“The relationship with Audre Lorde is just ongoing and life-long.” – Jacqui Alexander

A little under the weather today, but I’m really grateful to my friend Darnell Moore for pointing me to this video of Jacqui Alexander discussing her relationship with Audre Lorde. The clip is part of the Signified Project which is worth looking into as well.

Sleep Well, Adrienne.

First the air is blue and then

it is bluer and then green and then

black I am blacking out and yet

Going Through the Door with Nikky Finney

by Senseteam

“It’s true that they called my name specifically, and that in itself is a wonderful thing, but 10,000 other people rushed through the door with me.” – Nikky Finney on winning the 2011 National Book Award for Poetry

I am so grateful for this Lambda Literary interview with Nikky Finney. Truth be told, I haven’t even finished reading it but I couldn’t wait to share it with all of you. Given the thematic focus of this blog, I figured this excerpt was worthy of a taste, but you really need to read the entire interview.

Did you stay in South Carolina?

I could not have stayed in South Carolina and become the writer that I have become; a writer who relishes exploring themes that are as beautiful as they are taboo. I was always my mother’s most curious child, the one also with the hardest head. I wanted to see the rest of the country and the rest of the globe. I loved to be on the move. I had to see what was down the road and over the hill. South Carolina is a state steeped in conservative values and traditions. There’s a lot about the state that does not like change. As a teenager I knew I would break away from some of those traditions. As much as I loved my family, I knew I would step away from home and make my own way in the world. I had to. I had to leave home, the church, and all the people who loved and protected me. I had to explore all the things that I needed to explore. I knew that I had to leave the southern landscape that I had been born into in order to find out exactly who I was in the world.

Where did you go next?

I went further South (laughs).

But I Remember The Song…

by Sean Edward Whelan

I wonder what Reginald Shepherd would have had to say about the sky over New York this first December morning, and if Tory Dent would decide to sleep in, shoving the alarm clock off the night stand, and if Joe Brainard would be at work on another collage, and who would Essex Hemphill wake up beside this morning, and where is Assotto Saint, and where is Melvin Dixon, and where is Thomas Avena, and where is Donald Britton, and where is Tim Dlugos, and where is Jaime Gil de Biedma, and where is Leland Hickman and where and where…

With a grateful nod to Philip Clark & David Groff’s Persistent Voices (Poetry by Writers Lost to AIDS), I will be tweeting links to work by these voices today, December 1, World AIDS Day.

WHEN THE ONLY LIGHT IS FIRE featured in Next Magazine

by Hernan Paganini

Thanks to Jameson Fitzpatrick for doing this interview. Here’s an excerpt:

Saeed Jones’ debut chapbook of poems, When the Only Light Is Fire, charts a lush, humid nightscape where objects are transformed by distance and danger always lurks. Here, night has a throat. Trees turn their backs. A boy wears “a negligee of gnats.”

Counting influences as varied as Toni Morrison, Greek mythology and Alexander McQueen, the young poet is as unabashedly concerned with beauty as he is socially conscious. His slim 44-page collection, out November 15 from Sibling Rivalry Press, calls upon a multiplicity of voices and a strong sense of the magical to address the complexities of desire, violence and memory faced by a queer person of color from the South.

Over tea at his West Harlem home, Jones—who lived in Tennessee, Texas and Kentucky before moving north to complete his master’s degree at Rutgers-Newark—describes the chapbook as a love letter to who he was in the South. “But the letter’s been set on fire,” he explains. “That’s where we get the distortion, that’s why it hurts to hold. It’s turning to ash.”

Go here to read the rest.

A Response to Suheir Hammad’s “What I Will”

by Justin Walker

I. Well aware that every generation has likely thought the world was coming to an end during its time & that perhaps this kind of panic is another word for “civilization,” I have to say: I do believe the world is on fire. From the turned backs of governors against the people in Wisconsin & Ohio to the government guns being turned on people in Libya to the hardened faces I see when I walk to work in Newark to the faces among the wreck in Japan & back again: people are suffering in a way that seems to have outdistanced our understanding of the word “suffering.” Perhaps only “madness” is the word for our world, or “bedlam.”

II. But what use is it to give in to bedlam? Who exactly would that help? And so, I try not to give in. When I walk into my classroom & see the faces of my 9th & 12th grade students & hear them reading Dickens & Morrison out loud & asking questions — good, deep-hearted questions — I answer them smiling. I answer them & whisper to myself that “this is not bedlam.”

III. I’m grateful to have happened across Suheir Hammad’s performance of “What I Will” at TED. (Click the link to watch the video.) The poem which begins “I will not dance to your war drum. / I will not lend my soul nor my bones to your war drum. / I will not dance to that beat. / I know that beat. / It is lifeless.” speaks to a rejection not only of war (in all of its forms) but to a rejection of that “panic” as well; the kind of “panic” that seizes the mind and the body & renders them useless. Her poem reminded me that when I sit down at my desk each morning & write my way into this world, perhaps each line is just another way of saying “This heartbeat is louder than death.”

by Luigi Loquarto

The 2011 NEA Grant Awards for Poetry have been announced & it’s lovely to see so many familiar names on the list. Quite a few of them have been discussed on this blog: Jericho Brown, Anna Journey, James Allan Hall, Blas Falconer & many more.

Cheers!

“Listen — are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?” – Mary Oliver

by Vera Iliatova

• Tayari Jones, whose third novel Silver Girl comes out next May, gives some great advice to writers thinking about applying to MFA programs.
• I’m glad I read Chistopher Hennessy’s amazing blog; otherwise, I might not have found out about this amazing exhibit.
• Terrance Hayes won the 2010 National Book Award for Poetry!
• “Making Love to Myself” by James L. White is a beautifully devastating poem.

A Message For Queer Brothers & Sisters

by Guerra De La Paz

Here’s my video in support of Dan Savage’s It Gets Better Campaign.

I created this blog in 2008 & chose the title “For Southern Boys Who Consider Poetry (when the soul food isn’t enuf)” in part because I adore the original play by Ntozake Shange and because my version of the title made me giggle. It made me smile to think that I had come to poetry as the result of a kind a hunger.. the likes of which could not even be satisfied by collard greens.

Over the last two years, the blog has increasingly become a space to address poetics unique to queer emerging poets of color. As I have met amazing poets of color, I’ve tried to feature them on this blog to get the word out to you – wherever you are. Lately though, the title has come back to haunt me.

Ntozake Shange’s play was entitled “For Colored Girls Who Consider Suicide (when the rainbow isn’t enuf”). Her play dealt with a deeper hunger.. a more persistent yearning in the lives of black women: a starvation of love.. self-love in particular. In the month of September, nine gay teenagers (that we know of) committed suicide in response to a similar kind of starvation. We have not made this country safe for them. From the federal government on down to our schools and households, we not have taught our young queer brothers & sisters to truly love themselves.

I fear that the rainbow is not enough.

Elegy For Oscar Grant: A Found Poem

by Kehinde Wiley

In a painting that no longer exists // One boy kissed into bliss
by myth, who can’t remember // to see as beautiful what I thought would destroy me.

In a painting no longer // Maybe he was too calm during the taunts of the police. // “If you were smoke,” he said, “you’d be the smoke that rages from a forest fire, close and wild and dangerous.”

He is the thing that happens only once // His name wasn’t even a word. // Let him go.