yuh liltin’ island voice, miz lou. no lickle language, no lickle twang. the soul of jamaica contained therein yuh patois poesy. yuh mout so sweet, yuh mout so fly, so member seh me deh tell yuh. kibba yuh mout pure & free, miz lou & all a jamaica tank yuh.
sweet songs, you said, were gonna come again, my man/and didn't they? i mean they jetted in on a ray of radiance like the sun/ to shine on those in our midst and/ the still unborn in this hour of our great need. sarah webster fabio
in yr truncated, telegraphic wordflow, in the subtle blending of western & nonwestern metaphor; in the irregular rhythms of polyphonic speech, u probed/pondered the silent hurt of an oracular people who have used poem & prophesy for thousands of years, sounded out & puzzled over the anguished outcries of black poetic feet protesting their forcefit into narrow confines, into tight, crippling shoes imposed by those relatively new to the form – & said, enough!
i sat on the floor in the privacy of yr california modern eichler home, under the flat roof, contained by the vertical siding, & the spartan facades with geometric lines, among the objets d’ percussion that surrounded us like bodyguards, the lilolo, shekere, axatses & kayamba, the kpanlogo, sogo, kidi, bata & dundun, drinking u in; drinking u up, a chela sitting at yr high
yellowfeet, hoping to find that black thing u talked about; that mysterious black aesthetic.
o intrepid magical teacher, who taught huey p. newton & bobby seale, who touched them both, turned their lifewaters into summer wine, their anger & rage into the euphony that inseminated merritt college, womb & epicenter of the california black arts movement, who midwifed the breached twin births of black studies & the black panther party.
who taught me & showed me that the poem is not alien to struggle, that a poem can in fact be a personal instrument of insurrection, a bludgeon that when stripped of its subtlety, linguistic complexity or transcendent paradox & epiphany can beat down bourgeois structuration; that the black poet can & must use the didactic & imperative voice from time to time to propagandize, harangue & signify until our people are free; to stand rhetorically for something, something boldly black.
yr verse, musical & authentic, stands as thought/expression freed from the technologies of literacy; yr images clear, stand as totems & fetishes of restructured human consciousness. yr line breaks are political acts; yr enjambments mark the strong emotional pulse/presence behind yr words, the contracting current pushing yr poems to their relevatory ends.
who can be born black and not sing the wonder of it? from ”who can be born black?”
i heard yr exulting voice, yr forgiving clarities calling to me not from sinister sirenic beaches littered with random whitened skulls but from a safe, nurturing poetic place, a precious heart space that rejects guilt-ridden self-treachery. in that poetic place u preached/plotted self-naming. yr poems, vital, vibrant agents of living deliberately, suant self-expressions of primary personal choice. how long heretofore had black been something acutely noxious? how long were the black arts declaimed evil invocations. yet u sang of the joy, challenge & wonder of being black, the heady sound above sound power of being black & coming togetherness. u forged adequacy between self & color; between self & self-expression, that both must be the result of deliberate choice & creative work. how easy it soon became to exclaim black is beautiful, a beauty not derived from the absence of all color but from the quintessential quantum materia prima from whence all created things come. yr poems pointed the way to wholeness & gave to us much more of ourselves to love. yr black arts were additive not subtractive magic. how easy came the awakened sensitive sentience; the resurrected judgments of sentiment & taste. more difficult the next evolutionary leap, from color to culture, where color is jettisoned when it runs out of propellant & falls away, or the next, when a less dense consciousness ignites, unburdens itself of the weight of culture, reaches required velocity, attains spiritual union, & shares a mystical body wherein all who dwell there contribute to the good of all & share in the welfare of all.
amrita, most treasured & revered nectar of the goddess; ejaculate of women who joyfully release the fullness of their being.
amrita the poetry of certain women whose thickly mucous wordflow, whose pale, pungent & salty poetic diction arouses & opens wide the nose,
makes cilia-like skin hairs rise & ripple.
amrita, the intoxicant, the same which made me long to write like gwendolyn brooks, with that same grace & ease; to turn a phrase as deftly as she
& craft an image so exquisitely tuned to the boundaries of a moment, set apart in graphic sigils, penned with stark simplicity -- a sonnet or a folksy narrative
to condense the sanguine into vital vignettes.
amrita the surprising squirt, a light sprinkle or prodigious gush of words brought forth by orgasmic expulsion, that hit me in the face & heart.
amrita, distilled from the measured rhythms of the english sonnet sweetened by the ballad’s musical strains swirled around & coated my thrusting prosody
bringing my poetic tumescence to ejaculatory inevitability & past the point of no return!
i want to frame their dreams into words; their souls into notes. i want to catch their sunshine laughter in a bowl; fling dark hands to a darker sky from “i want to write”
i felt my own pride rekindled as I scried the bloody entralls of yr verse; when i glimpsed the auguries made plain in the patterns yr words made, i cried. conscious of the struggle, then, to write or die, my simple sanguine choice, i chose to wield my wordswords high, face death knell sounds; seize the night. i rode the winds to nigeria to explore, write thru’ her dense womblike jungles & beaches made of sugary sands; to seek & find a mythic self & more. my feet tapped out sonnets as I walked ibadan’s streets; evoked the voice of jp clark. i saw her splash of rust & gold. i thought of u & how u glibly talked of palm jungles & stretches of a neverending sea. i saw what u saw, tho’ i doubt the one-room shacks & pudency of yr old mobile poverty could ever match the sordid living rot, the desolation of africa’s poor, but I saw what u meant; even felt the pride & pain, the towering heights & the terribly tragic abrogation of an ancient people brought so low – i wrote sultans, emirs, obas & obongs, obis, ochi’domas & tor tivs into my poems; made them gratuitously glow with historic dignity & authenticity. but when i stood on yr fabled mountain tops & looked down on the scenes below i could not unsee for the life of me the corruption, ethnic hatred & the same soul killing poverty soiling that darkly beautiful land, finishing what lugard began, with no white man to blame. & i learned from u, miss walker, how to pawn the impact of my surroundings for lyrical coin, for biblical chant & experimental sonnets or every now & then for free wrought lines that extol or bemoan the plight of my people, frame their pride & pain into my own impassioned prosody & soothe my soul.
so very black a power yr source of inspiration so prettily dark a flower yr cause for celebration orisas bent at angles as u plumbed our dark aesthete unraveled stubborn tangles stringent/bitter, syrupy sweet combined to be pleasing. yr sharp, incisive wit proved so delicately teasing. like an iya’s sugar tit. yr dark chocolate wordplay & impish scarlet bitchery restored the tarnished sun day with softly indigo witchery til the last shades of sunset relieved horror, brittle grief & our dark obligations met with poems beyond belief.
that’s what they done to this shine, ain’t it? bottled him. from “bottled.”
yr poems were brown grains of sand in a bottle washed up on harlem’s concrete beaches. was the bottle ceremoniously enjoyed? a special bottle of wine shared at sunset or a flask of fiery African spirits passed around among friends before filled with sand and thrown into the sea? u never said. yr concern was for the sand, brown sand taken from the sahara.
yr poems were disdainful & magnificent negroes dressed to kill in yellow gloves & swallowtail coats dancing on harlem’s seventh avenue pavements. Did their shoulders tower high, were their heads thrown back & wide mouths full of orikis & juba songs? again, u didn’t say, but demurred to their flying supercilious feet too splendid for harlem’s streets.
yr poems were full of jazz & race & u swung from severing sonnet to syncopated vernacular line to scatological petitions to the sacred, rushing in where no woman & only langston dared to tread, throwing discretion into the harmattan’s teeth or jazz-age harlem’s substitute winds to write verse womanly wise, womanly wet & sobbing with song.
