PATRICIA SMITH ~

TRUE THAT

In my neighborhood

I got jumped

because my daddy lived at home.

Then,

when he didn't live at home anymore,

I got jumped

because he had the nerve

to visit.

LAUGH YOUR TROUBLES AWAY

                   Motto, Riverview Park, 1904-1967, Chicago 

1.

Every city had one, a palace with a fried tint to its air,

a hurting-hued screech of no underneath, everything

plummeting or ascending, a monument to hazy flailing

and sudden fun vomit. Swing the Riviera onto Belmont,

and you see the Pair-O-Chutes rising to heaven on dual

strings, headed for the pinpoint and release, then the sick

whip and fall, the little public murder, a blaring grace

so storybook gorgeous, suddenly flood in the throat.

Revelers board creaking Fireball cars and slice the August,

mistaking acid bubbling in their bellies for symptoms

of glee, then stop to stuff quavering guts with plastic

and syrup. Their quick sustenance has wafted all day

all day on a river of grease. They hunger for white cakes

curled stiff with sugar, sausages that pop huge heat,

pink candy of cotton chomping rot down their throats.

The jagged stains of compromised fruit circle screaming

mouths and paint shadow across the teeth, making them

horrible. Bulbs flash. Wet Polaroids are lifted and waved

like church fans to etch and clarify in the summer steam.

The aged horses are dizzied, diseased. Chained to a tilting

stake, they blur through the drag, deferring to their brutal,

squirming burdens. Potbellied flies, nasty to the point

of charm, nibble passages toward the horses' blue hearts.

Above it all, the freak show M.C. — his shout an odd mixture

of pity and sex — dares us to witness sweaty sloth, tiny floating

corpses, so much skin unlike ours, more legs than allowed,

and a Negro who can separate himself from his eyes.

While on the midway, your father will never win the thinly

stuffed neon grinners — the bears, dolphins, curlique serpents,

Kewpie dolls, and counterfeit Mickey Mice that leer from shelves.

He hurls balls at weighted milk cans, blasts at a measured parade

of bobbing ducks, guns water into a pinpoint, guesses a woman's

weight. Finally, he just buys something soft and ugly, a token

you will clutch and sing to until, too blackly loved, it melts.

At dusk, he steers you away from the midway's squalling edge,

where everything seems to be happening, where the hooting

and laughter have a raw, unmeasured throat. You pout, he pulls,

and, not for the first time, you wonder what he hides.

2.

I am their pickaninny, dressed in a repeating river,

All of me is droop and sustain.

My drenched dungarees are gravity on me.

I have learned to smile at the several versions

of my name, my face is complete in its teeth

and studied dumb ogle. Oh, woe is me I say

while the white boys wind up, and damn if they

don't always smack that huge disc, dead center.

I rise laughing from my clockwork baptisms,

the canned river funked with my own spit and piss,

just to see another man clutching the red ball,

his eyes harder than the first of these. Sometimes

 an awed Negro dots the crowd, his numbed smile

a link chained to mine. I spot one using his body

to block his little girl's view of me, so I make

my voice louder: I oh sweet jesus kind suh no,

I lawd ham mercy suh I believes I might drown

I please let me dry off in this sun a little I mercy

me you sho does look strong suh until she twists

hard away from her daddy and full unto me.

I have just enough time for her to sound it out:

D-D-D-unk-unk Dunk a N-N-N-ig-ig-Nig-ger

and then I salute, and hold her father's eyes as I fall. 

HAVE SOUL AND DIE

       For Mary Wells

Stiff wigs, in cool but impossible shades

of strawberry and sienna, all whipped

into silky flips her own flat naps could

never manage — the night hair different

from the day hair, the going out hair,

the staying-in hair, Friday's hair higher

and way redder than Monday's — all these

wigs, 100% syn-the-tic, thank you, lined

up on snowy Styrofoam heads and paid

for with her own money, what could be

slicker than that? No lovesick player

flopped his wallet open for those crowns.

So she wasn't Diana. Who wanted to be

all skeleton and whisper, hips like oil?

Didn't need no hussies slinking in the

backdrop giving more throat, boosting

her rhythm. So what if her first album

cover drew her pimpled, bloat-cheeked,

Sunday hair skewed? She roared gospel

in those naked songs, took Berry's little

ballads and made men squirm on their

barstools. They spun in her dark.

Wasn't she the alley grunt, the lyric played low?

Didn't people she never met run up to try

and own her tired shoulders, shouting Mary!

like they were calling on the mama of Jesus?

And everywhere she dared to step,

Detroit devilment bubbling beneath sequins

that can't help but pop under the pressure

black butts provide, every time she dropped

'round to paint the town brown, neon lights

slammed on, cameras clicked like air kisses,

and pretty soon somebody said Girl you know

you just gotta sing us something and even though

she didn't have to do a damned thing but be

black, have soul, and die, she'd puck those lips

just so, like she didn't know how damn electric

it all was, and every word landed torn and soft,

like a slap from somebody who loves you.

TO KEEP FROM SAYING DEAD

             For Gwendolyn Brooks 

Winter, with its numbing gusts and giddy twists of ice, 

is gone now. It's time for warmth again.

So where is Gwendolyn Brooks?

Its huge shoulders slumped, Chicago craves her hobble,

turns pissed and gray, undusts her name.

To know her,

you need to ride her city's wide watery hips,

you need to inhale an obscene sausage

smothered in gold slipping onions

while standing on a chaotic streetcross

where any jazz could be yours.

Walk the hurting fields of the West Side,

our slice of city burned to bones in '68: 

Goldblatt's, the colored Bloomingdale's, gone.

Lerners, where we learned pinafore, gone.

No more havens for layaway, no more places

to plop down a dollar a week for P.F. Flyers

or wool jumpers with seams glued shut.

The meat market with its bloody sawdust, torched,

its Jewish proprietors now crisping languid

under Florida sun. And flap-jowled Mayor Daley,

our big benevolent murderous daddy,

gifted us with high-rise castles crafted of dirty dollars,

battered cans of bumpy milk, free cheese.

To know Gwen, you need to know the Alex,

the only movie theater West, where frisky rats

big as toddlers poked slow noses into your popcorn,

then locked red round eyes on Cleopatra Jones

and sat, confident and transfixed.

After the movies and any street corner's friend lunch,

we'd head to "the store in back of that fat man's house"

to surrender hoarded quarters for the latest 45,

stripped licorice in black or red,

pork rinds, Boston Baked Beans,

or fat sour pickles floating in a jar in the corner.

The fat man's wife, Miss Caroline,

plunged her hammy forearm into the brine,

pulled out the exact pickle you pointed to

and shoved it deep into a single-ply paper bag.

Only the truly Negro would then poke

a peppermint stick down the center of that pickle

and slurp the dizzy of salt and sugar.

We gnawed rock-stiff candy dots off paper columns,

suffered Lemonheads and Red Hots,

pushed neon sweatsocks down on Vaselined calves,

and my Lord, we learned to switch. For a dime,

the fat man would warm up the record player,

click reject and give us a hit of Ms. Fontella Bass's

heartbroke heart clamoring the rescue

or Ruby Andrews steady wailing in a woman way.

There were so many millions of each one of us,

ashy goddesses walking the wild West,

strutting past sloped storefronts where brown meat

and hog heads crowded the windows,

past shuttered groceries, and gas stations

with pump boys eyeing our new undulating asses,

past fashion palaces where almost no money

satisfied our yearning for hollow glamour

with cheap threads already unraveling.

Observe the kick-ass angle of our crowns.
Chicago girls just keep coming back.
They don't hear you,
they don't see you,
they ain't never really needed you.
They got the Holy Ghost and Garfield Park,
on one city block, they got a hundred ways to buy chicken,
they jump rope nasty and barefoot in the dirt,
they got the ooh achie koo,
the pink plastic clothesline underhand,
they got the slip bone. They got the Gwen in them.

Any jazz could be ours, and her jazz was.
Unflinching in riotous headwrap
and thick, two-shades-too stockings,
she penned the soundtrack of we because she knew,
because she was skinny early church and not bending,
because no man could ever hold her the way hurt did,
because she could peer at you over those Coke-bottle specs,
fast gal, and turn the sorry sight of you into her next poem.

Each year she stays gone, we colored girls aimlessly bop
and search dangerous places for music.
Chicago bows its huge head, grudgingly accepts spring.

God, if there is a You, there must surely still be a her.
Stop the relentless seasons. Show us Your face,
explain Your skewered timing.
Your wacky choice of angels. 



__________________________

Patricia Smith
Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah
(Coffee House Press, 2012)

ELMORE LEONARD ~

WRITERS ON WRITING;

 Easy on the Adverbs,

 Exclamation Points and

 Especially Hooptedoodle

 

By ELMORE LEONARD 

(October 11, 1925 – August 20, 2013) 

 

These are rules I've picked up along the way to help me remain invisible when I'm writing a book, to help me show rather than tell what's taking place in the story. If you have a facility for language and imagery and the sound of your voice pleases you, invisibility is not what you are after, and you can skip the rules. Still, you might look them over.

1. Never open a book with weather.

If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a character's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, you can do all the weather reporting you want. 

2. Avoid prologues.

They can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in nonfiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want.

There is a prologue in John Steinbeck's ''Sweet Thursday,'' but it's O.K. because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: ''I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks. . . . figure out what the guy's thinking from what he says. I like some description but not too much of that. . . . Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. . . . Spin up some pretty words maybe or sing a little song with language. That's nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don't have to read it. I don't want hooptedoodle to get mixed up with the story.'' 

3. Never use a verb other than ''said'' to carry dialogue.

The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But said is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, lied. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with ''she asseverated,'' and had to stop reading to get the dictionary.

4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb ''said'' . . .

. . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances ''full of rape and adverbs.'' 

5. Keep your exclamation points under control.

You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful. 

6. Never use the words ''suddenly'' or ''all hell broke loose.'' 

This rule doesn't require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use ''suddenly'' tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points. 

7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.

Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won't be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavor of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories ''Close Range.'' 

8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.

Which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway's ''Hills Like White Elephants'' what do the ''American and the girl with him'' look like? ''She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.'' That's the only reference to a physical description in the story, and yet we see the couple and know them by their tones of voice, with not one adverb in sight. 

9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things.

Unless you're Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language or write landscapes in the style of Jim Harrison. But even if you're good at it, you don't want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.

And finally:

10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

A rule that came to mind in 1983. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he's writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character's head, and the reader either knows what the guy's thinking or doesn't care. I'll bet you don't skip dialogue. 

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10.

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can't allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative. It's my attempt to remain invisible, not distract the reader from the story with obvious writing. (Joseph Conrad said something about words getting in the way of what you want to say.)

If I write in scenes and always from the point of view of a particular character -- the one whose view best brings the scene to life -- I'm able to concentrate on the voices of the characters telling you who they are and how they feel about what they see and what's going on, and I'm nowhere in sight. 

What Steinbeck did in ''Sweet Thursday'' was title his chapters as an indication, though obscure, of what they cover. ''Whom the Gods Love They Drive Nuts'' is one, ''Lousy Wednesday'' another. The third chapter is titled ''Hooptedoodle 1'' and the 38th chapter ''Hooptedoodle 2'' as warnings to the reader, as if Steinbeck is saying: ''Here's where you'll see me taking flights of fancy with my writing, and it won't get in the way of the story. Skip them if you want.''

''Sweet Thursday'' came out in 1954, when I was just beginning to be published, and I've never forgotten that prologue. 

Did I read the hooptedoodle chapters? Every word.

BLUESMAN ~

Albert Murray

May 12, 1916 ~ Aug 19, 2013

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/20/books/albert-murray-essayist-who-challenged-the-conventional-dies-at-97.html?hp

DELIVERY ~

Just in time, or from-time-to-time, our net server for mail, after a dysfunctional patch, has deposited all the mail as one fell swoop mass mailing so we will have a double and triple electronic-file dumptruck'd onto us. It makes one think about modern life. . .

Brion Gysin & William Burroughs eyes closed tight with the Dream Machine

It reminds me of the milkman I used to wait for, as a child, roaming into our neighborhood with his old pickup truck and the back bed stocked with rattle glass milk bottles filled to the brim, paper capped, inside their metal trays. There'd be a thick and work-darkened quilt over the cold bottles and chunks of ice — that was it for "refrigeration". He'd stop, lift out from under the quilt what he thought my mother wanted and set two or three bottles into a metal basket he then carried up from the foot of the driveway to our house.

We even had a "milkman" metal door hatch built into the side of the kitchen wall so the deliveries could be made with someone managing the door inside. We'd say "hello" to each other

 as bottles empty and bottles full were exchanged. Of 

course if no one was there to greet on our side, the door stayed closed and the milkman just went about his business and left bottles of milk in the tiny chamber, and took away the empties. 

Sometime later we had a bread man, "Mike," cheery as Phil Silvers, and he brought acres of Dreikorns white bread, muffins, even delicious glazed donuts. All to our door! Both drivers parked their trucks not in the driveway but in the direction of the street, not minding at all the little further walk because when they got back to their vehicles they could just shove ahead to the next house. It all worked like a charm. Rain or shine.

And when it didn't — we mowed a lawn with mowers with churning sharp blades (hand powered reel mowers, not gas powered), or read a book (something with paper pages). Way off in the house, or out in the yard working, we might hear the telephone ring on the wall in the kitchen. No such thing as an answering machine. Whomever it was, they'd call back. Or visit! Need milk or bread because Mike may have had a breakdown, or the milkman got tied up with his cows? Send one of your three sons down the street to fetch a bottle or a loaf of bread, and those three boys ran! or hopped onto their bikes, and there was a variety store on almost every busy corner. One of the boys would be back, breathing hard, before mom needed the last sandwich made — it was an interesting concoction of white bread, butter, sliced bananas, sprinkled with sugar. It's August and we ate them on the run.

Bob Arnold

http://briongysin.com/

LORCA (BACKWARDS) ~

sorry about the light blur to the magnificent lines — 

please take the river sound, art work and passage as one

© Bob Arnold

Once In Vermont Films

DENISE LEVERTOV ~

The Day the Audience Walked Out on Me, and Why  
 (May 8th, 1970, Goucher College, Maryland)




Like this it happened:
after the antiphonal reading from the psalms
and the dance of lamentation before the altar,
and the two poems, "Life at War" and "What Were They Like,"
I began my rap,
and said:

Yes, it is well that we have gathered
in this chapel to remember
the students shot at Kent State,

but let us be sure we know
our gathering is a mockery unless
we remember also
the black students shot at Orangesburg two years ago,
and Fred Hampton murdered in his bed
by the police only months ago.

And while I spoke the people
— girls, older women, a few men —
began to rise and turn
their backs to the altar and leave.

And I went on and said,
Yes, it is well that we remember
all of these, but let us be sure
we know it is hypocrisy
to think of them unless
we make our actions their memorial,
actions of militant resistance.

By then the pews were almost empty
and I returned to my seat and a man stood up
in the back of the quiet chapel
(near the wide-open doors through which
the green of May showed, and the long shadows of late afternoon)
and said my words
desecrated a holy place.

And a few days later
when some more students (black) were shot
at Jackson, Mississippi,
no one desecrated the white folks' chapel,
because no memorial was held.


1971

Duke University Press

Box 90660

Durham, NC 27708-0660

www.dukeupress.edu

SWEPT AWAY. . .~

MidAugust wonders. . .
nippier in the air at dawn & dusk
less bird calls
lighting is magnificent, less humidity, stars are clear
42 degrees this morning and that falls straight into the river
less swimming
perfect time to clean the chimney & stovepipes

©  Bob Arnold

JULIUS LESTER ~

Julius Lester, circa 1965

Revolutionary Mandate 1
 




These are not the times to take your friends for granted — to assume
   that they will always be there. They may not be.
And if you wait until the next time to tell them that they are very
special to you
You may wait until
someone calls you and says that
so and so's body was found
beneath the bricks
of a dynamited building or
so and so was blown like water from a fountain over a midnight
   highway
or
so and so was shot while he slept.
Therefore
it is hereby mandated
(by the poets and artists and musicians who are responsible for
the spirit and soul of the revolution) that when you finish this poem
you are to call your brothers and sisters, and in your own way
make them know that you love them
that because of their love you have become more you
Let them know
Five minutes from now
You may never have the opportunity again.


1970

Duke University Press

Box 90660

Durham, NC 27708-0660

www.dukeupress.edu

FILMMAKER ~

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/magazine/laura-poitras-snowden.html?hp

nytimes / photo: Olaf Blecker

NAOMI LONG MADGETT ~

Midway





I've come this far to freedom and I won't turn back

I'm climbing to the highway from my old dirt track

          I'm coming and I'm going

          And I'm stretching and I'm growing

And I'll keep what I've been sowing or my skin's not black



I've prayed and slaved and waited and I've sung my song

You've bled me and you've starved me but I've still grown strong

          You've lashed me and you've treed me

          And you've everything but freed me

But in time you'll know you need me and it won't be long.



I've seen the daylight breaking high above the bough

I've found my destination and I've made my vow;

          so whether you abhor me

          Or deride me or ignore me

Mighty mountains loom before me and I won't stop now.



1959

Duke University Press

Box 90660

Durham, NC 27708-0660

www.dukeupress.edu

BEFORE RED WHEELBARROW ~

"The practical point would be to discover — "

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

XXI


one day in Paradise

a Gipsy



smiled

to see the blandness



of the leaves —

so many



so lascivious

and still


William Carlos Williams



________________________________

This is the poem that comes before "XXII" the now famous "so much depends / upon // a red wheel /

barrow..." getting to those "white chickens." Published first in 1923 in Spring and All and printed by the same hands (Maurice Darantière) that had printed Ulysses the year before — and released by Robert McAlmon's Contact Publishing Company (Paris) — issued in an edition of 300 copies, where most went undistributed. The Williams book was released the same year as Wallace Steven's Harmonium, Mina Loy's Lunar Baedecker and Jean Toomer's Cane. It was a year before Franz Kafka would pass away. All these giant rocks tumbling.



 



I love both my New Directions and Frontier Press editions of the Williams masterpiece — with one of the finest poetry book titles, ever.

"I can go no further than to say that poetry feels
the imagination and prose the emotions, poetry
liberates the words from their emotional implications,
prose confirms them in it. Both move centrifugally
or centripetally toward the intelligence."
WCW (1923)

"WHEN I HAD NO PENCIL. . .

Ivan Generalic

(1914-1992)

and paper I scratched the walls with pieces of coal, thus filling all the walls with awkward drawings. I also made drawings with twigs on sand and damp ground. Particularly while tending pigs and after rain."

 Horse With a Wagon (1973)

 Winter Night

 Deer in the Forest (1956)

 The Woodcutters (1959)

 Landscape (1954)

 River Landscape (1964)

 The Stag's Wedding (1959)

"I have painted cocks fighting — they are bigger even than the pigsty — (and) a crucified cock above the wheat as a scarecrow — a plucked cock in a dish; cows sleeping in the cowhouse, cows
pulling a cart, cows ploughing or resting below the wood; pigs digging under the snow looking for green grass or an occasional acorn which fell down last autumn, and the swineherd who looks after them. I have painted peasant weddings, religious customs and funeral rites; bread and cheese and apples which people eat; and flowers of all kinds. I prefer painting old people, because in old faces I can better see the difficulties of life, poverty and suffering. I have painted a white stag walking in the woods and looking for its hind, and then two stags at play, and finally four stags marching along like wedding guests...When I was a little boy my grandfather used to tell me about witches and the harm they can cause to people, and that they were mostly old women, and so I painted them. I have also painted tax collectors' auctions and a peasant revolt when the peasants chased away the police and the government official who were selling their cows and pigs for the tax the peasants could not pay... And I have painted processions and church fairs; and a red-horned horse eating grass sticking out through the snow while an old man and his wife watch anxiously in the hope that the miraculous horse, in which they believe, will rejuvenate them. This is only a tale I heard from old people. The horse never came. The painting was born."

from Generalic

by Grgo Gamulin

translated by Zeljko Bujas

(Jugoslovenska Knjiga, 1986)