Common Threads: My Most Exciting and Rich Performance Experience Yet

On February 4, 2016 at the Kalamazoo Institute of the Arts (KIA), I was honored to be part of poetry/music/art performance piece that was called Common Threads.

It was billed as "Poetry + music join in a call and response about art + race with creative justice arts activits Denise Miller, Dr. Michelle S. Johnson (aka dj Disobedience) Abbie Maikoski, and Jim Croteau and musicians Anne Rhode and Jonathan Boyd."
It was all put together by my poetry mentor, Denise Miller. It was a great honor to perform with her and these other great artists. The paintings from the exhibit Common Ground: African American Art at the Kalamazoo Institute of the Arts (http://www.kiarts.org/page.php?page_id=1055) that inspired the poetry or music was projected in the background. It was so well put together and so powerful.





I was trying to address White people as they approach race, racism, and art from the African American community in the four poems that I read. It was probably the best, and most exciting creative performance I have been a part of. I love poetry that addresses social change and love having my creative work be a part of efforts toward such change.

Look to the KIA website--we will be repeating the performance sometimes in the Spring or early Summer!

Redbird Chapbooks will the publishing my chapbook

In September I got the exciting news that Redbird Chapbooks will be publishing my first chapbook. Sarah Hayes, an editor from Redbird, will begin working with me on editing the poems next week (end of February 2016). I am as excited about working with an editor to improve the poems as I am about have a chapbook published. The chapbook should be out sometime this year. More on that soon.

Meantime check out Redbird.  Their chapbooks look great---consider buying one (but save some money for when mine comes out too.)

Redbird Chapbooks

Used to Not Seeing (or Everyone's Mississippi Delta)

 

I was honored to be asked to share this poem at the Racial Healing and Action Service at Second Baptist Church here in Kalamazoo a couple of weeks ago. The service represented the beginning of a collaboration of sorts between ISAAC and ERACCE to work together in dismantling racism.

I believe poetry can play a part in social change and is at its best when it does so.

I believe that for white folks to be able to do anti-racist work effectively over the long haul, we need to be aware of how racism hands us all kinds of privileges on the backs of people of color and we also need to be aware of how, at the same time, racism, that place of racial superiority,  robs us of our humanity. This is my attempt to address that belief in a personal and poetic way. (What follows is a version revised post that reading in June)

 Used to Not Seeing (or Everyone's Mississippi Delta)

Only low beams lit the road

as my parents drove Highway 61

south out of Memphis in route

to Cleveland, Mississippi. We passed

the Devils Crossroads in Clarksdale,

there wasn't a marker, we were blind

to more than the Blues. I barely saw

the civil rights marches, only learned later

it's not a delta at all, no mouth

until further south. It's all alluvial

plain, this place of my birth. Grandpa

disembarked in Baltimore's harbor

in 1921, moved south when

cotton was still king, but

he never planted. Instead he owned

a five and dime on Main Street

in Cleveland. I was proud

to help clerk. Sometimes he'd aim

squinted eyes my way, talk the Italian

he taught me, it translates: “follow that N____r."

"It's the longest stretch of straight road

east of the Great River," my Dad

always said as he drove with low beams

to avoid blinding the oncoming

drivers like us. We got used to not seeing

anything beyond the cotton

by the side of the road.

Even amid fields of outcries

at the murders in the streets,

in the parks, and the churches,

we whites miss the lay of the land

with our questions:

Was the officer following policy?

Was the shooter mentally ill?

Isn't the KKK really to blame?

The fertile flatness freed

by the floods of the Mississippi

and Yazoo was stolen

and exploited--Indian removal, slavery,

sharecropping, Jim Crow de jure

and now de facto. History's alive and

denied. But with my heart set

on high beams, I can see how

the land of my birth really lies,

how I could become Darren Wilson,

even Dylann Roof, if I don't feel

my conscription. If I don't feel

the white of my finger placed

every day on the trigger of the gun

I was given in my cradle, then

there's no chance of turning gun

into ploughshare, there's only

this senseless soldiering on.

This poem was original published in a earlier version in New Verse News (click here for that version) 

Please let me know if you share this poem..

Best Doggone Dog in the West

 Best Doggone Dog in the West--Direct Link to the Poem   

I wanted a separate posting for this poem that just came out in Melancholy Hyperbole. The poem is a tough one for me, reflecting back on the time that I had to make a decision for my mother that she was not going to return to the hospital yet again, that she was done fighting to live.

Remember Old Yeller?  I have heard many stories from folks on how tough that movie was as a kid for them when Travis had to shoot Old Yeller because he was rabid.  It was a trauma for me. And well, you'll see how it fits together.

Take a look and comment there too.

Also take a look at the e-zine in general, it is becoming one of my favorite poetry journals.

Ogunquit's Good for Poetry, Meditation, and . . . Blogging

I've been neglecting this blog. But I am back in Ogunquit---and that seems like a place I've blogged in as much as anywhere despite only spending two weeks a year here.  It is a lovely place and it has special significance for my partner, Darryl, and I as we have been coming here for 30 years including our first trip together ever.

The ocean makes a great place for meditation too. Two of the pictures are the scenes I looked at while meditating this week.  The other picture is of Frosty near the beach.

I have been writing here, and hearing good news on poetry publishing (I only mention the good news, not the rejections which outnumber the acceptances 10 to 1 of course.)

I had two poems published by Chicago Literati----Needlecast is a poem I am really liking right now.
Their link is here: Needlecast, After Mass and Harvey Milk

I also had a love poem anthologized. It is based on Darryl and I, projecting us out about a decade or two. The book looks pretty good. It has three sections on homelessness, aging, and the earth respectively. Mine is in the aging section and it is written with Whitman's Two Boys Together Clinging in mind. It is called Cover Boys and was first published in print only in Assaracus: A Journal of Gay Poetry.

 I have read through the aging section in the anthology and was moved by a lot the poems there. The PDF is free, the Kindle version is just 2.99. The paperback copy is 19.99 but all proceeds of sales is being donated to Friends of the Earth.

https://www.createspace.com/5479341

Check out the journal, Haibun Today, and some reflections on writing haibun

Check on the journal "Haibun Today". The editor for this issue, Melissa Allen, was great--she gave me some excellent feedback on a piece and asked me to revise and re-submit. It really pulled the piece together and was one of those rare times when I knew for sure "this is it, it is finished". I appreciate so much busy editors who take the time to help--so I thought I would plug the journal here. (My poem does not come out till March, I will post about it again then).

I am liking the haibun form and how this journal and others are "translating" the form in a way that speaks to, and registers with, folks and writing that is contemporary and Western.  I think I like it for several reasons.  First, I tend to "go prose" a lot with my writing and haibun combines prose with haiku poetry. Second, writing haiku forces me back from over-explaining which is one my (many) poetry weaknesses. The editor really got me to think of haiku as purely observational, not interpretive stuff, or at least no focus on interpretation.  Finally, I am really intrigued with the sense of "developing" the form--read through the journal and see all the differing approaches and styles---it really generated ideas for me own writing. I plan to keep writing haibun. Thanks Melissa Allen and Haibun Today!

Haibun Today

What if . . .?

Homophobia ruined my life. These words were spoken to me by another gay man who was in his late sixties and had been a leader in the gay community. He was a retired professor with what seemed like a good life and he was certainly well-liked and well-respected.  His words shook me.

Through my own therapy and other self-reflection I am discovering how deeply I was injured, certainly psychologically, probably spiritually, by having grown up in a time and place that was pervasively homophobic.

I often think “what if”—what if I had made some kind of connection with the gay community when I was younger and had been able to come out as an adolescent or young adult. How much less haunted by what I will simply call “internal demons” would I be now?

I had been trying to write a poem about the UpStairs Lounge fire in New Orleans in 1973. The lounge was a gay bar in New Orleans that was destroyed in an arson's fire on June 24, 1973. It was the deadliest fire in the city's history and the largest mass killing of LGBT people in the United States.

New Orleans holds a special place in my heart.  I moved to New Orleans in 1975 for college, still very closeted, even in some ways even to myself, as I would remain for a while. I never heard of the fire then, and in fact, did not know about it at all till 4 or 5 years ago. It has received little attention. Oppression is assisted through the concealing of history. 

I had down good description of the fire and its aftermath, but I needed something more.  Then at a writing conference this past summer I started thinking again about those words that my friend had said to me as well as the pain of my own youth. I started hearing in my head What if, what if I had heard, what if I knew, what if  . . . ?

And the poem fell into place.  Please go the link and give it a read.  (And while you are there look around the issue of The About Place Journal, you will be impressed by its passion for justice.)

The UpStairs Lounge in About Place Journal, November 2014

Photos from the fire