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#tbt: M. NourbeSe Philip, “Clues”

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This week’s Throwback Thursday selection is “Clues,” from Philip’s 1993 book She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (The Women’s Press Ltd). Wesleyan University Press will re-issue the book next year, with a new introduction from Evie Shockley, author of the new black.

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Clues

She gone—gone to where and don’t know
looking for me looking for she;
is pinch somebody pinch and tell me,
up where north marry cold I could find she—
Stateside, England, Canada—somewhere about,
“she still looking for you—
try the Black Bottom–Bathurst above Bloor,
Oakwood and Eglinton—even the suburbs them,
but don’t look for indigo hair and
skin of lime at Ontario Place,
or even the reggae shops;
stop looking for don’t see and can’t—
you bind she up tight with hope,
she own and yours knot up in together;
although she tight with nowhere and gone
she going find you, if you keep looking.”

 

Poet, essayist, lawyer, and novelist, M. NourbeSe Philip recently organized a series of participatory readings from Zong!, a masterful work exploring the anguish of some 150 enslaved Africans intentionally drowned at sea on November 29, 1781. These recent readings were participatory and ritual, and can be described as existing somewhere between noise and silence. The most recent event was on August 10th, at Trinity Bellwood Park in Toronto.

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Click on the poster above for further information on the Zong case, and related events.
In addition, view a reading presented as a Wake for Trevon Martin, from Naropa University here.

 

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M. NOURBESE PHILIP is a poet and writer and lawyer who was born in Tobago and now lives in Toronto. 

 

#tbt, Brenda Coultas, and the Subterranean Poetry Festival

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Brenda Coultas has been keeping busy after the release of her latest book, The Tatters! On Sunday, August 24th, she will be reading in the Widow Jane Mine in Rosendale, New York, as part of the 24th Annual Subterranean Poetry Festival.

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Coultas

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This week’s TBT selection is “Dream Life in a case of Transvestism,” from Coultas’s first book Early Films (Rodent Press, 1996). The poem was recently reprinted in Gurlesque: the new grrly, grotesque, burlesque poetics, a 2010 anthology edited by Lara Glenum and Arielle Greenberg. 
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Dream Life in a Case of Transvestism
1
I’m in a man’s uniform with military creases in the shirt. I search an informant for drugs or money, to verify that she goes in clean. It’s very hot. She wears a tank top, shorts, and slip-on shoes. She pulls up her top; nothing beneath her breasts but a wire taped on for sound. I look down her shorts, public hair shaved. Check inside the soles of her shoes. Nothing. It’s daylight and we are in an empty railroad yard.
2
My sister and I walk down the midway in matching sailor suits. My cousin Tommy is dressed in a nautical jacket, carrying a cane with a ceramic dalmatian head. All the carny barkers watch. They wish they were dressed like us.
3
At a party for girls only, I wear a can-can dress with big kittens on the skirt. It has  a velcro zipper that I like to open and close. We take our clothes off. They all turn out to be boys. Later, I found out that I went on the wrong day.
4
I am a woman dressed as a man dressed as a woman. I am so much a woman I do not recognize myself. Yet I have never been more of a man.
My testicles lie beneath my skin and I touch the two knots in my groin. When I swear I place my right hand upon them and tell the truth, as told by me, a liar.
5
Since I became a woman dressed as a man dressed as a woman, I lost my virginity. There are sixteen types of hymens. I had thirteen of them. My hymen was a chameleon that hung from a chain on my sweater and changed shape constantly.
“What’s that on your sweater?”
“It’s just an old maidenhead that I spray painted gold and glued some sequins onto.”
6
I lost it in a car in Kentucky, beneath the bride where I was born in the car’s back seat. My father drove, the doctor in back with my mother. My father drove faster and faster. Her pains came closer and closer together. The crown of my head emerged. We were late crossing the water. All of us were very, very late.
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BRENDA COULTAS is author of four books of poems: The Marvelous Bones of Time, A Handmade Museum, Early Films, and The Tatters. She teaches at Touro College and has served as faculty in Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program, and she lives in New York City.

Kazim Ali wins Ohioana Book Award

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We are pleased to announce that Kazim Ali’s Sky Ward is the 2014 Ohioana Book Award winner in Poetry!

 

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The Ohioana awards have been presented annually since 1942 to talented Ohioans in recognition of their contributions to the literary and cultural life of the state. The awards are among the oldest and most prestigious awards in the country; past winners in Poetry include Mary Oliver, David Young, Rita Dove, and Dave Lucas, among others. The 73rd annual Ohioana Awards ceremony will take place at the Ohio Statehouse in Columbus on Friday, October 10th.

“From the nearly 400 books that were eligible for this year’s awards, our judges selected twenty-nine finalists,” said David Weaver, executive director of the Ohioana Library. “To make this short list is recognition of excellence. Choosing a winner in each category from such outstanding books was a challenge for the final selection committee.”

Kazim Ali is the author of three books of poetry, including the cross-genre Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities. He is also the author of two novels and two essay collections— Fasting for Ramadan and Orange Alert: Essays on Poetry, Art, and the Architecture of Silence. Ali is a frequent contributor, of essays and poetry, to magazines including American Poetry Review, jubilat, and Boston Review. He is an associate professor of creative writing and comparative literature at Oberlin College and teaches in the low-residency MFA program at the University of Southern Maine. His diverse professional experiences include four years on the liberal arts faculty of The Culinary Institute of America and several years dancing with the Cocoon Theatre Modern Dance Company. Read more about Ali’s work here, or visit his website.

#tbt: James Dickey, “Fox Blood”

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This week’s TBT selection is “Fox Blood,” from James Dickey’s 1965 collection Buckdancer’s Choice (1965), winner of the 1966 National Book Award.

 

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Fox Blood

Blood blister over my thumb-moon
Rising, under clear still plastic
Still rising strongly, on the rise
Of unleashed dog-sounds: sound broke,
Log opened. Moon rose

Clear bright. Dark homeland
Peeled backward, scrambling its vines.
Stream showed, scent paled
In the spray of mountain-cold water.
The smell dogs followed

In the bush-thorns hung like a scarf,
The silver sharp creek
Cut; off yonder, fox feet
Went printing into the dark: there,
In the other wood,

The uncornered animal’s running
Is half floating off
Upon instinct. Sails spread, fox wings
Lift him alive over gullies,
Hair tips all over him lightly

Touched with the moon’s red silver,
Back-hearing around
The stream of his body the tongue of hounds,
Feather him. In his own animal sun
Made of human moonlight,

He flies like a bolt running home,
Whose passage kills the current in the river,
Whose track through the cornfield shakes
The symmetry from the rows.
Once shot, he dives through a bush

And disappears into air.
That is the bush in my hand
Went deeply through as I followed.
Like a wild hammer blazed my right thumb
On the flashlight and moonlight

And dried to one drop
Of fox blood I nail-polished in,
That lopsided animal sun
Over the nearly buried
Or rising human half-moon,

My glassed skin half mooning wrongly.
Between them, the logging road, the stopped
Stream, the disappearance into
The one bush’s common, foreseen
Superhuman door:

All this where I nailed it,
With my wife’s nailbrush, on my finger,
To keep, not under, but over
My thumb, a hammering day-and-night sign
Of that country.

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JAMES DICKEY (1923-1997), best known for his novel Deliverance, was a prolific poet and novelist as well as a critic and teacher. He served as the eighteenth U.S. Poet Laureate, and was awarded the National Book Award and the Order of the South Award.

#tbt: Agha Shalid Ali, “Prayer Rug”

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This week’s Throwback Thursday selection is “Prayer Rug,” from Agha Shalid Ali’s 1987 collection The Half-Inch Himalayas (also available in a special-edition minibook).

 

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Prayer Rug

Those intervals
between the day’s
five calls to prayer

the women of the house
pulling thick threads
through vegetables

rosaries of ginger
of rustling peppers
in autumn drying for winter

in those intervals this rug
part of Grandma’s dowry
folded

so the Devil’s shadow
would not desecrate
Mecca scarlet-woven

with minarets of gold
but then the sunset
call to prayer

the servants
their straw mats unrolled
praying or in the garden

in summer on grass
the children wanting
the prayers to end

the women’s foreheads
touching Abraham’s
silk stone of sacrifice

black stone descended
from Heaven
the pilgrims in white circling it

this year my grandmother
also a pilgrim
in Mecca she weeps

as the stone is unveiled
she weeps holding on
to the pillars

(for Begum Zafar Ali)

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AGHA SHAHID ALI (1949-2001) was born in New Delhi. He earned a Ph. D. in English from Pennsylvania State University in 1984 and an M.F.A. from the University of Arizona in 1985. His other volumes of poetry include Rooms Are Never Finished (2001), The Country Without a Post Office (1997), The Beloved Witness: Selected Poems (1992), A Nostalgist’s Map of America (1991), A Walk Through the Yellow Pages (1987), In Memory of Begum Akhtar and Other Poems (1979), and Bone Sculpture (1972). He is also the author of T.S. Eliot as Editor (1986), translator of The Rebel’s Silhouette: Selected Poems by Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1992), and editor of Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English (Wesleyan, 2000). Ali Received fellowships from The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation and was awarded a Pushcart Prize. He held teaching positions at the University of Delhi, Penn State, SUNY Binghamton, Princeton University, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Hamilton College, Baruch College, University of Utah, and Warren Wilson College.

A vivid ethnography and in-depth history of musical performance in North Sumatra

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We are pleased to announce a new book by Julia Byl, Antiphonal Histories: Resonant Pasts in the Toba Batak Musical Present.

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“Well-written, smart, and honest, Antiphonal Histories is an innovative juxtaposition of historiography, ethnography, musical analysis, and reflexive autobiography. There are also moments of poignant insight, brilliant induction, and hilarity.” —Jeremy Wallach, author of Modern Noise, Fluid Genres: Popular Music in Indonesia, 1997–2001

Positioned on a major trade route, the Toba Batak people of Sumatra have long witnessed the ebb and flow of cultural influence from India, the Middle East, and the West. Living as ethnic and religious minorities within modern Indonesia, Tobas have recast this history of difference through interpretations meant to strengthen or efface the identities it has shaped. Antiphonal Histories examines Toba musical performance as a legacy of global history, and a vital expression of local experience. This intriguingly constructed ethnography searches the palm liquor stand and the sanctuary to show how Toba performance manifests its many histories through its “local music”—Lutheran brass band hymns, gong-chime music sacred to Shiva, and Jimmie Rodgers yodeling. Combining vivid narrative, wide-ranging historical research, and personal reflections, Antiphonal Histories traces the musical trajectories of the past to show us how the global is manifest in the performative moment.

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Clockwise from top left: a group of men playing at the lapo tuak; ceremonial dancing at a Toba adat ceremony; Martahan Sitohang playing the Toba suling during a performance residency in the Netherlands (photo: Hardoni Sitohang); and a gondang group.

For more details, click here.

Also available as an ebook—check with your favorite ebook retailer.

Samuel R. Delany’s “American Shore”

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We are pleased to announce the release of a brand-new edition of The American Shore: Meditations on a Tale of Science Fiction by Thomas M. Disch —- “Angouleme,” with an introduction by Matthew Cheney.

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A keystone text in literary theory and science fiction The American Shore: Meditations on a Tale of Science Fiction by Thomas M. Disch—“Angouleme” was first published in 1978 to the intense interest of science fiction readers and the growing community of SF scholars. Recalling Nabokov’s commentary on Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, Roland Barthes’ commentary on Balzac’s Sarazine, and Grabinier’s reading of The Heart of Hamlet, this book-length essay helped prove the genre worthy of serious investigation. The American Shore is the third in a series of influential critical works by Samuel Delany, beginning with The Jewel-Hinged Jaw and Starboard Wine, first published in the late seventies and reissued over the last five years by Wesleyan University Press. Delany was honored with a Pilgrim Award for Science Fiction Scholarship from the Science Fiction Research Association of America. He has also received the Hugo Award, Nebula Award, and the William Whitehead Memorial Award for a lifetime’s contribution to gay and lesbian literature. In 2013, he was named the 31st Damon Knight Memorial Foundation Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. This edition of The American Shore includes the author’s corrected text as well as a new introduction by Delany scholar Matthew Cheney. For more details, click here. Also available as an ebook—check with your favorite ebook retailer.

Telling Janet Collins’ story

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Janet Collins, renowned dancer, painter, and the first African-American soloist ballerina to appear at the Metropolitan Opera, remains largely under-recognized. Actress and mother Karyn Parsons, who played Hilary Banks in The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, hopes to remedy this by sharing Collins’ story with those to whom it might be most important—children.

 

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Karyn created a Kickstarter campaign, which closes on July 18th, to fund the project. Donors will receive all manner of exciting prizes. There are signed posters, photographs, and books; chances to have a voicemail message recorded by Chris Rock or Jada Pinkett Smith; even opportunities to meet Rock or members of the cast of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.

You can also select Welseyan’s book on Janet Collins, Night’s Dancer: The Life of Janet Collins by Yaël Tamar Lewin. As Collins wrote in her unfinished memoir, included in Night’s Dancer, her life was full of  “great thrills—and great chills.” Janet was born in 1917 to a poor but educated family in New Orleans. The family moved to Los Angeles soon after her birth, as her mother wanted to live in a place where her children “could go anywhere they wanted to, particularly the library.”

Janet’s talents became apparent at a young age, but as a black woman in the entirely white world of dance, she faced prejudice. At age fifteen she was offered a spot in the prestigious company Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, but only if she agreed to perform in whiteface. She refused. Later, she was unable to tour in the Jim Crow South.

Collins went on to star in Aida and Carmen, and eventually graced the stage of the Metropolitan Opera, its first black prima ballerina. Since then, she has been widely recognized as one of the finest dancers in America. Her artistic and personal influences continue to shape the dance world today.

It’s an important story, one that is sure to inspire todays young people. Visit the Kickstarter page to contribute. The campaign has garnered attention from BET, The Guardian, and NPR.

Photo credits, all found in Night’s Dancer: 1 & 2: Collins in Spirituals. Photo @ Dennis Stock/Magnum Photos. Courtesy of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. 3: Painting of a young girl by Collins. Courtesy of the estate of Janet Collins. 4: Painting of a woman with magnolias by Collins. Courtesy of the estate of Janet Collins. 5: Collins with Hanya Holm, Don Redlick, and Elizabeth Harris, 1961. Photo by Bob McIntyre. Courtesy of Don Redlich. 6: Collins surrounded by her art. Betty Udesen/The Seattle Times.

#tbt: Rachel Zucker, “Letter [Persephone to Hades]”

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This week’s Throwback Thursday selection is Rachel Zucker’s “Letter [Persephone to Hades]” from Eating in the Underworld (2003), a re-imagining of Greek myth. Both spare and lyrical, the poems are written as entries in Persephone’s diary and as letters between Persephone, Demeter, and Hades. Zucker also features in a recent New Yorker article by Dan Chiasson.

 

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LETTER [PERSEPHONE TO HADES]

A city grows up to house millions;
cherished fields destroyed willingly.

The surface is carved over and over in names.

Some call it love, some obligation—
though neither true, we pile up and prosper.

Won, like a trinket, I obey and am nothing.
Hear?—she calls me:

from other rooms, across deep rivers,
complains I’m never where she left me.

She forbids me meadows, untilled prairies for fear
I’ll find the lower whose hundred stems grow from one root.

So I keep to the craggy enclaves, outside watchfulness:
mountains, shores, places which sustain no vegetation—

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RACHEL ZUCKER is the author of nine books, most recently, a memoir, MOTHERs, and a double collection of prose and poetry, The Pedestrians. Her book Museum of Accidents was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 2013. Zucker teaches poetry at New York University.

#tbt: Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, “Worn Blues Refrain”

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This week’s TBT selection is “Worn Blues Refrain,” from Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’ 2003 collection Outlandish Blues. Wesleyan is publishing her book, The Glory Gets, in Spring 2015.

 

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Worn Blues Refrain

My father danced on Saturday mornings,
turned his fat professor’s legs the wrong way.
No rhythm self, tripping over Mama’s corns,
his jitterbug like a worn blues refrain.
Then the afternoons, he sat himself down
to the piano, knee pants memories
of Louis and his trumpet come to town.
Louis didn’t crack a smile. Don’t believe?
Want to dispute it? Dad didn’t think so
and commenced with Jelly Roll religion.
Those porcelain hours, demons stopped poking
my father. From someplace close he found love.
He got some rhythm when he played the blues,
hollered and touched us all without bruising.

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HONOREÉ FANONNE JEFFERS  is the author of three books of poems, including Red Clay Suite (2007), Outlandish Blues (2003) and The Gospel of Barbecue (2000). Her next book, The Glory Gets, will be published by Wesleyan in Spring 2015. Her other honors include the 1999 Stan and Tom Wick Prize for Poetry for her first book and the 2002 Julia Peterkin Award for Poetry, as well as awards from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and the Rona Jaffe Foundation and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Antiquarian Society, the MacDowell Colony and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. A founding member of Cave Canem, the writer’s colony for African-American poets, Jeffers teaches at the University of Oklahoma, where she is Associate Professor of English.