On the Other Side of Tomorrow
California Poets in the Schools Statewide Anthology 2008

$12.95
ISBN-0-939927-24-1
Order at California Poets in the Schools

On the other side of tomorrow, amazing things are happening.
On the other side of tomorrow, yesterday happens again.
– Sarah Stretch, 5th grade

Cover image Gateways of Hope by Cherwith Hegawa, 9th grade
Cover deisgn by Ray Lemieux

Lucia Lemieux
editor

Daniel Zev Levinson, Chris Olander field editors

Foreword by Al Young

Waking Up the Other Side of Tomorrow

My breath tastes as deep as a poem written at dawn,
that breath alive longer than any of us; it has known
the time when the world was born and it has seen
the earliest of organisms open their eyes and inhale.
– Ellen Feldman, 10th Grade
Santa Barbara Music and Arts Conservatory, Santa Barbara County

While the chance and beauty of being born and re-born bubbles up for each of us as every moment turns, we mostly don’t feel life this way. We feel instead the gurgle and drizzle, the flaking and rot. Why not? Addicted to story, addicted to narrative, we either subscribe or tie into or buy into the story-notion that the ocean, which was once our home, is nothing but a corporate investment now. Let’s bundle and patent and sell all that water, all those micro-organisms, all that sea salt. The history and sadness of human ignorance has always been enough to break any heart that still beats, but now it stands a pretty good chance of killing us off. Stephen Hawking — eminent physicist and author of the poetically titled A Brief History of Time – gives the planet a fifty-fifty chance of surviving the 21st century. Given selfishness and fishlessness, given climate change, given greed, given the costliness of pride and prejudice — is this well informed forecast bleak, or what?

The what, the when, the who, how, when and wherefore of being alive leads inevitably, unalterably, and always backwards and forwards to poetry. Take away music, dance, painting, sculpture, theater, film, short stories, novels, textbooks, and the seeds for their survival will always survive in the playful rhythms and imagistic languages of poetry. Behind the doors of tomorrow a brand new breath is forever taking shape and taking heart and always, always, always  — as the raw, creative kick of it springs loose – the bull’s-eye it targets is freedom.  That’s what we come from. How can it be otherwise? Divine by nature, our kind, genetically encoded to speak poetry and tell stories, yearns to relax back into our original dwelling-place: spirit. To rule the world, to own everybody and everything that shines or soars or creeps and nods – what is that? What’s it all about, Alpha, Omega?

“If I were president I would promise / To save the American people from America,” is the way Mrs. Henley’s kindergarten class at Arena Union Elementary School in Mendocino County puts it. Backtracking, “If I Were President,” this kindergarteners’ poem  begins: “Anyone could be president / Even a girl or boy or a fish / A shark, a shoelace, or someone in the army / A president can be a number, like the dollar bill / Or a wall or a nothing.”

Art does not progress. This has long been my contention. The cave drawings at Altamira in what is now Spain or Lasceaux at what is now France remain as beautiful and elegant as anything the Museum of Modern, the Louvre or the Egyptian Museum at Cairo has on display. What this means to me is that the human spirit is vaster than and deeper than the art business or the dreadful and ultimately superfluous art business. It thrills me as much today to introduce this current anthology of California Poets in the Schools as it did when I last composed a foreword in another century. Most importantly, poetry encompasses drawing, painting, sculpture, music, dance, drama, film, poetry and narrative. Put another way: Poetry quivers at the center of everything to which all the other arts aspire. Using language that makes us taste, smell, touch, sight, sound, and move, poetic speech, at its best, dramatizes all within its reach.

I’ve often spoken of graphic artist friends of mine who make a point of attending kindergarten through 12th grade art shows. They tend to take an ardent interest in the kindergarten through third grade grouping. “After third grade,” more than one painter and collagist has told me, “the kids begin to conform. Their imagination gets rounded up.” All the same, these well-trained and self-taught professional artists, understanding the delicate nature of creativity, often admit to stealing some of their best ideas from child  artists.

With language it’s different. Kids don’t really begin to write poetry until third grade. We all live poetry from infancy, but don’t get to write it down until we take on penmanship and the mastery of keyboards. Storytelling and poem-making are natural to human all beings; writing is not. There is absolutely nothing natural about writing. It comes with conscientious and highly self-conscious training and effort.

What a pleasure and privilege it for me to introduce yet again another collection of poetry by our treasured children and their teachers. The new and remindful consciousness and vision that poetry brings into the world may be what saves us yet.

Our ancestors enjoyed and counted upon the profound d shape-changing powers and vitalizing effects of language and creative utterance, which we inherit as poetry. Their chants cherished memory, charted heavens and histories, changed weather. Part music, part dance, part spirit, part magic, poetry sticks fast to our DNA strands. Poetry stays and poetry keeps.

Translations: “I am the dreams of my long-gone people” (Vince Harjono); “I am the skeleton that is always left behind. / Divers just swim past me. / Fish think my ribs are their homes.” (Emily Pérez); “The world is full of liars, jokesters, and jerks, / But among them are people who will tell the truth even if it kills them. / The world is destroyed by those who don’t care, / But working against them are people who care and heal.” (Heather Mackay).

How unspeakably meaningful it becomes to know that through the doors of these strong and lovely young voices the other side of tomorrow is waking from nightmares and dreams.

I am the northern lights burning out.
I am the blue water lake drying up to a crater …
I am the one who can change the future, not the past.
I am the death, the life and the hope of the world around me.
I am a child.
– John Elliot, 6th Grade
Mill Valley Middle School, Marin County

Al Young
Poet Laureate of California
(2005-2008)

In Memory of Mama Africa

  “I never understood why I couldn’t come home … I never committed any crime.”
– Miriam Makeba, exiled from her native South Africa whose government revoked her citizenship.

Miriam Makeba performing in Barcelona in January 2008 © Gustau Nacarino/Reuters

The Click Song (1966)

 In poetry and melody, in rhetoric and rhythm, Miriam Makeba sang and spoke her truth to the world.
– Al Young

Miriam Makeba Wikipedia Biography

International Herald Tribune Obituary

Reviewer-novelist John Leonard in his Manhattan office, 1974
Photo © New York Times

When I arrived in Berkeley, CA in 1961, John Leonard was literature director at KPFA Radio Pacifica, He was also a pretty good basketball player. After computer scientist Dennis Allison — then a grad student at U.C. Berkeley — introduced us, Leonard invited me to tape stories of mine at KPFA’s studios. Thus were early pieces such as “Birthday Chicken with Wine,” “The Flamingo’s Stockings” (my translation of Uruguayan Horacio Quiroga’s haunting fable), and “Chicken Hawk’s Dream” (with Ian Underwood on alto saxophone) debuted. Later, when he moved from Berkeley to Manhattan and the New York Times, John Leonard gave my early novels of mine sensitive readings, and sometimes he reviewed them in the Times’ pages. He was a brave, generous and funny man with a stunning vocabulary, who followed his mind and heart.

– Al Young

The New York Times obituary for John Leonard

 Go to the Telegraph.com.uk original

Singer whose wide vocal range and exotic Peruvian background made her a phenomenon in the 1950s.

Courtesy Photo

Yma Sumac , who died on Saturday, probably aged 86, was a Peruvian singer and a phenomenon in the 1950s whose varied, tempestuous career started when her extraordinary voice, ranging over several octaves, startled people on the album Voice of Xtabuy.

The album went straight into the bestseller lists and was followed by Mambo!, arranged by Billy May, and Fuego del Ande (1959), perhaps her best record. British radio audiences were intrigued and countless requests flooded in to Children’s Choice, Two-Way Family Favourites and Housewives’ Choice.

Broadway was fascinated by her appearance in Flahooley (which also starred the young Barbara Cook) in the spring of 1951.

This strange musical satire starred Ernest Truex and concerned a genie in a lamp carelessly left behind at a toy factory by an Arabian princess.

The show gave the extraordinary range of Yma Sumac’s voice a chance to range from low contralto to A above high C, but it also revealed that the voice had not been trained.

Her part and the two songs it entailed had been hastily and badly written.

Yma Sumac claimed to have been born on September 10 1927 (or 1925), at Ichocán, a mountain town north of Lima, though her personal assistant, who claimed to have seen her birth certificate, gave her date of birth as September 13 1922. Her Spanish name was Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chavárri del Castillo; her Indian name, which meant “how beautiful”, was Imma Sumack, which she later altered to Yma Sumac.

She began to sing at church festivals and in 1941 a government official with a keen ear heard her. As a result Carlos Moises Vivanco, who was a musician and executive with the Peruvian Broadcasting Company, heard her and became her manager and, on in 1942, her husband as well.

Yma Sumac joined her husband’s Inca Taky Trio, which toured South America and Mexico and reached the United States in 1946 .

When she compromised her own musical impulses by appearing at the Blue Angel in New York, Capitol Records decided to take a risk; her first album for them, produced by Alan Livingstone, was released in 1950 . The record was a hit and, wearing exotic clothes and jewellery, Yma Sumac played to packed houses at the Hollywood Bowl and New York’s Hotel Pierre. Her voice became so well known that she became the subject of impersonations by comediennes : Joan Turner would do three or four bars of a Simac number and then spit, and growl: “Yma Tarmac - huh!’

She made two Hollywood films, neither any use: Secret of the Incas in 1954 marked one of Charlton Heston’s first appearances. In 1957 Omar Khayyam, which starred Cornel Wilde, was little better. The audiences would have preferred it as a musical since Yma Sumac had considerably livened up Hollywood’s version of Persian history.

In the latter part of the decade she divorced her husband, after he faced in a paternity suit brought by his secretary, who had had his twins. Yma Sumac remarried him in 1961, but they soon broke up again.

She toured North America with the Montreal and Toronto symphony orchestras; completed a concert tour of the West Coast and in 1961 toured the Soviet Union.

Yma Sumac fell out of favour during the 1960s, and spent the decade touring small venues. She attempted a comeback in America in 1968 with a disastrous concert in California. In 1972 she made Miracles, her first album for 13 years. It was not a success. However, her work continued to feature occasionally in soundtracks for films, and she gradually acquired a cult following. Bruce Springsteen declared: “It takes only a fraction of a second to succumb to her unique voice.”

During the early 1980s she recorded several more records and performed at Carnegie Hall and the Hollywood Bowl.

In 1987 she appeared on a collection of Disney songs entitled Stay Awake, alongside such figures as Ringo Starr and Sinead O’Connor.

She had a run of several weeks at the Ballroom in New York where, flanked by what purported to be Incan statues, she was greeted by “young boys screaming. I was shocked”, she said. “But they explained to me that it was because they adore Yma Sumac. All the big stars come to see Yma Sumac. What is the name of that one, I think Madonna?”

Yma Sumac never remarried. She is survived by her son.

© 2008 Telegraph.com.uk

Yma Sumac’s senational 1950 debut LP: Songs of Xtabay

File photo

Yma Sumac: La Pampa y La Puna

Official Yma Sumac Website

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 Go to the source (Black Caucus of the American Library Association)

NEW DVD COLLECTION ON POET PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR FEATURES RECITALS BY NATION’S TOP BLACK POETS

“Paul Laurence Dunbar is the poet laureate of the Negro race.”
– Booker T. Washington

Famous 19th Century African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar’s birthday will be celebrated with gala festivities during the weekend of June 27, 2008 at the Dunbar House in Dayton, Ohio. The national press and artists and dignitaries from all over the nation have been invited to attend. This weekend of Dunbar festivities will include a parade, dinner and a National Launch Party for several educational DVDs on Dunbar. These DVDs, known as The Paul Laurence Dunbar Collection, provide an entertaining and educational experience for poetry lovers, families and students of all ages. This DVD Collection will be a substantial educational resource for teachers and librarians all around the country.

This treasure trove of over 200 Dunbar poems and stories is important to both American Literature and African American culture. The poems are dramatically recited by the very top Dunbar storytellers and dramatic African American poets in the nation, including Nikki Giovanni, Ishmael Reed, Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, California Poet Laureate Al Young, Mitch Capel, Bobby Norfolk, Awele Makeba, Charlotte Blake-Alston, Dylan Pritchett, Sr., and Oni Lasana. The production also includes commentary and analysis by some of America’s foremost Dunbar scholars. Many famous African American poets, including Langston Hughes and Nikki Giovanni, have frequently acknowledged their debt of gratitude to Dunbar. “There is no poet, black or non-black, who measures his achievement,” Dr. Giovanni said of Dunbar. The title of Maya Angelou’s autobiography, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, is taken in homage from a stanza of Dunbar’s famous poem “Sympathy.” Even Jimi Hendrix’s anthem song “Purple Haze” draws its title from Dunbar’s description of the sublime autumn sky in Dunbar’s poem “The Old Apple Tree.”

Paul Laurence Dunbar was a most remarkable American writer. The child of slaves, Dunbar was raised in a racist and hostile America that used any means necessary to terrorize, criminalize, disenfranchise and re-enslave African Americans.

Despite the racist climate, Dunbar led an exciting and fulfilling life. He was childhood friends with Orville and Wilbur Wright. The only African American of his high school class, Dunbar was class president, editor-in-chief of the school newspaper, a member of the debate society, class poet and president of the literary society. He and Mark Twain shared the same literary agent. He was the protégé of Frederick Douglass. Frederick Douglass said of Dunbar, “I regard Paul Dunbar as the most promising young colored man in America.”

Dunbar toured America constantly, giving dramatized readings of his poetry. He was honored by President William McKinley and was awarded a ceremonial sword by Theodore Roosevelt. He was mentored by Frederick Douglass and praised by W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington and other giants of his day. The toast of Europe, Dunbar also gave a command performance before the Queen of England. He was married to poet and civil rights activist Alice Moore Dunbar. Together they were America’s African American power couple, hosting the top Black intellectuals and notables of the era in their home in Washington, D.C.

Through his work, Paul Laurence Dunbar chronicled an African American history and experience that had been distorted by white journalists and historians. Even today Dunbar’s writings are relevant. His works provide guidance, encouragement, cautionary tales and adages that help readers of all ages to better navigate through a hostile and racist society. Dunbar’s writings provide wisdom and direction for African American culture in the same way that “Poor Richard’s Almanac,” the “Mother Goose Rhymes” or the “Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales” guided white culture. This is where Dunbar achieves greatness. Dunbar gives joy, with a message, to the very young and old alike with stories such as “A Cabin Tale,” “Little Brown Baby” and “The Seedling.” He gives us all inspiration with poems such as “Keep A Song Up On De Way,” “Just Whistle A Bit” and “The Lesson.” He speaks of history in such poems as “W’en Dey ‘Listed Colored Soldiers,” “Frederick Douglass,” “The Haunted Oak,” “Goin’ Back,” “The Colored Soldiers,” “Sympathy,” “Life” and “We Wear the Mask.” His work provides so many other wonderful glimpses of the African American experience made universal.

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Al Young and Ishmael Reed hold out the cherished sweet potato pies given them by Cave Canem fellow LaTasha Diggs.
Photo © Rachel Eliza Griffiths

OCTOBER 1, 2008 — The New School, NYC, New York

For the fifteenth program in its Legacy Conversation series, Cave Canem brought writers Al Young and Ishmael Reed together for a brief reading and dialogue about the historical and cultural influences on their work. The conversation was moderated by Cave Canem fellow LaTasha Diggs.

 Photo: Xenobia Bailey

WEBCAST

About Cave Canem

Mission and History | Who We Are

Cave Canem is committed to the discovery and cultivation of new voices in African American poetry.

HISTORY

In 1996 poets and teachers Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady began a weeklong summer workshop/retreat designed to counter the under-representation and isolation of African American poets in writers’ workshops and literary programs. From the beginning, Cave Canem has offered a safe haven for black poets—whether schooled in MFA programs or poetry slams—to come together to work on their craft and engage others in critical debate.

Beginning as an all-volunteer effort in 1996, Cave Canem has moved swiftly to become a non-profit organization with a full-time staff and an active Board, funded through individual donations and foundation and government grants.

Our program has expanded from a summer retreat to include regional workshops, a first book prize, annual anthologies, readings and events in major cities around the United States. We are a national community of emerging and established poets, a family of writers who create, publish, perform, teach, study poetry, and support each others’ work.

Cornelius Eady on Cave Canem at the 10-Year mark (pdf) from Poets & Writers Magazine

ABOUT THE NAME

When Toi Derricotte shared her dream of a retreat for African American poets with Cornelius Eady and his wife Sarah Micklem, they agreed to work together to make it a reality. In Pompeii, Italy, they found a fitting symbol for the safe space they hoped to create: the mosaic of a dog guarding the entry to the House of the Tragic Poet, with the inscription CAVE CANEM (Beware of the Dog). It symbolized for them the role that Cave Canem could play: it would protect the poets and, by breaking the chain, it would unleash these vital new voices into the literary world.

Copyright © 1997-2008 by Cave Canem Foundation, Inc.

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New Documentary on Pinochet’s Dictatorship: Some Wounds Should Not Heal

By Debra Watson
25 September 2008

General Pinochet (1915-2006) and his alleged human rights advisor

The Judge and the General tells the story of recent efforts to bring to justice the perpetrators of horrific acts of political repression committed three decades ago under Chilean military dictator Augusto Pinochet. In their documentary, co-directors Elizabeth Farnsworth, a Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) correspondent, and Patricio Lanfranco weave together historical film footage and poignant and informative interviews with individuals victimized by the regime and those who have fought for justice for the victims.

Both filmmakers were in Chile in the early 1970s. The military coup against democratically elected president Salvador Allende occurred on September 11, 1973, and began with the shelling of the presidential palace in Santiago by the military plotters. Allende, the long-time leader of the Socialist Party, was killed.

The film has been shown at various film festivals in the US and in Latin America and aired on PBS’s “POV” in August.

During the 1970s and early 1980s, thousands of individuals were killed or disappeared in an unprecedented campaign of criminal terror by the Chilean army and police. The country’s intelligence service, DINA, formed under the dictatorship with the assistance of the American CIA, directed a massive campaign of arrest, torture and murder against opponents of the military regime.

(more…)

© 1969 Associated Press

The Great Santa Barbara Oil Disaster: Or A Diary

Day one

We ride down the coast hwy
through the heavy rain
to a beach that sits in a rocky cove
hidden from the eye.
I sit in the rear of the bus
where the shadows pass
over cold metal walls
& window screens,
looking through dirty glass
at the somber scenery.
A young Mexican girl stands in the muddy debris
of her home, rummaging through the mud.
The river flooded suddenly two days ago
after a torrential rain & shifted the terrain.
Overhead the clouds mount menacingly
in small squalls, prostituting themselves again
against the sky, & we turn left off the freeway
into the spent community of Carpinteria
like a funeral procession on a grey Saturday,
heading to the bone yard in tandem.
Beyond the border of thin sidewalks,
sit bleached out houses on paper stilts
with tattered venetian blinds & curtains
barely moving on the stiff ocean breeze.
We walk beneath the bleeding sky
single file to the oily beach in perfect silence;
everything around us is a chemical foundry.

Day two

The 1st. night
we arrived,
the college girls
in the dormitory
across from us
paraded before
their window in
bras & panties,
being friendly.
The people
came to watch us work,
in hip boots & work gloves,
cleaning oil & shoveling straw.
Some said, “my! don’t they look almost human?”
Others said, “a convict is a crime. don’t forget that!”
Sometimes the children’s ball
bounded in our area,
& the Spanish inmates
soccer kicked it back lightly.
We all laughed
& smiled a lot
the first day.
The sunset & the night
came on slowly.
From out of the night
came gargoyles
with church fathers
& concerned parents
to tell the children
not to play
within the border of red flags
& the fence of thick cane around us.
Because,
the sky would fall
& hell would follow,
if they instilled
licentious ambitions
in our minds.

& so
we didn’t laugh
anymore, or smile
at all the second day.
From that day forward,
we just worked,
hard & steady,
with our heads
low & our eyes
to the ground,
so the sky
wouldn’t fall,
& the people
wouldn’t know,
& the world
wouldn’t burn.

Day three

All day we work behind the sea breaker
in the black sand, shoveling straw
& thick lumps of oil
into the mouth of the skip loader,
while the cat skinner rides high
in the driver’s seat with a hole for his eye.
On the beach,
in the window
of the Santa Barbara Yacht Club,
Black servants watch us
swing picks & shovels
in the wet sand
like machetes
clearing a cane field
on their small island
in the Caribbean.
On a concrete wall
below this Diaspora
i sit & swing my legs over the ice plants
& puddles of oil where sand crabs,
& small fish lie dead
& stinking in the sun.
Beneath my work jacket
i touch the crushed sandwich
of white bread & yellow cheese
& think of the young Chinese girl
in the pink hairnet with braces.
After lunch we return with rakes & hip booths,
wading through the constant tide
of thick oil & grey foam,
to gather balls of sticky oil
stuck between rocks,
& place them in yellow plastic bags.
Along the beach
the tide falls back out to sea,
taking with it the trail of our feet
that follows us like a shadow.
I turn my back to the Santa Barbara Sound
& pull the weather jacket tight
to shield against the cold & damp air.
Over my shoulder,
past the far islands near the horizon,
someone is singing a song,
that i can barely hear,
in a voice
that i cannot recognize.

The 1969 Santa Barbara Oil Spill viewed by satellite

Day four

The children
come down
to the beach
with their dogs
barking happily
at their feet.
They watch us
rake the debris
in huge piles
for the cat skinner
to eat with his shovel.
The surf around us
is a gumbo of sludge, oil,
& dead birds cooking in the sun
& salt air.

The children
throw
enormous
blocks of blue ice
into the ocean
to cleanse our sins
& methodically
the night descends
like a curtain.

Day five

The women of Santa Barbara
watch us drag driftwood
across the rocky beach
to the gas chamber at San Quentin.
They protest
against the death sentence
& the inhumanity,
of humanity,
then go home
to husbands
& kill babies
in the morning
with a small pill
while we sleep.

Day six

Green toads
croak
on the black
asphalt
rain pond.
Dawn opens
with tenderness
from the sky.
A white gull
floats face upward
in the murky surf;
i watch the tide
push the gull
against the rocks,
again & again,
& again & again.

Day seven

Pearl crack
the dawning day
is all about
the tar marred
beach.
Favonian winds
gently caresses
a face beaten
by sun & surf.
Later,
the sunset on the ocean
& there wasn’t
any confusion.

Day eight

The citizens
of Santa Barbara
brought rags
for us to wipe
our oily
black hands on.
They were in small
woven baskets of tule reed
& filled with rags & apples.
I found a red one
& wore it around my neck,
to either
love
or eat
when
i
was
alone.

Day nine

Crickets
in
the vacant field
across from us
sing the loudest
late at night
when the oil slick
devours the seacoast
like
a
blanket
of
death
in its murkiness
of
thick oil
& caskets
of
beautiful
Cadillac’s.

Day ten

(Poem to the girl seen walking
below my window at 4:00a.m.)

I see you there
walking
on the freshly
cut grass
in bare feet.

Uncertain
about
your decision
to either
avoid
the
dark
shadows
or run
into
the kerosene night.

Day eleven

for Kiyono

All
night
i
touched
your
breast,
kissed
your
neck,
letting
the
long
black
hair
cover
me
thickly.
&
when
i
awoke,
alone,
with
only
a
love
stain
on
the
sheet
next
to
me,
i
fell
in
love
with
dreaming.

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