A Poet's Democracy-Inaugural Poems-Goucher College and Sistah Joy
A Poet's Democracy-Inaugural Poems-Goucher College and Sistah Joy
Last night I attended a wonderful reading at Goucher College. The occasion was “Inaugural Poems: Baltimore-D.C. Poets Bear Witness To A New Presidential Era.” The event was organized by Johnny Turtle, Director of the Katz Writing Center, and Noah Klein, a student at the College. What made the event most memorable for me was what I call the bandwidth of the ideas presented. The poets ranged in age from the early twenties to over sixty and read a wide variety of poems that spoke to the complexity of poets, poetry, and the difficult task of confronting politics.
After all, though both poet and politics begin with the letter “p,” the two terms seem to exist in alternate universes. A poet uses words to convey human experience, while politics seeks to use words to determine a human being’s experience. The convergence of the two suggests a middle path of action—difficult to obtain.
Many of the poets, myself included, addressed the current state of American poetry and the leveraging of poetry on behalf of the nostalgia and patriotism connected with the country. A few weeks back, I had the opportunity to hear Robert Pinsky speak just on the edge of the mountains up north in Maryland at a Frederick Reads event. When he was asked his opinion about the 2013 Inaugural Poem, Pinsky replied he hadn't read it yet and was a bit skeptical about the ability to produce a good poem simply because the President requested it. I share his sentiment.
Poetry exist as high art. This distinction is even more pronounced in a world full of hip-hop, which depending on the day is, or it not poetry. The rise of spoken word complicates matters even more. Who trained these street poets? While an apparatus has arisen to “educate” those who engage in the art on these levels, there is still some distinction or debate.
More and more we seem to be a country whose capacity for poetry has decreased. The profession, the ideas and the practice are more elitist. African American Poetry in particular has catapulted itself somewhere close to the top of the ivory tower. Most recently the back to back winners of the National Book Award for Poetry were African-American, along with at least two Pulitzer Prize winners in the past few years. But still, if one wants to be a poet, the question remains how one will be employed.
More than anything an inaugural poem means that the poet will receive some compensation for an art operating well below the radar of most Americans searching for entertainment. We are a country whose connection with our reality is reflected in our belief in a “freedom” that came on the backs of Native American’s genocide. Our capacity to separate our ideas from their practical application is part of our patriotic DNA. The same can be said for an inaugural poem. It is an opportunity for the Nation to listen to something, that if you follow or live the profession, people rarely want to listen to. This reality is as important as what is said. I am not sure how much the poet gets paid, but I imagine they do. And after all, publicity is publicity. Once you are presented on that platform, someone will present you on another platform. One way of viewing the significance of an inaugural poem is as the public branding of poetry and the poet.
The poets spoke about a range of topics: social justice, African American history, the idealism and nostalgia at the root of the construction of the country; and the range of diversity in terms of nationality, gender, race and age were astounding.
This past month I have been to more readings than usual. In addition to the reading at Goucher College last night, I saw Pinsky in Frederick, Karl Dargan at the University of Maryland, Angela Abedair at the Prince George's County Musuem and Sistah Joy and the young people of Lyrical Storm with Neville Adams at Annie's in Temple Hills. All of the readings were amazing. There was a joy in being able to simply be a part of an audience and listen to the work of poets from a wide variety of backgrounds. If democracy exists, it existed in the presentation of so many different poets. Sistah Joy's event topped the list as a presentation of democratic ideals. She is herself a poetic warrior who has been creating a poetry ministry in the Prince George's County and Washington Metropolitan area for many years. Her family night set at Annie's Art Gallery presented a young man, no more than thirteen years old, from Thomas Pullen Middle School who had the most perfect afro, singing. She had also invited students from Suitland High School who presented their visual work. Lyrical Storm, created by Neville Adams brought five or six students who presented wonderful poetry. Neville, the founder of Lyrical Storm, presented some of his work, which injected the room with a powerful voice and a political force uncommon in most of the poetry readings I have attended lately.
Sistah Joy’s set and Goucher College managed to stimulate for me some long buried experiences with poetry. As a part of those audiences I remembered my poetic roots. Twenty-six years ago, while sitting at a cubicle for a telemarketing company in Lanham, MD, I wrote my first poems on a large calendar tablet. They were odd creations like doodling stick people, stars or three-dimensional boxes to pass the time. They were communications from the place in my mind that could not be engaged by the all too simple task of calling random folks, invading their privacy with questions about condensation on their windows, electric bills and siding on their houses. Those first poems were political screams tinged with the anxiety, fear and anxiousness of adolescence. They were often about America, democracy and of course Malcolm X and Black History. I was educated in the country of my birth under the iron curtain of curriculums that suggested African Americans and Black History were almost non-existent. I was taught to pray and worship the flag at the same time. My father was distant, my mother was working all too hard and at sixteen I began to work too, almost forty hours a week while still in high school. Where was I to express myself? How was I to reconcile my ideas or relationship with words and others? Poetry emerged as a way for me to say what no one else wanted to hear. It became a craft and discipline of my own personal relationship with words and ideas.
But the question now, is from where does that diversity of ideas emerge in today's poetry scene? Goucher and Sistah Joy in particular present us with a hopeful scenario. Poetry belongs in the community and not simply the presentation of poetry workshops to children, which I'm all for, but through spaces where people can express themselves and know that their use of words are not simply a utility for their jobs and grades.
Returning to the inaugural poem and the topic addressed by many of the readers at Goucher College, it is obvious-the poet is given a job to do for the country. What will he say? Will he do his job well and who is the judge of that job?
I currently teach poetry at Bowie State University. There we manage a Creative Writing Concentration which allows students to study the craft of writing. The recent addition of Dr. Monifa Love, a long time veteran of the discipline of Creative Writing and author of numerous works, combined with the lone soldier in the department for many years, Jenise Williamson and Rion Scott, an excellent fiction writer, place the University in an exciting position to offer a wide range of skills to students who decided to engage in the discipline at our school.
But there's something that has unsettled me in the most recent years as a struggling poet. While poetry struggles to be publicly given proper respect and included in the wide range of activities designated as entertainment or significant in American culture, it also struggles with a form of schizophrenia. Publicly it wants to be of use. Privately it speaks of mastery of the craft. The quest for mastery is worthy and significant; however, as a branding agent it smells of the elitism and poor self esteem of many of us who as poets who are doomed to exist on the periphery of American Culture. After all spoken word and hip-hop suggested anyone could do poetry; including many of those outside of the elite institutions who guard the culture of the country. In many ways, poetry in America has always been like the inaugural poem itself. Our introduction to poetry, the fusing of the words with a concept came in classrooms where poetry was defined as a centerpiece of a Western tradition, which had brought us freedom, democracy, justice and liberty. Those same concepts steeped in a confusing colonialism gave us the definition for important words and showed us where to worship and praise the power of language. The only problem was the one articulated in my first poems. The root ore and expression of my own personal experience, the traumas of adolescence and the need to reconcile my use of words with the obvious inaccuracies of my good colonial education suggested I needed to establish a different relationship with words, letters and ideas. Poetry became a way to practice and engage that.
Perhaps poetry like religion is simply just a practice. This suggests an almost dynamic shift in the value of the product produced. Maybe the process is the product.
The worship and promotion of craft particularly within academic circles is in many ways a response to the need for significance amongst the average poet. "Skills", as we used to call it in my early days of experimentation with hip-hop, were always important; but they were not the only statement. The need for significance was implicit in the act itself. The performance and the listening the audience engaged in was a by product of the act of bringing folks together dedicated to the task of mining the rich ore of language flowing through their everyday lives. As important was the fact that the people who listened to you were often the folks you did it with. The process, like the beginnings of spoken word, built community as much as it created works of art. The assertion of craft is in many ways a symptom of the way the academic infrastructure functions like an industry. In many ways it must own poetry-own it’s product. Craft becomes a question of positioning. Given the nature of our country, this need to assert a clear, systematic set of principles for valuation is inevitable, practical and necessary as the stock market; but the clarity can easily become a tool for exclusion or devaluation of those without access to the channels of power-the proper channels to produce poetry.
I guess all roads lead to Rome.
But, the world of language is simply too big for that. My fed-ex delivery man owns it; the artistic English of the immigrant also owns a stake. People communicate whether they speak the national Standard English or not. At the root of my first poems, and the poems of many, is the craft of using the language they own to make art. The increased formalism I have encountered in African American poetry for me is symptomatic of the need to prove oneself worthy. It is skill, necessary and again inevitable but also questionable.
The talk of craft and freedom and democracy can only escape the world of confusion if you are a poet in the ivory tower certain of who you know, your credentials, your track towards the top. The true question is where is the tradition? We are mostly a country of immigrants, the poor, tired, weak and strong enslaved. Our very definition suggests the absence of craft and tradition, or at least a conflict with the tradition on these new shores. More importantly, the presence of free labor, and free land masks the utter brutality and inadequacy of many of our idealistic pursuits. If these are commonalities among men, our distinction is our designation of our pursuit of liberty, freedom and democracy as our most important designation as we engage in the dirty tasks. If there is craft, then where does it reconcile with the lies in our history, the mass mis-education of citizens, the robbing and stealing? I have recurring nightmares where my education is the process of having my head tilted back with my mouth forced open while the dreams and ideas of the country I was born in were poured down my throat. of a country that had mass appropriated the labor, intellectual abilities and spirit of my people was poured down my throat. To tell a young child who grows up in the house of Ebonics about the craft of writing and the history of the English language without an understanding of Ebonics or African drumming or any of the important aspects that enrich his culture is to assert their worthlessness by way of a clear trajectory towards "mastery" which cannot by definition include most of the people who linguistically nurture them. It seems like self-hatred all over again.
Which brings me back to Sistah Joy, Johnny Turtle, Noah Klein and countless other poets who promote events as diverse as theirs were. They offer a counter balance by bringing together a wide variety of people whose ages, gender, diversity and ideas expressed destabilize the myth of craft itself. It's why jazz, hip-hop and blues are so important to African American culture. Racism itself is a suggestion that the craft of running things exists outside the capacity of oppressed peoples, and the proof is in America's first nation status. It’s like the man who told Malcolm X he should be something else besides a lawyer. Of course, the new twist is work-the greatest of the American Gods, dressed in overalls, mud-ridden and dusty. If one works hard enough one can submit to “the craft”. But the poor and oppressed have always worked hard. Fundamentally, the struggle for many of us is how could we work so hard, and be treated so bad while the people who did it, ascend to the top of the world. Those ghosts and haints floating above us, driving by in their pretty cars singing the gospel of American freedom never seemed to work as hard as us. Aha, they must’ve had craft, like a spell, like a gri-gri.
It is a riddle of the greatest proportions. Yet, the community readings I attended suggest the simple magic is the one that has always sustained those outside of the “masters of craft”. These events function more like the simple Black Church that trained and developed so many of the great singers and musicians of the African American tradition. Everybody's gotta voice. Everybody can sing. Actually, half the folks who seem to be off tune, are invoking some nasal remnant of an African tradition unacknowledged by the history of the country. The same thing at the core of much of African American creativity is the same thing that has been oppressed by the institutions we occupy. It is for this reason, the creativity is so astounding when recognized by the outside society; but even there it is acknowledged as an entertainment, fascinating in a way that suggests the absence of craft. This is hip-hop and blues, spoken word poetry or whatever craft that is reminiscent of the ancestors of those oppressed. In reality it exists as unacknowledged intelligence that becomes acknowledged as entertainment in the larger society. There it can be exploited, indulged or manipulated without a true confrontation with its true intellectual roots that exists outside of the academic frameworks managing and manipulating the educational assets and memory of the country.
The community reading, like Goucher and Sistah Joy, create the space for expression that has the bandwidth of ideas and experiences to foster creative activity and suggests there’s something else besides craft as a defining element. The defining element is people coming together by way of some mystical or spiritual force greater than our simple ideas about the world of humans. I am not so sure how those organizers do it; but they are to be commended for creating those spaces. For in those places people experience something inspiring that breeds hope.
Jesus Papoleto Melendez concluded last night's reading at Goucher. He spoke about the Nuyorican Poet's Movement and the travels of his life with an astounding humility. Often he laughed to himself and with the crowd. He spoke about death and a walk to a school where he saw nothing but dead snails smushed at his feet all along his path, a mystery. When he asked the children at the school what happened, they explained the rain drew the snails onto the sidewalk; and some children made a habit of stomping on as many of them as they could find on their way to school. He noticed their deaths under the feat of people- the snails loss of life. It was a Democracy of sorts. The noticing. The speaking of it. An excellent example of the poet’s path.
Last night I attended a wonderful reading at Goucher College. The occasion was “Inaugural Poems: Baltimore-D.C. Poets Bear Witness To A New Presidential Era.” The event was organized by Johnny Turtle, Director of the Katz Writing Center, and Noah Klein, a student at the College. What made the event most memorable for me was what I call the bandwidth of the ideas presented. The poets ranged in age from the early twenties to over sixty and read a wide variety of poems that spoke to the complexity of poets, poetry, and the difficult task of confronting politics.
After all, though both poet and politics begin with the letter “p,” the two terms seem to exist in alternate universes. A poet uses words to convey human experience, while politics seeks to use words to determine a human being’s experience. The convergence of the two suggests a middle path of action—difficult to obtain.
Many of the poets, myself included, addressed the current state of American poetry and the leveraging of poetry on behalf of the nostalgia and patriotism connected with the country. A few weeks back, I had the opportunity to hear Robert Pinsky speak just on the edge of the mountains up north in Maryland at a Frederick Reads event. When he was asked his opinion about the 2013 Inaugural Poem, Pinsky replied he hadn't read it yet and was a bit skeptical about the ability to produce a good poem simply because the President requested it. I share his sentiment.
Poetry exist as high art. This distinction is even more pronounced in a world full of hip-hop, which depending on the day is, or it not poetry. The rise of spoken word complicates matters even more. Who trained these street poets? While an apparatus has arisen to “educate” those who engage in the art on these levels, there is still some distinction or debate.
More and more we seem to be a country whose capacity for poetry has decreased. The profession, the ideas and the practice are more elitist. African American Poetry in particular has catapulted itself somewhere close to the top of the ivory tower. Most recently the back to back winners of the National Book Award for Poetry were African-American, along with at least two Pulitzer Prize winners in the past few years. But still, if one wants to be a poet, the question remains how one will be employed.
More than anything an inaugural poem means that the poet will receive some compensation for an art operating well below the radar of most Americans searching for entertainment. We are a country whose connection with our reality is reflected in our belief in a “freedom” that came on the backs of Native American’s genocide. Our capacity to separate our ideas from their practical application is part of our patriotic DNA. The same can be said for an inaugural poem. It is an opportunity for the Nation to listen to something, that if you follow or live the profession, people rarely want to listen to. This reality is as important as what is said. I am not sure how much the poet gets paid, but I imagine they do. And after all, publicity is publicity. Once you are presented on that platform, someone will present you on another platform. One way of viewing the significance of an inaugural poem is as the public branding of poetry and the poet.
The poets spoke about a range of topics: social justice, African American history, the idealism and nostalgia at the root of the construction of the country; and the range of diversity in terms of nationality, gender, race and age were astounding.
This past month I have been to more readings than usual. In addition to the reading at Goucher College last night, I saw Pinsky in Frederick, Karl Dargan at the University of Maryland, Angela Abedair at the Prince George's County Musuem and Sistah Joy and the young people of Lyrical Storm with Neville Adams at Annie's in Temple Hills. All of the readings were amazing. There was a joy in being able to simply be a part of an audience and listen to the work of poets from a wide variety of backgrounds. If democracy exists, it existed in the presentation of so many different poets. Sistah Joy's event topped the list as a presentation of democratic ideals. She is herself a poetic warrior who has been creating a poetry ministry in the Prince George's County and Washington Metropolitan area for many years. Her family night set at Annie's Art Gallery presented a young man, no more than thirteen years old, from Thomas Pullen Middle School who had the most perfect afro, singing. She had also invited students from Suitland High School who presented their visual work. Lyrical Storm, created by Neville Adams brought five or six students who presented wonderful poetry. Neville, the founder of Lyrical Storm, presented some of his work, which injected the room with a powerful voice and a political force uncommon in most of the poetry readings I have attended lately.
Sistah Joy’s set and Goucher College managed to stimulate for me some long buried experiences with poetry. As a part of those audiences I remembered my poetic roots. Twenty-six years ago, while sitting at a cubicle for a telemarketing company in Lanham, MD, I wrote my first poems on a large calendar tablet. They were odd creations like doodling stick people, stars or three-dimensional boxes to pass the time. They were communications from the place in my mind that could not be engaged by the all too simple task of calling random folks, invading their privacy with questions about condensation on their windows, electric bills and siding on their houses. Those first poems were political screams tinged with the anxiety, fear and anxiousness of adolescence. They were often about America, democracy and of course Malcolm X and Black History. I was educated in the country of my birth under the iron curtain of curriculums that suggested African Americans and Black History were almost non-existent. I was taught to pray and worship the flag at the same time. My father was distant, my mother was working all too hard and at sixteen I began to work too, almost forty hours a week while still in high school. Where was I to express myself? How was I to reconcile my ideas or relationship with words and others? Poetry emerged as a way for me to say what no one else wanted to hear. It became a craft and discipline of my own personal relationship with words and ideas.
But the question now, is from where does that diversity of ideas emerge in today's poetry scene? Goucher and Sistah Joy in particular present us with a hopeful scenario. Poetry belongs in the community and not simply the presentation of poetry workshops to children, which I'm all for, but through spaces where people can express themselves and know that their use of words are not simply a utility for their jobs and grades.
Returning to the inaugural poem and the topic addressed by many of the readers at Goucher College, it is obvious-the poet is given a job to do for the country. What will he say? Will he do his job well and who is the judge of that job?
I currently teach poetry at Bowie State University. There we manage a Creative Writing Concentration which allows students to study the craft of writing. The recent addition of Dr. Monifa Love, a long time veteran of the discipline of Creative Writing and author of numerous works, combined with the lone soldier in the department for many years, Jenise Williamson and Rion Scott, an excellent fiction writer, place the University in an exciting position to offer a wide range of skills to students who decided to engage in the discipline at our school.
But there's something that has unsettled me in the most recent years as a struggling poet. While poetry struggles to be publicly given proper respect and included in the wide range of activities designated as entertainment or significant in American culture, it also struggles with a form of schizophrenia. Publicly it wants to be of use. Privately it speaks of mastery of the craft. The quest for mastery is worthy and significant; however, as a branding agent it smells of the elitism and poor self esteem of many of us who as poets who are doomed to exist on the periphery of American Culture. After all spoken word and hip-hop suggested anyone could do poetry; including many of those outside of the elite institutions who guard the culture of the country. In many ways, poetry in America has always been like the inaugural poem itself. Our introduction to poetry, the fusing of the words with a concept came in classrooms where poetry was defined as a centerpiece of a Western tradition, which had brought us freedom, democracy, justice and liberty. Those same concepts steeped in a confusing colonialism gave us the definition for important words and showed us where to worship and praise the power of language. The only problem was the one articulated in my first poems. The root ore and expression of my own personal experience, the traumas of adolescence and the need to reconcile my use of words with the obvious inaccuracies of my good colonial education suggested I needed to establish a different relationship with words, letters and ideas. Poetry became a way to practice and engage that.
Perhaps poetry like religion is simply just a practice. This suggests an almost dynamic shift in the value of the product produced. Maybe the process is the product.
The worship and promotion of craft particularly within academic circles is in many ways a response to the need for significance amongst the average poet. "Skills", as we used to call it in my early days of experimentation with hip-hop, were always important; but they were not the only statement. The need for significance was implicit in the act itself. The performance and the listening the audience engaged in was a by product of the act of bringing folks together dedicated to the task of mining the rich ore of language flowing through their everyday lives. As important was the fact that the people who listened to you were often the folks you did it with. The process, like the beginnings of spoken word, built community as much as it created works of art. The assertion of craft is in many ways a symptom of the way the academic infrastructure functions like an industry. In many ways it must own poetry-own it’s product. Craft becomes a question of positioning. Given the nature of our country, this need to assert a clear, systematic set of principles for valuation is inevitable, practical and necessary as the stock market; but the clarity can easily become a tool for exclusion or devaluation of those without access to the channels of power-the proper channels to produce poetry.
I guess all roads lead to Rome.
But, the world of language is simply too big for that. My fed-ex delivery man owns it; the artistic English of the immigrant also owns a stake. People communicate whether they speak the national Standard English or not. At the root of my first poems, and the poems of many, is the craft of using the language they own to make art. The increased formalism I have encountered in African American poetry for me is symptomatic of the need to prove oneself worthy. It is skill, necessary and again inevitable but also questionable.
The talk of craft and freedom and democracy can only escape the world of confusion if you are a poet in the ivory tower certain of who you know, your credentials, your track towards the top. The true question is where is the tradition? We are mostly a country of immigrants, the poor, tired, weak and strong enslaved. Our very definition suggests the absence of craft and tradition, or at least a conflict with the tradition on these new shores. More importantly, the presence of free labor, and free land masks the utter brutality and inadequacy of many of our idealistic pursuits. If these are commonalities among men, our distinction is our designation of our pursuit of liberty, freedom and democracy as our most important designation as we engage in the dirty tasks. If there is craft, then where does it reconcile with the lies in our history, the mass mis-education of citizens, the robbing and stealing? I have recurring nightmares where my education is the process of having my head tilted back with my mouth forced open while the dreams and ideas of the country I was born in were poured down my throat. of a country that had mass appropriated the labor, intellectual abilities and spirit of my people was poured down my throat. To tell a young child who grows up in the house of Ebonics about the craft of writing and the history of the English language without an understanding of Ebonics or African drumming or any of the important aspects that enrich his culture is to assert their worthlessness by way of a clear trajectory towards "mastery" which cannot by definition include most of the people who linguistically nurture them. It seems like self-hatred all over again.
Which brings me back to Sistah Joy, Johnny Turtle, Noah Klein and countless other poets who promote events as diverse as theirs were. They offer a counter balance by bringing together a wide variety of people whose ages, gender, diversity and ideas expressed destabilize the myth of craft itself. It's why jazz, hip-hop and blues are so important to African American culture. Racism itself is a suggestion that the craft of running things exists outside the capacity of oppressed peoples, and the proof is in America's first nation status. It’s like the man who told Malcolm X he should be something else besides a lawyer. Of course, the new twist is work-the greatest of the American Gods, dressed in overalls, mud-ridden and dusty. If one works hard enough one can submit to “the craft”. But the poor and oppressed have always worked hard. Fundamentally, the struggle for many of us is how could we work so hard, and be treated so bad while the people who did it, ascend to the top of the world. Those ghosts and haints floating above us, driving by in their pretty cars singing the gospel of American freedom never seemed to work as hard as us. Aha, they must’ve had craft, like a spell, like a gri-gri.
It is a riddle of the greatest proportions. Yet, the community readings I attended suggest the simple magic is the one that has always sustained those outside of the “masters of craft”. These events function more like the simple Black Church that trained and developed so many of the great singers and musicians of the African American tradition. Everybody's gotta voice. Everybody can sing. Actually, half the folks who seem to be off tune, are invoking some nasal remnant of an African tradition unacknowledged by the history of the country. The same thing at the core of much of African American creativity is the same thing that has been oppressed by the institutions we occupy. It is for this reason, the creativity is so astounding when recognized by the outside society; but even there it is acknowledged as an entertainment, fascinating in a way that suggests the absence of craft. This is hip-hop and blues, spoken word poetry or whatever craft that is reminiscent of the ancestors of those oppressed. In reality it exists as unacknowledged intelligence that becomes acknowledged as entertainment in the larger society. There it can be exploited, indulged or manipulated without a true confrontation with its true intellectual roots that exists outside of the academic frameworks managing and manipulating the educational assets and memory of the country.
The community reading, like Goucher and Sistah Joy, create the space for expression that has the bandwidth of ideas and experiences to foster creative activity and suggests there’s something else besides craft as a defining element. The defining element is people coming together by way of some mystical or spiritual force greater than our simple ideas about the world of humans. I am not so sure how those organizers do it; but they are to be commended for creating those spaces. For in those places people experience something inspiring that breeds hope.
Jesus Papoleto Melendez concluded last night's reading at Goucher. He spoke about the Nuyorican Poet's Movement and the travels of his life with an astounding humility. Often he laughed to himself and with the crowd. He spoke about death and a walk to a school where he saw nothing but dead snails smushed at his feet all along his path, a mystery. When he asked the children at the school what happened, they explained the rain drew the snails onto the sidewalk; and some children made a habit of stomping on as many of them as they could find on their way to school. He noticed their deaths under the feat of people- the snails loss of life. It was a Democracy of sorts. The noticing. The speaking of it. An excellent example of the poet’s path.
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