© 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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Isaac Hayes | Courtesy Photo

August 11, 2008
Isaac Hayes, 65, a Creator of ’70s Soul Style, Dies
By BEN SISARIO
The New York Times

Go to the New York Times original

Isaac Hayes, the singer and songwriter whose luxurious, strutting funk arrangements in songs like “Theme From ‘Shaft’ ” defined the glories and excesses of soul music in the early 1970s, died on Sunday in Memphis. He was 65.

The Shelby County Sheriff’s Office said that Mr. Hayes’s wife, Adjowa, found him collapsed near a treadmill at their home in Cordova, an eastern suburb of Memphis, and he was pronounced dead an hour later. The cause of death was not known.

With his lascivious bass-baritone and flamboyant wardrobe, Mr. Hayes developed a musical persona that was an embodiment of the hyper-masculine, street-savvy characters of the so-called blaxploitation films of the era. In his theme song to Gordon Parks’s “Shaft” from 1971, the title character is summed up in a line that has become a classic of kitsch: “Who’s a black private dick/Who’s a sex machine to all the chicks?”

(Furthermore: “He’s a complicated man/But no one understands him but his woman.”)

The “Shaft” theme won an Academy Award and has become one of his best-known songs. But Mr. Hayes’s career stretched far beyond soundtracks. For much of the 1960s and into the ’70s he was one of the principal songwriters and performers for Stax Records, the trailblazing Memphis R&B label, and in the 1990s he revived his career by providing the voice for the amorous and wise Chef on the cable television show “South Park.”

Isaac Hayes was born Aug. 20, 1942, in a tin shack in rural Covington, Tenn., to a mother who died early and a father who left home. He was raised largely by his grandparents, and worked in cotton fields while going to school. He began playing in local bands, and by early 1964, when he was 21, he was working as a backup musician for Stax. His first session was with Otis Redding.

Soon he began writing songs with David Porter, and their music — numbers like “Soul Man” and Hold On, I’m Comin’ ” for Sam and Dave, and “B-A-B-Y” for Carla Thomas — came to embody the Stax aesthetic. It was tight, catchy pop, but full of sweat and grit, a proudly unpolished Southern alternative to Motown.

By the late 1960s Mr. Hayes was stepping out as a solo artist, and his reputation grew as much for his dress as for his music. The cover of his 1969 album, “Hot Buttered Soul,” pictured him in customary style: shaved head, dark shades, gold chains, bare chest. The album was similarly eccentric, consisting of just four songs, including lengthy, elaborate versions of Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “Walk On By” and Jimmy Webb’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.” It also included spoken segments that he called raps, and the album became one of his biggest hits, reaching No. 8.

When he was approached to create the score to “Shaft,” one of the first blaxploitation films, Mr. Hayes said he also wanted the lead role. The part went to Richard Roundtree, but Mr. Hayes recorded the music anyway. It was done in four days with several members of the Bar-Kays, one of the house bands at Stax.

With a cymbal pattern borrowed from Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness,” which Mr. Hayes had arranged, the song layered funk guitars, horns, woodwinds and strings, prefiguring disco. It became a No. 1 hit.

In 1971 he followed up the “Shaft” soundtrack with “Black Moses,” a double album that was another ambitious expansion of the vocabulary of soul music. In its original issue, the cover folded out to reveal a portrait of Mr. Hayes in crucifix form.

In the mid-’70s Mr. Hayes’s finances collapsed and his music turned explicitly to disco, which turned out to be a career dead end.

Through the 1970s and into the ’90s he acted in several films, including “Escape From New York” in 1981 and the spoof “I’m Gonna Git You Sucka” in 1988. His music from this era sold poorly, but his career revived in 1997 when he began playing Chef on “South Park.” A Scientologist, he quit the show in 2006, saying that he had been offended by an episode that ridiculed Tom Cruise and other prominent Scientologists. He also had a radio show in New York in the 1990s.

Mr. Hayes had health problems in recent years but had continued to tour and work occasionally in film (he had a role in “Soul Men,” a comedy set for release in November and starring Samuel L. Jackson and Bernie Mac, the comedian who died Saturday).

In an interview on Sunday, Mr. Porter, Mr. Hayes’s fellow songwriter, said that his friend was “recuperating from a stroke,” but added that “in the middle of all that he was still trying to have fun” and had even returned to his birthplace in Covington to go fishing.

Mr. Hayes had been married three times previously. In addition to his wife, he is survived by their son, Nana, and 11 other children.

John M. Hubbell contributed reporting from Memphis.

© 2008 The New York Times

Vinyl LP cover from the Hit 1971 soundtrack album of the Gordon Parks film, Shaft

Courtesy IsaacHayes.Com

Go to the English Al-Jazeera original

“Every beautiful poem is an act of resistance.” – Mahmoud Darwish

10 August 2008

Mahmoud Darwish, the renowned Palestinian poet, has died after open heart surgery at the Memorial Hermann medical center in Texas.

Ann Brimberry, Memorial Hermann’s spokeswoman, confirmed to Al Jazeera that Darwish died at 1.35pm (18:35 GMT).

Siham Daoud, a fellow poet and friend of the 67-year-old, had asked not to be resuscitated if the surgery did not succeed.

She said Darwish departed for the US ten days ago for the surgery, and he had undergone two operations for heart problems before Saturday’s surgery.

Best known for his work describing the Palestinian struggle for independence, the experience of exile and factional infighting, Darwish was a vocal critic of Israeli policy and the occupation of Palestinian lands.

Many of his poems have also been put into music - most notably Rita, Birds of Galilee and I yearn for my mother’s bread, becoming anthems for at least two generations of Arabs.

“He felt the pulse of Palestinians in beautiful poetry. He was a mirror of the Palestinian society,” Ali Qleibo, a Palestinian anthropologist and lecturer in cultural studies at Al Quds University in Jerusalem said.

Last year, Darwish recited a poem damning the deadly infighting between rival Palestinian groups Hamas and Fatah, describing it as “a public attempt at suicide in the streets”.

Early life

He was born in the village of Barweh in Galilee, a village that was razed during the establishment of Israel in 1948.

He joined the Israeli Communist Party after high school and began writing poems for leftist newspapers.

He was put under house arrest and imprisoned for his political activities, after which he worked as editor of Ittihad newspaper before leaving to study in the USSR in 1971.

Originally a member of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), Darwish resigned in 1993 in protest over the interim peace accords that Yasser Arafat, the late Palestinian leader, signed with Israel.

As a journalist, he worked for al-Ahram newspaper in Cairo and later became director of the Palestinian Research Centre.

In 2000, Yossi Sarid, Israel’s education minister, suggested including some of Darwish’s poems in the Israeli high school curriculum.

But Ehud Barak, the Israeli prime minister overruled him, saying Israel was not ready yet for his ideas in the school system.

In 2001, he won the Lannan prize for cultural freedom.

Leaves of Olives was published in 1964 when Darwish was 22-years old. Since then more than 20 volumes of his works of poetry have been published.

PASSPORT
Mahmoud Darwish

They did not recognize me in the shadows
That suck away my color in this Passport
And to them my wound was an exhibit
For a tourist Who loves to collect photographs
They did not recognize me,
Ah . . . Don’t leave
The palm of my hand without the sun
Because the trees recognize me
Don’t leave me pale like the moon!

All the birds that followed my palm
To the door of the distant airport
All the wheatfields
All the prisons
All the white tombstones
All the barbed Boundaries
All the waving handkerchiefs
All the eyes
were with me,
But they dropped them from my passport

Stripped of my name and identity?
On soil I nourished with my own hands?
Today Job cried out
Filling the sky:
Don’t make and example of me again!
Oh, gentlemen, Prophets,
Don’t ask the trees for their names
Don’t ask the valleys who their mother is
>From my forehead bursts the sward of light
And from my hand springs the water of the river
All the hearts of the people are my identity
So take away my passport!

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Clickable, clockable moon

Click on MoonCURRENT MOON

lunar phases

© 2008 by WordPress.com

Go to The Berkeley Daily Planet original

Michael Howerton | The Berkeley Daily Planet

Cody’s Books at Telegraph Avenue and Haste Street in its heyday
Courtesy Photo

Cody’s Books Closes After 52 Years in Berkeley

By Michael Howerton
Friday June 20, 2008

Cody’s Books, founded on Euclid Avenue in Berkeley in 1956, moved to Telegraph Avenue, expanded to Fourth Street in 1998 and San Francisco in 2005, closed on Telegraph in 2006, closed in San Francisco the following year, moved to Shattuck Avenue in March, and then, on June 19, 2008, went out of business.

Shoppers and passersby at the 2201 Shattuck store Friday found a locked store and a sign taped on the glass doors reading: “Cody’s Books is Closed-Thank You.” Above the windows a recently hung temporary banner proclaimed: “Now Open-Cody’s Books.”

An employee greeted a few people who knocked on the locked doors Friday afternoon, informing them that Cody’s was indeed closed for good.

Melissa Mytinger, Cody’s last manager, said that staff was told of the store’s closing during an all-staff meeting Friday morning. She had no forewarning of the move, she said.

“We were all shocked,” she said. “It was a great team.”

She said an official statement was expected to be issued from Japan, but as of Friday late afternoon, it was not available.

Cody’s Books, founded by Fred and Pat Cody 52 years ago, was for many years Berkeley’s most famous and most beloved book store in a town that loves books. The Codys were renowned for treating street people and protesters with kindness and generosity, especially during the time of the Free Speech Movement.

The business was sold to Andy Ross in 1977. He was responsible for the Fourth Street and San Francisco expansions and presided over closing the Telegraph store, after a business downturn that many observers thought was caused by problems with the expansion financing.

Soon after closing the Telegraph store in mid-2006, Ross sold Cody’s to Yohan, a Japanese book distributor whose owner-CEO was Hiroshi Kagawa. Yohan kept only the Fourth Street shop open. In December, Ross, who had stayed on as Cody’s president under the new owner, stepped down, and at the same time Kagawa left Yohan and took Cody’s with him to the IBC Publishing Group, the current owner.

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A 2001 courtesy photograph of Jimmy McGriff
© Jack Vartoogian/FrontRowPhotos | All Rights Reserved

Jimmy McGriff Bio

Organ master Jimmy McGriff may have studied formally at Juilliard and at Philadelphia’s Combe College of Music, but there’s nothing fancy about his music. It’s basic to the bone, always swinging and steeped in blues and gospel. McGriff’s brand of jazz is about feeling. “That’s the most important thing,” he says.

Blues has been the backbone of most of the major jazz organists, including Jimmy Smith and Jack McDuff, but throughout his 42-year recording career, McGriff has stuck closer to the blues than any of them. “People are always classifying me as a jazz organist, but I’m more of a blues organ player,” he insists. “That’s really what I feel.”

McGriff’s recordings of “I’ve Got a Woman” and “All About My Girl” were r&b and jukebox staples during the Sixties. With McGriff Avenue, his fourteenth album for Milestone (counting the five he’s cut as co-leader with Hank Crawford), the Hammond organ grinder remains true to the blues grounding for which he’s famous. The way things turned out, McGriff Avenue was not just another record date for the organist and his sidemen, as producer Bob Porter recounts in the CD notes. Porter had booked a noon session at Rudy Van Gelder’s New Jersey studio for September 11th, 2001, but that morning he quickly realized — especially since bridge and tunnel access to and from Manhattan was cut off soon after the World Trade Center towers were hit — that the session was not going to take place as scheduled.

When the record date was rescheduled for six weeks later, some personnel adjustments were necessary. Although Bill Easley, Ronnie Cuber, and bassist Wilbur Bascomb were able to make both days of recording, Purdie was replaced on the second day by Don Williams. Guitarist Rodney Jones couldn’t make the first session, but he contributed the funky title track (and was ably replaced by Melvin Sparks-Hassan).

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Go to the original at NeglectedBooks.com

“Give the Writer Some!”

Excerpt from “Body and Soul”

When the record came out, saxophonists all over the world, hearing it and sensing that things would never be the same, started woodshedding Hawkins’s impassioned licks in their closets and on the stand. Why’d he have to go and do that? Of course, everybody fell in love with it. My father would play it, take it off, play something else, then put it back on. This went on for years. What was he listening for? What were we listening to? What did it mean? What were all those funny, throaty squawks and sighs and cries all about? I knew what a body was, but what was a soul? You kept hearing people say, “Well, bless his soul!” You thought you knew what they meant, but really, you could only imagine as you must now. You knew what they meant when they said, “Bless her heart!” because you could put your hand to your heart and feel the beat, and your Aunt Ethel sometimes fried up chicken hearts along with gizzards, livers and feet. But a soul was unseeable. did animals have souls, too? Did birds, dogs, cows, mules, pigs, snakes, bees? And what about other stuff, like corn, okra, creeks, rivers, moonlight, sunshine, trees, the ground, the rain, the sky? Did white folks have souls?

… Thirty-nine, forty, fifty, a hundred, thousands–who’s to say how many rosy-chilled Octobers have befallen us, each one engraved in micro-moments of this innocent utterance, electrically notated but, like light in a photograph, never quite captured in detail, only in essence. Essence in this instance is private song, is you hearing your secret sorrow and joy blown back through Coleman Hawkins, invisibly connected to you and played back through countless bodies, each one an embodiment of the same soul force.

All poetry is about silent music, invisible art and the clothing of time for the ages.

Editor’s Comments

Not long after moving to the Bay Area in 1981, I picked up a copy of Al Young’s first book of “musical memoirs”, Bodies and Soul, and devoured it. Full of short, lyrical essays no longer than it took to spin a good 45, it was the perfect book for the moment. With money to spend, nights and weekends free, and no homework for the first time in 18 years, I was reveling in the wonders of live and recorded musical to be found within an hour’s drive from Sunnyvale. Max Roach at the Keystone Korner; Elvis Costello at the Paramount; Anita O’Day at the Great American Musical Hall; King Sunny Ade in Santa Cruz; UB40 in Palo Alto; the SF Symphony at Stern Grove; Rasputin’s and Amoeba Music in Berkeley; and the world treasure of Village Music in Mill Valley. And a Tower Records store just fifteen minutes from my house.

Where, about a year later, I saw a tall black man with a distinctive streak of white hair browsing in the racks. I immediately recognized him as Al Young, and went over to offer my praise for his book. He was helping a friend decide how to spend a gift certificate, and the three of us talked for a few minutes about some albums they’d picked out. Then we all went back to fingering through the trays of LPs. It was the only time I met Young–the only time I’ve ever met the writer of a book I liked, in fact–but it seemed proof that I was living in a magical place.

Young published three more collections of musical essays after that: Kinds of Blue in 1984; Things Ain’t What They Used to Be in 1987; and Drowning in the Sea of Love, which included pieces from the three earlier books, in 1995. All four books are unforgiveably but understandably out of print now. Understandably, because Young had the misfortune to sign up with two different publishers — Creative Arts in Berkeley and the Ecco Press — that since went out of business. Unforgiveably because nobody beats Al Young when it comes to capturing the mood and rhythm of good pop, jazz, and blues music in prose.

You can get a taste of Young’s writing from reading his essay on Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” on Salon, taken from Drowning in the Sea of Love. And thanks to their utter neglect, you can pick up used and remaindered copies of all four books for not much more than a buck total plus shipping. Until someone rights this wrong and puts at least a sampler back in print, this is what you’ll have to do if you want to experience a master at his instrument. As James Brown would have told us: “Give the writer some!”

Al Young’s Musical Memoirs:

• Bodies and Soul
  Berkeley, California: Creative Arts, 1981
• Kinds of Blue
  Berkeley, California: Creative Arts, 1984
• Things Ain’t What They Used to Be
  Berkeley, California: Creative Arts, 1987
• Drowning in the Sea of Love
  Hopewell, New Jersey: Ecco Press, 1995

Posted in Featured Books |

Email the author: Editor@NeglectedBooks.com

©NeglectedBooks.com 2008. All rights reserved.

Click image to see painting in its truthful context

It was my privilege and pleasure to have basked in the presence of Utah Phillips in Nevada City, California, where he died May 23rd. The stories he told in poetry and song expressed his love for underdog working people and all human populations against whom the deck is stacked. Like a latter-day Johnny Appleseed, Utah planted in his audiences the spirit of populism and compassion that characterizes America’s noblest legacy. At a bend in our history when we hear continuously of corporate wars and hostile takeovers and little of workers or labor, Utah Phillips devoted his whole life to the cause of social justice. Every day this spirit is disappearing from the world. News of his death quiets and saddens me.
– Al Young

In October of 2003 guitarist-songster Marc Silber holds up announcement for an upcoming Utah Phillips performance at Berkeley’s Freight & Salvage. Marc and Al, who once played folk music together, have been friends for half a century, since college days at Ann Arbor.

Go to the original

Utah Phillips Dead at 73:

Folksinger, Storyteller, Railroad Tramp

by Jordan Fisher Smith and Molly Fisk

Utah Phillips, a seminal figure in American folk music who performed extensively and tirelessly for audiences on two continents for 38 years, died Friday of congestive heart failure in Nevada City, California, a small town in the Sierra Nevada mountains where he lived for the last 21 years with his wife, Joanna Robinson, a freelance editor.Born Bruce Duncan Phillips on May 15, 1935 in Cleveland, Ohio, he was the son of labor organizers. Whether through this early influence or an early life that was not always tranquil or easy, by his twenties Phillips demonstrated a lifelong concern with the living conditions of working people. He was a proud member of the Industrial Workers of the World, popularly known as “the Wobblies,” an organizational artifact of early twentieth-century labor struggles that has seen renewed interest and growth in membership in the last decade, not in small part due to his efforts to popularize it.

Phillips served as an Army private during the Korean War, an experience he would later refer to as the turning point of his life. Deeply affected by the devastation and human misery he had witnessed, upon his return to the United States he began drifting, riding freight trains around the country. His struggle would be familiar today, when the difficulties of returning combat veterans are more widely understood, but in the late fifties Phillips was left to work them out for himself. Destitute and drinking, Phillips got off a freight train in Salt Lake City and wound up at the Joe Hill House, a homeless shelter operated by the anarchist Ammon Hennacy, a member of the Catholic Worker movement and associate of Dorothy Day.

Phillips credited Hennacy and other social reformers he referred to as his “elders” with having provided a philosophical framework around which he later constructed songs and stories he intended as a template his audiences could employ to understand their own political and working lives. They were often hilarious, sometimes sad, but never shallow.

“He made me understand that music must be more than cotton candy for the ears,” said John McCutcheon, a nationally-known folksinger and close friend.

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In Memoriam

© Raymond Nat Turner/Zigi Lowenberg

LISTEN NOW | Full one-hour tribute to Reggie Lockett on Kris Welch’s KPFA Living Room program of 30th May 2008. Hear poets and friends broadcast their hearts in a live broadcast studio at KPFA Pacifica: q.r. hand, jr, Avotcja, Jack and Adelle Foley, Lucha Corpi, Adam David Miller, Kim Shuck, Judy Juanita, John Curl, Kirk Lumpkin, Kim McMillan, Gerald Nicosia, Mary Rudge, Raymond Nat Turner, Katherine Hastings, Karla Brundage, Jim LeCuyere, Karen Folger Jacobs, Slim Russell, Wanda Sabir, Al Young, and others.

Photos © Kathy Sloane

SERVICES WERE HELD
Thursday, May 22
11:00 a.m.
Bee Bee Memorial Cathedral
3900 Telegraph Avenue
Oakland, CA 94609
510.655.6114

Buried at Rolling Hills Cemetery, Richmond, CA

singing the Movement
blending with other voices
we miss yours, Reggie

Adelle Foley

UNTITLED
for Reginald Lockett

Your words are in the air
and enter us
on this hottest day in memory
flowers burst open
beyond open
brown birds with beautiful voices
dance in sprinkler rain
Would you be surprised to know
poems are being written
all up and down California tonight
in an attempt
to hold on to you somehow?
To love you into thin air?
Just hours before the call
Borges on death:
For me death is a hope, the irrational
certitude of being abolished,
erased, and forgotten. You think it matters
if tomorrow I will have disappeared?
Old spirit. New spirit.
Teacher of Watts and Trane,
August Crumpler,
West Oakland Archaeology,
the Culbersons and Backyard Boogie.
You wrote “To Kathy,”
a name from childhood
growing up in the 60s
in some other world

Katherine Hastings

for reginald lockett

there were your eyes
always holding twinkle and swoon
eyes to make ladies blush and smile

and the voice that rumbled deep
thunder on a summer day
sure to bring a cooling rain

and the head that tipped
with the tease that was to come
slipping it in with a wink and a chortle
always close with a ready quip, a cogent quote
a push, a pull, a slap on the back

sharp sure
a man’s man
true friend
a woman’s man
loved and loving

bookstore owners too knew
your face, your name
as you often sought out shop corners
as places of refuge, places called home

you were a man
of letters and words and books
reading inside their lines, you
could unknot meter, explicate metaphors,
and glean the truth from the quirkiest of prose
the most layered of poems

in your work, you laced memory and song
beneath and around your family of blood
your comrades your students your teachers
your daughter maya, who reshaped your heart
into new drum rhythms
your loves who brought
jubilation and destruction
your last love who brought
joy and acceptance

words of love, and history
regret and defiance
filled your pages
beside the music
that made your spirit dance

carrying sadness in your belly
laughter in your chest
a military posture of pride
and a hip sloping stride
Reginald you were always you
and we will miss you
miss you dearly

devorah major
devorah major at YouTube

polysyllabic omniverse of our dreams
for reginald lockett in memoriam; for his family and all of us
may 16, 2008

we set sail to the endless shore
together
riding ripples of language
carrying us toward the
ultimate song

you now
an ocean-going vessel
piloting a course
through the polysyllabic omniverse
of our dreams

i want to borrow your rhythm
but cannot match your cadence
i hear you sing praises
louder than any church choir
bolder than the soloist’s shout

your multiphonic speech
breathes cascading color
of a hue not yet seen by the naked eye
a fabric so finely woven that you can
drink from it

the sustenance you provide
is like water gushing forth
from an underground spring

now you are that spring
and we take heart in
your unending flow

you are with us
here now
you are with us
as the cosmic dance
you are with us
as the planet ceases its spin
a moment

silent
before bursting in praise

we are now your pages
leaves dog eared from late night study
we are the letters
that form the words
that build the phrase
to sing the song
of love we feel for you

as the boat now reaches its shore
you step forth into the light
you so often spoke of
each one of your poems
a particle forming to
embrace your union

you are with us
hear our song
you are with us
as we join together
you are with us
entities entwined
we will find you
in the polysyllabic omniverse
of our dreams

brian auerbach

Reginald Lockett, died May 15, 2008

If there was ever a poet deserving of the title poet laureate for a city, Reggie was Oakland’s unnamed honoree. His work breathed Oakland—each syllable an experience that we, who call this fair city home, could relate to. He lived in a haunted house, haunted by the memories of black people from southern towns where they were just as unwelcome, as some were here. Reggie was born in one of those places, too, but his family moved here and here is where the poet was born.

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In Memoriam

Photos: Brett Hall Jones

Go to the San Francisco Chronicle original

Oakley Hall, author of ‘Warlock,’ dies at 87

Heidi Benson, San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Oakley Hall, a prolific author and influential writing teacher best known for the novels “The Downhill Racers” and “Warlock” - and as a founder of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers - died Monday night in Nevada City. He was 87.His death was caused by cancer and kidney disease, said his daughter, Brett Hall Jones, executive director of the Community of Writers.

Mr. Hall was one of a handful of writers who helped to define and elevate California literature in the generation after John Steinbeck.

He was the author of more than 20 works of fiction and nonfiction, including two books on the art of fiction writing and thelibretto for an opera based on Wallace Stegner’s “Angle of Repose.” Among the many honors Mr. Hall received were lifetime achievement awards from the PEN Center USA and the Cowboy Hall of Fame.

“Oakley Hall was a master storyteller who loved the West,” said California poet laureate Al Young, who has known Mr. Hall for nearly three decades. Pulitzer Prize finalist Mr. Hall’s novel “Warlock,” a finalist for the 1958 Pulitzer Prize - and the first of a trilogy - was reissued in 2005 as part of the New York Review of Books Classics series with an introduction by Robert Stone.

Set in the fictional 19th century town of Warlock, it draws on the story of the OK Corral, said Edwin Frank, editor of the series.” Oakley effectively rediscovered the Wild West for post-World War II America - not as the heroic proving ground of the nation, but as a weird dreamworld and tragically violent masquerade,” Frank said. “It’s a great book, and it blazed a path for fellow writers like Thomas Pynchon and Cormac McCarthy.”

Author James D. Houston, a longtime friend and instructor at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, cites Mr. Hall’s 1997 novel, “Separations,” as a favorite. “It is about the discovery of the Colorado River, coming down through that canyon country on rafts in the 19th century,” Houston said. “It is some of the most remarkable writing about the Western landscape that you’ll ever see.”

Mr. Hall was born in 1920 in San Diego and grew up in that city’s Mission Hills district and in Honolulu. After graduating from UC Berkeley, he joined the Marines, serving in the Pacific during World War II. After the war, Mr. Hall studied in Europe on the GI Bill and went on to earn a master’s of fine arts in creative writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

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