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Black
Arts, Green Arts: A Story of My Mentors
Two consequential occurrences in the most banal of backdrops— Brutalist interior with ugly accents of
spartan Nordic design, mildew or some institutionalized grime
clinging to carpets, upholstered staircases, and furniture
ergonomic to invertebrates. A college library in the late
twentieth century, southeastern Massachusetts, part of what
began as a normal school, a place of education to teach teachers
how to teach. My mission on
this visit is to teach me how to teach me. I am thirteen, and
far from being a seasoned autodidact. I am not precocious
either, just a painfully sensitive young person who senses that
the inadequacy of his formal (public) schooling calls for an
immersion into the college stacks to collect information and
knowledge, curate them cerebrally, and be ready to challenge a
world that is confoundingly cruel, unjust, and antithetical to
his dreamed designs of possibility. I am not at this point an
artist, barely a person, perhaps a banal replication of the
diseased DNA informing the social and cultural forms and
practices of my country as I myopically see and overwhelmingly
feel them then. The music of punk has just entered my ears and
has recircuited my aural appetites. I am ignorant, angry, not at
all nihilistic, and avid for experience and wisdom that must
be elsewhere… But before I get wherever that elsewhere
might be, I have to get to the books. Street smarts, I lack;
book smarts I possess some minute share. Books are my companions
in solitude and protectors against oblivion. Highbrow? Lowbrow?
My promiscuous reading at this point nullifies the
distinctions—my tastes range from 19th century
English novels to comic books and Stephen King titles. The
architecture of my reading life encompasses castellated towers
and waste-filled gutters. Later, certain class antagonisms will
force me to excavate the foundations of those Big House novels
to see where the brown and black bodies are buried. For now,
discrimination is less in play than inexhaustible bibliomania,
lacking any degree of systematic reading or thinking. My later
questioning of systems now seems rooted in this literary lack of
organization. This lack of taste? The project I now set myself towards is
retrospectively obscene in its naivete. I am setting out to
correct the meagerness of my education by reading through ALL of
the subject matters offered at this college library, to read a
few titles each from Anthropology to Zoology, not understanding
that much disciplinary knowledge cannot be acquired from a book.
But the concept of extra-textual learning is as alien to me as
the atmosphere of a laboratory or observatory, fresh-aired
fieldwork, or any meaning or measure constructed outside a
classroom or library. So I am in the library, establishing my
mala fides as a blossoming, highly suspect boy-pedant. What
I need is a jolt, a slap, some strategic assault on my
assumptions, my senses, my expectations. I find this needed
recalibration on the third floor of the general collection, a
book—the book!—that will upset me, upset my aesthetic
conceptions, and set me on a sendero luminoso of cosmic
fate into the very presence of the author of this book, this
terrifying book, a book that changed his life and my life over
and over again. Even now, the transformative frisson that
this volume excited in me has the ability to dislodge me from my
current homeostatic self. Therefore, let me begin in a
restrained procession from the clinical to the agitated. The
Library of Congress classification of this book is PS3552.A503
A17 1969 and still exists there in the stacks after so many
years. Given the relative desolation of the third floor all that
time ago and with digital technologies these days extorting
attention and distracting pliable people from even the thought
of books, this book resides in presumed silence with no
register, no acknowledgement whatsoever, of its titanic power. A
paperback edition that has been artificially modified into a
hardback version by the library, the book—part grimoire, part
grenade—bears a title that reads more like an inscription:
Black Magic: Sabotage, Target Study, Black Art, Collected
Poetry, 1961-1967. Its author is Leroi Jones. The name at
the time means nothing to me. A curt gloss of the cover, which depicts
a pin through a white voodoo doll, does not prepare me for the
contents. I do not intend to read the entire collection,
figuring I shall read a few poems, then call my collegiate
education of poetry finished. After all, I have no affinity for
poetry, no desire to know it beyond incorporating it within my
holistic educational purview. Since it is among the disciplines,
it, too, must be investigated—but not with the stealth, glee, or
substance that it actually deserves. My educational pragmatism,
at this stage, is as entrenched and potentially disastrous as
some of my own students now, so-called STEM undergraduates at
the state polytechnical university in New Jersey. Only now,
while reflecting and retracing my own educational journey and
travails here, do I discover empathy for a demographic I deemed
lunatic in its vision and donning of intellectual blinders. Fate ordained, the first poem of the volume I read ricocheted off my psyche and brought me spinning into a state of instantaneous poetic reverence and pleasing disquiet. “Black Art” desires poems to magically transfer its aesthetic powers into extra-literary action: We want "poems that kill."
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
and take their weapons leaving them dead
with tongues pulled out and sent to Ireland. This passage
and many others that imagined redemptive violence, racist,
sexist, and antisemitic diatribes, and brutal condemnations,
blew apart this teenager’s aesthetic reception, rendered it
off-kilter, and very confused. How can an artwork be both
positively powerful and absolutely bewildering? The sensibility
both energized me and scared me, these forceful lines magnetized
me to its its energies while simultaneously repelling me.
Whiplash artistic apprehension—and that point of view remains to
this day. Then these final lines, declamatory,
beautiful, moving:
Clean out the world for virtue and love,
Let there be no love poems written
until love can exist freely and
cleanly. Let Black people understand
that they are the lovers and the sons
of warriors and sons
of warriors Are poems & poets &
all the loveliness here in the world
We want a black poem. And a
Black World.
Let the world be a Black Poem
And Let All Black People Speak This Poem
Silently
or LOUD I was hooked—but uncertain what form
this attraction would take, not clear yet how poetry would dawn
in my life, declare itself, and change me. Then, I had no
context for the poet or the poem. The book mentioned that its
author, Leroi Jones, was born and currently living in Newark,
New Jersey. Where is that? Fast forward: I am teaching at a
university in Newark, New Jersey, I am living in Newark. I have
gotten to know Leroi Jones, who changed his name to Amiri Baraka
soon after Black Magic was published. He becomes a mentor
(one of many); he helps me imagine a course and curriculum
called Newark Narratives, a very popular course, that I
still teach, twelve years after his death. I carry a copy of his
picture in my wallet. He becomes a lodestar as both artist and
activist, and that adolescent experience of finding his work in
that library instantly converts me into a poetry reader. The
conversion into a poetry writer will take place several years
later, same place. Rewind: I am four years older and in the
same library, different floor, the ground floor, a medium-sized
room just off the main lobby. I am attending a poetry reading
with my parents whom I accompany for the sheer pleasure of their
company and for an excuse to ditch homework on a school night.
Just four years later…but such span is a wide chasm in a young
person’s life, and I could feel decades in recollection of
anyone’s post-adolescence. Reading at the Clement C. Maxwell
Library of Bridgewater State College, that night, was Seamus
Heaney. I had never heard of him. As he began, I grew as
entranced by his Northern Irish accent as the words he was
reciting. When the Irish writer J.M. Synge visited the Aran
Islands, off the west coast of Ireland, at the beginning of the
last century to collect local folklore, he asked an old woman if
she believed in ghosts. “No,” she replied, “but I know that they
are there.” Do I believe in mystical experiences? No, I would
respond, like that woman, but I’d now had one. During the third poem, I felt some
uncanny physiological sensation at the back of my neck, an
insistent sensation that moves to my right shoulder and feels
like a hand pressing on my body. Later, when I discover
Herbert’s poetry (Heaney has written about Herbert and he also
has a poem about the Aran Islands: “…sifting from the Americas /
To possess Aran.”), I better understand what has transpired—at
once a calling and a command (or as expressed in Herbert’s “The
Collar,” “Methought I heard one calling, Child!/And I
replied My Lord”). My summoning was not religious—but
what was it? It’s still a holy mystery. After the reading, I introduce myself to
Heaney. I stay in touch. We write back and forth. I plunge into
a reading of Irish literature and decide to devote myself to its
study. Some friends and family (excluding my parents)
misinterpret my new scholarly devotion to some essentialist
ethnonationalist passion (my grandparents emigrated from
Ireland) as a desire to rediscover my own ancestral cultural
roots. But my Irish forbears were poor peasant farmers, not one
acknowledged as a reader. No, I turn to this body of work
because of, in the words of that German literary leprechaun,
Theodor Adorno, its “aesthetic splendor.” A few years pass—about the span of time
between “meeting” Jones/Baraka in the library and meeting
Heaney—and I invite Heaney to read at my university. He is
accompanied by his friend, the poet Michael S. Harper, who is on
the faculty. President Nixon and Ralph Ellison had just died,
the former to be excoriated by these two poets, the latter
extolled. After the reading, Heaney, Harper, and Curley will
repair to an empty bar where, by the end of the drinking
session, Heaney and Harper will each be drinking directly from
their pitchers of beer, gripping the handles like Vikings. I
will be sitting across from them entranced, amazed, sipping my
pint that suddenly looks much smaller. The day I arrive in Ireland, a few years
later, it is announced that Seamus Heaney has won the Nobel
Prize for Literature. I am on a Fulbright: studying Field Day, a
Derry, Northern Ireland, theater company whose dramatic
repertoire performs the sectarian crisis of the North as a means
of dismantling it by artistic means. Heaney is from Derry and
serves on the Field Day board. Northern Ireland is a colonial
statelet. Northern Ireland, a colony. Later
Newark—a colony? According to Baraka: “There is a clearer
feeling in Newark, than any other city I have been in, of
colonialism. Newark is a colony, a bankrupt, ugly colony
in the term, where white people make their money to take with
them (“Newark Before White Men Conquered”). Part of my
motivation for my Newark Narratives course has been
negatively inspired by the skewed operating system of my
undergraduates, who are mostly New Jersey suburbanites; they
have come to Newark for their postsecondary education,
completely incurious about the city and knowing very little
about it. So here
we have a scholastic community, which extracts educational and
social capital from a place of no organic connection to it.
Sounds like a colony! And it makes the university almost look
like a colonial garrison. My “Newark Narratives” course was
originally intended to be exclusively about the life and work of
Amiri Baraka. However, in a conversation begun on campus just
after Amiri’s visit to a colleague’s classroom (poet Burt
Kimmelman, also a mentor), he advised me to open the curriculum
to other artists as well, because “Newark has many stories to
tell and artists to tell them.” These two mentors passed away just a
little over four months apart, Heaney in late August of 2013,
Baraka in early January 2014. I don’t know if they were
acquainted with, or valued, each other’s work. While serving as
a visiting lecturer in Berkeley, in the late sixties, Heaney was
critical of the militancy of the Black Panther Party—the kind of
militancy then espoused by Baraka. He was also the mentor of
many Boston-based African-American poets associated with the
Dark Room Collective, including Natasha Trethewey and Kevin
Young (whom I met on a Greyhound bus while reading Heaney’s
The Spirit Level. Baraka wrote about Ireland’s colonial
status (“Who keep the Irish a colony”); and in the middle of “In
the Tradition,” a sweeping poetic paean to African American
music and culture, he abruptly detours into lyrical parentheses
about Irish writers: (Like englishmen talking about great britain stop with tongues
lapped on their cravats you put irish on em. Say
shit
man, you mean irish irish Literature…when they say about
they
you say nay you mean irish irish literature you mean, for
the last century you mean, when you scream say nay, you mean
yeats. shaw, wilde, joyce, ocasey, beckett, them is, nay,
them is
irish, they’re irish, irish as the ira) Heaney was no supporter of the IRA. (In
his 1996 poem “The Flight Path,” he recalls being asked by an
IRA member, “When, for fuck’s sake, are you going to
write/Something for us?” His reply: “If I do write something, /
Whatever it is, I’ll be writing for myself”). However, he also
resented his inclusion in an anthology of English poetry: “…be
advised. My passport’s green. / No glass of ours was ever raised
/ To toast the queen.”). That passport is green in both
nationality and the poetic permission for vitality and
possibility in one’s own mode. Affinities, polarities, loyalties,
disavowals: My mentors possess no symmetry or similarity other
than being poets of the first order, whose vision and
intensity still enthrall me. I look back at the dual
mysteries I discovered in a library long ago, the discovery of
poetry and then the discovery of a poetic vocation, forever
preserved in the archive of my personal and poetic identity. As far as I can tell, it seems influence
and inspiration are less about poetic practice than principled
commitment to securing words to illuminate the many fractures
and filaments of our shared lives. A poet from Newark and a poet
from Northern Ireland continue to inform my life, making me into
a living lyric, extending the line of lineage to a future
unfolding of pages, their possibility, in the poets yet to come.
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