MLA 2011 Part II

. . . though it did seem at times that if you wanted to be part of the discussions around poetry and poetics you either had to get up early or stay late. The panel on historical poetics proved that a fair number of people are wlling to roll out of bed early in the morning to argue metrics -- I had fun --

Other early risers attending the panel Evie Shockley organized on the poetry of Afaa Michael Weaver got the additional surprise of hearing a short reading by Weaver. Back when he was just Michael, he published a poetry mag out of Baltimore titled Blind Alleys, where the then-still-student me found himself published alongside Lucille Clifton. In conversation with Shockley after the panel I was musing that one of the great understudied topics of recent literary hitsory is the central role played by the D.C./Baltimore area in the poetry of the late 1960s through the early 80s. (The story since then needs attention too, but that's another chorus.)

In the last set of late afternoon sessions I chaired a Poetry Division panel on Jazz and Poetry, with presentations by Patrick Pritchett, Meta Jones and Michael New. As you can see from the photos, this was among the more thought-provoking sessions.

You had to walk a long time and leave a trail of bread crumbs so you could find your way back if you wanted to get to the session on poet Dennis Brutus, which was enlivened by the sounds of the motorcycle expo going on just beyond the window behind the speakers.

and then we were all off to the last reception . . . .

THE GRAND PIANO at MLA 2011 [click here to hear chorus]

"Even without considering the political agenda initiated against Memory . . . " -- Carla Harryman


Sad to say, I was not able to get to the Off-Site reading for this year's MLA. I'm hoping someone recorded it so I'll be able to hear later.
BUT I did get to the GRAND PIANO public event that was hosted by the MLA Friday night.

Following the recent release of the tenth volume of the GRAND PIANO series, the reading attracted not only the usual and growing poetry crowd but also a number of LA locals and old MLA hands who probably came not knowing what to expect but greeted the reading with real enthusiasm. The event was introduced by my new friend Helene Aji, who hosted the CIRCULATING AVANTE GARDES conference in France this past Fall. The reading featured a full three-fifths of the project's poets: Rae Armantrout, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Ted Pearson, Kit Robinson and Barrett Watten. There was a critical response from Antoine Caze.

You can visit the GRAND PIANO web site, and order copies, by clicking here.

MLA 2011 - Part I

Michael Davidson got this year's Modern Language Association convention started with a panel he'd organized for the Poetry Division in collaboration with the Division on Disability Studies. The scholars speaking on the topic of disability poetics at this roundtable included Petra Koopers, Jessica Lewis Luck, Janet Lyon, Heidi Rose and Susan Schweik. I believe this marked the first time I'd heard a discussion of the poetry of C.S. Giscombe at an MLA panel -- Hope to see more of that in the future.

There was a worthwhile pairing of panels later that day from the Division on Black American Literature and Culture on African American Studies in the Postrace Era and the question "Is There a Crisis in Black Research Publishing?" Many of us went to both, and so the discussion we started with the first panelists carried over to the next session, and on through the weekend.Spellman's Donna Akiba Sullivan Harper, who'd made an intriguing presentation from the point of view of HBCU students during that first session, was seen snapping photos, so I hope she'll upload hers somewhere soon.

The Film Division hosted another roundtable, on transmedia activism. Sure wish I could get the new media poetics people and the transmedia people into the same room some time so they could all hear each other.
























Sad to say (but glad to hear her) Dana Williams is still the only person doing solid work on novelist Leon Forrest at the MLA. Come to think of it, a Chicago MLA was the scene of my meeting Forrest when Jerry Ward introduced us at lunch as the convention was wrapping up.


We were all feeling a bit surreal meeting at the MLA in January, so it seemed only fitting to go to Jonathan Eburne's session of the Association for the Study of Dada and Surrealism.

My watch melted halfway through.

POETS AT MLA 2011

Afaa Michael Weaver
Meta Jones

Kit Robinson

Much more to come when I get back to campus . . . .

INSIDE SONGS OF CURTIS MAYFIELD

Among the highlights of my international music trading in recent years has been a set of concerts from Europe in which William Parker and company performed the bassist/composer's stunning work "The Inside Songs of Curtis Mayfield."

In my D.C. days, Jerry Washington, host of WPFW'S THE BAMA HOUR, used to have a recurring segment of his show called the "inner message in the music," a segment in which

listeners were challenged to identify the links joining the several, some times disparate, selections Jerry played.Parker has been up to something a bit different.

Musicians often talk about trying to get inside a piece, and it has long been clear to me that musicians who played outside were often those best suited to find that interiority. William Parker writes that "every song written or improvised has an inside song which lives in the shadows, in-between the sounds and silences and behind the words, pulsating, waiting to be reborn as a new song."

That's an apt description for what we hear in these concerts exploring the music of Curtis Mayfield. It reminds me of Aretha's brilliant reworkings of the songs Mayfield contributed to the sound track of the movie Sparkle. Vocalist Leena Conquest does much the same within Parker's recompositions of the Mayfield catalogue.

Further, Amiri Baraka (who previously released a collection of recordings titled New Song) finds new words in the corners of the lyrics Mayfield wrote and Conquest sings.

Until recently, few in the U.S. had heard any of this. Now, though, a two disk compilation of the concerts has been released on the AUM FIDELITY label. Individual tracks are drawn from concerts in Italy, France and the United States, and joining Parker's group (which includes Hamid Drake and Dave Burrell ) is the New Life Tabernacle Generation of Praise Choir. Curtis Mayfield, author of "We the People Who Are Darker than Blue," was always a poet, as much on the guitar as in his lyrics, and the mashup between him and Baraka is not to be missed.

Now that these concerts are available to the general public, I can only hope that they will find the audience they so deserve. This is one of the finest workings of jazz and poetry you will hear.

Go straight to Aum Fidelity for more information and to purchase.

"I Plan to Stay a Believer." A good resolve for 2011.

CROSS CULTURAL POETICS No. 23

Just in time for the holidays, here comes a stocking stuffer from Cross Cultural Poetics, XCP No. 23.

Here you'll find a new essay by Tyrone Williams on New Criticism and the Civil Rights Movement, poems by Adrienne Rich and Mahmoud Darwish, more work on war resistance poetry by Phil Metres, Timothy Yu writing on John Yau and Bill Barrette, a great poetry review from Maria Damon wherein the review is as compelling as the poetry she's reading.

My own contributions are "Sit-in at Bulworth's," a short meditation on racial definition and power, and a book review of A New Notion: Two Works by C.L.R. James.

You can find subscription information for XCP here, and check out the XCP blog site over here.

click to hear CHARLES BERNSTEIN @ PENN STATE

and here is one of the reasons I work at a place like Penn State -- just a half hour after that reading, and a short walk away, there was another reading by Charles Bernstein. The photo here at the top is not from the reading, but from Bernstein's segment of the Sean Connery film Finding Forrester, in which Charles plays the role of a school principal. He looks in this photo very much to be playing the same role he brought off to great effect in his Yellow Pages commercial, which he replayed for us the next day at the beginning of his talk.

The talk drew primarily from Bernstein's forthcoming book, Attack of the Difficult Poems, available for preorder from University of Chicago Press here.

Thanks again to Jeff Nealon for organizing Bernstein's visit. I've been reading the poems and essays of Charles Bernstein for more than three decades now, and wrote an early review of Controlling Interests for the D.C. mag Gargoyle during my student days. "So really not visit a remember to strange" he wrote in that book, no doubt foreseeing his 2010 touchdown in Happy Valley.

TOI DERRICOTTE AT PENN STATE

Poet Toi Derricotte was on campus last week for a day of workshops and a reading, organized by several of my dear colleagues. The reading kicked off with introductions by Shirley Moody-Turner (who had driven over from her postdoc at Rutgers just for the occasion) and Robin Becker.

One of the poems Toi read was this piece about the El Mina slave fortress, which I had visited on my trip to Ghana:

The Tour

The castle, always on an
outcrop of indifference;

human shells,
the discards on the way.

Where our mothers were held, we walk now
as tourists, looking for cokes, film, the bathroom.
A few steps beyond the brutalization, we
stand in the sun:

This area for tourists only.

Our very presence an ironic
point of interest to our guide.

[This is the "gate of no return" at El Mina.]

THE RETIRING OF SONNY ROLLINS

[A POEM I WROTE IN THE ANCIENT OF DAYS BUT HAVE NEVER INCLUDED IN A BOOK]

Sonny mounts the bridge and drives

The suicides beneath his keys to blow

The one sympathetic note that strikes the span senseless

Not retired but assumed into

The cable stitched heavens above

Neither sky nor sea

Flung out between radio snatching rails

To share that same ethereal gleam

Its antennaed supports plucking

Ambient overcast below

Prince over the powers of the air

Sonny sends

His winded tune skipping along arcs

Massively repeating the belled curve to

Towering horns seizing ships

Sonny sounds the altitudes

Where breath upholds the bridge

There he is tempted there reconciled

Concentrating within the exhaled pause sighs

Lapping darkly at piles recalling

Sonny to his drifting continent

Pads beneath his fingers fall

Upon that instrument that points to both

Here and there grounded waves

Roll in as Rollins

Descends Rollins

Resumes