VISIT TO THE BLACKSONIAN

Last Fall I was among the crowds on the mall to witness the opening of the new National Museum of African American History and Culture, The Blacksonian as we've come to call it in the months since. Perhaps most moving of all was seeing the numbers of people with their walkers and wheel chairs, some of them people who had been here for the March on Washington, come back to the nation's mall a half century on to mark the long awaited opening of this monument to a too neglected history.  Now, as the AWP was winding down, I finally had an opportunity to enter this museum for myself.

Like most, I worked my way up from the bottom, starting in the lower depths, in the darkness, confronting the relics of a slave ship, placards noting the histories and cultures of Africa from which the first African Americans had been violently ripped. Fitting that the tour that begins with the slave ship can end, many floors above, with the Mother Ship, astral sign of the bottomless creativity and unbounded aspirations of a people.

There were a lot of us that day, as every day, and some found curious the fact that I seemed to be taking photos mostly of documents and books.  Couldn't I have read them in a library?  I could have, and have . . . but seeing them here meant something different.

Seeing for example that familiar chart that had been such a powerful tool in the Abolitionist struggle, unfolding from its book as so many had read it then -- Seeing the handwriting on a slave owners inventory, followed by an original copy of Banneker's almanac, or a first edition of Phillis Wheatley's poetry, or a proclamation made by Toussaint Louverture . . . 

and here in a case lay Nat Turner's Bible!

One thing that brought me up short was a simple case containing an embroidered sack. Ashley was a nine-year-old girl who was sold away from her mother, Rose. Ashley's mother placed a dress, some pecans, and a braid of her own hair in this sack for her daughter to carry away with her. They never saw each other again. There is nothing I can say; you have to go and stand there with it yourself.

As you work your way up through the floors of the museum, you slowly ascend into your lived history, no matter how young you might be. I was already feeling the waves of recognition and pain seeing the room dedicated to Emmet Till, passing the model of a mid-century lunch counter, pausing in front of the case that contained the Klan's by-laws. But the museum's designers have given us a true ascent; as you rise within the building, you witness the rise through freedom to a possible future.

and so my long walk up through the building's exhibits eventually brought me not only to people I have known, but to events I was part of -- Like African Liberation Day, 1977.  Today's gentry may have reverted to calling it Meridian Hill Park, but to those of my generation it is still Malcolm X Park, and that's where we gathered, year after year.

AWP 2017 - D.C.

Always ambivalent about AWP, I have to concede that the thing has gotten more expansive and open-minded with the years.  I hear far less open hostility to innovation than used to fill the corridors in years past, and the making space for more interesting work that first became visible in the book exhibit hall more than a decade ago has now spread to the panels.  It remains true that you will hear endless rounds of nebulous and  blurby language coming from the podia, as if we had all just graduated from some MFA grad seminar on writing poetry reviews, but there is an ever increasing portion of truly interesting work spread among the hundreds of sessions. I'm still irked that AWP was the only national conference to reject a propsed panl on Gil Scott Heron (this year they had plenty of room for Prince, though), but I find more and more of worth each time that I attend.

The first session I went to was on writing long poems, though I was primarily there to hear R. Erica Doyle, whose Proxy made a tremendous impression on my first reading of it.

But I was also on a mission to touch base with D.C. writers I had not seen in ages. In the exhibits I ran into Jody Bolz, who is now co-editor of Poet Lore, the oldest continually publishing poetry journal in the USA. Her co-editor is E. Ethelbert Miller.  I first published in the journal decades ago, before their editorship, and have only recently sent work there again, which will appear shortly. It's a very short poem. Just around the corner was Rick Peabody, who I had also caught up with at last year's AWP in Los Angeles, editor and publisher of Gargoyle and of Paycock Editions, author of I'm in Love with the Morton Salt Girl. Back in the 70's, I won a poetry prize from Circus Maximus magazine. Both Rick Peabody and Ethelbert Miller also appeared in that issue. We were all to become poetry friends soon.

I would have gone to the panel on D.C. poetry anthologies anyway, but I especially wanted to meet up with Grace Cavalieri, who I had not seen in thirty years. Grace was a moving force in Pacifica Radio in D.C., the long time host of The Poet and the Poem. I had appeared on her program back in the day, and participated in the music and poetry fund raisers she had organized, about which I will write more elsewhere.  Grace is still at it, and still organizing poets for good.

and I'll admit, much of a Prince fan as I am, I only went to the Prince session to say hi to Tisa Bryant. She was, as always, shall we say, encyclopedic. 

BLACK SQUIRREL POETRY EXTRAVAGANZA

After Poemtalking the night away in Philadelphia, it was time to drive home to D.C. where the gathering of the AWP was to happen. 

SQUIRREL

got distracted -- what to do?

Cram into the top floor of the Black Squirrel in Adams Morgan for what promised, and turned out to be, the most offsiteish of all off site readings. Poets representing nine presses, poets from this year's Best American Experimental Writing volume, poets ranging from Ugly Ducklings to Wonders, the whole sheandhebang organized by Rod Smith . . . this was to be the place to be, so I be'd there.

Nearly missed my cue though. We were taking breaks between the press groupings so that the fine folk who run the Black Squirrel could rev up their glass washing mechanisms to keep up with the gathered thirst of all those poets. At the end of one such break, I saw Rod gesturing hypnotically to someone who turned out to be me.  The first best American experimentalist had failed to appear, so it was left to me to work my way through the crowd and read one of my selections from the volume. My own pieces in the book are part of the sequence Tray, the title poem of the book about to be released by Make Now Press. Janice Lowe was up a bit later with her elegy for Tamir Rice, accompanying herself on electronic keyboard. A bit earlier the crowd had roared in response to the hilarious performance of Mel Nichols's song "I'd Say Anything to Get an A."

It was a roaring night all around, with poets such as Douglas Kearney, Wendy Xu, Harmony Holiday, Trisha Low, Rodrigo Toscano, on and on . . . In the end, Nathan Bowles banjoed us into the wee hours.

If you missed it, and in that tightly packed crowd who knows if you were there that night, keep an eye on Penn Sound where the audio shall one day echo.

POEM TALK

Been on the road for weeks and just now catching up -- First entry, Philadelphia. I drove to the city and got myself over to Kelly Writers House to participate in another POEM TALK organized by Al Filreis.  The topic of discussion this time was a poem by my great friend Lorenzo Thomas, "An Arc Still Open," a poem from late in his life that has not yet been collected in a book. The poem was written in memory of the artist John T. Biggers, who had created the work "Salt Marsh," seen above, for installation at the campus where Lorenzo taught, University of Houston Downtown. Biggers had a crucial Penn State connection, having studied there as a graduate student in arts education, and two of his remarkable murals are in the entrance to the building where my office is located.

My colleagues in the discussion were Tyrone Williams and William J. Harris. The recording of our conversation about the poem will appear on Penn Sound shortly.

We reconvened in the larger room at Kelly Writers House for a reading by Tyrone Williams.  He presented recent work, so recent that it is still in his notebooks.  I'm hoping to hear more of this when he visits us at Penn State in a couple of weeks.

COMING SOON - TRAY

With Tray Aldon Nielsen establishes himself as a formidable voice among American poets. And voice, his forte and bete noire, articulates social criticism as aesthetic form. The incantations of religious and secular crusades are rendered in the eponymous opening poem as live scratching by a deejay (call him History, or God): Gangster Zimmerman as another wanna-be gangsta. And in the poems that constitute “Escamotage,” the second half of the book, Nielsen’s penchant for puns, jokes and blues whimsy are offset by a deft lyricism that is, by turns, poignant (“Interval” is a touching homage to Lucille Clifton’s “The Lost Baby Poem”), humorous (“Clarence Farmer’s Complaint”) and celebratory (“Experimental Hope”). The common senses and uncommon sense delineated as Tray will be balm for our new dark age.    

–Tyrone Williams

These days we're trying to save us. These are some good poems about that.

--Rod Smith

Watch for it at Make Now Books:  https://www.facebook.com/makenowbooks/

and SPD: http://www.spdbooks.org/

HIDDEN FIGURES - SCRIPT TO SCREEN

 The University of California at Santa Barbara's Film and Media Studies department has for some time hosted a great series, "Script to Screen," presenting discussions with script writers and others for a public audience.  Last week the session included a screening of America's number one movie, Hidden Figures. 

The Writer guest this time was Theodore Melfi, the writer/producer/director of the film, who passed up another Spider Man project because he so wanted to make this film. Melfi was accompanied on stage by Elizabeth Gabler, President of Fox 2000 Pictures, and a graduate of UCSB, and then there was this actor fella who grew up not far from here, one Costner by name. The only thing that could have made the night even better would have been the presence of the remarkable women at the heart of this project. (Is there nothing Janelle Monae can't do?)

After introductions, the audience settled in to watch the film, and it was easy to feel in that audience how the moment needed exactly this kind of feel good story of triumph.  There are small quiblles with the film, and it pretty much follows the arc of all such movies, but this is a great one of its genre and is really well written.

My favorite line comes near the end: "I know you believe that."

I won't spoil things by telling you the context.  See the film!

ABOUT THAT LAW & ORDER PARTY

So, we have an incoming President who has the distnction of being the first in history to have entered into a $25,000,000 settlement with people he had defrauded.

During the campaign, documents surfaced showing that his third wife, Melania, had performed illegal work for hire during the period of her first visa, which in turn would render her citizenship application fraudulent. Trump, you may recall, promised that Melania would hold a press conference to clear things up.  Never happened . . .

As of noon tomorrow, Trump will be in patent violation of his lease with the United States Government (us) for the Old Post Office property where he is visiting tonight.

As of noon tomorrow, Trump will be in violation of the emoluments clause of the U.S. Constitution.

Oh, and it was against the law to appoint Mattis as Secretary of Defense -- Not to worry; the GOP just changes the law.

I could go on, but there is no need to -- they will go on.  Get used to this flagrant lawlessness.