This is not a law firm. These are seven ways to dive into poetic learning, seven must-read writers:
E. Ethelbert Miller’s new book, How We Sleep on the Nights We Don’t make Love (Curbstone) makes a good case for his being Mayor of DC (he’s lived in Washington for years, where he professes and directs at Howard). The work is direct and atilt, politics lurks in love, they sing. When he reads, it’s song, too, a rev and rush into silence and thought.
devorah major is the current Poet laureate of San Francisco, and the SF Poets Laureate series that City Lights is putting out is another example of how forward Lawrence Ferlinghetti and City Lights are in defining US poetics. Beautiful books, this series hearkens back to the Pocket Poets Series, classics in a perfect back-pocket size that presaged the CD. Where River Meets Ocean includes her Inaugural Addess, an arresting blend of poetry, prose, rhetoric. She too has a Curbstone book: Street Smarts.
Amiri Baraka is “the Father of contemporary Black Literature,” the Beat poet LeRoi Jones, the former Poet Laureate of New Jersey who was ousted only when the State Legislature abolished that position, and still the newest kid on the block when he starts swinging with his controversial masterpiece, “Somebody Blew Up America,” woven into the strains of Monk’s Mysteriosoas performed by his band, Blue Ark. The rendition simply explodes with energy. In his midnight set at BPC he was joined, as usual, by his wife Amina who keens her way and bares her soul in her emotionally searing poems performed to jazz standards; and Dwight White, Amina’s brother, who croons beautifully and gives the whole evening a decidedly Small’s/Cotton Club feel. Herbie Morgan is the coolest tenor sax alive, Brian Smith keeps bass, and Rudy Walker led off with a drum prayer for Elvin (Jones). Spend a night with Amiri and Blue Ark when you can, and as for where to start with his written oeuvre, I’d say, start Now and Read Everything.
Kamau Brathwaite is Poet Laureate of the Caribbean. He is of the place and the sea and he is language in all forms natural which includes: cyberrealities. He is indescribable television -- try Trenchtown Rock (Lost Roads). His dialogue with Nathaniel Mackey, conVersations, and I’d start with his new book Words Need Love Too (House of Nehisi). At the Segue series he read a single long poem about the drum, invention of. He sat and read and thrummed the table ever so gently, a rain way back there somewhere. Simply stunning.
In between readings, Tuli Kupferberg dropped by to leave flyers (“My Country Went to Iraq and All I got was this Lousy T-Shirt”). Kupferberg is a comic poet anarchist Fug –- if you want the latest, visit him on the streets of Soho where he peddles his one-panel all-purpose one-size-fits-none cartoon poems. Get him to do a parasong (song using new and original lyrics set to an older, and generally popular, melody –- a Tuli neologism). You can hear his latest warblings (including the parasong, “Why Must I Be a Septuagenarian in Love” (which now must be updated to “octogenarian”) on The Fugs Last Album, Volume 1, and you can come across his amazing self-help books, 1,001 ways to Avoid the Draft or Make Love or Live Without Working, at yardsales across America.
Ed Hirsch is a fine, fine poet, an ambassador for poetry, and was recently appointed Director of the Guggenheim Foundation. His reading at BPC was offhand, serious, and plunged directly into madness and love and pain as if they were things you can talk about. Which Ed does, in his poetry. His newest book, Lay Back the Darkness, is a fine place to start; he’s at the top of his game. His How to Read a Poem (And Fall in Love with Poetry) is an education to itself. And the book he mentioned in his reading, John Clare’s Journey from Essex, has sent me off to new pleasures. Clare (1793-1864) struggled with madness –- and poetry –- his whole life.
Not a poet, but why not give props where props is due? Richard Price takes on the big subjects and gives them great stories to provoke mind workings, pleasure jilts, and rollicks. I.e., I think he’s great. Freedom Land, Clockers, his new Samaritan, and his first The Wanderers -– go! Plus his onstage discussion with screenwriter guru Barry Gifford was one of the most outrageous events the Club has ever heard.
