PALF in ACCRA

Once we'd all been disoriented and reoriented, unpacked and unjetlagged, the PALF organizers organized our way over to the W.E.B. DuBois Center for the official opening of the Literary Forum, marked by music and poetry.

After an invigorating welcome from the Jazz Tone All Stars (a pickup group from the Chelsea Hotel combining American and African musicians) we got down to the poetry.

First up was Keorapetse Kgositsile. I'd first read his MY NAME IS AFRIKA, attracted by the introduction written by Gwendolyn Brooks, back when I was twenty. I fianlly got to meet him a few times during the years when I was doing research at UCLA and Kgositsile was living and teaching in the area, still in exile from the Apartheid regime. He returned to South Africa with the advent of majority rule and he now serves as South Africa's Poet Laureate. Showing the spirit he'd exhibited in his young years in America as a close cousin of the Black Arts Movement, Kgositsile treated us to a strong dose of moral encouragement along with his poetry.

Another of the readers was my Penn State Altoona colleague Patricia Jabbeh Wesley. Following the conference, Patricia was going to Liberia to visit her family home for the first time since she was forced into exile by warfare eighteen years ago.

The one poet I was hearing for the first time was a tornado out of the midwest, Tyehimba Jess. I'd seen his work in places like OBSIDIAN III and had been hearing rumors of his performances for years, so it was great to be able to put a face together with the verse at long last.

BARBARA ANN TEER 1937-2008

One of the most energetic participants in last April's Georgetown conference on the arts in the Civil Rights Era (see April posting below) was the wonderful Barbara Ann Teer.

So you can imagine my shock when I saw this morning's NEW YORK TIMES with the news that Barbara Teer has died at age 71.

Teer hit the world of theater with explosive force as a young actress, but she quickly wearied of the stereotypical roles that were offered her. During the Black Arts Movement she was one of those who took the idea of institution building seriously, and so she founded the National Black Theater, still going today. Teer was always a theatrical personality; she was also always a generous person dedicated to the furtherance of artists. In 2008 she was still trying to live up to the goals she set for herself and for black theater in her 1968 manifesto establishing the criteria by which she was to work the rest of her career.

THE PAN AFRICAN LITERARY FORUM

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
--Frank O'Hara




well . . . that was before my day, and I never thought the copies of NEW WORLD WRITING I saw were especially ugly . . . but I have been intrigued by Ghana's writing scene ever since reading Kofi Awoonor as a young student . . . I had many other reasons to harbor dreams of visiting Ghana of which I will write later, but the poetry alone was enough to make me leap at the chance to journey to Ghana as part of the Pan African Literary Forum.

The Forum is a curious hybrid of writers' conference and creative writing study abroad program. It is the brainchild of Arthur Flowers and Jeffrey Renard Allen, who first spoke of organizing such a multinational opportunity for writers while at another conference in East Africa. Jeff spoke to me about it not too long after, but I was still surprised at how quickly these two got things up and running. In short order they had hired staff, scraped up funding, organized an accompanying book drive and writers' contests --

The culmination of their efforts was an ambitious program of readings, lectures and workshops at a variety of venues spread across Accra and environs over a two week period. Writers from the USA, Ghana, South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya and elsewhere came together for the kind of exchange that is hard to come by at MLA or AWP -- I was there to give a lecture and a reading, but I got far more from my daily conversations with the other writers -- those unplanned meetings that sprout up in the margins of any good conference.

In the coming days I'll be posting more photos and recording samples from the readings.

In the meantime, click here for the PALF web site to learn of their future plans.

from GHANA

Sitting on the coast in Accra

I read

"we are passing the coast of Africa"

But that was written

To Tom Raworth

(Who I just saw last week)

Some forty odd years ago

CLICKAPHONICS -- a quick listening to TOM RAWORTH

click here for RAE ARMANTROUT

for NICOLE BROSSARD & FRED WAH duet, click here

CLICK FOR CLARK COOLIDGE POEM

AMERICAN POETRY OF THE 1970S - NATIONAL POETRY FOUNDATION CONFERENCE - CELL PHONE EDITION

Fred Wah confronted by a critic.

Things had seemed to be going so well on my trip to Orono, Me, for the seventies conference [the ME. decade?]-- then I discovered that first night that the lens to my beloved Nikon had gotten broken somehow along the way. These two photos of Coolidges, Killians, Bellamys & Mylessssss were all that I was able to rescue. For the rest, I had to resort to taking photos with my cell phone, which eventuated in the soft focus results you see below. It seemed fitting, though; the seventies were a sort of soft focus, albeit harDCore, era.

The one photo I clearly did not take myself was borrowed from the Mongibeddu photo stream.

Along with delivering my own paper (on David Bromige, Kenneth Irby & Max Douglas), I was asked to provide an introduction for the reading by Jayne Cortez. Here are my remarks:

"At a certain moment in history when Aime Cesaire started to decolonize his neolonial head
and free his image by dealing with the world from the idea of negritude
when young Aime Cesaire said forget Paris and returned to look into the future by diving inside
the past of his native land . . .
At that moment of no compromise his poetry became poetry unique to poetry . . . "

In the small hours of April, before a crowd that did not know how to crowd, these words brought comfort –
That afternoon, as I sat in a room at Georgetown University, poet Rod Smith had come quietly up to me pushing his cell phone towards me – without my glasses on, I had no idea what he was trying to tell me, but then, as he pointed to the display on his phone, it came into focus . . . the screen bore the news that Aime Cesaire had died –

We passed the phone to poet Eugene Redmond, who made the announcement to the stunned crowd gathered at the conference, a conference dedicated to the arts in the Civil Rights era – What could any of us say? We all, poets and activists alike, carried Cesaire inside our very language – on our tongues --
That night, the first poet on the evening program was Jayne Cortez – with no preliminaries, she began quietly reciting her poem of tribute to Cesaire – a poem that itself grows out of a moment of no compromise – a moment when what is needed more than ever is a poetry unique to poetry –

This has always been Jayne Cortez’s way – from MOUTH ON PAPER to JAZZ FAN LOOKS BACK, from COAGULATIONS to SOMEWHERE IN ADVANCE OF NOWHERE – The titles of her brilliant recordings might almost serve as a manifesto for any artist determined on a course of self-sufficiency: MAINTAIN CONTROL, UNSUBMISSIVE BLUES, TAKING THE BLUES BACK HOME – or, if you’re of a philosophic bent, BORDERS OF DISORDERLY TIME

No one told her to do this – No one could tell her how to do this – There were only the brave examples of those disorderly orders of predecession: Aime Cesaire, Leon Damas, Nicolas Guillen, Big Mama Thornton – poets who recognized what Cortez remarks in one poem: "Everybody wants to be famous - Nobody needs it."
In the afterlife of the word, it is not fame that feeds us – it is the name that comes to the tip of our tongue, borne up on the waves of our history –
At a certain moment, when neither the politics nor the poetry of custom could bear us up any longer, Jayne Cortez returned to look into the future and found that THE BEAUTYFUL ONES ARE NOT YET BORN, found her way to THE BEAUTIFUL BOOK, found her way to flying home, to bumblebee and Big Mama, found her way to no compromise – won her primary –

Steve Evans inadvertently stumbles across Bruce Andrews's secret lexicon stash backstage.

Watch this space in days to come for a few sound samples from the poets at Orono --

Report from the Iowa Floods - Dee Morris

New Orleans; Minneapolis; Blacksburg, VA; Iowa City . . . A dread pattern I've been following in recent years as disaster strikes one after another of the places where beloved university colleagues live and work -- First that moment of disbelief (as when visiting Notre Dame I looked up at a television monitor to see someone I knew at Virginia Tech in the aftermath of the shootings there) -- then the rush for phones, email, esp -- any means by which we might locate people and assure ourselves that they have survived. I was again at one university watching something terrible happen to another university -- This time it was the University of Iowa I was watching from the safe vantage point of a student union TV at the University of Maine. -- It was only a couple of years ago that I had such a good time visiting and speaking at Iowa City for the first time -- In addition to the great discussions with friends, I got to attend a stunning concert by Funkadelic, whose performances had formed part of the subject matter of my talk.



What, I wondered, of all those good people in Iowa. I almost hate to email friends in such circumstances, adding yet one more burden of response at a time when they must be frantic and sleepless, but I had to know . . . So I posted a quick message to Adelaide Morris just to make sure she was OK -- Here is the report she took time to send back to me:






















It has been, as you've seen, apocalyptic here. At the height of it, it looked as though we'd lose all our bridges plus the power plant, EPB, the Library, and the arts campus. It looks as though all has survived, however, except for the arts campus, which is a ruin.



They may need to tear down the museum and they will certainly have to muck out the music building, the art studios, the theater building, and Hancher auditorium, all of which were filled to the windows with a fine soup of farm chemicals and feed lot manure. Very bad stuff--the police who had to wade in the waters got chemical burns on their legs and we've all been warned to get shots and wear masks.



Despite heroic efforts, none of the sandbag levees held. It only ended when the water went down, in its own time, but slowly now the bridges are reopening and summer school has resumed.It didn't escape our notice that EPB was not sandbagged, but the good thing is that the water which filled the basement was seepage-- filtered--rather than sewage, so I'm guessing we'll be back in business for the fall.



A relief. And, best of all, no one was hurt, though the waters were filled with trees hurtling forward faster than speeding cars.

McCAIN REDUX: "WOULD I HAD SEEN A WHITE BEAR!"

I just love it when strict contructionists let their original intent get all loosey goosey.

John McCain, deriding Obama and the defeatocrats for their failure to note the successes of the surge, listed among the accomplishments the fact that troop strength in Iraq had been drawn down to pre-surge levels.

Of course, no such thing had as yet happened, as any number of reporters and politicos pointed out.

Whereupon they were promptly denounced by the McCain camp for nitpicking verb tenses.

Now I'm in favor of doing all sorts of things with and to verb tenses, but this caught my attention; suddenly the McCain campaign was sounding like Gertrude Stein --

For of course, it was explained, by that great postmodernist John McCain himself, that what he had said had been true because troop strength "will have been drawn down to presurge levels."

In other words, what McCain explained he had all along meant was simply that when the day arrives that troop levels in Iraq have been drawn down to presurge levels, it will become true that troop strength has been drawn down to presurge levels.

Hard to argue with that logic.

Would that I had seen troop levels drawn down to presurge levels, for how shall I describe it --

McCAIN EPISTEMOLOGY

How is it, my friends, that Senator John McCain knew precisely how many days it had been since Senator Obama last visited Iraq, but somehow had no idea how many American troops were actually in Iraq?

WINSTON NAPIER

Late last night I received the sad news that Winston Napier had died from a brain hemorrhage. Winston was known to the world as the E. Franklin Frazier Chair in the Department of English at Clark University in Massachussetts. In my memory, though, he will always be the impressive, bright and delightfully eccentric Philosophy grad student I knew at Howard University back in the 80s. I was an adjunct in English at Howard, sharing an office in Locke Hall with fellow poet Calvin Forbes. I was somewhat unusual in the department of that time as a poet/critic with an abiding interest in philosophy and theory. Winston stood out, even in Howard's Philosophy Department, for sharing Alain Locke's twin interests in philosophy and literature, and for an interest in the debates over "continental" philosophy. He used to stop by my office regularly, not only to pore over my journals and books, but to involve me with his internal debates in theory. Winston also invited me to give a talk in an interdisciplinary series he organized, one of the first such invitations I was to receive.

When I moved to a tenure track position in California, I much missed those frequent visits from Winston. He had been a wonderful interlocutor and an encouraging fellow writer and thinker. From time to time I would get a phone call, or later an email, from him as he finished his degree program and went about locating a faculty position of his own. Later still, he was in touch with me as he finished work on his wonderful anthology of AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERARY THEORY. Following in the path broken by Angelyn Mitchell, Winston broadened and deepened the syllabus of black literary theory and philosophy, and I have often used his book in my courses.

Anyone who thinks deeply about the word, about race, about America, will feel this loss. Winston Napier was still young, still working, still teaching and still, as always, seeking out friends to debate as he worked his way through the questions that press in upon us.