A Poet's Political Questions

Poets are even more notoriously naive and/or misguided about politics than "the average citizen," whoever he or she might be. Percy Shelley claimed that poets were "the unacknowledged legislators of the world," but I think most people would add "and let's make sure we keep them unacknowledged." Especially poets in the Anglo-American tradition have not-so-great political reputations: Ezra Pound, for instance. I don't know that other traditions are much better in this regard, but Pablo Neruda and Vaclav Havel seem to be writers who combined literary and political careers well (Havel is not a poet, but is a fiction-writer and a dramatist)--but I know much is contingent upon your literary and political points of view.

To support the claim that poets are naive and/or misguided about politics, I hereby submit questions I would like presidential aspirants or even Congressional aspirants to answer--I mean really answer--not just the canned non-answer. For instance, if one asks, "How large is the national debt, and how do you propose to cut it?", one does not want to hear, "My candidacy represents change." By even entertaining the possibility of a straight answer, I am being naive, of course. Questions:

1. How many American military personnel are deployed worldwide, and in what regions is this deployment unnecessary, misguided, and/or wrong? Take your time. Be specific.

2. What is the month-and-year in your administration when everyone in the U.S. who is ill or might get ill will have affordable, guaranteed access to the appropriate doctors, nurses, equipment, therapy, and medicine? No hedging, and no excuses, please, and don't bother mentioning "Canada" or "socialized medicine"; that just wastes time.

3. What is the most cynical piece of advice from your political team you have accepted and acted upon?

4. Specifically, what Executive Branch powers that Bush II has expanded will you retract--when and how?

5. What are the three most severe erosions of civil liberties in the last 8 years and how will you insure that they are repaired?

6. How many nuclear weapons does the U.S. own, and, in your opinion, how many of these should be incapacitated--and by what date?

7. In your opinion, what are the acceptable numbers of a) homeless persons and b) persons who live below the poverty-line in the U.S.? Why are these numbers acceptable? What will you do to reduce the numbers to those levels permanently?

8. On what date will you reveal what all of the interrogation techniques, incarceration practices, and "rendering" practices of the U.S. government are and explain why all of these are both morally and legally acceptable?

9. What is the emptiest piece of effective speech-making, sloganeering, and/or political advertising your campaign has used so far?

10. What are the chief differences between your political campaign and a cult? What are the chief similarities?

11. In your political life, what is the most shameless thing you have done?

More Pigeons, Please

I haven't seen a pigeon in a long time. Some pigeons used to roost in the belfry at the parish to which I belong, but I think difficulties arose regarding their leavings, and someone installed some wire.

I think pigeons, like seagulls and crows, don't have great reputations. They annoy a lot of people, these birds. Some people adore pigeons, of course, including the few Italians who feed them in Piazza San Marco, which may well be the headquarters of Pigeon United Nations. I think there are some pigeons in downtown T-Town, but I haven't seen any in a while.

Sometimes I do get a bit weary watching pigeons walk because they seem to use the weight of their heads for propulsion, so with each step they thrust their heads forward. Empathetically, I start getting headaches and neck-aches. Pigeons' eyes and feather-coloring are very pleasant to look at. Pigeons seem very eager, almost as if they worked in sales, but they're not obstreperous and bossy, unlike some crows we might mention.

Probably cities with large populations of pigeons have tales to tell about how much trouble they are. . . .I used to see cousins of pigeons, doves, in the Sierra Nevada every so often. Lovely.

I've eaten squab--or cooked pigeon--once only. Fictional detective and large gourmand Nero Wolfe eats a lot of squab in those books--as well as starlings.

A friend of mine doesn't particularly like the Seahawks, Seattle's professional football team (it's a complicated story), so he refers to the them as the Sea Squab, a fine example of a satirist's deflationary move, with no loss of alliteration.

I'm not sure if this "information" springs from an urban legend or not, but I've heard that carrier pigeons are extinct. I'll need to investigate further--or await a tiny scroll delivered by a bird.

Maybe the most interesting thing about pigeons to me is the sounds they make in their throats--hence this poem:

Pigeons’ Throats

Trickling cold-water springs bubble up
in the throats of pigeons.

In the throats of pigeons,
weary orderlies push medicine-carts

down dim hospital corridors, and
the one weak, wobbly wheel eeks.

Old men and women sit around
tables, mutter alibis, lullabies,

and goodbyes in parlors
I've imagined in pigeons' throats,

which speak in pigeon-code of untraveled
highways upholstered in ground-mist . . .

gray, green, and purple purses full of coins from
a lost currency. . . pearl light of train-windows, dawn.

Hans Ostrom

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Poem for Lent by Kimball

Because I converted from having no particular religious beliefs to Catholicism after I'd traveled down the road quite a ways, I am still getting used to the rhythms of the Church, as well as still feeling as if I walked into the middle of a large family's party in which, among other things, several arguments have been taking place for, oh, three or four centuries, at minimum. I converted in 2000.

Catholics have just entered the season of Lent, which, I suppose, the public at large connects vaguely to Mardis Gras. Lent is a time of ashes, silence, self-reflection, figurative and literal fasting, and waiting.

I found a poem about Lent by Virginia Kimball. Usually I'm not drawn immediately to religious poems connected so directly to any one particular aspect of any one faith. I tend to like poems that are spiritual in a broader sense. For instance, you don't need to be a person of any particular faith (and you may even be an atheist) to see the sense of Hopkins' praise of "dappled things" in "God's Grandeur." But Kimball's poem intrigued me, and although she is, I believe, a Dominican nun, the poem has something for non-Catholics, non-Christians, and readers with no particular religious affiliation.

Rhythm of Lent,

by Virginia Kimball

The day dims to evening,
rosy sky tingeing
cold bare limbs
with pink tinting.

Wind howls meaning,
inner soul tingling.
Frigid cold wrapping,
on a coffin tapping.

Yet off to Compline,
this first day of Lent,
darkness creeping
on the sunset seeping,
chanted prayer singing
plaintive night shortening,
incense in vision ringing.

Rhythm of days proceed,
filling steady with hope:
prayers dressed in candlelight,
dark holes in a cosmos plight.

Stars birthing from strange, deep
abysses of compressed
energy, brilliance emerging
from death, a glory surging
in mystery,
God asking Job, "were you there
when I formed the earth?" (Job 38: 4)
"Have you seen the gates of darkness?" (17)
"Was it you who formed the deep?" (8)

From the mystery of nothing
we come by the breath of God.
From a valley of darkness walking,
yearning for Christ without talking,

from dimmer to brighter,
from shorter to longer,
the steps of this path
a cadence grows greater,
the pulse of Creator,
the beat with His heart,
to faith that is stronger.

I rather like the following lines:

prayers dressed in candlelight,
dark holes in a cosmos plight.

They present an unsentimental, startling image of prayer. The whole of stanza 5 is impressive. partly because, with ease and purpose, it blends modern physics into a religious poem, but also because of its stark references to God's having challenged Job. The poem is from a series of Lenten meditations by Kimball that are posted on a site at the University of Dayton.

The Jesuit priest at my parish gave a homily on Lent this weekend, and he mentioned that most Catholics are pretty predictable when it comes to giving something up for Lent. They might, for example, go on a diet or a give up a particular kind of food. The padre had no objections to these "sacrifices," but he also encouraged his listeners not just to give up something but to do something--something either to be better persons or to try to make the world a bit better. To me that was as refreshing as Kimball's poem.

Of course, the list of things I could give up is so long as to require several volumes. Food that's bad for me, impatience, self-absorption (said the blogger), and almost-constant worry are part of that heap. I guess I'll just pick one. As to what I will do, according to the padre's advice--I'm working on it, but I think I'll keep it a secret for now.

You don't need to be a Catholic to experience this time of year as one of waiting, especially in northern climes. A very large number of people in the Pacific Northwest are waiting for Winter to stop cuffing us around.

Repetitive Espresso Macchiato

Sinning against counter-corporatism, I do patronize Starbucks, although during the work-week I go to the (two) cafes on our wee campus.

At Starbucks, I usually order a beverage that used to be listed rather prominently on the menu in the Paleolithic Starbucks Era: espresso macchiato. I add "doppio" (not sure of my Italian spelling there) to the order, and I think the word suggests either that I'm a dope or that I want two shots of espresso or both. (That bit of drollery may have been too dry.)

For at least two years, I've been getting the sense that almost no one else orders this beverage, which is simply two shots of espresso "marked" with a dollop of foam, which is supposed to be creamy foam, I believe, but milk-foam is fine for me. I add a bit of Splenda just to take the edge off the brownish-black knife that is espresso.

Once a barista had to get out what looked to be a Top Secret Starbucks book of recipes. Another barista recently informed me that I was "the only one who ever orders this." His tone suggested neither condemnation nor admiration. He was just giving me a fact and pointing out that I was, in this fact, a doppio.

More typically, after I order the beverage (and if there are multiple baristas around), a brief consultation occurs in which the pullers of shots confirm what they think an espresso macchiato is. They mumble quietly and do not make eye-contact with me--I think they don't want to let on that a conference was required. Every so often, a barista makes the drink incorrectly and just dumps a load of hot milk in with the mud. I never complain or send it back, however. After all, folks, what we're after here is "a hot cup of coffee," more or less.

I have deduced that the bulk of Starbucks customers order drinks that I consider milkshakes--enormous jars of liquid topped with hillocks of cream, with red straws jutting out like accent-marks in Spanish. The drinks must take the better part of an hour to consume and drive the blood-sugar to record-heights. (This makes me think of Rome, and of going to an espresso bar--literally a zinc bar--and ordering a shot: If you don't toss the thing back immediately like the rest of the Italian men and leave, the barista looks at you as if you're a trespasser. The look he gives you, should you linger, suggests he's thinking, in Italian, "Are you gonna stand there and nurse that thing all day, moron?")

It is just like me to find something I like and stick with it--until it disappears. I hang on to everything from books to clothes to vehicles. (The 1969 Ford F-100 pickup featured on this blog belonged to my father, who purchased it new.) I once had a favorite pair of wool socks that I believe were handed down from one of my brothers, and I think I may have kept them for close to 20 years--until my wife executed them. I get in ruts and routines. My parents' generation sometimes referred to such behavior as "getting on a jag." I had an uncle who, as observed by my mother, would get "on a jag" that entailed eating the exact same breakfast (which his wife had to cook) every day--for a year or more. It might be a waffle and bacon, for instance.

I'm especially vulnerable to repetitive behavior that saves time and energy, and I don't like to put much thought into shopping for food or clothes, one of many reasons I tend not pay attention to advertisements or coupons. (I wish they'd put the money for that into food for the impoverished.) Who knows?--I may have been content with at least one part of Soviet society, wearing gray every day and buying the one kind of whatever that was available. I would be content with one "blazer," for instance; only my wife saves me from such repetitive, eccentric behavior and induces the proper variation. I may have gotten the clothing-part of this habit from my father, who, in summer, wore bluejeans, a "railroad" striped cotton shirt, work-boots, a hat, and suspenders every day. When the weather got colder, he would change the kind of shirt and wear a red chamois-cloth (a kind of flannel) one. He had dozens of the two kinds of shirts.

When viewing the tube, I tend to go to the news outlets, BBC America, and/or Turner Classic Movies--with an occasional check on the fundamentalist-Christian network, which for some reason fascinates me: the programming and personalities are so bad that they're good.

I will get on poetry jags and read somebody's collected poems (again)--like Housman's, a recent example.

Although I am an old dog, I don't necessarily mind being dislodged from a groove, a rut, a drill. It just doesn't occur to me, usually, to break my own routine, so usually some kind of external influence is required. One day, for instance, Starbucks may simply refuse my request for an espresso macchiato (doppio). I will have to reconsider the situation. It will take a while. I may need to interrogate the barista briefly but politely. But I will change, if need be. There is, I believe, a difference between being an old dog and a pain in the ass.

Beyond the Chortle

I saw a clip of President Bush today; he was giving a speech to conservatives in his party, attempting "to rally the base" behind the next Republican candidate. Whenever any politician speaks, not just Bush, I tend to think of e.e. cummings' poem that parodies political speech:

"next to of course god america i
love you land of the pilgrims' and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawn's early my
country 'tis of centuries come and go
and are no more what of it we should worry
in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-
iful than these heroic happy dead
who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
they did not stop to think they died instead
then shall the voice of liberty be mute?"

He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water


(I seem to have landed myself in a different font.) Bush himself seems
to have lost interest in his own speeches.In the speech today, and the
State of the Union, he seemed almost too relaxed--burned out, fatalistic.
He seems to be a man who has done whatever it was he was
going to do, a man who thinks this pageant, life, is a bit of a joke.
Who can blame him if he feels this way? He seems tohave become
president in spite of himself. When I saw the clip of him
speaking, I chortled.

He did say one thing that interested me.  He encouraged the audience
to stand up for "faith in our values." I assume he meant "conservative"
values,but I decided to broaden the term and assume, further, that
he meant "American values."  Then I asked myself, "What are American
values?"  Of course,some ironic, sarcastic, answers spring to mind.
But if I had to try to answer the question straight up, without a chortle,
I'd say the following:

1. Work. Americans value work, and statistics show we tend to
work ourselves to death, at least in comparison to folks in Europe,
for example. We tend to drive ourselves.

2. Consumption. We're mad for things. We make millions of things,
or have them made abroad, and we sell them to each other. Gadgets,
cars, stuff.  "Home improvements." Clothes, shoes, trinkets. Little boxes
of entertainment. I've spent some time inGermany and Sweden, two
industrialized countries, and while they're certainly modern
nations with all the "amenities," they simply aren't as obsessed with
things as we are. I don't think any nation is as obsessed as ours is with
things.And the statistics in this case don't lie: we consume the most
fuel and produce the most waste, per capita, of any nation.

3. Control.  How we got to the place where we think we can and should
control global politics is a complicated story, but I think that's the place
we're in, for better or worse. Nobody's business globally is not our
business. We can always rationalize its being our business because
of "national security" or "human rights" or "the global economy" or "the
spread of freedom." But these pieces of language really don't get at
why we Americans love control so much. I think it's more than just
greed and more than the fact that we're convinced our way is the way.
We have imperial instincts, in my opinion, but they're different from
those of England, for example. The net effect, however, may look the
same to those countries we try to control.

4. Immaturity.  Europeans are fond of saying that Americans never grow
up (somewhat ironic, given the trouble some Europeans get into, but
nonetheless . . .). We tend to try to extend youth perhaps even more
frantically than the rest of humanity.

5. Privilege. We like imagining that we are on top of the world. Lord
knows a lot of Americans are not privileged, to say the least, but still
I think there's an American way of looking at the world, one that sees
America at the top of a hierarchy.

I don't know, for sure, what President Bush meant when he spoke of
"values." In private,he may say something like, "It was just a speech,
okay? Grow up." Or he may really mean something, or at least believe
he means something, when he says "values." He may mean "freedom"
or "individuality" or whatever, but these are empty signifiers. As far
as I know, he never deigns to complicate such terms, to reflect on
them, even to define them. He says "values," and he counts on the
fact that his audience will read the code-word correctly. In this respect,
he's just like every other politician. Politicians speak in code.

And so, once more, I think of cummings' poem.

Ballad of the Bibliophile

It is such a heavy, cold, wet, harsh Thursday in the Pacific Northwest that I have decided to post some extremely light verse. In fact, it is arguably weightless verse, and it floats past with a virtual shout-out to anyone entranced by books in general or LibraryThing in particular.

Ballad of the Bibliophile

I wonder where my books will go
When I am gone away.
The image of that scattering
Has troubled me today.

Bibliophilia
Is really a,
Surreally a,
Condition one can’t cure.
Of this we can be sure.

Of course, the books don’t know that they
Belong to me, are held
By me in such sweet high esteem.
Without a doubt, the books will meld

With new collections easily.
Books after all are not
Hired help, don't owe fealty--
an independent lot.

Bibliophilia
Is really a,
Surreally a,
Condition one can’t cure.
Of this we can be sure.

From my stuffed shelves into the world—
Diaspora foretold.
Meanwhile I touch and horde and read
Dear books I have and hold.

Bibliophilia
Is really a,
Surreally a,
Condition one can’t cure.
Of this we can be sure.

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

African American poems--a few favorites

"An embarrassment of riches" is an intriguing cliche. I suppose if one is wealthy in a monetary or acquisitive sense, one ought to feel some embarrassment, at least enough to induce one to share. But in literature, I'm not sure it's posssible to have an embarrassment of riches. Of course, I would think that, for I'm a greedy reader of poetry and don't believe the world can have too many good poems.

But as we're well into Black History Month, I thought I'd mention a few of my favorite African American poems, many of which are also my favorite poems, period. In no particular order, then:

"Yet Do I Marvel," by Countee Cullen. A perfect sonnet, but also a modern sonnet. And considering that Cullen has to finish the argument in 14 lines, the argument is quite complicated. It's an argument with God, to some degree.

Paul Laurence Dunbar, "We Wear the Masks."

Jessie Redmon Fauset, "La Vie C'est La Vie." A superbly phrased lyric poem.

Georgia Douglas Johnson, "I Want to Die While You Love Me." I have a recording of Alfre Woodard reading this one; her rendition is captivating.

Claude McKay, " If We Must Die" and "To White Friends." I have a recording of Ice T reading "If We Must Die."

Two more by Cullen: "Incident" and "Heritage." The latter is a remarkable achievement in poetry.

Langston Hughes, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," "I, Too," "Harlem," "Mother to Son," several of the "Madam" poems, "Trumpet Player," and "Theme for English B." Really what I want to do is to recommend the whole Collected Poems, but I must restrain myself.

Robert Hayden, "Those Winter Sundays." Students tend to like this one a lot. It resonates for me partly because of the wood-stove in the poem.

Margaret Walker, "For Malcolm X."

Gwendolyn Brooks, "We Real Cool," "The Beat Eaters," and "Malcolm X"

Bob Kaufman, "Jail Poems"

Etheridge Knight, "For Black Poets Who Think of Suicide"

Audre Lorde, "Coal"

Amiri Baraka, "A Poem for Black Hearts"

Michael Harper, "Dear John, Dear Coltrane"

June Jordan, "Poem About My Rights" A wide variety of people "connect" with this poem.

Nikki Giovanni, "Beautiful Black Men"

Yusef Komunyakaa, "Facing It." One of the best poems from/about the Viet Nam War era.

Rita Dove, "Ö," "Parsley," "History" The second two are rather famous, the first one not so much, but I love that poem.

James Emanuel, "After the Record Is Broken" Emanuel is not a well known poet now, although he's still revered as a pioneer in African American criticism. It's a fine poem.

Dudley Randall, "Booker T. and W.E.B." A nice poetic summary of the two points of view, or at least one version of the two points of view.

Mari Evans, "And The Old Women Gathered"

Dabbling in Philosophy

I'm an amateur philosopher--at best. Dabbler is more like it. Like almost every other person who has earned degrees in English, I dipped into philosophy as important background to and context of literature, and I took a two-semester "History of Philosophy" course--but philosophers tend not to like such courses because (so the argument goes) they are more of a tour of ideas than a course in "doing" philosophy. Getting ready for written doctoral exams in 18th & 19th century British literature and Modern British & American poetry, I also read some philosophy, but mostly in connection with specific literary works, poets, and novelists, and not all that systematically.

Having established the absence of preparation and credentials, then, I shall proceed to provide details that will further liquefy, if not atomize, my status in this regard.

My favorite philosopher is Spinoza. I've been reading him (his work) ever since I took that history of philosophy course, and I plunged into Ethics again about a year ago. --Not exactly light reading. But the line of argument is elegant, and the thinking is cool, as in chilly. God is the substance, goes one part of the argument, and everything else (pieces of reality large and small) comprises attributes of God. Evil springs from human misguidedness and mis-perception, not from Satan.

The poet in me likes the fact that Spinoza earned his living as a lens-grinder in the Netherlands, where his Jewish community excommunicated him. Later, a colleague encouraged him to become a Catholic. Unfortunately, the colleague's argument (I take great liberties with the paraphrasing here) was something like "all the popular people in Europe are converting to Catholicism!" Spinoza politely told the fellow that when he (the friend) came to his senses, he would know how ridiculous the invitation and the argument were.

Stuart Hampshire's work on Spinoza has been quite good at getting me as close to understanding Spinoza as I'll ever get. Spinoza has tended to get mis-used quite a bit. The 19th century, for example, wanted to turn him into a mystical pantheist, but that wasn't his argument at all. ("That is not it at all," to quote Eliot.)

Aristotle's my second favorite philosopher, although I know his non-philosophical work better: his writing on poetics (especially on tragedy, of course) and the timeless On Rhetoric. As long as I can remember, I've always preferred his work to Plato's. If Ari were alive today, he'd probably be a scientist or a social scientist, for he was the great empiricist. He seems to have been interested in everything and capable of taking apart everything and having a look. The world was data; data were the world. Even the guesses he made that turned out all wrong were very good hypotheses, even the crystal-sphere stuff.

Hume I love, too. He seems to have taken great joy in disrupting arguments and explaining how the logical connections people thought they were making were neither logical nor connections. --A latter-day Zeno, in my opinion.

I have to give Descartes his props. He came up with the greatest "hook" in philosophy, after all--and kept it to three words. And his thinking certainly swept Europe by storm.

Wittgenstein is fascinating, especially his evolution--going from mocking any "philosophy" that wasn't essentially phrased mathematically to embracing (or at least this is how I misinterpret it) something akin to rhetoric, wherein premises and definitions can function even as we acknowledge that they're contingent or constructed. The book about the famous (and famously mis-remembered or multiply remembered) "poker" episode with Popper, Ludwig, and Bertie Russell is entertaining.

I wish I liked Plato more, but I don't feel quite so bad after having read a biography of A.E. Housman (classical scholar), who read Plato as an undergraduate, decided what Plato had to say was a useless way of explaining the world, and never changed his mind.

I always found it ironic that Plato wanted to expel poets from his utopian kingdom because I see him primarily as a dramatist, a writer of little plays in which Socrates is the hero and, like professional wrestling champions, always "wins" the rigged contests. And the parable of the caves is lovely poetry. I enjoyed I.F. Stone's book on Socrates, especially how Stone criticizes Socrates without defending the death-sentence given him, even if Socrates had the choice of leaving the city rather than facing death.

And how cool is it that Aristotle and Plato just had one name--just like some celebrities nowadays? "The Philosopher formerly known as 'Plato.'"

Among the legion of philosophers whose work I never "got" are Leibniz and Kant. Or maybe I did "get" part of Kant and just didn't think it went anywhere. He seems to want to deny reality--but not really. He seems to waffle (a technical term in philosophy). Without a doubt, I grossly oversimplify when I remark that "the categorical imperative" seems like a very ornate version of the golden rule. When I got to the "monads" in Leibniz, I started laughing, and I apologize--for that for thinking that Berkeley is Plato Redux.

It's hard to overestimate Hegel's revolutionary (so to speak) ideas about history, but damn, his work is often impenetrable (to me, a mere poet, critic, and dabbler).

I could never quite connect with Nietzsche's work, either. I probably just needed a better philosophy professor--a better or more systematic introduction to his work. Or maybe I just imbibed too much of Aristotle-on-hubris to be anything other than suspicious about what appears to be the glorification of the will. What we think of as "the will" seems like something useful selected by evolution; it provides persistence and focus, among other things. But does it provide a worthy basis for understanding the world fully, for doing well and doing good? I don't know. But then Nietzsche wanted to move past good and evil--so there's that. I need to give Nietzsche at least one more try. This time maybe I'll confer with a Nietzsche-expert who happens to work on the same corridor as I.

I reckon the stuff I've read on Zen Buddhism doesn't really qualify as philosophy--or does it? Zen Buddhism seems to me to have anticipated almost all of Existentialism, but I'd wager there are some strong counter-arguments to that position. Anyway, my favorite Zen writer is Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind.

Certainly St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas are more properly classified as theologians than as philosophers, but it is fascinating to watch their minds work as they reason on behalf of God and Christianity. When I read them, I feel as if I'm wandering around in a forest, not lost, by any means, but also not going in a straight line, the way one does with Descartes, say.

If he were alive, Spinoza wouldn't care that I became a Catholic several years ago because he wouldn't know or care who I was--I, a trivial micro-attribute. How to reconcile my great interest in Baruch's work with my Catholicism is an interesting problem--but also above my pay-grade.

Now that I have defamed several philosophers, my work is done here. Goodnight Baruch, wherever you are; by definition, you are with God--or is it of--God?

African American Books Slightly Under the Radar

I'm staying in the Black History Month (officially it started today) groove.

African American literature has become central to American literature, so the names Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and James Baldwin have the same literary heft as Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson, and Ernest Hemingway.

At the edges of the limelight, however, are some fine books; they're not so well known, and maybe the same is true of their authors. In no particular order . . .:

The Conjure-Man Dies: A Mystery Tale of Dark Harlem, by Rudolph Fisher. If you like detective fiction, you may already know this book, but if you somehow missed it, give it a read. Its plot is wonderfully structured, it mixes realism, comedy, and a bit of the gothic well, it has two (arguably, three) great detectives, and it present a memorable picture of Harlem in the 1930s. In addition to being a fine writer, Fisher was a physician. Unfortunately, he was a pioneer in X-ray technology, experimented on himself when the effects were still unknown, and contracted cancer, dying before he was thirty. Otherwise, a series would have developed from this novel. I've recommended the book on LibraryThing in several venues, and I may have noted it on the blog before, but another recommendation can't hurt. If you're a mystery-reader, are in one of those phases where you can't find "a good one" to read, and haven't read this one: go for it. A nice treat in Winter.

From the same era, Plum Bun, by Jessie Redmon Fauset. It's one of the better novels on the theme of passing, in my opinion, and its dissection of social class, desire, ambition, and romance (as well as racism) is worthy of Jane Austen; the book is that strong.

The poetry of Countee Cullen, also from the Harlem Renaissance. "Yet Do I Marvel" used to get taught in high schools, but I'm not sure it does anymore.

If Beale Street Could Talk, by James Baldwin. I think it's fair to say this is one of his least well known novels and books in general, but its quality is as good as that of Giovanni's Room and Another Country. He takes a chance by using a young woman as both protagonist and first-person narrator, but he just nails the narrative voice.

Black Ice, by Lorene Cary. An autobiography, much of which concerns her experience at an almost-all-white, extremely exclusive East Coast prep-school, at which she had earned a scholarship. The book's about 15 years old now, I think, but it is--among other things--highly pertinent to current presidential politics, where ethnicity, gender, and class are mixing it up in fascinating ways.

Harlem Redux, by Persia Walker. This is regarded as more of a popular novel than a literary one (whatever that distinction may mean). It came out around 2000, maybe a wee bit earlier, but it's set in the 1920s in Harlem, so it's an historical detective novel, with rich social texture. It may not be heavy enough for a reader fresh from a Morrison novel, but it's well written, smart, and immensely entertaining. Still available in paperback as far as I know.

Poem by William Stanley Braithwaite

Here is a poem by African American writer William Stanely Braithwaite (1878-1962) that I like:

Sic Vita

by William Stanley Braithwaite

Heart free, hand free,
Blue above, brown under
All the world to me
Is a place of wonder.
Sun shine, moon shine,
Stars, and winds a-blowing,
All into this heart of mine
Flowing, flowing, flowing!

Mind free, step free,
Days to follow after,
Joys of life sold to me
For the price of laughter.
Girl's love, man's love,
Love of work and duty,
Just a will of God's to prove
Beauty, beauty, beauty!

(first published 1908)

The rhetoric and language of Braithwaite's poetry are rarely this deliberately spare, stripped down. The poem reminds me of deliberately simplified paintings; for some reason, Chagall's work comes to mind, but I don't know how apt that comparison is.

Normally, the repetition of "beauty" followed by an exclamation point in a poem would make me nervous, but i think it works all right here. The poem seems to answer an unspoken question: "What are the basics of life, of human experience?" The poem seems both rhetorically and philosophically pithy, and althought the perspective is certainly adult, the landscape evoked by the poem reminds me of a children's book: blue above, brown below, keep it simple.

I did not see "Love of work and duty" coming, but I was glad to see it. Depending, of course, on the nature of the work and the duty, love of work and duty may be of basic importance to a good life, I'd argue. What does "Just a will of God's to prove" mean? It might mean that one has to live in order to live out or demonstrate whatever God's will is for one's life (and the poem assumes one believes in God). Or the line might be using "prove" as in "try" or "test." That is, "the exception that proves the rule" used to mean "the exception that tests the rule," not "the already accepted exception that we'll agree to ignore as we continue to abide by the rule." Anyway, I like the fact that the line seems as simple as the other lines but introduces some complexity there at the end.

It would be going way too far to suggest that there is something essentially "American" about the poem, but I do think there is a kind of American impulse to "get down to business," and Braithwaite may have had the impulse to list the basics of this life. I imagine I hear an American voice in the poem brusquely asking, "Okay, when we're talking about life, what are we really talking about, huh?"

I suppose Max Weber would perceive something quite Protestant in "Love of work and duty."

A final musing: Braithwaite's being born in the year after Reconstruction ended and having died after one major chapter in the Civil Rights Movement had occurred probably mean that he was astonished by some changes and dispirited by a lot of circumstances that remained the same. I wonder if he ever saw Jackie Robinson and/or Willie Mays play baseball--trivial in one sense, miraculous in another. Likewise (and not so likewise), I've always wondered if T.S. Eliot, who died in 1965 (if memory serves), listened to the Beatles, and if he did, what he thought about that. I assume he would have been unamused by the Beatles, but on the other hand, Tse Tse (as Ezra Pound called him) was the source of Broadway's Cats, so who knows? Maybe one of his biographers does. I'll have to check the index.

African American Writers: Some Favorites

Today a student asked me when I first became interested in African American literature. I told her, "When I was 16." I was hanging around high school after class--and not practicing a sport that day, for some reason--and I found James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time at the back of a classroom. I began reading it, and I couldn't believe how powerfully the writing confronted America's perpetual problem with race. I couldn't believe how good the writing was, even though I didn't have the terminology to describe what made it so good.

Oddly enough, I attended a suburban high school that was ethnically diverse. Mexican-Americans had been living in the town/small city (not far from Sacramento) for generations, many of them working for the railroad. Some of their families were the most venerable ones in town. Also, several African American students were in my graduating class, most of them from military families who lived at a nearby base. My lab-mate in "physical science" was one of them, we played football together, and we've kept in touch down through the years. He used to tease the hell out of me, and he still does at reunions.

The high school wasn't racism-free, of course, and I know I was especially oblivious to much of what the Black students must have had to endure, but social commerce among ethnicities was the rule, not the exception. So-called brown, white, and black students not only took classes together but were friends and were on teams and in clubs. Comparatively, at least, the high school seemed like an oasis in a nation deeply afflicted by racism and its effects, and in our freshman year, Martin Luther King, Jr., was murdered.

I'd always been drawn more to rhythm & blues and "soul" music than to much of the rock and pop on the airwaves. When I first heard Aretha Franklin's "Chain of Fools," I could hardly believe my ears; it was just better and more interesting than any pop song I'd ever heard. I loved Motown records, too--and still recall that purple label on the vinyl. "Ain't that peculiar?"--as Marvin Gaye sang. I think the music enhanced my interest in African American literature.

Although I studied chiefly British literature in graduate school and wrote a dissertation on British poets from the 19th century, I kept up my reading of African American literature over the years, and eventually I wrote a book on Langston Hughes, and then another, and that led to work on The Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Literature, which I edited with David Macey. It was a massive project--5 volumes--and much more work than we envisaged--but what an honor to be invited to edit it. Now that the volumes have been in print for a couple of years, thoughts of the constant work, deadline-missers, and endless details fade, and the fortune of having been asked to edit the thing shines brighter.

Among my favorite African American writers, in addition to the prolific, multifaceted, well known, but still under-rated Hughes, are Baldwin, of course--one of the greatest essayists in the English language, and no slouch at novels (Giovanni's Room and Another Country are my favorites, but If Beale Street Could Talk is a real sleeper); Rudolph Fisher (The Conjure Man Dies is a splendid detective novel--Denzel, if you're listening, turn it into a film); Rita Dove (she uses all the tools in the poet's toolbox); Sonya Sanchez (home-girls and hand-grenades is a fine book, with some extraordinarily inventive haiku, of all things); Countee Cullen (some of his lyric poems are perfect, including the perfect sonnet, "Yet Do I Marvel"); June Jordan (poet and essayist); and Elizabeth Keckley, once a slave, then a professional seamstress in D.C. who worked for the Lincolns and became very close to Mrs. Lincoln; Keckley's autobiography Behind The Scenes is fascinating, even as it was forced to adhere to some literary conventions of the era. I like some of Baraka's poetry and his essays on the blues and jazz.

Of course, there's no arguing with Ralph Ellison's monumental achievement in fiction, Invisible Man, one of the finest novels the U.S. has produced. Alice Walker's The Color Purple is terrific, and Morrison has joined the pantheon of great world writers. My favorite of hers is Solomon's Song.

One of numerous blessings that came from working on the encyclopedia was the chance to spend time with the work of writers who haven't been in the limelight. Lewis Alexander wrote some superb lyric poems, Ann Petry and Dorothy West some fine fiction, Chester Himes some great crime fiction, August Wilson's drama, and on and on. . . . Today in class we read compelling poetry by Angelina Weld Grimke and Anne Spencer. . . . . But this is merely to glance at a massive reservoir of literature--so much autobiography, drama, poetry, and fiction that even with 5 volumes available to us, we couldn't include all the writers and topics we wanted to include. I know they call February Black History Month, but secretly, I think of it as African American Literature Month because I'm selfish and "litero-centric," to coin a bad term, and it all started with the serendipity of finding Baldwin's book on a shelf at the back of a classroom. I'm sure glad I wasn't running wind-sprints for basketball or colliding with someone in the outfield that day.

Living and Writing

Arna Bontemps, great friend of Langston Hughes, novelist (he wrote Black Thunder, a fine historical novel), and poet, edited The Book of American Negro Poetry in 1963, and it became a highly regarded, oft-issued anthology, which he revised in 1973. It's still in print, in paperback, from Hill and Wang, and it contains many treasures, including this poem by Georgia Douglas Johnson:

The Poet Speaks

How much living have you done?
From it the patterns that you weave
Are imaged:
Your own life is your totem pole,
Your yard of cloth,
Your living.

How much loving have you done?
How full and free your giving?
For living is but loving
And loving only giving.

Beginning as it does with that question, we might think the poem will advance a customary view --namely, that in order to be a writer, you have to live first, and by "to live" is usually meant adventure, hard times, knocking about--perhaps heavy drinking, boxing, and watching bull-fights, a la Hemingway.

Instead the poem takes a different path and seems to suggest that what kind of living you do is entirely up to you, but that your life will be the material out of which your figurative weaving will be made. Richard Hugo, in The Triggering Town, expresses a similar view, cautioning writers not to take too seriously the alleged line between "the real world" and college. Hugo can speak with authority because he served in World War II, in a Flying Fortress Crew, and he worked for many years in "the real world" of the Boeing plant near Seattle. He urged writers to write not so much about their lives as from their lives, whatever and wherever those lives might be. He happened to find small obscure towns in the American west an important part of his life--towns that triggered his imagination.

The second stanza of Johnson's poem offers another great surprise; she shift to the topic of loving, which seems to be even more important than life. In other words, she asks, "How generous have you been?'' You don't see people linking generosity and art that often. More often, you see them making excuses for artists. If they're rotten people, it's okay, as long as the art is good.

Then Johnson demystifies loving. It's "only giving," she tells us. Wonderful. Yes, we can all imagine other attributes we might ascribe to loving, but it's hard to quibble with her fundamental definition. Put another way, if you take "giving" from "loving," does "loving" still exist? Does it hold on to its integrity?

We often look to anthologies as books that collect the famous poems and hit the high spots, but they may be more valuable for the not-so-famous poems they include, the overlooked gems, the surprises.

Toward Black History Month

As we head toward Black History Month, let's break out some determined optimism and envisage this century as the one in which the U.S. finally gets--in the parlance of the 1960s--its shit together with regard to race in general and, at long last, full African American citizenship in particular, not to mention poverty, health-care, education, and a foreign policy that looks vaguely sane. Let's also hope the horrors of war, famine, and displacement in some parts of the African continent will vanish soon.

One of James Baldwin's favorite words to describe the American dilemma of "race" was "conundrum": a kind of insoluble riddle. I think he might have looked at the events surrounding the Jena Six, juxtaposed against the candidacy of Barack Obama (and his primary-victory in S.C., with 25% of the white Democratic vote), as a conundrum. Is there progress or not? That is and always has been the question; yes and no have always been the answer.

I'm a spectator on a listserv (that word bugs me) on which "progressives" chat, and a while back several of the participants allowed as how they'd given up hope on the U.S. I decided to respond, and I wrote that if African Americans haven't given up, why should any of us? Who's had it worse than they? An African American colleague wrote an email (outside the list) to me and thanked me for making that point. I appreciated the thanks, but let's be real: the point was--or should have been--painfully obvious. White progressives, and white conservatives, for that matter, get a bit whiny. "Nobody knows the trouble they've seen": yeah, right.

And as we head--one hopes with optimism--into another Black History Month, let's appreciate some mighty fine literature, including Lerone Bennett's history, Before the Mayflower; James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, which includes some of the best extended American essays ever written; the well known but still under-valued poetry, prose, drama (etc.) of Langston Hughes; the masterpieces in fiction of James Weldon Johnson, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison; and more recent poetry by Rita Dove, Nikki Giovanni, Sonya Sanchez, Audre Lorde, Amiri and Ras Baraka, Robert Hayden, Lucille Clifton, Gil Scott Heron, Natasha Trethewey--and so many more.

And since, in the words of Langston Hughes, we're "still here," let's use our time wisely (my first-grade teacher liked that phrase) and do some good. It couldn't hurt. Optimism is foolish, but it's the right kind of foolishness. In first grade, I received an "S," as opposed to a "U," next to "uses time wisely," so I have some history going for me. Peace be with you.