Voices from the fringes: a voice was sounding

Welp, here we are at the end of National Poetry Month. I have to say that focusing almost exclusively on the work non-White poets has had much the same effect that spending two weeks visiting battle sites and military graveyards through northern and western France did: it gets really, really dark when you spend time in places where people have done their absolute worst.

It’s possible that—had I searched deeper—I’d have found examples of the black, brown, yellow, red, LBGTQ+ folks contemplating nature, joy, silliness and other things. Because all people experience those things. But I wanted to focus on hearing these voices—mostly new to me—speaking about the things they have to contend with that I don’t even have to think about.

(Actually, thinking about Lorna Dee Cervantes’ poem, “Freeway 280”—the house I grew up in was taken through eminent domain by the state of California for an extension of the Long Beach freeway. But the city of South Pasadena, with ideas far above its station, has effectively blocked construction of the highway, so the house is still there, occupied in rotation by residents at LA County General Hospital. So I connect with her upheaval, although my circumstances are so different.)

In the end—poets write about being human. We all encounter gaps in our time here. We all are swallowed in things we can't name. We all suffer loss, each in our own way. We all strive for meaning and joy and connectedness. And these voices have added to my understanding of what it is to be human. So it’s been a good month for me.

Since this is a Friday, I’m ending the month with a quintessentially American song by a quintessentially American songwriter. Woody Guthrie may have been a White man, but he was definitely not a privileged one. And he wrote on behalf of the little guy, the lost, the deported, the forgotten ones. A couple of years I gave you a recording of “This Land Is Your Land” performed by Woody’s son Arlo, John Mellencamp, Sweet Honey in the Rock, Springsteen and others. This time you’re getting a very different take, from Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, a funk and soul group. Seems like a fitting end to the month.

 

Voices from the fringes: Crust and sugar over

We started out National Poetry Month with one of the major figures in the Harlem Renaissance, Audre Lorde. Let’s round up with another. Because I just don’t think you can have too much Langston Hughes.

“Harlem” was published in 1951, but it could describe the African American experience today, or 100 or 200 or 300 years before. Eleven lines that pretty much encompass the history of the United States, from 1619 to 2021.

“Harlem”

What happens to a dream deferred?

      Does it dry up
      like a raisin in the sun?
      Or fester like a sore—
      And then run?
      Does it stink like rotten meat?
      Or crust and sugar over—
      like a syrupy sweet?

      Maybe it just sags
      like a heavy load.

      Or does it explode?

A dream deferred for 400 years is pretty much a dream denied. We need to get past this.

 

 

Voices from the fringes: the witch-grey hair of a ghost

Garrett Hongo was born in Volcano, Hawaii, six years after the end of World War II. He is of Japanese descent, and many of his poems deal with the wholesale forced relocation of tens of thousands of Japanese American citizens to concentration camps inland from the West Coast. Today’s entry for National Poetry Month was published in 1982.

The shakuhachi is an end-blown flute made from bamboo; you might hear it as background music at a spa. (Fun fact, I once attended a shakuhachi concert in Little Tokyo. It was rather a stretch to my Western music ears. But it may have made more sense than Mahler’s Nineth Symphony.)

“Something Whispered in the Shakuhachi”

No one knew the secret of my flutes,
and I laugh now
because some said I was enlightened.
But the truth is
I’m only a gardener
who before the War
was a dirt farmer and learned
how to grow the bamboo
in ditches next to the fields,
how to leave things alone
and let the silt build up
until it was deep enough to stink
bad as night soil, bad
as the long, witch-grey
hair of a ghost.

No secret in that.

My land was no good, rocky,
and so dry I had to sneak
water from the whites,
hacksaw the locks off the chutes at night,
and blame Mexicans, Filipinos,
or else some wicked spirit
of a migrant, murdered in his sleep
by sheriffs and wanting revenge.
Even though they never believed me,
it didn’t matter—no witnesses,
and my land was never thick with rice,
only the bamboo
growing lush as old melodies
and whispering like brush strokes
against the fine scroll of wind.

I found some string in the shed
or else took a few stalks
and stripped off their skins,
wove the fibers, the floss,
into cords I could bind
around the feet, ankles, and throats
of only the best bamboos.
I used an ice pick for an awl,
a fish knife to carve finger holes,
and a scythe to shape the mouthpiece.

I had my flutes.

                           *

When the War came,
I told myself I lost nothing.

My land, which was barren,
was not actually mine but leased
(we could not own property)
and the shacks didn’t matter.

What did were the power lines nearby
and that sabotage was suspected.

What mattered to me
were the flutes I burned
in a small fire
by the bath house.

                           *

All through Relocation,
in the desert where they put us,
at night when the stars talked
and the sky came down
and drummed against the mesas,
I could hear my flutes
wail like fists of wind
whistling through the barracks.
I came out of Camp,
a blanket slung over my shoulder,
found land next to this swamp,
planted strawberries and beanplants,
planted the dwarf pines and tended them,
got rich enough to quit
and leave things alone,
let the ditches clog with silt again
and the bamboo grow thick as history.

                           *

So, when it’s bad now,
when I can’t remember what’s lost
and all I have for the world to take
means nothing,
I go out back of the greenhouse
at the far end of my land
where the grasses go wild
and the arroyos come up
with cat’s-claw and giant dahlias,
where the children of my neighbors
consult with the wise heads
of sunflowers, huge against the sky,
where the rivers of weather
and the charred ghosts of old melodies
converge to flood my land
and sustain the one thicket
of memory that calls for me
to come and sit
among the tall canes
and shape full-throated songs
out of wind, out of bamboo,
out of a voice
that only whispers.

 

 

 

Voices from the fringes: Search for home

The poet for today’s National Poetry Month post is George Abraham, a Palestinian American born in Jacksonville, Fla. I have to say that I don’t find many of Abraham’s poems immediately accessible; I have to work to grasp what they’re saying. “in which you are the emptiness they made of your palestinian/queerness” is one of the more self-evident examples.

Abraham incorporates words not expressed into his poem, leaving the reader to literally fill in the blanks. It’s a little like cloud pruning—wherein the spaces between are the connective tissue for the parts that are filled. I dunno—whaddaya think?

“in which you are the emptiness they made of your palestinian/queerness” 

 

Voices from the fringe: We mourn and we bend

The event that jump-started my theme for this year’s National Poetry Month postings was watching the amazing and thrilling performance by Amanda Gorman at the inauguration of President Joe Biden. The 22-year-old in brilliant colors reciting “The Hill We Climb” completely stole the event.

Considering that Lady Gaga and J-Lo were also on the program, I gotta say that poets totally rule.

As with yesterday’s poet, I feel that Gorman’s work is more powerful when she speaks it, when she adds her literal voice to her poetic voice. She has a hip-hop vibe that benefits from the audience hearing and watching her—her hands, her face, her body all support the message. Poets like Gorman and Giles are more than writers, they’re performance artists.

See if you don’t agree with me as she recites “The Miracle of Morning”, as she tackles Life after COVID. This is the poem I need after a year of pandemic and four years of chaotic authoritarianism. It stuns me that such a young woman has such wisdom and such clarity of communication. But, man, she gives me hope. 

 

Gratitude Monday: Recognition of genocide

Six years ago, on the centenary of the beginning of the Turkish campaign to eradicate the Armenian people, I wrote about it. April, 1915, was a momentous month for inhumanity: the opening of unrestricted submarine warfare by the Germans, inauguration of using chemical weapons (by the Germans, although the Brits already had a stockpile of gas, so they weren’t far behind) and the first genocide-as-policy in the Twentieth Century.

Welcome to civilization, eh?

For a century, Armenians have pushed for Turkey to just recognize that they did what they did. But they’ve refused.

“Oh, yeah, some Armenians, uh, had these pre-existing conditions, so they died during the relocation-that-totally-was-not-a-death-march.”

“Also, look, some of them might have stepped in front of our soldiers while they were firing their weapons. Stuff happens.”

“Atatürk was the greatest leader of the Twentieth Century. Until Erdogan.”

“We did nothing wrong.”

Yeah—observers from their own allies (Austrians and Germans) were appalled at the scale of death, and reports flew out to the other side, too. But, you know, stuff happens, and Armenians didn’t have much of interest to big powers, so it was largely buried. Alongside 1.5 million bodies.

Ronald Reagan included the Armenian destruction in the term “genocide” when he spoke at the dedication of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. But no president since then has dared mention the event because Turkey is strategically located geopolitically. (In Turkey, you can’t utter “Armenians” and “genocide” together without risking prison. That’s how terrified they are of the truth.)

Well, on Saturday, President Biden spoke out against both the crime and the authoritarianism that’s been covering it up for a century—and was loud and clear. (Yeah, this is in part because we’re not as in love with Turkey as we used to be, and because Erdogan has just been taking the piss for the last four years.) I am so grateful for this sea change; just acknowledging publicly that events that happened, happened. I’m grateful for the Armenians, and for the United States, because it signals that we at least know where the moral high ground is.

I am hopeful.

 

 

Voices from the fringes: Not in Africa, not in Fiji

You have to work to find one of the poems of Will Nu’utupu Giles in print. The Samoan American from Honolulu’s poetry is—rather like Gertrude Stein’s—made to be shared via the human voice. It’s part of their Pacific Islander oral tradition, and they make the most of it. I started watching their videos, and I couldn’t choose only one for today’s National Poetry Month post.

Giles seeks out political undercurrents in the quotidian. As in “Deodorant”, where they walk into the personal hygiene aisle and emerge in the Middle Passage, genocide and colonialism:

But he also soars, as when he compares their family history to redwoods, in terms of strength and resiliency, here in “Prescribed Fire”.