Rereading: Vice, New And Selected Poems, by Ai

The early poems here-the ones in Cruelty ( 1973) and Killing Floor (1979)-are intricate and forceful. The best ones are learned, ambitious, drawing on such diverse traditions as Pound, the Oral Tradition, Browning’s Monologues and Post Second Wave Feminism. Obsessed with trauma and agonizingly internal, they can raise powerful questions about race, gender, identity and the human capacity to digest an enormous amount of grief. Even when the message or structure of the poems don’t necessarily jibe, they are consciously crafted enough to always be the readers time.

She loses me In the later poems, where she stops telling human personal stories and starts to ruminate on pop culture events and figures. Ai's  early work interpolated the motif of the early Cantos- that poetry didn’t have the language to encapsulate the grief and horror of modern life-more effectively than Pound ever did, but they worked when she wrote close to the vest of real life, what she knew, what she could see, what she could invent.  When she started writing about OJ, Monica Lewinsky, Koresh, and the Okalahoma city bombing, the animating aesthetics of her work fall flat. Still, the book is worth it: there is much here that needs to be read if you want to understand the history of poetry, chew on some literary theorizing,  or just read some good poems.  If you can get a good copy of Cruelty on Amazon, however, I would go with that first.

My Thoughts On The Year In Music

If, on December 31st, 1951, I wrote these descriptive sentences about

1: A moderate talent hampered by his sociopathic obsession with white women; who consciously crafted his work free from any cultural signifers to black people

2: A middle class kid with a skeevy interest in sex, who is so obsessed with black people not understanding his story, that he often forgets to develop his own one.

You would assume, in an era before Ellison and Baldwin, that I was talking about 1:Chester Himes( before the Cotton series) 2: Richard Gibson and Frank Yerby.
So why, when on December 31st 2011, they describe Frank Ocean, Childish Gambino and Drake, do I have to pretend that the cultural discussions about them that we are having now? In these agonizing, retrograde, backlash fueled discussions defending the thrown crumbs of black male privildge and the brothers who will grovel on the floor to eat them, why are we pretending that any of it is "futuristic"; that a new generation is "telling their story", that we are doing anything except what we are actually doing, which is ignore 60 years of intellectual struggles that actually happened?

I dont consider myself a nostalgist. There have been plenty of  terrible acts and  years that black culture critics wont care to admit were so. That said, so much of what came out in 2011 can just burn in hell.

Just Where Was The Love?

http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/02/showbiz/music/love-songs/index.html

( trigger warning)

What's wrong with Soul Music? I have a theory, and it doesn't have anything to do with how stupid and evil young black people are.

Fifteen years ago, Bill Clinton signed The 1996 Telecommunications Act; a bill which deregulated the media and allowed for companies to acquire consolidated empires. It is the evidentiary framework that allowed Clear Channel to get over 1200 stations, the reason Comcast bought NBC/Universal, and the reason that Black radio has been brutally cut to it’s knees. Under the Portable People Meter System installed because of the bill, radio ratings were attuned to the exposure an area has to a signal. Because of this, almost every local mom and pop soul radio station-the lifeblood for black music and black audiences for over a half a century-had to close down because of an erroneous ratings system.

Also, because of the abolition of regulatory restrictions in the air waves, Black stations that were profitable under the PPM system were bought out and replaced by companies that replaced their black radio formats with the most popular, failsafe black radio format in the past 25 years: gangster rap/ sex music geared to white teenagers from the suburbs. When black people stopped buying/listening to rap music, smaller, niche markets came up that bred artists that had no crossover support whatsoever. The result was that Rashaan Patterson couldn’t develop an audience the same way that The Ohio Players could, Joi Gilliam couldn’t build a following in a similar form as Betty Wright, and Phenomenally talented artists like Anthony David, Van Hunt, Donnie, Res,  and Janelle Monae get absolutely nowhere in the modern market. It is also the reason that Mary J Blige, Maxwell, Jill Scott, and Anthony Hamilton can go gold and platinum with almost no support outside of Black America.

All of this is far harder than to comprehend and talk about than articles about "The Narcissistic Black Youth". I revile Chris Brown’s work, wrote as such( http://open.salon.com/blog/robert_lashley_1/2011/04/18/review_fame_chris_brown

) and am the last person to offer any excuse for his behavior. His success is a prime example of  how young black men take advantage of the privileges the R&B/Hip hop market affords them, and how it damages the community. It is dishonest, however, to ignore the economic structure built to make a song like “3 am” profitable and ignore a song like this one. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQDcJBrLcNQ . ( Brown should be criticized to the high heavens, but by god when are cultural critics going to recognize that artists like David exist and face near impossible odds to get their great music heard.)

What is also dishonest is Blake’s romantic subtext: that Black male sexism began with the first Schooly D record, and has stayed only in the territory and ballpark of rap ever since. Reading his glory years timeline-the late 60’s to the early 80’s-I couldn’t help but recall that during them:

-Eldridge cleaver wrote a best selling book that espoused the belief that black women should be raped for practice by black men, who then should rape white women as a political statement.

-Amiri Baraka and Iceberg Slim were writing horror works that were as frightening in content as Odd Future at their worst

-Baraka and Ron Karenga were espousing the idea that black men should beat black women as a form of therapy.

-Writers like Ntosake Shange and Alice Walker were being subjected to cultural witch hunts by black men because they had “unfavorable” male characters in their work

-and, in this glorious era of black music Blake describes, Joe Tex went platinum with a record "Uh Huh-Huh ( You Never Should A Promised Me)" that was an ode to a violent rape.

Of course this shouldn't be used as an excuse for the modern generation of vile love men:  Karenga being a Sociopath in 1971 does not wash away Brown being one in 2011.  There are discussions that need to be had in regards to the decline of the soul love song in America, and hard questions that young men need to ask ourselves about patriarchy in regard to soul music. In this article, Blake asks none of them(and his quoted implication-that black music will get right when Black women take off their high heels- is a more subtle form of the sexism he is railing against). Blake knows this; but like a lot of writers he knows a popular song to sing to an audience. The Black Pathology song he's singing here-one that relies on the same airy, singular cliched tropes of black failure without a whit of subtext or analysis-will get him the gratitude and recognition of many people. Forgive me if I want to turn off the dial

Midnight

Midnight, Sista Souljah’s novel, embodies both the ugliness and narcotic like appeal of black nationalism. It’s hero, a 14year old killer/ex drug runner/gang lieutenant, functions mostly as a cipher for Souljah’s opinions on racism, islam, the role of women and “the jew”. What has hooked her audience to the book isn’t any of those things as it is the character itself;  a sainted, macho, underground hero who understands and flaunts the system. Midnight doesn’t speak to their opinions on race, gender and Islam, he speaks to their wounds. Souljah presents him as a young man given no other chance by the system; and his triumphs in gangsta life, in love, and in adherence to a rigidly masculine Islamic code are presented as the readers triumphs. Anarchy in response to oppression is the force that gives his life meaning; and in turn gives meaning to the lives of his fans.

What all three parties ( Midnight, Souljah and her audience) don’t understand is this: that our humanity lies in the realization of how flawed we are; that we become better when we recognize and learn from our mistakes instead of blaming them on outside forces. It is the fear of this, a tough, inner life in the face of obstacles, that is behind Sista Souljah’s outrages, whether it be her statement on “a day to kill white people”  or her reviving the  Shylock archetype in the novel ( a  Jewish Lawyer does in Midnight’s mother and forces him into a life crime). Like a junkie, Souljah uses the anger to numb away the difficulties of living, and like a drug dealer, Souljah is damaging herself and her own people with the message.

Why Questlove Fucked Up ( And Why Liberals Ignore It At Their Own Peril)

　
　
Here’s what Jimmy Fallon and Questlove would have done if they had spines. They would have had Michelle Bachmann on, but have big Freeda and Katey Red-avatars of New Orleans’ Sissy Bounce music scene-to jam with the band in between breaks. Since Fallon has an affinity for indie artists, he could have had Meshell Ndgeochello-one of great indie artists in the history of soul-perform from her new album. As a guest, he could have had Wanda Sykes on to talk about her supporting role in the upcoming Muppet movie. If Questlove and Fallon had pulled off, it would have been ethical guerilla theater similar the slow torture of Lester Maddox on the Dick Cavett Show( in which Cavett, Jim Brown, and Truman Capote made Maddox walk off the show by twisting him up in his own logic)

But that didn’t happen, did it? The Roots’ gender shaming moment with Bachmann had nothing to do with her abominable politics and everything to do with their male liberal Id. Like too many men, Questlove thought he could get away with acting on his darkest impulses just because the woman he was criticizing politics are reprehensible. His and Fallon’s non apologies, and the rhetoric of those who have downplayed the incident( or worse, defend it as a response to her politics on gender, race, and sexuality) all have the same subtext: disagree with us and you will be abused. It is a subtext that has haunted modern liberalism from the exodus of women from SNCC in the 60’s, to the backlashes against the feminist movement in literature in the 70’s and 80’s, all the way to the white liberal hipster men who went psycho on Hilary Clinton in 2008. If this is the way a sizeable amount of progressive men are going to act toward women they disagree with, it will continue to haunt us in 2012, and the consequences will be dire.

Mixed Unlike Me

http://www.newswise.com/articles/biracial-and-passing-as-black



This kind of dark, dense human symbology( in which social scientists use the examples of a few to make broad, sweeping statements on many) not only does absolutely nothing constructive for race relations, it's spits in the face of people who's experiences might have been different; as well as ignore the whites who love or have loved another person of another race, and have paid dearly for it.



When you deny someone their reality-when you tell them " your experiences didn't happen. your life isn't real because this other person lived their life this way"- you are going to get a visceral reaction. I can tell you many things about my experience with a " white" mother and a "black" father, but most of all I can tell you that my opinion about the subject and how other biracial people should/shouldn't handle it STOPS AT MY NOSE. Not everyone had my family dynamics, and I cant make judgments on anyone experience, because I haven't been in their shoes.



What I resent about the study is that, like every other dammed article written by someone about being mixed in America, it's written by someone who wants to make judgments about mine. Just as that I haven't walked in the shoes of the subjects Khanna has studied, Khanna damm sure hasn't walked in my 11 1/2 wingtips(And Damm sure hadn't walked in my mothers shoes, or the shoes of any "white" person who has actually, truly loved a "black" person and found out that a great deal of the population doesn't treat them with smiles and sunshine; who actually get abused by people who consider them to be "race traitors" or "nigger lovers"; who are disowned by their families simply for the fact they they love who they want to love.)


Again, my experience is my own, and my mothers experience is her own. Others may not have had the support system that my mother had with my fathers' family, and the community in hilltop. Others might have had the "white" side of their family be open to them, and experienced constructive familial relationships. Others might not have experienced the racism I got being bused to and living in university place. I also had other experiences: I went back to college in Bellingham and met some of the most wonderful people I have ever met; people who just happened to be "white". I also got called an uncle tom by "professional" Afrocentric student militants more times in my first two years back in school, than I ever did in my first 23 years in an entire neighborhood in Tacoma. But I repeat, those experiences are mine, and for me to project them every "biracial" person would just adding mote in the disgusting rolling dirt ball in race relations in America.


What I am sick of, however, is having the same batch of stereotyped projections being projected on myself-of me being benighted by my genealogy, all "whites" being beacons of liberal tolerance, all "blacks" ready and willin to throw me out the tribe and cook my momma in a pot, and the only thing for me to do is embrace my benightedness and prove that I am tolerant and post racial by...disowning and being intolerant of my "black" ancestry, ignoring the fluidity of human experience, and putting myself in a "black" free box that says "biracial". Forgive me if that box, like all boxes, seems like a prison.

You Oughta Read This Poem: CCXXCII, Emily Dickinson

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15393

 

It's an allusive minaret of a poem, with a deceptively simple surface language, written in a clear prose free from extravagant syllables.  Beneath that, however,  lies a gorgeously vivid lyrical montage of the final, fleeting moments of life. As a whole, it's clarity, brevity and craft are nothing short of mesmerizing.

The first thing that struck me after two readings is how there is no clear and well defined message, no succinct statement, no tidy moral. To paraphrase, WH Auden's oft misquoted line, CCXXVII "makes nothing happen".That's the greatness of it, though:  as what carries the poem is the succinctness of her images and metaphors and how both contribute to the internal action of the narrative. Almost everything she describes has a movement to it, the buzzing fly, the stillness of her form as a metaphor before a calm of the storm, eyes that are wrung dry, her final breaths gathering etc. Instead of telling you directly, it shows you the actions surrounding and leading to Dickinson's imagined passing.

Those images wouldn't have as much impact if it wasn't written in a style that says so much in so little space, as well as saying so much in what she left out. You see in how she sets up the scene in the first line, " I heard a fly buzz when I died". In that line you know that A: a fly had buzzed B: the protagonist is dead C: the poem is going to be about the surrounding environment. But what gives the poem it's gut tearing power is it's devastating metaphors: the stillness of her body akin to the stillness of a coming storm( I.E the storm of death. The eyes that were wrung dry. The failing windows.)

Her last line " I could not see to see" , might be seen by some as anti climatic, but so what?  Yes, A description of an imaginary heaven and afterlife might been an cuter ending. But it would have taken away a significant amount of the emotional power of the poem. What makes it stirring is that it describes a person who is a close to that afterlife as can be realistically described. It's hyper realism brings the reader closer to a spirit world than the most extravagantly imagined poetic landscape ever could.  That, 

On Black Men And Street Harassment In The Pacific Northwest

The street outside the Tacoma Art Place is a pastiche of history on top of history. The remade apartment complex above the building sits diagonally across a set of dilapidated building more than 50 years old. Under those rooms, three trendy Pho restaurants nestle the pawn shop where addicts like my father would pawn anything they got their hands on to get a fix. Across the street from shop, a desolate lot overlooks a shiny new discount grocery store. To sharp eyes sensitive to the area's history, the mixture and contrast's of the past and the present can be dizzying. 

In the month that I’ve been the Art Place's Writer in Residence, I’ve been trying to time the block's rhythm; to get acclimated to it's changes and understand the people who have lived there in sixteen years since i've left. My job, along with paperwork and doing the phones, is to answer any question about writing anyone has; whether it be a paper, assignment, book recommendation, or just to provide a resource that a school can't. No matter any expository pretensions of decency I put on in this essay, my success will rely on whether or not I help them; and if the people who come in that office say I am a failure, then I have failed.

In order for me to not fail, to actually help people instead of kill time in this neighborhood, I have to be honest about every aspect of the environment I'm in. To do so, I have to take inventory of the black men that I see outside my window. In my office hours (drop in and non), there have been countless numbers of black men over 35 who have not known how to act. Some of them have scowled at the students  from the windows. Others have resorted to the type of comments that weren’t cute when Dolomite and Blowfly used them in 1978. One 53 year old man, dressed as if he was 17, started flirting with a 16 year old girl on the 28 bus going north.

I write this in relation to Sonita Moss's Unsafe in Seattle (http://www.racialicious.com/2011/10/26/unsafe-in-seattle/)  for the sake of honesty and the dialogue that black men in the Pacific Northwest need to have in regards to street harassment. In what I’ve heard in regards to the subject so far, I hear black men talk about cultural morays, accuse the women who talk about it of lying, and reflexively wince at any criticism put toward a black man( not them in particular, any black man, period), and black women talk about wanting black men to just stop harassing them. 

And I also hear “The Argument” ( I. E what black men go through in America). You want to hear an argument about what black men go through? I lived with my dad in the Hillside Terrace projects, 23rd and G, between 1986-1994, and I have the scars and the funeral notices of loved ones to prove it. I also was bused every morning from 88 to 92, from Tacoma to University Place, Washington, later living there, taking my fair share of racism, both subtle and no so much. So yeah, I could make "the argument" as good as good as anyone.

What I also know is that for every bum that black men want to cover under "the argument", there is as least 5 people damaged by him. For every deadbeat brother black men say is maligned there is a child who is indirectly told that the pain the deadbeat caused him is meaningless. A young man with a higher statistical proclivity for suicide because of the scars the dead beat left him. A young woman who’se being bombarded by the torture porn the dead beat calls rap.  A woman who's eye popping obstacles the deadbeat has a part in are pushed aside on the account that we need to "save our black boys". A mother/partner/ who is told over and over again, in book, movie, and media lecture, that they need to go beyond the call of human duty to save the race and make the dead act right. (Not to expect equality, reciprocation and love. To "make him act right") Every time black men bring out "the argument" in the discussion, to shut down dialogue by trading in on pain, they telling an entire community of people that their story, their pain doesn’t matter.

Yes, I have to make the standard caveat: black men don’t have a monopoly on street harassment. I have groaned almost every night I’ve had to walk down Holly street in downtown Bellingham, because of the brutal things I’ve heard white men say to white women, several of them my friends. To act as if the problem of harassment is a problem of color instead of patriarchy is to not just ignore the problem, but their experiences as well. 

There is another side to that caveat, however. I’ve been reading blogs for years-primarily Feministing, Feministe, Jezebel, and Racialicious-and I haven’t seen a single woman who’s made the “black man’s fault” argument. Not one. I've read a lot of arguments relating to the interpersonal conflicts that second, third and 4th wave feminists have/had, some crossing over into race, some of them being very painful. I've seen a lot of arguments where the only logical thing for me to do was the shut the hell up and listen. I've read many posts on the subject of street harassment where women have to great pains to not single out black men as the only perpetrators. What I haven’t read was the“ get a nigga” essay that almost every black men's rights blogger accuses feminist bloggers of writing in every article, paragraph, and sentence.

And the black men who accuse white feminists of being out to get them( and accuse black women of being their accomplices) might do themselves well by listening to what those women have to say about the culture, particularly the culture of the pacific northwest. A great deal of the arts dialogue in the Seattle and Tacoma media is a sewer, with racism and sexism being the primary pumps of toxic waste. If I wrote in a novel such actual characters as  the white frat rap group Mad Rad, the white frat fans who love them, and the media that prop them on a pedestal, I'd be accused of being racist toward white men. If I put in a short story any character that did what I have actually seen some of the elite white male slime balls in Seattle/Tacoma literature, music, or media  do, I'd be accused of writing a caricature. They do exist, however, and women of all colors in this area and beyond have been writing about them critically for a very long time.

Who also exist are the black men who take the crumbs these white men throw at them, and have thrown at them for decades. The rappers who trade on horror core an get an enthusiastic following in Bellingham frat venues. The old thugs in Seattle and Tacoma unlucky enough to survive the gang wars of the 90's, thugs who I see during every office hours. The "playa‘s" that Sonita Moss sees every day in Seattle, many of them black men who outlived the usefulness of their "cool"( or at least the usefulness that white men had for them). Black men can( and probably will) talk about the cultural circumstances these brothers endure till my grandkids will be complaining about street harassment, but there comes a time when we have to take some responsibility; whether it be a quiet groan,  a “shut the hell up“, or just a personal commitment to not harass someone in the street.  I don’t know if it will save the race, but it’ll help a little.

Why Joe Frazier Mattered.

The feelings I have for Joe Frazier are personal. My grandfather, Uncle Moe, Uncle Herman, and Uncle Milton were all proud men from Mississippi and Alabama. They were dark, scrappy, steel tough, with a dignity and a decorum that got them through unendurable pain. And they were Frazier men. As a fighter, he was their symbol, an embodiment of their ethic to not just work, but to work just as five times hard as the next person.

And lord, what a fighter and worker he was. Joe Frazier wasn’t boxing‘s greatest overachiever as much as he was it‘s greatest force of will. Short, he cornered fighters in the ring like Raton ( a bull) transformed to the body of a man. Stocky, he was the greatest infighter in the history of the division.  Short of reach, he made up for it with the greatest left hook in the history of the sport. (Ever. Period. End of discussion.)

All of Joe’s  brilliance and class could not compete with two facts: that he was lived in early 70’s and that he wasn’t Muhammad Ali. Joe could never be the lightning rod, revolutionary figure and symbol of an age and time that Ali was, but he was a damm sight close to being his equal as a fighter, and Muhammad knew it. The only psychological Ali felt he could have over him was to break him: calling him an uncle tom in their first fight, ignorant in their second, and a gorillia in their dark, brutal third. When a generation went overboard in praise of Ali( Just as they are going over board in denigrating him now) Frazier was left with a lifetime of wounds, and was well within his rights to howl about them.

The only thing I can say in his passing is that, like many geniuses, it took him to die for the American public to fully get him.  Brutalized by Ali’s taunts, ignored by the counter culture, and seen only as what he wasn’t by the reactionary right, Frazier was sports answer to Ellison’s Invisible Man. Go to youtube. Watch his fights Hear his story. See him. Maybe, in the lower frequencies, he speaks for you.