A MAMMAL OF STYLE

This is what that old, familiar defamiliarization looks like. I went to my office mailbox for one of the last times before they close the building for renovations, and there, I thought, was an old fiend, but it turned out on second take to be a book by an old friend. For years I've resisted submitting to journals that would require submitting my texts to recasting in Chicago, deep dish style.  But now . . . thanks to Kit Robinson and Ted Greenwald, I have a riposte. Think I may require my freshman comp students to format thusly:

Catch an eye
On the road again
Brush fingers' legend


COGNITIVE BEHAVIORAL THEREMIN


Outside your ken
World keeps going
Our arms end in all hands on deck


Anonymize weather
Homemade say no evil
Unlocket trunk line

SNOW OVER JOHANNESBURG

It is the first day of spring
The white man is rolling balls
Across the lawns of Johannesburg
Piling up new white people

These are bloodless and building
Blind monuments against
The African sun
The white man has waited seventeen years to do this
For the stuff of reinforcement to fall
From the sky
Seventeen years he's prayed beneath
The Southern Cross saying "Lord of Whiteness,
Give me a likeness unto myself.
Give me something to set out
On this land to seal
Our covenant."

It is the first night of spring
The white man is in his bed
In Johannesburg
A black woman whispers
And the snowman rises
His eyes become homing diamonds
He rises on round thighs and rolls
Into his maker's house
He rises and rolls to the white man's side
Stretching out a thick white arm
He reaches to the lips of his lord
Lusting for his easy heat he lays
His glistening fingers upon the tongue
One by one they melt there
Till the white man fills
And is still

And it is the  second day
Of spring



                                 -- from Heat Strings, SOS PRESS 1985

BEYOND A BOUNDARY

Just out from Duke University Press in their new C.L.R. James Archives series, a 50th anniversary edition of Beyond a Boundary.  It reprints Robert Lipsyte's introduction to the 1983 American edition, and adds a quite short foreword from Paget Henry.

Indispensible!

A book meant to "extend our too limited conceptions of history and of the fine arts."