Events

#tbt: from Gerald Vizenor’s “Hotline Healers”

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Today’s Throwback Thursday post features Gerald Vizenor’s Hotline Healers (1997).

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At left: Gerald Vizenor reading from Blue Ravens at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum, October 18, 2014

 

Vizenor’s work, drawing upon the trickster tradition in Native American culture, is among the most radical in Native American writing today. Academics of all stripes (but particularly anthropologists), the champions of victimry, Richard Nixon, and many others come under the lash of Vizenor’s satiric tongue in this hilarious, often surreal work: Hotline Healers.

In this collection of eleven linked stories, Vizenor brings back one of his most popular characters, Almost Browne, in full trickster force. Born in the back of a hatchback, almost on the White Earth Reservation, this crossblood storyteller sells blank books–some autographed (by him) with such names as Isaac Singer, Geoffrey Chaucer, N. Scott Momaday, and Jesus Christ; projects laser demons over the reservation; lectures in the Transethnic Situations Department at the University of California; is crowned Indian Princess of the University of Oklahoma by posing as the “mature” senior Penny Birdwind (who majors in native animations and simulations) and delivering a heartstopping, lip-synched rendition of Peggy Lee’s “Fever”; and much more. The stories feature many members of the Browne family, including Grandmother Wink, who can drop an insect in flight with a single puff of her poison breath, and great-uncle Gesture, the acudenturist who creates false teeth with tricky smiles from the Naanabozho Express, the free railroad train he runs on the reservation.

From Chapter 1: Teaser of Chance

Almost Gegaa Browne is rather ordinary, as you know, and a homely person in many ways. Ordinary in the sense of natural reason and native sovereignty. His tricky stories, even as a child, were heard as dares, the trusty tease of chance, the ruse of extremes, and the constant motion of creation, but you might think otherwise in his actual presence.

Almost teases everyone, a natural sense of mercy that others sometimes misconstrue as censure outside of the barony. He wears four ordinary wrist watches, and the hands are set at arcane hours. His clothes are borrowed, bright, loose, and wrinkled from neck to ankle. He never wears hats, socks, or undershorts, and his outsized shoes are nicely tied with copper wire.

“We live forever in stories, not manners,” he teased a writer for the New York Times. “So, tease the chance of conception, tease your mother, tease the privy councils of the great spirit, be a natural pirate, and always tease your own history.” Yes, my cousin is outrageous, notorious, wanton, a natural bother, as you know, and he is a mighty hotline healer in his stories.

Almost creates his intimate celebrations of contradictions, the traces of natural chance, the turn of seasons, a thunderstorm, and yet he amounts to much more than humor, a tease, and a generous memory at the end of his own stories. He is a hotline healer with a sure hand, heart, and eye of survivance. Almost has never been a separatist or a treasonous coach of victimry.

Read the rest of Hotline Healers, Chapter 1.

 

Vizenor’s newest books are Blue Ravens, a historical novel based on his great uncles’ journeys before, during, and after WWI, and Favor of Crows: New and Collected Haiku.

Gerald Vizenor at Radcliffe Institute

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Gerard Vizenor is on the move again! Next week Vizenor will be at Harvard University for a reading and discussion on his recent book, Favor of Crows: New and Collected Haiku. The reading and moderated discussion will be a part of the Roosevelt Poetry Readings at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and is co-sponsored by the Harvard University Native American Program.

Favor of Crows is a collection of new and previously published original haiku poems written over the past forty years. Vizenor has earned a wide and devoted audience for his poetry and in the introductory essay he compares the imagistic poise of haiku with the early dream songs of Anishinaabe, or Chippewa. Vizenor concentrates on these two artistic traditions, and by intuition he creates a union of vision, perception, and natural motion in concise poems—he creates a sense of presence and at the same time a naturalistic trace of impermanence.

“Through the vehicle of these wondrous and succinct poems, Vizenor reinforces the reality of our human dependency upon the natural world as the source that sustains us within the circle of life. He reminds us that we are born to perceive the beauty of our surroundings and, by doing so, celebrate life in all its majesty.”- Sonja James, The Journal

The reading place will take place at the Radcliffe, Sheerr Room, Fay House, 10 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA. For more information please visit the event online. Vizenor will sign copies of his book at The Harvard Coop, 1400 Massachusetts Avenue, in Cambridge.

The reading is free and open to public.

#tbt: John Luther Adams and Experimental Music at Wesleyan

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This week’s Throw-Back-Thursday post is dedicated to composer John Luther Adams. Below you’ll find a passage from his 2004 book, Winter Music: Composing the North. 

John Luther Adams, who received the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Music, for his symphony Become Ocean, is a widely praised composer, and author of two books published by Wesleyan: Winter Music and The Place Where You Go to Listen: In Search of an Ecology of Music. Adams is the subject of a recent Radiolab podcast, which aired earlier this month on WNYC . Give it a listen if you are interested in “all the forces at play in Adams’ work,” or in “the dark majesty of Adams’ take on the apocalypse.”

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From Winter Music. “Love the Questions”

John Cage said that in the course of his life and work he gradually came to understand composition ‘‘not as the making of choices, but as the asking of questions.’’

Morton Feldman put it even more succinctly, when he advised simply: ‘‘Love the questions.’’

The most important questions in music and in life may turn out to have many answers, or no answers at all. In any case, the questions may well be more important than the answers.

Varèse had a maxim for composing: ‘‘Keep it level, especially in times of invention.’’

Lou Harrison has written: ‘‘When I find myself inspired I enjoy it—but, I try to lay the pencil down, for, if I continue, I know that I shall have to use the eraser in the morning.’’

Although the music of Cage, Feldman, Varèse, and Harrison sounds nothing alike, all four composers speak of a healthy mistrust of ‘‘inspiration,’’ ‘‘self-expression,’’ and the artist’s ego. In very different ways each of them placed his faith in something larger than his own will and intentions: a deep belief in the power of the music and the sounds themselves.

In my own work I try to follow a similar path. I try to ask as clearly and directly as possible a few essential questions about the music at hand. Once I articulate these questions, my discipline is simply to keep faith with the musical materials, to listen carefully to the sounds and follow wherever they might lead me.

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Wesleyan University Press and Wesleyan University’s music department are well known for their commitment to experimental music. Our press has published a number of John Cage titles. John Cage Was, by James Klosty, is newly available. Cage was an assistant professor in Wesleyan’s music department, collaborating with members of our community from the 1950s until his death in 1993. Our press also published Alvin Lucier’s Music 109 (now available in paperback), aptly named after his Wesleyan course “MUSIC 109: Introduction to Experimental Music.” Lucier is the John Spencer Camp Professor of Music, Emeritus, at Wesleyan. Another recent retiree from Wesleyan, Anthony Braxton (Emeritus, Faculty of Music), continues his musical life with the Tri-Centric Foundation. You can read more about Wesleyan University’s music department here.

This weekend (October 11), Wesleyan’s Center for the Arts will host a performance by the Vijay Iyer Trio. Vijay Iyer was described by Pitchfork as “one of the most interesting and vital young pianists in jazz today.” The trio also includes bassist Stephan Crump and drummer Tyshawn Sorey (Wesleyan, MA ’11).

In the brief piece above, “Love the Questions,” Adams considers the virtues of letting music itself take the lead while composing. Experimental music allows listeners to consider sound and art in ways they might never have imagined. Wesleyan remains committed to facilitating such artistic innovation. Experimental music has certainly enriched the cultural life at Wesleyan University. We hope our readers will enrich their own lives through experimental music.

Gerald Vizenor’s New England Tour, October 7-23

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Gerald Vizenor is Professor Emeritus of American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.  He is a citizen of the White Earth Nation, and has published more than thirty books, including Native Liberty: Natural Reason and Cultural Survivance, Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence, Native Storiers, Father Meme, Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence, Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57, Shrouds of White Earth, and The White Earth Nation: Ratification of a Native Democratic Constitution. His most recent publications are Blue Ravens, a historical novel about Native American Indians who served in the First World War in France, and Favor of Crows: New and Collected Haiku. Vizenor received an American Book Award for Griever: An American Monkey King in China, and for Chair of Tears, the Western Literature Association Distinguished Achievement Award, and the Lifetime Literary Achievement Award from the Native Writer’s Circle of the Americas. Vizenor is a veteran of the United States Army. He served in Japan during the era of reconstruction, following WWII.

 

October 7, Tuesday, 4:30 PM—Wesleyan University
Center for East Asian Studies, Mary Houghton Freeman Room
343 Washington Terrace, Middletown, CT
EXPEDITIONS IN FRANCE: Native American Indians in the First World War  

October 10, Friday, 12 Noon—Yale University
Native  American Cultural Center
26 High St., New Haven, CT
Reading, and discussion of Blue Ravens

October 14 , Tuesday, 12 Noon—Bridgewater State University
Heritage Room in the Maxwell Library
131 Summer St., Bridgewater, MA
EXPEDITIONS IN FRANCE: Native American Indians in the First World War  

October 15, Wednesday, 6:30 PM—Brown University
Metcalf Auditorium
190-194 Thayer St., Providence, RI
EMPIRE TREASONS: Native American Indians in the First World War    

October 16, Thursday, 4:15PM—Harvard University
Radcliffe, Sheerr Room, Fay House
10 Garden St., Cambridge, MA
Reading, and discussion of Favor of Crows: New and Collected Haiku

October 18, Saturday, 1:30-3PM—Mashantucket Pequot Museum
110 Pequot Trail, Mashantucket, CT
Reading, and discussion of Blue Ravens and Favor of Crows.

October 21, Tuesday, 4:30PM—Dartmouth College
Rockefeller Center 1
2 Webster Ave., Hanover, NH
White Earth to Picardy: Native Americans & the First World War in France 

October 23, Thursday, 4:30PM—Amherst College 
Paino Lecture Hall, Beneski Earth Sciences & Natural History Building
81 Dickinson St., Amherst, MA
EXPEDITIONS IN FRANCE: Native American Indians in the First World War  

 

The Strand to celebrate the last poems of Harvey Shapiro

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We are pleased to announce a new book by Harvey Shapiro, A Momentary Glory: Last Poems. A celebration of Shapiro’s work will occur on Tuesday, September 30, at 7:30 PM, in the Rare Book Room of The Strand Book Store (828 Broadway at 12th Street, NYC). Read more here.

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The distinguished poet Harvey Shapiro passed away on January 7, 2013. The poems in this book, many of them previously unpublished and discovered only after his death, are a great gift, and the final confirmation of his extraordinary talent. Edited by Shapiro’s literary executor, the poet and critic Norman Finkelstein, these last poems bear an unprecedented gravitas, and yet they are as supple, jazzy, and edgy as Shapiro’s earlier work. All the themes for which he is known are beautifully represented here. There are poems of his experiences in World War II, the erotic life, and of daily moments in Brooklyn and Manhattan, all in search of a worldly wisdom and grace that the poet calls “a momentary glory.” As Shapiro tells us, the poem “Is an Egyptian / ship of the dead, / everything required / for life stored / in its hold.” The book includes a introduction by the editor. An online reader’s companion is available at http://harveyshapiro.site.wesleyan.edu/.

For more details, click here.

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

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

 

Psalm

I am still on a rooftop in Brooklyn
on your holy day. The harbor is before me,
Governor’s Island, the Verrazano Bridge
and the Narrows. I keep in my head
what Rabbi Nachman said about the world
being a narrow bridge and that the important thing
is not to be afraid. So on this day
I bless my mother and father, that they be
not fearful where they wander. And I
ask you to bless them and before you
close your Book of Life, your Sefer Hachayim,
remember that I always praised your world
and your splendor and that my tongue
tried to say your name on Court Street in Brooklyn.
Take me safely through the Narrows to the sea.

SUBMIT NOW for Best American Experimental Writing

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Now is the time to submit your work for the 2015 edition of
Best American Experimental Writing!

THE DEADLINE IS DECEMBER 1ST 2014

BAX compiles the best North American writing inspired by an experimental ethos. The inaugural edition, published in July 2014 by Omnidawn, features 75 works by a diverse range of emerging and established writers. The anthology is a vital teaching tool and a must-read for anyone interested in innovative concepts. Contributors include Rae Armantrout, Charles Bernstein, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Ken Chen, Monica de la Torre, Forrest Gander, Kate Greenstreet, Brenda Hillman, Farid Matuk, Jena Osman, Ron Padgett, M. NourbeSe Philip, Vanessa Place, Ed Roberson, Danniel Schoonebeek, Anne Waldmen, and many more poets. 

The next edition of BAX will be published by Wesleyan University Press in 2015.
You may submit your work via Wesleyan UP’s Submittable Page.

 

Autumn fun in Connecticut–agricultural fairs and more!

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With Fall quickly approaching, we look forward to the many agricultural fairs happening across Connecticut. Attending a fair is the perfect way to enjoy Connecticut’s beautiful Fall weather, and colors, with your family, friends, or that special someone!

Wesleyan University Press is dedicated to publishing books to support Connecticut history and culture. Our Connecticut-related titles include some great Autumn reads: Becoming Tom Thumb by Eric D. Lehman, Connecticut’s Fife and Drum Tradition by James Clark, The Old Leather Man by Dan W. DeLuca, Hidden in Plain Sight by David K. Leff, African American Connecticut Explored edited by Elizabeth J. Normen, and Barns of Connecticut by Markham Starr, among other books.

Here is a schedule of Fall 2014 agricultural fairs and festivals in Connecticut:

Hebron Harvest Fair 2014 
347 Gilead Street
Hebron, CT
September 4-7, 2014
Hours: Thursday, 4-10pm; Friday, noon-11pm.; Saturday, 9am-11pm; Sunday, 9am-8pm. Admission: $12-13; parking, $5.

North Haven Fair 2014
Washington Avenue (Route 5)
North Haven, CT
September 4-7, 2014
Hours: Thursday, 5-10pm; Friday, 3-11pm; Saturday, 10am-11pm; Sunday, 10am-7pm Admission: $10; senior on Sunday only, $5; children under age 12 admitted free when accompanied by an adult.

Wapping Fair 2014
Evergreen Walk, 100 Cedar Avenue
South Windsor, CT
September 4-7, 2014
Admission: Adults, $6; seniors over age 64, $3; children 57 inches tall and taller, $6. Hours: Thursday 6-10; Friday 6-11pm; Saturday 10am-11pm; Sunday 10am-6pm. Parking is free.

Bethlehem Fair 2014 
284 Main Street
North Bethlehem, CT
Phone: 203-266-5350
September 5-7, 2014
Admission: General, $9; seniors, $7, Saturday and Sunday only; children under age 12, free with an adult. Hours: Friday, 5-10pm; Saturday, 8am-9:30pm; Sunday, 8am-5:30pm

East Haven Fall Festival on the Green 2014 
Town Green, Main and River streets
East Haven , CT
September 5-7, 2014
Hours: Friday, 6-11 pm; Saturday, noon to 11 pm; Sunday, noon-6 pm with a car show at 9am.

Ledyard Fair 2014 
Route 117
Ledyard, CT
Phone: 860-464-912
September 5-7 2014
Hours: Friday, 6-11pm; Saturday, 9am-11pm; Sunday, 11am-6pm. Admission: Adults, $8; seniors and youth age 13-18, $5; 3-day pass, $13; children under age 11, free. Parking: Free at junior and senior high school with shuttle bus to fair. Pets: Service animals only.

Norwalk Oyster Festival 2014 
Veteran’s Memorial Park, 42 Seaview Avenue
Norwalk, CT
Phone: 203-838-9444
September 5-7, 2014
Hours: Friday, 6-11pm; Saturday, 11am-11pm; Sunday, 11am-8pm. Admission: Friday $10, Saturday/Sunday $12. Seniors $10, Children ages 5-12 $5, US Military Personnel on Active Duty: Free with ID.

Connecticut Maritime Heritage Festival 2014
Fort Trumbull and other parts of the New London waterfront
New London, CT
September 11-13, 2014

Four Town Fair 2014 
Egypt Road and Billings Road
Tolland, CT
Phone: 860-749-6527
September 11-14, 2014
Hours: Thursday/Friday 4-11pm, Saturday 8am-11pm, Sunday 8am-7:30pm. Admission: Friday, Saturday, Sunday, $10; Thursday, $6; children age 12 years and younger, free; seniors all day Thursday and Friday, $5.

Newtown Arts Festival 2014 
Fairfield Hills, Trades Lane
Newtown, CT
Phone: 203-417-0862
September 13-14, 2014
Hours: 10am-6pm. Admission: $5. Children 12 & under FREE.

Guilford Agricultural Fair 2014
Guilford Fairgrounds, Lovers Lane
Guilford, CT
September 19-21, 2014
Hours: Friday, 1-11pm; Saturday, 9am-11pm; Sunday 9am-7pm. Admission: Adults, $10; seniors, $8; children age 6-11, $5; 3-day pass, $25.

Milford Irish Festival 2014
Fowler Field Rotary Pavilion behind the Milford Public Library, 57 New Haven Avenue
Milford, CT
Phone: 203-874-7275
September 19-20, 2014
Hours: Friday 6-11pm, Saturday 11am-11pm. Admission: Friday $5, Saturday $12.

Harvest Festival at Haight-Brown Vineyard 2014 
Haight-Brown Vineyard, 29 Chestnut Hill Road
Litchfield, CT
Phone: 860-307-5426
September 20-21, 2014
Hours: 11am – 6pm, both days. Admission: $25; kids under age 21, $10.

Harvest Festival at Stonington Vineyards 2014 
Stonington Vineyards, 523 Taugwonk Road
Stonington, CT
Phone: 860-535-1222
September 20-21, 2014
Hours: 12-6pm. Admission: Advance tickets $20, Day-of tickets $25.

Orange Country Fair 2014
525 Orange Center Road
Orange, CT
September 20 & 21, 2014
Hours: Saturday, 8am-7pm; Sunday: 8am-6pm. Admission: Adults, $7; seniors, $5; free parking and shuttle.

Durham Fair 2014 
Main Street and Fowler Avenue
Durham, CT
September 25 – 28, 2014
Hours: Thursday, 4-10 pm; Friday and Saturday, 9am-10pm; Sunday, 9am-7pm. Admission: Adults, $10-$15, depending on the day; children age 11 and younger admitted for free.

16th Annual Connecticut Renaissance Faire 
Dodd Stadium – 14 Stott Avenue
Norwich, CT 06360
Phone: 860-478-5954
Saturdays, Sundays and Columbus Day, Sept. 27 to Oct. 26, 2014
Hours: 10:30am-6pm. Parking: Free of charge. Admission: General (Ages 16+) $17, Youth (7-15) $10, Children 6 & under FREE.

New England Acoustic Music Festival 2014 
Main Street between Front (Route 44) and Lee streets
Putnam, CT
September 27, 2014
Hours: Gates open at 11:30 a.m. and music starts at noon. Festival ends at 9 p.m. Admission: $15 in advance and $20 at the door (includes one serving of beer, soda or water).

Oktoberfest at Quassy 2014 
Fieldside Pavilion, Quassy Amusement Park, Route 64
Middlebury, CT
Phone: 203-758-2913
September 27-28, 2014
Hours: 12-6pm. Admission: Free! Parking $6 per vehicle.

Berlin Fair 2014
Berlin Fairgrounds, 430 Beckley Road
East Berlin, CT
Phone: 860-828-0063
October 3-4, 2014
Hours: Friday, 11am – 10pm.; Saturday, 9am-10pm; Sunday, 9am-7pm. Admission: Adults, $12; seniors, $8; children under age 11, free.

Southington Apple Harvest Festival 2014 
On and around Town Green
Southington, CT 06489
October 3-5 and 10-12, 2014
Hours: Fridays, 5-9pm; Saturdays, 9am – 9pm; Sunday, October 5, noon – 7pm; Sunday, October 11, noon – 5pm. Admission: Free admission and parking.

Old Wethersfield Fall Craft Fair 2014 
Cove Park
Old Wethersfield, CT
October 4, 2014
Hours: 10am-4pm. Admission: $6, Children 12 and under FREE. Ample free parking!

Blue Slope Country Museum Fall Tyme Fest 2014 
Blue Slope Country Museum, 138 Blue Hill Road
Franklin, CT
October 4-5, 2014
Hours: Saturday, 10am-4pm; Sunday, 10am-3pm. Admission: Adults, $7; children age 4-14, $4.

Fall Festival & Swap Meet 2014 at Zagray Farm Museum
Zagray Farm Museum, 544 Amston Road (Route 85)
Colchester, CT
October 4-5, 2014
Hours: 8am-3pm. $5 per car.

Harwinton Fair 2014 
Locust Road
Harwinton, CT
Phone: 860-485-0464
October 4-5, 2014
Hours: Saturday, 8am-6pm; Sunday, 8am-5pm. Admission: Adults, $7; children age 12 and younger, free.

Portland Fair 2014 
Exchange Club Fairgrounds, Route 17A
Portland, CT
Phone: 860-342-0188
October 10-12, 2014
Hours: Friday, 5pm-11pm; Saturday, 10am-11pm; Sunday, 10am-5:30pm. Free off-site parking. Admission: Adults, $10; seniors, $6; children (under age 10), free.

Riverton Fair 2014 
Route 20
Riverton, CT
Phone: 860-738-4227
October 10-12, 2014
Hours: Friday, 5-10pm; Saturday and Sunday, 8am-6pm. Admission: Adults, $5; children under age 12, free. Free parking. Pets: Service animals only.

Garlic and Harvest Festival 2014 
Bethlehem Fairgrounds, 384 Main Street North (Route 61)
Bethlehem, CT
Phone: 203-266-7810
October 11-12, 2014
Hours: 10am to 5pm. Admission: Adults, $7; seniors, $6; children under age 12, $1.

Scotland Highland Festival at Waldo Homestead 2014 
Edward Waldo Homestead, 96 Waldo Road
Scotland, CT
October 12, 2014
Hours: 8 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Admission: Adults, $15; seniors and students, $10; kids age 6-12, $5. Parking location address: 130 Devotion Road, Scotland

Roseland Cottage Fine Arts & Crafts Festival 2014 
Roseland Cottage, 556 Route 169
Woodstock, CT
October 18-19, 2014
Hours: 10am-4:30pm. Admission: Free for Historic New England members and children under 12; $5 for nonmembers.

 

We wish you all the best for this lovely season!

#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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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.

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.