I gave a lecture on Langston Hughes at Marymount University yesterday. I'm scheduled to do 5 talks on the campus this year. The next one will be on the Black Arts Movement, November 1st.
I have four more weeks teaching my memoir class at the University of Houston/Victoria. I think it has gone well. Very positive feedback from the students.
I need to get ready for doing a new season of The Scholars (UDC-TV). It starts next week with an interview with Vera Katz.
Wednesday, September 28, 2016
Saturday, September 24, 2016
Fighting the Next Round
So I receive an award and folks say the recognition was long overdue. I don't know how to respond to this. At times I feel like Joe Louis standing in front of a hotel in Las Vegas shaking hands. I wonder whether it might have been better to be knockdown maybe years ago instead of being left standing without a punch. We should honor writers simply by reading their work. This morning I gave one of my books to a friend heading back to China. She held the book in her two hands and said she would cherish it. She spoke from the heart. Too few do these days. I wanted to hold her hands but I still had my gloves on.
Thursday, September 22, 2016
THE LIFE OF A POET: TERRANCE HAYES
Thursday, September 29, 7:00 PM
THE LIFE OF A POET: TERRANCE HAYES
THE LIFE OF A POET: TERRANCE HAYES
Poet Terrance Hayes will discuss his work with Ron Charles, editor of The Washington Post's Book World. This event is free and open to the public. Reservations are required. Co-sponsored by the Hill Center and The Washington Post.
Please click here for more information.
Sunday, September 18, 2016
E-Notes
100 emails I need to answer within the next 48 hours. I'm behind in a number of things, however still pushing forward. I completed my review of Clarence Major's Chicago Heat and Other Stories for The New York Journal of Books. I want to review a book each month.
The upcoming week is a busy one:
MONDAY
Aspen Institute talk by Jeff Chang
The poet Ko Un at the LOC
TUESDAY
Dentist
Reading at Oxon Hill Library
WEDNESDAY
Breakfast with Naomi Ayala
LM IPS
THURSDAY
On The Margin interview with Wilfred Samuels
The Mayor's Arts Awards
FRIDAY
IPS- Sheridan Circle and OAS Building
The upcoming week is a busy one:
MONDAY
Aspen Institute talk by Jeff Chang
The poet Ko Un at the LOC
TUESDAY
Dentist
Reading at Oxon Hill Library
WEDNESDAY
Breakfast with Naomi Ayala
LM IPS
THURSDAY
On The Margin interview with Wilfred Samuels
The Mayor's Arts Awards
FRIDAY
IPS- Sheridan Circle and OAS Building
Friday, September 16, 2016
LOOKS LIKE ANOTHER PRESIDENTIAL T.K.O
The biggest joke played on the American public is that folks haven't decided who they are going to vote for yet. How many people really change their minds about a candidate? I knew I wasn't going to vote for Trump- Trump years ago. No Baptist minister is going to bless me wrong. No poll or debate is going change my mind. We vote not just for an individual but for a party and the way one believes government should work. Who is the undecided voter? Is it the person in the checkout line trying to purchase 50 items? So you find yourself standing behind them with a soda in your hand. The solution is to vote and use the self-checkout machine.
What we have right now is drama. A countdown to the first debate. Of course the media will tell you the presidential race is too close to call. Of course, no candidate has a significant lead. Of course, in key battleground states it's a dead tie. Look, no matter what happens in the first debate, immediately afterwards both candidates will "spin" that they won. You can sit home and play the game of who got the best zingers in. And like that first Ali/Frazier fight tickets are already being sold for the rematch and the second debate. I bring up sports and boxing only because the media will be looking for a knockdown or a T.K.O. Yes, Teddy Pendergrass - it looks like we've been here before:
I'm losin' again
Takes a fool to lose twice
And start all over again
What we have right now is drama. A countdown to the first debate. Of course the media will tell you the presidential race is too close to call. Of course, no candidate has a significant lead. Of course, in key battleground states it's a dead tie. Look, no matter what happens in the first debate, immediately afterwards both candidates will "spin" that they won. You can sit home and play the game of who got the best zingers in. And like that first Ali/Frazier fight tickets are already being sold for the rematch and the second debate. I bring up sports and boxing only because the media will be looking for a knockdown or a T.K.O. Yes, Teddy Pendergrass - it looks like we've been here before:
Lookin' back over my years
I guessed, I've shed some tears
Told myself time and time again
This time I'm gonna win
I guessed, I've shed some tears
Told myself time and time again
This time I'm gonna win
But another fight, things ain't right
I'm losin' again
Takes a fool to lose twice
And start all over again
Think I'd better let it go
Monday, September 12, 2016
INTERNATIONAL LITERATURE: KO UN
Monday, September 19, 6:30 PM
INTERNATIONAL LITERATURE: KO UN
INTERNATIONAL LITERATURE: KO UN
Korean poet Ko Un and his translator, Brother Anthony, give a bi-lingual reading of Ko’s work, followed by a brief moderated discussion with Frank Stewart, writer and editor of MANOA: A Pacific Journal of International Writing. Co-sponsored by Asian Division of the Library of Congress, MANOA: A Pacific Journal of International Writing, and the Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea).
Location: Mumford Room, sixth floor, James Madison Building
Contact: (202) 707-5394
Contact: (202) 707-5394
Please click here for more information.
Saturday, September 10, 2016
The Big Kickoff
I looked at the NFL football schedule for the Washington Team. I have this team going 6-10.
Of course the Cowboys, Eagles, and Giants could play worse than last year. If that's the case then
Washington makes the playoffs. So tune into the games played on September 18th (Cowboys) and September 25th (Giants). Might Washington be looking for a second cousin? If Washington loses these early games it's going to be a long season. It will make the game (week 4) against the Browns very interesting. RG -What, RG-Who or RG-III?
Of course the Cowboys, Eagles, and Giants could play worse than last year. If that's the case then
Washington makes the playoffs. So tune into the games played on September 18th (Cowboys) and September 25th (Giants). Might Washington be looking for a second cousin? If Washington loses these early games it's going to be a long season. It will make the game (week 4) against the Browns very interesting. RG -What, RG-Who or RG-III?
Childhood's End
It was just a matter of months before North Korea would once again have the world trip over its toys.
I place this nation next to Yemen. It's like living next door to a kid who gets drums for Christmas.
What's the name of that movie or television series in which North Korea takes over the United States?
I never knew how that happened but then Trump is running for president and reality doesn't seem to play in our minds anymore.
Watch the media lick its plate over the weekend. North Korea gone nuclear is the type of story that will make parents in Middle America keep the lights on in their kid's bedroom. I'm so tired of things that go bump in the night. But then it's 9/11 this weekend and how many of
us ever imagined planes flying into The Towers? Stranger Things? We are living in the Upside/Down world. If only North Korea could be South Korea then we could all sleep on the roof and watch the stars glow on the basement floor. Until then the bright light might be a nuclear blast and not our friend the Sun.
Friday, September 9, 2016
TRYING TO LIVE OUTSIDE THE BOX WHEN HELL IS ONE FLOOR DOWN
Probably sometime next year Trump will announce the creation of a new media network. One can see Roger Ailes and Sean Hannity joining him and building something bigger than the Fox News Channel. At the end of the day it's not about our nation or national interest. It's about folks becoming a brand, being greedy and getting away with as much as they can. We live during the Age of Apology - which means steal now and explain later. During an hour of leisure take a moment to compile a list of names of people who could be placed in a freezer and maybe defrosted in their next life. One could begin with Johnny Manziel. This guy belongs in the NFL as much as a good many of folks who can't sing find their way at the top of the charts. But these are the times we live in. How many minds are currently trapped inside Hillary's missing emails? The problem right now is not Donald Trump - it's the people who permit him to escape from the truth. Trump knows how to hide a lie under his tongue and use it to escape when having an conversation. When does a con artist become an escape artist?
Houdini once hung himself upside down in downtown DC. Now it seems as if our nation is dangling like a flag some no longer care to salute. How many of us recall Pandora's box and how the opening of it released all the terrible evils? Once the box was closed the only thing left inside was - Hope.
On November 8th we must keep Hope alive. I think you know who to vote for. It might come down to Hillary or Hell. Only a fool bumping into a wall will think darkness doesn't matter.Yes -it's getting hot in here. The Devil always wants to sell you a cold drink.
Houdini once hung himself upside down in downtown DC. Now it seems as if our nation is dangling like a flag some no longer care to salute. How many of us recall Pandora's box and how the opening of it released all the terrible evils? Once the box was closed the only thing left inside was - Hope.
On November 8th we must keep Hope alive. I think you know who to vote for. It might come down to Hillary or Hell. Only a fool bumping into a wall will think darkness doesn't matter.Yes -it's getting hot in here. The Devil always wants to sell you a cold drink.
Thursday, September 8, 2016
 |
You're invited
TO THE 40TH ANNUAL
|
 
Institute for Policy Studies
1301 Connecticut Avenue NW, Suite 600 | Washington, DC 20036 202.234.9382 |
Tuesday, September 6, 2016
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Monday, September 5, 2016
FROM THE ALDON NIELSEN PROJECT: The words of Aldon Nielsen
Q.
It seems few critics examine Baraka's
collection of essays Daggers and Javelins; why is this? Isn't the
period between 1974-1979 key to the last stage of his intellectual development?
Few
critics have given more than cursory examination to any of Baraka’s work after
about 1972, a remarkable thing - pretty much blanking out four decades of an
artist’s work. In the general curriculum, Baraka has been represented by a few
anthology selections for decades now, occasionally including “In the Tradition”
as sole survivor of the works dating from his Marxist turn. Among those who
read at all more broadly, it’s usually restricted to those poems, along with Dutchman
and Blues People. The second version of Harris’s Baraka Reader
thankfully remains in print, but that dates to 1999, and now we have the deeply
flawed SOS: Poems 1961-2013. The Reader and SOS at least
give a broad overview of what Baraka accomplished in those decades, and yet,
even now, neither critics nor teachers seem to spend much time with the late
Baraka. In too many circles, the cliche has taken hold that the post Black Arts
Baraka was a sadly diminished trafficer in agit prop. (Though there are other
critics who mark the decline as dating to the Black Arts era itself. There isn’t
a whole lot of attention given to the essay collection Raise, Race, Rays,
Raze either.)
Yes,
there is agit prop to be found, particularly among the plays, but what this
attitude does is provide cover for people who can’t be bothered to read deeply
in the work, and the shame of that is that our discussions tend to overlook the
lyric intensity of work such as the very late poem “Hole Notes”:
A
below a sideways
An
alley clings to the garden
Owning
your alternatives
Why
do you want to
Be
here broke
Spring
won’t appear
Afraid
of winter here
Everybody
refuses to
Acknowledge
their everyness
Anybody
who was not closely following developments in the Congress of African Peoples
(and how many were following that closely?) might have been confounded by
Baraka’s emerging as a committed Marxist in the early seventies. Where just a
few years before, as we see in the essays in Raise, he had shown little
patience with those who would urge the study of Marx on Black Americans, here
he was announcing himself as a student of scientific socialism, as an adherent
of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse Tung Thought. There was a deep split in the ranks
of CAP as a result of this change in direction, and many, including Haki
Madhabuti, were openly repelled by the development. Baraka’s 1972 poetry
collection, Hard Facts, carried Marxist iconography on its red cover,
signed the t “M-L-M,” and contained poems with titles like “Das Kapital” and
spoke of the people “demanding the / new socialist reality.” It also included denunciations of “a
colorless shadow for / black militants in residence, to / bloat the pockets and
consolidate / the power of an international / bourgeoisie.” There were signs of
that same lyric intensity I spoke of, something that never went away even when
militant-in-residence readers might have. There were other signs. The book was
labeled excerpts, an indication that there was something much larger out there
waiting to appear in print. And where even Black Magic with its white
voodoo doll stuck full of pins on the cover and its scattered acts of
antisemitism had been published in both hardback and paper by a major
commercial house, this little red book appeared under the imprint of The
Revolutionary Communist League and was a stapled affair.
From
the outset, Baraka had been a DIY kind of guy. Recognizing early on that the
poetry he cared to write was a poetry the New Yorker and Harpers
would not care to print, he invented his own venues, started magazines for his
own work and that of his radical compatriots. In an introduction to Poems
for the Advanced, Baraka has claimed that it was easier to get into print
with “hate whitey” than with “hate capitalism.”
Was he right? The cultural nationalist Raise was published by
Random House even at a time when he was bringing out many of his works with his
own Jihad Press, and now he was publishing as the Revolutionary Communist
League. No matter what else may be said of Baraka, it has to be said that he
was unafraid in taking his positions and putting his work before whatever
public could be assembled. The move to the Black Arts left behind
integrationists of an ameliorist bent. Baraka was not sad to see them go. The
shift to Marxism dismayed cultural nationalists, including cultural nationalists
who had come to that ideology under Baraka’s influence. But Baraka had seen “something
in the way of things,” and he would call it out no matter the cost to his own
prospects as a publishing author.
And
the prospects were heavy. There’s a sub-theme in Daggers and Javelins
that comes into view when you read the acknowledgments and publication notes.
This was the era of solicitation followed by rejection. I witnessed this at
first hand during Baraka’s residency at George Washington University. Somebody (perhaps somebody who had never read
Baraka’s work?) thought it a good idea to solicit an essay from the university’s
famous visiting author for publication in GW Magazine, which the
university describes as its “flagship” alumni and university periodical, with a
circulation today of 200,000. Let’s just say they weren’t happy with what they
got. That same somebody sent a student go-between to try to negotiate something
less inflammatory from Baraka, but that was not going to happen. The same sort
of thing happened when Columbia Records asked Amiri Baraka, noted music critic
and frequent author of liner notes, do provide the notes for the album Woody
III. Woody Shaw and Baraka had known each other for decades and shared a
Newark background, as you can see in the title of the album’s lead piece, “On
the New Ark.” Columbia was horrified by the Marxist inflected essay Baraka
submitted, and sent an agent to try to talk him down. Problem was, as Baraka
reported to me rather gleefully, the album sleeves had already been printed up
with a note indicating that there was a Baraka essay inside. So the liner notes
did appear, but were dropped from subsequent pressings. My understanding is
that something similar happened with Baraka’s still unpublished Coltrane book.
What I have heard over the years is that Howard University Press had contracted
for the book with Baraka, but recoiled when they saw the manuscript in
progress. Selections from that work have appeared as essays over the years.
Much
of the initial reaction to Daggers and Javelins was hostile. When Kirkus
Reviews weighed in they said, “More like dull kitchen knives and wet
noodles than daggers and javelins: as those who've followed the Baraka (LeRoi
Jones) career might expect, these essays and speeches are repetitious,
monotonic, shrill--and painfully clotted with Marxist-Leninist jargon.“ Of
course, Baraka was used to hostility by then, had been, since his earliest days
as a poet, and one person’s “Marxist-Leninist jargon” may be another’s sharp
description. There are moments in the essays when they read as if Baraka were
simply running various cultural and political phenomena through the class
analysis meat grinder. But one thing that becomes apparent when you read all of
Baraka is that class had been at the heart of his thinking from the outset. It
runs all through Blues People and is foregrounded in much of the early
book reviewing. Just reread Home and you’ll see. But the sort of
dismissiveness we see in that Kirkus review is something to which we’d
already grown accustomed. Much the same sort of thing had been said about the
work of the Black Arts era. Much the same strategy had been used in dismissing
Baraka as merely a Beat poet, one of the bearded barbarians. What a review like
that is meant to do is keep readers away from a text, and if you don’t read Daggers
and Javelins you won’t understand what had happened to Baraka in the course
of his ideological evolution, and you will miss his insightful commentaries on
jazz, film, the revolutionary tradition in Afro-American literature, Césaire,
or Ngugi wa Thiong’o. (Driving Baraka to Union Station one day, with C.L.R.
James in the car, I mentioned that I had just read Ngugi’s Petals of Blood,
just out in paperback. I remember Baraka asking eagerly from the back seat how
it was.)
Along
with his readings in Marxist theory, Baraka had been reading the fiction and
criticism of the writer we know variously as Lu Xun or Lu Hsun, real name, in
Pinyin, Zhou Shuren. (I’ve found on my trips to China that there is always a
problem talking about the Chinese artists we read in English. I will make several stabs at the name as we
know it in America, and eventually somebody will suddenly smile and say
joyfully, “Oh, you mean ______________,” with all the Chinese readers expressing
delight that we know this author, if not this name.) The title of this book
derives from Lu Hsun’s commentary. The critic throws the javelin against
distant enemies; wields the dagger for close enemies. Baraka saw in this a good
description of his essays.
There
is much from which readers can benefit in Daggers and Javelins, but
scholars need to attend to this book too if we are ever to have any accurate
understanding of Baraka’s becoming a Marxist critic. At present, the best
sources for comprehending Baraka’s move from cultural nationalism to Marxism
are his own autobiography, Komosi Woodard’s A Nation within a Nation: Amiri
Baraka and Black Power Politics, and Michael Simanga’s recent Amiri
Baraka and the Congress of African People: History and Memory. It’s not
hard for those of us who lived through the period to see how Baraka could have
lost faith in his politics of the late 1960s. In D.C., we had experiences with
Marion Barry that closely paralleled Baraka’s disillusion with Newark’s Gibson.
It surely was important to elect Black leadership to cities that had for so
long been dominated by White politicians. But . . . there were limits to the
cultural revolution. When Barry first ran for mayor of the nation’s capitol, he
was often seen about town in dashikis. (To give him credit, he was one of the
first local political figures to recognize the needs of the gay community, he
was fiercely dedicated to jobs for youth, and his stated politics were vastly
preferable to the Democratic machine politics that would have been empowered by
the election of Walter Fauntroy.) But once Barry was in office, the dashikis
more often remained in the closet, the Armani suits showed up more often, and
the city became the plaything of real estate developers. (When Barry emerged
from his jail sentence years later and re-entered local politics, the Kente
cloth was much in evidence.) Baraka never abandoned the commitment to changing
consciousness, but he came to understand something Fanon had described years
before about the national bourgeoisie.
Political power doesn’t grow out of the sleeve of a dashiki, which is to say
that changing the color of the figures in power in a political structure may
ameliorate, but if the structure itself is not changed the oppression and
immiseration will continue.
Baraka
learned from his experiences, and he came increasingly to recognize the
material basis for consciousness and ideology. It was that experience that
prepared the way for his shift to Marxism. We need a much clearer study of how
Baraka and his CAP colleagues made that shift, though. Baraka, we have to
admit, generally lurched toward the more authoritarian end of whatever
ideological spectrum he joined, and the move to Marxism was no different. He
had sympathized with the Karenga version of nationalism for a time in the
sixties, and his Marixsm was similarly
doctrinaire. At the time I met him, he had a row of framed photos on his desk.
There were Marx, Lenin, Mao . . . and Stalin . . . and Enver Hoxha, First Secretary of the Party of Labour of
Albania, saints preserve us. If the poetry and drama of the period was somewhat
less sectarian, the pages of the newsletters Baraka participated in at the time
swirled with details of splinterings and denunciations within the Revolutionary
Left. As part of my research into the life and work of C.L.R. James, I have
been required at times to immerse myself in the arcana of Trotskyist
reconfigurings, a dispiriting exercise I have to admit. Left historians may one
day provide a full history of Baraka’s groups and their movements from the
Congress of Afrikan Peoples to the Revolutionary Communist League (M-L-M) to
the League of Revolutionary Struggle (M-L). For now, those who are interested
may peruse the outline provided by the activists themselves in their “Encyclopedia
of Anti-Revisionism On-Line,” where one may read of the period when “The
situation was also complicated by the fact that the anti-revisionist communist
movement itself was still very inexperienced and going through struggle to
define a correct orientation and line for the U.S. revolution. There were
various opportunist forces which had not yet been exposed or defeated. These
would have an impact on CAP/RCL, with the organization coming under the
influence of the ultra-left line of the so-called “Revolutionary Wing” for a
period of time.”
I’m
guessing not a lot of poetry critics are going down that rabbit hole. Still, if we are to be fair to Baraka, as
fair as we routinely are to Eliot and Pound, I think we need to do the work of
untangling these histories and taking the evolution of Baraka’s ideology
seriously.
Doing
that, though, I believe we will also find, as I have argued over the years,
that the “through line” is of greater importance than local political disputes.
The poet who wrote “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note” was still the poet
who wrote:
I
thought there were things
I
didn’t understand
that
wd make the world
poetry.
The
essayist who looked at the movement from jazz’s origins to Swing and Bop and
Free Jazz and beyond through the lens of class was the same essayist who wrote
of Coltrane in a way Howard University Press couldn’t quite abide. The same man
who wrote Tales wrote Tales of the Out and Gone. And this is why Daggers
and Javelins desires, requires, the same close attention as Home
then or Razor now. We are not trying to become members of Baraka’s
Marxist denomination, even if we are Marxists or post-Marxists. We don’t have
to sign off on his political line at every one of its turnings to love him and
his work, any more than being a post-Eliot poet requires signing off on Eliot’s
racism. There is much of real value to us in Daggers and Javelins, not
simply to those of us working as poets and scholars, but to those of us
grappling with the politics of our day. “We Live in a Political World,” sings
Bob Dylan:
Wisdom
is thrown in jail
It
rots in a cell
Is
misguided as hell
Leaving
no one to pick up a trail.
That
would be the same Dylan who went with his girlfriend to see Dutchman
when it was playing in the village. (Pound was at a performance in Italy a few
years down the road!) Baraka may have preached to choirs, but he also said you
never want poetry that is simply a checklist of opinions for you to give your
assent. You don’t have to go to church with Baraka to learn deep lessons from
his writing. His daggers and javelins could be right useful in our trumped up
political world.
CAN YOU GET THE DOOR?
It was a Saturday in November
or December, one of those days
you wish the year would end or
maybe begin again. The door bell
rings and no one in the house
hears it but you. There’s a choir
of rings already in your head.
When you open the door you
pray the woman in front of you
is not a friend of Jesus, not a second
cousin or even a best friend.
She stands in front of you, old
enough to be your mother. She’s
overweight, dark-skinned and
wearing a wig. If you passed her
in the street you would notice
the sky first or maybe how three
people were waiting at the bus-stop,
and you could make four.
You’re holding the door open
like you’re standing in a toll booth
on the New Jersey Turnpike. The woman
has flyers and you don’t have a dollar.
She’s the woman you remember was
on the evening news maybe a month
ago. Her son was killed and she begged
the airwaves for an end to the violence.
She has a handful of flyers and a heart full of grief.
But there is nothing but static in the neighborhood.
Nothing but death living behind every other door.
- E. Ethelbert Miller
September 5, 2016
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Friday, September 2, 2016
A LOVE SUPREME
So now it's September. In a few days the media will release those articles reporters have been researching over the summer. Look for those pieces crafted by two or three journalists. These are the articles that will influence the first debate. It will place one of the candidates in denial mode. The media loves drama - so the polls will tell Americans the election is "suddenly" too close to call. They will promote the first debate like its Ali against Frazier. The media will cry for a knockdown and not a knockout. Remember there will be two more debates. Each camp is ready to spin to the media that their candidate won. They could let us know this over the Labor Day weekend if there wasn't a hurricane coming. Don't be fooled by polls. Clinton will win the election because of the Electoral College. Let Trump have his HUGE rallies - it doesn't count for much unless you can turn that into the magical 270. So what will be the new battleground State? Aren't you tired of Ohio, Florida, Colorado and Pennsylvania having all the fun? How come the key state for winning the presidency is never Utah, Rhode Island or Hawaii? Can you imagine if it came down to South Dakota? Oh, and what group will be the key group with the key votes? Will it once again be white men K-12? Who continues to write this 1950s script? If you hear anything about black folks picking the next president of the US - then you know it's rigged. Yes, Trump - we had something to lose. We no longer pick cotton - we pick presidents. Three days before the first presidential debate Coltrane is born again - he quickly writes "Meditations" and promises " A Love Supreme."
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