Poetry Session — Oct 13, 2017

Priya

The poetry attendance was sparse, but what was remarkable was the 4 to 1 ratio of men to women in the attendance at CYC, which became 5 to 2 when Joe and KumKum from Arlington, MA, were added as virtual attendees with their recorded voice files sent via Dropbox.

Thommo

The choice of poets was all modern. Therefore penetrating the meaning posed a challenge to the readers and listeners, but that is just as well. For it makes one ponder the words of the poet, recite it aloud to discover what may be hidden in the sonority, and examine the possibilities. As Ashbery explains, obscurity can convey more in the same number of words than crystal clarity can.

Priya and Ankush

As before Priya was responsible for gathering the readers and reporting on the session. The readers responded and pictures of the occasion testify to the draw of poetry.

Sunil, Thommo, Sugandhi, Priya, Ankush, Hemjit (seated)

Full Account and Record of the Poetry Session

Oct 13, 2017

Present: Thommo, Sunil, Hemjit, Ankush, Priya

Present Virtually: Joe & KumKum (with voice reading and comments)

Absent: Preeti, Zakia, Shoba, Pamela, Saras, Kavita

Thekua -Bihari cookie with gur, made by Priya

Priya kindly brought a country delight of Bihari origin, the Thekua, a sweet made with gur. Everyone praised it, and a reader even proposed a poem should be addressed to it. Here is a haiku from Joe:

   Namkin and mishti 

   Both kurkure and khasta —

   Bihari cookie!

The highlight of the October poetry session was the dominant presence of KRG’s male members. Priya was the lone woman reader at CYC, and KumKum read her poem via recorded voice file, as did Joe. Thommo, Sunil, Hemjith, and Ankush were present; the unusual desertion by our vital women readers contributed to this unaccutomed imbalance.

Ankush

Joe read from the American poet John Ashbery. Referring to Ashbery’s sexual orientation Thommo said that all modern poets are either homosexual or lesbian. Sunil said that he tries to choose a poet who has no such orientation. While choosing a poet, Sunil is especially careful not to choose a lesbian!

Thommo felt that if a poet is bisexual he/she has a wider canvas to write about.

In olden days homosexuality was a crime by laws passed in Victorian times, which survive in India, long after they were repealed in UK. Traditionally India accepted homosexuality.

Alan Turing, the British mathematician, and computer scientist who deciphered the German coding machine, Enigma, was persecuted for being gay, his story being made into the award winning 2014 film, The Imitation Game. In 2013 he received a posthumous royal pardon for his 1952 conviction for gross indecency, following which he was chemically castrated.

Priya said that many sex change surgeries were taking place in Kochi and that transgenders and third gender people were being accepted in the city widely.

Sunil, with his humorous stories, said that once in Coorg he attributed the sight of a transgender, with breasts and mustache, to his hangover.

Continuing the trend of American poets read by Kumkum and Joe, Ankush chose to read Claudia Rankine. He was impressed by her subtle style of commenting on social issues, especially related to race in prose poetry style.

“She has taken the whole idea of race ahead, her work is forceful and deceptive” he said.

Priya narrated an incident on the train in New York when a black nurse while talking with her subtly brought in a difference between them. She felt that the Blacks inAmerica were brought up to believe their status in society was inferior through years of discrimination. She said that the nurse created a gap between them by addressing her as madam, to the end of their long conversation. She felt that a schism was indicated by the black woman’s behaviour.

Thommo responded by saying, that if Priya was distanced by being addressed as madam, he was done so by being called ‘Patel’.

Sunil spoke about communism in Kerala, about the class and caste distinctions present in society here and gave hilarious examples of the same.

Thommo read British poet Basil Cheesman Bunting. He read about the poet’s life in Iran and his poetry being influenced by the domicilie. Bunting has dedicated one of his poems to Ezra Pound. One of Bunting’s poems satirises poets. Taking a cue from that Priya said she would end the session by reading a poet who poked fun at and blasted the whole idea of poetry readings, which KRG indulges in regularly, with so much passion. That was kept for the end.

Sunil read the Nigerian poet Wole Soyinka. He said that Soyinka is very political and the poem After the Deluge is possibly about the dictator Idi Amin. The conversation then digressed to getting appointments with doctors in UK and how the NHS functions in Britain.

Hemjit read WB Yeats and said that he likes to play safe and did not venture into unfamiliar poets.

Priya read British poet Wendy Cope suggested to her by singer-song writer Bill Adair whom she met in Fort Kochi. He recommended this poet, saying she was concise and funny. Priya did not quite enjoy her poetry. She read The Anniversary which resonated with a topical event in Kerala of Dalits being allowed to officiate as temple priests. In the poem Cope writes about the time when the Church of England allowed women to become priests. The poem, Spared was about love, and lovers who escaped death in the 9/11 New York twin tower explosions.

To end the evening Priya read the American cult poet Charles Burokowski who takes the wind out of poetry readings. The group laughed heartily at the poem. Thommo said we could call ourselves ‘The Useless Society’ and added that if Burokowski had been to a KRG poetry reading he would not have written this poem.

Joe

John Ashbery, the American poet from New York died at age 90 on Sep 3, 2017. He was a guiding light of modern American poetry. His poems were frequently published in the New Yorker. Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, a collection published in 1975, won the Pulitzer Prize, and two other awards. the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle prize. He is the best exemplar of a maxim of modern poetry: stop trying to tease a unique meaning, indeed any meaning. As he said in an interview in 1979,“On the one hand I am an important poet, read by younger writers, and on the other hand nobody understands me.”

This lack of comprehensibility seemed to arise from his conviction that there are no “direct statements in life.” Therefore the way he writes is the staccato manner in which nuggets of knowledge came to him. One nugget may have little to do with the next. Finding patterns and through them, meaning, was therefore a vain undertaking. Perhaps a feeling is all the reader can aspire to. But Ashbery has explained that he thinks obscurity can convey more in the same number of words than crystal clarity can. For a detailed Instruction Manual on how to read Ashbery consult Meghan O'Rourke: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_highbrow/2005/03/the_instruction_manual.html

He spent much time when young in Paris where American writers generally go to get a dose of high culture and art. It made him so fluent in French that he not only became a translator of French poetry but wrote poems in French (which was to avoid using accustomed word patterns, he said); he translated them back into English. His translation of the 43 poems of Rimbaud’s Illumniations has been acclaimed; Rimbaud after all taught the world about modernism in poetry.

Ashbery taught for many years at several places including Harvard, and was Distinguished Professor at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. He published over 30 books of poetry, essays, translations, and even a novel. His abstractness was noted early and criticized by one critic as verse lacking “sensibility, sensuality or sentences.” He wrote in many forms — haiku, couplets, and blank verse.

In 1984 Ashbery published a poem titled “37 Haiku” consisting of 37 haiku, each presented as a single line of 17 syllables as in Japanese haiku. Ashbery entered Harvard in 1945 and was associated with a number of fellow students who became poets, Adrienne Rich, Robert Bly, Robert Creeley, and others. Later a New York school developed by associating with poets Ted Berrigan, Joe Brainard and Ron Padgett. Ashbery was an art journalist for a while and then turned to teaching and art criticism.

I may add that Ashbery was homosexual, long married to David Kermani, his partner of thirty-five years. For more about him read Becoming John Ashbery by Larissa MacFarquhar.

Since there were some adverse remarks against homosexual persons I shall add my voice to the millions of voices proclaiming that the discriminatory treatment of homosexuals is a violation of their equal rights as citizens of a tolerant land in which we are happy to live, and let live. I adduce also the voice of Vikram Seth who was present at Kalam (the Kolkata Literary Meet) on the day when the Supreme Court turned down the review petition of its earlier ruling to ban homosexuality. The next day he released a poem to express his sentiments and urged others at the gathering to distribute it free of copyright:

Through Love's Great Power

Through love's great power to be made whole

In mind and body, heart and soul –

Through freedom to find joy, or be

By dint of joy itself set free

In love and in companionhood:

This is the true and natural good.

To undo justice, and to seek

To quash the rights that guard the weak -

To sneer at love, and wrench apart

The bonds of body, mind and heart

With specious reason and no rhyme:

This is the true unnatural crime.

Hemjit

William Butler Yeats (1865 -1939) is of Anglo-Irish descent born in Ireland and educated in London and Ireland but maintained himself a staunch Irish Protestant. All his poems, plays, stories were devoted to Irish folklores, topics, characters, legends and ballads. His poetical images came from mystical illusions rather than the familiar physical world. He is considered one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. He had a deep seated interest in astrology, occultism, mysticism etc. He joined a society that practised ritual magic but the supernatural clashed with his own need to be a poet. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He served as an Irish senator for two years.

KumKum

Robert Lowell, An American Poet (1917-1977) Robert Lowell would have turned 100 on 1st of March, 2017. He was born in Boston in a very wealthy, aristocratic family. Lowell became a contentious intellectual with his upper-crust background. His poems and essays kept him in the limelight during his lifetime. He had friends from all walks of life. Among them were the poets John Berryman and Elizabeth Bishop. Robert Lowell never feared to speak up against US Government policies that he believed to be wrong. He wrote about international issues that were of concern to people.

As a poet he achieved moderate success. His voice, recognized in America during his lifetime, continues to have an influence. Lowell is best known for his fourth collection, Life Studies (1959). “He abandoned the tight metrical forms of his earlier work for free verse, helping him to articulate his experiments and the turbulence of postwar America.”

Priya

Wendy Cope (b. 1945) is a poet whose witty lyrics and pitch-perfect parodies have gained her a readership far beyond most of her peers. Born in Erith, Kent, she read History at St. Hilda's College, Oxford. She then taught in primary schools in London before becoming a freelance writer in 1986. Her debut collection, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, struck a chord with its lampooning of literary pretensions and its wry look at contemporary relationships, and has sold over 180,000 copies to date. Her subsequent collections - Serious Concerns in 1992 and If I Don't Know in 2001 (shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award) - bothconfirmed her reputation as a classic English humorist whilst also allowing room for poems of a more meditative tone. She has edited several poetry anthologies, including Heaven on Earth: 101 happy poems, and her poems for children are widely anthologised. She was made an O.B.E. in the Queen's Birthday honours 2010. She currently lives in Winchester.

Cope's rueful wisdom connects her to the tradition of Betjeman and Larkin, but she brings a fresh female perspective to bear on social and literary foibles. She has said of her parodies that they were a way "of coming to terms with what was fashionable in poetry" and in their unerring accuracy and mastery of form she showed she could match any of her male contemporaries. Men in general are often the target of her barbed wit, none more so than Strugnell, the hapless and rather unpleasant male poet she invented for her first collection. Long before Bridget Jones sipped her first Chardonnay, Cope was casting a satirical eye over the minefield of contemporary sexual politics: "Bloody men are like bloody buses/You wait for about a year/And as soon as one approaches your stop/Two or three others appear." Whilst Cope has little time for bleeding hearts, her poems can be poignant as well as humorous. A new mood of contentment infuses her most recent collection with poems of domestic celebration like 'Being Boring' or the unabashed tenderness of 'On a Train': "Long, radiant minutes,/your hand in my hand."

Cope keeps her explanations droll and to the point, wisely allowing the poems their own voice. Containing a generous selection from her three books this recording is a wonderful showcase for the emotional and technical deftness that's made her work so widely cherished. Her recording was made for The Poetry Archive on 8 December 2005 at The Audio Workshop, London and was produced by Richard Carrington. Wendy Cope returned to the recording studio for a second reading on 18 April 2016, recording at Heavy Entertainment, London, with Richard Carrington as producer.

Sunil

The Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka was born in July 1934 and is a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. For 2 years he was a prisoner in the Biafran Civil War in late 1960s. A couple years after being released, he wrote a book on his experience and named it The Man Died: Prison Notes. There is a catastrophe at the end of what happens to the man. You may read more at his wikipedia entry.

Thommo

Basil Bunting had a lifelong interest in music which was reflected in the sound of his poetry, when read aloud. He was born into a Quaker family and studied at Quaker schools from 1912 to 1918. His Quaker education strongly influenced his pacifist opposition to the First World War, and in 1918 he was arrested as a conscientious objector. He was court-martialled for refusing to obey orders, and served a sentence of more than a year.

These events were to have an important role in his first major poem, Villon (1925). Villon was a complex structured poem that Bunting labelled a sonata. After his release from prison in 1919, traumatised by the time spent there, Bunting went to London, and enrolled in the London School of Economics, and had his first contacts with journalists, social activists and Bohemia. Bunting was introduced to the works of Ezra Pound by Nina Hamnett who lent him a copy of Homage to Sextus Propertius. Bunting later moved from London to Paris.

After travelling in Northern Europe, Bunting left the London School of Economics without a degree and went to France. There, in 1923, he became friendly with Ezra Pound, who years later would dedicate his Guide to Kulchur (1938) to both Bunting and Louis Zukofsky. Between February and October 1927, Bunting wrote articles and reviews for The Outlook, and then became its music critic until the magazine ceased publication in 1928. Bunting's poetry began to show the influence of the friendship with Pound, whom he visited in Rapallo, Italy, and later settled there with his family from 1931 to 1933. He was published in the Objectivist issue of Poetry magazine, in the Objectivist Anthology, and in Pound's Active Anthology.

During the Second World War, Bunting served in British Military Intelligence in Persia. After the war, in 1948, he left government service to become the correspondent for The Times of London, in Iran. He married an Iranian woman, Sima Alladian, whilst continuing his intelligence work with the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company Tehran, until he was expelled by Mohammad Mossadegh in 1952.

Back in Newcastle, he worked as a journalist on the Evening Chronicle until his rediscovery during the 1960s by young poets, notably Tom Pickard and Jonathan Williams, who were interested in working in the modernist tradition. In 1965, he published his major long poem, Briggflatts, named after the Quaker village in Cumbria where he is now buried.

In later life he published Advice to Young Poets. Bunting died in 1985 in Hexham, Northumberland.

The Basil Bunting Poetry Award and Young Person's Prize, administered by Newcastle University, are open internationally to any poet writing in English. This biography is taken from the wiki entry at

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basil_Bunting

THE POEMS

Joe

John Ashbery (1927 - 2017)

A Blessing in Disguise 

Yes, they are alive and can have those colors, 

But I, in my soul, am alive too. 

I feel I must sing and dance, to tell 

Of this in a way, that knowing you may be drawn to me.

And I sing amid despair and isolation 

Of the chance to know you, to sing of me 

Which are you. You see, 

You hold me up to the light in a way

I should never have expected, or suspected, perhaps 

Because you always tell me I am you, 

And right. The great spruces loom. 

I am yours to die with, to desire.

I cannot ever think of me, I desire you 

For a room in which the chairs ever 

Have their backs turned to the light 

Inflicted on the stone and paths, the real trees

That seem to shine at me through a lattice toward you. 

If the wild light of this January day is true 

I pledge me to be truthful unto you 

Whom I cannot ever stop remembering.

Remembering to forgive. Remember to pass beyond you into the day 

On the wings of the secret you will never know. 

Taking me from myself, in the path 

Which the pastel girth of the day has assigned to me.

I prefer “you” in the plural, I want “you” 

You must come to me, all golden and pale 

Like the dew and the air. 

And then I start getting this feeling of exaltation.

(From Rivers and Mountains)

Landscape (After Baudelaire) 

I want a bedroom near the sky, an astrologer’s lair 

Where I can fashion eclogues that are chaste and spare. 

Dreaming, I’ll hear the wind in the steeples close by 

Snatch the solemn hymns away. I’ll spy 

On factories from my attic window, resting my chin 

In both hands, drinking in the songs, the din. 

I’ll see chimney and steeples, those masts of the city. 

And the great skies that make you dream of eternity.

How sweet to watch the birth of the star in the still-blue 

Sky, through mist; the lamp burning anew 

At the window; river of coal climbing the firmament 

And the moon pouring out its pale enchantment. 

I’ll see the spring, the summer and the fall 

And when winter casts its monotonous pall 

Of snow, I’ll draw the blinds and curtains tight 

And build my magic palaces in the night; 

Then dream of gardens, of bluish horizons, 

Of jets of water weeping in alabaster basins. 

Of kisses, of birds singing at dawn and at nightfall. 

Of all that’s most childish in our pastoral. 

When the riot storms my windowpane 

I’ll stay hunched at my desk, it will rage in vain. 

For I’ll have plunged deep inside the thrill 

Of conjuring spring with the force of my will, 

Coaxing the sun from my heart, and building here 

Out of my fiery thoughts, a tepid atmosphere.

(From A Wave)

Paradoxes and Oxymorons 

This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level. 

Look at it talking to you. You look out a window 

Or pretend to fidget. You have it but you don’t have it. 

You miss it, it misses you. You miss each other.

The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot. 

What’s a plain level? It is that and other things, 

Bringing a system of them into play. Play?

Well, actually, yes, but I consider play to be

A deeper outside thing, a dreamed role-pattern, 

As in the division of grace these long August days 

Without proof. Open-ended. And before you know 

It gets lost in the steam and chatter of typewriters.

It has been played once more. I think you exist only 

To tease me into doing it, on your level, and then you aren’t there 

Or have adopted a different attitude. And the poem 

Has set me softly down beside you. The poem is you.

(From Shadow Train)

Hemjit

William Butler Yeats (1865 - 1939)

Adam's Curse 

We sat together at one summer’s end, 

That beautiful mild woman, your close friend, 

And you and I, and talked of poetry. 

I said, ‘A line will take us hours maybe; 

Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought, 

Our stitching and unstitching has been naught. 

Better go down upon your marrow-bones 

And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones 

Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather; 

For to articulate sweet sounds together 

Is to work harder than all these, and yet 

Be thought an idler by the noisy set 

Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen 

The martyrs call the world.’

                                       And thereupon 

That beautiful mild woman for whose sake 

There’s many a one shall find out all heartache 

On finding that her voice is sweet and low 

Replied, ‘To be born woman is to know— 

Although they do not talk of it at school— 

That we must labour to be beautiful.’ 

I said, ‘It’s certain there is no fine thing 

Since Adam’s fall but needs much labouring. 

There have been lovers who thought love should be 

So much compounded of high courtesy 

That they would sigh and quote with learned looks 

Precedents out of beautiful old books; 

Yet now it seems an idle trade enough.’

We sat grown quiet at the name of love; 

We saw the last embers of daylight die, 

And in the trembling blue-green of the sky 

A moon, worn as if it had been a shell 

Washed by time’s waters as they rose and fell 

About the stars and broke in days and years. 

I had a thought for no one’s but your ears: 

That you were beautiful, and that I strove 

To love you in the old high way of love; 

That it had all seemed happy, and yet we’d grown 

As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.

KumKum

Robert Lowell (1917 - 1977)

Epilogue 

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme— 

why are they no help to me now 

I want to make 

something imagined, not recalled? 

I hear the noise of my own voice: 

The painter’s vision is not a lens, 

it trembles to caress the light. 

But sometimes everything I write 

with the threadbare art of my eye 

seems a snapshot, 

lurid, rapid, garish, grouped, 

heightened from life, 

yet paralyzed by fact. 

All’s misalliance. 

Yet why not say what happened? 

Pray for the grace of accuracy 

Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination 

stealing like the tide across a map 

to his girl solid with yearning. 

We are poor passing facts, 

warned by that to give 

each figure in the photograph his living name.

Thommo

Basil Bunting ca. 1980 (1900 - 1985)

THE OROTAVA ROAD

Four white heifers with sprawling hooves

trundle the waggon.

Its ill-roped crates heavy with fruit sway.

The chisel point of the goad, blue and white,

glitters ahead, a flame to follow lance-high in a man’s hand

who does not shave. His linen trousers

like him want washing. You can see his baked skin through his shirt.

He has no shoes and his hat has a hole in it.

‘Hu ! vaca ! Hu ! vaca !’

he says staccato without raising his voice;

‘Adios caballero’ legato but

in the same tone.

Camelmen high on muzzled mounts

boots rattling against the panels

of an empty

packsaddle do not answer strangers.

Each with his train of seven or eight tied

head to tail they

pass silent but for the heavy bells

and plip of slobber dripping from

muzzle to dust;

save that on sand their soles squeak slightly.

Milkmaids, friendly girls between

fourteen and twenty

or younger, bolt upright on small

trotting donkeys that bray (they arch their

tails a few inches

from the root, stretch neck and jaw forward

to make the windpipe a trumpet)

chatter. Jolted

cans clatter. The girls’ smiles repeat

the black silk curve of the wimple

under the chin.

Their hats are absurd doll’s hats

or flat-crowned to take a load.

All have fine eyes.

You can guess their balanced nakedness

under the cotton gown and thin shift.

They sing and laugh.

They say ‘Adios!’ shyly but look back

more than once, knowing our thoughts

and sharing our

desires and lack of faith in desire.

Priya

Wendy Cope (born 1945)

‘Spared’. This poem, written in the wake of the September 11th attacks of 2001, borrows from a short poem by Emily Dickinson (‘That love is all there is’), and shows that Cope can move, as well as amuse, us.

Spared, by Wendy Cope is her meditation on the events of 9/11 written specially for the poetry anthology CD Life Lines in aid of Oxfam.

"That Love is all there is,
Is all we know of Love... "
Emily Dickinson 

It wasn't you, it wasn't me, 

Up there, two thousand feet above 

A New York street. We're safe and free, 

A little while, to live and love, 

Imagining what might have been - 

The phone-call from the blazing tower, 

A last farewell on the machine, 

While someone sleeps another hour, 

Or worse, perhaps, to say goodbye 

And listen to each other's pain, 

Send helpless love across the sky, 

Knowing we'll never meet again, 

Or jump together, hand in hand, 

To certain death. Spared all of this F

or now, how well I understand 

That love is all, is all there is.

The Waste Land: Five Limericks [by Wendy Cope]

I

In April one seldom feels cheerful; 

Dry stones, sun and dust make me fearful; 

Clairvoyantes distress me, 

Commuters depress me-- 

Met Stetson and gave him an earful. 

II 

She sat on a mighty fine chair, 

Sparks flew as she tidied her hair; 

She asks many questions, 

I make few suggestions-- 

Bad as Albert and Lil--what a pair! 

III 

The Thames runs, bones rattle, rats creep; 

Tiresias fancies a peep-- 

A typist is laid, 

A record is played-- 

Wei la la. After this it gets deep. 

IV 

A Phoenician named Phlebas forgot 

About birds and his business – the lot, 

Which is no surprise, 

Since he'd met his demise 

And been left in the ocean to rot. 

V 

No water. Dry rocks and dry throats, 

Then thunder, a shower of quotes

From the Sanskrit and Dante. 

Da. Damyata. Shantih. I hope you'll make sense of the notes.

Sunil

Wole Soyinka (born 1934)

1. Relief or Wedding in a Minor Key 

Bread is magic, grace. 

Some touch the whitefluff only 

With crested silver spoon 

With coat of arms 

And liveried service. Delicately. 

Bread is magic, grace. Your grace 

Is not the pulse of life, Your Grace.

Bread is magic, grace. 

The mouldy crust alone was life and pulse 

Dungbread, blackbread, wholebread, rankbread Sparebreadstockbreadgutbreadbloodandsweatbread - 

BREAD!!! was that the victims craved 

Locked so long with hate and fear And fire before their eyes.

When he had 

Dined and wined and - surely - wived. . . . 

And much human dough there was 

Broken round his board and court 

Around his state and splendour. . . . 

When he had Dined and wined, and strutted wiving poised He ordered:

Empty that plane 

Of bread, damn bread! Turn its nose 

To a different wind, to a perfumed wind 

Fill the hold with cake and wine 

And champagne guests - It's time For MY wedding. And - 

Shut those hungry mouths! - I have Good Precedent.

(Shuttle in the Crypt Collection, 1972) Notes at http://www.postcolonialweb.org/soyinka/relief2.html

2. Background and Friezes 

They varied Death 

A thousand ways - sudden 

To piecemeal. Virgins bled 

At lepers' orgies 

The streets were cobbled with unnumbered dead

Jacques d'Odan 

Wise angel not to rush 

Where no hero treads 

Whispers - stop! 

This spree is getting out of hand - and heads

Rinses 

Clean fingers in a bowl 

Of blood, and humbly adds Pips and crowns

To a General make-weight of his shoulder-pads

My word 

Is bond. Whom I treat To the sworn safe-conduct I guarantee

Will journey safely down the one-way street

Street singers 

Chant my tune: I am God's chosen instrument Do I hear —

Played upon by fat unholy fingers?

Boots? Butts? 

Only a mild reproach He lives, a mud reptilian Heed sirens!

Drive into the sea at my approach!

Humane 

My code of conduct, creed 

Of good intentions, gun-mate Cromwellian style

Some day we'll teach the soldiery to read

Hands off! 

My affair's internal Await my beggar's cup For when I'm sated

Me to burn, you to grant full aid eternal

A beach 

Hides the pebble. Create - But bleach (or whitewash) -

Cairns

Of bones to hide the skeleton of hate

Futile shield 

Before the festive slayers 

Mother to child, prayers Unavailing

The scene is old, cue in the waiting players

Week Seventy-five: 

Observers welcome. Cheap 

Conducted tours - behold! 

Our hands are clean. 

The rains have fallen twice and earth is deep.

(Shuttle in the Crypt Collection, 1972) Notes at http://www.postcolonialweb.org/soyinka/frieze2.html

3. Telephone Conversations (1962) 

The price seemed reasonable, location 

Indifferent. The landlady swore she lived 

Off premises. Nothing remained 

But self-confession. "Madam," I warned, 

"I hate a wasted journey - I am African." 

Silence. Silenced transmission of 

Pressurized good-breeding. Voice, when it came, 

Lipstick coated, long gold-rolled 

Cigarette-holder pipped. Caught I was foully. 

HOW DARK? . . . I had not misheard . . . "ARE YOU LIGHT 

OR VERY DARK?" Button B, Button A. * Stench 

Of rancid breath of public hide-and-speak. 

Red booth. Red pillar box. Red double-tiered 

Omnibus squelching tar. It was real! Shamed 

By ill-mannered silence, surrender 

Pushed dumbfounded to beg simplification. 

Considerate she was, varying the emphasis — 

“ARE YOU DARK? OR VERY LIGHT" Revelation came. 

"You mean - like plain or milk chocolate?" 

Her assent was clinical, crushing in its light 

Impersonality. Rapidly, wave-length adjusted, 

I chose. "West African sepia" - and as afterthought, 

"Down in my passport." Silence for spectroscopic 

Flight of fancy, till truthfulness clanged her accent 

Hard on the mouthpiece. "WHAT’S THAT?” conceding 

"DON'T KNOW WHAT THAT IS." "Like brunette." 

"THAT'S DARK, ISNTIT?" "Not altogether. 

Facially, I am brunette, but, madam, you should see 

The rest of me. Palm of my hand, soles of my feet 

Are a peroxide blond. Friction, caused - 

Foolishly, madam - by sitting down, has turned 

My bottom raven black - One moment, madam!” - sensing 

Her receiver rearing on the thunderclap 

About my ears - "Madam," I pleaded, "wouldn't you rather 

See for yourself?"

*Buttons to be pressed by caller who has inserted a coin into a type of British public pay phone.

4. After The Deluge

Once, for a dare 

He filled his heart-shaped swimming pool 

With bank notes, high denomination 

And fed a pound of caviar to his dog. 

The dog was sick; a chartered plane 

Flew in replacement for the Persian rug

He made a billion yen 

Leap from Tokyo to Buenos Aires, 

Turn somersaults through Brussels, 

New York, Sofia, and Johannesburg. 

It cracked the bullion market open wide. 

Governments fell, coalitions cracked 

Insurrection raises it's bloody flag

From North to South

He knew his native land through iron gates, 

His sight was radar bowls, his hearing 

Electronic beams. For flesh and blood, 

kept company with a brace of Dobermans, 

But yes - the worthy causes never lacked 

His widow's mite, discreetly publicized.

He escaped the lynch days. He survives. 

I dreamt I saw him on a village 

Water line, a parched land where 

Water is a god 

That doles its favors by the drop, 

And waiting is a way of life. 

Rebellion gleamed yet faintly in his eye 

Traversing chrome-and-platinum retreats, There, 

Hubs of commerce smoothly turn without 

His bidding, and cities where he lately roosted 

Have forgotten him, the preying bird of passage.

They let him live, but not from pity 

Or human sufferance. He scratches life 

From Earth, no worse a mortal man than the rest. 

Far, far away in dreamland splendor, 

Creepers twine his gates of bronze relief 

The jade- lined pool is home 

To snakes and lizards; they hunt and mate On crusted algae.

(From Soyinka’s Mandela Earth collection)

Ankush

Claudia Rankine (born 1963)

From Citizen by Claudia Rankine 

You are in the dark, in the car, watching the black-tarred street being swallowed by speed; he tells you his dean is making him hire a person of color when there are so many great writers out there.

You think maybe this is an experiment and you are being tested or retroactively insulted or you have done something that communicates this is an okay conversation to be having.

Why do you feel okay saying this to me? You wish the light would turn red or a police siren would go off so you could slam on the brakes, slam into the car ahead of you, be propelled forward so quickly both your faces would suddenly be exposed to the wind.

As usual you drive straight through the moment with the expected backing off of what was previously said. It is not only that confrontation is headache producing; it is also that you have a destination that doesn’t include acting like this moment isn’t inhabitable, hasn’t happened before, and the before isn’t part of the now as the night darkens and the time shortens between where we are and where we are going.

≈

When you arrive in your driveway and turn off the car, you remain behind the wheel another ten minutes. You fear the night is being locked in and coded on a cellular level and want time to function as a power wash. Sitting there staring at the closed garage door you are reminded that a friend once told you there exists a medical term — John Henryism — for people exposed to stresses stemming from racism. They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the build up of erasure. Sherman James, the researcher who came up with the term, claimed the physiological costs were high. You hope by sitting in silence you are bucking the trend.

≈

In line at the drugstore it’s finally your turn, and then it’s not as he walks in front of you and puts his things on the counter. The cashier says, Sir, she was next. When he turns to you he is truly surprised.

Oh my god, I didn’t see you. You must be in a hurry, you offer.

No, no, no, I really didn’t see you. 

≈ 

Because of your elite status from a year’ worth of travel, you have already settled into your window seat on United Airlines, when the girl and her mother arrive at your row. The girl, looking over at you, tells her mother, these are our seats, but this is not what I expected. The mother’s response is barely audible – I see, she says. I will sit in the middle.

≈