farewell my friend & agemate tho’ our paths like an ancient river’s branches have paralleled & crossed many times in our many attempts “to front the essential facts of life” & reach behond the possible limits of attainable results… tho’ sourced alike from boggy emotional landscapes, fed & renewed by the glacial melt of spirit, tellurian surface runoff & free elysian water flowing from elevated headwaters to the sea. tho’ u’ve slipped yr mortal coil, it is not as tho’ u’ve flowed into the ground or dried up completely. our waters are joined; there are none who have known u who do not happily carry the weight of yr verse, yr love of life & memory. yr lifesong rings in my ears & heart & i am full with the joy of knowing u… farewell, ole gansta poet, farewell, my friend, adieu.
i say god great & good god i say master living clear in my mind this morning… from "drunk on god"
i know good homily when i hear it, i know good poetry when i read it , & i know the feathery godtouch that comes when in the presence of both; rippling efferent nerves, making muscles move & glands secrete, making organs quiesce. i felt this when i first heard u read in a los angeles salon in ‘77 where gene redmond rocked, invaded the nose & the mystical ojenke lassoed butterflies. u took sylvester st. elmo hope, possessed him, took his head & rode him like a mississippi mule; spoke thru’ him like an oracle before he vanished in an easter sunrise; u spoke thru him to me, yr voice the sound of cowrie shells falling on a divining tray. u made me divinely drunk; made me speak in perorating tongues lying deep & dormant in me, the vocalized thoughts of poets & preachers; made me rise take up my pen & write. yr spirit touched my verse, put a healing on it & filled it with the joyful noise of those who shout & sing.
u are still de mayor of harlem; the world echoes in yr lush voice still haunt harlem’s streets in the darkest part of shadow, where the source of light is completely concealed.u are the occulting body, the go-between& translator for thosewho prowl urban mindscapes hungry & the intrepid few whowant to know about them. becauseu know, have lively lived thru’ america’s permutations, those sequences wherein human events occur at best once, from new york to berkeley, u can interpret for those who have no vision outside of center or those whosehyperopia prevents them fromseeing anything up close &personal. u still speak the language of the moment & line the cages of yr verse with it. u still point to the light with yr sharp-pointed lifegiving shock poems or those withthe dazzling waves & curls & cutbacks of walter payton sweetnessthat generate powerful momentum, that upon reading make usglow/ grow, incandescent testimonies against a dark present.
bone bare voices chewed skeletal choices in fangs of piranha gales spewing out slivers of raucous laughter glinting bright as hard polished silver nails from ‘snow & ice”
“can u play that instrument?” [monk irritably asked a musician who complained that the charts he had written were too hard] “or are u just pretending?”
u are like that, quincy, the true craftsman. u demand so much of those of us who emulate u & so much more of yrself.
u stretch the poet in u with a conjure hand, a magical manipulation of the mechanics of verse which deform reversibly under the stresses, polyrhythms, intonations & macro--
metaphorsu use to free up the music in language; the meaning in significations, the soul in solilo- quies,to burn then build anew constructs leading to new & neoteric tongues.
pastmaster of form & poetic diction, there is no gainsaying that always u hit yr mark. like the blind zen master who looses his darts into the night & amuses himself by sending
someone to confirm what he already knows, that the arrows are snug in a tight cluster at the center of the target.
u keep us guessing about the bag u will come out of next, be it sestina or sonnet, or classic villanelle; slick phrase-turning, head-bending narra- tives,or something new & blue to evict the vagrant double-entendre
living rent-free in our poet heads; to relax the smooth muscles around the arteries that supply blood to our flaccid euphony; to fill that emptiness with urgent, oracular pleasure.
u have challenged me, laureate, u have laid down charts that are hard to play, but play them i will for they take me down paths where u have trod. i can never hope to catch u.
that’d be like reaching the age of a living someone who is older than u. besides, every time i reach some place u’ve been, following the syllables u left like bread crumbs
to mark the path, syllables, u say, that are keys to new doorways of freedom, i usually discover that u left that place long ago.
the shackled black, being torn in innocence molded his advent through cyclical time surging, flowing, rising falling time… from “time & the eagle”
in a dream i beheld an ancient muse whose eyes were deep like the world’s great rivers; whose skin, the blackest black, so like the materia prima from whence came all creative & created things, whose voice did rumble like an ancient thunder roiling in the bellies of infinite clouds & standing with him, another, whose countenance seemed like that of a man; who looked a lot like u, ishmael, namesake of a prophet, who seemed so full of grace.
the ancient bade u go with me, & show me every secret thing. u took me to when life began, when human spirit lived within the verdant green & rode time like a pristine river; when a great power ruled, a lord of the sun, whose name was ra. we stood there, u & i, in the middle of the air, & watchedhis mighty sun boat sail through that shadowland, watched him stand to the front of that boat, blazing bright, hawk-like watching for any sign of change. u pointed out the powers on the deck, for ra would never deign
to ride alone. sweet maat, who always speaks the truth, anubis, gaunt guardian & guide of the dead & thrice great thoth among the many passengers. & then i saw a curious sight – one who seemed a man among those gods, who looked a lot like u, whose shifting visage, fluid like the season change, transmo- grifiedfrom human to hawk tojackal to frightful loup garou morecurious still, he wore a dark brownstetson hat on top of a headdressblack feathers.
he wore twelve inch tall cowboy boots made of black oiled cowhide leather with spanish stitching, gray stressed levis & a long sleeve, solid red button-down oxford shirt & two colt single action peacemakers slung low on his hips. on a snakish cord with a decorative clasp worn around his neck hung several packet kongos, gris gris bags & bones of ju-ju snake. who was that dog-faced man, i asked, that hoodoo cowboy in ra’s boat? u laughed aloud at my failure to accept the obvious.
it is i, u said, horus-returned. it is u, the heroic poetic persona. it is every poet, black & proud; the satirical prophet, once exiled, now ready to take on the divided self; chaos, confusion, storm, wind & rain. wake up, u said, so u can rock ra’s boat & purge yrself of conditioning; wake up so that u might restore yr mystic vision & yr freedom. i did wake up, moved from passivity to agency, stepped up firmly, passed resolutely into yr neo-hoodoo & began to truly write.
yr illuminating dissembling, yr vaunted double-consciousness & african/american entendre, yr folksy exegesis, flavor the second language in which u write. a master of form & polyphonic voice, u animate & enliven yr verse, yr songs, stories & yr characters like an ethnic god toiling over a lump of clay, breathing into those creations -- not unlike the breathy riffs of ben webster or coleman hawkins -- enigma, sanguine intimacy & the dead ringer for life itself, music. like sterling brown & langston hughes before u, yr first language is the blues, subversive, destructive, liberating; the hoodoo stab of hurt, erectile hope & abandonment's vacuum-–that space wherein the pressure of living is sucked out through holes in the soul making screeching & honking sounds like john coltrane turning a standard inside out; the blues shapeshifting into odes, librettos, sonnets & piano solos of percussive ideas & phrasings; into the loveliness of poems that keep & lives that don't.
yr funky grace & coital insertion of rite, remonstrance & rue into heavy bottomed verse defines u; yr long poetic sight extends yr call & response like an old landmark liner hymn raises up & stretches out from the storefront church to surreptitiously caress the juke joint across the street. u always loved to boogie, get down on the flamefloor of desire. jump back, baby, jump back! yr metered feet ablur with the mixed choreography of the urban core, the down home country & the academy. yr stanzas abstracted, take their form, from the spirit-sphere; are kaleidoscopic & sparkling, revealing different views of human life put together in ways that blend the incongruous & contradictory in words & images that express something different from & often opposite to their verbal visceral experience. i loved what you did with words; what u still do, painting them on airy canvases with the coarse brush of yr voice, the palette knife of yr wit spreading textured impasto sounds into sweeping areas of flat as well as tiny shapes of colorful speech. well u deserve yr laurel wreath, a fitting crown for one like u perpetuating the oral & oracular, the spoken truths of family, village & leaders of a people; singing histories & tales of their triumphs, foibles & infamy cloaked in the polysemy of their speech; that mirror the rich & colorful grayness of living; the reality ‘tween the exit signs of black & white.
& what do i do. i boil my tears in a twisted spoon & dance like an angel on the point of a needle. i sit counting syllables like midas gold… from “violent space.”
by showing us the terrible toll that prison takes & the harsh lurid lessons that prison taught, yr poems gave us a window to yr soul. & there were bars on that window; common steel bars that contained but could not obscure the beast pacing in its cage, the deep, dangerous soft & low growl, the thunderous high energy roar & bared teeth that announced the freefloating rage spawned by helplessness, hopelessness & yes, intense immobilizing fear. yr poetic lines, recurring memories & flashbacks artfully crafted into words & figures by a tendency toward impulse violence -- against severely restricted self-expression, against passive compliance to oppression. yr syntax carried the force of physical abuse; yr imagery, stark like naked inmates stood up against their cell doors, provoked a kind of surprise, a recognition of having been tricked into glimpsing yr vulnerability. u weren’t such a hardass. what kind of gangsta could put into words the angst & profound despair for a lobotomized inmate or the way one sadly, helplessly dies a little death each time his woman leaves his bed to walk the streets & work the johns or the fuck- everything-&-run in nondirectional fear when that same woman or any woman leaves him for good? u gave me my many there-but-for-the-grace-of-god moments in poems that when cut did surely bleed & i identified like most black men i know on either side of prison bars. what kind of gangsta? a black postmodern antihero who flew over the prison walls of his verse.
the rocky mountain’s gateway yawned on a land rich in lumber & hardworking white folks. i am sure they heard me coming, the blue green streams, rich with yellow perch, cutthroat trout, awaited the angler years before becoming inflamed by contact with sewage, pcbs, lead, arsenic, zinc, & cadmium. & the mountain trails carved by the civilian conservation corps called out to the hiker, & the lakes in the area out-numbered only by the coniferous trees growing large & tall in the mountain sun – sang to the outdoors lover. the problem was, i couldn’t hear them. i didn’t fish, i hated hiking, & if the truth were told, i didn’t even like the outdoors.
i came to spokane from the soon to be murder capital of the country to play manhood making basketball & in the process, go to college. i was a writer-in-the-making with nothing much to write about. a chance encounter with an image in a freshman english class – an andrew marvell carpe diem enclosed a few lines i’d never heard, but made to me exquisite sense; that
“worms shall try that long preserv'd virginity/yr quaint honor turn to dust, / & into ashes all my lust.”
i knew what the poet was talking about; up thrust my puerile wishes into the womb of his verse dead three hundred years. my eyes were opened wide. i saw & scried coition in every man-wrought poem: in ejaculating bullets; in the prow of a boat riding on the tide, moving in & out of the narrow harbor slip; & in the pollinating power of a dripping hummingbird’s bill.
i thought i was ready to write, but alas & (literally) alack, i had to get laid first. 18 yrs old & still a virgin, i could not unlock the lusty verse swelling up taut in my soul; if wishes were horses then even virgin boys could … write.
i wanted to write; i really & truly did, but could not. there was basketball to play; there was school & there was the learn-as-u-go-like-yr-life-depended-on-it oh jay tee of the seduction frustration/ humiliation/triumph/jealousy/heartbreak/ dejection dance.
there was, too, the modern day circa 1967 artemisia absinthum, the elixirs of poets cross-dressing in cans of coors beer & bottles of loganberry, white port & ripple wine, one dollar joints & ten dollar lids, orange barrels, peyote buttons & blotter paper acid inspiring choric cassandra-crying siren songs of addiction & future recovery rooms:
“cry o mother, father, family cry, lend me ten thousand eyes & i will fill them with prophetic tears.”
i wanted to write; i really & truly did, but could not. there was basketball to play; wine, women, bawdy song & … marriage. there was adversarial blackness walking about, seeking whom he might devour. i got bit; gnawed & chawed, masticated & swallowed & spit back up; renewed.
u came to me then, my teacher, my lyrical mentor, in the rustling of pages & images in a volume of poems & a book of plays. when the student is ready, the master surely appears…
i was ready! lying semi-comatose in an apartment above a tavern, musically awash in monk’s “epistrophe,” (originally named ‘fly right” & then “iambic pentameter”) playing over & over again on the phonograph (his percussive quarter tones hammering in the dissonance of a souring modernism), i held in my hands a borrowed volume – yr book of poems, “a preface to a twenty volume suicide note.” i struggled with each of yr words as they fought to focus in my blurry eyes, in my inebriated brain.
the rising sun (a voyeur looking in on the dead soldiers who had spewed forth liquid pleasure/punishment from their glassy bellies, the roach-filled ash trays, the empty bags of potato chips & the sleeping couples in various stages of undress reduced & fractured into abstract, geometric structures – a set of discrete planes intersecting, in which successive outcomes end the same again & again, mimicking the angry, despairing & repetitive pain in yr poetic lines) bore witness to the birth of insight. & in yr flagship poem, i heard u:
lately, i've become accustomed to the way the ground opens up & envelopes me each time i go out to walk the dog. or the broad edged silly music the wind makes when i run for a bus...
the geography of my life then was littered with barrows & barrowwights & i was routinely swallowed up by any & everything new. the only dogs i chose to walk, rufus thomas notwith-standing, were a ferocious new black persona that kept slipping off its chain & a tentative sexual identity afraid of being unleashed.
i found myself in yr proverbial “toilet” – not the battered & bloodied karolis or the conflicted ray foots, but looking out through the eyes of the gang of boys who turned their backs on the audience to pee: who pulled on their whatchama-- callits; who beat up karolis because he was gay;because they knew of no other way to love him.
yr verse taunted & tortured me like a prison guard; i thought i had no other choice than to be like u; to write like u. i devoured everything u wrote. u were the target at which i arrow-aimed myself; yr verse the model for my own. u were the horned god, the loa, the òrìşà who circumscribed the sacred & purified space where all writes, magic & otherwise were fashioned & crafted.
u were my initiator, leading me to & past each warden’s station, beat/bohemianism in the south, cultural nationalism in the east, scientific socialism in the west, post-modernism & beyond in the dark & dreary north. u showed me in “dutchman,” like yr hapless clay, how to relieve my insanity, assert my blackness through the blunt force trauma of narrative; how to make my poems projectiles & bullets.
offering up yr own life as a passion play, an initiation drama, u showed me – not unlike the christian’s sacred cannibalism – how ideated murder could be sanctified, even sacramental; how redemption might be found in the passionate slaying of fundamentalism, romanticism, self-hatred & progressive myopia.
u taught me the futility of ideology & the ascendancy of change; that human beings can change & change their minds; that black was merely a color not a cultural absolute & all manner of siblings can be found in the human family; & that self transcendence, though a choice, was the rule not the exception in the cosmic plan.
u taught me to stretch the outer boundaries of all the curves that describe convention & made me write through my personal pain until i broke through, cleansed & tempered on the other side. u bade me lay down with my anima & perform the great rite, my hieros gamos, where i plunged my throbbing knifepoem into a chalice of wine & my lifepoem took shape in that sacred, life-changing moment.
thank u, amiri, for my poetic life. though i walk through the valleys & the shadows of my own path, u have given me & others like me the baraka. yr tariqa, the entire ritual system of yr verse lives on in me & my like; will be passed down through the sisillah, through the great chain of scintillating poetic figures that comprise yr spirit & yr grace.
the hood of night is coming up the river, down the river the sky & night kiss between the wind from “take this river”
those with greater gifts than mine have extolled u, poet/ prophet, yr far-reach & longsight, yr rhythmic perceptors, yr sweeping range & achingly sweet poetic voice that tears into our cultural viscera, reaches past our shore-swimming shines & signifying monkeys, past our stagolees, sweet georgia browns & erstwhile urban legends, past the crass, psychotropic atheism of the infinitely inner city to touch that something holy within us, that something densely african that resonates like the spiritual forces placed within the drum when it is made sacred; that calls down the òrìşàs & represents the ultimate expression of god as sound, as rhythm & as the chief of trees planted by the river of waters that talk & makes us know roads we haven’t seen before; that speaks directly to our elastic & elongated past. i will not try to outdo them, but merely make humble ebo to one who has joined the egungun, to one who has touched me with his song & offer nothing less than my bittersweet poemfruit & sing orikis to yr spiritual lineage.
i saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix…
from 'howl"
from those negro streets at dawn i watched, wondering what to make of u. yr protracted cry of distress, of pain & rage attached like a hero’s cape to the rear of yr streaking naked body, a white anomaly against a static & incredulous blackness, a turbulence, a white noise, mimicking the sound of the flow of air or the billowing, wavelike, backward surge of liquid flying off a fast moving spirit.
from those negro streets at dawn i watched, wondering what to make of yr poetry. those long-winded, run-on lines pregnant with peyote, broken up into yogi breaths & oft-repeating choruses of cassandra crying solos, be-bop style; pitting cubic images of child-devouring molochs – the military industrial complex, consumer capitalism, victorian sexual attitudes – vs the best minds of yr generation – the poets, writers, artists, anarchists, lunatics & of course, the messianic, sometimes smack-addled musicians.
from those negro streets at dawn i searched for u, found you in the sexually free verse of walt whitman, in the luminous imagist stanzas of william carlos williams & in the elegiac lines of garcia lorca, saw u cruciform & victimized, imprisoned in & by yr own imagery, howling on yr knees in existential subways, clutching yr poems & yr genitalia, held down & sensationally sodomized, a very different emblem of suffering & shame.
from those negro streets at dawn i read yr poems, saw thru yr eyes with the unwavering certainty that i was viewing present time with all of my attention. i saw in an instant what poems like yrs could do. i witnessed the terrible calculated destruction within america of america’s own icons, symbols & monuments & their triumphant rising from the wreckage & smoldering ashes into a glorious new vision, healed of all their malignancies.
& i knew, then, in a moment of clarity, that i wanted to be a part of this iconoclasm, wanted the thick & slippery blood of those icons, symbols & monuments dripping from my own wordswords. looking at my own poetic euphony, i found it blunt & wanting. so i retreated to my private woodshed somewhere on one of those negro streets to dream new dreams & sharpen my verse.
hoot-owl calling in the ghosted air, five times calling to the hants in the air. shadow of a face in the scary leaves, shadow of a voice in the talking leaves… from “runagate”
connected u were, immediately & intimately, to a seductively lyrical mistress, some might guess cerridwen but most probably it was isis or iyami àjẹ given the fragrant scent of blood in yr poems; poems well-wrought, carefully conceived & painstakingly revised, poems that moved me to tears, made my neck hairs stand on end, sent shivers down my spine. beaten to yr knees & almost exiled for a time by critics, u never lost yr vision, never lost yr clarion voice that oracle spoke, a ku jlople from rocky, subterranean caves, an orunmila advising thru’ ikin & opele ifa, to a larger human culture. yr poems, like u, never sacrificed themselves, have lives of their own grown out of yr life, stripped of their selfishness & connected to the supernatural, that powerful runagate spirit force movering thru’ swamp & savannah that mitigates the machineries of history.
dead men are wisest, for they know how far the roots of flowers go, how long a seed must rot to grow… from “the wise.”
they say u wrote classic verse – boisterous ballads, silky sonnets, quaint quatrains, & the like – much better & more beautifully than most. yr keats more keatsian, more rococo in word choice, more sensual in image than the englishman himself. were u white & british, u might easily have been ushered to the front ranks of romantic english parades. but in spite of yr genuine skill & power, yr intimate & acute understanding of yr poetself, u were boyishly black & shy & as such no one guessed apart from the evidentiary lines that screamed from of yr verse that u knew how deeply the roots of yr poems pushed downward into a dank dark soil, into a moist, nurturing aesthetic; that u had for sooth foreseen there the breaking dormancy of yr creative seed, the rot-rending of its thick coat before germinal grace, before growth, long after yr demise. i am so glad to be now alive to pick yr poetic fruit; to bite into & savor its sweet pulp, swallow its seeds, knowing that as they pass through me, their thick seed coats will weaken enough to sprout anew.
but someday, somebody'll stand up & talk about me & write about me black & beautiful & sing about me… from “note on commercial theater”
in a band of poets u’d have been the lead; yr gorgeous tone & phrasing, yr range & deceptive speed would dazzle longhead jazzers in some harlem cabaret; even haughty hipsters would stop to check yr play & everyone who heard would feel yr need.
in a pride of lions u’d have been the first to feed; the alpha lion, yr dominance would let you seed the pride with yr issues. u’d certainly have yr way in a band of poets.
blending mood & rhythm, u did skillfully succeed to scale the racial mountain. joy turned to ecstasy indeed when yr poems, racial in theme & treatment, made way for the blues & bebop to set the cadence; to sashay like a buck & wing; a fresh new laureate to read in a band of poets.
poet, pedant & bluesman, yr veritable verse stands tall, defiant -- its head unbowed, meeting the gaze of its divided audience with both eyes; its hamlike hands balled into fists rebuking, repudiating superficial depictions of black humanity jailed, held without bail, double-shackled & guard-shadowed, in the myopic awareness of white readership or it fat butt sits, swiveling around on its stool, swaying from side to side, hambone slapping its thighs, whooping & shouting recapitulatory oh yeahs behind a funky expository feel; high balling like a runaway train intent, hell bent on collision with the strawmen & inflated heroic personas tied up in the ropey substance of fanciful things black readers hope & yearn for, strewn across its tracks.
pedant, poet & bluesman, where dunbar exposed a vital african pulse in dialect, in the regionreek of down home speech, u found the same in a blue dialectic, in the exchange of tonic, dominant & subdominant phrasings from little river settlements, black bottom cornrows, lumber camps, chain gangs & big city tenements advocating, celebrating the proposition of dignity, humanism & worth against a racist antithetical counter. u drew text & aesthetic context from the blues, folk tales & work songs, shaping them to poetic purpose; prosodically professing in their rhythms, stresses & intonations a toughness of spirit -- a way out of no way – that might expel the bilious yellow water of oppression from the blood & uproot those feet still set in the sticky mudbanks of bigotry.
bluesman, pedant & poet, tho’ college campus born & a scion of academia, u opened wide yr nostrils, breathed in the sweet scent of human sweat, of musty bodies moving & lusty spirits touching in juke joints & churches, in bedrooms, on back porches & picnic grounds; breathed in the eroticism & tensions of body, soul & spirit, the unforgettable stench of lynchings: the crucified, dead & buried. u held yr breath & descended into slim greer’s hell & saw all that was doing, then rose again & soared, exhaled in rhythmic puffs of breath, in robust speechsinging, a poetic voice, obscure but mighty, that rode the blues like a cc rider, that placed desire ahead of reality’s stifling claims & kindled like raging pentacostal fire a spirit of revolt & longing for liberation.
