RIP Donald Agarrat + Kofi Awoonor

Donald Agarrat (photo © Jen Bekman, from Flickr)

Two days ago, I learned via a Facebook post that Donald Agarrat, a photographer and web designer C and I have known for about a decade and a half, had passed away. There were no details. Subsequent posts from his friend, author, editor and archivist Steve Fullwood, have revealed that Donald was found dead in his apartment. He lived alone in Harlem. While Donald and I were not running buddies, we maintained an acquaintance that became a friendship over the years, especially via the net, and were linked on Flickr, Twitter, and, first and foremost, our blogs (he had inaugurated several different versions of Anzi Design). I first came to know of him online, and then in person via mutual friends, and quickly learned about his web design work, which many people affirmed and swore by. I soon learned of his photography, an art genre for which he had real talent, such that his work was highlighted, as part of its Harlem Postcards series, by The Studio Museum in Harlem. I also would run into him when he worked at Tek-Serve in the Village, but once I went out to Chicago, we communicated mainly online.

Donald in June (photo by John Keene)

Donald was a gentle, witty, often hilarious soul, someone deeply rooted in the communities (black, queer/sgl, artists, tech, and more) to which he belonged, all of which he affirmed in his life and work, and he had eyes and a face so expressive they could stop traffic, a smile that was unforgettable. I associate him not only with the visual but with the music he loved. Many were the times he would send a message letting friends know about an upcoming show he hoped to attend. I feel fortunate to have been able to hang out with him this past June, when my dear friend Tisa Bryant came to town to read and participate in a public conversation at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Donald was there, taking pictures he posted to Flickr, images that capture more than just what happened but the life of any given moment, the person beneath the face, something richer and more soulful, something beautiful. I snapped a photo of him that I have posted above; we talked at dinner little afterwards, and later as we all walked through Harlem. It was too brief; I wish I had called him to hang out more since I've been back. I also don't think he received his due as an artist, but many people I know appreciated him and his work, as I did and do. We will all miss him. As I wrote on Twitter, one of the spaces in which we chatted from time to time, the flowers of his soul will be with us always.''

Donald's family is raising money to bury him properly. If you want to and can contribute, you may do so here: Donald Agarrat Memorial Fund.

***

Kofi Awoonor

We have all heard of yesterday's horrific Al-Shabaab attack on the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya. As I write this entry, 68 people are said to have been killed, and over a hundred wounded. The Kenyan military has tweeted that it has rescued most of the hostages, but it remains unclear whether or not they have captured or subdued the assailants, who were vowing earlier to no negotations. Among the many killed in this horrible event was one of the greatest living Anglophone African poets, 78-year-old Ghanaian éminence grise, former diplomat and government official Kofi Awoonor (b. 1935), who was attending the Storymoja Hay Festival, a four-day gathering of storytelling and writing in Nairobi, and who was shopping with his son when the Al-Shabaab attackers burst in. Awoonor was slated to read the evening he was killed.  His son, though wounded, is expected to fully recover from his injuries.

Kofi Awoonor was born in Ghana when it was still a British colony known as The Gold Coast, and began publishing his poetry in the 1960s under the name George Awoonor-Williams. His work, which included poetry, novels, plays and essays, is perhaps most strongly informed by his native Ewe oral traditions (his grandmother was an Ewe dirge-singer), though one can also see parallels in the later poems to other emergent African poetries of the independence era and African Diasporic poetries, as well as the influences of the Modernist-era and mid-century Anglophone lyric.

Awoonor studied at the University of Ghana and University College, London, and lived in exile in the United States in the 1970s, where he received his PhD at and served as chairman of the department of comparative literature at SUNY Stony Brook and published two of his major books, the novel-in-verse This Earth, My Brother and the poetry collection The Night of My Blood.

After returning to Ghana to teach at the University of the Cape Coast, he was imprisoned in 1975 on the pretext of participation in a coup, which sparked worldwide condemnation. He also served as Ghana's ambassador to Cuba and Brazil in the 1980s, and as the country's 8th Permanent Representative (Ambassador) to the United Nations from 1990-1994, where he headed the committee against Apartheid. Earlier he had served as Ghana's Chairman of the Council of State.

The University of Nebraska Press, in conjunction with the African Poetry Book Series, established by the editor of Prairie Schooner, the eminent Ghanaian-Jamaican poet and editor Kwame Dawes, is slated to publish Awoonor's New and Selected Poems: 1964-2013 next year, with an introduction by fellow Ghanaian poet and scholar Kofi Anyidoho. It was to be perhaps one capstone to an exceptional career, but the book will now also serve as a tribute to a poet, statesman, teacher, mentor, and friend to countless other writers, across Ghana, across Africa, across Africa, and all over the globe. As Kwame Dawes wrote on Twitter: “Kofi Awoonor's death is a sad sad moment here in Nairobi. We have lost one of the greatest African poets and diplomats. I've lost my uncle. I woke hoping that the news I got late in the night was false.”

THE WEAVER BIRD

The weaver bird built in our house
And laid its eggs on our only tree
We did not want to send it away

We watched the building of the nest
And supervised the egg-laying.
And the weaver returned in the guise of the owner
Preaching salvation to us that own the house
They say it came from the west
Where the storms at the sea has felled the gulls
And the fishers dried their nets by the lantern light
Its sermon is the divination of ourselves
And over new horizons limit at its nest
But we cannot join the prayers and the answers of the communicants.
We look for new homes every day,
For new altars we strive to rebuild
The old shrines defiled from the weaver’s excrement

Copyright © Kofi Awoonor, from Poetry Foundation Ghana, 2013. All rights reserved.

Poems: Robert Duncan + Sonia Sanchez

Robert Duncan, 1955, in SF (Photo by Jonathan Williams)

First, today's poem about poetry, by a poet I've posted before (I realized today that all the poets I've blogged this month are ones have previously appeared on here over the last 7 years, so it's greatest hits time to start), but a great poet is just that, someone whose work you want to return to. And so today it's Robert Duncan (1919-1988), the pioneering queer avant-gardist who played a central role in what became known as the Beat, Black Mountain and San Francisco Renaissance movements of the 1950s and 1960s, and whose poetry drew from multiple sources (Biblical imagery, Classical Greek, the high lyricism of the troubadors, Renaissance poetry, and Romantic poetry, the fertile delta of Modernism, etc.) to carve out an original path as one of the most significant avant-garde American poets of the 20th century. For most of his adult life Duncan was politically active on the left, and also lived openly as a gay man, with his partner, the artist Jess Collins (1923-2004), at a time when very few of his peers dared to.

I first read Duncan's poetry in junior high; "My Mother Would Be a Falconress," which appears in a subsequent book, Bending the Bow (New Directions, 1968) and which was in the anthology I read in English class, is a strange, terrifying, exhilarating poem that I still remember encountering. In its mythologized yet direct, incantatory staging of the child's struggle with the parent (the child metaphorized as a falcon, the parent-mother as the falconress), it not only seemed to speak immediately to my sense of self and my peers, but also upended the very order of poetry as I was learning it. It led me, a few years later, to more of his work, which I am still reading with fascination and pleasure. Below is his poem, "Poetry, A Natural Thing," from his important 1960 collection The Opening of the Field. In this poem he takes up T.S. Eliot's idea of the poet's impersonality, while making a case for the power of language, poetic language, which is both the result of human culture and of the natural world, and for the poem itself (like the work of visual art referenced, the painting "by Stubbs," of the moose) as thusa  "natural thing," a source and force of cognition, of truth. Enjoy.

POETRY, A NATURAL THING

    Neither our vices nor our virtues
further the poem. "They came up
    and died
just like they do every year
    on the rocks."

    The poem
feeds upon thought, feeling, impulse,
    to breed    itself,
a spiritual urgency at the dark ladders leaping.

This beauty is an inner persistence
    toward the source
striving against (within) down-rushet of the river,
    a call we heard and answer
in the lateness of the world
    primordial bellowings
from which the youngest world might spring,

salmon not in the well where the
    hazelnut falls
but at the falls battling, inarticulate,
    blindly making it.

This is one picture apt for the mind.

A second: a moose painted by Stubbs,
where last year's extravagant antlers
    lie on the ground.
The forlorn moosey-faced poem wears
    new antler-buds,
    the same,

"a little heavy, a little contrived",

his only beauty, to be
    all moose.

Copyright © 1960 by Robert Duncan, “Poetry, a Natural Thing” from The Opening of the Field, New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1960. All rights reserved.

***

Sonia Sanchez, 2011 (Photo, Phillyburbs.com)

Today's second poem is a series of haiku by the poet Sonia Sanchez (1934-), a key figure in the Black Arts Movement and in subsequent developments in African-American and American poetry.  Like Duncan, she has been a politically and socially engaged poet, speaking out about and against racism, sexism, imperialism, and homophobia, among many other issues, while also serving as a (beloved) teacher and mentor, and a bridge across multiple poetry movements. She is currently the Poet Laureate of Philadelphia.

Elizabeth Catlett
Legend's Ball, 2005
 (AP Photo
Michael A. Mariant, File)

A few years ago, she wrote a series of haiku, a form she has increasingly worked in over the years, for the artist Elizabeth Catlett (1915-2012), an African-American sculptor and printmaker, and longtime resident and citizen of Mexico, whose work also spans generations, from the 1940s through the politically and culturally revolutionary period of the 1960s and 1970s.  Some of her images, such as her print "Sharecropper" (1968/1970), are iconic in African-American and American visual art. Catlett passed just a few days ago, in Cuernavaca, Mexico, where she was active in the arts community and had lived for decades, having previously taught, as the first female professor of sculpture and head of the sculpture department, at the Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City from 1958 to 1975. In 2006, Oprah Winfrey selected her as one of 18 women she honored as part of her Legends Ball, (which I blogged about here), bringing her name and work back to American public consciousness.

I hope Sister Sonia and Beacon Press, which published the book, Morning Haiku (2010) in which these first appeared, do not get upset at me for reposting these haiku; I direct you to her website, but I also wanted to post them here as a tribute to her and Elizabeth Catlett, two artists whose works, in art, politics, culture, and life, like Duncan's, have blazed the way for those who follow. Here are her haiku, preceded by her note to Elizabeth Catlett. One thing Sister Sonia does in these poems is give a sense of the swift movement, the vibrancy, of Catlett's sculpting, as the materiality of the words themselves take sculptural shape on the page (or here, screen).  Together the 6 haiku create a sculptural form as firm as the flesh, as fluid as the wind, before our eyes.

“In loving memory of a great woman. You will be missed.
It was an honor to walk on this earth with
you.” —Sonia Sanchez

6 haiku
(for Elizabeth Catlett
in Cuernavaca)

1.
La Señora
making us remember
flesh and wind

2.
O how you
help us catch
each other’s breath

3.
a woman’s
arms climbing with
colored dreams

4.
Elizabeth
slides into the pool
hands kissing the water

5.
i pick
up your breath and
remember me

6.
your hands
humming hurricanes
of beauty.

Copyright © Sonia Sanchez, "6 haiku (for Elizabeth Catlett in Cuernavaca)", from Morning Haiku, Boston: Beacon Press, 2010. All rights reserved.