June Jordan's revenge

Obama is June Jordan's revenge. A sweet and satisfying revenge that does no harm to anybody, but goes far to right an ancient wrong. You'll know this when you listen to Sweet Honey in the Rock perform "We Are the Ones" -- which you can hear along with other great songs on their website at that link.

Barack Obama must have heard Sweet Honey's version many times, and no doubt knows well the work of June Jordan, one of the sharpest and most politically conscious American poets of our times.

The line is the last one in her "Poem for South African Women," written in 1980, when the end of apartheid still seemed distant. Whether he got if from the song or directly from the original poem, Obama made it the defining call of his presidential campaign, and may its spirit guide his administration: "we are the ones we have been waiting for." To say it another way, it's up to us to make this a better world. The South African women and men were up to the challenge, and we had better be too.

June Jordan, unfortunately for all of us, did not live long enough to see this triumph. Her words still echo, though, in the minds of all of us who have read them or heard her read them in her rich voice. (You can hear that voice in a 2003 interview on Democracy Now!) Obama's campaign amplified them.

Here is the whole poem.

Poem for South African Women
June Jordan, 1980

Our own shadows disappear as the feet of thousands
by the tens of thousands pound the fallow land
into new dust that
rising like a marvelous pollen will be
fertile
even as the first woman whispering
imagination to the trees around her made
for righteous fruit
from such deliberate defense of life
as no other still
will claim inferior to any other safety
in the world

The whispers too they
intimate to the inmost ear of every spirit
now aroused they
carousing in ferocious affirmation
of all peaceable and loving amplitude
sound a certainly unbounded heat
from a baptismal smoke where yes
there will be fire

And the babies cease alarm as mothers
raising arms
and heart high as the stars so far unseen
nevertheless hurl into the universe
a moving force
irreversible as light years
traveling to the open eye

And who will join this standing up
and the ones who stood without sweet company
will sing and sing
back into the mountains and
if necessary
even under the sea:

we are the ones we have been waiting for.

Holiday message from Roy Blount

This is too good not to share. I endorse the sentiments.

I've been talking to booksellers lately who report that times are hard. And local booksellers aren't known for vast reserves of capital, so a serious dip in sales can be devastating. Booksellers don't lose enough money, however, to receive congressional attention. A government bailout isn't in the cards.

We don't want bookstores to die. Authors need them, and so do neighborhoods. So let's mount a book-buying splurge. Get your friends together, go to your local bookstore and have a book-buying party. Buy the rest of your Christmas presents, but that's just for starters. Clear out the mysteries, wrap up the histories, beam up the science fiction! Round up the westerns, go crazy for self-help, say yes to the university press books! Get a load of those coffee-table books, fatten up on slim volumes of verse, and take a chance on romance!

There will be birthdays in the next twelve months; books keep well; they're easy to wrap: buy those books now. Buy replacements for any books looking raggedy on your shelves. Stockpile children's books as gifts for friends who look like they may eventually give birth. Hold off on the flat-screen TV and the GPS (they'll be cheaper after Christmas) and buy many, many books. Then tell the grateful booksellers, who by this time will be hanging onto your legs begging you to stay and live with their cat in the stockroom: "Got to move on, folks. Got some books to write now. You see...we're the Authors Guild."

Enjoy the holidays.

Roy Blount Jr.
President
Authors Guild

For poetry lovers

Back to literary matters. Here is my updated page covering our two groups of literary performers in Carboneras, "Personas libro" (in Spanish) and "Book Persons" (for the English-speakers among us). See Poetry Readings (though not every text chosen is a poem). There you will find links to the selected texts, and maybe will find something you like well enough to learn.

There may be enough French speakers in town to form a third group, but that hasn't happened yet.

Carboneras' “Book People”

Lately I've talked more about "society" than "literature" here, but in fact in Carboneras we do more literature than social agitation. Spurred on by actor-playwright Antonio Rodríguez Menéndez, 30 or more people in town have joined his "Fahrenheit 451/Personas Libro" project, learning texts (all in Spanish) and delivering them before audiences with voice and gesture. It's great fun, and I think we're all getting better. So far, my texts have been by Neruda, Juan Gelman, and Heberto Padilla, and from the other participants I've become acquainted with a dozen other poets and prose writers. This Saturday our group will be part of a festival celebrating cultural diversity in Almería (capital of the province), where I'll be doing another piece by Gelman: Medidas.

And now, as an offshoot of that Spanish-language project, some of the English-speakers in town have formed our own "Book Person" club. Our aim is to meet once a month (the last Friday), each of us with a new text prepared (memorized and rehearsed) to present. Tomorrow will be our 3rd gathering. Here are some of the pieces performed last month (presenter in parentheses):

The Owl and the Pussycat, by Edward Lear (sung, beautifully, by Jeanne Durban Taylor)
The book has been man's greatest triumph, by Louis L'Amour (Pamela Ravander)
Daffodils, by William Wordsworth (Hazel Jones)
Death in Leamington, by John Betjeman (John Taylor)
Loveliest of trees, by A. E. Housman (David Jones)
Frustration, by Dorothy Parker (Susana Torre)
The Makers, by Howard Nemerov (Geoffrey Fox)

Photo, Inma Caparrós: Larry, Jeanne and Hazel listen as David Jones interprets A. E. Housman's “Loveliest of Trees”.

The Ode Less Traveled

Unhappy with that great syllabic mess
of stutterings and halts that I call prose,
I've found this book just off the press
that I most need: self-help for me and those
like me who want to sing but only caw
in raucous tones disordered and sans law.

A 12-step plan to bardhood. First, step one:
sound out the samples, tap your feet
to Shakespeare, Heaney, Dickinson and Donne,
until you're sure you've caught the beat:
pentametrically ordered five-by-five,
those iambs and those trochees come alive!

Then pen in hand, begin to write some word
that's stressed on second stroke; you can forget
if it makes sense, an iamb even if absurd
sounds good in the right place. And yet,

the lesson that you learn is truly sad:
All poetry, or most I've ever read,
consists of this: the banal thought well said.
It sounds good sometimes even when it's bad.

(To try it on your own, see Stephen Fry, The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within, Gotham Books, 2005.)

Poetecstasy: Communally hated!

Here's a poet who can help us feel the anger of those our leaders Bush and Blair are trying to "democratize". Poetecstasy: Communally hated! See also this same writer's comments on The Amitava Kumar - Salman Rushdie Controversy. This John Matthew is a thoughtful man, with a refreshingly open (possibly naive?) faith in the power of the word.