KIT ROBINSON AT PENN STATE

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

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

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

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!