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#tbt: Pierre Joris, “2 Poems for Pens”

by sgerton • March 12, 2015

This week’s Throwback Thursday post features work from Pierre Joris’s 2001 collection, Poasis: Selected Poems 1986-1999. Joris is teaming up with multimedia artist Nicole Peyrafitte for two events sponsored by San Francisco State University’s Poetry Center. The first, on March 18th (7PM), will be at City Lights Books and is co-sponsored by City Lights. The second event is on March 19th (4:30PM), at the SFSU Poetry Center, HUM 512. Read more about the events here.

2 Poems for Pens

black & blue

the inks mix

sky at five o’color

a fountain

pen like a big

beaked bird,

childhood

games & smells

I see the pen

poised, the shadow it throws,

the indents in the wooden

underbelly below the nib,

like sharkgills,

the meat eating

metaphor

i.e. writing instrument.

#tbt: Joanne Kyger in “Poet Be Like God”, and reading for SFSU!

by agansley • March 5, 2015

The painter Harry Jacobus lounges behind Joanne Kyger in this Stinson Beach scene from June 1959.
Photo by Tom Field, from Poet Be Like God

Today’s Throwback Thursday post features three brief excerpts from Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance, by Lewis Ellingham and Kevin Killian. On the occasion of Joanne Kyger’s reading for San Francisco State University Poetry Center at the First Unitarian Universalist Church (1187 Franklin St., San Francisco) on Friday, March 6th, we’re sharing a few short passages from Poet Be Like God that touch on Spicer’s literary relationships with Kyger and others in the Bay Area. These passages shed some light on the 1950s Bay Area literacy scene, the rise of the Beatnik in American poetry, and what it was like for women authors navigating the literary landscape of the time.

from page 100:

On Blabbermouth Night, no reading from text was permitted; it was all extemporaneous public speaking. Up on the balcony, set into the wall, stood a box “like a soap-box,” where the contestants stood. If you were terrible, one of the bartenders would play a trumpet, or the crowd would hoot you off by yelling, “Take off your clothes,” as they do in the French Quarter during Mardi Gras.

Just too late to attend the “Magic Workshop,” Joanne Kyger and her childhood friend Emily (“Nemi”) Frost came from Santa Barbara to San Francisco. The two women fell in love with the city’s bohemian splendors. “We couldn’t stand to be away from North Beach,” Nemi remembered, “or each other. We couldn’t go through the tunnel[s—Broadway and Stockton, which divided North Beach from the rest of San Francisco]…. And we just raced to get back. It was home. It was where everything was happening.”

North Beach was a small world—three or four blocks, like a toy city dropped at the edge of a larger metropolis. Nemi, Joanne, and their friends Paul Alexander and Tom Field rarely went even to Washington Square Park, which was just a block away—only after the bars had closed at 2:00 A.M., when Joanne would cartwheel around the Park.

Kyger worked and held court at Brentano’s Bookstore, meeting poets of all schools, including Spicer, who took her under his wing—the wing of Hecate. One night he added her to a group performance of “Zen singers,” inviting Tom Parkinson over from Berkeley to witness their performance at The Place on Blabbermouth Night. In her journal she wrote: “We have rehearsed, whenever we felt like it, such tunes as ‘Give me some Zen who are Stout Hearted Zen’ and ‘When it rains it always rains, Zenies from Heaven.'” When it came time actually to perform, however, the singers demurred “on some grounds or other, probably lack of free beer.”

More and more young people, most without the talent and alacrity of Kyger and Frost, flooded the once-quiet streets of North Beach. The police became concerned and assigned a special task force to deal with this invasion. “Officer Bigarani was arresting people for pissing in the street,” George Stanley recalled, “and a woman named Wendy [Murphy] was arrested for “The Whole Boon of His Fertility” being barefoot. It was a big scandal: the Chronicle was playing it up, you know, ‘degeneracy’ or whatever. And then thousands of tourists.” Who was “beat”? Who wasn’t? The wild, crazy style of the Spicer/Duncan group made many of the Beat poets doubt their seriousness. Joanne Kyger, who met her future husband, Gary Snyder, at The Place, was torn between allegiances to two very different kinds of poetry life. The exclusiveness of Spicer’s group of poets, friends, and lovers did not escape the members’ own notice. “There were definitely circles within circles,” recalled another young poet in the Spicer circle. “There was a sense of ‘We are not Beatnik.’ We [the poets] all felt like that. Sometimes we’d play it up to the tourists: the tourists came in and they thought we were all Beatniks. It was a big game. There were Beatniks out there. The Beatniks were more the followers of Ginsberg—more ‘everything is everything else.’ We called them ‘sloppy thinkers.'”

These young poets tended to despise other artists whose interests and personalities seemed unsympathetic. Nevertheless, the allegiances were ambiguous. George Stanley put the matter succinctly: “If you could consider the group centering around Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, Corso, and later on, McClure—and still later, the Oregon poets, Whalen, Snyder and Welch—if you consider that one group ‘Beatniks,’ then the group around Spicer and Duncan were anti-Beatniks. But we were all Beatniks; we didn’t think we were Beatniks, but we were.”

from page 111:

In the fall of 1957, Joanne remembered, George Stanley approached her in The Place, and said, “Some people are treating these meetings just like a party.” The tone of his voice left no doubt that “some people” included herself. She hadn’t been reading her own work at the meetings, that was true. Too shy; too hesitant. It was time to shape up. She assembled her work, got on the cable car over the hill, realized she had forgotten her poems, went back home, found the poems, got on the cable car again, and finally read them at the Dunns’. “Robert Duncan loved them, and I remember Jack Spicer looking very serious-faced and saying, ‘Now what do you intend to do?’ His commitment to poetry was absolute, right down to the marrow of your bone. This was no light-hearted affair at all. And then after I wrote ‘The Maze’ poem, which was the first one in The Tapestry and the Web.” Completed late in 1964, The Tapestry and the Web became Kyger’s first book.

If Spicer was serious with Kyger, Duncan was coy. “I remember Robert Duncan saying, ‘There are a few things I could teach you about the line,’ and I said, ‘Well, tell me.’ ‘Oh, I’ll tell you next meeting.’ So, when everything was over, we were standing in the kitchen, and I said, ‘Now tell me.’ ‘Well, ah … ‘and he really didn’t tell me anything at all, as a matter of fact.” Joanne laughed, a deep, rich chortle of warmth. “But there was something he did tell me which then made me more interested in the fact that there was something going on which I wasn’t quite handling, or could handle in some way-some breath-beat implicit in Creeley’s tone, the hanging-article at the end of the breath-line, in the ear, giving this kind of staccato rhythm.”

From page 117

The Sunday meetings attracted a variegated group of men and women, but why were no more women writing than Joanne Kyger? The reason was partly financial, since the women who were likely to contribute were busy supporting their men. Dora Geissler recalled:

I didn’t read anything at Joe Dunn’s. I was Harold [DullJ’s woman. It was sort oflike—There wasn’t room for me to write, too. There were women in the group, but only Joanne did any writing. Nemi [Frost] went to the poetry meetings, too, but she wasn’t a writer. It was the group that went. Joanne and Nemi and I were very good friends. We were so different we weren’t competitive. Nor were we feminists. We all enjoyed the company of gay men, probably for similar reasons. For me, coming to San Francisco and meeting gay men was a wonderful experience, because I had just been through that season in my life where you’re seen as a sex object, and in Seattle, I would try to talk to people and think they were interested in my mind, and they just wanted to get in my pants? That was always so disappointing to me, and then when I met gay men in San Francisco, and realized, “They’re interested in my ideas,” I was just overjoyed! I knew my gay friends enjoyed my company for me alone, not as someone to fuck. That was a very comfortable place for me to be then. Feminism really hadn’t been invented then to any extent, and most women were uninteresting to me. They would talk about the house, and clothes, and I was never interested in makeup, clothes, the things that they talked about that didn’t interest me. The world of ideas and poetry and politics that gay friends would talk to me about, why, that’s where I felt at home.

In addition to Poet Be Like God—a project brought to our attention by Samuel R. Delany—Wesleyan has published two books of Spicer’s work, both poetry and lectures: My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, edited by Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian, and The House that Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer, edited by Peter Gizzi.

New film on dancer Martha Hill

by sgerton • March 5, 2015

Martha Hill (1900–1995), the first Director of Dance at the Juilliard School, was one of the most influential dance figures of the twentieth century. Her leadership was instrumental in cementing dance’s position as an art form and as an area for serious scholarship. She carved out a place for contemporary dance in America, paving the way for artists like José Limón and Merce Cunningham. Recently, Hill has come back into the public eye with Greg Vander Veer’s movie Miss Hill: Making Dance Matter, which premiered at the 2014 Dance on Camera Festival in New York. In her review of Miss Hill for Film Journal International, Lisa Jo Sagolla writes that “Hill’s crucial role in modern dance history is comprehensively delineated in Janet Mansfield Soares’ exemplary 2009 biography, Martha Hill & the Making of American Dance. Yet director Greg Vander Veer’s smartly constructed documentary bears viewing, even by those who’ve thoroughly digested Soares’ book.”

Author Janet Mansfield Soares was a student, colleague, and teacher of dance composition with Martha Hill at the Juilliard School and is a professor emerita of dance at Barnard College, Columbia University.

Janet Mansfield Soares and her book, Martha Hill & the Making of American Dance.

Martha Hill, along with contemporaries like Martha Graham, Hanya Holm, and Doris Humphrey, broke away from the old-world paradigms of ballet and European dance to create the distinctly American art form of modern dance. Soares traces the social and political forces that shaped Hill’s life, following her as she challenged the expectations placed on women in terms of their physical capabilities. Hill questioned the tenets of “white-gloved” physical education for women, and battled members of the “old boys’ club” in her mission to gain acceptance and status for dance as an independent performing art. Her work was essential in proving female dancers, teachers, and choreographers to be true artists in their own right. In her introduction to Martha Hill & the Making of American Dance, Soares wrote: “Hill worked to position dance as a valued artistic practice, one that belonged in the sociocultural life of campuses and arts centers in the United States and around the world—and one that would gradually shape a cultural entity of its own… [Hill], with her colleagues, managed to transform a many-faceted group of eccentrics into a community of talents with a single goal: to assure the survival of contemporary dance into a new millennium.”

President Gerald Ford greeting Martha Hill in 1976. Courtesy of the Martha Hill Archives.

#tbt: “a big train roaring through a long tunnel”

by agansley • February 13, 2015

In honor of Black History Month, this week’s Throwback Thursday sheds light on some of the African American and Caribbean intellectual and scholarly works published by Wesleyan University Press. Not only has Wesleyan published a number of scholarly works that fall into the category of African American and Caribbean studies, we also recently became the distributor of works by the formative Jamaican-American author and journalist, J.A. Rogers. In keeping with Wesleyan’s tradition, we are very excited about a groundbreaking book coming this May, Why Haiti Needs New Narratives, in which Wesleyan anthropology professor Dr. Gina Athens Ulysse explores many facets of the aftermath of the devastating earthquake that struck Haiti in 2010.

There are many highlights in Wesleyan’s African American and Caribbean Studies list, from film scholar Christopher Sieving’s Soul Searching: Black-Themed Cinema From the March On Washington to the Rise of Blaxploitation, which examines African American commercial cinema prior to the advent of more commonly known “blaxploitation” movies, to seminal older works by renowned historian George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind and The Arrogance of Race.

Today’s excerpt is from Horatio T. Strother’s The Underground Railroad in Connecticut. Though it was published in 1962, the book maintains its relevance in today’s conversations about the development of slavery and abolitionism in America. Strother’s book is based on the masters thesis he wrote as a graduate student at the University of Connecticut. Having held a long fascination with what, as a child, he’d imagined as “a big train roaring through a long tunnel,” he persisted with the project, despite being told that there was not enough information available to form a cohesive thesis. Strother defied this warning and went on to uncover new material on the subject. At a time when the oral tradition was not held in high regard by mainstream scholars, Strother made a bold decision to include oral accounts of first generation descendants of people involved in the shepherding of escaped slaves. Sadly, Strother died in a tragic swimming accident at age 44, cutting short a promising academic career.

In Chapter 3 of the book, Strother describes the lives of three slaves who escaped to Connecticut. The first is William Grimes, whose life in Connecticut and eventual decision to purchase his own freedom is described in the following excerpt.

from The Underground Railroad in Connecticut:

But Grimes found it difficult to make a living in eastern Connecticut, so he returned to New Haven. There he found work at Yale College, shaving, barbering, “waiting on the scholars in their rooms,” and doing odd jobs for other employers on the side. Six or eight months later he heard that a barber was needed at the Litchfield Law School—Tapping Reeve’s famous establishment—and there he went in the year 1808. He became a general servant to the students and was also active as a barber, earning fifty or sixty dollars per month. “For some time,” he said, “I made money very fast; but at length, trading horses a number of times, the horse jockies would cheat me, and to get restitution, I was compelled to sue them; I would sometimes win the case; but the lawyers alone would reap the benefit of it. At other times, I lost my case, fiddle and all, besides paying my attorney…. Let it not be imagined that the poor and friendless are entirely free from oppression where slavery does not exist; this would be fully illustrated if I should give all the particulars of my life, since I have been in Connecticut.”

Back in New Haven in the year 1812 or 1813, Grimes met and soon married Clarissa Caesar, a colored girl whom he called “the lovely and all accomplished.” She was also a “lady of education,” teaching him all the reading and writing he ever knew. Because his situation was not entirely safe—he was still a runaway slave and still, before the law, his master’s property—Grimes and his bride returned to “the back country” of Litchfield, where they bought a house and settled down. And just as he had feared, his owner eventually learned of his whereabouts and sent an emissary, a brisk and rude fellow called Thompson, to reclaim him. This man confronted the fugitive with a plain choice: he could buy his freedom, or Thompson would “put him in irons and send him down to New York, and then on to Savannah.” Grimes described his state of mind and his subsequent actions as follows:

To be put in irons and dragged back to a state of slavery, and either leave my wife and children in the street, or take them into servitude, was a situation in which my soul now shudders at the thought of having been placed. … I may give my life for the good or the safety of others, but no law, no consequences, not the lives of millions, can authorize them to take my life or liberty from me while innocent of any crime. I have to thank my master, how ever, that he took what I had, and freed me. I gave a deed of my house to a gentleman in Litchfield. He paid the money for it to Mr. Thompson, who then gave me my free papers. Oh! how my heart did rejoice and thank God.

Thus William Grimes became a free man, to live out the rest of his long life as his own man in a free state. Yet, as he came to set down his memoirs in later years, he viewed the condition of slavery and the condition of freedom in a somewhat ambivalent light:

To say that a man is better fed, and has less care [in slavery] than in the other, is false. It is true, if you regard him as a brute, as destitute of the feelings of human nature. But I will not speak on the subject more. Those slaves who have kind masters are perhaps as happy as the generality of mankind. They are not aware what their condition can be except by their own exertions. I would advise no slave to leave his master. If he runs away, he is most sure to be taken. If he is not, he will ever be in the apprehension of it; and I do think there is no inducement for a slave to leave his master and be set free in the Northern States. I have had to work hard; I have often been cheated, insulted, abused and injured; yet a black man, if he will be industrious and honest, can get along here as well as any one who is poor and in a situation to be imposed on. I have been very fortunate in life in this respect. Notwithstanding all my struggles and sufferings and injuries, I have been an honest man.

Read the rest of Chapter 3 here to learn more about Grimes, as well as two other former slaves who utilized the Underground Railroad.

We hope our readers will join us in celebrating Black History Month this February, with some great books!

#tbt: A note from Langston Hughes

by selliott • February 12, 2015

This small flyer was recently unearthed from files relating to our 1962 publication The Underground Railroad in Connecticut, by Horatio T. Strother.

Wesleyan’s esteemed editor, José Rollin de la Torre Bueno, was seeking Hughes as a pre-publication reader for the book. Hughes regretted that he could not act as a reader, being busy with his own projects and on account of having:

..been away a great deal from New York…twice to California, twice to Africa, and having just now come back a few weeks ago from abroad…. I have just sent to the press my book on the NAACP; now I have one other long overdue book deadline to meet, not counting the numerous magazine articles and other things that I have promised. While I was away, mail piled up to the ceiling and I have now in front of me at least a half dozen new books in proofs and others that publishers have sent me that I have had no more than a chance to glance at.

The above flyer, advertising Hughes’s gospel song-play, Black Nativity, accompanied his letter. On the reverse there is a hand-written note explaining that the play would be performed in Spoleto, Italy. The European debut of the play was at the Spoleto Festival. Then the play moved to London, where it was taped for a television special by the Westinghouse Broadcasting Company.

#tbt: Evie Shockley’s “ode to my blackness”

by ojonathan • February 5, 2015

Throughout the month of February, we will be celebrating Black History Month. Today’s Throwback Thursday post is a poem by Evie Shockley: “ode to my blackness,” from her collection the new black. Wesleyan University Press has published the works of many notable African American and Caribbean poets. Some recent books include Testimony, by Yusef Komunyakaa, The Little Edges, by Fred Moten, and Zong!, by M.NourbeSe Philip. We are pleased to announce that the long out of print book She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks, also by Philips, will be reissued by Wesleyan in the fall, with a new foreword by Shockley. And don’t forget we have a new book from Honorée Jeffers, The Glory Gets, coming this spring!

ode to my blackness

you are my shelter from the storm
and the storm
my anchor
and the troubled sea
* * *
nights casts you warm and glittering
upon my shoulders some would
say you give off no heat some folks
can’t see beyond the closest star
* * *
you are the tunnel john henry died
to carve
i see the light
at the end of you the beginning
* * *
i dig down deep and there you are at the root of my blues
you’re all thick and dark, enveloping the root of my blues
seem like it’s so hard to let you go when i got nothing to lose
* * *
without you, I would be just
a self of my former shadow

Evie Shockley is an associate professor of English at Rutgers University and the author of a half-red sea, the chapbook The Gorgon Goddess, and Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry.

#tbt: Joseph Ceravolo’s “Night Wanderer”

by ojonathan • January 22, 2015

Today’s Throwback Thursday poem is Joseph Ceravolo’s “Night Wanderer” from Collected Poems.

In his lifetime, Ceravolo published six books. The publication of Collected Poems made these six books available again, and also includes a substantial amount of work that has never been in print. Collected Poems offers the first full portrait of Ceravolo’s aesthetic trajectory, bringing to light his highly original voice that often operated at a remove from his contemporaries.

Ceravolo’s poem, “Hidden Bird,” also found in Collected Poems, was selected for the anthology The Best American Poetry, 2014. The paperback edition of Collected Poems is due out in April, 2015.

Night Wander

Eyes without light,

night without eyes,

scum of the earth, primordial skin.

A black, a beautiful universe.

Skin and eyes and fever

travels within itself

into the other.

Do not be afraid.

Recline with your hopes

on this resplendent day.

Birds cry out to the morning,

the ground calls me brother.

I crawl to you

wiped out,

stains on the heart.

O you who from our eyes is hid

with one odor

one note

and no explosion at all.

JOSEPH CERAVOLO (1934–1988) was a poet and civil engineer who was born in Astoria, Queens, and lived in New Jersey. He was the author of six books of poetry and won the first Frank O’Hara Award.

Ceravolo was not the only Wesleyan poet to be honored for a stand-out poem. Rae Armantrout’s “Control,” from Just Saying, was also included in The Best American Poetry, 2014.

#tbt: Martin Luther King in Connecticut

by ojonathan • January 15, 2015

January 19th will mark the annual celebration of the life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. This week’s Throwback Thursday post is dedicated to Dr. King, his time spent in Connecticut (both as an unknown student and as a national leader), and the reaction of Hartford residents to his tragic assassination.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. addresses Wesleyan students in 1963. Courtesy of Wesleyan University.
Read one student’s memory of the visit here.

This first passage is from an essay by Connecticut historian Stacey Close, “Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Connecticut, and Non-Violent Protest.” The essay, found in African American Connecticut Explored, explains the impact of Dr. King on African Americans in Connecticut and, in turn, the influence of Connecticut residents on the Civil Rights movement. It begins with the story of King’s first trip to Connecticut.

As a teenager in 1944 Martin Luther King, Jr. became part of a long tradition of southern students venturing to Connecticut to spend the summer working in the state’s tobacco fields. The teenager joined a group of students from Atlanta, Georgia’s Morehouse College at work on a Simsbury, Connecticut, farm. In My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr., Coretta Scott King recalled that her eventual husband experienced an incredible sense of “freedom” while in Connecticut. Unlike in the South, King and other southern youth ate in restaurants and visited local theaters without having to deal with the horror of legalized segregation. Coretta Scott King argued that the opportunity to lead devotional services with other students that summer started Martin on the road to becoming a minister. This visit to Connecticut had a major impact on the teenage King, but his relationship with Connecticut did not stop there. Later efforts by Connecticans would make important contributions to the non-violent civil rights movement he led in the South. People from Connecticut would frequently travel south to bolster the civil rights movement, and Dr. King’s visits to Connecticut would helped to support and transform African American communities in urban areas here.

In addition to Close’s essay, and other essays dealing with Civil Rights era Connecticut, we find historian Cynthia Reik’s moving essay, “What Would Dr. King Want You to Do?” Her essay deals with King’s tragic assassination and the reaction of school children in Hartford.

Hartford mayor Ann Uccello with students, 1968. Hartford History Collection, Hartford History Center, Hartford Public Library

On Thursday evening, April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. In response, riots erupted in Hartford’s North End. People were angry about the lack of progress on King’s dream: integrated education, housing, a fair judicial system, and jobs. Republican Mayor Ann Uccello, the first woman elected mayor of a Connecticut municipality and the first woman in the U.S. elected mayor of a capital city, went into the rioting area in a police cruiser on Thursday evening against the advice of most of her administration, carrying but not wearing a riot helmet. The Hartford Times reported that she toured the public housing complexes, “mingling with the people, trying to let them know the city cared.”

The police cordoned off the North End and used massive doses of tear gas to quiet the rioters. Residents in the city’s West End reported that the tear gas was so heavy that it drifted to Elizabeth Park. Showing the extent to which the city was divided, one Fox Scholar graduate of Hartford Public High School, Tom Smith, then attending college nearby, drove to join his family in the North End to share their sorrow but was turned away by police.

Friday morning, after extensive rioting, when Hartford Public High School (where I was a teacher) opened at 7:30 a.m., John Gale (Hartford Public High School class of 1969) recalled that many students remained outdoors, uncertain as to whether it was appropriate to enter the school. The student body was then about 50 percent African American, 15 percent Latino, and the rest white. The principal of Hartford Public High, Dr. Duncan Yetman, came outside to address the reluctant students, asking the question, “What would Dr. King want you to do?” Most students came inside and went to their homerooms for attendance. Over the P.A. system, Dr. Yetman gave students the option of remaining for a regular day or coming down to the office to phone home for parental permission to leave school. For two hours students tied up the office phones, making arrangements to leave.

Instead of going directly home, however, four hundred or more students walked down Farmington Avenue to St. Joseph Cathedral and asked the rector, Monsignor Father John S. Kennedy, to hold a memorial service for Dr. King. Msgr. Kennedy agreed. During this impromptu service, The Hartford Courant’s David Rhinelander reported, Kennedy said, “the Rev. Dr. King was a great black man. He was ‘perhaps the greatest man of his generation.’”

Visit the book page to learn more about African American Connecticut Explored, which covers the state’s African American history from the Colonial era through the Civil Rights era. A full list of topics covered is found at the book page.

Haiti, 5 Years Later: “Tout moun se moun, men tout moun pa menm.”

by selliott • January 12, 2015

January 12, 2015, marks the fifth anniversary of the catastrophic magnitude 7.0 earthquake that struck Haiti. The epicenter was near Léogane, approximately 16 miles west of the capital city, Port-au-Prince. By the January 24, 2010, at least 52 aftershocks measuring 4.5 or greater had been recorded. The death toll has been estimated at between 200,000 and 300,000 individuals lost. Hundreds of thousands of homes and commercial buildings were destroyed. In short, Haiti was devastated. Haiti—a country already in a precarious position given its centuries-long history of national debt, unfair trade policies imposed by outside nations, and the other, often unhelpful, foreign interventions.

READ AN EXCERPT HERE.

Wesleyan University Press will release Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-Quake Chronicle in May of this year. The author, Haitian-American anthropologist Gina Athena Ulysse, makes sense of the discussions surrounding her homeland in the wake of the tragedy of the earthquake and its aftermath, including the battle against cholera, the mistreatment of Haitian women and children, and the nation’s ongoing political turmoil. As Robin D.G. Kelley points out in his foreword to the book, “Ulysse wants to know how we arrived at this point, when Haiti is treated much like the random bodies of homeless people, whose deaths we’ve come to expect but not mourn?” You can read an excerpt from Ulysse’s work here, a piece titled “Haiti’s Future: A Requiem for the Dying,” dated February 4, 2010.

As Ulysse makes clear, in order to have a meaningful discussion on the state of Haiti today, one must look to the past. On January 1, 1804, Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared Haitian independence—the outcome of a successful slave revolt. Although Haiti would now be free, France and other European powers forced the island nation to pay 150 million francs in reparations for the loss of “property” in slaves and land. Western powers refused to trade with Haiti, hoping to choke the life out of a black free state. Today, unfair trade practices continue to plague Haiti and its workforce—not to mention the long history of oppressive and genocidal acts committed against Haitians by the government of its neighbor, The Dominican Republic.

Ulysse also looks at the treatment of Haiti in both the press and popular media. Haiti is often, mistakenly, seen as a dark “other.” Voudou, the prominent earth-based religion of Haiti, is often mis-interpreted, mis-appropriated, and maligned as “Voodoo,” seen by European-Americans as a dark and dangerous power. While Haiti remains the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, to restrict the nation to dystopian narratives of desperation obscures the complexity of the republic and comes dangerously close to dehumanizing Haitians.

Why Haiti Needs New Narratives is largely a reaction to mainstream news coverage of the catastrophic quake of 2010. Ulysse observed that much coverage reproduced longstanding narratives of Haiti and stereotypes of Haitians. In response, she embarked on a writing spree that lasted over two years, and a resulted in a large body of dispatches, op-eds and articles on post-quake Haiti. As an ethnographer and a member of the diaspora, Ulysse delivered critical cultural analysis of geopolitics and daily life in Haiti, with the aim of making sense of how the nation and its subjects continue to negotiate sovereignty in a world where, according to a Haitian saying, tout moun se moun, men tout moun pa menm (All people are human, but all humans are not the same). Why Haiti Needs New Narratives contains thirty pieces, most of which were previously published in and on Haitian Times, Huffington Post, Ms Magazine, Ms Blog, NACLA, and other print and online venues. The book is trilingual (English, Kreyòl, and French) and includes a foreword by award-winning author and historian Robin D.G. Kelley. It will be published on May 25, 2015.

Today, Haiti continues to be rocked by political turmoil in the form of protests over the delay of elections. Read more about the protests, calling for the resignation of President Michel Martelly, here. The need for better infrastructure and health care continues. You can view recent photographs from Haiti, here, provided by Susan Schulman for The Guardian newspaper.

#tbt: “To come to rest; strike bottom; land…”

by ojonathan • January 8, 2015

Today’s Throwback Thursday poem is Amy Newman’s “To come to rest; strike bottom; land: The world first fell from the firmament,” from the book Fall. In this collection of poems, Newman draws upon 72 definitions of the word “fall,” each definition serving as a poem’s title.

To come to rest; strike bottom; land:

The world first fell from the firmament.

In the beginning. Out of the most original begins the world,

its wish of industry, the main idea,

this first weather, a breeze across God’s face,

new craft swifting, moored, in the unharbored sky.

While we were in effort dreamed—a wordless dream of evers,

the still un-world buzzing in a magnet’s pull,

humming our eyes swift under their translucence, images

in slow motion—while we were dreamed, the world solid shape

pulled its mathematical issue from the density of sky,

the filaments of matter in their depth, dirt, color.

And out of this we must have arrived, without luggage.

What would be our eventual.

A sweet primary shift to be the ordered world.

When I lean in, I feel a fibrous answer,

the burden of the heart hanging in its chest, a little fruit,

and it hurts with its tiny weight, the logarithm

of the pre-made world—the pre-world

firmament, soft, inviting, into which—

by invitation, or uninvited—we

spread ourselves among the Eden. Raised

to its first power. Into that temperate, unforced place,

entwined as promise beneath the trees, we arrived, the fallible human material.

AMY NEWMAN is Associate Professor of English at Northern Illinois University and author of Order, or Disorder (1995), which received the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Prize, and Camera Lyrica (1999), which received the Beatrice Hawley Award.