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reflections on the world

On Poetry as Science

One piece of prose floating from the fading memory I have from reading Czeslaw Milosz’s Visions from San Francisco Bay occasionally come back to haunt me in my still moments. It asks amidst a whole lot of other questions what the purpose of words are beyond their ability to convey meanings. In one recent interview with Stephen Colbert, Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson compares the inconsequentiality of our presence on this planet to that of a billion (and some) bacteria living in the walls of our intestines whose number is equal to almost three times the number of all human life that ever existed and died. Like those bacteria, he suggests, who live without the mental capability of understanding the dimension of their inconsequentiality when compared to six billion other intestines walking the earth (with the multibillion units of bacteria they carry in them), we may not possess the mental flexibility to understand our insignificance (along with our equally possible random relevance as evidenced by our current existence).

Milosz asks as if to himself what makes it so that words, in their utmost insignificance beyond immediate use, lends themselves to entendres, rhyme and poetry. Did there exist on some magical plane a predestination for the word “apple” to become the symbol of ultimate taboo, pleasure and sin? In which realm of serendipity did “gain” and “pain” acquire the paradox of their rhyming complementarity. Sure computers may not write poems now (and I have no doubt that this is false), but the lexical matrix of today’s world endows us with a gazillion ways of expressing thoughts in inventive ways. The order in which I have written the last couple of sentences in this post (with almost a 100% certainty) is an order in which these words have never ever been arranged and never will anymore by anyone else. There is something to that. The process of writing poetry, for me, taps into the science of this randomness. The art resides in the chance of success – that moment when meaning, form, and words meet at the tip of the writer’s hands. See below:

I balanced all, brought all to mind,

The years to come seemed waste of breath,

A waste of breath the years behind

In balance with this life, this death.

from W.B. Yeats’ An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

This concise beauty, and an underlying deceptive simplicity that wows, has always defined for me one of writing’s unreachable bars; the place where science, art and meaning collide with the earnest needs of the present.

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On Poetry as Science was published on December 9th, 2011, with the tags , , , , , , , under the Art, Observations, Opinion, Soliloquy category. There are currently 1 comment on this article so far.

Occupation Blues

Open window peers into a blue evening through tiny louvre slits,

removed, it seems, from floods around the Nile and the Hudson,

Mississippi, Missouri and Victoria and other throbbing tributaries.

 

Open veins of revolt, serrated slivers of soul across the landscape

as far as eyes could see: a finger in the pupil of the surly present.

“Occupy this,” morning calls, blue with equal promises of dawn.

 

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Occupation Blues was published on November 20th, 2011, with the tags , , , , under the Observations, Soliloquy category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

Poetry Reading…

Hanging out with writers and poets at a cafe downtown last night…

The open-mic poetry reading was sponsored by the English Language and Literature Association. Poets and readers include Jason Braun, David Rawson, Geoff Schmidt and others. Earlier in the day was a similar event at the school library featuring Eugene B. Redmond, the Poet Laureate of East St. Louis.

I read four unpublished poems.

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Poetry Reading… was published on November 18th, 2011, with the tags , , , , under the adventures, Art, Fun category. There are currently 6 comments on this article so far.

Across from me, Dawning.

Waking up to the soft silence of fall, there is a magic unspoken. Trees bob light heads in the kindness of the wind. Yellow leaves blow around a once lonely place. The ground lay spread on a terrace of rust. Through the solid glass where the traveller looks out into the backyard, the season floats in the air like a dream of a faraway land. The snap, crackle of dry broken stems could only break the silences. They rarely shake the shape of the morning out of the serene lure of its affection. Morning breaks into the rote of rust. It brings with it silence, crackles of dry slivers of life across the dawning day.

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Across from me, Dawning. was published on November 14th, 2011, with the tags , , , , , under the Observations, Soliloquy category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

Halfway to Sixty

Seeking time comes often to a rote around edges of reason, my friend,

when tomorrow moves away from reach into the lengths of a near past.

It is not just the distance of time and space, or memory, but what portends

In-between the fast changing chords of our once rhyming flat bombasts.

Look at it here: movements, shapes, forms, people, hope, desires, and lusts,

And pleasing exuberance circling within one spot of deferred dreams.

So we wonder restlessly where all the time went. We trade masks that must

Hold fears within claypots of growth. We howl our tears into the stream.

We don’t own then, it seems, balms that soothe with scents of silent mimesis,

Else we would sway with wine bags in reclined poses, seconds spent to please,

Which held us then when time favoured the pockets of our scant playfulnesses.

We would not wonder where they went, days spent sprawled in the shades of ease.

It could be only relief that mischief remains, and love’s comfort in the end,

To sew a new tapestry, and to daily, patiently mend. It was never ours to rend.

___________________________

Being too lazy to write a new pre-birthday poem, this will have to do it for the last day of my twenties.

Edited, from Dec 2009.

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Halfway to Sixty was published on September 21st, 2011, with the tags , , , under the Uncategorized category. There are currently 2 comments on this article so far.

CFN: Nominate African poets for Poetry Parnassus at the Olympics

Date: 5 July 2011

The Southbank Centre in London will host the Poetry Parnassus festival during the Olympics in London, featuring one poet from each competing country in the Olympics (about 205 in total). Please nominate poets from competing African countries for this festival. Nominations for up to three poets are invited; the deadline is July 22nd, 2011.

http://ticketing.southbankcentre.co.uk/about-us/discover-and-do/poetry-parnassus

(deadline: 22 July 2011)
—

Cross-posted from H-SAfrica (h-safrica@h-net.msu.edu>.

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CFN: Nominate African poets for Poetry Parnassus at the Olympics was published on July 6th, 2011, with the tags , , under the Art category. There are currently 1 comment on this article so far.

America Tonight (visuals)

As a guest of the S.P.E.A.C (Students/Professors Exploring All Cultures) club at SIUE last month, I read a couple of (in-progress as well as already published) works to a small but diverse audience in the Willows Room. Here’s me reading America Tonight and sharing a little background story.

 

The poem itself was first blogged here, and later published here. Enjoy

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America Tonight (visuals) was published on May 13th, 2011, with the tags , , , , , , under the Art, Opinion, Travelling category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

Re: “Drumvoices Revue” #17

TO: All Media, Poets & Writers, Readers/Students/Lovers of Poetry, Aspiring Poets, Literati
FROM: “Drumvoices Revue”/SIUE English Dept./EBR Writers Club: 618 650-3991; Email: eredmon@siue.edu; Fax: 618 650-3509

Call: “Kwansabas” for Special 20th Anniversary Issue of Journal

Kwansaba example #1: To Godson Sekou: a Kwansabas for Your 18th Birthday

I entrust to you our past, never
fully passed, dressed in royalty & poverty,
a symfony of koras & Zoras, war-
prepped prayers & def jams of bondage,
Nia-driven duties, a pyramid named Asa,
a motif known as Malcolm &, finally,
Sekou, a land of juju called Medu.
–
EBR/2010, from MS

“Drumvoices Revue: A Confluence of Literary, Cultural & Vision Arts” is issuing a “call” for the “kwansaba,” a 49-word poetic form created in East St. Louis, Illinois during the Eugene B. Redmond Writers Club’s 1995 season. The kwansaba
is a layer of sevens: seven lines, seven words per line, and seven letters (or fewer) per word. (Exceptions to the seven-letter rule are proper nouns and foreign terms.) If used as stanzas in a poem, each kwansaba should also have a
stand-alone life. Accepted kwansabas will appear in Drumvices Revue’s 20th Anniversary issue #17 (Fall 2011). Hundreds of examples/discussions of the form can be accessed via online search engines and previous issues of DR which have featured kwansabas devoted to Katherine Dunham, Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Maya Angelou, Miles Davis, Jayne Cortez, Quincy Troupe and others.

Kwansaba example #2: Song of Sister Maya

From God’s amazing peace rises a choir
of caged birds, the leader’s private song
flung up to heaven like a paean
on the pulse of morning. Hallelujah, the
heart of this woman, taking nothing for
her journey, says if you’re singin’, wingin’
and swingin’, sit at the welcome table.

–Marie A. Celestin (Young), from “Drumvoices” #15, 2007

Themes/focuses: 1. “2011” as it arches East St. Louis’ Sesquicentennial (150th year) re: the city’s historical impact on the bi-state area (Illinois/Missouri), Midwest, nation and globe (e.g., the 1917 race riots). 2. The 25th birthday of the EBR Writers Club, which has co-published “Drumvoices” with Southern Illinois University Edwardsville since 1991 (Club namesake has been poet laureate of ESL for 35 years). 3. “1926,” year of ESL Native Son Miles Davis’ birth (he’s 85!) and the co-writing/recording of “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo” by Duke Ellington, one of MD’s idols.  4. Other East St. Louisans who created their way out of “no way,” including Harry Edwards, Lillian and Dorothy Gish, LaFonso Ellis, Dawn Harper, William Holden, Leon Thomas, Darryl Phinnessee, Donald McHenry, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Katherine Dunham, Sherman Fowler, Barbara Ann Teer, James Rosser, the Hudlin Brothers, Ike & Tina Turner. (See attached “TALKIING POINTS” re: East St. Louis Sesquicentennial.) 5. The Sesquicentennial of the beginning of the Civil War. 6. The Centennial of Romare Bearden. 7. The 80th birth year of Toni Morrison.  8. The 45th birthday of Kwanzaa.  9. Writers Club patron saint Henry Lee Dumas (1934-1968) whose fiction and poetry Morrison helped champion into posthumous print—and whom she and critic Clyde Taylor referred to a “genius.” 10. Any of the Club Trustees
(listed below) or combination of themes/focuses noted above.

Kwansaba example #3: Kwansaba for Quincy

Come from a place of truth widdit
Smoke it lika fast ball neath dachin
Bringit bringit high & hard, wit command,
Cause it all depends u being on
Yr game, strut yo stuff, but be
Down widdit, baby, bringit high, low, calm
Come from a place of truth widdit
–Michael Castro, “Drumvoices” #15, 2007

Send kwansabas via Email—MS Word (.doc file type)–to eredmon@siue.edu–by JULY 1. Hard copies may also be sent to Editor: “Drumvoices Revue,” English Dept./Box 1431, SIUE, Edwardsville, Illinois 62026; or to EBR Writers Club, P.O. Box 6165, East St. Louis, Illinois 62202. Telephone: (618) 650-3991. (Include a two-sentence bio and a physical mailing address.) Trustees of the Club, which meets September-May, include Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka, Avery Brooks, Haki R. Madhubuti, Walter Mosley, Quincy Troupe, Jerry Ward Jr., and Lena J. Weathers. The late Margaret Walker Alexander (1915-1998), Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000), Raymond Patterson (1929-2001) and Barbara Ann Teer (1937- 2008) were also trustees. Founded in 1986, the group was chartered by Fowler,Roy and EBR.

Kwansaba example #4: Calling your name

for richard wright

rich in the sadness of our times
harsh again the dark storms we weather
our boys, our men hemmed by hate—
your black rites call across these years.
your hand sure in calling forth truth
writes black boys into men of honor
makes us richer, guides us toward light
–devorah major, “Drumvoices” #16, 2008

Kwansaba example #5: For Katherine Dunham

(Inspired by “A Touch of Innocence” and “Island  Possessed”)

Come here lost child of Nan Guinee
Come away, spin free of the dust
Away from Bluff Street, and the wheel
Move arms, move legs, coax bad knees
Dance in wedded union with the earth
Carry Thunder, carry Shango, carry me—Home
To Haiti on breath freer than air.
–Mali Newman, “Drumvoices” #12, 2004

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Re: “Drumvoices Revue” #17 was published on May 4th, 2011, with the tags , , , , , under the Art category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

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