The Best American Poetry

The Complete Works of Frank Zappa -- an American composer (1940-1993) (Part 2) [by Lewis R. Saul]

RELEASES #14-27 (1972-1979) 

14. Just Another Band From L.A. (LP, Bizarre/Reprise MS 2075, March 26, 1972)

There is no incarnation of any Zappa band that did not incorporate large doses of FZ-humor into its regular repertoire. However, over the years, this band has come to be known as "Zappa's Comedy Group." In fact, other than a short appearances on #11, this "Flo & Eddie band" was integral on only three releases (this one, and the previous two [including the film], and a few "post-mortem" releases) ... but if the hard-core early Zappa fans stubbornly refused to give this band a chance -- they missed out on a quite a bit of incredible music!

"Billy the Mountain" is a classic. This edit stitches together several performances seamlessly and the end result is a powerful 25-minute masterpiece. (CC: compare the versions on Release #60 and 91).

"Call Any Vegetable" gets a unique treatment with a Gustav Holst quote thrown in for good measure, which cleverly segues into an historic high-octane guitar solo.

15. Waka/Jawaka (LP, Bizarre/Reprise MS 2094, July 5, 1972)

With good reason, FZ put the words "HOT RATS" on the faucet handles. This is a sort of follow-up to the '69 masterpiece; it is an all-studio album, but it is also quite different than Hot Rats. There is no Ian Underwood, no Ponty or Sugarcane Harris.

Zappa had been thrown off a stage in London by a crazed fan and was severely injured. He recuperated by creating two new masterpieces.

"Big Swifty" (17:22) features an amazing five-piece band (FZ, guitar & percussion / Tony Duran, slide guitar / George Duke, ring-modulated & echoplexed electric piano / Sal Marquez, many trumpets & chimes / Erroneous [Alex Dmochowski], electric bass / and Aynsley Dunbar, drums) with tons of overdubs. The initial melody, stomps out an insistent seven, dissolving into long -- but never boring -- solos by Marquez and FZ.

"Your Mouth" (3:12) is hilarious. By now, Zappa's producing abilities were enhancing his compositional skills -- like the weird little musical snippets which accompany the vocals here -- and creating an end product that sounds both slick and shockingly original.

"It Just Might Be a One-Shot Deal" (4:16) features FZ on "electric bed springs." The lyrics -- something about a frog with a satchel -- are partially recited with a Russian accent. This is wonderfully obtuse.

"Waka/Jawaka" (11:19). Nine musicians make this track sound like a full big band! Masterful music with never a dull moment, despite the track's length.

16. The Grand Wazoo (LP, Bizarre/Reprise MS 2093, November 27, 1972)

As Zappa's injuries healed, he rehearsed this large ensemble from his wheelchair, and began pondering the idea of taking this current band on the road -- which he ultimately did for two very brief tours at the tail end of 1972 (see Charles Ulrich: Big Band Projects of 1972). The five tracks on this record are all suberb -- the final one "Blessed Relief" (about pain meds, I heard once -- but it might have referred to the time when he could finally stop taking the pills -- he hated taking drugs in any form, other than coffee and cigarettes) has become something of a jazz standard, with its lilting 3/4 melody and rich 9th-chord harmonies. 

17. Over-Nite Sensation (LP, DiscReet MS 2149, September 7, 1973)

Many people believe -- and sales would probably verify -- that the next four releases constitute the finest period in the entire oeuvre. It would be hard to argue otherwise. These are four slickly produced studio albums (Roxy is live, of course) played by some of the finest studio musicians in the world.

This seven-track release is stitched together like a thousand-dollar suit. What sound like relatively simplistic "pop songs" are carefully tailored charts, using Zappa's sophisticated musical language in new and unusual ways (for example: the dirty blues feel he achieves with syncopated flat-sevens; the cute musical fills in tight rhythmic spaces, etc.)

"For According to Our Mother You're Our Father"

(hat tip to Scott Sommer for sharing this on facebook)

The Map of His Dreams [by Lera Auerbach]

 

My father never asks for directions.

Even when he’s lost – he looks quite confident.

He spends long hours studying his collection of maps.

If it’s not in the map – its existence is doubtful.

 

My mother asks everyone for directions,

even when she knows well where she’s going,

even if she is just two blocks from her house.

She looks like a lost child, waiting to be found,

not yet panicking, but on the verge of tears.

 

My father likes the smell of his old car,

its obedient noises, familiar caprices.

He feels it’s the only thing left where

he’s still in control, while all else is slipping

and moving away. He can’t stand it if someone

else is driving. Without his car – 

life loses its meaning.

 

My mother goes to sleep early,

she will sleep soundly until the morning.

He watches her curled in the bed, fixes the blanket.

He sits in the armchair, a book on his lap,

thinking of driving to some unknown sight;

traveling there, he is dozing off,

his mouth opened and nose looking

as if it belonged to someone else –

in his sleep he is drawing 

the map of his dreams. 

The Complete Works of Frank Zappa -- an American Composer (1940-1993) (Part 1) [by Lewis R. Saul]

Next week will mark the 47th anniversary of Frank Zappa's first release, Freak Out! (#01)* (June 27, 1966).

On December 12th, 2012, Gail Zappa released Finer Moments (#94), a beautifully-packaged double-CD of music from 1969-1972. To date, this is the 94th "Official Release" in the Frank Zappa catalogue. (The term "official release" is used to distinguish the recognized canon from bootleg recordings, live shows taped by fans, compilation albums, etc.) 

In addition to the 94 LPs and CDs, Zappa directed two amazing full-length films (200 Motels [1971] and Baby Snakes [1979]); wrote two books (Them or Us [1984] and The Real Frank Zappa Book [1989]); produced numerous video compilations and played literally thousands of live concerts between 1966 and 1988.

Thus the term “project/object,” which refers to the whole shebang: music (live and studio), films, books, interviews, public appearances, etc. The PO is held together by the musical, lyrical and Dadaistic connections of FZ’s universal language. Poodles, dental floss, the tritone, a gas mask, naughty televangelists – it all figures into the mysterious, ethereal world that Frank Zappa created, nurtured and produced over an approximately 35-year period.

Zappa used the term conceptual continuity to define the inner workings of his Project/Object. CC has a variety of usages in the FZ universe.

For example, chronologically, the word "poodle" is first used on a track entitled "The Purse" from the posthumous 2005 release, Joe's Xmasage (#75). (In the liner notes, Gail says that "there are over 19,321 clues in this one.")

Al Surratt is reading a letter from some girl out loud to Zappa:

'Guess what? I have a French poodle. That's right.

A pedigree. Apricot champagne French poodle. He was given to me as a present, gift from a man who raises them. He was repaying me for a flavor I did him once. I named the dog Duchamp, with a long A. He sure is a cute thing, and I -- and so well-behaved. He is six months old. I wish you could have see him. He is the prettiest color. George just loves him. And he is trying to spoil him something awful. Sometimes I feel he comes over just to see the dog.'

'We are doing real good in football so far. We played Burroughs last Friday for our first league game. And beset them.'

From that 1963 tape onwards, there are 16 additional and separate references to poodles on other releases, plus the title of Ben Watson's mighty tome, "The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play."

2. #14. (1972) On the high-energy remake of "Call Any Vegetable," Flo & Eddie engage in this brief rap over a repeating vamp:

You know, a lot of people don't bother about their friends in the vegetable kingdom. They, think, "What can I say?" Sometimes they think, "Where can I go?" / Where can I go to get my poodle clipped in Burbank? /. At Ralph's vegetarian poodle clippin', where you can come this ...

3. #17. (1973) In the original three-minute "Dirty Love," Zappa as narrator sings:

Give me
Your dirty love
Just like your mama
Make her fuzzy poodle do

4. #18. (1974) The "Stink-Foot" outro repeats the

poodle bites / the poodle chews it ...

section from "Dirty Love."

5. #19. (1974) On "Cheepnis," the poodle is named: Frunobulax -- a movie monster!

6. #52. (1974) In Helsinki, the poodle became Frenchie.

7-9. #70/#86/#59. (1976-1977) "The Poodle Lecture" preceded "Dirty Love" in concert, usually with the assistance of visual aids, as Frank would explain it all for his rapt audience.

10. #37. (1977) "They stole my poodle from last ..." screams a deranged fan into the microphone during "Disco Boy." (Most likely, the guy was referring to the stuffed poodle toys that Zappa used to explain things in "The Poodle Lecture.")

11-12. #34/#80. (1980) "Mudd Club." This reference deserves an extended quote. Zappa's voice is electronically modulated:

Try it on a Saturday 'bout four o'clock in the mornin' 
Or even a Monday at midnight 
When there's just a few of those
Fabulous Poodles 
Doin' the Peppermint Twist for real 
In a black sack dress with nine inch heels 
And then a guy with a blue mohawk comes in 
In Serious Leather . . . 
(And all the rest of whom for which 
To whensonever of partially indeterminate 
Bio-chemical degradation 
Seek the path to the sudsy yellow nozzle 
Of their foaming nocturnal 
Parametric digital whole-wheat inter-faith 
Geo-thermal terpsichorean ejectamenta)

13-15. #40/#54/#67. (1984) "In France"

Now we cannot wait
(Wait wait waiting) 
Till we go back
(Wait wait waiting) 
Gets so exciting
(Wait wait waiting) 
When the poodles 'react'
In France

16. #62. (1993) How fitting that this one last poodle reference made its way onto this track on this magnificent FZ release -- the last one before his death -- for which the complete lyrics are as follows:

'Food Gathering In Post-Industrial America, 1992'

When the last decrepit factory
Has dumped its final load of toxic waste into the water supply
And shipped its last badly manufactured,
Incompetently designed consumer-thing,
We gaze in astonishment
As the denizens of NU-PERFECT AMERICA dine on rats,
Poodles,
Styrofoam packing pellets,
All floating in a broth of tritium-enriched sewage,
Roasting the least-diseased body parts of abandoned 'wild children'
(Accumulating since the total ban on abortion a few years back)

Similar musical connections can likewise be made from era to era; the music from this single line in "Fembot in a Wet T-Shirt" from Joe's Garage, Act I (#28):

I know you want someone to show you some tit!

is re-used as the initial motive which begins Zappa's greatest orchestral work, "Mo 'N Herb's Vacation" (#38).

Quotes from Stravinsky, Holst and even Tchaikovsky adorn some pieces, while "The Sailor's Hornpipe" is just as likely to show up in some marginal musical space as the "Entry of the Gladiators (Thunder and Blazes)" by Julius Fučík (1872-1916) -- written in 1897.

For our purposes, think of Zappa’s work as one big lifetime-long composition. This week, I will attempt to deconstruct that work into its sub-units, the 94 “Official Releases.”

For a good history of FZ’s life before 1966, the Wikipedia article is a good place to start.

Infinite Jest, Unjust Thrust? [by Jeremiah West]

What is wrong with this sentence from the June 3 issue of The Nation?
<<<
In her introduction to the catalog [of Infinite Jest, a show about political cartoons at the Metropolitan Musuem of Art two years ago], curator Constance McPhee proposed that the pieces in the exhibiton were hardly related to contemporary cartooning and caricature because they were "usually conceived with greater seriousness of purpose" -- as if cutting down to size Napoleon, Louis-Philippe and Boss Tweed was a more noble calling than eviscerating Hitler, Nixon, Kissinger, Thatcher, and sundry other modern despots and miscreants.
>>>
What is wrong with this sentence? In a word -- the commas.
Orwell, who had no patience for cant on either side of the political divide, would have, well, eviscerated the conclusion of this sentence for its cheap use of Hitler comma Nixon comma Kissinger comma Thatcher, each name linking the name before it and the one following it, in a feat of rhetorical guilt by association, such that the extraordinary distance between the first and the last in the series gets erased. But, then, any list beginning with Hitler should make us skeptical..
"Rhetoric," as Professor Austerlitz used to say, "is magic, and when the conjuror lets you see the trick, you know you're in mountebank country."
Orwell would have addressed the relation of dishonesty to rhetoric in this sentence before castigating it on moral grounds. He might have noted that, in the matter of caricatures, some figures are more equal than others. But moral grounds and "value judgments" are suspect categories these days, and the cunning linguist may find, in an ugly quote, a useful guide to the opinions that right-minded people are expected to hold.
-- Jeremiah West

"Do Husbands Matter?" [by David Lehman]

<<<
Collaboration between poets and their peers in poetry and painting is a crucial element of modernism and of avant-garde art in general, and it’s a prized feature of the New York School. John Ashbery wrote a novel, A Nest of Ninnies, alternating sentences with James Schuyler. Kenneth Koch got Ashbery to collaborate with him on zany poems with detailed and arbitrary requirements. A show consisting largely of Frank O’Hara’s collaborations with painters opened in Los Angeles in 1999 and traveled the next summer to New York. For these writers, collaborating was, in a way, their model of friendship.

The more than 60 paintings Jane Hammond has created since embarking on her “John Ashbery Collaboration”—works that seem to me inexhaustible as objects of vision and contemplation—attest to the extraordinary power that artistic friendship can have in the genesis of works of art. Back in June 1993, Jane asked John to come up with titles for paintings that she would then make. A week later he faxed her the list. It took him (he later wrote) about four minutes to make a list of 44 titles. That’s 11 titles every 60 seconds. And these titles are anything but pedestrian; Ashbery casually produced some of the wildest appellations this side of Wallace Stevens, titles like No One Can Win at the Hurricane Bar, Lobby Card, Bread and Butter Machine, The Hagiography of This Moment, Contra-Zed, A Parliament of Refrigerator Magnets and Do Husbands Matter? I liked the last one (and the painting it inspired) so much that I wrote this poem:

Do Husbands Matter?
for Jane Hammond

At the vital center the fool holds a candle
like a pious medieval donor
in one hand, a feather in the other
but look he has more than two hands
I count seven it's as if this were
a Hindu tarot card wishbone in one
a heart some gems a horseshoe a mask
and a globe in the belly how does one read that
for read it one must, not chaos but a rebus
of my life or yours stares you in the face
scratched on the walls of my cabin where
I left messages for others to write over
it's a scratched itch and a door into a hallway
where stands a row of grandfather clocks
that don't tell time in this dream of a cello
in the corner where function follows form
and girls with dolls assemble a still life
with fallen candles on the highway a black car

>>>

Read my interview with Jane Hammond, along with reproductions of some of her paintings, in the Faul 2002 issue of Bomb   -- DL

Final Blog: The Persona Poem. Veronica Golos

This is my final blog, (and just when I’ve gotten used to it!).  I’d like to thank Molly Peacock for suggesting me to Stacey Harwood, Managing Editor of Best American Poetry blog, and for allowing me the space to write some of my thoughts.

To come full circle, I have been thinking about the uses of Persona poems.  Persona poems are an invitation to speak in the voice of an imagined other, like acting, you enter the character, but it is the YOU the poet/actor who enters, and takes on or adds the persona.  It is a possession of sorts. 

The persona was the mask worn by an actor in Greek drama.  The actor is the god, and conscribed by the story, but through the ask may reveal a deeper view.  Masquerades carnivals employ a similar masking—a place where one can be free to be one’s self – without the use of the “I.”

The use of the term “persona” (as distinct from “author”) stresses that the speaker is part of the fictional creation, invented for the author’s particular purposes in a given literary work.(1) 

I think that teaching the persona poem to emerging fiction writers, as well as to poets, would do service to both in developing “character” – that is, a character in a story, as well as our own “character”, as it gives us an exercise in empathy and analysis – it offers an opportunity to enter the “other.”

In my first book, A Bell Buried Deep, (Story Line Press), the original framework was the biblical story of Sarah and Hagar, brought through American slavery as Sara and Harriet, following the framework of the slave native by Harriet Jacobs; and in the Coda, I place the two women in the mythic present in Coney Island, NY, as Sadie and Hattie. Using a “frame” that is, an already-told /or known story, gave me license, paradoxically enough, to enter more deeply into the characters, my imaging of them.  I think the “frame” also gives the writer a chance to contradict or deepen the stories that everyone thinks they know.  Telling the story from a different slant. Upending people’s assumptions.  And, our own.  

It is a practice too of compassion, empathy, imaginative impulse.

Another reason a writer might choose to use a mask, or persona, in her poetry is the issue of power and politics. A writer might choose to use a persona for the subversive remaking of narratives.

To end, I would like to list a number of persona poetry books that I think are outstanding, just off the cuff (there are SO many more) and in no particular order:

Patricia Smith’s, Blood Dazzler, Coffee House Press.  In the voice of Hurricane Katrina.

Cornelius Eady, Brutal Imagination, Putnam. Narrated by the Black kidnapper invented by Susan Smith to cover up the killing of her two small sons.

Anna Rabinowtiz, The Wanton Sublime, Tupelo Press. Narrative of the Annunciation.

A Van Jordan, Macnolia, Norton. In the voices of MacNolia Cox and John Montiere.

C.D. Wright, One Big Self, Copper Canyon Press. Voices of prisoners in Louisiana Prisons.

Veronica Golos, A Bell Buried Deep, StoryLine Press, to be reissued by Tupelo Press. Biblical story of Sarah and Hagar.

Thylias Moss, Slave Moth, Persea Books. In the voice of an enslaved Black woman.

Lucille Clifton, The Book of Light, Copper Canyon Press. Variety of mythical and biblical voices.

Cleopatra Mathis, What To Tip The Boatman?, Sheep Meadow Press. Demeter and Persephone.

Gregory Orr, Orpheus & Eurydice, A Lyric Sequence, Copper Canyon Press.

Pascale Petit, What the Water Gave Me. Poems After Frida Kahlo. Seren Press.

Penelope Scanbly Schott, A is for Anne. Mistress Hutchinson Disturbs the Common-wealth, A Narrative Poem. Turning Point Press.

Louise Gluck, The Wild Iris, The Ecco Press. Flowers speak in Eden.

Rachel Zucker, Eating in the Underworld, Wesleyan University Press. Persephone and Demeter.

(1) and (2): Jeannine Hall Gailey: Why We Wear Masks: http://www.poemeleon.org/gailey-why-we-wear-masks-essay/

 

Whither the Humanities: Harvard Rethinks the Canon (and Expects no Tanks)

Declining numbers of students majoring in the humanities have led Harvard to reconsider its academic poilicies.

<<<
With a recently released report, Harvard University has weighed in on the crisis of the humanities, offering some surprising diagnoses. Mapping the Future is a thoughtful statement, crafted diplomatically in the hope of reassuring the often-fractious humanities community, while laying the groundwork for a potentially significant reconstruction of humanities education.

Declining humanities majors worry the Harvard faculty. In 1954, 36 percent of undergraduates at Harvard and Radcliffe College majored in the humanities. By 2012, that figure had fallen to 20 percent. Yet Harvard does fairly well when compared to national figures, which show a decline from 14 percent humanities B.A.’s awarded in 1966 to a mere 7 percent in 2010.

Clearly majoring in the humanities has long been an anomaly for American undergraduates, even at Harvard, which means that the protestations we hear today that the humanities are the heart of the university or that our democracy needs the humanities are factually inaccurate. Still, it is surely fair for humanities faculty members to ask how they might attract more students.

* * *

Bolder, however, than the rejection of departmental tunnel vision is the report’s call to revisit the canon. It’s not that the report tries to reopen the culture wars. Far from it: Harvard’s analysis does not mandate a great-books list, and it certainly does not eliminate room for revisionism and diversity.

Yet the report does suggest that the marginalization of the great works of the erstwhile canon has impoverished the humanities, making them less attractive to students. To correct that would involve “teaching only works whose transmission in our classrooms we consider vitally important.” That is a direct challenge to the canon critics, even if the report refrains from naming those important works.

* * *

The most explosive element in the report’s diagnosis of the humanities’ malaise is embedded in its map of three competing interpretive traditions: philology, with its critical hermeneutics of suspicion, a philosophical aesthetics of appreciation, and a romanticism of identity and engagement. This masterful but highly stylized intellectual history demonstrates the diversity of the humanities—a big tent, so to speak—but it also allows the report to assert, with all due caution, that the disproportionate visibility of the critical and suspicious strand, with its exclusive focus on culture’s complicity in domination, has contributed to the decline in student interest.

The report struggles with this point but eventually makes its way through to an unexpected confession: “Those of us committed to criticism as critique might recognize a kernel of truth in conservative fears about the left-leaning academy. Among the ways we sometimes alienate students from the humanities is the impression they get that some ideas are unspeakable in our classrooms.”

>>>
From "Humanist: Heal Thyself" by Stanford professor Russell A. Berman in The Chronicle of Higher Eduction. For more, click here.

Samples of exile and hope in Occupied Iraqi and Palestinian poetry, Veronica Golos

“It is not the soil that is occupied…colonialism has settled itself in the very center of the…individual, and has undertaken a sustained work of cleanup, of expulsion of self…there is not occupation of territory on the one hand, and independence of persons on the other.  It is the country as a whole, its history, its daily pulsation that are contested, disfigured, in the hope of a final destruction.  Under these conditions, the individual’s breathing is an observed, an occupied breathing. It is a combat breathing.”

Iraq? Afghanistan? Palestine? No. But it could be.  This is Frantz Fanon writing about the French in Algeria, in his book, A Dying Colonialism, 1965.

So, someone reading this might say, what does this have to do with Best American Poetry?  With poetry at all?  Fannon knew what he was speaking about. His books are still read for the clarity of his understanding of colonialism, occupiers and the occupied.

Poetry can be a rebellion, a refusal to allow occupation of the soul.  Rebellion to the occupiers themselves.

When I wrote Vocabulary of Silence, (Red Hen Press, 2011) it was from the stance of a witness-from-afar to the continued US war against Iraq and Afghanistan. I tried to examine in myself how that felt, what it meant to be living in the country that conducted, and took photos of, torture in Abu Ghraib, for instance.  Many of poems from Vocabulary of Silence have been translated into Arabic by poet and translator Nizar Sartawi, and have appeared in journals and newspapers throughout the Arab world, an honor to be sure. 

One must write what one must write.  For myself, I couldn’t bear what was going on without “doing” something.  Poetry and politics.  Political poetry.  What seems to be questionable in this country, that is, there seems to always be a challenge to those who write what is termed “political poetry,” in my limited experience of reading poets from the Arab world, particularly Iraq and Palestine, the division isn’t there. The assumption is, I believe, that the poets are the speakers for the people, (and for themselves as individuals) what happens to their country and the world, is matter for their poems -- and the poets are highly revered.  

Of course, Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish comes to mind.  His poems, “Identity Card” and “State of Seige” propelled him to international fame, and he was considered the voice of the Palestinians for most of his writing career. He exemplifies too, a theme, that for me, runs through so much of modern Arab poetry: the theme of exile. Here are some excerpts from Who Am I, without Exile?

Stranger on the river bank,

like the river, water binds me to your name.

Nothing brings me back from this distance

to the oasis: neither war nor peace.

Nothing grants me entry into the gospels.

Nothing. Nothing shines from the shores

of ebb and flow between the Tigris and the Nile….

What shall I do? What shall I do without exile

and the long night of gazing at the water?

This displacement and comment upon exile, and colonial occupation, is echoed in this excerpt of Iraqi poet Lateef Helmet’s, The Heart of a Woman:

The heart of a woman is the only country

That I can enter without a passport,

Where no policeman

Asks me for my card

Or searches my suitcase

Full of contraband joys

Forbidden poems

And delicious sorrows. 

The heart of a woman is the only country

That does not heap up heavy weapons

Nor force its citizens to fight its wars.

Iraqi poet Fawzi Karim circles the question of exile, even in one’s homeland, in his poem,

What Was my Choice??

One has learned to allow a tiny space in the head for contingency…

then you in one moment peel yourself of whom you love

and lone, dim-sighted, grope your way home,

the light of the street lamps heavier than darkness

---the burden of exile…memory.

 

Tantalizing ourselves with hope

shielding ourselves against…but the question in the middle

    of exiles suddenly…:

--What have you chosen?

The question of hope as both desired and feared, is echoed in Darwish’s famous poem, State of Seige:

Here, by the downslope of hills, facing the sunset

and time’s muzzle,

near gardens with severed shadows,

we do what the prisoners do,

what the unemployed do:

we nurture hope

 

And finally, excerpts from We Are Not Dead, by Iraqi poet Munthir Abdul-Hur:

…We go, every sunset, to the river

Carrying the coffins of our day

…We are not dead…

We compose our features,

Bandage our calendars,

Our disappointments…

We return to our hospitals

Lighting lamps of regret

…Where fold after fold,

The sea takes our dreams…

Our lifetimes are withered leaves

That launched an attack on the sun

And fell in flames.

The fire now licks at our names,

Sewn together with splinters.

What poetry can do, is to seize back our names, emblazon them on paper, and send poems out like messages in a bottle, or the folded paper boats with candles, set upon the water, in tribute to hope, endurance, peace and poetry.

 

 

Sources Used:

Mahmoud Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, Selected Poems, translated and edited by Minir Akash and Carolyn Forche, with Sinan Antoon and Amira El-Zein, University of California Press.

Mahoud Darwish, The Butterfly’s Burden, translated by Fady Joudah, Copper Canyon Press.

Fanon, Frantz, A Dying Colonialism, Evergreen Press.

Sadek Mohammed, Sohell Najm, Haider Al-Kabi, Dan Vech, editors and translators; Flowers of Flame, Unheard Voices of Iraq, Michigan State University Press, East Lansing.

Saadi Simawe, editor, Iraqi Poetry Today, Zephyrpress.

 

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Literary Appropriation? [by Veronica Golos]

Help me understand something. For the past dozen years or so, many students, particularly undergraduates, and throughout the country, have challenged me for writing in sympathy or portraying the plight of others not myself, particularly Native Hawaiians, Chinese detainees on Angel Island, Arab detainees in Guantanamo, African American blues and jazz artists. What is there in the current zeitgeist that proscribes literary acts of intellectual, imaginative, and emotional sympathy and solidarity? It seems mis-appropriation is a concern, as it is strongly implied in all the questioning I've received. Or, other times, I've heard my work faulted for its concentration on depicting the history of Japanese Americans and NOT taking up portrayals and sympathies with those more overtly oppressed. Is it that concern over a political and territorial area of contestation here has taken primacy over personal claims of compassion? What is up? Wilco-Tango-Foxtrot? --  Garrett Hongo ==  ttps://www.facebook.com/notes/garrett-hongo/literary-appropriation/491047991450

The paragraph above was a post on Facebook, a few weeks ago by poet Garrett Hongo.  My first thought was that this questioning by “young” people of a professor of color, of Japanese descent, was ignorance…I could only guess that the students who challenged poet Hongo were white…of course, he doesn’t say, and I don’t know.

Was the question one of poetics?  Does the topic of poems determine their validity, their grace or achievement?  Or, as Hongo asks, is the criticism about imaginative and emotional sympathy with others not “like” oneself? 

Perhaps students need to read more widely?  Take for example Patricia Smith’s poem, Skinhead. Here, a mature poet, African American woman, speaks in the voice of a white, male, Skinhead: 

They call me skinhead, and I got my own beauty.
It is knife-scrawled across my back in sore, jagged letters,
it’s in the way my eyes snap away from the obvious.
I sit in my dim matchbox,
on the edge of a bed tousled with my ragged smell,
slide razors across my hair,
count how many ways
I can bring blood closer to the surface of my skin.
These are the duties of the righteous,
the ways of the anointed.

Of course, when writing about “the other” appropriation is a concern. As Felecia Canton Garcia said in answer to Garret’s question, …” many people are (rightly) wary of anything that recalls minstrelsy. The history of appropriating and exploiting for profit is so deeply entrenched, I think that we are right to be aware of the subtlety of its operations as well. The problem seems to come when people fail to account for the extreme messiness and complexity of individual identity and the difference between caricature and character.” (my emphasis).

Certainly, if Hongo’s students read his work,  its subtlety and language, its developed “character” they would be assured that “mis-appropriateion” was not a problem. 

for example, in The Ledgend:

In Chicago, it is snowing softly
and a man has just done his wash for the week.
He steps into the twilight of early evening,
carrying a wrinkled shopping bag
full of neatly folded clothes,
and, for a moment, enjoys
the feel of warm laundry and crinkled paper,
flannellike against his gloveless hands.
There's a Rembrandt glow on his face,
a triangle of orange in the hollow of his cheek
as a last flash of sunset
blazes the storefronts and lit windows of the street.

He is Asian, Thai or Vietnamese,
and very skinny, dressed as one of the poor
in rumpled suit pants and a plaid mackinaw,
dingy and too large.

Poetry, poetry that moves me, more often than not, is one where yes, the self is examined, but examined in context. Self absorption is one thing; scrutiny and its component part, empathy, another.  Craft is the tool we use in order to more closely approximate the poem we see in our mind and imagination.  Compassion/passion, at least for me, is a necessary ingredient.

More on this tomorrow.