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1. The Poet Man.

   Dis poetry is like a riddim dat drops
   De tongue fires a riddim dat shoots like shots
   Dis poetry is designed fe rantin
   Dance hall style, big mouth chanting,
   Dis poetry nar put yu to sleep
   Preaching follow me
   Like yu is blind sheep,
   Dis poetry is not Party Political
   Not designed fe dose who are critical.
   Dis poetry is wid me when I gu to me bed
   It gets into me dreadlocks
   It lingers around me head
   Dis poetry goes wid me as I pedal me bike
   IÕve tried Shakespeare, respect due dere
   But did is de stuff I like.
   Dis poetry is not afraid of going ina book
   Still dis poetry need ears fe hear an eyes fe hav a look
   Dis poetry is Verbal Riddim, no big words involved
   An if I hav a problem de riddim gets it solved,
   I’ve tried to be more romantic, it does nu good for me
   So I tek a Reggae Riddim an build me poetry,
   I could try be more personal
   But youÕve heard it all before,
   Pages of written words not needed
   Brain has many words in store,
   Yu could call dis poetry Dub Ranting
   De tongue plays a beat
   De body starts skanking,
   Dis poetry is quick an childish
   Dis poetry is fe de wise an foolish,
   Anybody can do it fe free,
   Dis poetry is fe yu an me,
   DonÕt stretch yu imagination
   Dis poetry is fe de good of de Nation,
   Chant,
   In de morning
   I chant
   In de night
   I chant
   In de darkness
   An under de spotlight,
   I pass thru University
   I pass thru Sociology
   An den I got a dread degree
   In Dreadfull Ghettology.
   Dis poetry stays wid me when I run or walk
   An when I am talking to meself in poetry I talk,
   Dis poetry is wid me,
   Below me an above,
   Dis poetry’s from inside me
   It goes to yu
   WID LUV.

   B Z

2. When I was in grad school at Iowa State pursuing my English MA (creative emphasis, of course) we read the great Audre Lorde in one of my classes. It felt that all eyes turned to me, because by that point I had established myself as … ummm, how to put this? … a man of strong opinions. I was also a Southern White Man who struck many of these folks as far more conservative than I ought to be (and than I actually was).

   So naturally, I’m supposed to have issues with a black Yankee lesbian poet. As it turned out, she was marvelous. And my last semester she came to Ames and did a session – this was when she was dying of cancer and had little time left, so it took a toll on her. I’ll never forget one undergrad, a white girl, launching into how could she possibly work for justice on behalf of minorities when she was white. It was one of the more disturbing bouts of self-loathing I had ever seen, and Lorde jumped on it hard. She told her that she had to accept herself, because whatever power she could have in life, it had to issue from WHAT and WHO she WAS.

   Lorde was remarkable, not only as a voice for minorities, but as a voice that accepted that white people could be part of the solution, too.

   THE BLACK UNICORN
   The black unicorn is greedy.
   The black unicorn is impatient.
   ‘The black unicorn was mistaken
   for a shadow or symbol
   and taken
   through a cold country
   where mist painted mockeries
   of my fury.
   It is not on her lap where the horn rests
   but deep in her moonpit
   growing.
   The black unicorn is restless
   the black unicorn is unrelenting
   the black unicorn is not
   free.

3. Thanks for this thread and the opportunity to pimp Kansas City’s own tragic oracular voice, Mbembe Milton Smith. His four books were published locally, but I know they still show up in some classrooms and secondhand shops around the country. He was better than we knew, and we knew he was fine. (And Ms. Brooks confirmed it, more than once.)

   Here are a handful of his poems:

   http://cas.umkc.edu/english/mbembe/mbembe.html

   And here’s one of them, just to make sure you go:

   Nostalgia of The Mud
   (for Etheridge Knight)

   you remind me of my father–
   the pain somehow aesthetic
   the way they’ve strung you out
   over a religion

   that skips Sunday,
   turns up red-eyed
   ’bout 2 o’clock Monday afternoon.
   there’s a jazz riff, a waywardness
   at the core of your Karma.
   reminds me of the time
   the family was walking from church
   & we dug my old man
   in the alley drinking wine.

   must be we inherit red eyes.
   our folk hugged against ghetto walls
   bent by so much dark blue living.

   give me the bottle too.
   hope this poem kills the poison
   off the wine we’ve uncapped
   but if not, drink up, pass the grapes ’round.

4. marvelous stuff, folks. thanks. hope to see more…

5. A piece from N. Scott Momaday that always speaks to me (I think this qualifies as prose poetry) and that takes me back to my first experience of the West:

   One morning on the high plains of Wyoming I saw several pronghorns in the distance. They were moving very slowly at an angle away from me, and they were almost invisible in the tall brown and yellow grass. They ambled along in their own wilderness dimension of time, as if no notion of flight could ever come upon them. But I remembered once having seen a frightened buck on the run, how the white rosette of its rump seemed to hang for the smallest fraction of time at the top of each frantic bound–like a succession of sunbursts against the purple hills.

6. A couple weeks ago Bill Moyers had Martin Espada on. I was previous unfamiliar with his work, but was impressed. You have to respect a guy who works this hard getting poetry into urban communities that are prone to anything but poetry.

   MRS. BÁEZ SERVES COFFEE ON THE THIRD FLOOR

   It hunches
   with a brittle black spine
   where they poured
   gasoline on the stairs
   and the bannister
   and burnt it.

   The fire went running
   down the steps,
   a naked lunatic,
   calling the names
   of the neighbors,
   cackling in the hall.

   The immigrants
   ate terror with their hands
   and prayed to Catholic statues
   as the fire company
   pumped a million gallons in
   and burst the roof,
   as an old man
   on the top floor
   with no name known
   to authorities
   strangled on the smoke
   and stopped breathing.

   Some of the people left.
   There’s a room on the third floor:
   high-heeled shoes kicked off,
   a broken dresser,
   the saint’s portrait
   hanging where it looked on
   shrugging shoulders for years,
   soot, trash, burnt tile,
   a perfect black light bulb
   to remember everything.

   And some stayed. The old men
   barechested, squatting
   on the milk crates to play dominoes
   in the front-stoop sun;
   the younger ones, the tigres,
   watching the block with unemployed faces
   bitter as bad liquor;
   Mrs. Báez, who serves coffee
   on the third floor
   from tiny porcelain cups,
   insisting that we stay;
   the children who live
   between narrow kitchens
   and charred metal doors
   and laugh anyway;
   the skinny man, the one
   just arrived from Santo Domingo,
   who cannot read or write,
   with no hot water
   for six weeks,
   telling us in the hallway
   that the landlord set the fire
   and everyone knows it,
   the building’s worth more empty.

   The street organizer said it:
   burn the building out,
   blacken an old Dominicano’s lungs
   and sell
   so that the money-people
   can renovate
   and live here
   where an old Dominicano died,
   over the objections
   of his choking spirit.

   But some have stayed.
   Stayed for the malicious winter,
   stayed frightened of the white man who comes
   to collect rent
   and borrowing from cousins
   to pay it,
   stayed waiting for the next fire,
   and the siren,
   hysterical and late.

   Someone poured gasoline
   on the steps outside her door,
   but Mrs. Báez
   still serves coffee
   in porcelain cups
   to strangers,
   coffee the color
   of a young girl’s skin
   in Santo Domingo.

7. Fresno poet Blas Manuel de Luna’s voice is urban, gritty and real. His poems are evocative and a call to action.

   Here are lines from his poem “Today”:

   Today, where my mother works,
   a young man,
   no older than myself,
   lost his hand
   in a machine.
   He screamed when his hand came off.
   My mother told me
   she could not get the scream
   out of her head. All around them,
   the pistachios, on the conveyor belt,
   and on the ground, reddened.

8. More great little works… thanks so much everyone.

9. Tim Z. Hernandez — Skin Tax — here’s a link:

   http://www.heydaybooks.com/public/books/stx.html

   American Book Award

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