Terrance Hayes, The Ride: Finding a Love That's Gonna Last

I’m thinking about cars. And when I say cars, you should know I mean poems and books of poems. Sometimes when I think about houses I am also thinking of poems. That’s one thing I love about poems—they can be almost anything. That’s what I love about metaphor. But today is a nice day and I have been out cruising and I have been talking with another poet (who is trying to get someone to drive her car) about poems. That’s how I got here. It will become tedious to point back to poems each time I mention cars so just keep this idea at hand. Car=poem. I was listening to “The Couch Sessions Present a Tribute to Yukimi Nagano ” because it is 55:48 long and I wanted to talk to you about cars for about that long, but now I am listening to Gary Numan’s “Cars” (3:59) because it is perfectly, obviously apropos: “Here in my car / I feel safest of all.” (Synthesizers are making a comeback and I feel a bit of nostalgia-tinged glee and a bit of dread about that.) Car is a blunt round word. Like book. A little less like poem, which to me is closer to a word like home. But automobile—that word is closer to why thinking of cars is like thinking of poems. The self in transport. The mind wants to be moved. Maybe a poetry teacher is part driving instructor, part mechanic. A teacher can suggest the best route, explain the rules and customs of the car universe; and a teacher can inspect the parts of a car: the wheels, the transmission, the battery. (If we were talking houses, I’d say the teacher is a kind of interior decorator.) But really, I don’t want that sort of work most of the time. I mean not if I ain’t getting paid for it. Mostly I want to be a passenger. I can be a benevolent carpooler, or a shotgunner, but being a hitchhiker is fine too. I just want to go for a ride. I just want to see where you’re taking me, Driver. And I’ll hop in just about anything that moves: model T, forklift, covered-wagon, Hummer. Long as you got room for me. Gary Numan’s been done for a while now and I’m listening to Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn, but after that I’m listening to Prince’s “Little Red Corvette” (“need to find a love that’s gonna last”). There’s not much room for my legs in a Corvette, but I’ll squeeze in to experience the speed. And the intimacy. To be shot along a dangerous, winding road with you. I’ll come along if I trust you.

I’m talking about cars because that’s how I was trying to explain this whole poetry book business to a sweet exasperated poet just morning. I’ve looked at a lot of cars these last years. Used to be I loved what was shiny, exotic, roomy. I was once like the judges at a car show. Innovation counts, for sure. Practicality counts too. The cars are often hotly colored at those shows. You don’t have to live in Detroit to see them either. They’re parked in the big convention halls of your town a couple of times a year. I saw this snazzy tinted SUV in a tent at a Jazz Festival many years ago. The context was supposed to suggest, I’m guessing, classiness. My mouth was watering. I sat my daughter, who was barely a year old at the time, behind the wheel. Parked there under those bright lights in that bright music on that bright day, the SUV looked like perfection. But then, a year or two later I saw the same model somewhere in the city. Not nearly as dazzling. Wasn’t dirty or anything. Wasn’t broken down. But it was just big. Blocky. Ordinary. It had a made terrific first impression, but thank goodness I couldn’t afford to take it home. Sometimes I think too few car makers are building cars a soul can live in/with. Are you following me? You see where I’m going?

There are these car plants all over the country. People are building these grand vehicles, and I don’t blame them. They want drivers. (That’s not the same as needing drivers, of course.) But there are these car plants and these lovely cars rolling from the assembly lines with bells and GPS navigators and sparkling paint. What mechanic wouldn’t want to peek under the hood? What driving instructor wouldn’t say, yes I’d like to help that thing there on its way! And then, here you are—this is what I said to the exasperated, discouraged poet— here you are with your ride. It’s not unadorned. It’s got a great sound system. It’s got wide clear windows. It’s eccentric, even. The wheels look kind of Italian. You must know a little something about speed. And the body! The body looks like something refurbished in Cuba, you been to Cuba? You must have a background in automotive repair too. The seats look made from, goddamn, is that a quilt! Your grandmother’s quilt? Shit! This is a wild ride. I admit I’ll be a little nervous when we pull off, but sure let’s go.

I’m not proposing solutions here. You can’t tell folks what car to drive or what passenger to be, what path to take. I’m just identifying a problem. Here you are having built a car from scratch. It’s like one of those mythical amalgamated creatures? Griffins, Minotaurs, and such. That’s what you have, something enchanted, something strange. Back at the car plant, many of the bosses are telling the youngsters—or many of the youngsters are telling themselves, your car should be both irresistible and recognizable. For sure, it should have some flair, some personal touches, but when the judge comes he needs to know the trucks from the hatchbacks, the roadsters from the tanks. Some judges like tanks. Tanks are durable, intimidating. You never know whose driving a tank. Some judges like that. The Hummer was a military Humvee (High Mobility Multi-Purpose Wheeled Vehicle) before it was a Hummer. Judges don’t mind—judges like in fact, a little surprise, but they want a car to be identifiable. How else would they categorize it? So you walk— you and I walk into the car show and we’re amazed at these brand-new vehicles. I mean you absolutely have to attend the car shows, you have to know what people are making—and we do. But here’s the thing: most of the cars only have enough gas to get them from the assembly line to the show room. Some of them don’t even have engines! There go the judges with their ribbons and trophies for cars they won’t drive more than once. They’ll step from the show room without looking back, a lot of them. I don’t know if we should blame them for crowding the streets with cars that won’t hold up. Cars with plastic that looked like silver under the display lights, cars with pleather that looked like leather. Maybe we shouldn’t blame them. They’ve got their own cars to build after all. (And some of those cars ain’t really worth riding around in, truth be told.) They do the best they can. This whole thing is discouraging to me too, frankly. I’m sorry. I’m thinking of you and your strange, hand-made car. I could drive to paradise and back in it, I know that. I’ve been under the hood. You know Robert Frost had to go to England to have his first book published, and look how he turned out! Does that help? What if he’d decided he needed to become a modernist? What if he decided to make T.S. Eliot poems! I don’t care much for either of them, but that’s not my point. And I don’t mean to simply say: “Hang in there!” though that’s what I’m saying; “Hang in there.”

Let’s go outside and cruise around in your ride for a bit. If I was a badass, I’d say let’s drive it through the showroom glass and right up into the mix! But that’s not your style, I know. I love your car. Let’s maybe just tail one of the judges through the city. And when whatever he’s driving breaks down, let’s give him a ride… No, fuck the judges. Let’s just go cruising. Let’s pick up anyone smart enough to want a ride.




Terrance Hayes is the author of four collections: Lightheaded (Penguin, 2010), Wind in a Box (Penguin, 2006); Hip Logic (Penguin, 2002), which won National Poetry Series; and Muscular Music (Carnegie Mellon University Press 2005, Tia Chucha Press, 1999), winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He has received many honors and awards for his poetry, including a Whiting Writers Award, a Pushcart Prize, two Best American Poetry selections, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. He is a Professor of Creative Writing at Carnegie Mellon University and lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with his wife, the poet Yona Harvey, and their family.

Congratulations to Terrance Hayes
National Book Award Winner in Poetry for his collection, Lightheaded

Summer, Where Have You Gone?

The summer hiatus of ABOUTAWORD comes to an end this week. Look for guest posts this fall by Terrence Hayes, Kathy Fagan, Jewell Parker Rhodes, Cynthia Hogue, and more.

Patrick Rosal, Digging Poetics: the Mastermix

I dug through crates this past Sunday at a friend’s garage. Real crates, maybe a dozen filled with vinyl from the seventies, eighties and early nineties. We gasped and even threw our hands in the air a couple times when we pulled out some DeBarge 45, Freestyle’s “Don’t Stop the Rock” or New Order’s “Blue Monday”. There were the obscure but unforgettable Euro joints too, like Secession’s “Touch”, Antonia’s Italian-import, disco-version of “La Bamba”, and Tin Tin Duffy’s “Kiss Me”. It wasn’t until I actually read the Song of Solomon out of the Bible that I realized that song’s lyrics were lifted right from the sexiest of those holy verses.

In 1983, I had no idea the word syncretic existed, let alone what it meant, but I didn’t flinch when I heard the praise of litany Whiz Kid shouted out in his hit “Play That Beat”: “Punk rock, new wave and soul, pop music, salsa and rock and roll, calypso, reggae, rhythm and blues. Master mix those number one tunes!” Music was music. Still is.

Whiz Kid’s lyrics are a testimony to the death of the word master mix, which is now supplanted by the words remix or mashup. The earlier phrase, master mix, was meant to evoke mastery and skill. It was, of course, in line with a hip hop aesthetic of swagger and braggadocio. But the term was also subversive.

We weren’t aspiring merely to be master mixers, we aspired to mix the masters. We learned to break them down, the ones who held the power, the overlords, and put them back together again the way we wanted. And if the mix was good, people danced. The activists might refer to this as “agency” or “empowerment”. We called it mixing.

(It’s even funny to think where we got crates to hold all our records in the first place. We usually snuck behind Foodtown, tagged the back wall, then snatched the crates off the loading dock and piled near the dumpster. I remember grabbing a new, bright red one the first time, bringing it home and reading the text on the side: WARNING! Unauthorized use or possession of milk cases is against the LAW. Criminals WILL be prosecuted. I said, Fuck it, and dropped my twelve-inches right in.)

Check Whiz Kid again: “Master mix those number one tunes!” as if the chart-toppers by themselves would not hit, but chopped up in pieces and spliced to other sounds and other kinds of music they would, according to the Rakim mandate, move the crowd. Teachers and bullies might, in school and on the corner, cut you down, but you could go
home, reach into a stack of masters, from Mozart to Mtume, and cut them up. (Whiz Kid’s twelve-inch begins with the sound of a saw in quarter notes.)

The club scene has changed dramatically in thirty years. Step into a New York lounge and see how many people are just standing around with the music blaring. Strangers used to meet on the dance floor (some went home alone). In the post-Napster era it’s remarkable how one-dimensional the music is. DJs and producers have access to more beats than we ever had. If the lounge has wifi, you can make a request for a song the DJ doesn’t even have on his hard drive. He can download it right there. All the songs we knew, had heard snippets of, all available now, with a quick search and a broadband connection.

Maybe this is just dumb nostalgia, and I’m feeling sentimental about getting on my knees to dig through crates and spending twenty dollars on a few no-name imports hoping I have a horn hit or break that some other DJ doesn’t have, something to twist the played-out hook or corny pop song. All I know is we grinded to all kinds of music, any kind of music, if the DJ could flow. The S-and-M sultriness of “Dominatrix” blended with Strafe’s “Set it Off”. God bless Malcolm McClaren (I just learned he passed last month), who managed the Sex Pistol and produced the b-boy hits “Buffalo Gals” and “Double Dutch”. On KTU, the Latin Rascals gave us Kurtis Blow, Culture Club, Kraftwerk, John Rocca, and many more—seamlessly.

I don’t miss lugging those heavy-ass milk crates from basement to van to venue, the walk-ups, the set up and break down, spending my meager split at the diner, leaving the equipment in the driveway until morning. It was work—or something like it. Well, I’m a poet now, and not for nothing, but I’m still digging.





Patrick Rosal is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive , which won the Members’ Choice Award from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and most recently My American Kundiman, which won the Association of Asian American Studies 2006 Book Award in Poetry. He was awarded a Fulbright grant as a U.S. Scholar to the Philippines in 2009. His poems and essays have been published widely in journals and anthologies including American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, The Literary Review, Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Non-Fiction, The Beacon Best and Language for a New Century. He teaches in the Rutgers-Camden MFA Creative Writing program.

Eve Jones, All the Poems Lied

The failure of language to genuinely (re)capture an experience has always been a fascination for me. Always: a disconnect between what actually happens in the world and what, consequently, we create. After all, they’re just words. The sculptor is standing with his hands in wet clay and the cellist wraps her arms around all that string and wood. After all.
Do we genuinely attempt to write poems about love/death/fear/jealousy/suffering/awe? Yes. Are they often knee-buckling, emotionally wrought poems? Oh, yes. Can they come close to the actual experience? I think so. But can they equal it? No.
Doesn’t that drive you a little crazy sometimes?
Maybe that’s why war poetry fascinates me as it does. There’s no better example of that disconnect. What other experience is a seemingly unending, unflinching 360-degree view of shit and suffering? How can it possibly be conveyed through language with adequacy and accuracy? How does someone wade through bodies one afternoon and then hunker in the bad light to write about it? No, no – not how does someone, because there are many therapeutic and artistic reasons why someone would turn to language for that exorcism. It’s not a question of whether to write a war poem; it’s a question of whether it is even possible to make art a semblance of the catastrophic.
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
For most of us, the front line happens elsewhere. Wilfred Owen, the English language’s most popular World War I poet, set out to “agitate” Europe’s sleepy-headed view of war. In poem after poem, like “Dulce et Decorum Est,” he attempts to look war in the face. And he does, he does: “the white eyes writhing in his face,/ His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin.” My god. But at the same time – to my desensitized, 21st century ear – there is such music , such an orderly form to his grisly scenes. I confess I can’t help but love words like “sludge” and “blood-shod” and “guttering.” So I hum right over his attempt to show me war.
Jarrell, hosing the gunner out of the ball turret, comes damn close.
I think about this because a sequence in Bird in the Machine edges up to the label “war poetry.” It takes the form of letters, sent by a soldier from an unidentified front. I played with the literal, assuming stains and tears and other damage to the text. I let the language fail as I imagined it would/should. These were deliberate decisions, yet my strongest impression of those poems now is that I couldn’t/can’t look at the horror of war straight on. I took it in pieces, in manageable fragments of narrative, in my peripheral vision. It feels like a flinch. My own failure? Language’s?
So maybe the philosophical question is whether it is poetry’s (or any art’s) responsibility to equate to the experience or feeling in question. Is it a silly question? We attempt, over and over. There are incredible war poems out there. Yusef Komyankaa’s “Thanks.” Yehuda Amichai’s “The Diameter of the Bomb.” Brian Turner’s “Here, Bullet.”
Czeslaw Milosz says in Road Side Dog:
An atheist should accept the world as it is. But then whence comes our protest, our scream: “No!” Precisely, this excludes us from Nature, determines our incomprehensible oddity, makes us a lonely species. Here, in a moral protest against the order of the world, in our asking ourselves where this scream of horror comes from, the defense of the peculiar place of man begins.
The peculiar place of man. Not just to kill each other in cold blood, but to attempt, generation after generation, to make sense of that tendency. Not just to make it survivable, but to make it beautiful. What loneliness, and what luxury.
Those are not my poems. Those are my attempts. I tell you, I am not a camera, but sometimes I want to be one. Look. I want to know you know. I want to know I know. Look. I just have these words. I want to harm you.
Owen saw a man guttering like a candle. He heard the shells’ “demented choir” and perhaps he scattered sonnets for the doomed like small flags. This is what we seem to do, trying to write up against the unspeakable – we let the thing go inside its cage. Still, there’s a cage.
Is that the point?

Eve Jones’s poetry has appeared in journals such as AGNI, Hotel Amerika, Natural Bridge, Nimrod, and Poet Lore, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. A graduate of the MFA in Creative Writing program at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, she teaches writing and humanities and lives with her family in St. Louis, and soon Colorado Springs. Her first book, Bird in the Machine, was published this year by Turning Point Press

Stacey Lynn Brown, Finding Form

A couple of days ago, I flew down to Atlanta to visit Karen Head's class on Southern Poetry at Georgia Tech. As an institute of technology, Georgia Tech is a gathering ground of mathematically-inclined geniuses who study Aeronautical Engineering and the like. Not much room for poetry, one would think. But one would be wrong: Karen Head is planting seeds of poetry down there, sowing wispy stems of art that shoot up unexpectedly between concrete slabs of science and math. And their approach is phenomenal.

I walked into the room of twelve students who were almost equally divided along gender lines—
also a rarity for Tech, which notoriously has more men than women. Desks in a circle, each student with a copy of my book in hand, they dove right in, asking some of the most intelligent questions I've ever heard asked of a poet, or of poetry.

Maybe it's the difference between left and right brain thinking, but these students of engineering, math, and science approached the poems and the words on the page in an analytical style that defied (and, in my mind, surpassed) the rhetorical strategies of conventional literature classes. They drew connections in an almost formulaic way, analyzing the relationships between words, ideas, and biography as if it were something quantifiable, which made me wonder: is it? Does free verse, which I always considered to be freewheeling and high spirited, actually consist of mappable equations? Does this mean that math is relevant after all? Does it apply to the arrangement of words on the page, to my choices regarding form, or the lack thereof?

As I explained to the students, I write primarily in free verse because I want the poems to find their own forms rather than having me superimpose form over them. When I write in a form with rhyme, for example, my effort to get to the required sound at the end of the line ends up steering the poem's direction rather than allowing it to take its own path and shape. They seemed surprised, on some level, that I would resist a formula. Wouldn't a formula make it easier? Weren't there discernible formulas in my first book? Didn't I see them? (It's a question I'm still thinking about. I wish I'd asked them to map it out for me, Will Hunting style.)

These students were on to something, something I'm just beginning to be able to articulate and understand myself. My longstanding insistence that form hinders content has been turned on its head recently by my second manuscript, The Shallows, which is structured around the title poem—a poem that has declared itself in no uncertain terms to be a crown of sonnets. This was not my idea. In this case, the content truly dictated the form, and I had no choice but follow it.

My father suffered a massive stroke in the spring of 2008, and no matter how much I fought against the idea of writing about it, the poems came—and continue to come. As I began to sketch and shape the manuscript, I kept coming back again and again to the Gulf of Mexico and the trips that our family took together every year. From my childhood days of bobbing in my father's arms to our swims together as adults, it was a constant in our lives. And one specific image kept haunting me: on what would be our last trip to the beach together, my husband and I sat on the balcony and watched my father as he walked into the ocean for what would be his last swim. The line came to me: My father, wading out into the sea. I scanned it. Iambic pentameter. Uh oh. It seemed like the beginning of a sonnet, felt like one. But that line didn't want to just happen once. It wanted to both begin and end something; it wanted to be a part of something larger that brought experiences together and contained ideas and lines that overlapped and led one into the next. It insisted upon being the first and last line of a crown of sonnets,
interwoven ideas and images coming full circle back again to the image that haunted me most, that stood for so much: the venturing out into an uncertainty, the journey away, the return to something so primordial.

As I began to work on it, each individual poem in the sequence became an opportunity to explore and encapsulate a different time period in that ocean, different contexts for growth and the changes in a relationship between father and daughter. For once, the idea of form didn't feel limiting but instead became expansive, ripe with possibilities. It was a house with seven rooms that I could decorate however I wanted to, each room echoing and reverberating against the next and last. I suddenly got it: what once had seemed so limiting was actually one of the most liberating approaches to writing poetry that I had ever found. I already knew the structure of each poem, so I could actually focus even more on the content itself. Form was fun.

This approach to poetry—as something structured in a quantifiable way, as a series of relationships with variables and valuations—was completely new to me but was the cornerstone of how the students at Tech approached it, instinctively. In our discussion, I learned a great deal about how I might find patterns and significance in aspects of poetry I used to just see as being intuitive. They taught me this. They also reminded me, in their computational wisdom, that my crown would need a total of at least 49 rhymes. Thanks for that reminder, guys. Math rocks.



Stacey Lynn Brown was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, and studied at Emory University, Oxford University, and The University of Oregon, where she received her MFA. A poet, playwright, and essayist, her work has appeared in various literary journals and anthologies, including Crab Orchard Review, Poetry Daily, Copper Nickel, and The Rumpus. Her book-length poem in sections, Cradle Song, was published by C&R Press in 2009. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville, where she lives with her husband, poet Adrian Matejka, and their daughter.

Black Nature: Cave Canem at Notre Dame

Allison Joseph, Writing the Body: Hands, Fingers, Moles

Whenever I'm stuck for something to write about, I think of the body. One of my favorite writing prompts involves singling out a body part (mine or someone else's) and writing about it. I've written about the mole on my upper lip, the recurring stye I get on my right eye (never my left, for some reason), my hair, women's breasts, Rita Dove's fingernails (spectacular) and my husband's belly. To me, the human body is one of the best landscapes to explore--I never tire of thinking of it, of writing about it, of rescuing it from the easy promises of commercials and magazine ads. The human body is work--but to me, writing about it is the kind of work that's well worth doing.

The idea of rescue was firmly in my mind when I wrote the following poem:









The Middle Finger

Others come to condemn you, but I
come to praise you--your no-nonsense
sense of authority, your rigidity in the face

of foolishness, your pride in flipping off
the buttpinchers, money-grubbers
and backstabbers, all those steal

from the collection plate grinners.
I am particularly fond of mine: long,
articulate, resting spot for the pens

and pencils that sketch the words
and drama that I cherish, humble
co-worker with thumb and forefinger,

nowhere near as arrogant
as the smug ring finger who wags
her certitude over the rest of the hand,

such a drama queen with her
store-bought band. The middle finger
needs no ring to make everyone gasp,

making its point straight up,
no equivocating, just hating,
president of the let me tell you what I

think club, no words needed to show
the most righteous anger in the
fastest way, torch you can light

simply by lifting a finger.
Why is everyone so afraid of you
when you're merely pointing heavenward?

Allison Joseph

I wrote this poem with the notion in mind that demonizing one finger of the hand is both strange and delightful--why this one finger? Why is the middle finger so scary, so taboo? I like my middle finger; it does exactly what I want it to do. So I wanted to write a tribute to both its strength and its utility, a poem that both recognized and gently mocked its power. I liked that I got in a dig at the ring finger in this poem, which leads me very naturally to my next finger poem. I've seen way too many off those "He went to Jared" commercials not to write a ring finger poem.

Since the human body is constantly in flux--in sickness and in health--there's no limit to the ways in which it can be explored in poetry. The more I write about my body, more fearless I become, the more accepting of its limits, the more respectful of its abilities. The more I write about the bodies of others, the more imaginative I have to make myself become--how do her feet hurt after a day in those high heels? How do his lungs feel after the burn of another cigarette? Writing about the body, I reach, stretch, become limber, looser--a lot more like the person I've always wanted to be.

Allison Joseph’s award-winning poetry looks her own past—and America’s too—squarely in the eye.


Allison Joseph is all grown up—has been for years. But she’s built a reputation for poetry that’s rooted in her childhood and adolescence, both the good and the bad, the ugly and the beautiful. As a black girl coming of age in the Bronx, Joseph had a complex, interesting, and often oppressive world to negotiate. Her poems re-create that world, celebrating some things and indicting others, and they’ve been winning plaudits nationally for this associate professor of creative writing at SIUC.
Joseph's fourth book, Imitation of Life, was published in April 2003 by Carnegie Mellon University Press. A new manuscript of hers titled Worldly Pleasures has won the 2003 Word Press Poetry Prize and will be published next year. A first-place prize in the 2002 Wallace W. Winchell Poetry Competition, announced in February 2003, and other recent top poetry awards from Georgia State University Review and Yawp Magazine (a literary journal whose name alludes to a Whitman poem) have added icing to the cake.

Colleen McKee, So You Want to Edit an Anthology?

When I took on the project of co-editing an anthology of personal narratives, Are We Feeling Better Yet? Women Speak About Health Care in America, I said yes because it sounded cool (after all, I do like women), and it was a dreary blistering summer, and I was underemployed. I have an MFA in Creative Writing, and I read the magazines writers are supposed to read, but it was only after I edited the book that I realized I had never read or heard any advice on editing an anthology. Yet it can be a more time-consuming, complicated process than writing one’s own book. For me, it was worth it—I have made terrific, smart friends across the country because of readings. And there is no greater pleasure than to hear an audience laugh uproariously at a black-humored essay, or have women tell me that the book has helped them feel supported as they navigate their own health care labyrinths. Still it is work, a lot of work. So here are some tips for anyone considering editing a creative writing anthology:

1. Make sure you have the time for this and you really want to do it. The creative, fun part--reading amazing essays or poems or stories, and doing readings in front of captivated, sexy audiences who all want to take you out for drinks afterwards—that is a very small part of the work. Unless you can afford an assistant or two, you will spend tons of time doing clerical and sometimes unpleasant things such as mailing off reject slips, updating lists of contributors’ addresses, sending out forms requesting reprint rights, etc. Between soliciting work, editing it, seeking a publisher, editing and proofing again and again, then promoting of the book, count on working hard at this for four or five years. If you’re a teacher, that’s like adding one or two classes to every semester for four or five years.

2. Don’t expect to make money at this. Maybe if your book has cross-over appeal as a textbook, and is published by a company who chooses to promote the bejesus out of you. Then again, my book is selling as a textbook, and my publisher is pretty supportive. My book did make a profit the first year, which is unusual. I made $75. What about an advance, you may say? Many small presses do not do advances, and if they do, you may have to choose between using it to pay your contributors and paying yourself. I think writers should get paid. I used the money to pay each writer a small fee.

3. Do not be shy about promoting your anthology. Carry your business cards and promotional postcards around (if your publisher won’t have them made, get them made yourself). Carry a copy of your book wherever you go and be prepared to talk about it to everyone. If you are a woman, this is probably going to feel really egotistical and weird. If you need to, tell yourself you’re not doing it for you; you’re doing it for your contributors. And remember that while bookstores are great, they are not your only friends. My contributors and I have read at universities (where we might actually get paid), an anarchist bakery, a synagogue, an acupuncturist clinic, an older women’s political action group, a women’s studies conference, bars, and even a few bookstores.

4. Travel cheap and travel wide on book tour. If you live in the Midwestern U.S., the Northeastern U.S. or Canada, or England, consider planning your tour around the Megabus schedule, the super-cheap yet comfortable, reliable bus. Don’t feel bad about asking contributors if you can crash on their couches. You can ask your publisher to pay for this, but she probably doesn’t have the money to pay for any of it. So make a low-budget adventure out of it, and have fun.

5. I could say a lot more, but blogs are supposed to be short. Have questions? Email me.


B'shalom,
Colleen

Colleen McKee is co-editor of Are We Feeling Better Yet? Women Speak About Health Care in America (Penultimate, 2008). She is also author of a collection of poetry about food and sex, My Hot Little Tomato (Cherry Pie, 2007). Her poems, essays, and fiction have appeared in publications such as Poetry Daily, Bellevue Literary Review, and Criminal Class Review. She will be reading memoir at the Meramec Writing Festival in St. Louis on Apr. 7th, and poetry at the Holiday Club in Chicago on Apr. 23rd. Colleen teaches English at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. You may virtually visit her at colleenmckee.blogspot.com or email her at lilyofthegutter@yahoo.com.

The Passing of the poet Ai

The passing this past week of the poet Ai caught me off guard. We are just on the heels of the passing of Lucille Clifton, who was not only a foundational poet of lyric and personal circumstance, but the first brick in the wall for so many young poets, especially poets of color. Lucille Clifton was wise and revered and her name did not recess into memory for even a moment right up until her death.

Ai, perhaps, is a different matter all together. Ai did not always strive to make herself known, to make herself visible. During my time in the MFA program at Arizona State University, Ai lived in Tempe, was beloved by all, faculty and students alike, but she was for the most part a ghost to us, a slight figure in the landscape, a quiet space.

But the quiet space of her existence countered the explosion in her work. I remember the exact moment, the exact place, the exact visual memory of holding her book, Greed, and reading these lines:

Open wide and let me in,
or else I'll set your world on fire ...

You haven't heard the word is coming down
like the hammer of a gun


I read these lines from "Riot Act, April 29, 1992" sitting in Hayden, the underground library on the main campus of ASU. It was scorching outside even though it was October. I had found a place in the desert and loved it there. I had found a place in my poetry. I had developed what I thought was a 'voice' which was my own. When I read these few lines of Ai's poem, it seemed as though someone had kicked the doors in, that my perfectly built house, my steady voice, my lineation, my subject, my voice ... it all crumbled. It all became clearly the facade of something underneath which I really hadn't allowed myself to discover, something muddy and thick, something ugly that I didn't want to meet. I didn't want to deal with some rash, pissed off, hungry, destructive, confrontational thing bubbling to the surface

I thought, you can say this? You can write this in a poem? How can you say this? How can you write this and make a poem that is a beautiful poem? I'd just read, a few weeks earlier, Rilke's elegies, and remembered the line, beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure ... and the library tipped a little on it's side as that ugly I was running from started to rise up in my throat.

Ai led me to my ugly center and challenged me to do something with it. She also helped me to understand that the poem is anything I make of it, that my voice is my voice. It can sing one day and curse the next, it can sonnet its way onto the page or it can disrupt every notion we have of what a poem should be or how it should sound or what it should look like and that, as a writer, I shouldn't force myself to be any single thing. Scatter yourself. Kick in the doors. Curse at the book that evades you.


Jerry Wiliams wrote a short piece on The Best American Poetry site blog which I think really touches on the heart of this loss:

excerpt


In Memoriam to Ai (1947 - 2010) by Jerry Williams

Ai When I was in high school and college I started seeing work in literary magazines by a woman with this exotic name who wrote what every other poet seemed too afraid to write—disturbing poems, violent, sexy, unspeakably moving, grief-stricken, harrowing, cutting, beautiful, and yet the verse seemed skillfully controlled and peaceable. For me, most other poets sat in the back seat and Ai drove (which is ironic because she never in her life, from what I understand, possessed a driver’s license). I sort of mythologized her, and I knew I wanted to be her kind of poet—if the world would let me be one—fearless....

You can read the rest of this article here.

It's been a season of loss.

Evie Shockley, Top Ten Reasons Why It’s Okay That There Are “Too Many Poets”

10. Because there used to be too few poets (and they really did all know each other then).

9. Because it appears to be okay that there are too many baseball fans. (Granted, that is a bit subjective – but this whole thing is subjective, right?)

8. Because employing the logic of capitalism (supply and demand) to explain the production of art is like using a Minnie Mouse sticker to close a surgical incision—it might seem effective at some point, but it is the wrong tool for the job.

7. Because many of them would otherwise become novelists.

6.Because poets—in the practice of their art—don’t leave a terribly large carbon footprint.

5. Because, as Nikky Finney has said (and this is badly paraphrased), a poet is someone who can’t not write poetry. There aren’t too many of those types. The rest will sooner or later stop writing poetry. All’s well that ends well.

4. Because poets regularly come out of jail, but only rarely go into jail. (The statistics behind this claim are based on an informal survey of my memory, so the margin of error is ±

3. Because, although it is true that poets, like rabbits, have a taste for green, poets generally do not eat through your whole garden, literally or metaphorically (or if they do, they write a poem about how very good it was).

2. Because more poets means more points of view, more experiences, more lexicons, more aesthetic choices—a wider range of voices, by any measure—will be available to the poetry reader. And, likewise, more and different readers of poetry will be called forth. If not inevitably, very probably.

1. Because the existence—and cultivation—of a growing number of people in the world who have a jones for language, a passion for truth, and a weakness for beauty cannot be a bad thing.







Evie Shockley is the author of one book of poetry, a half-red sea (Carolina Wren Press, 2006), and two poetry chapbooks, 31 words * prose poems (Belladonna* Books, 2007) and The Gorgon Goddess (Carolina Wren Press, 2001). Her poems also appear and are forthcoming in numerous journals and anthologies, including Indiana Review, The Southern Review, La Petite Zine, Columbia Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Hambone, No Tell Motel, Harvard Review, Crab Orchard Review, HOW2, nocturnes (re)view, Achiote Seeds, Tuesday; An Art Project, Poetry Daily: Poems from the World's Most Popular Poetry Website, Fingernails Across the Chalkboard: Poetry and Prose on HIV/AIDS from the African Diaspora, From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great, and Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. She currently co-edits jubilat; in 2007, she guest-edited a special issue ofMiPOesias (called "~QUEST~")

Evie Shockley blogs at Red Room: Where The Writers Are

Afaa Michael Weaver, This Tongue of Yours

If I think of where I began, it seems overwhelming. My naivete seems so large and implausible. Forty years after walking into the steel mills and declaring myself a poet, I wonder why no one was able to make me see the difficulties inherent in succeeding in literary life. I find it much easier to talk to poets who feel they have had to live with being given God’s tongue rather than trying to acquire the same. The difference for those of us who feel it was given to us is that we sometimes want to give it back. All along the way, I have resisted the categorizing, the placement, the misperceptions, all the things that come from acting from an inner base and contrary to what most other people move in life when they think they are poets.

“Here God, I think Gabriel could make better use of this tongue of yours. After all, he has wings.”

If ambition and self-loathing are not a recipe for inner turmoil, then there is no such thing as the soul’s chemistry, but there I was, the son of a sharecropper become steelworker, working in the steel mill myself and writing poetry. It has been forty years since I scribbled those juvenile poems that are now a part of the Howard Gotlieb archives at Boston University alongside Dr. Martin Luther King’s papers as well as Walt Whitman’s papers. I knew in the past when I was having to summon a gargantuan courage, but it is only now that I am realizing the courage it takes to begin to make an honest assessment of the distance I have traveled to this point as a poet and writer, of the distance and the depth. The greater wonder is that it feels the way it has always felt in the past when I thought I had established a firm foundation in my writing and my life.

It is good to always think of oneself as a beginner, and from that place pray and work for an honest humility, one that is a quiet acknowledgement of what one has done and hopes to do. Success and critical assessments can make that project of honest humility a harder one to undertake. It has not been easy to even think about my accomplishments as being on the same level as Whitman, to think that I have laid a foundation not just for myself but for my culture.

I think of this comparison in little bits of time, a little at a time. It’s not good to stare into the sun, into God’s eyes.

If you are working class and white, discussion of class is a more recognizable thing, but when you are black and working class, which is to say born working class and working in the working class world, you know discussions of class do not often take place among black people. Someone recently told me that I was playing the “class” card, but I don’t see it that way, especially as the person who told me has had the privilege afforded in the black community by our own strategies of opportunities based on color, including education historically. High school education in better schools in Baltimore, my hometown, was a matter, in the past, of how light-skinned one was. Segregation kept people of different occupations in the same neighborhood, but our social worlds were points of demarcation. My family knew nothing of Cape May’s segregated beaches for middle class blacks in south Jersey. But people who went to those beaches lived in houses that were structurally like mine, although my parents’ home bore the markings of different levels of education and black privilege.

My Kool Aid was not your Kool Aid is one way of pointing up the slowly and begrudgingly emergent discussion of class among black people. For one thing, it threatens that old sense of ourselves as a group that is bound in complex ways in our use of the first person plural pronoun. We are an amazing people is something I still believe.

It was against and within this that I launched myself, determined to use what I was given, as in the biblical story of the ten talents. I know now that it was a matter of coming up the rough side of the mountain, and it was ambition, an ambition made more complex by my inability to embrace whatever success came my way. I just kept moving along like a lumbering freight train until I hit that ultimate destination, me. It was my interface with my childhood that gave me the light to use as a tool of inner illumination. It was when I saw the power of child sexual abuse to configure our lives that I came to understand my writing life and my life, as well as came to understand how my spiritual and truer self is independent of God’s gifts.

God’s gift is life itself.

God’s gift requires recognition, recognition of ourselves by ourselves. There are nearly forty boxes of documents and artifacts in those archives at Boston University that verify most, if not all of the stories I have told people over the years, stories that seem almost incredible to me, but are made credible by affirmations of that terrifyingly beautiful tongue, the tongue that some of us are given, and which we can only see as a blessing when we let go the thing that drives us, ambition and the will of the ego, the will to fame.

Why do I write? I write because it is the work that I do, and I am working class in nature, although I have a professor’s office next to a park where Canada geese have the unmitigated gall, the temerity to stop traffic whenever they please.

That’s a long, long way from East Baltimore and the steel mills, my beginnings, as now I begin once more.


Afaa Michael Weaver (b. Michael S. Weaver) is a poet, playwright, short fiction writer, translator, editor, and journalist. He has been an NEA fellow, a Pew fellow and a Fulbright scholar. In 2008 he received a Pushcart prize. His tenth collection of poetry is The Plum Flower Dance (U Pitt 2007). His eleventh collection of poems, Kama i’reeh (Like the Wind, a translation of newer and selected poems of his into Arabic by Wissal Al-Allaq is in press. Afaa works with poets in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong and holds an endowed chair at Simmons College. His websites are: www.afaamweaver.com & www.transpoet.com

Sandy Tseng, Tragedy and Art

We’ve all seen it before—the undeniable connection between tragedy and the creative process. I have never been good at humor, wit or rhyme, but take a tragic event—my own loss or someone else’s—and I feel thoroughly consumed by it, fueled by it, energized to write for days, even weeks or months.

When my husband joined a team of medical professionals from Denver to go to Haiti last month, I had never felt so unhelpful as I had watching them pack up 1500 lbs of medical supplies. There we were, working around the clock on a few hours of sleep to get the team ready to go, and I didn’t know enough about medicines and supplies to help pack their duffle bags. I did, however, appreciate learning two new drug names, Ketamine and Lidocaine—words that were sure to contribute to a poem eventually. Throughout the night, someone would mention the drugs again, and while I never noted the context, the musicality of those words echoed in me, rolled off my tongue. How many feet were in those words? I mouthed the syllables and counted the stresses on my fingers. Could the words be used in the same line? Ketamine. Lidocaine. That all depended.


I saw the medical team off at the airport at 6am on a Sunday morning, and it was a good hour to get started on my writing. Yes good luck, team--I’ll just be hanging out in Denver, writing. Let’s face it. There’s a reason someone doesn’t study medicine. I couldn’t assist in surgery even if someone gave me an instrument and told me exactly when to hand it to the surgeon.

But then something exciting happened after the team returned to Denver. The entire team of 11 medical professionals began talking enthusiastically about writing a book together. Each of them had an insatiable desire to express what they had experienced. Did they go as doctors and nurses and come back as writers? Were they driven, for the first time, by the inexorable energy that produced art?

Amidst the team’s talks of memoir writing, I can only begin to imagine the energy running through the Haitian artists at this time. I am sure that the energy in the Haitians is many times more inspiring and empowering than what we are experiencing. What we don’t see on CNN is the Haitians singing, dancing—celebrating art—in spite of tragedy.


And every one of them has a tragic story. The artist Joseph Sandral, whose banana bark collages my husband purchased in Haiti, lost his daughter during the earthquake. The artist Thamara, who made boxes and jewelry out of cow horn with her father, lost her husband whom she just married in mid-December. We receive these updates through Matthew 25 House (http://blogs.capecodonline.com/cct-haiti/), where the team stayed, and where there was once an artisan shop featuring paintings, banana bark collage, jewelry, wood and metal sculptures by over 20 artists. Many of the artists continue to stop by the house, and they are able to receive some money for food because of the artwork that volunteers purchase while passing through. Despite the circumstances, the artists continue to endure, and they continue to produce art.

There is a power in art that has the ability to bring us through tragedy time and time again. Art is as essential to our survival as food and water. We require it as a form of self-expression. Art is an act of mourning, it’s an acknowledgment, and it brings healing. It is a rebuilding process. If it is possible, in the five days spent in Haiti, to make writers out of doctors and nurses—to inspire memoirs out of people who have never expressed an interest in writing—then the Haitians are indeed rebuilding themselves. This is their rebuilding process. They are building mansions in place of shacks, and they will rise in the spirit of their music and dancing. Many people are asking how this poverty stricken country can ever recover, but indeed they will rise out of the rubble. Out of the graves of their loved ones, they will rise.



Sandy Tseng




Sandy Tseng is the author of Sediment, published by Four Way Books in October 2009. Among her awards are The Nation's Discovery Award, the Louis Untermeyer Tuition Scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Vira I. Heinz Foundation scholarship. She has held residencies at the MacDowell Colony and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Currently a resident of Colorado, she teaches at Metropolitan State College of Denver.

Jacqueline Jones LaMon: Demons, Bodies, and the Rustling in the Wild

Later this week, Victor LaValle, our visiting fiction writer at Adelphi University, will be leading an open discussion on why writers write. The longer I engage in this activity, the more interested I am in the answers to this question. I know the answers I’ve given over the years, which range from, “To give voice to those who have no voice,” to “Because I have a need to,” but I’m not so certain that any one of those responses truly addresses the motivations behind my actions.

Writing is terrifying. Facing that blank page and approaching it with honesty and openness is not an activity for the faint at heart. We play these little tricks on ourselves, saying that the particular piece under construction is just a draft or an entire fiction, written for the eyes of no one but ourselves, but it doesn’t always work. It takes a great deal of courage to speak truth, even when no lives are seemingly on the line or we convince ourselves that no one is listening. The potential for an eventual reader is always present, and we always know this. We know this, and we do it anyway. We engage in an activity that gives tangible life to thought and impression. A piece of writing allows the reader to hold the thoughts of the writer, in a very literal sense. Writing gives those thoughts a body and if the time should come when that body is destroyed, the meaning contained in the writing still lives on.

The more I realize the potential impact of writing, the more in awe of it I become. There are times when I write to discover and refine my perspectives, to figure out how I truly stand on an issue. But in the last few years, my poems have increasingly taken up the task of filling in the blanks of life, of serving as a form of instruction. I wonder now if it is possible for us to write that which we truly do not know. Is there something inherent about the act of writing that allows for the entrance of spirit far beyond our individual experiences?

I think of my writing as a braid of joy, responsibility, and terror—not unlike the feeling of a first-time mother left alone with her newborn in the wilderness. I know a variety of ways of how to approach the page, but each day brings a new experience and a new revelation. Most days, I choose to focus on the joy of the act itself and turn away from the incessant demons rustling in the distance. Maybe a life of letters actually means that we are the ones that must summon the courage to coax out those demons, and pen a series of books about the process.

As a teaching poet, I want my students to walk away with a healthy respect for both the art and the craft of poetry. I want them to crave a steady diet of poetry in their lives and I want them to fortify themselves with technique and revision. They don’t know it yet, but there will come a time in their writing lives when their poetry will evolve beyond the workshop, beyond the line break, and even beyond the form. Their poetry will become more than the sum of its parts. Maybe this is what Lorca had in mind as he tried to describe to us our Duende. And today, this is why I write: to evolve into the woman I was not yet yesterday, to offer cavernous entrances for the reader between my lines, and to share those new worlds with honesty and reverence.

(In Memoriam: Lucille Clifton, 1936-2010)

Jacqueline Jones LaMon is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College, UCLA School of Law, and Indiana University Bloomington, where she earned her MFA in Poetry. A graduate fellow of Cave Canem, her first poetry collection, Gravity, U.S.A., received the Quercus Review Press Poetry Series Book Award. Her first novel, In the Arms of One Who Loves Me, was published by One World/Ballantine Books. She is Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Adelphi University, where she teaches poetry, literature, and pedagogy.

Wendy S. Walters: In These Times

This past week an earthquake with a magnitude of 3.8 shook the small town of Pingree Grove, IL forty miles northwest of Chicago. The earthquake was 1600 times milder than the one that tore down Port-au-Prince a month ago. Despite the lack of catastrophe, the Illinois earthquake caused rattling in many homes throughout the Wabash Valley Seismic Zone. The quake appears to have happened along an unknown fault line, which seems to suggest that there may be a number of small fractures extending throughout the state.

In an unrelated incident, two coyotes were seen wandering around the Columbia University campus in upper Manhattan in early morning hours over the weekend. Their appearance was noted by several students and confirmed by campus police, who were unable to apprehend the animals as they fled from the attention of worried onlookers. Weeks earlier, another coyote had been spotted wandering the neighborhood of West Harlem. For those unfamiliar with the area, West Harlem and Morningside Heights, where Columbia is located, are heavily urbanized. The presence of coyote in these regions is unusual, as they tend to be intimidated by people, traffic and loud noises. It is unclear what suffices for prey in these environs.

Lately I spend a lot of time trying to locate the geography of the work. I believe the writing is someplace. While always true, facts of location are always temporary. And while current events seem to confirm this point for me over and over, somehow I still go out to try and find the line. Whether this is a problem with poetry or a problem with me matters less, I think, than the mistake of not feeling how much wildness is naturally occurring wherever it is the search for the poem takes me.

In these times, naturally occurring wildness has me worried. (How about you?) I do not know how to put events in order. I do not know how often catastrophe is the beginning or end of the word. (What do you think?) The point of the poem makes less sense once it is done than when I am doing it. Whenever I smell futility, I hunt my work down to destroy it. Whenever I feel the ground beneath me cracking, I let my work fall into the chasm. (How do you do it?) Still I think to be subsumed by fear is one kind of avoidable madness. To put the words in order might be a way of noting the difference between now and now. To put the words in order could also be catching my breath. Then there it goes.

Wendy S. Walters

www.wendyswalters.com

Wendy S. Walters’ work resides at the intersection of the poem, essay and lyric drama. She is the author of Longer I Wait, More You Love Me (2009) and a chapbook, Birds of Los Angeles (2005), both published by Palm Press (Long Beach, CA). Walters’ poetry has been recognized with residency fellowships from Breadloaf, MacDowell and Yaddo, and her poems have recently appeared in Callaloo, HOW2, Natural Bridge, Seneca Review and the Yalobusha Review,Seneca Review, Seattle Review, and Harper’s Magazine. among several others.

Guston in Grasmere: The Poem-Pictures

... misunderstood and castigated by the art world, he sought the company of writers and poets, amongst them his Woodstock neighbour, Philip Roth and the poets Bill Berkson, Clark Coolidge, William Corbett, Stanley Kunitz, and Guston's wife, Musa McKim. From these friendships came an astounding series of collaborations: the result was not illustrated poetry, but a hybrid art-form of intermingled words and mysterious images, which were called 'poem-pictures ...

from
Dove Cottage: Wordsworth Museum and Art Gallery

Douglas Kearney, Black Automation

I need to warn you that I'm really about to gush. Now, I don't mean gush in a girly way, but gush in a deep-book-language-poetry-artsy way.

Doug Kearney is one of the most creative people I've ever met. That says a lot since my life, my career, and my recreation center around creative poetics and prose, and arts and culture. He refers to himself on his web page as Poet/Performer/Librettist/Educator, which in some ways doesn't cover the range of his talent, but more importantly, his skill. He has the visual sense of a graphic artist and the aesthetic consciousness of a painter. He has the ear of a musician. He has the mind of an architect who is also a linguist. He has the spirit of a poet, and the tongue of a storyteller. He has created poetry of the kind I have never, ever seen before, and yet, the work is immediately a delight, sometimes a privilege to be immersed in it.



I'm still gushing, I know, but the bottom line is that there is no limit of respect and awe I hold for this writer. I can say, personally, that I've read this book three times, which is a great testament given that I tell my own students, each term, their goal as writers should be to produce something that their readers are compelled to pick up and read again, to go back to, to remember while they are shopping in the super market, on the train. I imagine, off in California where everything seems a bit magical in some way, his instruction is a gift and his students are some of the luckiest young writers in the country.

His new book Black Automation is a treat for the eye as well as the ear. I cannot imagine being a reader of Contemporary Poetry and not having this text in your collection. Hats off to Fence Books for seeing real talent, and investing in it. I applaud his work, and I'm certainly not the only one, as you'll see if you read on.

I've taken the liberty of excerpting some information from Fence Books and thank them ahead of time for not blacklisting me for doing so (insert smiley here).

THE BLACK AUTOMATON
Douglas Kearney
Winner of the National Poetry Series

From ambivalent animals thriving after Katrina to party chants echoing in a burning city, The Black Automaton troubles rubble, cobbling a kind of life. In this collection bodies at risk seek renewal through violence and fertility, history and myth, flesh and radios.

"First, you have to see Douglas Kearney's visual poems, which cheekily diagram cultural memes as if they were parts of speech (as they are). The Black Automaton has its share of sharp, tender lyrics, too...these exploit the political possibilities of puns and the way meanings hinge on inexact resemblance. Kearney's poems tweak and skewer pop culture and literary sources from Paul Laurence Dunbar to T. S. Eliot to traditional ballads and blues...Kearney's work turns poetic and cultural conventions disquietingly inside out."

—Catherine Wagner

Douglas Kearney's work as a poet, performer and librettist has been featured in many venues in print, in-the-flesh and in digital code. His first book, Fear, Some, was published in 2006 (Red Hen Press). In 2008, he was honored with a Whiting Writers Award. He lives in the Valley with his wife and teaches at California Institute of the Arts. For more info, go to his personal web site: www.douglaskearney.com

"Douglas Kearney's innovative new collection makes me tremble like a "mouth and mind full of fish hooks." It makes me think of the despair at the heart of ecstasy; of restlessness as a kind of anodyne. These poems literally vibrate with Kearney's precocious intellect and passion. They hum, they bang, they bite. This is a jaw-dropping, electrifying book. What else can I say? I have never encountered poetry like this before."

—Terrance Hayes, author of Lighthead and Wind in a Box

"We inhabit a world of automata, complicities, complacencies, sound waves, soundless suggestive sales pitches and blaring lingo-infested jingles, machines, robots, rotgut and gut-wrenching city-burnt silences, slave ships, space ships, straitjackets, samples, metonyms and nimble meta-limbs angling gangly nomenclatures, singularities, consecrations and condemnations, assassinations and ass-backward nations, disgraced antonymic masses of matter jostling in unchosen seas, types in stereo singing syncopated tunes out of time with the lock-step of what we might have been supposed to think. What good is poetry in such a world? No good. Not good, useful: "righteous art is a rod./rods are very useful." The Black Automaton is a whip-smart lightning rod: use it."

—Jen Hofer, author of one and translator of sexoPUROsexoVELOZ+Septiembre (Dolores Dorantes)

"Kearney's poetry flows from a consideration of urban speech, negro spontaneity and book learning not easily parsed if you haven't fully digested every major hiphop lyric composed between 1979 and 1983 and spent a considerable amount of time backtracking the library stacks stuffed with Zora Neale Hurston and Ishmael Reed's neofolkloric trails. The Black Automaton is the graphic afterbirth of a Jeep with a booming system driven at 90 mph into a stack of Bibles, small press journals and the Tibetan Book of the Dead by a man who mistook his mouth for a sledgehammer."

—Greg Tate is a writer/musician currently working on a book about James Brown and is still HNIC of Burnt Sugar, The Arkestra Chamber

Radio

the first black you met was on the radio.

this is true even if you lived with blacks.

the first black to speak the word radio

knew it meant the same as blood.

the first black to know blood meant radio,

claimed radio meant love, to better lure you.

the first black you dreamed about was on the radio

and waited for you there each night to fuck you,

you still believe this and sleep with the radio

on or off; it all depends.

the first blacks to realize they were blacks became radios

at once, singing something that could never be english.

the first black to confess it was a radio

did so to account for the snow filling its voice.

the first black you heard was a radio

and did not speak english even if it did: radios cannot speak.

the first blacks to change radio's

meaning from love back to blood are still here

and want to fuck you. they are doing so on the radio

right now. you don't like it but go to sleep.

Tallahatchie Lullabye, Baby

cattail cast tattles Till tale,

lowing low along the hollow.

crickets chirrup and ribbits lick-up.

what's chucked the 'hatchie swallow.

skin scow skiffs upon pond scum skin

going slow along the hollow.

now may mayfly alight brown brow.

what's chucked the 'hatchie swallow.

maybe bye baby bye baby by and by—

lowing low along the hollow—

we will slip the knot not slip will we?

what's chucked the 'hatchie swallow.

who's a bruise to blue hue 'hatchie,

going slow along the hollow?

who's a bruise to whose hue, 'hatchie?

what's chucked the 'hatchie swallow.

Kodak flash tattles Till tale

going slow among the hollow.

who's a bruise to bruise hue?

swallow what the 'hatchie chucks.

—Emmett Till (1941–1955)