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facing the chaos of truth: Tara Hart on the Poetry of Tyehimba Jess
Tara Hart, Co-Chair of HoCoPoLitSo Board of Directors and Professor of English at Howard Community College
A blog post by Tara Hart, Co-Chair of HoCoPoLitso Board of Directors
Especially at this time, when the arts are so clearly at risk of losing national support, we are so grateful to live in a community composed of people who value what poet Marilyn Nelson calls “communal pondering” of meaning, who value spacious perspectives.
At the ninth annual Blackbird Poetry Festival, we were dazzled all day by the presence of two important master poets, E. Ethelbert Miller and Tyehimba Jess, who conducted student poetry workshops in the morning, charmed us over lunch, inspired a variety of eager new poets and poetry lovers in a free open reading of many voices, taped a TV interview for our show The Writing Life, and finally, after we squeezed them up into balls and rolled them towards overwhelming questions, we let them have a dinner break and catch their breath before Mr. Jess took the stage for the last time for the Nightbird Reading.
Tyehimba Jess at Blackbird Poetry Festival @ Howard Community College’s Smith Theatre
It was my honor to introduce Pulitzer Prize winning poet Tyehimba Jess to the Howard County community. Years ago, at one of the wonderful Dodge Poetry Festivals held bi-annually in New Jersey, Tim Singleton and I and several other HoCoPoLitSo board members did our usual reconnaissance to see who we thought we should invite for you. During one debriefing, I remember Tim saying, “Tyehimba Jess, Tyehimba Jess!” and I said “Yes! I saw him too, he’s amazing. And his name sounds like a song, or a prayer.” And then when we finally did connect with Mr. Jess and he accepted our invitation to come, he said, “HoCoPoLitSo! It sounds like a dance!” So I think this music Jess and HoCoPoLitSo made that evening at Nightbird Reading was meant to be.
Tyehimba Jess is the author of two award-winning books Leadbelly and Olio, and their significance and groundbreaking nature are difficult to convey sufficiently. Olio, the collection of first generation freed voices from the post-Civil War era to World War I does, as those at Found Poetry Review said, “distract you from your preconceived notions about what poetry can be, what it can do, and, ultimately, what you think you know. More than a book (and many reviewers have commented at length about what a fantastic object the book is), Olio is an extended performance, a musical score, and an epic libretto…”
Olio is made up of poems that Mr. Jess directly invites us to read in our own way and in any order (you can read the lines straight across the page, or up one side and down the other). “Weave your own chosen way among these voices,” Jess invites. There are even instructions for turning some of the pages into a sort origami that allow you to make the poems and their meanings three-dimensional. You’ll find interviews, historical documents, lists, and hymns. He faces the chaos of truth, and of our own fickle, diverse, various ways of seeing and not-seeing, and makes it all sing. Truly it is both deconstructive, giving voices back to the silenced, the misunderstood, the invisible, the abducted and it is creative – weaving them back together into patterns and inviting the reader to weave them back in ways that they choose.
There are even other ways to read the poems – I think they also tell the story of what the poet himself is achieving. Even as the poet breathes life into these people from the past, his words illuminate the impact of his own art. I’m using his words now: They “show the world the gut meaning of grace.” They are “a hurricane of back and forth notes.” They are “the sound of one mallet against history’s pale fist.” They say, “listen to how we’re bound in unison, this is our story I want you to hear.”
In his poems, boxes and trunks packed long ago are opened up, and what we find makes us question everything we thought we knew.
In the collection Leadbelly, the poems ask, “how to weed graveyard from his garden of tongue? What rainbow of prayer to pull between teeth?” They ask how we might find “a place where I can dream drought into rain, pray storm cloud out of spotless sky” or find the hope that “our wondrous oneness exists”? They speak in the voices of women as well as men, and in the voices of the objects we tie our meaning to, like guitars, or streets.
Overall, I agree with Brigit Pegeen Kelly that “It is exhilarating to be invited into a world so large and muscular, so rooted in history, a world where so much is at stake.”
And, finally I must say that the work of Mr. Jess, as well as the Poetry Out Loud program itself, are the two best arguments I know of for sustaining the National Endowment of the Arts, if these tremendous artists and their work are the result of that small investment.
WAYR Series – A Gentleman in Moscow
In this this month’s “What are you reading?” HoCoPoLitSo’s Board Member Kathy Larsen tells us about The Gentleman from Moscow by Amor Towels.
Although The Gentleman from Moscow by Amor Towles could be a quick read, it is so beautifully written that I chose to savor it.
The novel opens in 1922 Moscow with an interrogation between Count Rostov and a Bolshevik charged with sending aristocrats to the firing squad. Expecting to die, the Count gives flippant answers. Asked if he had written a poem seen as a “call to action” prior to the Russian Revolution, the Count replies that the poem was attributed to him. Surprisingly, his life is spared. Instead, he is exiled to the Metropole Hotel and shifted from his suite above the Bolshoi to what used to be the servants’ quarters in the attic.
With the interactions among these characters working and living in the hotel, the author builds a community of hope and friendship amidst a world of fear. The Count, always charming and always observant, befriends a small girl who teaches him the terrain of the hotel. He’s kept informed by the concierge stationed at the door and kept sane by the rooftop beekeeper. He is also challenged by his nemesis, a boorish waiter who becomes the Communist enforcer.
Subtle changes in the Count’s situation reflect the changes in the greater Russian world during the 1920s and on. As Communism solidifies, the Count’s elitism and knowledge are discounted, even condemned. But when Stalin takes over and Russia returns to the world stage, the Count is asked to teach table manners to a potential ambassador.
Despite the turmoil, the love that Russians have for their homeland vibrates through the novel.
by Kathy Larsen
HoCoPoLitSo’s Board Member
On Reading: Cooking Is An Act Of Reading
Tim Singleton, co-chair of the HoCoPoLitSo board, writes On Reading for the fourth week of each month on the HoCoPoLitSo blog.
I am trying to remember those first attempts. They had to be failures. Probably middle school home economics class where the disaster was no fault of the effort, but – and I can still taste this clearly – a bad ingredient from the classroom cabinet that had been there who knows how long before we read the recipe and reached for it. Bleck. Fortunately, we were graded on the effort and not the ingredient.
That probably wasn’t the first time I cooked, or helped out in a kitchen, but it probably was the first time I took a recipe, printed words on a page, read it and followed its instruction in an attempt to cook something into being. I wasn’t in on the secret then, but it wouldn’t have been long before I was smitten with the practice: cooking is an act of reading.
I would have first learned how to cook standing by my mother’s side, watching and helping here and there, marveling at what came out of her mind and hands. She knew her way along. Or so it seemed to me at the time. I now know there was a box of index cards in a container on the fridge top, and, of course, a book case along the wall that grew from time to time as a new series subscription began, expanding the family menu beyond the basics.
It is probably there that something really took hold, that bookcase and the words it held. I can remember Saturday afternoons, probably winter and gray with not much to do: I’d open the pages of one of the books in the Time Life series Foods Of The World and dig in.
Spellbound, I was traveling. I was delving into cultures. I was imagining creations and thinking they were just a listing of words away from appearing in the very room I was in. Actually, at first I was probably just looking at the pictures and wholly captivated, whether it was in consideration of a beautiful landscape from a far away place, a joyous collection of people being who they were wherever it was they lived, a collection of ingredients from what seemed like it had to have been another planet, not a part of the world I lived in (decades on, the grocery stores have caught up), and, of course, the food exactingly prepared and brightly photographed, though, looking back, nothing compared to the food porn poses of many a modern day Instagram account. I was smitten indeed. Eventually, probably after a year or two or three of drooling over images, maybe after having started to work in a local restaurant as a day cook, I reached for the picture book’s companion recipe volume and had a go. Such reading has been a life long endeavor since.
These days, I reach less for those quaint Time Life books, though there are recipes still in the repertoire (and, I’ll admit, they also take me time traveling back to childhood and the family kitchen, or at least lazy, dreamy Saturday afternoons). Over the years, they have given me the confidence and the inclination to pick up cookbooks and have a go at whatever I am looking at. My work in the kitchen won’t be masterly, but it often is enough to have taken words on a page and turned it into bright and happy taste.
Lately, I am enjoying reading and bringing to life the words of the Thug Kitchen series, and I want to make every recipe in Ottolenghi’s Plenty, a gift received from a friend after a visit – I’ll have perfected a few things for the next time they drop by. Moosewood’s books are go to favorites – I remember going to their restaurant once, ordering something and then, after that first taste, exclaiming too loudly, “I made this!” as if I had made that particular batch. At least that was the look on the faces of those around me. I had to explain that I had made the recipe before and it tasted as right proper from my hands as from the Moosewood kitchen itself.
There is nothing like a favorite restaurant’s cookbook, especially if the restaurant exists out of town: I have both the Vedge and Vstreet books as well as Zahav’s. Both bring tastes from far away to the kitchen table. There’s a cookie recipe from one of Emeril’s books that I have made a hundred times. I am not good at cakes, yet. Perhaps I need to start reading more dessert.
Some of my mother’s cookbooks have made it to my collection. They are cherished, though I am reading them differently than I once did. While there’s the personal nostalgia of the Time Life ones and the connection to my mother throughout, there are books in the collection I wasn’t as clued into at the time, particularly the ones generated by the women’s magazines of the day. They gave us some of the everyday recipes, more easy, economic fuel than edible taste, like tuna casserole — I would have never learned to love reading recipes into being had I started there. They also share a window on the culture in America back not that long ago, sexism and racism steaming off the pages in places. But that is a subject for a future post. For now, go grab yourself a cookbook and feast your eyes.
Respectfully,
Tim Singleton
Board Co-chair
March for Science, Literarily
Science people and literature people don’t usually mix. We use different languages – dew and anguish for the lit types, water vapor and comorbid anxiety disorder for the science folks.
But there is a kinship.
Environmental activist and poet Jane Hirshfield, who knocked out crowds at a 2007 reading for HoCoPoLitSo at the Howard County Conservancy, showed that science and poetry should march hand in hand more often.
On April 22, Earth Day, at the rain-soaked March for Science in D.C. to support the scientific community, Hirshfield read a poem from the main stage (photo). Cheers and whoops broke from the crowd of hundreds of thousands who crammed the park below the Washington Monument and spilled over into Constitution Avenue.
She prefaced her poem with this statement: “On Jan. 25, when the federal scientists were told to be silent, this march was first conceived. By the afternoon, I began writing the poem I’m about to read you.”
“On the Fifth Day” begins:
“On the fifth day
the scientists who studied the rivers
were forbidden to speak
or to study the rivers.”
(Click here for the full text of poem.)
A few hundred yards from the main stage, through the crowds with their creative signs (Got Smallpox? Me neither! Thanks, science!), the March for Science community had set up tents to hold science teach-ins. Marchers crammed into sessions about the benefit of preserving nature in cities, about efforts to save the bees and manage stormwater. In a tent sponsored by #Poets for Science – a popular place on the rainy day – people popped in to write poems. The tent was surrounded by a collection of eight-foot-tall signs printed with verse by writers such as W.S. Merwin and Linda Pastan, each poem chosen by Hirshfield.
The activities inside the tent were directed by Kent State University’s Wick Poetry Center and its Traveling Stanzas program. As the rain pattered on the tent’s ceiling, hundreds of people created “emerge” poems, striking out some words in long paragraphs of scientific language. Copies of the speeches given on the stage that day were handed to anyone who came in – from four-year-olds to gray beards. Using markers, the authors crossed out blocks of words, leaving poems to emerge from the blackness.
One read:
Eye witnessed
a law
The intrinsic value
of diverse and abundant plant and animal species
That value has been shared
forever.
The Wick Poetry Center site features more photos and emerge poems.
In Washington last Saturday, the crowd was exposed to the connections between poetry and science, demonstrating the ideas that many activist poets are trying to express — that art and science are not expendable, they are intrinsic to survival in the world.
As many signs read: “There is no Planet B.”
Hirshfield explains in her statement on the #Poets for Science site:
“Poetry and science are allies, not opposites. … Observation and imagination, the microscope and the metaphor, the sense of amazement— you need all of them to take the measure of a moment, of a life. Poetry and science each seek to ground our lives in both what exists and the sense of the large, of mystery and awe. Every scientist I know is grounded in curiosity, wonder, the spirit of exploration, the spirit of service. As is every poet.”
Many signs at the march were lettered with the March for Science’s slogan: “Science, not silence.” I would add, though the rhythm isn’t quite as sublime, “Poetry and science, not silence.”
Susan Thornton Hobby
Recording secretary
black nature – a reading for earth day and national poetry month
By Laura Yoo
April is National Poetry Month, and Saturday, April 22nd is Earth Day. And I have a book recommendation that can help celebrate both: Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature edited by Camille T. Dungy.
Black Nature edited by Camille T. Dungy is edited by .
Black Nature offers a different perspective through which we might read, understand, and talk about the 93 black poets and their 180 poems included in this anthology. Dungy writes a compelling introduction in which she describes the noticeable absence of black writers from anthologies and discussions in ecocriticism and ecopoetics. She reminds us of the complex and unique connection that African Americans have to “land, animal, and vegetation in American culture”.
Despite all these connections to America’s soil, we don’t see much African American poetry in nature-related anthologies because, regardless of their presence, blacks have not been recognized in their poetic attempts to affix themselves to the landscape. They haven’t been seen, or when they have it is not as people who are rightful stewards of the land. They are accidentally or invisibly or dangerously or temporarily or inappropriately on/in the landscape. The majority of the works in this collection incorporate treatments of the natural world that are historicized or politicized and are expressed through the African American perspective, which inclines readers to consider these texts as political poems, historical poems, protest poems, socioeconomic commentary, anything but nature poems.
I want to test this new perspective, and with this in mind I turn to the poetry of Tyehimba Jess, the newly minted 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry winner, who is coming to headline HoCoPoLitSo and Howard Community College’s annual Blackbird Poetry Festival on Thursday, April 27th. He will be reading and speaking with E. Ethelbert Miller during the Sunbird Reading. Notably, Miller’s “I am Black and the Trees are Green” is included in Dungy’s anthology.
Much of Jess’s acclaimed body of work illuminates on the African American experience. About Olio, Wave Books says, “Part fact, part fiction, Jess’s much anticipated second book weaves sonnet, song, and narrative to examine the lives of mostly unrecorded African American performers directly before and after the Civil War up to World War I.”
In an interview with LitHub about Olio, Jess spoke about the power and the politics of song: “To be able to sing under that kind of oppression I think, in a lot of ways, is the very essence of survival, of a people, of the ability to have to the hope to make something beautiful amongst so much wretchedness. That’s critical to the concept of human survival. And in this particular context, of African Americans working through slavery… that’s what we had.”
But in the context of Dungy’s Black Nature, I turn to Jess’s leadbelly with a different ear.
In “john wesley ledbetter,” Jess writes,
singing a crusade of axe and machete i take virgin texas territory by force, clear it of timber and trouble. each eastern twilight, i till top soil ’til sun plants itself back into that western horizon. i keep struggling against a brooding moon’s skyline until dark sleep is my friend again, a place where i can dream drought into rain, pray storm could out of spotless sky.
The poem goes on with, “there’s only one way out of slave time dues: hump this land down till it shrieks up a crop of cancelled debt into your wagon.” In this poem, we see an illustration of what Dungy describes as African Americans’ “complex relationship to land, animals, and vegetation.” She says, “African Americans are tied up in the toil and soil involved in working the land into the country we know today,” and she reminds us how they were “viewed once as chattel, part of a farm’s livestock or asset in a bank’s ledger.”
In “leadbelly: runagate,” Jess writes,
where water and land meet is shore, and on shore is iron in fists of jailers in sun of texas swamp. i wade into bubble and blue ink of red river, my head is shaven, bobbing, brown island of shine. […]
i want to let the water take me, i want to surrender to this river’s rock and swirl, come up clean and white as death itself, but the black in me breaks into blues, and i feel the coffle of their claws. i am stepping toward dry land, the dance of ankle chains, where i scream history into song that works itself into blood, sweat, memory.
The water in this poem reminds me of Dungy’s description of the “river” in Rita Dove’s “Three Days of forest, a River, Free”: it is “more than a moving body of water. It is a biblical allusion, a historical reality, a geographical boundary, a legal boundary, a decoy, the center of emotional and personal change, an aspiration, a metaphor: all these things at once.”
Tyehimba Jess’s leadbelly
As I re-see the poems in leadbelly with a different framework, I am reminded how the way we group, categorize, thematically arrange, and shelf literature can limit or expand our experiences of literature. We put the poems under one category or another, and it’s hard to imagine what else it can be.
Dungy’s Black Nature is important, because it acknowledges the African American perspective these 93 poets highlight while introducing what else their work is – and how that “what else” amplifies our understanding of their works. As Dungy says, Black Nature “encourage[s] readers to divert their gaze into new directions, demanding they notice new aspects of the world and accept alternative modes of description.”
To put it another way, a book like Black Nature is like a hearing aid. It can give us that extra power to hear poetry in an even more powerful way. It can help us turn up the volume on that work – perhaps turn up the bass or the treble and experience the poem in a myriad of ways.
Laura Yoo
HoCoPoLitSo Board member and Associate Professor of English at Howard Community College.
an English major goes to a literary reading for the first time
Author Belinda McKeon reading on stage at the 39th Annual Irish Evening – photo by Lee Waxman
A guest blog written by Christina Smith, a student in Professor Ryna May’s literature class at Howard Community College
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Admittedly, I had never attended a literary reading prior to the HoCoPoLitSo Irish Evening on February 10th. I hope that it is not too shocking that I say this, given that I am an English major. So, I am happy that I finally had the opportunity to experience a literary reading at the 39th Irish Evening held at the Smith Theater at Howard Community College.
Before I went I knew little about the program, only that the author would read from at least one of her two books, and that there would be Irish music and dancing for entertainment. Even though my friend Amy and I were probably some of the youngest people to attend that night, I did not feel awkward there. On the faces of the people there, you could tell everyone was having a fantastic time. The entire evening was a hit.
Catherine McLoughlin-Hayes, Ambassador Anne Anderson, and Susan Thorton Hobby at the 39th Annual Irish Evening- photo by Lee Waxman
I was shocked to see that the program boasted the Ambassador of Ireland, her Excellency Anne Anderson. She was very gracious, and it was impressive that Mrs. Anderson was able to join us for the Irish Evening despite her busy schedule. A list of her accomplishments made me feel lazy and slightly light-headed at the enormity of her dedication to civil rights and women’s right’s worldwide.
While I like to think myself well read, I had not been made familiar with Belinda McKeon’s work. It was a treat to have her read from both her books, Solace and Tender. I was quite taken with her reading from Tender as I could feel the insecurities that her characters suffered from, the anguish of unrequited love and how truly awkward it is to be a young 18-year-old. She was witty and kind with her characters, as though greeting an old friend. Hearing the author read her own work gives you an idea of how those characters really present themselves in her mind. From her reading, the audience got a feel that these characters were real, that they had pains, hopes, flaws, and humor.
I loved the reading from Tender so much that I even ordered it from Amazon when I got home. Now when I read it, I will have the added pleasure of knowing how the author intended for it to be read. And in a way I will be able to connect with the characters on a more personal level.
The evening wrapped up with a performance from the Narrowbacks and Irish step dancing by the Culkin School. The music was traditional Irish music, a perfect nightcap to a fantastic evening.
I admit that I got some strange looks when I told people about my Friday night, but it was definitely worth it to let my inner nerd have a fun evening. I look forward to attending more events produced by the HoCoPoLitSo.
And a big thank you to Professor May for making it possible for me and a plus one to attend.
By Christina Smith
a taste of Ireland right here in Columbia
Belinda McKeon read from Solace and Tender at the 39th Irish Evening in Columbia, Maryland
A guest blog submitted by Cara Caccamisi, a student in Professor Ryna May’s literature class at Howard Community College in Columbia, Maryland
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Howard County Poetry and Literature Society’s 39th Annual Irish Evening, which took place at Howard Community College’s Smith Theater on Friday, February 10th at 7:30 pm, was an event of Irish pride and culture. Hosted by Columbia’s own Catherine McLoughlin-Hayes, the HoCoPoLitSo Irish Evening Chair, the evening was a great way to experience Ireland without leaving the state of Maryland.
The auditorium was filled with fascination, excitement, and anticipation from the many spectators, while musician Jared Denhard performed the Celtic Harp. Then, Ms. McLoughlin-Hayes came on stage to introduce the main event for the night. Her enthusiasm set the tone for the evening.
Ms. McKeon chose to read first from Solace which was awarded the Faber Prize and Irish Book of the Year. The passage she read described a conflicting relationship between father and son on a farm in Ireland. Ms. McKeon’s second reading was from her latest book, Tender, about two college friends who meet in Dublin and become close; it shows the transformation of friendship from being teenagers to becoming adults. In her unique and exhilarating story, Ms. McKeon depicts the friend’s difficult relationship as Catherine grows strong feelings for James, who is a homosexual. The book grows extra complicated as it is set in the 1990’s when being homosexual was not widely accepted.
Following the author were the Narrowbacks. The Narrowbacks name is a tribute to the term immigrant, as many of the band members have roots in Ireland and they are inspired by the band, Celtic Thunder. The group members consisted of brothers, Jesse and Terence Winch, Dominick Murray, and Linda Hickman, all of whom were apart of Celtic Thunder. Other members were Terence’s son, Michael Winch and Eileen Estes, daughter of Celtic Thunder’s lead singer.
Many of the songs performed consisted of main themes of nature, growing up as an immigrant, and love. One of the most memorable songs, “Childhood Ground”, was written by Terence Winch and sung by Eileen Estes. It remembers the time when the Bronx Expressway was built and shattered the homes of many Irish families, including Winch’s family home. Traditional Irish music is so distinctive as it combines poetry of hardships, life, and love with rare instruments, known in Ireland. The Irish step dancers from the Culkin School performed during some of the songs played by the Narrowbacks.
With the outstanding performance by the Narrowbacks and the talented step dancers, the audience was very well-entertained. The auditorium was filled with the sound of Ireland, and the spectators joined in on clapping hands and nodding their heads to the music. And Belinda McKeon, a truly brilliant writer, left the listeners craving more of the stories.
HoCoPoLitSo created an enjoyable evening and allowed the viewers a chance to spend an evening immersed in Irish culture.
What Am I Reading And Why? Diane Ackerman’s The Human Age.
Recently, I reached for something hopeful to read. I wanted to get out of the funky funk current affairs has had me in. I wanted a bigger picture, something that might observe, teach, and inspire. Basically, a tonic for these blues I have been dwelling in. I reached for Diane Ackerman’s The Human Age: The World Shaped By Us.
Open your imagination to how we began – as semi-upright apes which spent some of their time in trees; next as ragtag bands of nomadic hunter-gatherers; then as purposeful custodians of favorite grains, chosen with mind-bending slowness, over thousands of years; and in time as intrepid farmers and clearers of forests with fixed roofs over our heads and a more reliable food supply; afterward as builders of villages and towns dwarfed by furrowed, well-tilled farmlands; then as makers, fed by such inventions as the steam engine (a lavish power source unlike horses, oxen, or water power, and not subject to health or weather, not limited by location); later as industry’s operators, drudges and tycoons who moved closer to the factories that arose in honey-combed cities beside endless fields of staple crops (like corn, wheat, and rice) and giant herds of key species (mainly cows, sheep, or pigs); and finally as builders of big buzzing metropolises, ringed by suburbs on whose fringes lay shrinking farms and forests; and then, as if magnetized by a fierce urge to coalesce, fleeing en mass into these mountainous hope-scented cities.
That’s about as big picture as you can get, the 150 thousand or so years of Homo sapiens developing like a Polaroid right in front of your eyes. It is the kind of scope that shares what a grand thing life is and what we on the now end of existence should consider as we take on the seemingly insurmountable troubles of our own day. The tribe can survive, adapt, invent.
The book doesn’t pose a pretty picture — our current environmental concerns weigh heavy within it. But it doesn’t look at just the real, rough edges of how we live on Earth and how we treat our home. It also looks at ways we are currently taking on our challenges through imagination, ingenuity, persistence, care, action, and number – the world’s problems are not to be taken on individually, though that is often where engagement starts, but with a growing collective effort and resource. Some lead by expertise and example, others take it from there. In that light, it is inspiring. One reads as an individual, but as the pages turn, one realizes that they describe the efforts of your kin and kind hard at work to do the right thing and mind this wonderful home for all of us, making better today so that our story will carry on into the future.
Ackerman’s sentences are beautiful, full of words that touch up to each other perfectly as they flow into informative paragraphs and chapter-length essays. She has a wonderful sense of observation and detail. The way she names species specifically like the pearls they are, or identifies the detail of cultures or individuals she is describing are testament to her expertise on what she is writing about. It deepens one’s understanding of the world. It is clear and full of insight, compassion, and, yes, hope. I don’t know if it was an odd choice or not to reach for on a whim, but I am loving it and it is mending me.
Sincerely,
Tim Singleton
Board Co-chair, HoCoPoLitSo
mana’s musings: poetry-binge at dodge poetry festival 2016
Laura Yoo
HoCoPoLitSo Board member and Associate Professor of English at Howard Community College.
It was my first time. I was nervous. I was excited. I felt better that a friend was going to be there with me the whole time, a friend who had done it before.
My first Dodge Poetry Festival.
I had two goals and I had 24 hours (if I didn’t sleep) to achieve them. First, hear Claudia Rankine, my new literary hero whose formidable poetic and intellectual power show us what a real-life super hero looks like. Move over, Captain America! Second, discover one new poet – someone I’ve never read or heard
The first event I attended was called “American Poetries” with Brenda Hillman, Khaled Mattawa, Claudia Rankine, and Anne Waldman – all Chancellors of Academy of American Poets. While I would have loved to hear these poets read from their own impressive repertoire of works, it was also wonderful to hear the poems they’re reading and who they recommend for us to discover.
from the left – Khaled Mattawa, Brenda Hillman, Claudia Rankine, Anne Waldman
Khaled Mattawa read a poem by Hayan Charara called “Animals,” a haunting story about the violence we commit against each other. The poem, Mattawa reminded us, exposes the horrors that we’re not allowed to speak of. I immediately ordered a copy of Charara’s book, Something Sinister.
Claudia Rankine told us about a poet named Mark Nowak and his book, Shut Up Shut Down. In referring to Nowak, Rankine brought to the foreground a voice that is sometimes ignored in our discussions about race – the working white class. This voice is essential to Rankine’s new project of studying whiteness.
Much of this forum’s discussion on “America’s Poetries” highlighted the diversity of voices, experiences, and perspectives. The takeaway for me was that poets feel a deep sense of responsibility in their roles not only as artists but also as people who speak for, about, and on behalf of American lives. Their poetry gives us language with which we can speak of our world in ways that are creative and enlightening.
That evening, I experienced one of the most special poetry performances I’ve ever attended at “Poetry like Bread – Poems of Social and Political Consciousness.” The lineup included Marilyn Chin, Robert Hass, Martín Espada, Juan Felipe Herrera, Brenda Hillman, Claudia Rankine, Vijay Seshadri, and Gary Snyder. I know, right? Yes, let that list sink in.
I rediscovered Robert Hass. Though I had read his works and studied them in school, experiencing his poetry live on stage sparked a new interest. His reading of what can only be called an epic poem titled “Dancing” – about human history of violence and weapons – brought people to a standing ovation.
That same evening, I discovered Marilyn Chin. I don’t know many poets who look like me – an Asian American woman. And there is something powerful about seeing someone who looks like you speaking of an experience, a perspective, a history, a family, or a value that you are personally familiar with. She is a cool performer with a bit of an attitude and spunk. I like that.
So within hours of arriving at the festival, I met both of my goals.
But it’s not just the poets and the poetry that made this overnight trip to Newark deeply moving. Conversations with my friend about language, education, art, race, politics – those conversations had me doing mental gymnastics. My ideas were both validated and challenged. My mind stretched.
I learned that the community of poets and poetry is a thing of beauty and power. Dodge got me hooked. I can’t wait to go back in two years.
Reading Recap: On the coattails of her words – Carolyn Forché
© Don J. Usner / Blue Flower Arts
When poetry lovers attended a Carolyn Forché reading Oct. 30, they probably expected gorgeous wordplay. But beyond the language, the world’s troubles — even those we didn’t know about — were laid bare.
Should we expect any less from the writer who coined the phrase “poetry of witness”?
At HoCoPoLitSo’s most recent event in the annual fall Lucille Clifton Reading Series, Forché gave HoCoPoLitSo audiences an exclusive — a reading from her yet-unpublished manuscript, In the Lateness of the World.
The whole world crept into the theater on the coattails of her words: the refugees fleeing Syria in flimsy rubber boats and her grandmother’s crossing of the Atlantic to reach Ellis Island, the siege of Sarajevo and the resistance of the Russian poet Pushkin.
Despite being thick into recovery from pneumonia, Forché delivered a forceful reading of her work, and answered questions for half an hour after the reading with the audience about how she helps translate poetry from Vietnamese, Bulgarian and Arabic, the tradition of oral poetry and human rights around the world. Even in the questions from the audience, in which one poetry lover talked about the thousands of annual deaths along the Rio Grande, the world’s woes were evident.
Author of two collections of poetry of witness, including the seminal Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (1993) and the more recent Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English, 1500 to 2001 (2014), Forché has always been both a human rights advocate and a poet.
During the afternoon’s taping of HoCoPoLitSo’s The Writing Life, a thirty-minute writer-to-writer talk show hosted by Grace Cavalieri (also the host of the Library of Congress’ The Poet and the Poem: https://www.loc.gov/poetry/media/poetpoem.html), Forché talked about her beginnings, and about “my poet’s responsibility.”
She talked with Cavalieri about winning a Guggenheim, meeting someone in California who talked with her about El Salvador, and about voyaging to Central America to find out what was happening. Turns out, it was death squads, the military dictatorship’s brutality and an impending revolution. She began writing to Amnesty International, and putting poems on paper. Those experiences gave rise to her book The Country between Us (1981), which became that rarest of birds, a poetry bestseller.
At the tail end of the question session after her reading, a student asked, “What would you tell young poets of witness?”
“Stay open, stay awake,” Forché said, and don’t think you have to travel the world to find trouble. There’s plenty here at home. “Enlarge your capacity for empathy.”
“Poetry,” she told Cavalieri during The Writing Life taping, is “the natural prayer of the human soul,” and can work to heal the world.
Let’s hope.
— Susan Thornton Hobby,
Recording secretary
HoCoPoLitSo 