Cecil Brown, June Jordan, Richard Wright

The poem that grabbed hold of me tightest was, aptly placed, the first entry in the Politics section, “Integrating the Strawberry Swimming Pool in 1998.” Reed initiates us into this section with Cecil Brown’s Blues-inspired piece, one whose disquieting and sorrowful refrain belies title year of 1998. The lilt of the slow, swaying opening lines dances me into the section, while at once making the clear, grizzly statement that the reality of these poets will be lain before us, stark and honest—nothing hidden, nothing cushioned. Then, the questions swell in my head: Could it be that a segregated pool still exists in Berkeley at the turn of the 21st Century? Are we, as readers, shocked? If so, who is shocked? And, as such, whom is Brown aiming to shock?

The story unravels in a tight, punched dialogue, as the set of the springtime swimming pool flows in around the cast: the poet and the twos sets of Gestapo boots. Brown thinks, “Isn’t it strange…how they now have cops everywhere/.” In 2009, when I drive home on Sacramento late I am slow and steady alongside cruising black-and-whites, my hands tight on the wheel. Isn’t it strange, I think, how there are cops everywhere. Hard to know if they circle in pairs waiting to protect ya or waiting to catchya.

But this poem isn’t about the police so much, with their twisted gestures, demands, icy voices and glares. Maybe they plucked him, profiled him (this most decorated academic swimming in his own backyard campus pool) or maybe they followed the lead of the lifeguard who profiled, rang the town bell, swung the rope; followed the lead of the white ladies in bikinis who swept eyes to their sides and whispered into receivers; followed the lead of professors and deans who parsed their departmental budgets and cast a proprietary watch over these facilities. The final stanzas crescendo into an indictment of the academy itself.

At the top of page 197, Brown tells us “Not more than a few hours/ I asked the Department of _______ / to teach a course in James Baldwin.” But he doesn’t tell us whether this was a few hours before or after the Strawberry Canyon Swimming Pool incident. When his course was declined did he take it just as the perennial struggle of any academic for recognition and funding? Then, after being attacked a few hours later did he allow the connection to snap together that this purportedly liberal university has biased, canon-entrenched, racist policies? Or did he ask for the course afterward, to vindicate himself, to create a platform in this mecca of learning where he could declare: “James Baldwin was carried off to a Paris jail under the accusation of pilfering bed sheets and I too, here too, have known this injustice!” We don’t know which department he asked or when he asked it. —Why this choice?— But the importance of the timeline, the details, evaporates, and the verse pounds to the thundering crux: “We pay taxes, they get the classes. / We have the melanin in our skins, but they get to lie in the sun in/ The Strawberry swimming pool.”

Brown holds the blues beat throughout; he writes in speech-slang and employs double negatives in his refrain—a guideline June Jordan and her students once outlined for the formal use of Black English (“Nobody Mean More to Me Than You and the Future Life of Willie Jordan”). He uses these linguistic tropes ironically in the face of abject racial profiling, but also because the the emotional impact of lines like “They don’t want no blacks up there / Ain’t goin’ there no mo’/” runs directly into the soul in a way a formally rhetorical condemnation never could.

Somehow I have left little room for the other poems I loved. June Jordan’s poem dedicated to Dr. Elizabeth Ann Karlin: “I think / I have decided / I wish it to be understood.” I don’t know this language but it sounds like the way the Pope might address us—how one’s whims or wishes can so easily turn into a decree. I love that she turns this language right back around, claiming the power for women over their own bodies and elucidating the pope’s harbored sexuality/privacy. The short lines emphasize the point so brilliantly—crisp and tumbling after one another like the words on a scroll.

Also Richard Wright’s well-placed closing poem chilled me. I read it backwards and forwards, over and over. The scene of the lynching was pieced together, re-invented, torn apart, embodied. It comes upon us, “the thing” like a sinister breeze—at once a memory and a premonition. The imagery of white bones in a cushion of ashes clashes against images of black blood, charred stump, traces of tar. We know what’s been here even before the details arrive; the sky and the trees have borne witness. Wright stumbles upon the scene that wrenches a chasm between the world and himself. Perhaps he begins outside, part of the world, far from this treachery; and he ends, having traced through the “sooty details” only to find himself within the scene, but a skull, far divided from the world he once inhabited.

-Jessica

Couldn't Help It

Okay, I know I'm only supposed to post one main posting for week 2, but I wanted to also mention how wonderfully fascinated I was by T. Moss's Video Poams -- LOVED THEM. I read the PDF version of the Bubbles video first and found that once I watched the video, I was really intrigued by the blending of music and images and voice with the option of a text version-- it was really well done. (Plan to share this with my cluster). It was kind of trippy in a way that made me tilt my head a lot to figure out what images I was actually seeing and what words where ghosted behind the images.

It got me thinking about the mixed media of poetry and how we (and I mean me) limit ourselves in our definition of poetry. I think one of the things I anticipate in this class is a redefining of what I call poetry. Thanks for this beginning of exploration Elmaz!!

I'm interested in what other people thought of Moss's work.

peacelovelight

Kiala

Totems to Hip Hop

Hi all,

Reed’s introduction to From Totems to Hip-Hop really moved me. Got me thinking. He gave me the words I’ve been searching for to explain how I know when I appreciate a writer’s work. “It’s when a writer, through the use of their talent, connects to readers who might not share that writer’s background, that the writer’s work becomes universal.” I found that to be the case in the Politics section of this book. I don’t consider myself to be politically-savvy, but I know enough to have intelligent conversations with those who do. I don’t get into great debates about politics, but I am aware of how politics affects my life. So when I read Miguel Algarin’s, And in the U.S.A., I didn’t need to be from New Brunswick, NJ to connect to it, I’ve got enough family members who have gone through the criminal injustice system to understand the picture he paints. I didn’t need to know about the Strawberry Swimming Pool in 1998 (see link below) to know what it feels like to be somewhere that I didn’t belong (according to those who claim they did belong) and to have my presence questioned and threatened. I can go to the Claremont Hotel 10 blocks from my apartment and experience that today. But these poems did widen my lens. They made me aware of the fact that what I experience is not isolated to my experience. That is what I think some poets of color do really well. They use poetry as a medium for telling the truth, no matter how hard or how harsh that truth may be. Not that white writers don’t do that, but more times than not, white writers write for themselves ( a really selfish use of the craft) or they write for others just like them—not concerned with the universality of their work.

**Let me provide the disclaimer before you start banging on your keyboards: I know I’m over-generalizing –not ALL poets of color use poetry as a medium for telling the truth and not all white writers are selfishly using the craft or only writing for those like them.

Moving on – so the idea that poetry has the power to be universal is not a new one, but one that continues to intrigue me as a poet and a writer. I found most of the poems in this Politics section to have some universal quality to them and I found ways to connect to them either as a poet or as a person of color who shares the experience they are writing about.

Mari Evans’s poem, “Speak the Truth to the People” seemed like a mantra poem to me (can we add mantra poem to the glossary?) because of the abundance of repetition. Not just because of the repetition – great poets use repetition all the time, it’s where Evans places the repetition and how she chooses to emphasize the repeated lines/phrases/words. In the first and second lines, she repeats, “to the people” then in the third and fourth lines, she repeats, “free them.” She continues to use similar repetition in lines 8 – 13 with the word “enslaved” and the words “can be” and “unwisdom.” This pattern continues throughout and becomes mantra/chant-like.

How do truth-telling and mantra poems go together? Well for me, a mantra is something you use to change or alter your energy in a positive way – I feel the Truth (yes capital T) can do the same thing.

My favorite piece from this section of Reed’s book happens to be by a white poet, 1990 by Bob Holman. Aside from that being the year I graduated high school, the poem really read aloud beautifully. Are y’all starting to see that I’m a fan of repetition if done well? Okay, I’m guilty. But Holman uses the phrase, “It’s 1990/& Nelson Mandela is free” to highlight the other, somewhat insane, moments that were happening or being focused on when this historically powerful and significant event was taking place. He uses lots of sarcasm (which I am also a fan of if done right) to show how many people simply moved on as if Mandela’s freedom was just another thing to take up news footage and keep them from their soap operas or their busy lives. He uses the truth of what was happening in 1990 and creates a satirical poem that mimics Kenneth Fearing’s 1933 in many ways. While Fearing does not use repetition to propel his work, he does highlight events by personifying 1933—Holman was able to do this with repetition. So to bring this post full circle, I must point out that the political content in all of the poems in this section did several things for me the poet – 1)they made me realize that my poetry might benefit from the inclusion of political content and 2) that political content will be best if I see my poetry as a vehicle for truth and honor the truth that is my unique experience as delivered by my unique voice. As a reader, the political content reminded me that there is a global experience that is happening in this world, whether we choose to participate in it or not, it happened, is happening, and will happen. I appreciate the work of poets (no matter their color) who use their poetry to include everyone in truthful conversations about this one world we all share – regardless of the many elements that we allow to divide us.

--awaiting your thoughts—

Kiala

p.s. the link to a fairly recent article about the Cecil Brown experience

I read Hilton Obenzinger’s ‘This Passover or the Next I Will Never Be in Jerusalem’ from my own Jewish perspective and had many questions. I wondered if Obenzinger is Jewish and if that matters. I think it does, but is that just my own protective shield going up around my group? Is this an outsider’s portrayal of all Jews at Passover, or is it a disapproving insider’s perspective of his own individual family? Why does he perpetuate the negative and ignorant stereotypes by saying that Jews “need gelt in life” or “[i]s it so bad selling rags?” What will readers think who are not Jewish? On the one hand, the ritual of walking on Shabbas is explained for those not in the know. On the other hand, will those same readers get the references to the Passover table without further explanation? The speaker asks the question, “Why is this Jew different from all other Jews?” and says, “This Passover or the next I will never be in Jerusalem”; these are explicit, but changed, references to the text read at Passover. These changes, however, are direct rejections of the tradition. Why is he different from other Jews? Or, at least, why does he feel he is different? It brings up a thematic question of belonging to a group and what it’s like to reject or disassociate yourself from that group (of course, recognizing that in some groups it’s easier to do this than in others).

What happens when “your own people” are no longer your people, when you no longer feel part of the group? The speaker in this poem “fidget[s] and nod[s] politely,” and is clearly uncomfortable, but he says at the end, “I don’t feel strange at all....” Clearly, he is strange to his family, and it made me wonder why, presumably, he has traveled from California to Brooklyn to even participate in this holiday ritual with the “clan.” What is the purpose of this tradition for him? Is it an excuse to reunite with a family that feels more and more foreign to him, but is, nonetheless, related to him if only as “long-lost relatives?” Is there still some connection for him, or when he asks himself at the end if he is the “anti-Moses,” does this imply that the connection is more about what he is not, or what he has rejected, than what he has become (a teacher, a Californian, etc.)?

Is he making a more general statement about a person disagreeing with the group with which he or she is identified? The speaker is physically present at the table, but he is a long way away, philosophically and mentally, from his people. The “Patriarch” makes statements about why Jews belong in Israel, but we can only speculate what the speaker’s disagreement is – this is not made explicit. The reader needs to fill in the blanks, but who is the reader? Is it someone sympathetic to the group (member or not) or is it someone critical of the group who might believe the stereotypes and read this poem as affirmation of his or her prejudiced beliefs?

I thought about this question when I read June Jordan’s “Poem for The New York Times Dedicated to Dr. Elizabeth Ann Karlin” and Jack Foley’s “Eli, Eli.” I wondered how Catholics, although included in the list of “billions of folks out here/Catholics/and Buddhists and Muslims and Jews and/Protestants and Atheists...,” felt about Jordan’s admonitions to the Pope, and I wondered how they felt about Foley’s writing about the problem of priests molesting children. Both of these poems bring conflict within the group to the reader’s eye. Again, does it matter to what group(s) the poets belong? And, does it matter to what group(s) the reader belongs? I agreed with Jordan’s speaker, but I also thought that I am not the target audience, if there is one (and that’s another question to be explored) since, as a non-Catholic, the Pope’s “pronouncements” are not binding on me. I found the subject and execution of Foley’s “Father O’Fondle” outrageous (not provoking outrage at the airing of this dirty laundry – daylight and fresh air can do wonders for dirty laundry), but it’s somewhat shocking to read a rhyme that includes “I’ll apply the priestly arts/To your troubled private parts” especially if you are part of the group for whom priests are agents of God.

These poems challenge the reader and may even be offensive to some, but if we read them as the poets’ expressions, then the poems are really about those expressions and not about the reader. The poet says what he or she has to say, and it should be in a form that we can understand, but once it’s out in the world, it’s possible that we’re reading it differently than it may have been intended or designed, and we have to be conscious of that possibility and what that difference may say to and about us.

Sheila Joseph

I found the Introduction to From Totems to Hip Hop to be very enlightening. As a student who has grown up with the traditional "white" canon, I can honestly say that I know virtually nothing of the poetry of Poets of Color. Reed might pass this off as my desire to be lazy, to be unwilling to "do the work." His statement that, "They want everybody to join in the effort of making things easy and comfortable for them. They want an intellectual affirmative action to exempt them from studying other cultures as rigorously as everyone has studied theirs. That will enable them to bypass the hard work the rest of us have put into becoming acquainted with something Americans call Western Civilization," struck me as somewhat true, though not, in my case, as maliciously intentional as Reed suggests. While he seems to be referring to those poets and intellectuals who make the canon, in my case, the indoctrination of academia with regards to these different types of poetry sneaked in upon me, unknown, and took up residence. Until one knows that a bias exists, ridding oneself of it is out of the question. I do not feel that I know much about other cultures, especially compared to some, but this is not because I don't want to know. In some ways, I have been unaware of the academic canon's hold on me. In other ways, I have had to dedicate myself to other items of interest without having much time left over to become an expert on every other thing one could possibly be an expert in. It took me dating a young man of Mexican descent to even become aware that the social circles of my youth consisted of only white people. I wasn't biased against black people, hispanics, asians or any other race. I simply had no contact with them. And I had no contact with them because it never occurred to me to seek them out. 

Another reason I have been hesitant about learning about Poets of Color is from a general feeling that as a white person, I do not belong. And often, the feeling that those who belong to the group of poets of color do not want me to belong. And it is not merely from some awkward feeling for myself being in the wrong place and not fitting in that I hide from it, but a desire not to be perceived as trying to lay a claim to a piece of history that is not mine. Perhaps I will ask all of the wrong questions, or make statements that belie my ignorance of the topic. Perhaps I will come across as intolerant (unintentionally) or as though I'm trying to be something I'm not. Rational or not, these are legitimate feelings of a person who has always been white, in white South, with grandparents who were in the KKK and still use inappropriate terms to describe black people and hispanics. That is not me. But it is my heritage. I am embarrassed by it, because my history is a part of me. But how often can I apologize for the sins of my fathers and grandfathers? How often can I apologize for the misguided, fearful and inconscionable acts of my white heritage? Perhaps if I am knowledgeable, I will no longer have to apologize for where I come from. In this class, certainly, as with other classes at Mills, I am in the minority and I feel keenly the sting of not exactly belonging. I am glad that Ishmael Reed put such eloquent words to the feelings of marginalization I'm sure everyone sometimes (if not all the time) must feel.

--H.K. Rainey

Questions of Identity and War

Closing the ranks of identity was the first thing I thought as I read many of these poems especially the ones in the Oregon Literary Review. I felt as if all the poems had a level of awareness around identity that linked them. In some of them that identity is named and is the focus of the poem such as with James Welch's Harlem, Montana. Just Off the Reservation and in some others it is implied and never explicitly mentioned as in June Jordan's Love Song about Choosing Your Booze. Overall they are all dealing with connecting identities in a politicized way. Many of the poems make connections to histories of cultures and peoples and draw parallels with modern situations or fully embody the past bringing it into the future and now.

To bring this post in narrower and focus on one poet, I was really taken with Chris Abani's poetry. There's a silence to his poetry, a quietness. Even when the poem is more dense and word heavy such as Dearest Jane, there are these intensely quiet lines that in a quick reading you would just rush over but when going over his work a second and third time you learn to weight the lines in your head. The lines I'm talking about in particular in Dearest Jane, come at the end:

I have decided that I want no more of this war,
and revealed myself to the doctor whose lust

weighed my breasts before discharging me.
I will be home soon. You are my redemption, sweet Jane.

This is the only line break besides the greeting and the sign off within the poem and it's seems meant to draw us in, to create a weighted pause before the revelation that the sex of the writer is female. It seems like it could be a corny twist, a shock ending to a poem but the pause makes it function as so much more. The words there not only reveal the narrator's sex but also reveal the really gendered space she enters by claiming the idea of woman with all the baggage that carries in a patriarchal society. That empty line, the sudden silence of the person whose been so verbose this whole time feels like more than a pause for dramatic effect. It feels like the line more than enforcing silence actually represents the silence inherent in being a woman in this society. The dispassionate recounting of the Doctor's sexualization of her body after he becomes aware of her sex holds a quiet despair and acceptance of this as the societal accepted order. The line immediately after connects Jane and her relationship with Henrietta as a healing one, creating an oppositional tenson with the recently mentioned Doctor and his interaction with Henrietta.

The other poem of Abani's that truly struck me was Say Something about Child's Play because of the specificity of the poem and it's universality. Knowing Abani's personal history as a political prisoner in his native Nigeria would normally cause a reader to assume that the subject for this poem is strife in his native country. However the imagery of a child being mutilated/tortured/attacked by a soldier is endemic to all cases of colonialist regimes. In this way the poet's personal cultural context of the poem takes on a real liminal space, an in-between-ness of being vital and at the same time not at all necessary to the work. That amorphous presence of culture reacts to the very direct language of the poem creating a dialog between the poem's percieved cultural context and the reader's own personal cutural history that I really like.

The other thing that really drew me to this piece was the sense of time as malleable and shifting within the poem. In the first stanza the boy's age is clearly defined in relation to the soldier. The first line of the second stanza seems to imply that the soldier's next question is immediate in following the boy's answer but the boy's age shifts, his age is no longer defined as a number instead it is in relation to something else, something we as the reader cannot possibly know. Is the aging metaphorical, emotional, mental or have we moved physically in time to a new wave of oppression, a new colonialist regime? Then in the third stanza the soldier is no longer asking to maim the boy, instead a body part is offered, a routine, known, expected, disrupted with this offering. And the boy's age is even more indirectly referenced only with the admittance of having seen too much.

Both poems made me think of war in broader contexts of waves of violence not just physical but emotional and societal. The poems seemed to me to share a core question of at what point have we seen too much? And what do we do at that point?

--Naamen Tilahun

James Welch's "Harlem, Montana" An Accurate History Through Poetry

I appreciate the Oregon Literary Review for publishing talented writers of color!  It’s just something you don’t see too often.  And Native poets at that, like James Welch (Blackfeet) who I had just heard of for the first time a couple days ago from my fellow artist at the Montana Artist Refuge, Tommy Orange (Cheyenne) who is also from Oakland.  Another exciting link I discovered is that one of the featured poets in this issue is Native poet Jennifer Foerster, who I am proud to say (shameless plug!), is in the forthcoming anthology I am editing Turtle Island to Abya Yala: A Love Anthology of Art and Poetry by Native American and Latina Women.  

James Welch’s poem “Harlem, Montana.  Just Off the Reservation” sums up the racism, tension, and history here in Montana in a nutshell.  After fellow Native artist Brooke Swaney Pepion (Salish/Blackfeet) and I returned from Butte back to Basin I told her how I was surprised how racially segregated it is here.  Before coming to Montana I had thought it would be separate as far as the majority white and Indian population, but for some reason I had forgotten and was in disbelief.  She said,  

“No girl, yea back in the day if you were Blackfeet and you stepped off the Rez, you would be arrested and fined.”

Welch demonstrates the inequalities, alcoholism, and desperation many Native American face here when he writes, 

“The Constable, a local farmer, plants the jail with wild raven-haired stiffs who beg just one more drink.”

What I have observed in my short time here is there are a lot of working class whites also suffering from alcoholism.  Across from my “refuge” I walked passed a shed-like home at mid-day that had a sign on it saying “No public drunkenness alllowed.”   A couple minutes later I saw a man swaggering out of the local bar into this home.  Public drunkeness in this “white town” of Basin (population  approx. 250) is not uncommon.  Also in Butte, I saw many rough-looking white men drinking outside of the local bar, or saloon as many of them are still called.  This does not mean there are not oppressive conditions for Native Americans in the area.  There are and this is true, but there are layers here that speak to a hardworking life for many of the whites in the area not so far off from that of the livelihood of the Native Americans.  Maybe that is why the racial tension is still so strong, a “my people” versus “your people” mentality still exists for poor whites who want to try and “get ahead” of their Native American counterparts.   A sense of entitlement, yes and you see this in all of the preservation of colonial history around (steel mining landmarks, Irish and Finnish memorabilia, romanticization of Lewis and Clark, etc.) and a lack of celebrated history for Native Americans.

Welch masterfully weaves this complex depiction and even shows the economic tension and lack of tolerance for difference as exemplified by his mention of the Amish looking Hutterites,

“Now, Only the Hutterites are nice.  We hate them.  They are tough and their crops are always good.  We accuse them of idiocy and believe their belief all wrong.”

What I appreciate most about Welch’s prose is it’s gritty honesty, his ability to create realistic portraits that are often unflattering, unveiling the ugliness of bigotry and it’s effects on all the peoples in the town “just off the reservation.”  I also enjoy Welch’s poetry technique of consonance.  For example the paring of words “Disgusted, busted...”  Another technique he uses frequently is repetition and there is a preaching gospel  to it in his words “goodbye, goodbye,”  “when you die, if you die” and “...we’re rich, help us, oh God, we’re rich.”

This is a very specific story, not part of the current poetry cannon but I am sure Ishmael Reed (From Totems to Hip-Hop) would agree that although not a contributor to his antholgy, Welch delivers a very important contribution to U.S. literature and history.

The Educated Mind...

Wow, the work that we looked at this week was great! It’s amazing how much I was feeling Ishmael Reed’s introduction also. It felt like someone was just explaining the entire history of my life. Particularly with the story of the Latina student who felt like her white friends couldn't appreciate her work. How many times have I heard in a workshop “This seems like a performance piece or spoken word rather then something that can be read on the page. “ with this sort of ton as if to say, “This isn’t poetry. This is that stuff that the black people do in nightclubs on Monday nights.” Ugh. Really? Can't you just appreciate the work for what it is? Despite subject matter? Or rather looking at the subject matter but with out labeling it something that your over. Obviously if someone is writing about it, we’re not all over it.

Anyways, I think that’s why I became so hung up on the Giles Johnson, PH.D by Frank Marshall Davis. Yeah I’m having a moment with my privileged identity as a grad student. Giles Johnson was short but it felt like there was so much packed in. The last two lines especially: “because he wouldn’t teach/ and he couldn’t porter.” There is so much in that! It’s wouldn’t and couldn’t that are so intentional in these lines. If it had been switched the other way, he couldn’t teach and wouldn’t porter, it would have indicated a certain snobbishness on Giles part. He couldn’t teach, presumably because he didn’t know how or wasn’t very good at it and he refused to porter because he was too educated to do it. I think this is generally what people think happens with People of color. The perception is that POC’s get these big degrees and yet they can’t teach cause they’re terrible and then they think they’re too good to do any other work their just throwing their PH.D around and acting like having it will pay the bills. What I love so much about this poem is that it’s not that way. It’s he wouldn’t teach, maybe because he thought he was too good for it or maybe because he has a problem with the institution, whatever the case maybe but he couldn’t porter. Maybe because their wasn’t any work or maybe because he didn’t know how. For all of his degrees the thing that would seem to be easy for him to do was in accessible to him. He couldn’t do it; he wasn’t able to work as a porter. Something about that just spoke so much to the situation that most people in academia find themselves. You can make the choice to teach or not but what will you do if you don’t? What can you do if you don’t? What are all of these degrees making us capable of doing? Giles can speak Latin and Greek and can probably analyze text like nobodies business but he can’t actually work. As I read the poems following that one I just kept thinking about the wouldn’t/couldn’t aspect. Maybe that’s not going deep enough but you can tell it hit me.

I was also really intrigued by the Thylias Moss’s Video Poams. They’re not something I have any experience with. They reminded me of the kinds of videos that play in the movies when they want you to know that the character is wacked out. They usually say, “Look at what this kid made.” and then they show you a video that looks like these. What makes them so interesting though is that they really bring into question this whole idea of, is a poem only a poem if it’s on the page. Take the first video Bubbling. It came with an attachment of one of the poems that is included in the video. We can see in the printed page that there is a lot of intention in the words and look of the poem that, it seems to me, gets lost in the video. We also realize that the video is essentially a few poems sewn together to create one poem and a poem that is seen and heard rather than simply read. I was struggling really hard to see what the words actually said in the video (though it was rather small and I’m rather blind) and it forces you to listen really closely to the voice that’s reading them. I’ve listened to the video several times now and I’m still not sure I picked up on every line. It makes you wonder what the intention of putting all these poams together is. Obviously there is something about bubbles and roundness that is important but why put them together in this way when they have been put in the print form already. It really pushes your perception of what poetry really is and also at the intention of poetry in general is. Is poetry words written on a page, or is it about what can be read or heard, or is it about being visual? And why can’t it be all those things and more like it is in these videos? Watching these videos really brought up the question of my own work because as I watched them I could accept that someone somewhere thought of them as poetry but I myself had trouble viewing them that way which bothered me. How often do people try and put my work in to a box say it’s not this, it’s that and then move on? I didn't want to do that with this work and I think what helps is this deliberate spelling of Poam. Now what that necessarily means I don’t know and maybe I’m reading too much into it but the label does make it easier to accept (how ridiculous is that!). The one thing I can say about these poams is that they really allow the writer a lot of control over the viewer (I don’t feel comfortable saying reader here). The Meditation on Dada for instance is really deliberate about when the lines come out, which column they are in and on which line they should be read. The viewer sees the poam the way the writer truly intended unlike with a print poem where the reader may understand what your going for but may get tripped up by having read something further down or something. With the video, you only see what the author wants you too. The only distractions are distractions that they themselves have created and when meditated upon can probably be seen as adding to the work.

Its seems like most of what we read this week was about cultural navigation and I think it’s interesting that when we read the work of POC’s that becomes the link between them. We are all always trying to figure out how to get through the day, what we have to give up or share in order to do that (ref. June Jordan’s Love Song about Choosing Your Booze) and also what get’s taken from us or given to us by other cultures (ref. Michael Harper’s To Mammy and James Welch’s Harlem, Montana. Just Off the Reservation). I hope we get to talk about this in class some. I’d cover more here but I have to go to work. See you all Tuesday!