Where I’d like to start this 2005 Poetry Roundup is Iraq, as in, how did we get there and how do we get back? The consciousness-altering book of poems that tells the tale, in no uncertain terms and yet always via poetry, is the astonishing Land of My Daughters: Poems 1995-2005 (Black Bird Press) by Marvin X. Marvin X is the USA’s Rumi, and his nation is not “where our fathers died” but where our daughters live. The death of patriarchal war culture is his everyday reality.
X’s poems vibrate, whip, love in the most meta- and physical ways imaginable and un-. He’s got the humor of Pietri, the politics of Baraka, and the spiritual Muslim grounding that is totally new in English –- the ecstasy of Hafiz, the wisdom of Saadi. It’s not unusual for him to have a sequence of shortish lines followed by a culminating line that stretches a quarter page –- it is the dance of the dervishes, the rhythms of a Qasida.
“I am the black bird in love I fly with love I swoop into the ocean ands pluck the fish in the name of love oceans flow with love let the ocean wash me with love even the cold ocean is love this morning swim is love the ocean chills me with love from the deep come fish full of love” (from the opening poem, “In the Name of Love”)
“How to Love A Thinking Woman”:
“Be revolutionary, radical, bodacious
Stay beyond the common
Have some class about yaself
…
Say things she’s never heard before
Ihdina sirata al mustaquim
(guide us on the straight path)
Make her laugh til she comes in her panties
serious jokes to get her mind off the world.”
There are anthems (“When I’ll Wave the Flag/Cuando Voy a Flamear la Bandera”), rants (“JESUS AND LIQUOR STORES”), love poems (“Thursday”) and poems totally uncategorizable (“Dreamtime”). Read this one cover to cover when you’ve got the time to “Marry a Tree.”
Eliot Weinberger’s What Happened Here: The Bush Chronicles (New Directions) is a poet’s book when the time of poetry is done. Where to start with Iraq? Weinberger begins with the poets in the early days of Baghdad (including Abu al-Ala al-Ma’arri, 973-1052, who wrote a parody of the Qu’ran) and then moves to W’s first inauguration and an article in the New York Times which led Weinberger to write on 1/27/01 that a “principal concern” of the new Administration would be a “return to Iraq.” Simply, personally, succinctly, appallingly, Weinberger outlines the facts of the lies that have led us to the Hell that is Iraq. The resistible rise of GWB is described with horrifying clarity. The book to read to keep you fired up.
A beautiful book from Oyster Knife Publishing in Chicago celebrates the life and art of the greatly missed Oscar Brown Jr., one of the Fathers of Hip-Hop. What It Is brings together the poems he wrote for Cannonball Adderley (“Work Song” and “Dat Dere”), covered by Nina Simone. Also included: his classic “Watermelon Man,” a version of “Signifyin’ Monkey” and the two pieces that tore ‘em up on HBO Def Poetry: “This Beach” and “An Apology.” Reading these poems and thinking the pop songs and classic Broadway tunes that are “our” history makes you think, Whahoppin?
This is the year the Naropa Audio Archives gave us Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action (Coffee House Press), edited by Anne Waldman and Lisa Birman. Quite simply an Essential Text, full of great ideas, controversy, poetics –- you read Sonia Sanchez, Allen Ginsberg, Lorenzo Thomas, Gary Snyder all brilliantly “thinking aloud.” The truth is in the transcribing: what you have here is the pure orality laid down on the page, the Oral Tradition with all its repetitions, loops, ellipses, and praise –- the book is as much a History of Consciousness as it is The Conscience of History. Check Sister Sonia, whose opening “In This Place Called America” gives the history of African Americans through the lone voice of a woman who remembers everything. Just as....
