DISQUS

Your comments on our civil rights legacy are right on. As a registered independent since 1992 with great suspicions regarding the current centrist left *and* the right, and an abiding belief in flexible value systems that interpenetrate rather than isolate, I find it hard to romanticize anything so flawed as our country.



I also believe firmly that we should never have to apologize for not being "patriotic" or give Republicans a copy of "Poetry and Politics" because it gives us another, more leftist kind of patriotism.



As a Black American who is as critical of the current machinery and chicanery of Black leadership circles as I am of everyone else, I can never have the luxury of *not* being critical because, as it happened last week, I can always be stopped, SPOOKED, and questioned like an animal on my way home from work at night under the presumption that I am one of the "young black men" out there who is committing--perhaps just by living--or has committed a crime.



So, I actually agree with your comments much more than I do with the tenor of "Poetry and Politics."



Man, this is *your* blog and, as I take it, digressions are the discursive provence of blogispation. I for one appreciate "reading" your thoughts as they unfurl.



My only beef is that you don't post more poems...

Another poem please...

Sweet Benjamin: have I told you recently how much I love you and cherish our brotherhood? Reading your blog is like seeing the grace that informs all that you do. May God continue to bless you, Aaron and Ruthie.



And now, may I say with no exaggeration, that there is only ONE memoir that you should read and, in fact, it is a POEM as a memoir. It is available through that corporate sycophant amazon.com or through the wonderful Sun and Moon Press via the Small Press Distribution service.



(Oh I do hope you don't have this one already.)



And the title is...



*My Life*

By Lyn Hejinian

LA: Sun and Moon Press, 1987



Of course the book was originally published when she was in her late 30's--I believe 37--in 1980 (hence the 37 sections with 37 sentences in each one). But, she updated this remarkable poetic memoir when she was well into her forties yet she stuck to the same rule-based structure.



How does the everyday-ness of recollection manifest itself in this book? How does the structure resist the onslaught of "I" statements and temporally backward evaluation that is so characteristic of prose life-writing? These are questions that I still ask years after first buying this book in 1996.



This book will inspire you.

Quotidian delights and the genealogical momment... what's so magical about this poem--and I must say, Benjamin, if this one and "Frankie Gets Lucky" are any indications, you have emerged into a distinct, deeply meaningful style these days and I might suggest gathering them into a fascicle and sending them to the Poetry Society of America's chapbook competition or anywhere really--what's so magical about this poem is the way in which it stays within the experiential moment. It begins with an uncertain address--"I think...embarrassed"--and this uncertainty about the relative is the crux of the poem and it's ability to capture an unpredictable family moment and at the same time illuminate a character. The reader--me--doesn't know who is being addressed but this is not some elision. The poem's vernacular staging allows us to listen in and over hear an everday address broken up, indeed, complicated, by a subtly theatrical recollection; the incident so upsets the rememberer and the "you" that, in fact, they do not engage the quotidian act referenced in the title: that is, lunch. What a wonderful poem!

I'd like to talk first about your marvelous poem, "Frankie Gets Lucky." The first and most important marvel is its ease of delivery, or shall I say, its *phrasing*. It's four sections are at once snapshots--with vivid senses of physical movement, scene-setting, and wry observation--and highly emotional commentary about the presence that a person leaves once she or he is gone. That the commentary, and the snapshots move via indirection and employ a free verse in which I never once questioned the sense behind every line break and choice of diction; that the commentary keeps shifting to new scenes; that the commentary moves through multiple discourses of the vernacular, the erudite, the blues--all of these movements signify a speaker in the throes of cinematic remembering, of the in-the-moment discovery of one's sense of Frankie rather than the editorializing about Frankie. The marvel is that the rhapsody of the poem is reigned in by the economy of the free verse and the precision in diction. This is important as there are less than successful jazz and blues poems that so idolize their subjects--especially John Coltrane--that 1. one never senses the in-the-moment path of the speaker's subjectivity or 2. one senses that path as spilling over indulgently into romanticism. The verbal/situational/dramatic irony of the last section, especially the last four lines ending with Frankie's "words" and his blues, puts the act of remembering into the honored subject's mouth and then displaces the potential romanticism of the memory by upsetting the use that we may find from the memory of our most beloved friends/artists: Did the speaker do Frankie any good? Does the poem do Frankie any good in its remembering? I think so.