THE SOUNDS OF MUSIC - E. ETHELBERT MILLER - THE ALDON NIELSEN PROJECT 03

THE SOUNDS OF MUSIC

Posted on January 8, 2015

Q. What type of music did you listen to while growing up? Did you play any instruments?

1.

I wanted to play tenor saxophone so badly it hurt, but those things were expensive. We got me a clarinet. This was around fifth grade, before I’d started playing air guitar while listening to my radio.

There had been so little music in the house in my earliest years that I have often wondered where my obsession with music came from. It wasn’t that anyone in the family was opposed to music. My grandmother used to play a little bit of piano; still had one in her living room. (Though what fascinated me about that instrument was that it was a hybrid. It still had the pedals and mechanisms to double as a player piano, and I remember finding some old piano rolls out in the barn.) There was always music on Sundays, mostly hymns. What little music I heard before about age six mostly came over the radio. I don’t recall just when we got the record player; seems to have been around the time T.V. came into our home, or maybe my memory just associates the two devices, in part because there was a lot of music on the T.V. once it arrived: Dinah Shore, Nat King Cole, Tennessee Ernie Ford, and even more church shows with hymns.

When my parents brought the Sears and Roebuck portable record player home, they brought a few LPs along, which remained almost the only LPs till my sister and I started bringing records home. Most of those first records my parents bought for us have been long forgotten, but there was one that had Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture on it. (Side 2 featured Mussorgsky”s Night on Bald Mountain, which made less of an impression on me at the time, though Mussorgsky became a favorite later). The canon fire was clearly one attraction; the melodies were striking. The mixing in (early mashup!) of Russian folk song, “La Marseillaise,” “Oh Lord Save Thy People” etc. fascinated me even on first hearing. But there was something particularly about the structure that I attended to. I listened to that LP over and over for years, still had it when I moved out of the house and into my own first basement apartment (just a block above Dupont Circle). My grandmother had a record of Ravel’s Bolero at her house, and again it was the structure that caught me as much as the haunting melody. It was in C major, 3/4 time, which made it easy for a young ear to catch. It had a sopranino saxophone in it, something I’d never heard before. I remembered that the first time I heard Coltrane play a soprano sax.

But it was mostly Baptist music around our home in the first years. My father was never one for buying records, but each year he bought the annual release of THE LAYMEN SINGERS, a Baptist men’s choral group. I don’t recollect that any of those ever got played more than once. Father was a loyal watcher of the Lawrence Welk show, though not so much for musical as geographical reasons. One of the featured singers for some years was a guy named Joe Feeney, a tenor from, of course, Grand Island, Nebraska. He was likely the first person I ever heard sing “Danny Boy.” Lawrence Welk, like my grandfather, had been born in a sod house, and during my father’s youth Welk was operating out of Omaha, frequently playing around my parents’ region.

These were musical interests I didn’t really share, though the hymn form stayed with me, as it had with Emily Dickinson. Charles Ives in interviews about the evolution of his compositional style used to remember sitting with his father in the park and listening to different marching bands as they practiced and moved about the grounds, playing different songs at the same time. In my case, it was partly the effect of standing in church between my mother, who had a quite pretty singing voice, and my father, who most distinctly did not, as they clashed around the chorus of “Onward Christian Soldiers.”

By the time of our move to Denver, I was growing beyond the Sparky the Firedog show and gravitating towards the pop music stations. Pop radio of the late fifties and early sixties was an odd melange. The initial shock of Rock, with its brilliant conjoining of Rhythm and Blues with Country, had been conquered by corporate music and the powers of Tin Pan Alley had been reasserted. None-the-less, in just a few minutes of airplay the D.J.s might well lurch from The Drifters “On Broadway” to Bobby Bare’s “Detroit City” to a novelty like Ray Stevens’s “Hairy the Hairy Ape.” One of the Djs did a publicity stunt that involved walking on a treadmill at a shopping plaza while a record of The Four Seasons singing “Walk Like a Man” played over and over again. You could hear Lou Christy back to back with The New Christy Minstrels. (Their song “Denver” was popular in Denver – go figure.) Didn’t know it then, but several of these folk were to reappear in different musical incarnations. Take the version of the New Christy Minstrels that was riding the wave of the Folk revival then. One Asian American dude in the crowd went on to replace about three guys in The Association. Gruff voiced Barry McGuire would join the move from Folk to Folk Rock and have a hit with his protest song, “The Eve of Destruction.” (This was the heroic era of “answer records.” Just as “Work with Me Annie” was answered by “Annie Had a Baby, She Can’t Work No More,” McGuire’s “Eve” was answered by a right wing offering from The Spoksemen titled “The Dawn of Correction.”) Kim Carnes was already looking out at the world through “Betty Davis Eyes.” Another horror to be found in the quite near future: the act that had originally toured the previous century as The Christy Minstrels. I was never to know why Randy Sparks would name his California Folk/Pop machine after such a racist predecessor.

My sister was two and a half years ahead of me, so she started bringing records home before I did. There was the inescapable Elvis, Fats Domino, etc. . There were shlock tunes I can still sing to this day. “Johnny Please Wait for Me.” “Patches” – No, not the Clarence Carter weeper you may remember. This was Bobby Vinton singing: “Down by the river that flows by the coal yards / Stands wooden houses with shutters torn down / There lives a girl everybody calls Patches / Patches my darling of Old Shanty town,” which did nothing for my evolution as a poet. Vinton’s Patches, as you might suppose, meets a bad end. This was a strange era in popular song. In just months we had tumbled from the eruption of Rock and Roll to Hollywood making Chuck Berry a spectator to his own life story. In the film Go Johnny Go, Johnny was played by Jimmy Clanton, while Chuck Berry looked on (and played a couple of killer numbers).

About the best that can be said for that time was that I learned to play Ruby and the Romantics’ “Our Day Will Come” on the clarinet.

2.

By the time our record player had been relocated to the East Coast and its basement, I was old enough to do things like fall for the come-ons of mail order record clubs. The Folk boom was still going, so alongside the Peter, Paul and Mary album my sister had, there was now my own Josh White record. (Met him a few years down the road in D.C.) I had an LP of speeches by presidents. I had two LPs of Carl Sandburg reading his poetry and his autobiography. I had the reverberating surf guitar sounds of The Ventures. I got those first two American Beatles albums, one for me and one for my sister. The one I gave my sister was mostly covers, but it was on the Vee Jay label out of Chicago, and it was from the ad materials that came with the record that I ordered up copies of other Vee Jay acts like Jerry Butler, Betty Everett, Gene Chandler and, major discovery for me, JIMMY REED, who played guitar and harmonica at the same time. An idea began to form in my mind.

I was still playing clarinet in the school band (and so met, over in the brass section, the fellow who was to become my band’s bass player and lead male vocalist). But when I looked in the mirror I saw myself as Jimmy Reed, playing a guitar with a harmonica in a rack around my neck. Reed was taller and older than me, but I had ambitions. I didn’t, however, have money. (And couldn’t sing, really.) A fair amount of pleading resulted in a cardboard box with a guitar in it under the Christmas tree. It was a pretty sorry instrument, practically made from cardboard itself. It was painted black, with a big white musical note painted around the sound hole. From Sears, of course. (Well, it may have been Montgomery Wards; who knows after this many years?) That was my only acoustic guitar for the next ten years.

A friend up the street (later our lead guitarist) had a sister too, and that sister had a good guitar. My friend was taking banjo lessons and had a tape recorder and was a near genius at figuring out how to play things by ear, something my clarinet training was no help with, I fear. He began teaching me chords and songs, and we played folk tunes – even wore those striped shirts you had to wear if you were a folk group.

Then things started happening fast.

Things that included B.B. King – Blues Is King – still one of the greatest live recordings of all time. Junior Wells – It’s My Life Baby, where I heard Buddy Guy’s guitar for the first time. Muddy Waters – Real Folk Blues. KinksRollingStonesYardbirds(Clapton first heard in that company) – Lightning Hopkins LPs checked out from the library – James Brown – Live at the Apollo (Live sounded so much better then, even with the crap sound systems we had in the sixties). Any and everything from Memphis.

First trip inside the Howard Theater (which I will write about more fully one day) for a show that gave us Billy Stewart, Charlie and Inez Foxx of “Mockingbird” fame, The Temptations, and Joe Tex singing “You Had Better Hold On” till there was no holding back, all to the accompaniment of a stellar stage band, with an M.C./comedian between the acts.

On February 9, 1964, just months after watching President Kennedy’s coffin go down Constitution Avenue to the capital building, I sat down with 73 million of my closest friends to watch The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show. We all watched Sullivan all through the era. Two years on that’s where I’d catch Richard Pryor for the first time. That’s where I saw Godfrey Cambridge, who was responsible for the only time I ever saw Sullivan completely lose it, when Cambridge, having finished his routine, walked over to Ed and presented him with a plaque designating him an “honorary Negro.” Later still, I witnessed Roland Kirk leading an all star jazz congregation (Charles Mingus, Roy Haynes, Archie Shepp!) that got on air by disrupting the Sullivan taping previously – Kirk’s Jazz and People’s Movement had hit upon a great mode of protest: sitting in an audience before a show taping and suddenly whipping out their instruments and playing where they were. Sullivan’s people had been expecting the group to play Stevie Wonder’s “My Cherie Amour,” but instead millions of Americans were treated to Mingus’s “Haitian Fight Song.”

Watching The Beatles in ‘64, though, two things hit me at once. 1) They were playing songs they’d written themselves. 2) Electricity.

I had to have an electric guitar. I thought about electricity more than at any time since that day I’d plugged myself into a wall socket in Denver. There was still a money problem. I saved (uncharacteristic for me) till I could afford the lowest quality instrument on sale in the basement of E.J. Korvettes. This guitar, again, came in a cardboard box. (Couldn’t afford a case for the thing.) Because I didn’t have enough money to buy an amp, it was a couple weeks later before I found out the thing didn’t work. Back to the store and home again with a different one, all white with a big metal plate on the body – only one pickup – strings so high you needed to put your whole weight behind trying to press them to the fret board. My banjo-playing friend up the street had gotten hold of a Gibson SG by then, and helped me dig a hole under the bridge on mine. If you can’t get over on the strings, lower the bridge. That made it moderately easier to form a chord, and that same friend let me plug into the Danelctro amp he had acquired. Eventually I got together enough money for my own amp, from Sears again. By then everybody else in the group were plugged into Fender amps, but as it happened Sears was much better at manufacturing amplifiers than guitars. That Silvertone twin twelve reverb was in fact something that people who really knew how to play liked to use. When Psychedelia arrived I was ready. You could bang the head of your guitar into the head of the amp, setting the reverb into fits, and get a quite nice trippy effect.

On the other hand . . . turned out you could buy a Hohner Marine Band harmonica down at the pawn shop (No, it was not used!) for just 50 cents. I could grab one of our mics, hold it close to my Mississippi saxophone and imagine I sounded like Little Walter. Turned out, too, that I could play that thing. I got much better, much more quickly, playing harp than I was on guitar, which meant I had my own little territory of playing leads in the incipient band.

And then this happened.

One day in the Summer of my fourteenth year, I was sitting in the back seat of the family car when there was a single snare drum crack out of the radio. I brought my head up from the book I was looking at and cocked an ear to the sounds of piano and organ that filled the first couple measures. For the next six minutes I had no idea what else was happening in the world. “Once upon a time you dressed so fine / Threw the bums a dime in your prime / Didn’t you” – This was a far cry from “Patches.” I recognized the voice from some folk music albums my sister played. “You used to be so amused / at Napolean in rags and the language that he used / Go to him now, he calls you, you can’t refuse / . . . How does it feel?”

There had been nothing like it on our radio before. (The closest? Chuck Berry lyrics. “Pay phone – something wrong – dime gone – will mail / Ought to sue the operator for telling me a tale, ahh!” Sheer pop genius.) This was poetry, and it seemed it would never end. (That same year, The Dells would release a song on one of those Chicago labels that made so much of the Blues I listened to. Three years after, Bob Dylan having broken the six minute barrier on pop radio, those same Dells went back to the studio and did that same song over again, but this time it was the gloriously unending “Stay in My Corner” that made us all stay in their corner.

[We were to learn from Bobby Seale of Panther Party founder Huey Newton’s deep political exegesis of that Dylan album, his close reading of “Ballad of a Thin Man.” ‘This song Bobby Dylan was singing became a very big part of that whole publishing operation of the Black Panther paper. And in the background, while we were putting this paper out, this record came up and I guess a number of papers were published, and many times we would play that record. Brother Stokely Carmichael also liked that record. This record became so related to us, even to the brothers who had held down most of the security for the set.“ Amiri Baraka, then at the peak of his cultural nationalist period, was to denounce “the cartoon hippy world of Black leaders digging Bobby Dylan.”]

A revelation. Surrealist poetry could be pop song. My worlds were converging. (And Dylan played harp in a rack around his neck, just like Jimmy Reed, albeit Dylan’s more immediate model was Woody Guthrie.)

By the end of the decade, Gil Scott Heron would arrive to demonstrate that actual poetry could play on pop radio. You didn’t even have to sing.

But in the now, Dylan reappeared at the Newport Folk Festival (so it told me in my newspapers) playing “Like a Rolling Stone” in the company of Michael Bloomfield (dude who played that great guitar part on the record), Al Kooper (he of the organ part that had arrested my attention) with Sam Lay on drums and Jerome Arnold on bass. I recognized that this was pretty much the Paul Butterfield Blues band without Paul Butterfield. (Once I got to see film footage of the event, I saw that Butterfield was sitting on the railing behind the group as they played for Dylan.) Once more, I read, my worlds were jamming into one another. Poetry – Music – it was all one continuum.

3.

That was the continuum I was following when I went to a store intent on purchasing my first ever jazz albums. Once the band had gotten going, playing at dances and parties, I had a little of something I’d never seen before, disposable income. I meant to dispose of most of it in music and book stores.

Giant Music in Arlington; almost as good as Soul Shack; better in a way, in that you could get your instruments and band equipment in the same store where you bought your records. I headed over to the bins marked “jazz” with a definite program in mind.

I had read that John Coltrane had recently died, all too young. I had been told that one Miles Davis was interesting. From one bin I extracted the Sorcerer LP. Maybe I chose that one because of the hypnotizing photo of a woman who turned out to be Cicely Tyson on the cover. Next door in the C bin, I grabbed a copy of Expression for myself (because the liner notes said it was the last thing he’d recorded in the studio) and a copy of Ascension for our tenor sax player. Do I remember thinking that Ascension might be a good name for a poetry series? No, I don’t, because I didn’t. I’m not sure I knew there was such a thing as a poetry series yet.

Sorcerer made me its apprentice.

The back cover featured something that looked like poetry, signed simply “R.J.G.” That would be Ralph Gleason, normally a journalist and music reviewer, here lining hymns after a fashion. “Blowing bubble notes quicker than some ears,” went one line. “Bluesteel fire hard flame white smouldering red,” read another. It was an attempt at poetry that, I came to know, was just the sort of thing people beginning to write poetry for the first time would do. Sad to say, it was also just the sort of thing several more prominent writers would do over the years. (I’m looking at you, Q.T.) Thanks to Dylan, everybody started writing their own songs and wearing their lyrics on their sleeves. This was often not such a good idea. Dylan himself never printed his lyrics on the covers of his albums, but he did print poetry on the album sleeves, lines about characters such as Savage Rose and Fixable.

Ralph Gleason would never be a poet, but Miles Davis was one, and he had surrounded himself with some of the most lyric musicians on the planet. The album kicked off with Wayne Shorter’s “Prince of Darkness.” The same side held Herbie Hancock’s “Masquelero.” I would follow these guys for the rest of my life. Drummer Tony Williams showed up playing a free outdoor concert at San Jose State University not long after I’d started my first tenure track position there. I saw Herbie Hancock again at U.C. Santa Barbara performing his River album. One night at GWU’s Lisner Auditorium, in the middle of a Weather Report Concert, I witnessed a fifteen minute solo performance by Wayne Shorter that I can still hear in memory. Just last year I met Ron Carter in New York. And Miles . . .

Still in the ear
All these years
From first hearing
To this news
Miles
Whose blues
Inhere
In rests

So I wrote upon hearing of his passing.

Something profoundly weird happened at the close of Sorcerer, a vocal by one Bob Dorough. It was hard to figure what that was doing there, though the melody was interesting. Not having children, I didn’t know that this same Bob Dorough featured on Schoolhouse Rock in the next decade.

Everything about Coltrane’s Expression was elegiac, beginning with the painting of the musician holding his soprano sax that appeared on the cover. The opening track was the powerful and prayerful “Ogunde,” which found the tenor sax in a particularly meditative mood, his wife, Alice, on piano, with Rashied Ali providing percussion and Jimmy Garrison still on bass from the previous iteration of Coltrane’s group. The wandering flute of “To Be” seemed to be exploring the depths of the infinitive. It was a haunting album throughout

I was a good student, outside the classroom – Studied liner notes as closely as I would read a lyric poem. I followed the leads from the liner notes. After Ascension, doing as I was always to do, I pursued all the musicians in the lineup. (This was harder to do with Miles, who usually didn’t identify his band members on his album sleeves, but it didn’t take long to track them down. They often appeared as the composers credited on the label.) Ascension took me to Archie Shepp, On This Night, with its setting of the words of W.E.B. DuBois. (Am I the only person who went to read DuBois because his writing had been set to music by Archie Shepp?) Other Archie albums featured settings of the composer’s own poetry. Ascension led me to alto saxophonist Marion Brown and his Georgia Trilogy, including the album Geechee Recollections and a track that was a setting of Jean Toomer’s “Karintha” read by poet Bill Hasson. (Marion Brown led me to Sun Ra, and his Heliocentric Worlds; also to some Ornette Coleman, whose plastic sax Brown borrowed at one point.) Ascension led me to Afro-Danish John Tchicai, who proved to be one fourth of the New York Art Quartet, whose album on the eccentric ESP Disk returned me to LeRoi Jones, reading “Black Dada Nihilismus.

Most of all, Ascension propelled my rethinking of what musical (and poetic) structures could be. Where many of my rock and roll friends heard only chaos, I heard a repeating form. (Those years of listening and playing in the school band had trained me to spot an A part and a B part when I heard them.) I showed my friends photos of the musicians in the studio playing in front of music stands, but they didn’t credit the evidence of their eyes. The chart was, admittedly, minimal, but Trane knew what he wanted. (We get a clearer sense of the process now that both studio takes are available for comparison.) Free Jazz / Free Verse – neither was what it was commonly thought to be. Both were the continuous creation of form.

Have I mentioned going to see Jimi Hendrix at the Washington Hilton?

4.

Quickly in the here and now.

I spent much of the intervening years following through on those early discoveries. Blues and jazz remain at the core of everything I do. I still listen to Bob Dylan, and have never blamed him for all the “new Dylans” the record companies foisted on us.

It was a blessing and a curse to have been young at a time when the music seemed to change every fifteen minutes, when each day brought new sounds and technologies, new ways of organizing creation, new ways of disorganizing the cliched into something more interesting. (Think it can’t be done? Listen to the paramount instance of bubble gum, The Archies recording “Sugar Sugar,” then listen to Wilson Pickett tear away at the confines of that song.)

As I entered adulthood, Reggae came to America. We listened to that, and to musics from all over the world, though we didn’t think to term it “world music.” I’d begun listening to African music in High School. I’d listened to even more after hearing Leon Thomas cite recordings of African folk music as a source for his jazz yodeling on Phaorah Sanders sessions. On my play list today: Fatoumata Diawara. When I had a literature radio program for several years in Northern California, my “outro” music was by Toure Kunda. Another recent enthusiasm is Tinariwen, the Tuareg group.

I just finished giving a first listen to D’Angelo and the Vanguard’s Black Messiah, whose title did make me think of Isaac Hayes’s Black Moses. D’Angelo has emerged from fourteen years in the desert bearing gifts.

Having witnessed the birth of Rap and Hip Hop, I confess to a certain weariness as I hear academic colleagues deliver paper after paper saying the same things over and over about this putatively transgressive form. I’m not saying that it is not possible for verses sanctified by inclusion in a Yale anthology to be transgressive; it’s just that I don’t want to hear anymore about this from people who have not listened to Georgia Anne Muldrow. (No, really – Right now, go listen to Georgia Anne Muldrow’s Olesi: Fragments of an Earth and then we can talk about Hip Hop transgression again.)

I’ll listen to anything that William Parker records and have in my permanent rotation a box set of his bass solo releases. I’ve written elsewhere about the project he did with Amiri Baraka, The Inside Songs of Curtis Mayfield. I’m writing now about recent releases of the old New York Art Quartet with yet more recordings with Baraka, and that group reformed for a CD some years ago with new music and poetry. Back in the day we already heard from Japanese piano giants like Toshiko Akiyoshi. Today that tradition is carried forward by Hiromi and by Satoko Fujii. Susie Ibarra is a monster on drums. Fred Ho had told us all about the coming revolution in Asian and Asian American jazz, and it’s full upon us now. Any day you listen to Vijay Iyer is a good day; he’s another who has worked with Baraka.
One intriguing development for throwback Thursdays is the way that artists like Robert Glasper and Esperanza Spalding have created projects inspired by R&B radio, except that it’s really the sound of early to mid-seventies Soul/Jazz melding that they are taking us back to. Not “Soul Jazz” of the Horace Silver variety, good as that was, but the radio sounds of the days that brought us Roy Ayers, Norman Connors, Lonnie Liston Smith, Donald Byrd and the Blackbyrds.

But if I were going to pass a list to a friend from my permanent collection of the new, high on that list would be Matthew Shipp, Hamid Drake, Cindy Blackman, Craig Taborn, D.D. Jackson, Dr. Lonnie Smith (NOT to be confused with Lonnie Liston Smith), Nicole Mitchell . . . I could go on and on. These, like good poetry, are news that will stay news.

Have I mentioned Jimi Hendrix’s take on “All along the Watchtower.”

RACE AROUND THE TABLE -- E. ETHELBERT MILLER - THE ALDON NIELSEN PROJECT 02

RACE AROUND THE TABLE

Posted on January 5, 2015

Q. How were subjects like race, class and religion discussed around the dinner table?

1.

Easiest to speak of the third. Religion was there at dinner, lunch, breakfast, day in and out. There was a Baptist publication called The Secret Place that had a daily devotion rooted in a text from scripture, followed by a prayer. As a rule, my father did the readings, though my mother took a turn often enough. I can’t remember a time when I was not thinking intensely about the complexities and contradictions of what I was hearing. (This is probably what led to those religious studies courses I was to take as an undergraduate. I would never take Ahura Mazda as my Zorastrian savior, but I would have some sense of Robert Hayden’s B’hai faith when I met him; I would know what I was looking at when I came to the two sided statue at the Buddhist temple I visited in Wuhan.) It struck me that my father and I, when it was our turn to “say grace,” invariably recited the same formula, as though there were never more nor less to pray for or to. Being a Baptist, with that denomination’s emphasis upon a personal relationship to the deity and the priesthood of all believers, I always had a Bible. But that just multiplied the problems. Why was the creation story told twice, with minor but telling variations? Why were there two versions of those ten or more commandments? Why did Bruce, my Mexican American Catholic friend across the street, have a different and longer Bible than the ones in our house? (And why did they always eat fish on Fridays over there?)

Church structure or strictures just compounded the confusions. I soon came to see that anybody could teach Sunday School. Including the obviously mentally ill woman who one Sunday morning told us about the little devils she had seen hovering in the corners of her ceiling the night before. Or the guy in Richmond who told us solemnly that when you had a nightmare the blood in your body stopped circulating and that if you didn’t wake up in time you would die. (A piece of advice that put me in mind of the words of that prayer adults for some unfathomable reason taught to small children that included the lines “If I should die before I wake / I pray the Lord my soul to take.”) None of this did much for my general opinion of the intellectual capacities of the grownups of the world. I was growing a generation gap long before Time magazine talked it up. I was agnostic even about gnosticism. I did not know the word “hermeneutics” yet, but all this was making me a textual critic, not quite what my parents had in mind in putting scripture in my hands.

We didn’t discuss class much, but it was clear that each of our churches in turn seemed to be a step up the ecclesiastical social step ladder. I gathered that we Baptists were somehow not in the same league with those Episcopalians with their country clubs. It was not till I visited the deep South much later that I came to a town where the Baptist church was the high class affair, with the endlessly varying charismatics stringing themselves along the unspooling line of class, speaking in tongues. (Usually the same tongues, it seemed to me, despite their many doctrinal disputes.)

Race, it turned out, had something to do with our going to that church at 8th and H NW instead of one of the many Baptist churches in Arlington. My father had been elected to the presidency of the American Baptist Men’s Association not long before our move East. The Baptist congregations in Northern Virginia were aligned with the Southern Baptist convention. I knew enough of church history by age twelve to know that the separation of the two conventions had its origins in the arguments about slavery in the 19th century, which fact didn’t do anything to ease my suspicions of Southern White folk. (I did not yet know of the National Baptists, a Black Baptist convention formed out of those same tectonic movements of the spirit.) The church we went to at 8th and H had not always been there, or been at all. It had formed, also in the 19th century, when Baptist congregants at an existing church split over the issue of praying for President Lincoln. (The Capitol, even during the Civil War, harbored an astonishing number of copperheads.) It was the pro-Lincoln group that had left and established the new church we were to join in the next century. The American Baptist Convention was founded at the new church, so it made sense for my father to enroll us there. Even with that background, even that church had gone through some painfully racist moments in the decades before we arrived.

One of my father’s duties as President of the American Baptist Men was to visit churches that had just formed men’s associations and present them with charters. My father was called upon, upon such occasions, to deliver himself of something resembling a sermonette. He did his best, rather in the tone of the reports he made to Congress. Some of these churches were African American congregations, and I can remember the first time that my father was the recipient of an enthusiastic “Amen” from an older lady, which was followed quickly by more Amens. My father had grown up with Ameners; our new church even had an Amen corner of pews off to one side of the pulpit, though nobody ever Amened from that quarter any more. But my father had never before been on the receiving end of such spirited welcome, and he looked genuinely surprised. The white gloved ladies who ushered everybody took a particular liking to me, welcoming me as kin, but I was no doubt considerably more likeable at thirteen than later.

Yet I really don’t recall overt discussions of race at the dinner table. Call it an early, odd form of White privilege – the privilege to go about your business not having to think much about race most of the time, especially at dinner time. But I’m sure we did discuss race, and I’m pretty sure it would have been at my instigation, because our move was causing me to think about race all the time.

I had, along with my radio and T.V. addictions, always been an avid reader of newspapers. We always took one of the local ones, and for years the newspapers from our previous towns followed in our wake. That’s how, reading the Grand Island Independent. I learned that a couple of my bonehead neighbors from third grade were arrested for vandalizing another neighbor’s home. I guess those abandoned shacks outside town had gotten boring to them. My parents still subscribed to the paper from their tiny home town, though there wasn’t much of race in that village sheet. As a reader of the news, though, I saw the stories about the unfolding Civil Rights Movement, which was often written about as if it were taking place in some foreign land, as if there were no Black people in Denver.

The one memory of such a discussion at home I thought I had has, in retrospect, to be a false memory. I thought I had a memory of my parents sitting in the living room, looking at a map of a Southern state, and talking over a possible job transfer that had been proposed to my father. And I thought I remembered my mother expressing severe doubts about moving her children to a place where crazy White folk segregated and attacked people; most of those attacked and segregated, like Dr. King, appeared to be Baptists. That conversation could not have happened, though. My father’s work with the Bureau of Reclamation was restricted to projects West of the Mississippi River. There was no way the Bureau would have offered to move him to, say Georgia. So just what things from the Fifties were getting conflated in my memory, and why?

It was the move East that crystallized things for me. Back in Grand Island, I’d grown up looking at that painting of Jesus with “all the little children of the world.” Reading the part of the Bible that picture had sprung from, I knew that all the children gathered around him would have been Palestinian. (The painting was inspired by Matthew 19:14, which, in my King James version, read “ But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.” The incipient poet in me wondered about that “suffer.” Why would you “suffer” the children to go to Jesus? The church grownups were no help on this point in semantics.) That painting, though, presented an ideal I had no reason to question. “They’re all precious in his sight.” I grew up with that assumption and nobody had told me there were any amendments or sub-clauses. Our family from time to time hosted visits by people from Africa, and American Indians, all Baptists passing through town to talk international Baptist efforts. (And I remember visiting the home of an older couple who had glass cases in their house filled with artifacts from Africa, where they had worked for many years.) If my mother and father ever had any stereotypical ideas about races, they never expressed them in my presence. (Grandparents were another matter. My mother’s father, for reasons lost on me, compensated for his inability to remember people’s names, a problem I inherited from him, by calling everyone by the same multipurpose nickname, “Irish.”)

I’d always been a Civil War buff; read up on all the battles. I’d also spent an evening listening to a Denver radio special about the history of the KKK in Colorado, a Klan that had been pretty well busted by an expose in the Denver Post back in the day. So the move to Northern Virginia and D.C., just as the Civil War centennials were underway, meant I would see the real places I had read about. (Children tend to have a tenuous grasp of history and geography. My new neighbors in Arlington were impressed with my cowboy boots and envied my knowing how to ride horses, but thought I was lying about driving around in cars out West. I, in my turn, proved woefully ignorant of the racial geography of my country, and nobody was in any hurry to enlighten me.)

We arrived just in time to witness the March on Washington on our T.V. set that had just come off the moving truck. It was the year before the biggest of the Civil Rights Acts. I never saw segregation up close in Arlington. (I saw its legacy everywhere, as I’m about to explain.) But one day I stumbled into it in the Virginia countryside. I’d gone on a trip, to what the locals thought were mountains, with a car full of scouts. On the way back we’d stopped out in rural Virginia for gasoline. I needed to use the rest room, so walked around the corner of the gas station only to find myself blinking at a sign that read: “We reserve the right to refuse service to anybody.” I had no idea what it meant, but worried it meant I couldn’t pee. The adult driving the car saw me frozen, saw the sign, grabbed me and pushed me into the car. We drove on a few hundred yards and bought our gas and peed at a station that didn’t have such a sign. There was no explanation offered during the nearly silent ride back to Arlington.

2.

Arlington’s Wakefield High School had finally been integrated, or at least desegregated, a couple years before I entered its tenth grade, and so I was assigned to Algebra class with Mr. Haygood. Mr. Haygood was “really” a chemistry teacher, but he was covering Algebra too that year, while also coaching J.V. football. He was part of the small, first contingent of black teachers who had come over from Hoffman-Boston, which had until then been the Black high school for the county. By the time I was there, Wakefield’s school population included hundreds of African American students, and nobody told me there had not always been hundreds of African American students there. (The Wakefield alumni association has recently published a book of interviews with students and faculty who were involved in the integration – .) It didn’t take at all long for me to recognize what was going on in the county, though. By far the preponderance of Black students were at Wakefield; Washington-Lee, in the middle of the row of three high schools, had a fair number; Yorktown, at the opposite end of the county from Wakefield, seemed to have only two at the time. This lined up with the housing legacy of segregation days. Green Valley was just down the hill from our school. Johnson Hill was farther over, and so some of the students from that neighborhood went to W&L. Johnson Hill was home to the Black Baptist church; Green Valley was where you found Arlington’s A.M.E. Zion congregation

I was never one to seek “role models,” and had no intention of becoming an Algebra teacher, but Mr. Haygood was my idea of a model for us youth. He didn’t take any disrespect from anybody, and he was possessed of the proverbial sharp-edged wit. He caught wind of the fact that I was getting a band started, and that I was making sorry attempts at playing harmonica, so he began to bring in tapes from his massive collection and play people like Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee for me. I didn’t do all that well in Algebra that year, but I was soon immersed in that music. One of my proudest moments in high school came the next year when our band was playing “Born in Chicago” and I caught sight of Mr. Haygood, who was one of the chaperones that night, smiling, nodding and tapping his foot. One night after graduation, I was to run into Mr. Haygood in Georgetown at the Cellar Door. Muddy Waters sat at our table while waiting to go on stage. Mr. Haygood introduced us to Muddy. Seems they were old friends. Mr. Haygood even offered to arrange for us to stay for the second show and hang out back stage, but my date had a curfew.

The little bit I learned about what had happened as the schools desegregated I learned from my Black class mates. None of the White students seemed to know or want to know anything. The Black kids in my classes told me about an infamous assembly that had been held at Hoffman-Boston, during which the principal and faculty members advised the students on how they should act around the White kids they would soon be sharing classrooms with. I wasn’t able to find any White students who reported similar assemblies in their schools.
The band we were getting started in tenth grade was a gathering of people I’d known in Junior High and two more met at Wakefield. It was a remarkable group. Come graduation time, three of us were National Merit semi-finalists. Two of us later earned PhD’s. One of the band members went on to be Miss Black America. We were, by the time we were in our final lineup, one of about three racially integrated bands that played around the county routinely. That led to some tough experiences, like the night some guy outside a 7/11 scratched the “N word” in the side of my father’s car while the band was inside the store getting sodas. On the more positive side of interracial relations, the Chinese kids in D.C.’s Chinatown latched onto us. They were, I believe, the last generation of Chinese kids to grow up there, when the neighborhood was still significantly residential. We played gigs at the Chinese Cultural Center in downtown D.C., and a Chinese wedding party out in Arlington. Nobody told us we were being multicultural.

But it was when our lead singer and I started dating that I ran full face into the buzz saw of American racism. She had written me an anonymous note and stuck it in my books during lunch period, but I figured out who the note was from. (I had seen her handwriting before, after all. She had to write out the lyrics to the songs she was learning, and I’d pencil the chords in, which our lead guitarist had figured out using his tape recorder.) She was easily the most beautiful girl in the school, sang like Aretha, was sharp as a tack and, to my amazement, liked me. Why wouldn’t I date her?

Well, apparently there were a lot of people I had never met who had strong answers to that question. It’s hard for me to believe there had never been an interracial couple at the school before, but I can’t remember another one during our time there. A Patch of Blue had already screened at the movies, but Sammy Davis had not yet kissed Nancy Sinatra on the cheek; Captain Kirk and Uhura had not yet exchanged their interstellar kiss. The mere prospect of the two of us seemed to unhinge some people. Most of the teachers and staff knew better than to say anything about it, though there was a homeroom teacher who mysteriously said something about an article in the New York Times he wanted to show me. Hell, maybe it was just a poetry book review; he never did show it to me. A guy who lived up the street from me threw me against the lockers and was about to break my arm off before a teacher came along, all because he didn’t like my witty response to his racist comment. This kind of thing started to happen regularly. I was trying to be some sort of pacifist conscientious objector as my draft age approached, but this was making it hard to hold to that plan. One day as we were walking along Four Mile Run Drive, a guy who had just driven past us ran up over the curb, spun around screeching his tires, did a second U turn and pulled alongside us. He kept reaching under the driver’s seat while shouting abuse at us, threatening to do us in with whatever he had under there. Not sure what he thought was going to happen. After a dance in Fairfax, Virginia, a couple cops made me open the trunk of the car and they spent about twenty minutes searching its empty interior
while making veiled suggestions about what they might do to us if they found anything. In contrast, the Arlington cops, some of whom made extra money by working at school and church dances where we played, would sort of look out for us, like guardian angels who hovered just a tad too close.

One reason I don’t recall discussions about race around the dinner table is that I never told my parents about any of these episodes.. (I did, obviously, tell them how the “N word” came to be scratched in the car. I have since wished I could have listened in as my father spoke to his insurance agent about that claim.) They knew the young lady I was dating, and knew that she was a Baptist. Maybe that was the key. At any rate, in those years I was unlikely to talk to my parents about much of anything I was thinking about, that’s what my friends were for, and my books and magazines. My friends in the band, and those neo-hippies I hung around with at school, were engaged in one continuous conversation about that political world we were to inherit. Our small, interracial tribe were, we were certain, hip, maybe unbearably so, and we knew the others were war mongering racists who would soon be washed away in the tides of history. (Fooled us, again.) The band prospered, meanwhile, as we played Soul and Rock both. (I had not yet heard my own singing voice on tape, but since I was the one singing the Dylan songs, it didn’t matter so much. Soon enough, I’d leave the mic and our bass player would sing like Otis Redding or our organ player would sing like Marianne Faithful or our lead vocalist would sing Fontella Bass.)

I had found Ramparts magazine in the library, and had my own subscription to Esquire, which in that time published cutting edge fiction and major essays on people like LeRoi Jones. Negro Digest had not yet become Black World, but it was in many of the homes I hung out in. (Usually sitting under the ubiquitous ceremonial plate bearing an otherworldly portrait of President Kennedy, and often enough right next to a portrait of Jesus.) Radio station WOL, which I listened to religiously (it became an all talk format, sad to say, as the years passed), hosted several weekend discussion programs where I would hear local political figures and ministers opine on the evolving liberation struggles. The voices of the prophets: Petey Greene, Sunny Jim Kelsey (DO NOT be misled about this fine D.J. by the caricature of him in the Petey Greene movie), and my own long time favorite, Bob “Nighthawk” Terry. On that blonde T.V. set that had come with us from the wild west, now housed in the basement (the living room was hereafter strictly for living), I saw the breaking news of riots in Detroit and Watts.

Then Dr. King was shot.

I was sitting in my girlfriend’s house when her little brother came running in the room with the news.

The next morning as I walked from my first class through the halls, there was a small group of students holding a sit-in in the lobby outside the main gym. I sat. More people sat. Our group grew bigger than the lobby and we wound up spending most of the day occupying the school’s central courtyard. Some parents came and got their kids out of school. Some heard on the radio that we were rioting, came, saw us making speeches (have to admit I was among the speechifiers) and singing songs (I was on surer ground playing a guitar that had appeared) and wheeled on one heel, leaving the school and their kids behind.

That Sunday, despite continued warnings from the T.V. and radio, we did what we did every Sunday, piled in the car and drove to 8th and H for church. We drove past machine gun nests. When we got to the church, there was a National Guard encampment in the parking lot across the street. Two of my friends (one of them the previously mentioned organ player in our band, who I still know and have known since age 12) joined me in what we did every Sunday instead of going to Sunday School, exploring the streets and museums of D.C. That Sunday, 7th Street was eerily silent. We were only a block away from the National Guard, but they didn’t know where they were and they might as well have been on another planet. 7th Street was glistening with broken glass. A guy came walking down the street past us casually swinging a golf club. Wonder if he was walking to Haines Point to practice his putting.

At the end of the school year, when we had our traditional assembly, the principal presented an award to my friend Annie Mae, one of the two organizers of the sit-in, because, in the words of the principal, it was largely due to their efforts that there “was no trouble” at Wakefield that day. I was troubled by that, but I learned an important lesson about the ability of what we called the power structure to absorb blows and assimilate movements.

Can’t remember what was said at dinner.

E. Ethelbert Miller - The Aldon Nielsen Project -- 01

[Poet E. Ethelbert Miller began the Aldon Nielsen Project in January of 2015 -- Throughout the year, Miller is posing questions to Nielsen.]

The Early Years of Aldon Nielsen

Posted on December 31, 2014

Q. Place is very important in literature. Describe the neighborhood that shaped you as a boy.

1.

I’ve never really thought of myself as a “poet of place” (this from a poet whose works include titles such as “Life along Nannie Helen Burroughs Avenue” and “S.E. Love Cry”), and have often wondered why nobody ever speaks of a “critic of place” in the same way. If you think of the examples of Charles Olson and Amiri Baraka, you quickly see how critique and verse can be so wonderfully conjoined around an exploration of place and space. Olson took “SPACE” to be “central fact to man born in America” and spent a lifetime in the spaces afforded by his outward thrust from Gloucester. Baraka, a traveler of the world, was always recognizably a passenger on the NEW ARK.

Still, though I’ve never stood still, several neighborhoods formed me, as they formed that mode of my speech that seemed to confuse at least one speech communications teacher in Junior High School who just couldn’t place me. Perhaps it was due to my beginnings in the Midwest, a place where we thought ourselves the only people on the planet free of an accent. It was only after we moved to Northern Virginia that I could listen to my mother and hear in her tones the distinctive, crackling drawl of the Great Plains. Nebraska turned out to be a great place to be from.

We missed as much by accent as by trees. Nebraska was so devoid of groves that they invented an annual observance, Arbor Day, on which we were encouraged to plant trees. Wouldn’t want the state to blow away again like it nearly did when the Great Depression hit the Great Plains. We were a state in need of roots. For God’s sake, there were tumbleweeds rolling down the street, just like in the song and movies. Once we belatedly got a T.V., I saw Roy Rogers singing about “Drifting along with the tumbling tumbleweeds.” Like most boys of my generation, I thought cowboy life looked pretty good on T.V. I could locate myself in the spaces of that song: “See them tumbling down / Pledging their love to the ground,” and it may be that was one of the early experiences of lyric that sent me towards poetry. But that song had been recorded six years before I was born (six years before E. Ethelbert Miller was born, too). The only thing left of that already then imaginary life was the tumbleweed itself. When I walked down the street to school, the tumbleweed would pass me by, rolling in the opposite direction.

I had a closer view of cowboy life than my Eastern friends, though, thanks to the farms and ranches my family had come from. We lived in a town of about thirty thousand grandly named Grand Island, so called evidently because of its originally being nestled between the Wood (ha!) and Platte Rivers. We were surrounded by Prairie Dog towns (one reason I was so puzzled upon finding Prairie Dogs on exhibit at the National Zoo once we’d made it to D.C.). There was a sugar beet factory nearby, which, along with the many abandoned shacks beyond the edge of town, made the perfect playground for us boys. The presence of the factory meant there were trains coming and going, with tracks for us to play around. (How many coins did we let the freights flatten out?) Mine was a town life, but we were perched at the leading edge of town, so there were always basements being dug around us, dirt roads turning to asphalt (and thus plenty of that wondrous substance TAR for us to mess with) and the fields with their mounds of sugar beets stretching away past the school.

Both sets of grandparents were still farming, not so far from Grand Island. My mother’s brother had a ranch near the Sand Hills. Two Aunts, seeing something of the nothing in the Midwest future, had decamped for Denver and greater opportunity, where we would follow before too long. Summers and many weekends were spent on horseback, playing in the grain bin, chasing the chickens, wrestling hogs, going to that little rural church where people would interrupt the preacher if he forgot something. But it only took a few times being sent out to the soy bean field to uproot the volunteer corn to teach me that I would be no cowboy. (Years later, when some of my D.C. friends were moving “up to the country” and getting closer to mother earth, I wanted no part of it.) But I was a natural in the saddle; loved the horses; loved riding among the cattle, the ruminants. At bottom, what I found there was the same thing Sterling Brown celebrated in “After Winter”: “fo’ the little feller, / Runnin’ space.” In my case in space, “galloping” might have been more apropos, closer to my accustomed gait. I was a climber, too, much to the terror of my mother. There were no mountains to climb in Nebraska, so it was first furniture, then the tallest tree in the park. Like so many climbers, I was a faller, landing on my head countless times – maybe the true source of the poetry.

We lived on Louise Street in a house my parents had gotten built thanks to the G.I. Bill. Before that we’d been a basement family, prefiguring the basement apartments I was to favor as a young adult. The surrounding countryside featured an odd architectural sight – flat fields on which someone had stuck a door. Seems people would start a house, get as far as digging a basement and laying the concrete, then go ahead and move in before any above-ground house was in evidence. Driving past you’d just see a slab with a door standing at the front of it. But maybe it wasn’t a matter of waiting for enough money for a first floor; maybe those folk were just taking to heart the drills we had in school in the Fifties. We had tornado drills and we had nuclear war drills. The grownups seemed convinced that the Russians were going to fire atomic weapons at Grand Island, Nebraska, largely because there was a Strategic Air Command base over closer to Omaha. Never made much sense to me. I couldn’t help noticing, have remarked frequently over the years, that the drill was the same duck and cover for both nuclear war and the far more likely tornado. Maybe those under-the-ground-living people were just being savvy. Live in a basement house and you were already in the storm cellar, which might conceivably double as a fallout shelter should Russia and us have another falling out.

Like I said, it was a great place to be from. After nine years of running pretty much without constraint, I moved with my family to the West. Good thing, too. We never did have that nuclear war, but a few years later the inevitable tornado wiped out roughly a third of the town, taking a fair number of those trees we’d planted on Arbor Days along with the roofs of houses foolish enough to stick out above ground level.
2.

My father’s work led to a promotion, which led to Denver, where my Aunts had gone before. We’d been there on a car trip once earlier, for my Aunt Leila’s wedding. I still remember my first glimpse of the mountains – snow-capped and seemingly floating above the ground, though that illusion was probably the result of my small body being planted on the car’s back seat and looking up between shoulders through the windshield. That was something, though, those floating Rockies drifting above my horizon. I don’t remember anything of the wedding, but I remember my Aunt’s record player and her copy of Peter and the Wolf, which I insisted on replaying. The name Sergei Prokofiev meant nothing to me then. (There were those Russians again! – And a composition completed fourteen years before Ethelbert and I were born.) But here was text (I don’t suppose anybody in my Aunt’s apartment called it “text”) with music. This was something that my brain locked down on. Spoken word with music. It was clear that the music was not simply accompanying the text; the two forms of creation were twining together and producing something beyond what either could do alone. My Aunt was a school teacher and probably used the record for its intended purpose, cultivating musical interest in children. We were just far enough past the Red Scare that she wasn’t fired for using Russian music to accomplish this end. I never forgot those final words: “If you listen very carefully, you’ll hear the duck quacking inside the wolf’s belly, because the wolf in his hurry had swallowed her alive.” (The things grownups tell children!) But the reason I never forgot them was the music. A symphony for children – I knew there must be more – I knew we needed to get a record player.

I went to three schools in the three years we lived in Denver, and we lived in two houses. The first house was a rental we moved into while the parents looked around for permanent housing. This was the house where I called myself a painter and set up a studio in a crowded upstairs room, all as the result of seeing the 1959 movie A Dog of Flanders. (The dog acting the title role had also appeared in Old Yeller – this was the sort of thing I paid attention to – Back in Grand Island I’d gone to a dog movie, The Littlest Hobo, at which the dog himself came on stage, and typed on a typewriter! I got an autographed [paw printed] glossy photo of the dog, which I kept for decades.) This was also the house in which I conducted my first experiments as an inventor, one of which involved my plugging myself into a wall socket. I had learned about electricity but not about insulation. No doubt this was another of those experiences leading me to poetry. My mother managed to disconnect me using a broom, whose handle, of course, would not conduct the current from me into her. Bill collectors occasionally came to our door looking for the previous tenant, but more often our bell was rung by salesmen who had vacuum cleaners, indestructible dining plates, even socks to try to sell to us.

It was in those Denver schools that I began to understand something of racism. Back in Grand Island, several of my closest friends in the neighborhood were Mexican-American. This was even more the case in Denver, but it was in Denver that I first saw that this fact meant something about my relationships with certain among the other white kids (though none of us ever called ourselves white kids – we were just kids – but I was learning that my friends weren’t just kids; they were Mexican kids, despite having lived in Colorado considerably longer than any of my family had). By the time I got to seventh grade, and my third school, “race” was becoming visible in more dangerous ways. That school was huge, had so many students that it was split in two. Half the students went in the early morning, while the other half, my half, arrived a little after noon and stayed till late afternoon. There was an open area with a lake adjacent to the school, and on more than one occasion as my bus arrived I saw groups of boys fighting near the lake, always evenly divisible by ethnicity.

Yes, we were bused to achieve education. The rule was in Winter you had to wait at the bus stop at least an hour. If the snow was so bad that the bus hadn’t shown up by then, you were allowed that shivering walk back to your home. This of course meant that the street around the bus stop was subjected to pretty ferocious snow ball throwing for an hour. One evening as we were busing home, the whole side of one mountain was ablaze. I’d never seen a forest fire before. (The prairie fires of the plains, on the other hand, remain among the most terrifying things I have ever seen, able to spread faster than any animal could run.) Given the distance to the mountain, and the fact that the fire was illuminating the faces of us students in the bus, the fire must have been of tremendous size.

Denver was where I began to learn something of Spanish, first from Mr. Vigil, my favorite teacher at my second school. He was the one who let me and my buddy take over the blackboards one day to work out some computation involving the speed of light that we thought proved the possibility of time travel. (I was deep into comic books and Sci Fi by that time.) On the first day of class, Señor Vigil went around the room assigning each of us a Spanish name. (I remembered this when I went to teach in China and learned that nearly all my students had English names along with their Chinese monikers.) Thus Robert became Roberto, Mary became Maria, Richard was to be Ricardo, Dolores remained Dolores, but what to do with me? Señor Vigil looked at the name “Aldon” in exasperation for a minute, then brightened. “What’s your middle name?” “Lynn,” I responded truthfully, adding to his exasperation. And that is the true story of how I became “Pancho,” a name I was glad to leave behind when I moved on to Junior High School and lunch time gang wars.

Grownups were worried about something they called Juvenile Delinquency. I was worried about the guy who came to shop class straight from stealing a knife from the drug store, which knife he proceeded to sharpen using the school’s equipment. This was the same little dude who said I was probably such a case of arrested development that I hadn’t looked at a Playboy magazine yet. I lied and said I had, but then he asked how many times. There’s no winning with those guys.

It was at my first Denver school that I was for the first time asked by a teacher to write a poem. My initial effort was a great success, one that the teacher read aloud to the rest of the class. Inspired by my triumph, I quickly wrote another one, which was, to put it mildly, less successful. For the next year or so my virtuoso rhyming was confined to warning signs I hung on the door to my bedroom. Now that was an advance. In Denver, for the first time, I got a room of my own. Once we’d moved to our permanent house, where we lived for all of two-and-a-half years, my father, with me pretending to help, walled off a section of the basement that became my room. So I had a basement place! With a door! I put a sign on the door to keep everybody out, rhymed, and hung one of those rubber fake shrunken heads on it to drive the point home. Inside my little man cave, I built my own laboratory, where I concocted strange chemicals and looked at stuff through a microscope. There too I created my comic book library and spent countless hours reading adventure yarns, murder mysteries, Sci Fi and Fantasy, and, my then favorite, science books. I decided I was going to become a forensic pathologist. Even went to a science fair where I got to talk to someone who cut up bodies to find out how they died. I was somewhat unusual in those pre-CSI days in my selection of hero figures with which to identify.

I have to think that my second poem is involved with my first act of criticism. I knew that poem was not as good as the first one; I knew that it failed in comparison to the poems that were beginning to fill my head, from my reading and from listening to the radio. I had to think through what it was that made those other poems so markedly better than my little failed poem. (It was about mythical South Pole people and their ice church steeple/home.)

I had always listened to radio. We didn’t have a T.V. at first in Grand Island, so radio was it in early childhood. (My parents remember having to come get me from my friend Stevie’s house across the street. He had T.V., and it was in color.) I listened to things like the Sparky the Fire Dog program. Sparky sent me a coupon for a six pack of orange soda on my birthday. I never lost the fascination with radio. In Denver I built a crystal set and would listen to it under the covers when I shared a room with my two brothers, who had to have lights out earlier than I would have liked. By fifth grade I had the Japanese transistor radio that we all had, with the single ear phone screwed into an ear. That was how I listened to the World Series out on the playground between classes. One day I’d discovered that the old radio we’d brought with us from Nebraska had a short wave band on it. I stretched a sheet of tin foil (what I still call it, much to my wife’s amusement, the term marking the place and era of my beginnings) across one wall and ran a wire into the radio, and then the world came streaming into my basement. My favorite was a station coming from Cuba that played mostly U.S. Rhythm and Blues.

By then, though, we had gotten that much-needed record player. (Like the big blonde T.V. set we got, that record player stayed with us till long after I was grown and out of the house. I listened to my sister’s records of The Everly Brothers, The Isley Brothers, an unlikely pair known as Paul and Paula, the indomitable Chubby Checker. One day in the drug store I spotted a plastic bag full of 45s that I could buy for just 99 cents, which is how I came to have copies of “Itsy Bitsy Teensy Weensy Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” along with more interesting fare from Little Anthony and the Imperials, whose “Shimmy Shimmy Ko Ko Bop” taught me another important early lesson in poetry. There was a record store I could get to on my bicycle, and there you could audition records as if you actually had the money to buy them. There were no headphones. You would go into a little booth, rather like the isolation booth in which game show contestants stood while being questioned, and there you could play pretty much any record that was in the store on a turntable considerably better than the Sears and Roebuck portable box we listened to at home.

We had the advantage of the nearby mountains. (My buddies and me could even, on a particularly adventurous day, ride our bicycles out of town and up to the Red Rocks amphitheater.) And we still were within driving distance of the grandparents and uncle with their farms and ranch and, most important, horses. (One grandfather tried to train me to drive a tractor, but the strangeness of separate brakes for the two huge back wheels flummoxed me.)

But the main thing was that we had come to a city. I discovered I was an essentially urban person. Running space was fine in the country. It was far better in the streets. Kerouac’s Neal Cassidy was running on Larimer Street, but I wouldn’t know that till years later, when I could finally get a copy of a book I remembered seeing in the paperback racks at the grocery store in Denver.

3.

My father’s job was in the U.S. Department of the Interior, so that steady promotions eventually promoted us all the way to the nation’s capitol. This time the parents went ahead to find us a house (in Arlington as it turned out – I would quickly learn to tell people I was going to D.C., as otherwise they seemed to think we were moving into a cemetery). I stayed on in Denver for a month with my favorite Aunt and Uncle, the ones who read books and played music and went to art museums. My Uncle even built his own sundial in his backyard.

The day came that I took my first flight on an airplane, all the way to the newly opened (and, I would later realize, hideously named) Dulles Airport. (Like everybody else of a certain age from D.C., I still call that closer-in airport National – can’t bring myself to call it by that other name. Same way we still speak of Malcolm X Park, even though the city never made the name official. Hi there, Meridian Hill !) I’d had no prior experience of anything that could be called the South. My first impression, riding in from the airport, was one of intense claustrophobia. Born on the plains, just arrived from the Rockies, I had never seen so many trees, seemingly leaning threateningly over the also never experienced before white board fences, forming a green tunnel and making it impossible for me to have any sense of direction.

I got used to it.

As I got used to living in a brick house. The real estate people called it “antique brick,” which just meant that it was used bricks, still bearing the tar and markings from whatever structure it had been a part of in its past. Every row house I lived in later in D.C. was built of that same brick, as if it were following me around across the years.

My father went to work not far from the Lincoln Memorial, and I could take that same bus right through Georgetown to downtown and across to the other side of the city. I quickly discovered there was a train station you could reach by bus, thus putting the entire North East in easy reach. We went to a Baptist church at 8th and H, NW. Later, one version of WPFW would be housed around the corner. THEN there was a pet store on 7th street we’d go to when were supposed to be in Sunday School. It was a tiny place, but it had a llama. Not far away was SOUL SHACK, which continued my musical education. They even had a section of records of people reading stories, telling jokes, reciting poetry. I found Carl Sandburg and Redd Foxx within two bins of one another.

Another bus would take me uptown to the Howard Theater, though the first time I saw a show there I arrived by car with the boss of my little gang of newspaper sales boys. Ben’s Chilli Bowl was the place where I had my first half smoke. It would be twenty years more before I realized that people in the rest of the country didn’t know what a half smoke was, perhaps another ten before I realized that Ben didn’t eat half smokes.

Roberta Flack had grown up not far from where we lived (on her way home from school she’d buy a peppermint stick and a pickle and stick one inside the other – I never did care for sweet and sour), and by the time I was in high school, she was beginning to play in places like Mr. Henry’s that I wasn’t old enough to get into. She was also teaching school herself. D.C. and Arlington, it transpired, were the kind of place where such things were happening every day.

It was a city filled with music. Some evenings we’d go to sit on steps by the Potomac and listen to a military band play from a barge in the river. In the summers there were free concerts absolutely everywhere. Each summer the Smithsonian held a folk life festival on the mall, where you could just walk up and talk to the musicians. In short order I was to meet Lightning Hopkins, Mance Lipscombe, Big Boy Arthur Crudup, Skip James. I remember the guy going around the mall selling programs calling out, “learn how the Eskimoes make ice.” A few years later I would hear a commotion behind me at the festival and, turning, find myself in front of the first version of Sweet Honey in the Rock. But that was much later after graduation, after the draft.

We saw the President coming out of a church one Sunday afternoon. I saw James Brown in a music store. (He was a whole lot shorter than he looked on our T.V. set.) When Carl Sandburg died, I persuaded my mother to take me to a memorial event at the Lincoln, uh, Memorial. The poet’s widow and her famous photographer brother were seated up there. Charlie Byrd’s group played a song. Next thing we knew, that same President made his way to the microphone in an apparent surprise move to pay homage to the late poet. I was to stand in that same place so many times in the coming years; once to visit Resurrection City; once to witness the Panthers’ rally for their People’s Constitutional Convention.

We came to the area when I was twelve, when I was old enough to ride my bike or the bus (more secretly the train) to just about anywhere. I was able to discover book stores. I could hear about any kind of music. I could see politicians ignoring us. I could join in demonstrations in the streets. I could get tear gassed. I could walk right up to the friggin’ Library of Congress. I could talk the nice Arlington librarians into letting me read books in the “adult” section, at a time when the meaning of “adult” had not yet been narrowed to just things I wouldn’t want to read. I could read Joyce. And there was some guy named LeRoi Jones I was seeing mentioned.

At Arlington’s Kenmore Junior High, my English teacher, Mrs. Mowatt, required each of us to memorize and recite a poem. “Old man Woolworth put up a building. / There it was;” Don’t recall if it was before or after my recitation, but I saw Sandburg on, I think it was, Ed Sullivan reading his poem “Arches.” This was a time when a poet could be invited to recite his verses on a network, prime time show, the biggest really big show of them all. This was also a time before I sat down to read Sandburg’s complete poems in the library and was horrified by the frequent racism in the work of this poet who wrote “The People, Yes.” Another stage in my development as a critic, learning that poets were not always good people. (Hey, I was a kid.)

Soon I was reading e.e. cummings. “my father moved through dooms of love
through sames of am through haves of give, / singing each morning out of each night.” Again finding that reading someone’s complete works might well color your reading of your favorite poems forever.

One day when I was thirteen, I was dawdling among the racks at a Brentanos when I saw this face staring out at me. The look was of such intensity I had to look at the poetry inside the book. The Dead Lecturer. Who was Edward Dorn, and what did he have to do with the Green Lantern? (I for sure knew who the Green Lantern was.) There was an explanation for the name of Willie Best, but I had never seen any of those movies, and couldn’t in that pre-Netflix year. Who was Robert Williams and why was he in exile? But most of all: “The symbols hang limply / in the street. A forest of objects, / motives.” There was much of motives in the book, a motif. This was well beyond anything of Sandburg or cummings, beyond yet the little of Eliot I’d ingested. Seemed, though, to be in the neighborhood of Pound, Williams and Hughes. I was on to something. First year at Wakefield High School, I went to the Brentanos downtown and came away with a little black and white book titled Kaddish.

D.C. was a place of books, of free music, of free museums, of countless people in the streets from every part of the globe. It was where I should have been born, but then I would have talked differently.

I heard myself saying “y’all.”

Ojo Caliente

 I'm recently returned from Palovista Ranch, which is outside Ojo Caliente, New Mexico, which is outside Santa Fe. Hadn't been to New Mexico since a family trip when I was eleven years old. (Somewhere I still have the book on prehistoric human cultures of New Mexico that I bought on that trip.) The occasion of my return was an invitation to participate in a unique seminar hosted there for several years now by Daisy Atterbury and Genji Amino.

The seminar brings together writers, artists and musicians who pursue their work and interact with visiting speakers. I had been preceded this year by Craig Dworkin (who I keep just missing at one place or another) and Lucy Lippard. While I was there, film maker Jeanne Liotta drove in from Boulder. The seminar is a curious mix of scholarship, creative work (not that there's a real difference) and winter camp.

Look close and you'll see Stephen Jonas was in the house.

New from Lisa Jarnot

Here's the treasure I carried away from the SPD booth at this year's MLA in Vancouver, this beautiful book from Lisa Jarnot with art works by Emilie Clark.  It was Lisa's name that caught my attention first, of course -- been reading her for years -- but the other thing that made me pick this up and hold it was the beautiful book design. This thing reminds me of nothing so much as those children's story books I didn't much read as a child. (I went for the larger hardback books on science or containing Sci Fi fiction in those days.) Solid Objects press has done a great job with this simply as a solid object. It is a delight to hold, to turn the pages; the colors are rendered gorgeously.  And the poetry's playful meters may also remind you of children's verse, if only the children's verse I got in school had been this interesting. (It was only in my adolescence that I stumbled across the more interesting children's verse, still well worth reading in my teens.)

Into the eve of a picnic of trees of the strawberry rabbit tyrone

into a glazed economic disturbance caused by the rain most dramatic and strange

small whole moon in the sky    fishlike in semblance

as damp as an amphibrach the anthony braxton gland of ant launch

click here to get the book from Solid Objects!

MLA - Vancouver - 2015

I've always wanted to visit Vancouver, not only because of the testaments to its beauty I'd heard over the years from Stan Brakhage and others, but because of its crucial place in the geographies of the New American Poetries of the last century. I'll have to plan a return visit to follow up on those attractions, though, because aside from the few times I was able to get to MLA panels, I was in a hotel suite interviewing candidates for a position at Penn State. The first sight greeting me as I approached the convention center made me question my sight, a seemingly pixilated whale rising from the water. 

The conference proper started off for me with the panel on Modernism, Harlem, and the Paradox of Memory. Then came what was for me, with my limited ability to attend panels, perhaps the highlight of the week, the session on Rethinking Postslavery Consciousness. My own roundtable came the next morning, a co-sponsored session on Amiri Baraka's essays, that reunited me with Billy Joe Harris, Margo Crawford and Jeremy Glick, and introduced me to the exciting work of Simon Abramowitsch. We were chaired by Brian Norman, representing the Division on Nonfiction Prose Studies, and, representing the Division on Black American Literature and Culture, my dear friend from Howard University, Dana Williams.

Another treat, a session on Twentieth Century American Literature and Sound Recording, in the course of which I finally heard a recording of the Town Hall concert joining Ree Dragonette and Eric Dolphy that I had been searching for over the past two decades.

I was sorry not to be able to get to more of the poetry panels, but I did catch a great session on The New York School and elegy, and just before leaving town I joined a small band of Sunday early risers for an excellent session on Steve McCaffery. Appranetly there was a nearly secret off site reading Saturday night, which I only learned of late Friday despite having made copious inquiries. I gather it went well, and only wish more of us out of towners could have known of it and attended. That disappointment was more than offset by the discovery that the good people at the Small Press Distributing booth were giving away books for free. I snagged a gorgeous new book by Lisa Jarnot.

HOT DOG

A new book from a new press -- Just out from selva oscura press, in North Carolina, here is Ken Taylor's Dog with Elizabethan Collar.

This is an oversize, gorgeous book, bringing Taylor's poetry together with art works by a dozen artists.


before i drag an allegory back from the bar
i guess her weight on la cienega & hazard
if that's a number i can bench press.



[I was driving on La Cienega just the other day, nearly allegorically.]

find the book here!