Groundbreaking Poetry Troupe Reconvenes in Washington

Photo credit: Marlene Lillian Hawthrone

Founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the late 1980s, the Dark Room Collective helped foster a generation of African-American poets, from Thomas Sayers Ellis andSharan Strange to Major Jackson and Kevin Young. More than two decades and two Pulitzer Prizes later, the group reunited at the Lutheran Church of Reformation on Capitol Hill Monday for a reading at the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Poetry series.

The evening felt more like a church service or a rock concert than a poetry reading. Pews were filled to capacity as each poet made his or her way to the microphone, reciting words in syncopated breaths with dramatic pauses between lines.

Present was Washington’s own Thomas Sayers Ellis, a poet and photographer who cofounded the Dark Room Collective with poet Sharan Strange at Harvard University* and Janice Lowe, who was a student at Berklee College of Music, in 1987. Over time the collective, based in a rent-controlled Victorian near Harvard Square, grew to include scores of literary and visual artists. Also in attendance Monday were members Tisa Bryant, Major Jackson, John Keene, Tracy K. Smith, Natasha Trethewey, andKevin Young. The reading marked the collective’s 25th anniversary and paid tribute to its influence and popularity among scholars and academics over the decades.

“To us young aspiring artists, the Dark Room Collective represented the tradition of making a way out of no way,” said Strange. “[It was] a literary matrix where we could work out creative ideas, share, and have some sense that someone had our back.”

Although the group was originally based in Boston, Ellis’s Washington heritage played its own part. The city has a rich poetic history dating back to the 1920s, when Langston Hughes roamed the streets of U Street with Zora Neale Hurston, before scholars claimed both writers as leaders of the Harlem Renaissance.

“The way is there–you just need enough like minds under the same roof to kick down doors,” said Ellis. “[The Dark Room Collective] gave me backup–[as a result] there were more voices; someone would be heard. It didn’t matter which one, because it would trickle down to the rest of us.”

To Continue reading, visit Washingtonian magazine.

Fixing Daddy, #7

Fixing Daddy

He tips to the thermostat, adjusts

it to heat the house before

she awakens, decides what to make

for the first of four meals

he’ll prepare that day.

An alarm only he can hear

summons, and he’s by her bed,

rolling the insulin vial between

his hands like a lemon, warming

the clear fluid before she’s allowed

to inject it.  He hovers until the last

spot of drawn blood is wiped away. 

I watch him wire himself to her

piece by piece, give her a dose

of something at three-hour intervals

until the pain she can’t recount is his,

until her oxygen-starved breath

has him fighting for his own, until

he’s a self sacrificed—never mind

that he wrestled death for 5 long

months, pinned it just last year.  “Relax,”

I plead, “Beck and call is your order, Dad,

not the doctor’s.”  “I’m not an invalid,

James,” Mama assures.  He won’t

loosen the wires, only knows how

to tighten them, ensure his snap

to her every move—doesn’t see 

his heart wink, fool him that he can

fix her.  I believe no less when mine

signals the same, tells me I can fix

him, bring back the foot stomping

in his full-bodied laughter, the fun

Dad I once knew. 

“Let me do it,” he protests, his voice

calling up mine at six, learning to do

something hard, knowing I need help,

but turning it away until I break.

Carolyn Joyner is a DC-based poet and writer.

Murillo Returns

Poet John Murillo (Up Jump the Boogie) will be in DC this weekend leading a workshop for Split This Rock and giving a reading at Bus Boys and Poets with KatyRichey. There are still spaces left for the workshop, I believe. You should contact Sarah Browning at browning@splitthisrock.org for registration or further details.

Here’s a clip of Murillo reading at the Bowery Poetry Club. I was very fortunate to be in the audience.

Poetry 101

Since I left college, I’ve learned that sometimes the professor who always offered honest critiques helped you grow as a poet much more than those who praised you and made you feel great. I caught up with Jon Woodson, Ph.D and asked him a few questions. His perspectives about art—poetry in particular— are always interesting and earth shattering.

AA: What do you consider good poetry?

JW: When I was eleven years old I was taken to see Carl Sandburg read. It was a tremendous experience, and I was probably never the same. Sandburg was the most interesting person I had ever seen. He had imagination, conviction, personality, and he was completely convincing and captivating.  And despite the fact that he was an old man, he was a better child than I was. He was a great showman and his material was poetry. That is my standard, and I now see that it is very high because often I am amazed that poets are so lacking in nearly everything that they need to bring to the endeavor of poetry. Now that I am an adult, I see that he was a very serious man with very deep concerns, but he knew that if he was a bore he was not getting anywhere. He was smart enough to know that if you are not able to communicate with children you are just kidding yourself. There is that primal element of amazement that is the foundation of poetry, and that is what has to be present so that the poet and the audience are on the same vibration of rapture, vision, dream, and discovery.

AA:What’s your criteria?

JW: All over the place I keep coming across the same idea—that poetry has to be interesting—that old idea that it should make the hair on your neck stand up—that it’s autonomic and involuntary. In general art is a realm that gives you access to areas not otherwise available in life. I just watched two women get drunk on Bloody Marys while eating a huge brunch, and something like that brings home to me the pathetic nature of ordinary consciousness. One of them said—“Babies are cool, that’s why you like them.” That is typical of the level of ordinary consciousness.  People are robots, and they need to have access to more authentic moments of consciousness: that is the role of art and the function of poetry.  I mean it’s obvious that in the example above somebody needs to explain to them what a baby is. Of course, there is the problem that most poets don’t know either, so poetry is not automatically of any usefulness most of the time. Poets are as robotic in their poetry as most people are at brunch. So, you have to be careful not to give yourself  too much credit for knowing what you are doing.

AA: And what do you perceive to be some challenges for poets coming up today?

JW: It’s not possible for most people to be human beings.  They buy into all of the forms of modern insanity, and thus they are unattractive and uninteresting, often dangerous or merely exhausting to deal with. We live in a dark age. Most people do not seem to realize the darkness of this period of history. I am not sure there are any special things about barbarians who consider themselves to be poets. I imagine that a real poet can be expected to be badly misunderstood by the robot poets. It’s a struggle to be an artist at any age, but we have all sorts of delusions, so many things get undeserved credit. Gurdjieff called this “word prostitution” and I think that I ought to do a t-shirt and make it possible for that concept to enter the culture more widely. Perhaps the challenges are always the same—in fact nobody knows. If anyone were able to actually know how to develop into an artist, perhaps we would be making progress as a planetary culture. But this is not one of the things that seriously engages us: instead we just give ourselves credit for nonsense and are content with mediocrity.

JON WOODSON is the Graduate Professor of English at Howard University, received his Ph.D. from Brown University. Woodson is a scholar and teacher of Modern American literature with interests in poetics, the novel, and the long poem. In 2006, Woodson was a visiting Fulbright lecturer in American Literature at the University of Pecs and at ELTE in Budapest. His articles have appeared in Obsidian II, African American Review, The Furious Flowering Of African American Poetry, The Dictionary of Literary Biography, Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, The Harlem Renaissance: a Gale Critical Companion, and The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing. His critical studies are To Make a New Race: Gurdjieff, Toomer, and The Harlem Renaissance (1999) and A Study of Catch-22: Going Around Twice (2000). Anthems, Sonnets, and Chants: Recovering the African-American Poetry of the 1930s is forthcoming from Ohio State University Press. Recent work is directed toward a study of the Egyptian materials in Z. N. Hurston’s fiction. Jon Woodson’s chapbook, Cage with a Live Mouth, has just been translated into Hungarian and is forthcoming in a bilingual edition. His poems have been published in Poet Lore, Northeast Journal, Arjuna Library, Baltimore City Paper, and Manzanita Quarterly. He has also published two chapbooks, I Slept Like Liquid Paper and Worry Dolls.

Four Days Away…

Teaching Soon-to-be Moms Poetry

Yesterday, I finished the last poetry workshop of my short poet-in-residence for the Arlington Public School program. I enjoyed each school in a different way. There was a funky charter school. The students didn’t have school bells. They called their teachers by their first name. They were pretty hip and very energetic. Sadly most of them giggled through my workshop.

There was something different about the workshop I taught yeaterday, though. It was a “special” high school. All of my students were teenage mothers or soon-to-be teenage mothers. I felt uneasy because I was a guy going into “their” space. Add to that, I was twenty years old when I became a father and I started to wonder what would have happened if I weren’t allowed to go to school (even though I was in college then) with everybody else. What would happen if I was segregated with all of the other soon-to-be fathers. What might that have done to my self esteem? Add to that, my being male gave me a certain privilege: No one had to know that I was expecting a child with my partner unless I told them. Women, however, don’t have this liberty.

The young women were all bright-eyed, curious, smart, and funny. They wrote missives after Lucille Clifton celebrating all sorts of things, especially the ten fingers and toes of their new borns. More so than the rest of the schools, I visited, there was a need to be heard with these young women. There were questions about my age, what I did for a living. How did I get a radio show? How can they get their own radio show? It was all very humbling.

Moreso than the writing, what struck me was how discerning they were with the poems. Their feedback was on-point. I wonder how the session might have changed if it were with a group of soon-to-be fathers. Would they have opened up? Would they have allowed language to claim them in the way that these young women did?

Before leaving I felt a sobering reality that for many of these young women, being a teenage mom is the only identity  allowed for them. Not high school student, poet, apprentice at some profession. . . And what was worse, is that there wasn’t much I could do about it as my time was up.

Register Now. Less than Three Weeks Until Festival.

Deep Breath

This is just a short note to update Words Matter readers that I appreciate all of the support you all have given me these past four months. The numbers are unbelievable–hundreds of folks are logging-on to see what’s going on in this virtual world I’ve created.

For those of who you may not know the great poet, Lucille Clifton has transitioned. I hope each of you will get your hands on a volume of at least one of her poems and read them out loud either to yourself or someone you love. Her words crawl on you like a welcomed wind in the midst of a heat wave. And they tell the truth like your mama when you’ve done something stupid. Ms. Clifton will not be forgotten. I’m so grateful the brief moment, I spent with her as I was waiting in line to get a children’s book of hers and one of her volumes of poetry signed at the Folger’s here in Washington, D.C. I shared with her that I was a poet thinking about getting an MFA. She immediately said “you don’t need an MFA to write good poems.” I’ll always be grateful to Ms. Clifton for that as I needed to hear that in that moment more than anything.

For those of you who’ve checked out my recent article on TheRoot about the enduring spirit of the film, Love Jones. Thank you so much! I’ve received a number of emails from readers around the country. The article itself has sparked some interest in Words Matter and on the whole it’s made me feel very good to connect with so many visionary filmmakers and writers and movie goers like myself.

Like Al Green sings, Let’s stay together. We really can bring about a radical new framework for black cinema. Stay Tuned.

Thirteen Years Later and Still Got the Jones

This was the film where I first saw myself on screen. This was the film where everything was jazz, cool, yet real. This was the film that showed relationships as I came to witness and experience them.

I just wrote an essay for TheRoot about why this film has endured for so long. And how black writers and filmmakers must re-commit themselves to telling our stories on this level.

Take a look.

Erykah Badu

I just got an e-mail from Erykah Badu’s publicist. There seems to be a lot of hype surrounding her latest project: New AmErykah, Part Two: The Return of the Ankh. I can’t wait. More than the album, I can’t wait to meet Ms. badu in person. I wrote about Ms. Badu for The Root back in the day.

Here’s a clip from Ms. Badu on Def Poetry Jam.