POEM: Storytelling (1)

Posted 30 August, 2010 in Family, My poems, Poetry

Storytelling

telling stories in our hotel room
keeping my game face on
my Superman fights a giant robot
John’s defeats a huge gorilla
Bernie’s Man of Steel takes on a fire monster
he’s tired so he forgets
sometimes his villain is a robot, too
I’m wearing a necklace made of Kryptonite
my powers are fading
keeping my game face on so they won’t notice
never expected this hotel room
never expected the hurricane
and yes, that’s a metaphor
what kind of kit do you pack for a storm of rejection?

Five Years After Katrina: What Right Have I To Mourn? (2)

Posted 28 August, 2010 in Politics & Activism

A few months back my first book of poetry was published. It includes a poem called “Charity,” which gives a snapshot of a nurse in New Orleans as Katrina approached that city five years ago. When my book came out, I read that poem at a gathering of poets who had work published by the same press.

Later in the day, I overheard a poet from New Orleans talking about the fact that several non-NOLA poets had read Katrina or New Orleans poems, and this poet wasn’t particularly happy about that. A couple weeks later, at another poetry event, this poet mentioned that many New Orleans writers had struggled mightily after Katrina while non-native writers were publishing books and poems and essays about Katrina and New Orleans. The poet suggested that this was a form of theft – the non-NOLA writers were taking money and opportunity away from New Orleans writers.

I said on that day that I thought all artists – and all people, for that matter – had a right to make art about the things they feel strongly about. In my case, although I’ve sold some of my books, the total number is so small that it’s very difficult for me to believe that my tiny book with one Katrina poem is taking food off the table of anyone from New Orleans.

I can’t think of any public event that has had as deep an impact on me as Katrina and the subsequent engineering failures that flooded New Orleans. (Please note that I although I use “Katrina” as shorthand for the disaster, I’m fully aware that it wasn’t the storm that caused the flooding – it was the failure of the man-made structures that were installed to protect the city.)

I did a lot of crying at the end of August and the beginning of September in 2005. Like many Americans, I spent hours in front of the TV trying to understand what was happening in New Orleans. I also spent a lot of time on the phone with my friend Satoru Ohashi, a trumpeter I’d known since I was an exchange student in Japan in 1991-92. Satoru lived in New Orleans and was scheduled to start a graduate program in jazz performance in the fall as part of the Louis Armstrong Quintet at the University of New Orleans. Now he was staying with a family member of the founder of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band several hours north of New Orleans and trying to figure out what to do next. UNO wasn’t going to be opening up anytime soon and he needed to be in school to stay in this country. I was living in Rochester, NY, at the time and was working with friends on the faculty at the Eastman School of Music there to see whether they could help him.

A few days after Katrina hit, Rochester held its annual Labor Day parade. I worked for a labor union at the time that had many members in the hotels and casinos of New Orleans. I printed up thousands of flyers with information about the union’s Katrina relief fund and passed those flyers out (with the help of a fellow employee) to everyone in the parade and to the crowds along the route. It wasn’t much, but it was something.

I was a political radical long before Katrina, but the government response to the disaster was still worse than I could have imagined. As I watched our leaders leave an entire city to die, I felt as though the final veil had been pulled from my eyes and I finally saw this country for what it had become. Yes, millions of people contributed money to the relief effort, and thousands traveled to New Orleans to assist in the relief and recovery efforts. But as the waters rose and dead bodies floated through the streets, our government seemed unable and unwilling to help its own people. Sure, we didn’t care much for the civilian casualties we were inflicting in Afghanistan and Iraq, but our own citizens? How could this be happening?

Where were you when MLK or JFK or RFK were assassinated? When Armstrong walked on the moon? When Pearl Harbor was attacked? Those are the questions that have defined generations of Americans. For some people, 9/11 is the contemporary moment that changed everything. Certainly our nation has never been the same, and our downward slide shows no signs of halting anytime soon.

For me, though, Katrina is the defining public moment in my life. It is the clear demarcation line before which I had some shreds of confidence in our government’s unwillingness to let its own people perish on their own soil. After Katrina, that confidence – tenuous as it had been – was gone. I felt as if the ground beneath my feet had shifted and I couldn’t quite catch my balance.

Five years later I wrote “Charity” and included it in a book of poems that otherwise have nothing to do with Katrina. The poem was also published (under a different title) in Blue Collar Review, a journal of working-class literature. I’ve also interviewed musicians from New Orleans on The Jazz Session, my online jazz interview show. Sometimes those interviews were explicitly about the storm and its aftermath (such as my interviews with Terence Blanchard and Andrew Lamb). At other times, what happened in August 2005 was present in the interviews or mentioned, but not the main topic of conversation. For the first two years of The Jazz Session, I featured a “Cause of the Month” and encouraged listeners to donate. Several of those causes were charities in New Orleans such as Musicians Village or the Tipitina Foundation.

As we commemorate the fifth anniversary of the storm and the human failures that devastated a city I’ve never set foot in, I still grapple with my place in the story that is New Orleans. I worry about being a cultural tourist, as suggested by the poet I mentioned above. But deep inside I know that’s not true. I don’t feel the way I feel because I want to make a buck or because it’s trendy to like New Orleans. I feel this way because what happened there happened to all of us. Because of all of us. We’re all New Orleanians now. And it isn’t over yet.

Recommended Listening: Citizen Radio (0)

Posted 26 August, 2010 in Politics & Activism, Radio

Highly recommended political commentary, interviews and comedy from Jamie Kilstein and Allison Kilkenny.

Another poem accepted (0)

Posted 24 August, 2010 in My poems, Poetry

I’m happy to announce that an updated version of my bicycling poem “this two-wheeled life” will appear in the next issue of Boneshaker: A Bicycling Almanac. I’ll post details here when it comes out, which will likely be in October.

POEM: Life Is Whirling Around Us (2)

Posted 20 August, 2010 in My poems, Poetry

I wrote this poem after the Third Thursday Poetry Reading tonight, based on a comment Dan Wilcox made during the reading as the sound of sirens faded on the street outside.

Life Is Whirling Around Us

While we are reading poetry,
an elderly woman in a flower-print dress
is clutching her chest in a kitchen on Hamilton Street
she knocks over the pitcher of cream she’d just poured
for the cup of coffee she’ll never get around to drinking

While we are reading poetry,
he finally gins up the nerve to lean toward her
and she leans toward him and the moment
they both spent the whole night thinking about
is even better than they’d thought it would be

While we are reading poetry,
the passing sirens are responding to a cigarette
left unattended in a bed already stained with cheap wine
as flames lick the newspaper he hadn’t really wanted to read
but had fished out of the trash can anyway

While we are reading poetry,
the newest father in Albany feels his knees weaken
and his heart grow three sizes as the doctor
places his crying daughter in his arms
and the man turns to show her to his wife

While we are reading poetry,
a kid from Sioux Falls is taking his first major-league at-bat
in a city he’s never been to, in front of a crowd of strangers
and back home his mom is wiping her eyes – and so is his dad –
as everyone he’s ever met gathers around the family television

While we are reading poetry,
a housewife is discovering a stack of letters
she never would have found except that she’d finally decided
to clean her husband’s dresser drawers all the way to the backs
and now she’s hunched over sobbing on the suddenly massive bed

While we are reading poetry,
a kid is coming in the door from his job bagging groceries
to find a letter in a fancy envelope from the college
he’d applied to without telling anyone
he runs up to his room to open it behind his closed door

We are reading poetry while
life is whirling around us, depositing the ore
we’ll mine for the next stanza, filling the good earth
with a rich lode of the precious materials we’ll find
with lamps mounted on our helmets, down there in the dark

Two of my poems featured at Poets For Living Waters (2)

Posted 18 August, 2010 in My poems, Poetry, Politics & Activism

I’m pleased to announce that “The Last Piece Of Ice Under The Sky” and “deepwater horizon” are now featured at Poets For Living Waters, a poetic response to the oil crisis in the Gulf.

Violating a law (of nature) (4)

Posted 5 August, 2010 in Albany, Random Musings

I asked my landlord for a weed wacker / and he gave me a slingblade

No, that’s not the first line of a terrible, Billy-Bob-Thornton-inspired blues song. Read on.

For those of you who know me even slightly, you know there is one underlying philosophy that informs every aspect of my life. It is the beacon of wisdom that lights my way forward, and it is this:

I hate manual labor, especially if it occurs outside.

So when I asked my landlord to borrow a weed wacker so I could clean up our side of the block, I fully expected to be pulling a crank line and buzzing my way down the street. Instead, I had a lovely opportunity to study the life of a 19th-century farmer as I hacked and chopped my way down the street.

Before we go to the video, allow me to mention two other facts:

• It was 78 degrees Farenheit
• The humidity was 96%

Let’s go to the tape:

POEM: Tennessee Horizon (0)

Posted 5 August, 2010 in Audio Poems, My poems, Poetry

Listen to this poem using the player above.

Tennessee Horizon

I am a little bit in love with everyone, including you
and this Tennessee horizon will no let me go.

Who is the giver of names for the things we most cherish?
In the dawn light I can’t see you clearly enough

to know whether you are crying or maybe that’s the rain.
It’s raining in everything I write.

I could take shelter in you, if only time is a circle
and I’ll have this all to do again.

Tennessee is a terrible beauty and you are a fleeting gift.
Whosoever has cause why this couple should not be joined,

let him speak now. I loved you in the dim and bright,
in the thick silences and the sticky-sweet mornings.

Sailors always knew the world was round
because ships disappeared over the horizon.

That’s how I knew it was time to go.
I’m still a little bit in love with you and with Tennessee

and with this dawn light and with this rain.
If you let me go, I’ll come back to you

because time is a circle
and the world is round.

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