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An Open Letter from James LeCuyer

Fracking, Jellyfish, Carbon and Psychopaths

 Photo: Al Young

James LeCuyer is a Califorenia poet, essayist and environmentalist who spends much of his time speaking to youthful audiences. He is also a passionate deep-water fisherman. His moving The Power of Our Youth — produced by the Resource Renewal Institute — is posted at Vimeo.

The Power of Our Youth
A conversation with James LeCuyer

 

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‘The Mandela Tapes’ | CBC Radio One

Reuters
Watch the ‘BIO’ documentary 1/5   2/5   3/5   4/5   5/5

Bring Back Nelson Mandela (Hugh Masekela)

© AFB/Getty Images

Nelson Mandela (1918-2013)

“A good head and good heart are always a formidable combination. But when you add to that a literate tongue or pen, then you have something very special.”
— Nelson Mandela

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 clickable

‘Madiba’

© Reuters

South Africa: AllAfrica Exclusive —
Desmond Tutu Pays Tribute to Nelson Mandela

By Desmond Tutu, 5 December 2013

Cape Town — Nelson Mandela is mourned by South Africans, Africans and the international community today as the leader of our generation who stood head and shoulders above his contemporaries — a colossus of unimpeachable moral character and integrity, the world’s most admired and revered public figure.

Not since Kenyatta, Nkrumah, Nyerere and Senghor has Africa seen his like. Looking for comparisons beyond Africa, he will go down in history as South Africa’s George Washington, a person who within a single five-year presidency became the principal icon of both liberation and reconciliation, loved by those of all political persuasions as the founder of modern, democratic South Africa.

He was of course not always regarded as such. When he was born in 1918 in the rural village of Mvezo, he was named Rolihlahla, or “troublemaker.” (Nelson was the name given to him by a teacher when he started school.) After running away to Johannesburg to escape an arranged marriage, he lived up to his name. Introduced to politics by his mentor, Walter Sisulu, he joined a group of young militants who challenged the cautious elders of the African National Congress, founded by black leaders in 1912 to oppose the racist policies of the newly-formed union of white-ruled British colonies and Afrikaner republics … >>>

>>> To read Bishop Tutu’s tribute in its entirety,
go to the AllAfrica original

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Nelson Mandela’s release from prison speech at Wembley Stadium, 1990
(the full 15 minutes)

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DEPARTURES | Mike Sonksen: In Honor of Wanda Coleman November 27, 2013
LIVING IN THE DEEP WEST | Al Young: A poem in memory of Wanda Coleman

The shorter version of Wanda Coleman’s May 2013 interview

Mariano Zaro’s interview notes

Wanda Coleman (1946-2013) had a literary career that spanned over 30 years and included numerous volumes of poetry and fiction, most recently Jazz & Twelve O’Clock Tales (Godine/Black Sparrow Books, 2008) and The World Falls Apart (Pitt Poetry Series, 2011). Her honors included an Emmy in Daytime Drama Writing and a Leonard Marshall Prize. In this May 11, 2013 video she discusses her life and work with Mariano Zaro, part of the www.Poetry.LA interview series featuring noted poets of Southern California and beyond.

© pippoetry.blogspot.com

“We got so naturally ripped, we sprouted wings,

crashed parties on the moon, and howled at the earth

we lived off love. It was all we had to eat

when you split you took all the wisdom
and left me the worry”

— Wanda Coleman
(“In That Other Fantasy Where We Live Forever,”)

Copyright © 2001 by Wanda Coleman. Reprinted from Mercurochrome: New Poems (Black Sparrow Press). All rights reserved

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Saturday, November 23, 2013

WANDA COLEMAN:

High Priestess gone at 67

© giovanni singleton

© Foto Gezett (Germany)

I was introduced to the work and the person known as Wanda Coleman by the poet/literary activist E. Ethelbert Miller as I made my way as a young poet and human being. Her work opened my ears and heart. Her American Sonnets for sure turned the tables. She was part of an important mandala of influence for me, the last one remaining after Barbara Christian, Alice Coltrane, Lucille Clifton, and Jayne Cortez.

Our first meeting would be at a conference in the late 1990s entitled “Expanding the Repertoire: Innovation and Change in African-American Writing” organized by Renee Gladman and myself at the New College of California in San Francisco. The proceedings were published in special issue of Tripwire and include talks and writing by Will Alexander, C. S. Giscombe, Erica Hunt, Nathaniel Mackey, Mark McMorris, Harryette Mullen, Julie Patton, Lorenzo Thomas. To my great surprise Ms. Coleman dedicated her presentation to me. Read her article at http://davidbuuck.com/downloads/tripwire_5_coleman.pdf

She later said how wonderful it was to have been invited to such a historical and important gathering.

After that, we gathered occasionally by phone, snail mail, email and occasionally in person. As founding editor of nocturnes (re)view  I was honored to publish a selection of her work in the 2002 “Spirit” issue. This past April (2013), I was invited to join Ms. Coleman for dinner at a private residence in San Francisco. The neighborhood is notorious for difficult parking but I set out early, determined not to miss one minute of her company. I had heard that she had been unwell. Though more slight of build, her voice, her presence was unmistakable. The occasion was a simple but important one: to introduce local, young African American women poets to the High Priestess. Ms. Coleman was gracious in sharing her wisdom and intelligence. She and I exchanged knowing glances and silent conversation. We shared a long, heartful hug, the sound and warmth of which lingered for a long time afterwards. And too we cleaned our plates full of good home cooking. Cameras flashed long into the night.

Over the years, Ms. Coleman and I laughed loudly and fearlessly. We did not hold our tongues. We too communed in conversations punctuated by silence.

We could see stained glass and tell time by colors.

As I head to L.A. to teach for the Spring, I bow my head to the High Priestess and hear her say, “Now, listen.”

peace,
giovanni

giovanni singleton received a MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics from The New College of California. Her debut collection, Ascension, is informed by the music and life of Alice Coltrane. It has recently received the California Book Award Gold Medal for Poetry. singleton was selected in 2011 for the Poetry Society of America’s biennial New American Poetry Series, which recognizes recent first book poets. In 1999, she founded nocturnes (re)view of the literary arts, a critically acclaimed journal dedicated to the work of artists and writers of the African Diaspora and other contested spaces.

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Wanda Coleman dies at 67; Watts native, L.A.’s unofficial poet laureate

During four decades as a force on the L.A. poetry scene, Coleman produced works that compelled attention to racism and hatred. | Elaine Woo | November 23, 2013

afropoets.net

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E. Ethelbert Miller: ‘Remembering Wanda Coleman’ | The Nation, November 25, 2013

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Click image to enlarge

Poet Wanda Coleman

Wanda Coleman grew up in Los Angeles in Watts in the 1960s. She witnessed the 1965 Watts Riots, and the 1992 Rodney King riot. We invited her into the KCRW studios to share some of her poetry, which we are also playing on air this week as we look back on the civil unrest. “The Riot Inside Me” was published in 2003 and Coleman says she wrote it in response to the Watts Riot and the Rodney King Riot.

  Listen

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Jack Foley

2 FOR WANDA
(mostly her words)

“THE NAME IS POPULARLY INTERPRETED TO MEAN ‘WANDERER’”

Jazz and 12 O’Clock Tales cover (David R Godine)

I’ve been thrown out of Hollywood night spots for being too rowdy

Wanda

have picked cotton from the roadside in Fresno

Wanda

was once pulled over by the CHP for spilling apple juice on the roads of King City

Wanda

Allen Ginsberg hugged me in Oakland

Wanda

I’ve seen L.A. riot twice

Wanda

I’ve been blissed out at Mt. Shasta, stoned at Wolfgang’s, and nauseated in Palm Springs

Wanda

My heart lives in Lancaster and my grief dwells in the Russian River

Wanda

I am a Black Californian, but I am forever married to a New York Jew.

Wanda

I was born here. I intend to die here.

Wanda

At home.

*

“in cold grey morning
comes the forlorn honk of workbound traffic
i wake to the video news report

the world is going off
rising, I struggle free of the quilt
& wet dreams of my lover dispel
leave me moist and wanting

 in the bathroom
i rinse away illusions, brush my teeth and
unbraid my hair
there’re the children to wake
breakfast to conjure
the job
the day laid out before me
the cold corpse of an endless grind

 so this is it, i say to the enigma in the mirror
this is your lot/assignment/relegation
this is your city

 i find my way to the picture window
my eyes capture the purple reach of hollywood’s hills
the gold eye of sun mounting the east
the gray anguished arms of avenue

 i will never leave here”

people speak
of the violence and dignity
of your presence
but what
of the beauty
of your language?

© 2013 Jack Foley

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Clickable file photo

In memory of John Fitzgerald Kennedy
May 29, 1917 – November 22, 1963

On November 22, 1963, when he was hardly past his first thousand days in office, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was killed by an assassin’s bullets as his motorcade wound through Dallas, Texas. Kennedy was the youngest man elected President; he was the youngest to die.

Of Irish descent, he was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, on May 29, 1917. Graduating from Harvard in 1940, he entered the Navy. In 1943, when his PT boat was rammed and sunk by a Japanese destroyer, Kennedy, despite grave injuries, led the survivors through perilous waters to safety.

Back from the war, he became a Democratic Congressman from the Boston area, advancing in 1953 to the Senate. He married Jacqueline Bouvier on September 12, 1953. In 1955, while recuperating from a back operation, he wrote Profiles in Courage, which won the Pulitzer Prize in history.

In 1956 Kennedy almost gained the Democratic nomination for Vice President, and four years later was a first-ballot nominee for President. Millions watched his television debates with the Republican candidate, Richard M. Nixon. Winning by a narrow margin in the popular vote, Kennedy became the first Roman Catholic President.

His Inaugural Address offered the memorable injunction: “Ask not what your country can do for you–ask what you can do for your country.” As President, he set out to redeem his campaign pledge to get America moving again. His economic programs launched the country on its longest sustained expansion since World War II; before his death, he laid plans for a massive assault on persisting pockets of privation and poverty.

Responding to ever more urgent demands, he took vigorous action in the cause of equal rights, calling for new civil rights legislation. His vision of America extended to the quality of the national culture and the central role of the arts in a vital society.

He wished America to resume its old mission as the first nation dedicated to the revolution of human rights. With the Alliance for Progress and the Peace Corps, he brought American idealism to the aid of developing nations. But the hard reality of the Communist challenge remained.

Shortly after his inauguration, Kennedy permitted a band of Cuban exiles, already armed and trained, to invade their homeland. The attempt to overthrow the regime of Fidel Castro was a failure. Soon thereafter, the Soviet Union renewed its campaign against West Berlin. Kennedy replied by reinforcing the Berlin garrison and increasing the Nation’s military strength, including new efforts in outer space. Confronted by this reaction, Moscow, after the erection of the Berlin Wall, relaxed its pressure in central Europe.

Instead, the Russians now sought to install nuclear missiles in Cuba. When this was discovered by air reconnaissance in October 1962, Kennedy imposed a quarantine on all offensive weapons bound for Cuba. While the world trembled on the brink of nuclear war, the Russians backed down and agreed to take the missiles away. The American response to the Cuban crisis evidently persuaded Moscow of the futility of nuclear blackmail.

Kennedy now contended that both sides had a vital interest in stopping the spread of nuclear weapons and slowing the arms race–a contention which led to the test ban treaty of 1963. The months after the Cuban crisis showed significant progress toward his goal of “a world of law and free choice, banishing the world of war and coercion.” His administration thus saw the beginning of new hope for both the equal rights of Americans and the peace of the world.

The Presidential biographies on WhiteHouse.gov are from “The Presidents of the United States of America,” by Frank Freidel and Hugh Sidey. Copyright 2006 by the White House Historical Association.

© WhiteHouse.gov

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For facts about the the assassination of John F. Kennedy, visit JFKFacts.org

“And today, JFK’s great concerns seem more relevant than ever: the dangers of nuclear proliferation, the notion that empire is inconsistent with a republic and that corporate domination of our democracy at home is the partner of imperial policies abroad.”

— Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in “JFK’s Vision of Peace,”
Rolling Stone, November 20, 2013

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Clickable

Racial Profiling, Police Brutality & Prisons

© 123rf

presented by the
Revolutionary Poets Brigade

speakers

 

Al Young
California’s poet laureate emeritus

  © Scott Braley

Kiilu Nyasha
revolutionary journalist,
host of “Freedom Is a Constant Struggle”

poets
Dee Allen
  Martin Hickel
Anne Leonard
Karen Melander Magoon
Michael Warr

music by
Carol Denney

hosted by
John Curl

Friday, November 22, 2013
7pm
Free

Unitarian Universalist Church
1187 Franklin Street (near Geary)
San Francisco, CA 94109

MAP & DIRECTIONS

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