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Courtesy Lorna Dee Cervantes

Three Poems for the Terremoto

DEATH THEMES

Double your leisure
Double your death
Double the bodies
That died in the berths

Double the trouble
Of toil and rumble

Double the slaves
The meek and the humble

All the world’s a death
Waiting to happen
All this death’s a life
Hoping to remain

All of life asleep
In the supper
All of death alive
In the slumber

We walk through the shadow
Of the Valley of Oz
We are all behind the curtain
We are all because

Double your pleasure
Double your fun
Forget the bodies
In the body of one

All the world’s a taste,
A refreshment; a waste
When Liberty’s left alone
In a mirrored case

— Lorna Dee Cervantes
6/27/09

FOR HAITI

3 million stories fall
an apocalypse away
the concrete structures fail
the palaces, the guard houses
the poverty pockets buckle
and strap
3 million stories
fall silent and silence the tongues
of those who stay — 3 million voices
rise singing in a dusty song of survival
a hymn to the Orishas, a single
story in a last breath — the people still
their hearts — the people open closed
hearts — the people need to speak
their stories, their ragged endings
the wings of will arise

— Lorna Dee Cervantes
1/14/10

INSURANCE

“The greatest earthquake is poverty.”
— Miguel Robles, survivor of the Mexico City earthquake

The typical American man
doesn’t care about Haiti.
The typical American man
doesn’t care if Jericho
falls down on Chile.
The typical American paycheck
doesn’t allow for donations
of the heart, doesn’t count the fallen
or the blood drops of crushed
children or the buzz of the saw
on limbs or the long long wait.
The typical American fellow
wouldn’t give water
to a mother and babe. The babe
on the arm of the typical American
male is a sight to behold, to hold,
but might not stop to care.
The usual type in America
texts ten dollars to fill a page
and the paychecks of the admin
while snorting up the rest.
The typical American man will not
be found alone in a jungle digging
out the dead and living dead.
He will not be found hauling
rails to drive the washed-out chasms.
He will not be discovered
with food, with water, with
water, with water, with water
so that a whole pueblo survives.
The normal man will not stand
and hold the shunt, the stent,
the IV to a new way of life.
Another world is possible.
When the rubble is cleaned
and the clearing of the dead
hearts and minds begins.
The typical American man
doesn’t know we are
all American.

— Lorna Dee Cervantes
3/25/10

Copyright © 2010 Lorna Dee Cervantes
(Posted with the poet’s permission)

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Who took this photo?

© Nancy Fewkes

Born Florence Anthony (October 21, 1947 – March 20, 2010), Ai was a National Book Award winning American poet and educator who legally changed her name to Ai Ogawa. Ai, who described herself as ½ Japanese, Choctaw-Chickasaw, Black, Irish, Southern Cheyenne, and Comanche, was born in Albany, Texas in 1947, and she grew up in Tucson, Arizona. Raised also in Las Vegas and San Francisco, she majored in Japanese at the University of Arizona and immersed herself in Buddhism. (See Wikipedia)

© Andrew Ferguson

Ai

Conversation

We smile at each other
and I lean back against the wicker couch.
How does it feel to be dead? I say.
You touch my knees with your blue fingers.
And when you open your mouth,
a ball of yellow light falls to the floor
and burns a hole through it.
Don’t tell me, I say. I don’t want to hear.
Did you ever, you start,
wear a certain kind of dress
and just by accident,
so inconsequential you barely notice it,
your fingers graze that dress
and you hear the sound of a knife cutting paper,
you see it too
and you realize how that image
is simply the extension of another image,
that your own life
is a chain of words
that one day will snap.
Words, you say, young girls in a circle, holding hands,
and beginning to rise heavenward
in their confirmation dresses,
like white helium balloons,
the wreathes of flowers on their heads spinning,
and above all that,
that’s where I’m floating,
and that’s what it’s like
only ten times clearer,
ten times more horrible.
Could anyone alive survive it?

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Ai, a Steadfast Poetic Channel of Hard Lives, Dies at 62 ~ Margalit Fox, New York Times; March 27, 2010

National Book Award winning poet Ai has died ~ Carolyn Kellogg, Jacket Copy, L.A. Times; March 24, 2010

The poet Ai joins the ancestors ~ this black sista’s page; March 24, 2010

Books by Ai

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Patricia Spears Jones

It’s a beautiful morning, a Sunday morning the second day of Spring and I am in tears. The poet, Ai Ogawa has passed on March 19. We just lived through a soul killing winter and many people did not make it to Friday’s glorious vernal equinox. Joy Harjo said there was snow in Albuqurque. There was sun sun sun here.

Ai was not a mentor or teacher, she was a friend. One of the wonderful people I got to know in my short time living in Boston. She was a brilliant poet and I remember buying Cruelty in the 1970s and seeing her picture and thinking what a beautiful and incredibly insightful woman. Her personna poems are contemporary classics. She was able to go deep into her subjects-she really could roam the shadow world; she understood the consequences, the brutality of absolute power whether wielded by dictators or some poor woman’s husband. I loved her occasional obsessions like The Wooster Group-esp Willem Dafoe and Ron Vawter who showed off their Johnsons when they performed a hula-yes those guys were sans culottes! She was incredibly bawdy and stylish and occasionally imperious, totally eccentric and witty. I wonder if her cats are okay.

I talked with her earlier this year sharing a bit of my troubles, but mostly we ranked on some poets (lots of laughter), talked about Obama and hoped each other well.

I don’t know what happened, but around this time last year Deborah Digges took her life and I know that other women in their late 50’s and early 60s are really vulnerable. We are the generation that has seen, done many things. Some of us have been rewarded for this, but many of us are just trying to stay vital, disciplined in our work, and gain recognition for for our work, our lives. But we live in a culture that has not learned how to care for women and men aging, evolving if they are not in certain categories. A single woman, even one as celebrated as Ai living in the middle of this country could be poorly treated, but that’s speculation.

Where her soul goes, I know not. But she worked language in amazing ways and I would hope that there’s a really great flea market where she can search for gorgeous fabrics and designer dresses from the 1920s and try them on to her heart’s content.

Lord, what a morning.

– Patricia Spears Jones,
Brooklyn, NY

Sharon Doubiago

Ai:  I go back to G Road North, Albion, California, poems in APR, 1976-7. I was so trying to be a poet out of all the established shit. Her photo. Her incredible Asian American African face. Poems I couldn’t entirely figure (and the anger was harder) but poems of “people” I also was trying to write of. Daughter molesters, mixed racists, killing, the famous icons, American history, violence and love, fathers and the military and US colonialism, family (did she ever write of her own family? intimate poems of herself?) One about Marilyn Monroe that though read and reread and studied, and of whom I knew, it almost seemed, as much as any serious thinker about Monroe, re America (later Joyce Carol Oak’s Blonde???), I could not figure, entirely, this poem–re the history, the facts.  Yet it’s energy was so explosive, so making the read worth it, so the truth I knew even if i still did not understand. (”Kerouac and Monroe on Kalaloch”). There’s her poem from back then, Salome, that’s gone around in the announcements of her death and which I remember reading from then, but which, I still don’t fully understand:  the last line (the mother’s complicity???). Sending this for now. (Last night I decided not to copy it.) but it’s hear: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/books/28ai.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Many many years later I learned (from Philip Suntree Doughtry) that Ai was in his UC Irvine phd Writing program I received a full fellowship to, but decline so as NOT write the story of my father. I still can’t imagine what would have happened if I had. But I do know, always, that Ai was my sister (as is Philip my brother).

Kisses, Ai, kisses into the ether (especially to your lungs, your breast on top of it).

– Sharon Doubiago,
Berkeley, CA

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What a great little bookstore! You can really see how much thought goes into the selection of the inventory. I was stoked to find such a great selection of Iceberg Slim books. There’s also an amazing selection of ethnic poetry. The owner puts on cool events like book signings, open mic nights, kid’s events (there’s a neat kid’s room in the back of the store) and poetry readings. She also sells mugs, key rings, bumper stickers, and stuff like that. If you’re in the neighborhood, be sure to check it out. It’s fun to look around in there. You’ll most likely find something you’ll want. Like, Trick Baby by Iceberg Slim. — Rebecca R. (Yelp.com)

Courtesy photo

Owner and manager Mary Ann Braithwaite — who always wanted to own a book store — named Rebecca’s Books after her late mother.

BENEFIT EXTRAVAGANZA
for
REBECCA’S BOOKS

Saturday, March 27, 2010
10 am to 6 pm

hosted by
AVOTCJA

with
VOICES OF OUR YOUTH:
“JOSH” JOSHUA MERCHANT
BOMBAZANDO with LAS CANEPAS

also
LEWIS JORDAN & Q.R. HAND, JR.
(members of the Wordwind Chorus)
GENNY LIM
(poet/teacher)
ELIZA SHEFLER & ANTHONY SMITH
(piano & vocalists)
MARK STATES
(deep performance poet)
MARC
KOCKINOS
(open verse poet)
PABLO ROSALES
(poet/spoken word artist)
ODILIA
GALVAN RODRÍGUEZ
(La Curandera)
JORGE MOLINA
(Journeyman/MAPP)
DAPHNE MUSE
(poet/educator)
MAMACOATL
(poet/singer/musician/educator)
AYODELE NZINGA “WORDSLANGER”
(poet/actress)
TRES SANTOS
(Alison Fletcher, Muteado & Marc G)
JAVIER REYES
(hip hop poetry)
JACK & ADELLE FOLEY
(KPFA poets/playwrights)

guest appearances by
AL YOUNG
YAYA MALDONADO y sus RUMBEROS
TUREEDA
MIKEL
CLIVE MATSON
AVA SQUARE-LeVIAS
SEVÉ TORRES, RAYMOND NAT TURNER  & DAVID KUBRIN

Saturday, March 27th
REBECCA’S BOOKS
(specializing in ethnic poetry)

3268 Adeline Street
Berkeley, CA 94703

(½ block North of Alcatraz &
2 short blocks South of Ashby BART)

510.852.4768

10 am to 6 pm
$3 – $20 Sliding Scale

rebeccasbooks@yahoo.com
www.Avotcja.com
LaVerdadMusical@yahoo.com

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Gabourey Sidibe as Precious

View trailer

Courtesy of Crown Publishers

Ishmael Reed

Renowned poet-novelist-essayist-playwright Ishmael Reed unpacks the motion picture Precious — recipient of two Oscars at this year’s Academy Awards — based on Push, a novel published in 2009 by the poet-novelist Sapphire (Ramona Lofton).

Courtesy photo

Barbara Bush

Not only did former First Lady Barbara Bush review Precious for Newsweek; she and her husband held two private screenings at their home. “Recently,” she wrote, “George and I hosted a special sneak preview of Precious in our hometown, Houston. The audience of 200 included young people and old, teachers and corporate executives, parents and grandparents, and folks of just about every ethnic and economic background. I planned to say a few words when the movie was over—but I was speechless. (My husband would tell you that is highly unusual.)” Written before Mrs. Bush’s Newsweek account appeared, Reed’s 25,000-word consciousness-expanding essay was posted online in early December at CounterPunch.

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Read Ishmael Reed’s “The Selling of Precious“

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Mo’Nique: Recipient of the 2010 Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for her portrayal of Precious’ mother

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HAPPY 80th BIRTHDAY, ORNETTE ~ Jazz on the Tube
Born March 9, 1930 at Fort Worth, Texas

Jazz scholar Phil Schaap’s radio celebration of Ornette’s 80th

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© Chris Felver

Ornette Coleman

© 2006 by Lee Friedlander / New York Times

Ornette Coleman biography at PBS.org

Nate Chinen: Ornette Coleman, Starring as Himself (New York Times, 27 September 2009)

Ben Ratliff: Seeking the Mystical Inside the Music (New York Times, 22 September 2006)

© John Abbott/Photography

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ORNETTE

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Courtesy of Justin Desmangles

Ornette muraled in at 15th & F Streets, Sacramento, CA

New Day Jazz at KDVS-FM ~ CELEBRATING ORNETTE COLEMAN ~ Part One
A special edition of Brian Ang’s Farewell Transmission, hosted this week by Justin Desmangles, celebrating Ornette Coleman, born March 9, 1930.

New Day Jazz at KDVS-FM ~ CELEBRATING ORNETTE COLEMAN ~ Part Two
A special edition of Brian Ang’s Farewell Transmission, hosted by Justin Desmangles, continuing the celebration of  Ornette Coleman.

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Courtesy photo

Ornette Coleman Quartet ~ ROMA 1974 #1

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Update March 11th 2010
7.2 MAGNITUDE AFTERSHOCK SHAKES CHILE AGAIN

© Yahoo News/AFP Photo

Sworn in: new Chilean President Sebastian Pinera with wife Cecilia Morel accompanied by his wife Cecilia Morel and Lower House Congresswoman Carolina Fuenzalida at the end of the inauguration ceremony in Valparaiso.

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Courtesy photo

The poetry of Gabriela Mistral — one of Chile’s great 20th century poets, the first Latin American awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature — was also translated by Langston Hughes

Hay besos que calcinan y que hieren,
hay besos que arrebatan los sentidos,
hay besos misteriosos que han dejado
mil sueños errantes y perdidos.

Hay besos problemáticos que encierran
una clave que nadie ha descifrado,
hay besos que engendran la tragedia
cuantas rosas en broche han deshojado.

from the poem Besos (Kisses)
© Literary estate of Lucila de María del Perpetuo Socorro Godoy Alcayaga

Some kisses scorch and hurt,
Some kisses enrapture,
Some kisses are mysterious and have left
A thousand dreams wandering and lost.

Some kisses are troublesome and contain
A code nobody has cracked,
Some kisses breed tragedy
As they pull off countless rosebuds.

Anonymous translation

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Photo © Sebastian Martínez/Associated Press

‘State of Catastrophe’ After Chile Quake | New York Times, 28 February 2010

Read the full story …

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President Obama expresses sympathy and pledges support for Chile

Photo © Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images North America

U.S. President Barack Obama (R) talks with Chilean President Michelle Bachelet during a photo op after a bilateral meeting in the Oval Office at the White House June 23, 2009 in Washington, DC.

CNN Updates, including Chilean President Michelle Bachelet’s ’state of catastrophe’ declaration

Chilean broadcaster Pamela Rodríguez reports from Santiago on Russian TV

Chilean quake has knocked Earth three inches off her axis, shortening our day by millionths of a second

Photo © REUTERS/Pilar Olivares

An earthquake survivor plays soccer next to the tent where he is living with his family five days after a massive earthquake and ensuing tsunami caused widespread destruction in Dichato March 4, 2010.  (Story by Terry Wade and Fabian Cambero ~ Maylasian National News Agency, 5 March 2010)
Courtesy Bernama.com

Earthquake exposes social chasm in Chile (Rafael Azul, World Socialist Website, 8 March 2010)

Chile’s infrastructure after the quake (Pamela Morales, Santiago Times, 3 March 2010)

Chilean newspapers at onlinenewspapers.com

La historia de terremotos en chile

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Blogs, posts, and updates at Alternet

Updates and relief efforts at The Cleanest Line

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RATTLE AND HUM

Olde New England Towne

Read Reverend Peter Bulkeley’s cautionary poem about the 1653 New England earthquake, plus other quake poems at Dark Sky Magazine

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Source: poetacandida.se

Courtesy photo

Cándida Pedersen:

Chile sufre el dolor del terremoto

Este poema está compuesto
con lágrimas de angustia y desesperación,
mis ojos lloran, mi corazón está triste y solo,
porque mi país sufre el dolor
más grande que pisa la tierra.
En enero fue Haití, ahora Chile,
donde el terremoto no tuvo piedad
por los niños ni las mujeres,
quitándole la vida a más de 700 personas
dejando a más de dos millones
de familias sin hogar.

Mañana tal vez le toque a otro país hermano
que viva el pánico con la impotencia de querer vivir
y no poder hacer nada contra este fenómeno.

Ayer en Estocolomo se reunían
miles de chilenos y latinamericanos
pidiendo ayuda para Haití,
pero la tempestad del dolor
atravesó las fronteras
y atacó la gente más pobre de mi país.

Chile es un poema de amor y calor,
pero hoy el arte de la poesía
se viste con tormenta de tristeza
escribiendo el lamento que azota
al pueblo chileno.

Mi alma pide la colaboración de todos los poetas,
extendiendo este mensaje
de solidaridad y hermandad
para todo el mundo,
tratando de unirnos en la agonía
que invade a mi país
que ha sido víctima
por una terrible catástrofe natural,
impidiéndonos el camino a la felicidad,
pero mi luz de esperanza´
aún está encendida
para estrechar lazos de bondad
y ayudar a mi país Chile.

© 2010 Cándida Pedersen
Courtesy of poetacandida.se

CHILE
at InfoPlease (All the Knowledge You Need)

Situated south of Peru and west of Bolivia and Argentina, Chile fills a narrow 2,880-mi (4,506 km) strip between the Andes and the Pacific. One-third of Chile is covered by the towering ranges of the Andes. In the north is the driest place on Earth, the Atacama Desert, and in the center is a 700-mile-long (1,127 km) thickly populated valley with most of Chile’s arable land … Click to continue

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“oh children think about the
good times”
– Lucille Clifton

Courtesy Vox of Dartmouth

Poet Lucille Clifton

Clifton’s VOICES ~ Recipient of the National Book Award

Jay Rey: Lucille Clifton, honored poet from Buffalo, dies ~ The Buffalo News, February 14, 2010

Nick Madigan: Lucille Clifton, one-time poet laureate of Md., dies at 73 ~ Baltimore Sun, February 14, 2010

Dwayne Betts: In Memory of Ms. Lucille Clifton (June 27, 1936 – February 13, 2010) ~ The Atlantic, February 15, 2010

Lucille Clifton reads a poem about the days surrounding 9/11 ~ PBS News Hour

<<Listen>>

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There is a girl inside

There is a girl inside.
She is randy as a wolf.
She will not walk away and leave these bones
to an old woman.

She is a green tree in a forest of kindling.
She is a greeen girl in a used poet.

She has waited patient as a nun
for the second coming,
when she can break through gray hairs
into blossom

and her lovers will harvest
honey and thyme
and the woods will be wild
with the damn wonder of it.

– Lucille Clifton

© Estate of Lucille Clifton

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Click a look inside

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Lucille Clifton at Wikipedia

Books by Lucille Clifton at Library Thing

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Courtesy photo

LUCILLE CLIFTON: 1936 – 2010

Beloved and admired friend and staff member, Lucille Clifton died Saturday, February 13. She had been invited back again to Squaw Valley this summer as a Special Guest. We had so looked forward to seeing her again. She had been a regular staff member since 1991 and continued to return almost every other year since then. She last taught in Squaw in 2008.

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LUCILLE CLIFTON: 1936 – 2010
Lucille was a major figure in American letters. She was an award-winning poet, fiction writer and author of children’s books. BOA Editions published her most recent collection, Mercy, as well as Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1969-1999, which won the 2000 National Book Award for Poetry. Two of Clifton’s BOA poetry collections, Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980 and Next: New Poems, were chosen as finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in 1988, while Clifton’s The Terrible Stories (BOA) was a finalist for the 1996 National Book Award. Clifton served as Distinguished Professor of Humanities and holder of the Hilda C. Landers Endowed Chair in the Liberal Arts at St. Mary’s College of Maryland until her retirement in the fall of 2005. She continued to serve St. Mary’s as Professor Emeritus and Friend to the College. She was appointed a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and elected as Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 1999. In 2007 she was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, which honors a living U.S. poet whose lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition. This year, 2010, she was awarded the Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America to honor “distinguished lifetime service to American poetry.”At the Poetry Workshop in Squaw Valley, she was a warm and wise presence, a listener as well as a storyteller. She wrote new poems each day along with the other staff poets and participants, and even her rough drafts were fine examples of her work. Lucille composed her daily poems on a typewriter, working on one of Oakley Hall’s shabby IBM Selectrics.

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We still remember her final poem of the 2008 week, how it achieved what Lucille’s work did so well – three spare lines that captured the spirit of the previous night’s party at the Hall House, the week itself – and much more. That poem, the last, as it turned out, that we would see from our old friend, went something like this:

over the mountains
and under the stars it is
one hell of a ride

There is an empty place where once there was Lucille, but we are fortunate to have her words to help us fill it.

A Community of Writers scholarship to honor Lucille has been established. If you wish to contribute, please send donations made to Squaw Valley Community of Writers and mail to:

Squaw Valley Community of Writers
Clifton Scholarship
PO Box 1416
Nevada City, CA 95959

Tax ID: 23-7179177

Or visit JustGive.org and donate with a credit card.
www.squawvalleywriters.org

Courtesy photo

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Ed Thigpen, Jazz Drummer, Dies at 79
By Peter Keepnews
The New York Times, January 26, 2010

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“Do you know why they call a drummer’s seat a throne? Because drummers are kings and queens.”
–Ed Thigpen, August 1984

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© Heinz Kronberger

JAZZ DRUMMER ED THIGPEN DIES AT 79

By Jesse Werner
10 February 2010
WSWS.org

On January 13, 2010, American jazz drummer Ed Thigpen died in Copenhagen at age 79. With a career spanning nearly six decades, he was an underrated master in his field. Although his finely crafted technique, artful subtlety and musicality at the drums made him a respected figure in the international jazz community, Thigpen received relatively limited recognition during his lifetime in the United States, his native country.

Read the rest of this story

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Ed Thigpen Discography

Photo courtesy of AllAboutJazz.com

… and scores more

Ed Thigpen Online

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© Nicola Fasano

Ed Thigpen: Master of Time, Rhythm & Taste (2009)

Ed Thigpen: Solo Brushes

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Drummer Matt Wilson: Remembering Ed Thigpen
at NPR’s A Blog Supreme

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Courtesy photo

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Courtesy Examiner.com

Sir John Dankworth in concert with vocalist Dame Cleo Laine, his life-long love and musical collaborator — the UK’s jazz royalty couple.

Breaking news
Saturday, 06 February 2010 20:18

Sir John Dankworth, who died today aged 82, was one of the totemic figures of British jazz, the first major jazz musician and the first British bebopper to be knighted, a leading musician, who with his wife Dame Cleo Laine, became known to the broader public beyond the jazz world and to an international audience, particularly in America.

Sir John had been in poor health for same time and back in November, before the London Jazz Festival where he was due to appear, was hospitalised with some fears that he would not make the concert. But made it he did even sitting on the stage in a wheelchair for the duration of the concert.

Born in Essex in 1927, Dankworth grew up in Walthamstow in a family of musicians and began to play clarinet after gaining a liking for the music of Benny Goodman. He later took up saxophone and studied at the Royal Academy of Music before national service. A high flier soon on the jazz scene in the UK he became a favourite with readers of Melody Maker in the late-1940s and was voted musician of the year, touring further afield with Sidney Bechet and even played with Charlie Parker in Paris. His group the Dankworth Seven became a favourite on the local scene in the 1950s and later his big band extended the scope for his writing activities and ambitions and played at the Newport Jazz Festival in the States. Cleo Laine’s singing was a feature of his band’s performances and the pair married in 1958.

Dankworth began a parallel career as a film and TV composer and became known to a wider public for the music he wrote for The Avengers, Tomorrow’s World and Modesty Blaise. He made the charts with ‘African Waltz’ and became a frequent presence on radio and TV.

Aside from his musical career he developed a theatre, The Stables, in the garden of his home at Wavendon in Buckinghamshire which flourishes to this day and he became heavily involved in jazz education and as an ambassador for jazz. For his services to the music he was made a knight bachelor in the 2006 New Year’s Honours List.

– Stephen Graham

Stephen Graham — a regular contributor to Jazzwise.com, the UK’s best-selling jazz publication — filed this early obituary on the internet while news of Johnny Dankworth’s death was breaking over the BBC.

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Courtesy Photo

John Fordham: Sir John Dankworth obituary
UK Guardian, 7 February 2010

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BBC tribute to Sir Johnny Dankworth ~ 7 February 2010

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Courtesy photos

The Charlie Parker-influenced Johnny Dankworth in 1955 and 2005

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A Johnny Dankworth Discography

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Cleo Laine & Johnny Dankworth swing “Lady Be Good”
~ Marina Del Rey, CA, February 1965

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Visit the home of Dame Cleo Laine
& Sir John Dankworth

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Such was the blues
of Langston Hughes xxxx
What was the blues
of Langston Hughes?

Like democracy, this page is always under reconstruction

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Langston Hughes in 1925

Langston Hughes in 1939

Photographs by Carl Van Vechten

Langston Hughes in 1940

Democracy will not come
Today, this year
Nor ever
Through compromise and fear.
–Langston Hughes
(”Democracy”)

Clickable

Langston Hughes

February 1, 1902~May 22, 1967

Courtesy photo

A pack of smokes, a desk, a lamp, a typewriter, a telephone, and a nimble-fingered Langston Hughes

Courtesy photo

James P. Johnson | 1894-1955 Master stride pianist and Harlem composer of “Carolina Shout” and “The Charleston,”"You’ve Got to Be Modernistic,” “Snowy Morning Blues,” symphonic scores, and further classics.

SNOWY MORNING BLUES

in tribute to James P. Johnson & Langston Hughes

New York, you know, has its New Yorks,
Manhattan her Queens, the Bronx
keepers of flames with all their names intact.
Now that’s a fact. Upside it, though,
you’ll put your heart and everything
you know or thought you knew of snow.

When Snowy Morning Blues plays James P. Johnson’s
game of catch-me-if-you-can, you can. He could, too.
New York ain’t no last word, you know.
Nothing’s what it used to be. And you, the you who sees
out past the end of the world, this snow, this wee wind-
fall he fells us with under eaves the way we all fall
under suspicion in detective movies.
Blam! Blame it on the blues, blame in on a blizzard.

Diamonded, grounded in its ice cream crisscross,
snow makes you take to the country again, harmonica in hand,
craving the guitar of a pianistic You-Gotta-Be-Modernistic
genius — you can’t get into this. Let snow tell its own story.
Let the blues roll on. Let snow fall right on time this time
blue, blank, blackening the city-within-a-city christened
in Dutch: Harlem, Haarlem,
Haaaarrrrrlem.
Vermeer, beware.

Al Young

© 2001, 2006 and 2007 by Al Young

from The Sound of Dreams Remembered: Poems 1990-2000; reprinted in Something About the Blues: An Unlikely Collection of Poetry

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Historic photo

Langston Hughes in Lawrence, Kansas: Photographs & Biographical Resources
by Denise Low and T.F. Pecore Weso

Langston Hughes, the great American poet who inspired the Harlem Renaissance, spent most of his childhood in Lawrence, Kansas. Authors Denise Low and T.F. Pecore Weso assemble photos & new research about Lawrence sites associated with Langston Hughes. Hughes lived with his grandmother in Lawrence much of the time from his birth in 1902 until his grandmother’s death in 1915. Because of the efforts of Lawrence preservationists, many of the structures are still standing.

LANGSTON HUGHES at PAL
(Perspectives in American Literature):
A Research and Reference Guide
An Ongoing Project
© Paul P. Reuben

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Langston Hughes, the busboy-poet, Washington, DC, early 1920s

« Read the 1967 NY Times obituary account of how busboy on-duty Langston Hughes got “discovered” after he slipped three poems under poet Vachel Lindsay’s luncheon plate at the Wardman Park Hotel, where young Hughes worked. »

Visit the website of DC’s Busboys and Poets, a restaurant, bookstore, fair trade market and gathering place, where people can discuss issues of social justice and peace. Each Busboys and Poets location should enhance the community — allowing us to bring together a diverse clientele reflective of the surrounding neighborhoods. Busboys and Poets creates an environment where shared conversations over food and drink allow the progressive, artistic and literary communities to dialogue, educate and interact. Busboys and Poets is a community gathering place.

First established in 2005, Busboys and Poets was created by owner Anas “Andy” Shallal, an Iraqi-American artist, activist and restaurateur. After opening, the flagship location at 14th and V Streets, NW (Washington DC), the neighboring residents and the progressive community, embraced Busboys, especially activists opposed to the Iraq War. Busboys and Poets is now located in three distinctive neighborhoods in the Washington Metropolitan area and is a community resource for artists, activists, writers, thinkers and dreamers.

BRASS SPITTOONS

by Langston Hughes

Clean the spittoons, boy.
Detroit,
Chicago,
Atlantic City,
Palm Beach.
Clean the spittoons.
The steam in hotel kitchens,
And the smoke in hotel lobbies,
And the slime in hotel spittoons:
Part of my life.
Hey, boy!
A nickel,
A dime,
A dollar,
Two dollars a day.
Hey, boy! A nickel,
A dime,
A dollar, Two dollars
Buys shoes for the baby.
House rent to pay.
Gin on Saturday,
Church on Sunday.
My God!
Babies and gin and church and women and
Sunday all mixed up with dimes and dollars
and clean spittoons and house rent to pay.
Hey, boy!
A bright bowl of brass is beautiful to the Lord,
Bright polished brass like the cymbals
Of King David’s dancers,
Like the wine cups of Solomon.
Hey, boy!
A clean spittoon on the altar of the Lord.
A clean bright spittoon all newly polished –
Come ‘ere boy!

© Estate of Langston Hughes

This spittoon-shaped poem first appeared in New Masses, December 1926; reprinted in Fine Clothes to the Jew, 1927.

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Al Young comments:
Reading in my late teens I Wonder As I Wander — Langston Hughes’ autobiographical follow-up to The Big Sea – I was enthralled and inspired by the tales he weaves of his travels throughout the U.S., Mexico, Cuba, Europe, the USSR, Soviet Asia, and China. One of Hughes’ lingering memoirs describes a voyage that he and 20 other African Americans took to Russia during the Great Depression to make a movie called Black and White. While his 1956 account of this episode does not match up with documents lately uncovered in the U.S. and in Russia, Hughes’ socio-romantic flashback lives on in imagination. This sunny picture invites us to peer into the faces of some amazingly contemporary-looking passengers, who made that fabled crossing: Langston Hughes with his friends aboard the Europa-Bremen, June 17, 1932. Seated front center from left to right are Louise Thompson Patterson and Dorothy West. On board ship was also Ralph Bunche, who was visiting Paris with Alain Locke.

Photograph courtesy of Yale University Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

Hughes poses with neighborhood kids in the cramped, flowering confines of what they called “Our Block’s Childrens Garden” — and long before seed-leasing and genetic modification became commonplace.

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