Visionaries: Keorapetse Kgositsile (+ Poem) + Kynaston McShine

Keorapetse Kgositsile

With the new year comes saddening news, and so it was with the emails, Tweets and posts announcing the passing in Johannesburg of Keorapetse "Willie" Kgositsile (September 19, 1938 - January 3, 2018). Kgositsile, whom I had the immense pleasure of meeting when he toured the US back in 2012, came to Evanston under the auspices of Northwestern University's Poetry and Poetics Colloquium, performing his work with his longtime friend, musician Douglas Ewart. At the time he was the Poet Laureate of South Africa. His visit was a special event, and I felt extraordinarily fortunate to have the opportunity finally to hear him read his work in person.

As I noted in my 2012 post,

Not only is Kgositsile one of the major poets of his country and of contemporary African literature, but during the 1960s and part of the 1970s was actively involved in the creation of the Black Art literary, cultural and political movement, and as such represents and embodies a link between the political and cultural liberation movements of Africa and the US and the Americas. The famous proto-rap group, The Last Poets, took their name from one of his poems; others who acclaimed his work included established figures like Gwendolyn Brooks, and peers like Amiri Baraka.

He had lived in exile in the US from 1962 until 1975, and is acclaimed in part as one of the first African authors to connect in his work 20th century African and African American poetries. He also was actively involved in Harlem's Black Arts Theater, formulating a revolutionary theory of theater that sought to transform Black artists' underlying assumptions about their work and its effects on Black people. To put it another way, he was a linchpin in terms of thinking through Diasporic artistic practices during the Civil Rights, Black Arts and anti-apartheid eras.

Kgositsile returned to South Africa, after a number of years living in other African countries, in 1990, and was active from that point forward in artistic and cultural activities. The South Africa he returned to had changed dramatically and improved considerably in some ways from the country he left, but the ongoing social, political and economic inequities remained, and he did not hesitate to criticize them in his work.  In 2009, he published Beyond Words: South African Poetics (Flipped Eye Publishing), with fellow South African poets Don Mattera, Lebo Mashile and Phillippa Yaa de Villiers.

Above and below are two poems by Kgositsile, from his 2002 collection If I Could Sing (Kwela Publishers), via Poetry International Web, that convey his later style, questioning approach and committed spirit. Also below are a few more links with much more information about him. Read his work, and remember him, and may he rest in poetry.

Huffington Post Black Voices: "Poet and activist Keorapetse Kgositsile, Who Celebrated Black Arts, Dead at 79"

News24: "National Poet Laureate and political activist dead at 79"

XXL: "Earl Sweatshirt's Father, Famed Poet Keorapetse Kgositsile, Dies at 79"

Pitchfork: "Earl Sweatshirt's Father, Poet Keorapetse Kgositsile, Dead at 79"

***

Kynaston McShine (center) at the opening
of "Primary Structures: Younger American
and British Sculptors," April 27-
June 12, 1966. The Jewish Museum, NY.

Outside the art world, the name Kynaston McShine (February 20, 1935 - January 8, 2018) is probably little known, but within it, and especially in New York City, it held considerable importance, for, as I blogged back in 2011, McShine played a key role as a curator at several of New York's major art institutions: the Museum of Modern Art, and The Jewish Museum. When I wrote my blog post, McShine did not have a Wikipedia entry--he now does, though it remains fairly threadbare--and some of my information, culled from various online sources, was incorrect. (I had seen his birth year listed online as 1939.)

Billy Sullivan's Kynaston (2001).
The Museum of Modern Art,
New York © 2018 Billy Sullivan

What led me initially to write about McShine? I had previously come across a mention of his striking name online, and assumed that he was one of many well-placed, powerful, clearly brilliant and far-thinking, possibly British white curators of his generation, but an image search brought back the face of a Black man, and so I had to dig a bit more and write something up here, though I am hardly an art historian or scholar in the field. As it turns out, there are numerous mentions of McShine, as the scholar and critic Dorothy Wang shared with me, in MoMA's online interviews with its former curators, and Sarah Kleinman, who was writing her dissertation back in 2011 and wrote me via my comments section, may have unearthed other nuggets about him. As she pointed out, though, at that time biographical details about him online, at least seven years ago, were scarce.

At ArtNet, Julia Halpern, in a moving memorial writeup, asserts that McShine might have been "the first curator of color to work at a major American museum," and quotes Sarah Kleinman making a key point about McShine: "In the context of 1950s and 1960s New York City, where curators and artists of color faced blatant discrimination, McShine’s work is even more significant and groundbreaking, opening conversations about the intersections of race, identity, and power." A second ArtNet piece by Halperin collects lovely tributes to him, from MoMA president emerita Agnes Gund and artist Billy Sullivan to curator Anne Umland.

Mr. McShine in a 1988 photograph by
Robert Mapplethorpe. Among the many
exhibitions he organized,  two have
become part of art history.  (© Credit
Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation,
via New York Times)

His New York Times obituary does give considerably more information, including the fact that he did stage solo shows of at least one Black, Sam Gilliam, and one Latino artist, Rafael Ferrer, the first through the pioneer experimental exhibition program he founded at MoMA in 1971, and included other artists of color, including Fred Wilson, in his large-scale exhibitions. The Times review also points out, though, that his 1984 show, "An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture" included only 13 women artists out of 165 total (ArtNet lists 169!), which spurred a group of women to found the now legendary Guerrilla Girls. In its tribute to McShine, the Jewish Museum also notes that in his landmark 1966 "Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculptors," he included several women, including Judy Chicago (then Judy Gerowitz) and Ann Truitt. He received the CSS Bard Award for Curatorial Excellence in 2003, and served on the boards of several arts organizations. He retired from MoMA in 2008, and passed away just days ago. He was 82.

To quote The New York Times's obit, whose author Roberta Smith spoke with Ann Temkin, formerly McShine’s curatorial assistant at the end of the 1980s, and later chief curator of painting and sculpture at MoMA starting in 2008:

Kynaston’s sensitivity was deep and his opinions were strong. At the museum, he championed the poetic, the unexpected and the individual as opposed to the academic, the predictable and the institutional. His lasting contribution to the life of the museum, and to the lives of countless artists and colleagues, is immense.

What a fitting epitaph.

PS: In my original post I included Alex Katz's painting of McShine, and as part of this post I have included Robert Mapplethorpe's beautiful portrait of him, which accompanied the Times obituary, and Billy Sullivan's portrait, which was part of the ArtNet tributes. I now wonder whether there might be other images created or taken of him over the years. Something for someone else to suss out, I think.

RIP Mari Evans & Derek Walcott

Within the last few weeks, two major Black poets, Mari Evans (1919/1923?-2017) and Derek Walcott (1930-2017), have passed. Unsurprisingly, there has been much more coverage of Walcott, an internationally renown poet and playwright, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature, than of Evans, who probably is best known among afficionados of 20th century Black Women's writing and the Black Arts Movement. In both she was an invaluable voice. As I have come to do when thinking about the rich constellations of Black poetries throughout history, I see them as part of a continuum, a point I doubt will be mentioned in obituaries of either. Both poets probed their intersectional identities in part through an investigation of history and contemporary society, and both drew upon the oral traditions in which they had grown up, to different but parallel ends. With their passing, the poetry world has lost two significant voices.

Evans was the older poet, an African American, a native of Toledo, Ohio, and did not publish her first book until she was already 40 years old. It was around this time, in the late 1960s, which marked the rise of the Black Arts Movement, that she began teaching, a profession in which she made her mark. In 1970, she issued her second volume, I Am a Black Woman, which stands alongside early books by Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Jayne Cortez, Lucille Clifton, and Carolyn Rodgers as exemplars of the new Black women's poetry that still continues to influence Black poets writing in the US and globally today. In this collection's poems you can see the themes, the style, the fierceness that would appear in all of Evans's later work, and you can also see how it serves and continues to function as an important counterweight to the sometimes masculinist, misogynistic discourse that marked some--but not all--poetry by Black Arts male poets.

A feminist, politically progressive, a poet drawing from vernacular traditions but possessing a keen sense of the line, and of humor, Evans would go on to publish four more books of poetry, as well as writings for children and plays, while also pursuing a career as a poetry professor at a number of institutions. I had the pleasure of hearing Mari Evans read a few times, though I never got an opportunity to speak with her at length. A longtime resident of Indianapolis, Indiana, she died there on March 10, 2017. Here is one of her most famous poems, "I Am a Black Woman," from the AfroPoets website, and I hear echoes of it in so many poems being written today, even as they take different approaches to the themes Evans so movingly articulated in her work:

I Am a Black Woman

I am a black woman
the music of my song
some sweet arpeggio of tears
is written in a minor key
and I
can be heard humming in the night
Can be heard
humming
in the night


I saw my mate leap screaming to the sea
and I/with these hands/cupped the lifebreath
from my issue in the canebrake
I lost Nat's swinging body in a rain of tears
and heard my son scream all the way from Anzio
for Peace he never knew....I
learned Da Nang and Pork Chop Hill
in anguish
Now my nostrils know the gas
and these trigger tire/d fingers
seek the softness in my warrior's beard


I am a black woman
tall as a cypress
strong
beyond all definition still
defying place
and time
and circumstance
assailed
impervious
indestructible
Look
on me and be
renewed 

Copyright © Mari Evans, 2017. All rights reserved.

I have written about and posted a few poems by Derek Walcott over the years, including back in 2006, when I ran into him at a New York bank branch, spoke with and snapped a photo of him, upsetting the customer assistant who was handling his business. (A subsequent encounter at Sea Grape--which nearly shares the name of his 1976 collection--a wine store on Hudson Street, was without incident, and he was warm and gregarious, though I still think he really had no idea who I was beyond a vag with Boston.) I wrote about him again in 2008, when I posted "As John to Patmos," the first poem by him I ever read, when I was in junior high and I happened upon it in a poetry anthology my class was using. If I remember correctly,  we were not assigned Walcott's poem but the poem's final lines immediately drew me to it. I did have the pleasure of meeting Walcott a few times over the years, including all the way back to the early Dark Room Writers Collective days, when he read with Martín Espada. His delivery of his poems that night was as unforgettable as the lead up to the event, when several Dark Room members had to go fetch him, I think, and later, as his inimitable entrance into the Dark Room house, with a little entourage. Every reading thereafter I always measured by that first one, and he rarely disappointed.

Even before I'd met him in person, I'd heard about him as a teacher, including the good--his brilliance in finding ways to help poets reshape and perfect their poems, his many nuggets of wisdom, his sharp eye--and the bad; the year before I started college, he was called out for having sexually harassed an undergraduate student, and he was called out again a few years later for the same behavior. His life's complexities and complications are there in the work, which drew upon a range of traditions, including English formalism and Caribbean orality and its trove of storytelling and myth-making. The rich fusion of this poetics is apparent from the very beginning; Walcott's first book, In a Green Night: Poems 1948-1960, was more accomplished than the second or third books of highly praised poets. It reaches its apogee, I think, in the later work, particularly his masterpiece Omeros (1990), which stands as one of the great long poems of all time in English, and a landmark in Anglophone, Caribbean and Black Diasporic literature.

Here is the 1lth section of "The Schooner Flight," another of my favorite Walcott poems. You can find the entire poem here, on the Poetry Foundation's website.

From "The Schooner Flight"

11 After the Storm

There’s a fresh light that follows a storm
while the whole sea still havoc; in its bright wake   
I saw the veiled face of Maria Concepcion   
marrying the ocean, then drifting away
in the widening lace of her bridal train
with white gulls her bridesmaids, till she was gone.   
I wanted nothing after that day.
Across my own face, like the face of the sun,   
a light rain was falling, with the sea calm.

Fall gently, rain, on the sea’s upturned face   
like a girl showering; make these islands fresh   
as Shabine once knew them! Let every trace,   
every hot road, smell like clothes she just press   
and sprinkle with drizzle. I finish dream;   
whatever the rain wash and the sun iron:
the white clouds, the sea and sky with one seam,   
is clothes enough for my nakedness.   
Though my Flight never pass the incoming tide   
of this inland sea beyond the loud reefs   
of the final Bahamas, I am satisfied   
if my hand gave voice to one people’s grief.   
Open the map. More islands there, man,   
than peas on a tin plate, all different size,   
one thousand in the Bahamas alone,   
from mountains to low scrub with coral keys,   
and from this bowsprit, I bless every town,   
the blue smell of smoke in hills behind them,
and the one small road winding down them like twine
to the roofs below; I have only one theme:

The bowsprit, the arrow, the longing, the lunging heart—
the flight to a target whose aim we’ll never know,   
vain search for one island that heals with its harbor   
and a guiltless horizon, where the almond’s shadow   
doesn’t injure the sand. There are so many islands!   
As many islands as the stars at night
on that branched tree from which meteors are shaken
like falling fruit around the schooner Flight.   
But things must fall, and so it always was,   
on one hand Venus, on the other Mars;   
fall, and are one, just as this earth is one   
island in archipelagoes of stars.
My first friend was the sea. Now, is my last.   
I stop talking now. I work, then I read,   
cotching under a lantern hooked to the mast.   
I try to forget what happiness was,
and when that don’t work, I study the stars.   
Sometimes is just me, and the soft-scissored foam   
as the deck turn white and the moon open   
a cloud like a door, and the light over me   
is a road in white moonlight taking me home.   
Shabine sang to you from the depths of the sea.

Derek Walcott, “The Schooner Flight” from Collected Poems 1948-1984. Copyright © 1990 by Derek Walcott. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC, http://us.macmillan.com/fsg. All rights reserved. Source: Poems 1965-1980 (Jonathan Cape, 1980)

Amiri Baraka's Homegoing Celebration

Here are some photos from Amiri Baraka's (1935-2014) homegoing ceremony at the Symphony Hall on Broad Street in Newark. It was a remarkable affair, as much celebration as memorial, and drew major figures from across the Black artistic, cultural and political spectrum, including Amina Baraka, all of Baraka's children, Asha Bandele (who acknowledged Baraka's children by Hettie Cohen Jones, who were there with Jones, and Baraka's daughter with Diane DiPrima), Michael Eric Dyson, Danny Glover, Savion Glover, Haki Madhubuti, Tony Medina, Jessica Care Moore, Sonia Sanchez, Sister Souljah, Glyn Turman, Cornel West, and Saul Williams. Baraka's son, mayoral hopeful Ras Baraka, delivered an elegy for his late father that was, hyperbole excused, soul-stirring. 

I went in part because though I have not always agreed with--and have even outright rejected them--Baraka's positions and rhetoric, I can say without hesitation that he was and remains one of the most influential and important Black--American--writers of the 20th century, a towering figure whose stature, based on his creative and cultural work, will only grow. His poetry, his essays, his plays, his fiction, his central role in the development of the Black Arts Movement, his position as a founder of landmark institutions, his teaching and mentoring, and his long and sustained activism and resistance are all worthy of the highest consideration. I had the opportunity to hear and spend time with him several times during his life, including a car ride from Newark to NYU that nearly cost me my job (though he did what he could to ensure I kept it, as our delay was not my fault), and each time he demonstrated why he was the commanding figure people know him to be. 

May his soul rest in peace, poetry and power, and may the best of his words, the ones that offer visions of a better tomorrow, live as long as words live in and with us.

You can read my eulogy for Amiri Baraka, posted a week ago, here.

You may read others reflections on his life and work at First of the Month.

Semester's/First Year's End + Congratulations to 2013 Graduates

It seems hard to believe, but as of today I have concluded my spring semester and first year teaching at Rutgers-Newark. I've graded the exams, read, reread and assigned grades to the final papers, signed off on MFA theses and an undergraduate honors thesis, and reviewed the work of my independent study student. CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL THE GRADUATING STUDENTS! I now have only to complete an assessment for my department and the undergraduate college, and I believe I will be fully done until this fall, a few administrative tasks notwithstanding.

On Twitter I described the experience as "exhilarating", and it was, though I also feel mentally and physically drained as I do at the end of every term, the spring/summer ones perhaps even more so than the fall ones, since no matter where I have taught, far more occurs from January to June than September to December. I designed and taught four new classes, which is unsurprising considering that this was a new job, but as anyone who teaches regularly will attest, new courses, especially at a new institution, require a tremendous amount of work, and since none of these was a repurposed course from my prior institutions, they entailed even more work and planning than ever before.

I have already written about the fall courses (an undergraduate Afro-Latin literature course, and a graduate course for English and American Studies under the Topics in Post-Modernism rubric on post-humanism and trans-humanism), so I'll say a little about the two spring courses, one a jointly listed course in English and African American and African Studies (AAAS) on the Black Arts Movement, and the second the spring half of the year-long, introductory survey course for AAAS. I enjoyed both, though I must admit I particularly loved the literature class, which took place at 8:30 AM and meant very early Sunday and Wednesday nights for me, as well as arriving in Newark when almost no one was on the street. My first morning I tweeted how shuttered everything was at 7:30 AM, and my colleague Tayari Jones, though on sabbatical, helped guide me via Twitter to a spot where I could grab coffee.

In the literature class I taught more poetry than I have ever taught in a single, non-survey course, as well as more drama (four plays, two by LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, and one each by Ed Bullins and Kia Corthron), a film, and rap music (three different artists, also a first), with a good helping of historical, critical and theoretical material. One of the most powerful moments for me was when I read the students' creative pieces (they wrote 6 short essays, a creative piece, and a final paper), and could see how fully nearly all of them had engaged with the course materials, in aesthetic, theoretical and personal terms. Their final papers represented an extension of this engagement.

The survey course was a huge challenge, as I had not taught such a large class in a few years, and I realized while planning it that I would need to create a narrative for the students to bring the disciplinarily disparate materials together. As an undergraduate I studied history in its various forms (including social history, which became my main approach), and into my historical narrative I tried to weave, to varying degrees of success, works of literature, sociology, political science, and journalism, to present the students with a way of understanding the rich and complex stories of African America from 1865 to the present. Based on the final exams, I think I succeeded, though I also know what to work on to improve the course, and my teaching of it, for future versions.

I want to note in particular how energizing it was to once again read Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery, which I read as an undergraduate and only recalled in pieces, and W. E. B. DuBois's The Souls of Black Folk, which impressed me no less this time than it had before. I had never finished LeRoi Jones's/Amiri Baraka's The Blues People, but did for this class, nor had I ever read beyond a few chapters in Nelson George's The Death of Rhythm and Blues, which together provide excellent overviews of Black music, and thus by extension, African American culture and society, from the mid-19th century through the end of the 20th. Their narratives provided a second scaffolding for us to follow as we proceeded chronologically from the Emancipation period to the election of Barack Obama. To teach this class in the year marking the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation and the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington (both of which we talked about) was also energizing.

I also have even deeper appreciation for the work of so many former colleagues, including Robin D. G. Kelley, Darlene Clark Hine, and Aldon Morris, whose work I taught and from which I, like the students, learned a great deal. Among the exciting moments for me was when I had the chance to discuss with the class Robin Kelley's exploration of working-class and poor African Americans' day-to-day battles in the mid-to-late 1940s, the innumerable acts of resistance, self-protection and self-assertion that constituted "small war zones," in public transportation in Birmingham, Montgomery and other Southern cities, that helped prepared the ground for the Civil Rights movement struggles and victories that would soon come there and elsewhere. The poet and scholar Geoffrey Jacques has noted more than once how badly we in the US could benefit from a careful and thorough study of the history of African Americans, and this course underlined how important and pressing Geoffrey's suggestion continues to be. Most of us--including African Americans--still don't know enough, beyond some significant historical facts and anecdotes, about our past, and how much that past continues to inform our contemporary--which is to say, American, and global--experience.

These courses unfolded as Rutgers itself has faced a significant institutional crisis, which began before I started last fall and which continues to unfold as I type this blog post. In both classes I was able to note how significant the social, political and cultural activism we were studying had proved in the past fortunes of our campus; in 1969, black students occupied Conklin Hall for a week, thus provoking changes that helped to create the vibrant, racially, ethnically, economically, and culturally diverse campus--the most diverse campus in the United States--Rutgers-Newark is today. I also was able to point out to them that one of the sources of the university's current crisis, the forced integration of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ) into Rutgers as the "new" medical school, had an antecedent in the state's rezoning and forced clearance, using eminent domain, of an African American Newark neighborhood in 1967, in order to build a new campus for UMDNJ, and which led to the 1967 Newark Uprising, that profoundly scarred and changed the city. How fitting that these earlier history has been all but buried in the discussions about Rutgers's transformation, but how powerfully it resonates in the threats Rutgers-Newark (and Rutgers-Camden) and the university as a whole face as the changes unfold. I tried my best to let the students know that they could and must be agents of change, as their predecessors were.

I must add that at this point over the last 10 years (with the exception of 2006, when I had a spring leave yet nevertheless had university business to address) I would still be in class, in the final weeks of the spring quarter, so I continue to feel a bit unsettled, as if I am leaving classes full of students hanging in the lurch. I remind myself: the grades are in! It feels good to be done before the end of May, and I imagine that by next year this time, I will feel as if an earlier start to the summer is the way things have always been. Once again, congratulations to all the 2013 graduates!

Spring Semester Classes Begin

This post is of zero interest to anyone beyond my students and me, I know, but Spring 2013 semester classes began today, first thing this morning to be exact, and I'm excited about both of them, but especially about my undergraduate literature class, which incorporates some material I've taught before but many new texts as well. That class is officially an English and African American Studies class on The Black Arts Movement, satisfying two distinct registrations (and I thus have two Blackboard sites, which is a little disorienting), and covers not only aspects of the movement itself, but several antecedent moments (The Harlem Renaissance, Négritude, Black American poetry of the 1950s) and successors (a Spike Lee film, Public Enemy's music, and Kia Corthron's play Force Continuum). At the core of the course we'll be delving into a great deal of Amiri BarakI've included a good deal of  scholarly, critical and theoretical material (by figures from Alain Locke and W. E. B. DuBois to more recent scholars and authors like Cheryl Clarke, Howard Rambsy II, Cherise Pollard, and Lorrie Smith, as well as primary), including some primary documents by Larry Neal, Amiri Baraka and others. It's a decent-sized class (anywhere from 18-26 students, depending upon how many stay enrolled, and smaller is always better for the students and their professor) and thus manageable. The second course is one all members of the African American and African Studies teach in rotation, Introduction to African American Studies (Part II), which spans the period from Reconstruction through today, and which draws a pretty sizable enrollment. Right now I have about 45-50 students, but one asked about the amount of reading (up to 200 pages a week, from an array of texts, including historical and critical studies in a range of fields, primary documents by the likes of Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and creative works), so perhaps the numbers will slim down by next week. As with my fall classes my students come from a range of backgrounds, though the majority are black (African American, African, Caribbean, mixed race, etc.), latino (many Afro-Latino), and Asian-American (South Asian and East Asian), which I learned quickly lent a very different cast to the conversations we had about the course material. I expect no less this semester. We begin with Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery, a book I haven't read in many years, and rereading it in preparation for the class has reminded me why I enjoyed it so years ago, and how rich and complex our history--black history, American history--truly is.

In Memoriam + Poem: Jayne Cortez

Jayne Cortez (1934-2012), has passed away after a long illness. She was a original among the Black Arts Movement poets, as likely to wield striking, surrealistic yet vernacular images as invoke nationalist credos, though sometimes, as with a poem like the infamous "Race," she could also serve up half-baked homophobia with the best of them (Amiri Baraka, Everett Hoagland, etc.). Nevertheless, Cortez's larger oeuvre, even in her first book of poems, also included a distinctive feminist strain that challenged the misogyny that sometimes underpinned the ethos and cultural production of her black male peers. If she did not do it through direct critique of their hypermasculinist rhetoric and practices, she did articulate a vision grounded in the firm belief of aesthetic, political and social freedom for black women, and more broadly, the equality and liberation of all woman, all black people, and all oppressed people, in the US and across the globe.

I saw Jayne Cortez perform her work several times during my youth; she was one of the poets who always seemed to be doing her own thing while still keeping tune with the choir. She performed with musicians but it didn't feel perfunctory or staged. I appreciated that. I appreciated her cool, her poise, her love of and invocation and embodiment of jazz in its multiple dimensions, her lightness of spirit and spiritual depth, her commitment to the struggle, which is ongoing. I appreciated how she deployed language as if it were something fun, but also dangerous as a weapon. I liked how she avoided editorializing through wit and artistry. I don't know that I fully appreciated her poetry then, but I have grown to understand and appreciate it much more now, and to appreciate its influence on several generations of poets who followed her.

Here is a poem that captures some of what I have been speaking about above, with a healthy dose of humor included. Enjoy, and RIP, Jayne Cortez (with condolences to your family, including your husband, artist Mel Edwards, your ex-husband, Ornette Coleman, and your son, drummer Denardo Coleman):

I AM NEW YORK CITY

I am New York City

i am new york city
here is my brain of hot sauce
my tobacco teeth my
  mattress of bedbug tongue
legs aparthand on chin
war on the roofinsults
pointed fingerspushcarts
my contraceptives all


look at my pelvis blushing


i am new york city of blood
police and fried pies
i rub my docks red with grenadine
and jelly madness in a flow of tokay my huge skull of pigeons
my seance of peeping toms
my plaited ovaries excuse me
this is my grime my thigh of
steelspoons and toothpicks
  i imitate no one


i am new york city
of the brown spit and soft tomatoes
give me my confetti of flesh
  my marquee of false nipples
my sideshow of open beaks
 in my nose of soot
in my ox bled eyes
in my ear of Saturday night specials


i eat ha ha hee hee and ho ho
i am new york city
never change never sleep never melt
my shoes are incognito
cadavers grow from my goatee
look i sparkle with shit with wishbones
my nickname is glue-me


take my face of stink bombs
my star spangled banner of hot dogs
take my beer can junta
my reptilian ass of footprints
and approach me through life
approach me through death
approach me through my widow's peak
through my split ends my
asthmatic laughapproach me
through my wash rag
half anklehalf elbow
massage me with your camphor tears
salute the patina and concrete
of my rat tail wig
face upface downpiss
into the bite of our handshake


i am new york city
my skillet-head friend
my fat-bellied comrade
citizens
break wind with me 

Copyright © Jayne Cortez, all rights reserved.(

Keorapetse Kgositsile, Spring Tour 2012

It's exam week, which for me is final revised short story-and-final essay week, which means (lots of and) yet more reading, so little to no blogging. This quarter has left me particularly bleary-eyed, but by next Monday the grades will be in and it will be a wrap. The following quarter begins a week later!

In lieu of one of countless things I would like to blog about, I am going to do something I haven't in a while, which is to post information about an upcoming event, or rather, a series of events, involving a living legend, the great South African and Black Arts poet Keorapetse Kgositsile (1938-), who has begun a spring tour of the United States.  Not only is Kgositsile one of the major poets of his country and of contemporary African literature, but during the 1960s and part of the 1970s was actively involved in the creation of the Black Art literary, cultural and political movement, and as such represents and embodies a link between the political and cultural liberation movements of Africa and the US and the Americas.  The famous proto-rap group, The Last Poets, took their name from one of his poems; others who acclaimed his work included established figures like Gwendolyn Brooks, and peers like Amiri Baraka.

A quote: "In a situation of oppression, there are no choices beyond didactic writing: either you are a tool of oppression or an instrument of liberation."

He has already begun his tour, with readings in Brooklyn, down at Virginia Tech (with Nikki Giovanni, I imagine), at today at the University of Oklahoma, but he will be traveling all over the country, so if you can, do go hear him read if you can.  Here's the itinerary (I cannot verify it, so please check with the institutions) that poet Tyehimba Jess forwarded to me:

March 15th (Thursday): University of California at Santa Cruz

March 16th (Friday): California College of the Arts in San Francisco, 6:00 pm

March 22nd (Thursday): Hammer Museum near UCLA, 7:00 pm

March 23rd (Friday): University of Texas at Austin

March 26th (Monday): Miami University in Ohio

March 28th (Wednesday): University of Vermont

March 29th (Thursday): U of Mass at Amherst (with Sonia Sanchez)

March 31st (Saturday): National Black Writers' Conference at Medgar Evers College, Brooklyn, 7:00 pm

April 2nd (Monday): Labyrinth Books in Princeton, 6:00 pm

April 3rd (Tuesday): George Washington University (mid-morning class); Library of Congress, 4:00 P.M.
(Gathering at the home of Dolen Perkins-Valdez)

April 4th (Wednesday): College of Staten Island, CUNY, 2:30-3:30

: The New School (6:30 p.m.)

April 5th: (Thursday): University of Pennsylvania

April 7th (Saturday): CSI in San Francisco (Lecture)

April 9th (Monday): Institute of American Indian Arts, Sante Fe

UPDATED: April 10th (Tuesday): University of Illinois at Chicago - UIC Daley Library: Poetry Reading: 4:00 pm; Poetry Workshop: 6:00 pm.

April 12th (Thursday): Vanderbilt, 7:00 pm

April 13th (Friday): NYU, 5:00 pm

April 16th (Monday): Rutgers University, New Brunswick, 4:30 pm

April 18th (Wednesday): Fairleigh Dickinson University

April 19th (Thursday): Fairleigh Dickinson University
April 20th (Friday): CUNY Graduate Center

[Waiting to Confirm--April 21st (Saturday): Kalamazoo, Michigan]

April 23rd (Monday): Northwestern University

April 24th: (Tuesday): City of Asylum, Pittsburgh with Oliver Lake

April 26th (Thursday): Gaines Center

April 30th (Monday): Brown, 4:00 pm—arrive on Sunday the 29th and return to NYC on Tuesday, May 1st, with Chinua Achebe

Black Arts Movement in Chicago + Jordan & Jess at Poetry Center

This fall, the university has been especially lucky to have Ed Roberson as the Visiting Writer in Residence at the Center for Writing Arts, an autonomous division headed up by my distinguished colleague, author Reg Gibbons. Ed's residency is a huge deal, as the Center infrequently invites poets, and in the past (before Reg's tenure) seldom (never?) had a writer of color for a full quarter. (Mary Ann Mohanraj will be in residence in the spring.)

Ed, whom I think of as a sage, is teaching two classes, and as part of his visit and the courses, he planned a one-day conference on the Black Arts Movement in the Broader Legacy of the Civil Rights Movement, with special emphasis on its history in Chicago. The event brought three of the central figures from the Chicago branch of that movement, writers Angela Jackson, Carolyn Rogers, and Sterling Plumpp, to campus to talk about their experiences as poets and activists. (This was pretty significant in that Chicago, where the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), was established in 1966, was an important center for Black Arts poetry and the Black Power movement--one of the key Black Panthers branches was in the city; Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were assassinated in a joint FBI Cointelpro-Chicago Police Department assault in 1969--and yet it is often passed over in scholarly and artistic discussions on this topic.) In addition, Ed invited his friend Sala Udin, who took many of the ideas he'd gained in the movement back to his hometown of Pittsburgh, where he's been an actor in the plays of his friend and fellow poet, and later one of the greatest American playwrights, August Wilson, while also serving as a city councilor and arts and community activist. One of his successes is Pittsburgh's August Wilson Center for African American Culture.

Hearing the speakers talk about the history of the movement in Chicago filled in so many gaps in my knowledge. All spoke of the crucial roles that Gwendolyn Brooks and Hoyt Fuller played in encouraging artists, artmaking and activism. Sterling Plumpp's comments about his friendship and work with Dennis Brutus, then teaching at the university, and the relationship between African-American and South African poets, who were battling for freedom and an end to the oppressive apartheid system, was revelatory. He spoke at length about the intricacies of Left-politics and how these played a role in the positions people took, both in terms of the Black Arts movement members and the African National Congress. (I sometimes have to remind myself that at one point, Brutus, Jan Carew, and Leon Forrest all taught at the university--but simultaneously? I think of this constellation of Black creative writer-intellectuals with considerable awe.) Plumpp also noted that he wished he and others had taken on the issues of gender and sexism, and, as he put, "gender and sexual choice" (I think I transcribed that right) more forcefully. This led one of Ed's students, who prepared an excellent overview of the movement, to ask the panelists about their feelings on Fuller, who was gay, and despite the extremely problematic nature of the term "sexual choice," they all argued there was no hostility towards Fuller (who, Jackson noted, most did not know was gay), nor homophobia among any of them.

Concluding the event, my colleague Alex Weheliye gave a brief yet thorough response to the talks and panel discussion.

Ed Roberson introducing the speakers (Sam Greenlee and Sterling Plumpp are the two poets in the foreground)

Angela Jackson, offering a history lesson on the Black Arts Movement in Chicago

Carolyn Rogers, who Ed characterized as a "metaphysical" poet, talking about her experiences with the local poets

Ed, and the panelists (Rogers, Salah Udin of Pittsburgh, Jackson, Plumpp)

My colleague Alex Weheliye, who gave a fitting response

***

In addition to slipping in briefly to today's late afternoon conversation between Haki Madhubuti and Sonia Sanchez, whom I could listen to for hours (and who was one of the best workshop leaders I ever had) at Chicago State University's annual Gwendolyn Brooks Conference, I went to hear two poets I admire tremendously, A. Van Jordan and Tyehimba Jess, present their work this past Wednesday at the Poetry Center of Chicago's reading down at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. It was a rainy night, I'd had a long day, and it took forever to get downtown from Evanston, and parking is scarce downtown, but I did get to hear Van and spend some time with both poets, as well as Tasha Tarpley and Toni, who brightens any room she enters. Cue the photos:

Van on stage, Jess in the foreground

Van answering a question from Francesco of the Poetry Center

Jess and Toni

Van signing books