b. medusa 17 June 2007 10:55:02 am
continuing in the roundup mode, cause my writing suckz after all. i have a lot to say, but i’m too uneducated & inarticulate to make it sound good/relevant. or maybe no one is interested in what this particular poor black female disabled veteran (yes i’m all that 
) has to say. or my tiny little space/self is lost in the vastness of the internetz/universe. or prolly a combination of all these things. of course, my infrequent blog posts don’t help either!
anyway, more good shit seen & read on the internetz:
- ADDED – info on the cherokee election @ Alas, a blog (includes links to previous posts on this subject, plus the racial & political dynamics behind the ouster of the Freedmen)
- ADDED – La Nación es de Quien lo Trabaja @ The Unapologetic Mexican. for the haters see this one also
- bgf @ and we shall march on the appropriation of audre lorde’s ‘master’s tools’ & the irony in this particular instance. includes a posting of lorde’s letter to mary daly.
- an interview on alternet with the author of ’sisterhood interrupted’ titled ‘why feminists fight with each other’, that leaves us (woc) out.
- locally, did anyone from b’more know there are plans to build 2 60 story buildings? um, why? one of them on a historically designated site (which apparently doesn’t mean shit, just an extra step developers have to take before razing the building). wouldn’t have heard about this if i hadn’t googled ‘baltimore’s tallest building’ after getting into an argument w/ someone calling the buildings downtown ’skyscrapers’. when i lived in the chicago area, buildings under 80 stories were called mid-rises or low-rises, over that they were called skyscapers. calling 40 story & under buildings skyscrapers is like calling b’more’s one underground transit line ‘the metro’ (dc) or ‘the subway’ (ny). not!
sorry, i digressed. finally there’s this:
i love to listen to our people. i learn a whole lot by just sitting in the corner and checking out what other people got to say. and though i usually don’t have much to say about stuff that’s not important to me, i feel compelled to bring this up: as much as i hate to say it, i heard nothing new at any of the critics panels. don’t get me wrong, much of what i heard i agree with, and a number of statements were important statements that needed to be made, but i didn’t hear any new ground being broken, no paradigm shifts, no theoretical breakthroughs, no insightful revelations that rock you to the roots, no radical suggestions that offer clarity or suggest new directions.
why not? i believe that the arrival of something new will only occur when there is a profound dissatisfaction with the status quo, a dissatisfaction so deep that we are impelled to do something else. as long as all we want is more of the same old same old, or all we want is our piece of the pie, well it’s going to be the same old recipe, maybe with blackberries or watermelon, but essentially more of the same. no we got to want to get rid of what is, in order to bring something new. and you know it’s hard to achieve an mfa or achieve tenure and at the same time be burning down the big house, and it’s even harder to achieve a recording contract or get on def-what-ever or cop a guest appearance on whore-tv and at the same time actually be burning down the big house. you can talk change and get a contract, but if you really making change, well. well. you know what i’m saying?
and i don’t mean this as no blanket condemnation of anyone, or any group, i mean this as a very precise socio-economic analysis of why so much of our shit is boring right now, boring or at best technically shinny but not going to bring no actual fire.
at the same time, as i sat listening to folk, all up under a lot of the conversation there was a palpable yearning for something more, something real, something distinctive and sustaining. we just got to figure how to get to it. may not know how to get to what we want, but for sure we know: most of what we got is not what we want. or need. even if we are pretending we are happy with the current state of our poetry.
there are many blogs/web sites/articles/books i read that get me to look @ things in ways i’d never considered or new ideas entirely. and there are far more that ain’t nothing new, the same old recipe. i don’t have any answers either, but i know i don’t want the same old same old.
continuing:
from the audience came questions about making a career of poetry, . . . because capitalism, because being here in america will make you think the whole world is all about the dollar. yeah, we got to have money to survive, but money is not life. and so the answer is that there are some aspects of black poetics that money has nothing to do with, that some of us does whatever we got to do to keep that particular aspect at the forefront of our tongues, our consciousness. a career? no, a life. we could be ditch diggers, cotton pickers, porters, even a security guard or school teacher to make our money, our livelihood, but the poetry of us would/should still be kept alive.
this panel had my head both recoiling and screaming, even though i was sitting there, big, black and silent. i was thinking maybe it is better not to make a career out of our poetry, maybe it is better to keep our words off the auction block. so we can keep our words true to our soul. yeah, they got our bodies trapped here in the buying and selling of so-called free enterprise, but we, the hippest of us, we know that our souls are not for sale, our poetry is not a product to be def-ly (deathly?) advertising cars, clothes, liquor and debauchery. is it not true that our words really should/ought to be about the holy of our souls, about an identification of our heart.
ok, i understand the temptation, the language of commerce, i just don’t feel such talk will ever come anywhere near capturing the essence of our poetry, and if such language do, then surely our poetry will have become doo-doo dribblings, and not even that. i am saying to sell it, we got to kill it, and dead words are not what black poetry is.
and this:
but for every up there is a down, the downside is that often a lot of the personal talk masks an avoidance of dealing with major issues of the day, issues that are not personal in the sense that they are social and happening to everyone: could be haiti. for sure iraq. depleted uranium. health care. tax inequality. the impending draft. religious fundamentalism. (yall know this is a long list of shit). what i don’t dig is how a great deal of the personal poetry avoids dealing with the larger issues, avoids going head on against the beast. and, of course, i know why: cause you can’t keep some of these jobs and be debating with the boss. . .so what we have is a blackness that deals with the world it inhabits but not the world it avoids. will write about racism of the past but will not bite back at raw capitalism & imperialism in action here and now. ok. no, not ok. really. we got to deal. if we don’t be careful we will look up and be writing our poems on the walls of concentration camps, in the silence of fascism and academic outhouses which are really intellectual sanatoriums masquerading as educational oasis.
and this:
now the academy is deep into technique for sophistication’s sake, into detail regardless of the subject matter, and what i am suggesting is that form without content is emptiness, and content do matter, and during dangerous times we need content that is shield and spear, that is not just friendly but also comrade, i.e. ready to smite down babylon, ready to identify and, yes, defend us against our enemies, as well as ready to praise and affirm family, friends, and allies. . .there is no wrestling with changing the world, with confronting the devil and calling them beasts by the names they earn through their actions. you know you got to be a sick somebody to take nuclear waste and make bombs out of that and drop it on peoples knowing that you are not just going to blow them up, but you are also going to genetically mutilate their asses for centuries to come. and, i mean, that’s what the u.s. is doing in iraq, this is beyond war, this is inhumane crimes against humanity, international bestiality. and i think black poetry ought to be dealing with that.
all quoted from a 4 part article on the furious flower convention held @ jmu in 2004. the author is speaking on poetry & the black artists movement in particular, but his words have a far wider application to black & other poc movements. a lengthy, but excellent read.
