What comes to mind is a certain brawn, a radiant boldness that defies the boundaries of can’t do or won’t make it happen. I’ve seen you look askance, your single eye focused in the strut through garbage and refuse-- All the heaps of discouragements that hinder others but excite your passion for excellence and a worthy prosperity. Let's move mountains, scale globes of gold, defy the house rules to blaze a path towards realization arising from such unlikely origins as the lowly earth rat who never says No.
There is a remarkable paucity of poems from the 'academy' dedicated to the American Civil Rights movement.
This site Civil Rights Movement Veterans offers a generous selection of poems by motly African American forerunners and veterans of the Civil Rights Movement, especially by Freedom Riders.
THE DEMONSTRATION
Democratic National Convention
Atlantic City, New Jersey, 1964
They bob above us all afternoon —
three giant charcoal portraits
of Goodman, Schwerner. and Chaney.
civil rights martyrs whose tortured
bodies have just been found
in the red clay wall
of a dam in rural Mississippi.
Staring up at their flat, larger-
than-life faces, I envy the way
they gaze at the gray ocean
and the gray buildings
with the calm indifference
of those whose agonies are over .
Myself, I'm a frightened teenager
at my fIrst demonstration.
carrying a placard that demands
the seating of a mixed delegation
from a Southern state.
No one
prepared me for the crowd's hostility.
the names we're called.
Still, we chant the slogan reason
proposed: "One man. one vote."
And still it holds — the small shape
we make on the dilapidated boardwalk —
reminding me now of the magic circles
medieval conjurers drew
to protect themselves from demons
their spells had summoned up.
Even as the last bars clang
shut and I start to rub the purple ache
clubs left on shoulders, ribs,
and shins, my mind is fashioning
an invisible ladder.
lt's rungs an lifts of escape.
They've taken the SNCC pamphlets
but let me keep a book
of Keats — poems reminiscent
of my sad, adolescent affair
with the coffln-maker's daughter,
which taught me many things,
including carpentry.
And when, at dusk,
the trusty held for car theft brings
my tray of grits and fatback,
it won't matter so much that,
groaning and puking,
I'll be sick for hours.
Imagination is good wood; by midnight
I'll be high as that mockingbird
in the magnolia across the moonlit road.
I was disappointed but not surprised that the American Academy of Poets made no mention on their front page of either African American poets or the legacy of Dr. King who spoke with the lyricism of a poet.
One of the great contemporary poems about the civil rights movement is Marilyn Nelson's crown of sonnets for Emmett Till, "A Wreath for Emmett Till." To hear her read it on NPR, click here.
On the other hand, the American folk movement responded with lyrics today that are still sung and listened to. Here is Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival in 1963--the year of Dr. King's great march on Washington.
Here is Nikki Giovanni's tribute, "In the Spirit of Martin" for Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968.
You Tube has many great short videos relating to African American artists. Here is Billie Holiday singing "Strange Fruit," the greatest anti-racism song ever written.
"Strange Fruit" began as a poem written by Abel Meeropol, a Jewish schoolteacher from the Bronx, about the lynching of two black men. He published under the pen name Lewis Allan (the names of his two children who died in infancy). Meeropol wrote "Strange Fruit" to express his horror at lynchings after seeing Lawrence Beitler's photograph of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Indiana. He published the poem in 1937 in The New York Teacher, a union magazine. Though Meeropol/Allan had often asked others (notably Earl Robinson) to set his poems to music, he set Strange Fruit to music himself. The song gained a certain success as a protest song in and around New York. Meeropol, his wife, and black vocalist Laura Duncan performed it at Madison Square Garden.
Strange Fruit
By Lewis Allan
Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
Pastoral scene of the gallant south,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.
Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.
photo that inspired Lewis Allan to write "Strange Fruit"
In Memorium Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)
For Philip Whalen historic reading at the Vancouver Poetry Festival, University of British Columbia, July 31, 1963 complete reading (1:12:45): MP3 click here.
Joanne Kyger reading, introduced by Robert Hass at University of California, Berkeley The video is about 30 minutes long and well worth watching.
"Whalen and Kyger are essentially School of Backyard poets, who look out their kitchen windows and see the universe. Both have given themselves permission to write about what is immediately in front of them and/or on their minds, no matter how exalted or mundane. They are both domestics who leave plenty of room for splendor. Both have mastered the conversational; both feed off slang. Everything is the subject of their poems. Now, these two remarkable careers are represented by a pair of retrospective collections: "The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen," edited by Michael Rothenberg, and Kyger's "About Now: Collected Poems."
To read more of Lewis MacAdams' fine review, click on the title above.
"What do I know or care about life and death My concern is to arrange immediate BREAKTHROUGH into this heaven where we live as music" Philip Whalen
from an email I wrote following Philip's death in 2002.
Dear Friends--fellow poets and meditators:
Poet and Zen master, Philip Whalen, Roshi died on June 26 (2002) at 5:50 am. Among the last of the surviving beat generation writers, Philip was a remarkable and authentic presence. I count him among my first dharma teachers. He was a friend and teacher to many Buddhists from all the practicing lineages.As a poet, he was uncompromising in his dedication to remain true to his calling, outside the range of conventional literary circuits--so rare these days.
On October 6, 1955, he was a participant in the historical Six Gallery reading in San Francisco where he read with Kerouac, Ginsberg, Snyder, Philip Lamantia, and Michael McClure. His poetry appeared in issues of the Evergreen Review, as well as other small journals of the period, and in 1960 he appeared in Donald Allen's New American Poetry anthology. Whalen is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Like I Say and Memoirs of an Interglacial Age which, along with other early books, were collected in the 1967 publication of On Bear's Head. He is also the author of two novels, You Didn't Even Try and Imaginary Speeches for a Brazen Head. More recent books include The Kindness of Strangers, Severance Pay,Scenes of Life at the Capital and Canoeing Up Cabarga Creek.
Throughout the 1970's and 80's he taught at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied poets at the Naropa Institute (now university) where I had the privilege of living with him and Allen Ginsberg the summer of 1985. I owe a lot to him for breaking through my ignorance about the 'nature of mind.' An imposing presence and mountain of a man, he could stop your mind with a gaze.
Not one actively to seek fame, in fact, outright rejecting its lure at the height of the San Francisco poetry renaissance and his own burgeoning career, Philip was among the first generation Americans to fully embrace the Buddhist teachings living for many years in Japan while studying with traditional Zen masters before returning to the US where he spent the last 30 years or so devoted to his practice primarily-- then some on his poetry. In recent years, although nearly blind and in failing health, he was installed as Abbot of the Hartford Street Zen Center in San Francisco, a hospice dedicated to working with Aids patients. His life's work embodied the classic paradigm of the monk/poet living simply and with great impartial compassion towards all.
Tip north, darkest day of the season but down below, reverses to the longest with sunny rays dead on. Either way, when gaiety dons festoons of snowy boughs or fruit laden arbors heaving to golden harvests, our work is done as we anticipate the New Year, between the dark and light of solstice. You hoary voyagers—my friends bearing gifts of luminous mind outside the turn of celestial events, I send you greetings from north to south across the equatorial circumference of our common purpose, whose light, after all, outshines the arc of time.
*Nasa composite image of the sun using extreme ultraviolet light at summer solstice circa 2004 from different vantages on earth.
