City Trees and a few quotes

One of mine and a few readings, thoughts, resources, and recommendations:

City Trees

A small calico girl
huddles under the meager shadow
of a dying honey locust.
(City trees are always dying.)

The slide is fried
The monkey bars burn
But there’s nothing else here
Home is close but
You can’t go there, no

Your noise wakes her up,
And damn near everyone knows
That she don’t wake up until
The sweaty heat has passed.

You, barely more than toddling,
Say this with such nonchalance
Such everyday normative regularity
Apathy I thought had to be learned
Apathy that is inherent to you

And if she’s locked up like
a Disney Princess
(except she would never be
a Disney Princess
not with skin so dark)
then who will remember you small,
calico child,
who will ever know about you?

Time flies, and next thing
you’re pregnant

An older child, alone on the schoolbus
Speaks of her mother:

“My ma, she can’t read and
this is just fine
she gots a job and
she got pregnant and
she got pregnant again and
this is just fine
she can’t read and
this is just fine”

And looking at you,
And looking at the rest of you
And by god, here in the north,
We were all innocent bystanders to that big civil mess, no never us,
Just a stones throw away
From the cradle of liberty

It’s like Will Simmons is laughing
While the President Wilson claps
At how amazingly profound
of a joke is being told
and better yet,
the dumb mouthed party
of the guffawing stupid
applauding how brilliant
this joke is.

And listening to you,
A calico child, a lonesome girl,
And knowing that you know
Just how sick the joke is

I feel nauseous.
But I pay the Klecktoken
And we all gather round
To read from the Kloran.

“In 1492, Columbus discovered America.”

“Slavery in the United States
ended in 1865.”


***


Memory and (comm)Unity: Black Liberation Poetry

“In a new world where African people were transported to labor, die, and disappear, we’ve needed unbound voices to reformulate our destiny—voices refusing to be ensnared by somebody else’s terms. … Listen to them, to ourselves, to the best we’ve managed to write and say and dance and paint and sing. African-American culture, in spite of the weight, the assaults it has endured, may contain a key to our nation’s survival, a key not found simply in the goal of material prosperity, but in the force of spirit, will, communal interdependence.”
-John Edgar Wideman

Not unlike the African Griots, the Surrealists or the Chicano poets, the practitioners of liberation poetry approach language with great suspicion. They know that any motivated social, religious, ideological or ethnic group can use and manipulate the attributes of a given language for its own agenda—and it usually works for the benefit of the most privileged… In this respect, poets as diverse as Gary Hicks, Mutaburuka or Jack Hirshman have manipulated the English language to say things other than what it was originally invented (and intended) to say: a discourse of disruption that goes overboard of both the confines of academic dogmas and the mystification of prejudiced truths.
- Un-poetic Manifesto of Liberation Poetry

Beauty is relative; its pretended universal splendor, as represented in the ruling classes’ standard of valor, is a fraud: its false transcendence is revealed, denounced and devalued by the not so endearing occurrences in practical reality.
- Un-poetic Manifesto of Liberation Poetry

Governments and political systems come and go, but people continue to live the dream of being with hope in a better tomorrow even in the middle of abysmal horror
- Un-poetic Manifesto of Liberation Poetry

A poet has no way of shaping and shifting such tectonic plates surrounding his life, and he can be so unlucky as to be helpless over his own personality, that is personality and not self. I take the two entities to be quite different. In fact, I suppose personality to be an obstacle to realization of self and that realization of self prerequisite to a poet’s ascension to the sublime.
- Masters and Master Works: On Black Male Poetics by Afaa Weaver

[Is there] still a choice to be made regarding the role a black male poet should choose? Perhaps, but that implies the ideal of leadership, which is a problematic holdover from centuries of male domination. The black poetic tradition is defined, to a large extent, by the accomplishments of black women, accomplishments that never came to black men.
- Masters and Master Works: On Black Male Poetics by Afaa Weaver


Notable Voices of Black Liberation Poetry
Phillis Wheatley
Jay Wright
Robert Hayden
Langston Hughes
Amiri Baraka aka Leroi Jones
Henry Dumas
Gwendolyn Brooks
Jayne Cortez
Eugene Redmond
Mumia Abu-Jamal

Highly Recommended Manifesto on Liberation Poetry:
http://www.tanbou.com/1996/LiberationPoetry.htm

“The Black Narrator” –Ahmed Alhamisi, 1966
1
White poems
Are daggers, guns, cops.
piercing hearts in weird designs. Ofays
beating niggers to their knees. Coloured
girls with wigs passing & cutting Afro’s
minds. Or black poems judged by whitey’s
standards….
…
2
Black poems are beautiful…
…A
poem for wooly-haired brothers, natural-haired sisters.
Bimbos.
boots & woogies. Or nappy-headed youngsters
Cause they want what i
Want: blood from revolutions…

3
Here in america i want black thoughts, in forms of con
crete skies
tumbling down
on dingy ofays. on negro
middleclass heads (konked-haired hipsters. wig-wearing
whores…)
Crush their minds & lives thoughts. Talk to them in
chinese
vietnamese
Or
black language


“Black Art” by LeRoi Jones, 1966

Poems are bullshit unless they are
teeth or trees or lemons piled
on a step. Or black ladies dying
of men leaving nickel hearts
beating them down. Fuck poems
and they are useful, they shoot
come at you, love what you are,
breathe like wrestlers, or shudder
strangely after pissing. We want live
words of the hip world live flesh &
coursing blood. Hearts Brains
Souls splintering fire. We want poems
like fists beating niggers out of Jocks.