one in the coming days.

CELEBRATING AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE

2011-10-10T20:03:00.001-07:00

Penn State is the host to a biennial conference on African American Literature that has been gathering a growing base of scholars and writers. This year's theme was "Race and Sexual Identity." The first day featured readings and performances by E. Patrick Johnson, Sharon Bridgforth (who had been the subject of a talk I'd heard just before at the TILTS symposium in Austin) and Randall Kenan. As at the last conference, I organized the theory panel and we had provocative presentations by Maisha Wester and Evie Shockley.

After a reception we all convened for a banquet followed by a musical offering from Ronnie Burrage.

AUSTIN TILTS - DAY TWO

2011-09-20T08:52:00.000-07:00

And this could be another chapter from the Brief Annotated History of Aldon and the Hat -- This sign greeted me upon my arrival at the B&B where I was staying during my Austin TILTS.

Day two dawned bright and hot. Evie Shockley, Dante Micheaux, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon and I had a leisurely poets' breakfast and sought the refuge of the shady front porch. (By the way, the highest concentration of people who drink Dr. Pepper is in the South, so I felt welcome.)

Then it was back to campus for an afternoon roundtable on issues of form, audience, politics and anything else we thought to bring up, featuring GerShun Avilez, Keith Leonard, Roger Reeves, Lesley Wheeler and me. That evening the retiring Arnold Rampersad gave a keynote on the history of African American poetry.

On my way out of town I cast a last look at that notorious tower on the U.T. campus, choosing to see in it a post-9/11 beacon of education. Any place that could make this much room for the poetics of our time can surely find a way to survive governors and boards and flourish in the newish century.

GYPSY SCHOLAR II - Texas

2011-09-20T04:27:00.000-07:00

I rode that rainbow and found myself at the end in front of these giant guitars -- nice.

I had gone to Austin, stopping in State College long enough to meet with my wonderful Caribbean Literature grad seminar students. At the University of Guelph the Vice President of Research in welcoming us to the colloquium had told us that he likes to think of Guelph as the Austin of Canada. Sister cities of a sort, I suppose . . .

Having seen a band named TILTING perform at Guelph, I was now in Austin for a symposium sponsored by TILTS, the Texas Institute for Literary and Textual Studies. We had been gathered together for two days of readings and discussions among scholar/poets.

The event kicked off with "Poetry on the Plaza," readings outside the Ransom Center. Ice cream was served, a good idea in the 100 degree plus heat. That afternoon featured a roundtable with Chanel Clarke, Dawn Lundy Martin, Dante Micheaux, Evie Shockley and Penn State alum Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon. During casual conversation at lunch I observed that the MacArthur Foundation Awards in literature, somewhat in contrast to the frequent practice in visual arts and music, seem invariably to go to the already recognized and amply rewarded. Sure enough, the news broke shortly that a MacArthur was going to the Poet Laureate of the U.S. -- I could think of at least one poet I saw in Texas who should have gotten a MacArthur a long time ago -- Ah MacArthur, Ah humanity . . .

The symposia in Austin were organized by Meta Jones and Lisa Moore with the help of an able and enthusiastic staff. The first night culminated with a great reading by Harryette Mullen, including presentation of much new work from her "Tanka Diary." The reading was dedicated to David Wevill, who, long before coming to Texas, had been a member of "The Group," not to be confused with a novel by Mary McCarthy. David was on hand and went out to dinner with us afterwards -- An honor to meet him having read his work over the years. Harryette is an alum of this very campus, so it was something of a homecoming for her.

Though I'd never before been to Austin it was something of a homecoming for me too, spending the days with poet/critics I had come to know over the years -- There was a documentary once titled "Piano Players Rarely Ever Play Together." Here for two days in Austin, some of the greats were playing together (and sounding good, I might add).

GUELPH JAZZ FESTIVAL - FINAL DAY

2011-09-19T14:45:00.000-07:00

I'll gladly confess that I went back to the hotel for a nap. I didn't want to risk missing William Parker's 6:15 AM solo bass concert that was closing out Nuit Blanche (though not the festival -- I had to catch my flight before the final show).

When I got to the Arts Center a solo drum concert was just winding up in the next gallery -- just the thing to reinvigorate a roomful of folk who had been up all night.

After a brief introduction, Parker launched into his ambitious solo.

Click here for a short audio sample of Parker's performance.

AND you can click here for an all too brief video sample of Parker in action.

Earlier in the week, one announcer had joked that William Parker is the patron saint of the Guelph Jazz Festival. Given how often he played, with so many differing configurations of musicians (he even accepted the task of reading Alexandre Pierrepont's text during one improvisation), it's clear that Parker is fully committed to Guelph's celebration of improvisation in music.

As he brought his solo, and my festival, to a close, William Parker began to lead the audience in a sing-along dating to his days playing with the late Don Cherry.

Having forgotten completely that the tenth anniversary of 9/11 was coming on, I had booked my flight back to the States on 9/11/2011 -- My mind was very much on the losses represented by that date as I was listening to Parker and getting ready to leave Canada. The lyric Parker was recalling that he had learned from Cherry was just what I needed to sing that day: "May the light that remains abide within you." Then, and I wouldn't believe it myself if I didn't have this picture, I walked out the front door and was faced with a ribbon of rainbow in the sky to accompany me home.

Guelph Jazz Festival - Day Four

2011-09-18T21:11:00.000-07:00

With the colloquium concluded, it was all music all day and night in Guelph. I rode over to the Guelph Youth Music Center with Jayne Cortez for the duet improv featuring Trevor Watts and Veryan Weston. Cortez had appeared in a program with Watts in England many years ago; this was my first time hearing this pair.

And so began the biggest 24 hours of music in Canada. Guelph traditionally hosts "nuit blanche," a series of performances spread around town that go on all through the night.

Under a tent on Wyndham Street there were free concerts all day -- After Watts and Weston I caught a power Ska band, Sound One from Burlington, Ontario, while having lunch.
I headed back to the River Run Center for the afternoon concerts to hear a trio of Danish saxophonist Lotte Anker with Americans Craig Taborn and Gerald Cleaver. I didn't go simply out of a sense of Danish national pride; this was my first opportunity to see Taborn in person, who I've been listening to on recordings with growing interest.

Click here for a brief audio sample of Anker, Taborn and Cleaver.

For short video samples, click here and here.

Anker, Taborn and Cleaver were followed to the stage by Australian minimalists The Necks whose literally mesmerizing music will be heard again live in Los Angeles later in their tour.

Back at the Wyndham Street tent, local soul favorite Shane Phillips was presenting his tribute to the late Gil Scott-Heron. The show started oddly with songs by Marvin Gaye and Bill Withers that Scott-Heron had covered at one time or another, but the band finally got to Gil's own pieces, including The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, which I have never seen anyone else attempt live. Click here for a video of Shane Phillips doing Johannesburg.

Closing out the night at the River Run Center was a double-header starting with the lively young act, The Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, featuring the sons of Chicago trumpet great Phil Cohran. The feature, and the high point of the entire week for me, was a set by Henry Threadgill and Zooid. I've been following Threadgill since I first bought an LP of the trio Air he formed with Fred Hopkins and Steve McCall decades ago. Like Miles Davis, Threadgill changes the musical context in which his compositions appear. Zooid gives them a more introspective and intensely searching feel.

Guelph Jazz Festival - Day Three

2011-09-18T10:42:00.000-07:00

THIS was my prized possession for one week in September 2011.

By the third day of the festival and colloquium, poetry really had taken center stage. We started the morning with a lecture/demonstration from Jayne Cortez titled "Find Your Voice and Use It," including a recording of Cortez performing that poem with the Firespitters band. [For an interesting alternate take on the piece, try this video from last year of Cortez reciting the poem with her son, Denardo Coleman.]

Later in the morning we heard a poetry reading by Kevin McNeilly from his new book Embouchure with improvised accompaniment by trumpeter Eric Lewis. [Click here for an audio sample of McNeilly and Lewis in performance.]

After lunch Paris poet Alexandre Pierrepont performed with Marianne Trudel, Didier Petit and Gerry Hemingway, whose flight had finally made it across the Atlantic.

There was a plenary session in which Henry Threadgill sat for an informative interview, and the afternoon closed out with a tightly arranged set by the Marianne Trudel Septet.

GUELPH JAZZ FESTIVAL Day Two

2011-09-17T08:09:00.000-07:00

The second day of the colloquium presented in conjunction with the jazz festival featured talks and workshops on everything from the use of musical improvisation in Nigerian social activism to organizational practices in laptop orchestras. I was particularly interested in Tegan Ceschi-Smith's paper on Mingus's "Fables of Faubus" and the record company censorship Mingus faced. Francois Houle, here depicted with his clarinet, delivered a fascinating discussion of "poetic restructuralist aspects in live performance," including a practical demonstration. There was a morning performance in which musicians created an improvised soundscape as the Mexican artist Jazzmoart strung paper snakes about the room and moved through the performance space and audience drawing and painting with the emerging music. Canadian musicians The Rent returned for an afternoon workshop detailing their work on Steve Lacy's "Tips," which it turns out several in the audience hadn't known of as the CD appears to be out of print. Lacy worked often with texts, especially poetry, and I was beginning to silently celebrate the strong presence of poetry at this year's festival.

Which continued in my own keynote lecture, "Meeting Over Yonder," taking up the program William Parker has created reimagining the music of Curtis Mayfield with poetry in performance by Amiri Baraka, a project that had in fact been performed at an earlier Guelph festival. Sorry to say I have no photos from my keynote. Perhaps one of the many other photographers on the scene will send me something. This session was something of a reunion as well; I was introduced by Rob Wallace, a fine scholar and drummer I had met years ago on a visit to UC Santa Barbara's English Department. (You really should drop by your library and check out Rob's great book, Improvisation and the Making of American Literary Modernism, which you can read about by following this link.) And while you're visiting that site, click on this link and buy a copy of William Parker's official release of his Curtis Mayfield project.

[even the local beaver was inspired to try a percussion improv outside the hall]

After a reception in the art gallery, we all made the trek across town to the River Run Center for an evening concert featuring Canadian improvisers TILTING followed by a trio improvisation led by Paul Plimley with the aforementioned William Parker on bass. Gerry Hemingway was supposed to play with them, but was still in the air between England and the US, so his place was ably taken by a Canadian drummer who was able to get to Guelph in time to confer with Parker and Plimley about what they were about. Check the next Guelph blog for a photo of Hemingway, who arrived in time to play later in the festival.

GYPSY SCHOLAR PART I - Guelph

2011-09-12T13:01:00.001-07:00

My friend Cecil Giscombe has talked about the "No Book Book Tour." I've got a book, but this is more of a circuit riding affair I'm commencing. First up: The Guelph Jazz Festival, where I was invited to give one of two keynote addresses at the colloquium. Since I'm leaving on another mission in the morning, I'll just post these few photos from the first day of Guelph for now, but I'll be back with more in a few days.

Ajay Hebble and all the staff and volunteers put together a remarkable week in celebration of musical improvisation. The colloquium got started with a reading and interview featuring Caribbean/Canadian writer Cecil Foster, author of Blackness and Modernity.

The rest of the day brought a host of panelists discussing the pedagogy of improvisation (including teaching improv in a big band or a choral context), work on Jack Kerouac and jazz, reconsiderations of Bix, and a workshop on contact improvisation in dance.

That evening there was a wonderful exploration of the music of Steve Lacy by a Canadian group, The Rent.

BACK TO SCHOOL

2011-09-04T14:58:00.001-07:00

I've in truth been back at school a couple weeks already, but today was the annual Penn State English back to school picnic. The thunderstorm that had been threatening held off (it's breaking furiously around me now)

Oh Oh -- there goes the electricity --

Back now -- The picnic, human-powered, was again on Tussey Mountain, where all the birds sing bass and the bass sing contralto (probably because if you catch one, you have to toss it back in the water after its aria) --

The veritable good time was had by all. In the annual raffle to support the grad student group I won a gift certificate for a hair salon. Nice, but I passed it along to someone who could make better use of it.

We'll all be back in our classrooms Tuesday, but for now, the laboring classes had one fine day of rest.

Bad Tenors Back to School West Coast Tour

2011-08-22T15:59:00.000-07:00

CLICKEAR AQUI to hear backyard badness.

The 1980s were a time of tremendous musical ferment in D.C. There was the slow national awakening to the Go Go scene (marked by Spike Lee's inclusion of the music in his film), there was the harDCore phenomenon, the Bad Brains were stirring their stew and the famed 930 club was still located at 930.

And then there was the mysterious Bad Tenors Blues Band. The Bad Tenors, noted for their shifting personnel, first surfaced at a series of benefits for poetry programming on Pacifica Radio (WPFW). They disappeared for a time, only to resurface at the ADD Arts Festivals, where they appeared on bills (though not on the same stage!) with On Beyond Zebra, Gil Scott-Heron and Mary Chapin Carpenter. Local critic Royal Stokes noted their harmonica and guitar stylings in the Washington Post. The group also appeared at such odd venues as D.C.'s only above-ground Rathskellar and played a triumphant tour of E St., NW. The band was known to include at various times Dennis "Little Bro" Nielsen, Ross "Hound Dog" Taylor, "Huge" Walthall and "Wally" Walton. There was never any telling who might appear on the drummer's throne at any given gig, and the group were even known to play "unplugged," following the fad of the day. The only constant was the presence of co-founders Aldon "Papa Doc" Nielsen and Richard "I Still Ain't Got No Nickname" Flynn.

Seeing even the Monkees doing the reunion tour thing, the Bad Tenors decided to have a go at it themselves and were quickly booked for a Kardashian Wedding Weekend garden party. The crowd went wild when the Bad Tenors performed their famed bad tenoring. Rumor has it they may reappear at any moment (in any configuration) bringing the blues back to wine tastings everywhere.

(muchos photos A.Everett)

MANTIC SEMANTIC - Now Available

2011-07-28T10:02:00.000-07:00

Last Spring, about the time I was working up the syllabus for the seminar I was to offer at the University of Kansas, Steve Tills got in touch with me about doing a chapbook of my poetry. I've always admired Steve and his "chappers" and so was happy to agree to the project.

BUT THEN . . . turns out the chapbook is being produced in Lawrence, Kansas, the very week I am to arrive in town.

In an earlier post I noted my first meeting with poet Jim McCrary. Jim not only contributed the blurb for the chapbook and saw it through press, he arranged for a publication reading in the series at THE TAPROOM downtown. The event started out with an open reading -- Due to unusual tech problems, I don't have a full recording of the event and so don't have the names of all the readers, though Kara Bollinger and Mary Dockery, both participants in the seminar, both read new work.

The other featured reader was Crystal Boson, who, according to Pank magazine, is fascinated by both bacon and roller derby, and whose poetry has appeared in Callaloo. Her own chapbook is The Icarus Series (she did seem to be flying perilously close to the sun that day).

Lots of old and new friends in the room - I couldn't have asked for a better way to celebrate the new chapbook.

The new book is from Hank's Loose Gravel Press.

To inquire about getting copies, contact sueandjim5@juno.com or theenkBooks@rochester.rr.com

CLICK HERE OR IN BLOG TITLE TO LISTEN TO THE OPENING OF MY PORTION OF THE PUBLICATION READING

LAWRENCE OF KANSAS

2011-07-26T16:52:00.002-07:00

Just back from two weeks at the University of Kansas, where I'd been invited to teach a graduate seminar for their Summer Institute for Rethinking Literature. The subject of the seminar, and of the public lecture I delivered while there, was contemporary African American Experimental Poetry and Poetics.

Found myself working every day with an exciting and engaged group of scholars from whom I learned much in the course of our discussions.

I don't know what your idea of a summer vacation might be, but three hours a day reading and talking about poetry with this group was just what I needed to get through that heat wave that enveloped most of the country this July.

As it turned out, my time in Kansas coincided with the final stages of the Women's World Cup, so it was off to the Buffalo Wild Wings Grill to watch the championship game on their big flat screens.

At the close of the seminar, we all went to "The Pig" (don't ask) for a final and joyful goodbye.

Burning Kansas Remembers Gil Scott Heron

2011-07-18T20:17:00.000-07:00

Saw this display in a window on Massachusetts Street in Lawrence, Kansas last night on my way to the poetry reading. It's going home with me. Thanks to the store staff.

In Lawrence

2011-07-13T04:38:00.001-07:00

I'm at the University of Kansas for their Institute for Rethinking Literature. Whenever I'm about to start rethinking literature, I like to meet up with a poet for drinks first. Jim McCrary (note the San Jose State baseball cap here depicted) kindly welcomed me to the Free State Grill, where I got a John Brown Tee shirt. Jim shared his memories of David Bromige with me. Max Douglass was someone Jim had known both in California and Kansas -- If you've never heard of Max Douglass, you should first read Kenneth Irby's great poem For Max Douglass and then you should try to locate a copy of Douglass's Collected Poems.

From Jim's own poetry, here's a passage out of Dive, She Said:

Some too will agree

it doesn't go

towards our finish

when that might be

fence and

moving fast

Ahh what's the use

we do go on

this old way

KANSAS!

2011-07-08T13:31:00.001-07:00

I'm heading off to the University of Kansas for their Institute for Rethinking Literature.

If you happen to be passing through Lawrence, be sure to drop by --

Ed Roberson - Winner of the 2011 Stephen Henderson Award

2011-07-02T08:34:00.000-07:00

The Stephen Henderson Award for achievement in literature was established by the African American Literature and Culture Society in memory of one of America's most respected literary critics, the author/editor of Understanding the New Black Poetry. This year it was my honor to introduce Ed Roberson on the occasion of his receipt of the award in Boston. It was my last official act as president of the society and I could not have asked for a better way to finish my term.

Ed read passages from his most recent book, To See the Earth before the End of the World, and was greeted by an enthusiastic audience.

You can hear the entire reading at the Heat Strings site on Penn Sound by clicking here.

AMERICAN LITERATURE ASSOCIATION - BOSTON 2011

2011-07-01T19:28:00.001-07:00

I've been in North Carolina so am a bit late in posting photos from the 2011 American Literature Association in Boston. This was my final year of service as President of the African American Literature Association. As of now, the new officers are President James Peterson of Lehigh, First Vice President Keith Byerman of Indiana State, and Second Vice President Shirley Moody Turner of Penn State.

We had an exceptional set of panels this year, including such presentations as the first critical analysis I've heard anywhere of Jerry Ward's Katrina Papers.

My friend from grad school days Richard Flynn was there, along with his son, Richard Flynn, who is commencing graduate work at Brandeis. One of Richard's Georgia Southern colleagues had her daughter with her.

I've always enjoyed seeing people bring their children with them to conferences, but now I'm starting to feel uncharacteristically grandfatherly.

and somewhat interstitial . . .

on WHAT WAS AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE

2011-06-14T21:20:00.000-07:00

"The dialogue that is African American literature really gets going with the slave narrative, the first book-length manuscript of which was published by Olaudah Equiano in 1789." --Chris Jaynes

Professor Jaynes, recently ejected from a tenure track position, goes on to make clear that he does not confuse the goals to which African American literature might be directed with its ontological status as a literature, and writes of it, I note, in the present tense. But then what would he know; he couldn't even hang on to a tenure track in a literature department. Worse still, he is a fictional character, an African American fictional character inhabiting the dialogue that constitutes a literature called "African American." See PYM, by Mat Johnson.

Warrenized

2011-06-13T09:43:00.000-07:00

[The last time I was asked to write for a symposium about a book was during the Modernist Studies Association, for their meeting in Nashville. The symposium, organized by faculty and staff at Vanderbilt, was a retrospective on Robert Penn Warren's WHO SPEAKS FOR THE NEGRO. I couldn't help thinking of the coincidence when I was asked by the new on-line Los Angeles Review of Books to participate in a symposium responding to another Warren book, Kenneth Warren's What Was African American Literature. Here is the response I wrote for them, published in today's issue.]

WASNESSAldon Lynn Nielsen
As someone who has devoted a considerable part of his life and energies to the study of what I took to be contemporary African American literature, I suppose I may be forgiven the trepidation with which I approached a book whose central claim is that there is no such thing, especially as this book was written by someone, Professor Kenneth Warren, whose earlier work I have learned from and cited in my own. But I will concede at the outset: if we define African American Literature as something that “would not have existed as a literature” had it not been for “white suspicions of, or commitment to imposing, black inferiority,” then, yes, as Warren argues, “African American literature as a distinct entity would seem to be at an end.” I would go farther, even, and suggest that if we define African American literature as “a postemancipation phenomenon that gained its coherence as an undertaking in the social world defined by the system of Jim Crow segregation which ensued after the nation’s retreat from Reconstruction,” as Professor Warren does on the book’s first page, then African American literature may never have existed at all, for, as he notes, “the mere existence of literary texts does not necessarily indicate the presence of a literature.”

But this begs the question: why would anyone be satisfied with such a procrustean definition of the field of African American literature? Warren never really supplies sufficiently compelling (to this reader at least) answers to that question, despite his powerfully engaging readings of literary history and recent debates.

His argument feels familiar. I am old enough to have met the first person who ever received a doctorate in American Studies, and I have worked in the past with faculty who regaled me with stories of battles with their own senior colleagues, those traditionalists who weren’t sure there was such a thing as American literature. The earliest scholars to configure a collection of texts that they termed “American Literature,” of course, did so with no thought for the writings of black Americans – and thus devised just the sort of “American Literature” that supplied the motivation and coherence for configuring an African American literature. In the years of my schooling and early writing we witnessed a flood of critical works on the invention of “America,” “sexuality,” “Africa,” the “Orient,” and even “the human,” so it was inevitable that scholars who had come to think of such categories as invented, would, in turn, shift focus from their birth to their demise. And so we had the end of history and even the end of the human, and just as Warren argues that African American authors once wrote literary texts that were not “a literature,” and may now be doing so once more, we were encouraged to think that, while things might continue to happen, they would no more constitute history, and while things might continue to be written, they would no longer constitute a literature.

In a world of such fine distinctions, the assertion once made by conservative white critics can now be made by a prominent African American critic: African American literature, perhaps, is not. In a much cited passage, cited again by Warren, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., advanced the thesis that “unlike almost every other literary tradition, the Afro-American literary tradition was generated as a response to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century allegations that persons of African descent did not, and could not, create literature.” This last was certainly the position adopted by Thomas Jefferson, who, in an argument parallel to Warren’s in places, held that while Phillis Wheatley wrote poems, she did not write literature. This widely repeated passage from Gates shows us, at the very least, that Professor Gates is not a poet, and neither was Thomas Jefferson. But the importance for the present debate is this: If we choose to accept Gates’s argument, then we must also accept the implication that this “response,” and thus African American literature’s reason for being, might one day dissipate. In “The Negro Art Hokum,” first published in the Nation on June 16, 1926 (and now perhaps best known for having prompted Langston Hughes to write the much more famous “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”), George Schuyler boldly holds that there was not and never had been an African American literature. Warren here reproduces Schuyler’s devastating quip to the effect that “Negro art ‘made in America’ is as nonexistent as the widely advertised profundity of Calvin Coolidge.” Negro art did not exist, in Schuyler’s view, because of the ontological status of the Negro, who, according to Schuyler, was no more than a “lampblacked Anglo-Saxon.” Where Gates holds that African American literature came to be for reasons that might one day no longer hold, and Schuyler argued that there had never been and never could be an African American literature, Amiri Baraka, in his essay “The Myth of a Negro Literature,” an essay assuredly not cited by Warren, made the provocative case that there had never been such a literature, only, as per Jefferson, black middle class imitations of white writing. In Baraka’s estimation, African American literature was not, as Warren has it, something constructed in retrospect, but something whose possibility lay in a future writing.

As provocative and mischievous as Baraka, Warren suggests that the objection that African American artists continue “to write what they understand to be African American literature,” might “have been met more easily had I given the book the titleWhat Was Negro Literature?” He is probably right about that, but had his book been so titled, it would not have so rapidly become the subject of an online forum in the influential Chronicle of Higher Education or a collection of responses in the new Los Angeles Review of Books, let alone, as is surely inevitable, the occasion of many heated panel discussions at professional conferences. But what of that “Negro literature” that apparently did not exist as Negro literature in the antebellum era? Warren’s argument makes Phillis Wheatley and Jupiter Hammon part of African American literature only retroactively, but what, then, did Jupiter Hammon think he was doing when he wrote to his fellow poet in slavery Phillis Wheatley? It will not do to say that writing by slaves was not a literature until we said it was, nor will it do to make such a case regarding the writing of free blacks in the antebellum period.

Once he’s decided on his basic distinctions, Warren is a little careless with his evidence. In reading James Weldon Johnson’s introduction to Sterling Brown’s first collection of poetry, Southern Road, Warren finds Johnson tracing a view of the earlier writing much like his own. “In Johnson’s brief comments,” as Warren characterizes them, there had earlier been “simply Negroes who were writers–or perhaps one could helpfully say that they were writers who were not yet Negro writers.” In my own scholarly practice I’ve had to learn to resist being so “helpful” to my sources. This is not what Johnson says at all, as is readily evident in the very passage from Johnson that Warren quotes, where Johnson writes:

it is only in the last ten years that America as a whole has been made consciously aware of the Negro as a literary artist… . It is only within these few years that the arbiters of American letters have begun to assay the work of these writers by the general literary standards and accord it such appraisal as it might merit.

It is one thing to acknowledge that many black American writers harbored hopes that their work would convince the larger American polity of something, and it is quite another to posit this as the primary motivation for the literature’s very existence. We should not enlist Johnson in the argument that African American literature only becomes African American literature once recognized by that “America as a whole” and those “arbiters” Johnson has in his sights. One needn’t be a black nationalist to get a bit queasy at the suggestion, and he is arguing something quite different here.

The untenability of the book’s central thesis produces a number of slippery spots in the text. Warren makes an important distinction between indexical and instrumental texts, but then reads novels as if they were social science. Schuyler’s novel Black No More, for example, is a book that, we are told, “demonstrates” that “even when race no longer matters, all sorts of inequalities can still count in American social life.” I dearly love Schuyler’s novel, one of the most deadly satires of race in America ever written, but I’m not sure that fiction can safely be held to “demonstrate” a truth of social life in quite the way Warren suggests. Warren states that “it is arguable that since The New Negro, only three or four edited collections … have had a field defining effect … comparable to Locke’s earlier volume,” and he specifies Baraka and Neal’s Black Fire, Gayle’s The Black Aesthetic and Gates’s “Race,” Writing and Difference. The first two items on this list may have had an even greater reach than Locke’s collection. They reached far beyond the academy and were part of a general figure/background shift in thinking about black arts. As important as the Gates collection is (and it is very important), it’s not at all evident why it should be privileged above such volumes as The Reconstruction of Instruction or Chant of Saints. (For that matter, Warren’s comment has the effect of disappearing such field-changing collections of African American feminist work as Mari Evans’s Black Women Writers, Sturdy Black Bridges by Bell, Parker and Guy-Sheftall, or Mary Helen Washington’s Black Eyed Susans and Midnight Birds.) More tellingly, Warren cautions readers against confusing the story of “what African American literature was, as opposed to what it is now,” and yet he has already told us, and continues to tell us, that African American literature is not. “African American literature has come to an end.”

Warren himself alerts us to the echo in his title of Leslie Fiedler’s What Was Literature?and the lectures that produced this book participate in that rhetoric of wasness: What Was the Oxford Movement?, What Was Socialism?, What Was Shakespeare?, What Was Postmodernism?, and, my own favorite, What Was the Hipster? Warren’s book has already demonstrated Fiedler’s ability to stir up conversation, but I worry, still, that little of real use will come of that discussion, which is too bad. Warren has, while tossing his grenades, given us some truly interesting readings of the evolution of African American intellectual debates over a crucial period, raising, for example, the importance of the special issue of the journal Phylon titled “The Negro in Literature: The Current Scene,” a collection that has been, as Warren details, sadly overlooked, and one that has much to tell us about the unfolding of what was, and is, for want of a better term, African American literature.

[Part 1 of the symposium, including responses from Walter Benn Michaels and Erica Edwards, can be found at this link.]

Professor Gil Scott-Heron

2011-05-30T15:14:00.000-07:00

small talk at 125th and lenox

a collection

of black poems

gil scott-heron

photographs by steve wilson

THE

WORLD

PUBLISHING

COMPANY

NEW YORK

AND

CLEVELAND

The very first LP released by Gil Scott-Heron bore the legend "A NEW BLACK POET" above the title, and that's the way I want to remember him. The world first knew him by way of a recording, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," which has become so much a part of our vocabularies that people routinely allude to it in print without feeling the need to identify its source. The recording most remember was not, though, Scott-Heron's first version of the piece. His first album included a version that was very much what he had been doing live; the second version, found on his second album, featured a full band with a driving bass, and that's the one we all heard booming from our radios. A poem -- on the radio -- and it was a hit. Dylan had broken the restrictions on the length of a pop record (though most radio stations played a version missing one verse), and now Gil Scott-Heron had shown you could have a hit record that was in fact a poem. No singing at all -- and so we were almost surprised when we got the album and found that he sang too -- that, in fact, he was a great song writer. Before you knew it there were covers of his compositions everywhere. If you've never heard it, look up Esther Phillips's scorching version of Gil's "Home Is Where The Hatred Is." La Belle, no longer the Blue Bells, even covered "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," mashing it up with "Something in the Air." These were the kind of recordings that could change your life.

I first knew of Gil Scott-Heron by way of those records, but I soon came to know him as a writer and a teacher. As a newly enrolled English major at the Federal City College in my home town, Washington, D.C., I was working a night shift across town and then going to school full time in one of those "temporary" buildings, this one over on E Street, left over from the second World War. (That building, which then housed most of the humanities for the college, later became a shelter for the homeless. Now it's gone, temporary at last.) There were always vendors with tables outside the building, selling African arts, tapes, incense, you name it. As I sat in Gregory Rigsby's Caribbean Literature course on hot days with the windows open, I could hear Doug and Jean Carn's vocal arrangement of Coltrane's "Acknowledgment" floating up from the vendor's boom box below.

And my Professor for Creative Writing was Gil Scott-Heron.

I'll admit to being a bit awed as I approached the first meeting of the course. This guy was just a year-and-a-half older than me and had already published two novels, a book of poetry, and four record albums. He'd just recently earned an MA in writing from Johns Hopkins University over in Baltimore. That first novel, The Vulture, was a murder mystery with an intricate plot. Clearly Scott-Heron knew something about the form. His second novel was one of the first to offer a depiction of the contemporary HBCU with its plot involving radical politics at a black college.

Came the first day of class and I entered the room to find just two people there, a young woman and a tall skinny dude wearing a World War I aviator's cap and gloves that had no fingers. I of course took a seat by the young woman and struck up a conversation. At one point I expressed the hope that there were more than three of us in the class. Without looking up, the skinny dude, who'd been furiously making notes the whole time, said, "Oh, there's fifteen people signed up." That, as it turned out, was Gil Scott-Heron.

Gil was one of the three professors most responsible for what I went on to become in my career. He rapidly saw what I was trying to do and was encouraging from the outset. We spent many hours in his office kicking around ideas about books we loved. (He always carried an attache case, and as that case sat open on the floor of his office you could see the distinctive shape of his first book of poems sticking up out of a pocket in the lid, a book tall and skinny like its author.) Like all good creative writing teachers, he assigned a lot of reading. I'd already read people like Chesnutt and Toomer on my own. My first African American Lit class had brought me to Melvin Tolson. To my reading of more "out" novelists like Ishmael Reed, Gil added the works of John Hawkes, who I had never read before. The Lime Twig was on that first syllabus. Gil read voraciously and read every type of literature. In addition to the most experimental novelists, he also had a real taste for genre fiction, especially genre fiction built around some challenging formal device, like his own first novel. I remember he loved The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, and I can see why. (These guys take over a subway car; then what?!) Gil would diagram these plot issues with us on the blackboard and we'd discuss how to handle various intricate corners we might write ourselves into and out of. Gil also read and liked to talk about We Almost Lost Detroit, one of the first books to raise popular concern with nuclear safety issues. That reading in turn led to the creation of the song "We Almost Lost Detroit This Time," which Scott-Heron performed at the legendary No Nukes concert, and you can hear it on the album made from that benefit concert.

Sure enough, a few more students showed up, but one thing that made that first class so worthwhile was its intimacy. We all felt free to talk about anything and our work benefited from it. I was already publishing poetry by then, but Gil's class was a place where I could try out new ideas.

I took a second class, but by then word had gotten around that Scott-Heron was teaching at FCC and the class was filled to the brim. The college, which was not paying Gil much, wanted, like all colleges, to shoehorn as many students into as few classes as possible. Gil, an accomplished performer from an early age, had no trouble managing a large class, too large for creative writing, and we still had those great, free-ranging discussions in his office. (The phone by then rang constantly. Gil would answer, and was always nice to the people on the other end. But whenever they asked him about the music he'd tell them to call Brain Jackson, his partner in the band, who knew much more about music.) It was clear, though, that Gil, who had now signed with Arista records and was touring more frequently, would not much longer have the patience to deal with the college administration. Soon enough he had left the school, and teaching, behind.

Years later I had become a professor myself, at San Jose State in California. Gil Scott Heron was playing at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. I met him back stage and had the pleasure of presenting him with a copy of my first book of literary criticism, autographed. (For some reason, I had never thought to ask Gil to autograph any of his albums or books -- and my papers with his comments on them vanished many moves and years ago.) For a minute there, just a minute, it felt like we were back in that tiny office in that temporary building in D.C. again, just two guys with no air conditioning talking poetry for hours.

The world knows Gil Scott-Heron as the performer of those great songs, looming over his electric piano, cap on head, singing, "Now it's winter / Winter in America." But for me, he'll always be that prodigiously talented young man, a copy of his first book of poems poking up out of his attache case, excitedly telling me about some book he had just finished reading.

Parroting Will: On the Substance of Will Alexander's ON THE SUBSTANCE OF DISORDER

2011-05-18T19:16:00.000-07:00

I somehow missed the Blanc Press PARROT series, which appeared in LA in the years after I'd left for central PA -- but now Insert Press is bringing them back in a sudden flock. These are gorgeous little pamphlets, designed to parrot the pamphlets once published by Black Sparrow Press. (See the black parrot on the cover?) This being PARROT Seven, there are seven black and blue parrots on the back cover. Once insert has completed the run of facsimile parrots, the entire set will be made available as a limited edition, signed and numbered set.

Number seven, seen here, is Will Alexander's On the Substance of Disorder, which you should order. Visit the Insert Press web site by clicking here.

"You see, I am simple in the sense that the lamp burns beside me and I speak." -- Will Alexander

What goes around . . .

2011-05-09T11:30:00.000-07:00

"Thirty years ago, conceptual artists claimed to have broken with the forms of commodified art by no longer creating solid objects available for private ownership, but instead specific forms for the presentation or spatialization of ideas: a hole in a wall, a crack running through a building, [the New York Times], a line in the desert, etc. And yet intellectual and artistic property did not disappear; it simply underwent a displacement. Artists increasingly began to be viewed--and paid--as owners and sellers of ideas as such. This meant that intelligence itself came to take the place of its products, implying a radicalization in the idea of private property. The immateriality of concepts and images, instead of doing away with private appropriation, turned out to be its best refuge, the place where its reality is tantamount to its self-legitimation."

--Jacques Ranciere, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics [except for the part about the NY TIMES]

Poets jam in Louisville

2011-04-22T11:12:00.000-07:00

Navigate on over to the Heat Strings page at Penn Sound to hear a recording from this year's group poetry jam at Alan Golding's homestead in the widening wake of the Louisville Conference on Language and literature after 1900. Quite a bit after 1900, as it turned out.

click here to be transported.

A LITTLE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE

2011-04-18T17:51:00.000-07:00

He wasn't there again today.

Oh, how I wish he'd go away.

KIT ROBINSON AT PENN STATE

2011-04-17T12:50:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week, Kit Robinson managed to squeeze a visit to Penn State in between readings in D.C. and Philadelphia. The Grucci Poetry Room was filled quickly, leaving barely enough room to get a word in edgewise.

One thing I like about SLR cameras is that you only need one eye. (click on this sample from the reading, passages from THE DOLCH STANZAS, for one explanation.)

Kit began with those early stanzas, then moved to work from his current book, Determination, which can be ordered here.

He ended with some very fresh work indeed, newly written - newly read.

The young lady with the other camera rushed off mid-poem, and we knew why the next morning when we saw a photo of Kit published in the Daily Collegian.

WRITING THE AMERICAS

2011-04-12T17:02:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite groups on campus is the PSU AMERICANISTS, a grad student organization headquartered in the Penn State Comparative Literature program and dedicated to truly hemispheric approaches to the literatures of the Americas. Over the years, this group has organized some of the best and most provocative symposia offered at the university. Last night, they produced "Writing the Americas: Writing World Literature," a symposium that brought the authors Zulfikar Ghose, Joao Almino and Luisa Valenzuela for a few days of intense conversation. I had not known of Almino before, despite his having won the Casa de las Americas Prize, but I see that his winning novel has been translated into English as The Five Seasons of Love, one in a series of novels Almino has set in the city of Brasilia. Ghose is, of course, a far better known writer in the United States who appears often in literary journals and newspapers. His The Incredible Brazilian provides one link to Almino's world, though my favorite Ghose title is Confessions of a Native-Alien. (I noticed just this evening that Wilson Harris's novel Jonestown, which I'll be teaching next semester, is dedicated to Ghose.) But the artist I had been anticipating most eagerly was Luisa Valenzuela, author of such stunning works as Clara, Strange Things Happen Here and Black Novel with Argentines. Valenzuela's novels appeared in my favorite remainder store in Washington DC back in my penniless undergraduate student days and I've been reading her with fascination ever since. I'd last had an opportunity to speak with her in 1982, when DC hosted an Hispanic Book Festival and Valenzuela was featured one memorable evening on the campus of the University of the District of Columbia. If you haven't read Valenzuela yet, start with the more recent Bedside Manners, available here.

CLA 2011 - Spartanburg, SC

2011-04-11T12:49:00.000-07:00

This blog launched in April of 2006 from a Birmingham hotel room during the conference of the College Language Association. Here it is, 2011, and we're still here. This year's CLA met in Spartanburg, SC. The theme of this gathering was music and literature, and my own presentation was about the William Parker reworkings of Curtis Mayfield songs, officially released as I Plan to Stay a Believer: The Inside Songs of Curtis Mayfield. Parker's program includes poetry recited by Amiri Baraka from the interior of the Mayfield songs. Mayfield himself had a Spartanburg background, and was pictured on the cover of the conference program along with such illuminaries as Arthur Prysock and Pink Anderson. I really only got started on the subject at this conference, so you can expect to hear the rest of this at some later venue. Baraka was the keynote speaker at an earlier CLA. This year it was Cornelius Eady.

Cave canem.

This was the same week they were reenacting the beginning of the Civil War over in Charleston. The spirit was somewhat different in Spartanburg, a celebration of union, if you will.

MANNING MARABLE 1950-2011

2011-04-01T15:19:00.000-07:00

Manning Marable's new book on Malcolm X will be released Monday, but Manning won't be with us to celebrate.

A few minutes ago I got the sad news that Manning Marable has died, age 60, after long struggle with lung disease.

Like so many others, I first knew of Marable through his early book How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America. The title was a delightful play on the work of Walter Rodney, and Marable's book more than earned its comparison to his Guyanese predecessor. It was hard to believe, in the years that followed, that one person could keep up such a pace of activism while at the same time publishing so many valuable and ground breaking books.

At least one of my own projects owes its appearance in part to Marable. It was Manning who had suggested to the director of the University of Mississippi Press that they should look into the possibility of publishing work by and about C.L.R. James, a suggestion that led directly to that director's contacting me about the project that eventually became C.L.R. James: A Critical Introduction.

Which leads to my favorite Manning Marable anecdote. Selwyn Cudjoe organized one of the first international conferences on James's life and legacy, hosting it at Wellesley college. Manning Marable was, of course, one of the essential panelists on the schedule. Things were running late already when Selwyn began his banquet speech (a version of which appears in the book C.L.R. James: His Intellectual Legacies). Manning had been delayed in getting to the conference site, and walked into the room as Selwyn was speaking. In those days, unlike more recent years, Manning sported a fairly long Afro, which had already turned completely grey. Which prompted Selwyn, upon seeing Manning enter the room, to interrupt himself and observe:

"There's Manning. He wanting to be our next W.E.B. DuBois, but he looking like Frederick Douglass."

A decade later, Manning Marable came to Santa Barbara to deliver a major lecture for the Center for Black Studies. We drove him to the lecture and had a warm visit, after not having seen him for some time. And though we emailed on James-related matters in the time since, I never saw him again.

In August of 1990, writing of the revised edition of his Race, Reform and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945-1990, Marable left us these words:

"I hope that this slender reader, which presents some of the essential details of the African-American movement for human equality and political empowerment, will inspire members of the next generation to join a very long and rich tradition of resistance."

Here's a link to Amazon's page for The Manning Marable Reader, a great starting point if you are new to Manning's work. Order a few more of his books while you're there!

GEOFFREY JACQUES AT PENN STATE

2011-03-23T19:11:00.000-07:00

Geoffrey Jacques came out from New York to spend Monday on campus. He gave a critical talk on William S. Braithwaite and early modernism at lunch time in a series sponsored by Comparative Literature. My grad seminar in Black Theory and Criticism has been reading and debating his recent University of Massachusetts Press book, A Change in the Weather, and relished the chance to get to know Jacques and his work a bit better. That evening he read poetry. The next morning the Daily Collegian ran a story on the reading, which I reprint below.

Poetry read 'just for a thrill'

By Sarah Becks Collegian Staff Writer

Aldon Nielsen asked poet Geoffrey Jacques to come to Penn State so that students could have the opportunity to experience “out of the mainstream” poetry.

And Monday night, Jacques read from his published book of poems, “Just For A Thrill,” and from a manuscript for an upcoming book

of poems in 102 Chambers.

A few of the pieces he read spoke about real life events focusing on controversies in people’s daily lives. But, most of his poetry highlights African-American culture. He wrote poems about African-American artists such as Charlie Parker, a jazz saxophonist, and James Brown, who is known as the “Godfather of Soul.”

Penn State Professor Nielsen, teaches a graduate seminar class and has taught several undergraduate poetry classes, said he thought Jacques’ unique poetic approach would benefit students to hear.

“[Jacques] is different from mainstream poets and what students are probably used to hearing by now,” he said.

Jacques’ poems aren’t always linear, and he tries to create them so they are “simultaneously musical” so that the reader focuses on the language itself and how the words are utilized to their fullest potential, Nielsen added.

Jacques discussed the techniques he used to compose two of his poems read at the event. One poem he read was “Ode,” which he created using refrigerator magnet sayings. Other techniques he implemented include cutting out strips of words in a newspaper and putting them in a bag. And when he wrote “Evaluation,” he randomly picked these word scraps out of the bag.

Julie Mangurten attended the poetry reading for her poetry class, and she said was familiar with Jacques’ poetry because of previous class discussions.

She said the experience of actually hearing the poet read his work out loud was significantly different than reading in class.

“Being able to hear the tone of voice gave the words more meaning,” Mangurten (freshman-theatre and English) said.

THERE HE GOES AGAIN

2011-03-21T11:44:00.000-07:00

This morning the Chronicle of Higher Education published a short article reporting on the most recent of several studies that attempted to discover the much vaunted "liberal bias" in higher education to no avail. The focus of the article was on the deceptive method used in the study. Emails were sent to graduate programs from non-existent students who were inquiring about possible admission and who mentioned having worked either for the McCain or the Obama campaigns. The directors of the study found that the emails were treated identically by admissions officers, faculty directors and staff.

Just move on folks; nothing happening here.

BUT count on the irrepressible David Horowitz to turn the whole thing on its head. (Why they always go to him for a comment is beyond me.)

In the Horowitzian, fact-free world, such studies prove nothing because we already know that there is a liberal bias in higher education and higher education simply hides this fact on all occasions. Here is Horowitz's argument:

"The experiment focused on how college administrators handle an activity in which they are likely to try to hide any political bias they might have—much, he said, as he believes professors who abuse bright conservative students in class go on to give them good grades to demonstrate their own fairness."

Now, this could help explain why Horowitz's attempt to locate college students in Pennsylvania with complaints about having been mistreated by liberal professors came up empty. Evidently, the best way to get a good grade is to be a conservative student. Faculty are not fair; they just give right-wing students good grades to prove that they are fair.

RADICAL SPIRITUAL MOTHERHOOD

2011-03-20T21:19:00.001-07:00

Here's a new book from my dear friend Rosetta Haynes, who teaches at Indiana State University. Dr. Haynes is a long-time, active member of the African American Literature and Culture Society and I've been learning from her conference presentations for many years now.

In the early days of my work as a teacher, I used to tell undergraduate students that there was a wealth of literature to be studied and written about in the post-Emancipation writings of African American women, many of whose narratives were evangelical in nature, often published by church-related publishing houses. We've begun to see some of that work getting done more recently. This new book by Haynes sheds additional light on now familiar names of earlier writers such as Jarena Lee, but Haynes also writes about Amanda Berry Smith, Rebecca Cox Jackson and others. If you have any interest at all in spiritual narratives in particular, or in the larger evolution of African American prose, or if you just like to read informative books, then this is for you. Here's a link to the book's Amazon page.

Louisville - Day III

2011-03-10T13:47:00.000-08:00

2011 turned out to be the year people showed up reading poems off of their smart phones.

I rolled out of bed early to catch the bus over to the University of Louisville campus to make that first session, chaired by Barrett Watten, on American Poetics of Relational Space. A bit later I chaired a panel with papers by Scott Pound, Lisa Hollenbach and Rebecca Steffy on Kenny Goldsmith, Myung Mi Kim and David Antin respectively. The conference wrapped with a keynote by Jose Saldivar, who managed to find something new to say about Junot Diaz, just as the conference program found a new way to spell the author's name.

Then it was all over but the wrap party, at Alan Golding's house as usual, and featuring the by now eagerly anticipated annual marathon reading of poetry from conference participants.

Recordings from this year's readings will appear on Penn Sound shortly.

You will note that his blog entry includes two photos that could not have been taken by me. They come, in order, from the cameras of Scott Pound and Norman Finkelstein. Thanks guys!

LOUISVILLE 2011 - Day 2

2011-03-06T11:07:00.000-08:00

Day 2 kicked off with discussions of "distributed being." Appropriate, given how distributed most of us who'd spent the previous evening dining at Proof were probably feeling. I went on being ontologically distributed throughout the day, making it possible for me, for the first time, to attend concurrent sessions, where I even occasionally concurred.

The final event of the day was a poetry reading by Rae Armantrout. After not having seen much of Rae the past few years, I now have seen her virtually every other week. At MLA I saw her read from The Grand Piano with her co-authors. At AWP I saw her interviewed at a conference session and reading with friends at the off-site events hosted by Rod Smith. At Louisville she read beautifully from past works, including the award-winning Versed, the newly published Money Shot and some poems in manuscript. Rae was ably introduced by the always already able Alan Golding, a distributed being of the best sort.

LOUISVILLE 2011 - Day One

2011-03-04T15:38:00.000-08:00

This year we were spared the ice storm, but a killer rain ran through Louisville on the first day of the conference formerly known as the Twentieth-Century Literature Conference (now the unpronounceable "LCLC"). The opening keynote for 2011 was a poetry reading by Michael Heller. I first became aware of Heller when I read his critical study of Objectivist poetry, Conviction's Net of Branches. Finally got to know the man himself, and Jane (a fine poet herself) in Maine years ago in the

course of a mad bus trip through the fog.

Heller's reading was followed by two critical panels addressing his work, to all of which Michael responded graciously and with humor.

We all bussed over to the Muhammed Ali Center for the evening keynote, a rousing cultural studies reading of Jackie Robinson (with nods to Ali along the way) from Grant Farred. Grant edited the collection Rethinking C.L.R. James and is the author of What's My Name? among other works.

Then it was off to Proof Restaurant to celebrate with these delightful creatures.

CEDRIC ROBINSON at PENN STATE

2011-03-01T17:07:00.000-08:00

Today Penn State was the beneficiary of a visit from Cedric Robinson, author of the classic Black Marxism and other works including Terms of Order, Black Movements and the Anthropology of Marxism.

Robinson's topic was the figure of the black detective and his paper centered on the early work in the evolution of the figure from Pauline Hopkins.

In the course of a careful analysis of the serial novel Hagar's Daughter, Robinson gave his listeners a grounding in such cultural phenomena as the Colored American Magazine and the career of Bert Williams.

After the Q & A, Robinson was presented with an award for his life's work from the African and African American Studies department.