Voices and Soul


by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Tuesday's Chile Poetry Editor

When I was a young father and husband in my mid-20's, attending Portland State University to finish out my undergrad degree, one of the many jobs to make ends meet, was as a life form model in several Art Schools in town.

It seemed curious to me at the time, why few of the student artists would draw the scars from my athletic injuries; tank track-like scars on my right shoulder and right knee, back in the day when they flailed you open to operate. I asked one of those student artists why that was so,

"Because," he sort of sniffed, "true Artists are only concerned with Beauty. By our efforts, we only want to immortalize that which is Beautiful."

And that summed up the dichotomy that presented itself, to me, in Art generally, but Poetry in particular; is Poetry of the detached observer or of the active participant? Is Poetry to concern itself with Beauty only? How then, is Beauty defined? To that question, I had already concluded with Balzac and Baudelaire, that Beauty is in and can be found in, all things. Regardless, Art and Poetry are records, Art and Poetry are History. As the French academic, Fernand Braudel wrote:

For the historian everything begins and ends with time, a mathematical, godlike time, a notion easily mocked, time external to men, 'exogenous,' as economists would say, pushing men, forcing them, and painting their own individual times the same color.

-- Fernand Braudel
On History

And Victor Hugo punctuated,

One cannot be a good historian of the outward, visible world without giving some thought to the hidden, private life of ordinary people; and on the other hand one cannot be a good historian of this inner life without taking into account outward events where these are relevant. They are two orders of fact which reflect each other, which are always linked and which sometimes provoke each other.

-- Victor Hugo
Les Misérables

The Beats, The Harlem Renaissance and especially The Black Arts movement incorporated in their Ethos, The Primacy of Experience; one's primary experience is what one recorded. It followed then, that one's primary experience was usually that of the active participant. When the neighborhood is burning and dad is shot by vigilantes and mom is cursing the helicopter lights and moving shadows as the windows shake from the prop wash, it's a little difficult to meditate on the petals of an orchid.

So it was for me in the days and weeks after 11 September. I had already flirted with the cynicism brought on by multiples of personal, national and world tragedies; from love lost by absence, incarceration or death; to stumbling upon,

"... the gutted remains of Honduran peasants desiccated next to red bougainvillea, as green hummingbirds darted and stopped at delicate petals and darted away again. I have seen the blasted remains of the last hospital in Sarajevo spilling stone and beds onto the street."

In spite of these experiences, I was still able to hold onto some child-like wonder at the world. I visited New York before the month of September 2001 ended. I didn't find any answers, but I had many questions, questions that revolved around Time, around the change in a person's Heart; questions revolving around the steady erosion of Innocence and how the graduations of that erosion is marked by...

The Dates of Demarcation

by

Justice Putnam


How many times
Can a Heart be broken
How many times
Can a resolve be tested

Is this the meaning
Of Life?

To be reminded
At the most unexpected
Time of
Pain and impermanence

How many times?

I hear the voices
Of those whose
Memories of
Lost innocence

Are etched with the
Precision of a Calendar
On the Stone of History:

Jack London remembered
The Boxer Rebellion
Jack Reed recalled more
Than Ten Days

Hemingway remembered
A Hospital in Italy
Vonnegut talked of
Dresden’s fiery face

Our Grandparents
Think of the Seventh
Of December

While others recall

A day in Dallas
A balcony in Memphis
A hotel in LA

How many more times
How many more generations

Will be born into this
Impending loss?

How many more
Incidents of horror
Before the last
Vestige of innocence
Is carried away?

These questions
May seem on the surface
To be a plea

But
How many more times

How many more images
Of a woman

Her dress blown
In a fall among

Glass
Concrete
Steel
Fire?



(New York September 2001)



from: The Nature of Poetics Collapsed Outside My Window

© 2006 by Justice Putnam
and Mechanisches-Strophe Verlagswesen

Voices and Soul




24 August 2010

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Tuesday's Chile, Poetry Editor


We are not born American, anymore than we are born Christian, Muslim or Jew. We are not born a Hindu or a Jain, a Sikh or an Atheist. We are not born French, Ugandan, Chinese or Uzbek. We may become those things in time, but at birth, we are from Dust. When we die, we become Dust. Can anyone really, with the naked eye, divide one particle of Dust from another? Can our differences be so great that those differences are easily made out in a maelstrom of particles dusted across the Universe? What does it mean then, to be American? To be French or Ugandan? To be Chinese or Uzbek? What does it mean to be a Christian, a Muslim or a Jew? A Hindu or a Jain? A Sikh or an Atheist? Human ego, small-minded bigotry or national identity might demand that we are special; the few among the many. But as it was in the Beginning, so it shall be in the End; we are nothing more than...

Common Dust


And who shall separate the dust
What later we shall be:
Whose keen discerning eye will scan
And solve the mystery?

The high, the low, the rich, the poor,
The black, the white, the red,
And all the chromatique between,
Of whom shall it be said:

Here lies the dust of Africa;
Here are the sons of Rome;
Here lies the one unlabelled,
The world at large his home!

Can one then separate the dust?
Will mankind lie apart,
When life has settled back again
The same as from the start?


-- Georgia Douglas Johnson

(On Starlight and Fire, Keck Observatory Mauna Kea, Hawai’i / copyright Justice Putnam)

Voices and Soul



17 August 2010

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos, Tuesday's Chile Poetry Editor


I had the great fortune to meet Abbey Lincoln backstage at Yoshi's in Oakland's Jack London Square in 2004. I was a little awe-struck, not so much by her fame as a jazz great, but more because of her actions and voice over all these years for civil rights. Though her albums were prominent on our turntable growing up, it was the poetry in her songs, the poetry that gave voice to the struggle of man and woman, that we spoke about in our family. It is the same poetry I give to my ten year old grandson and six year old granddaughter, as they embark on their own journey of life.

Abbey Lincoln's journey is done and she has gone home. May her rest be at ease.

Story Of My Father

Do we kill ourselves on purpose?
Is destruction all our own?
Are we dying for a reason?
Is our misery all our own?
Are the people suicidal?
Did we come this far to die?
Of ourselves are we to perish?
For this useless, worthless lie?

My father had a kingdom
My father wore a crown
They said he was an awful man
He tried to live it down
My father built us houses
And he kept his folks inside
His images were stolen
And his beauty was denied.

My brothers are unhappy
And my sisters they are too
And my mother cries for glory
And my father stands accused.

My father, yes my father
Was a brave and skillful man
And he led and served his people
With the magic of his hand.

My father, yes my father
His soul was sorely tried
‘Cause his images were stolen
And his beauty was denied.

Sometimes the river’s calling
And sometimes the shadows fall
That’s when he’s like a mountain
That is in master over all.

This story of my father
Is the one I tell and give
It’s the power and the glory
Of the life I make and live

My father has a kingdom
My father wears a crown
And he lives within the people
And the lives he handed down
My father has a kingdom
My father wears a crown
And through the spirit of my mother, Lord
The crown was handed down.

Well sometimes the rivers callin’
And sometimes the shadows fall
That’s when he’s like a mountain
That’s a master over all.

My father has a kingdom
My father wears a crown
And he lives within the people
And the lives he handed down

My father has a kingdom
My father wears a crown
Through the spirit of my mother, Lord
The crown was handed down
Through the spirit of my mother
The crown was handed down
Through the spirit of my mother, Lord
The crown was handed down!

-- Abbey Lincoln

Voices and Soul



27 July 2010

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos, Tuesday's Chile, Poetry Editor

When Kruschev spoke at the UN, back during the height of the Cold War, he famously banged his shoe on the lectern he spoke from; it made all the news at the time. People were either aghast and apalled, or humored by yet again, another Kruschevian, dramatic masterpiece. Regardless, the world couldn't stop speaking about it. What was less reported was an off hand answer to an off hand question as Kruschev moved about on his escorted tour of the US. He was asked how he was so sure that the Soviets would prevail over the West.

"When I come to grind the West under the iron heel of my iron boot,"

I like to emellish his response,

"rest assured, the Capitalist will sell me the rope I hang him from first."

That last part is all Kruschev; and though the Soviets have gone the way of the Velociraptor, Kruschev's truism about the Capitalist cannot be refuted. How else to explain the oil blow out in the Gulf? How else to explain contaminated foodstuffs, acid rain, polluted aquafiers and mountaintop removal? How else to explain what it means to live...

Under Corporate Skies


Dawn, you miserable slow-cooker
of goat meat, why do you park
yourself at my window to snooker

me into imagining the smoky night
will never come again? Sometimes
when you turn up so impeccably

disguised as a new day with wines
of forgetfulness, I respectfully
give in. Life clouds the very trail

life spins: a spidering website.
How long can we put truth in jail?
How long can politicians stab

biology and physics in the heart
and gut the world before there is
no world left? Where profit ignites,

where dividends burn up, lives go out.

-- Al Young

(Knockout Stacks, Martinez, California / copyright Justice Putnam)

Voices and Soul



Friday 23 July 2010

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor

For those of the Black Community who have been incarcerated, Due Process was really a Dual Process; and Equal Protection was really Unequal. It is an old tale, as old as America, sadly; and one that seems to be unchanged now or in the future. Etheridge Knight spent eight years in Indiana State Prison. He chronicled his time there; and later, after his release in 1968, became an important part of the Black Arts Movement. Though many of his poems speak of redemption, many more also speak of hope lost; and of the mind-numbing passage of time, locked in a warren of oppressive authority.

Hard Rock Returns To Prison From The Hospital For The Criminal Insane


Hard Rock/ was/ "known not to take no shit
From nobody," and he had the scars to prove it:
Split purple lips, lumbed ears, welts above
His yellow eyes, and one long scar that cut
Across his temple and plowed through a thick
Canopy of kinky hair.

The WORD/ was/ that Hard Rock wasn't a mean nigger
Anymore, that the doctors had bored a hole in his head,
Cut out part of his brain, and shot electricity
Through the rest. When they brought Hard Rock back,
Handcuffed and chained, he was turned loose,
Like a freshly gelded stallion, to try his new status.
and we all waited and watched, like a herd of sheep,
To see if the WORD was true.

As we waited we wrapped ourselves in the cloak
Of his exploits: "Man, the last time, it took eight
Screws to put him in the Hole." "Yeah, remember when he
Smacked the captain with his dinner tray?" "he set
The record for time in the Hole-67 straight days!"
"Ol Hard Rock! man, that's one crazy nigger."
And then the jewel of a myth that Hard Rock had once bit
A screw on the thumb and poisoned him with syphilitic spit.

The testing came to see if Hard Rock was really tame.
A hillbilly called him a black son of a bitch
And didn't lose his teeth, a screw who knew Hard Rock
>From before shook him down and barked in his face
And Hard Rock did nothing. Just grinned and look silly.
His empty eyes like knot holes in a fence.

And even after we discovered that it took Hard Rock
Exactly 3 minutes to tell you his name,
we told ourselves that he had just wised up,
Was being cool; but we could not fool ourselves for long.
And we turned away, our eyes on the ground. Crushed.
He had been our Destroyer, the doer of things
We dreamed of doing but could not bring ourselves to do.
The fears of years like a biting whip,
Had cut deep bloody grooves
Across our backs.

-- Etheridge Knight

Voices and Soul 20 July 2010 by Justice Putnam Black Kos, Tuesday's Chile Poetry Editor The Nigerian Poet, Playwright, Actor and Political Activist, Wole Soyinka, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986; the first African writer to be so recognized. Though much of his early work satirized the absurdities of his society with gentle humor and an affectionate spirit; as the struggle for independence in Nigeria turned sour, Soyinka's work took on a darker tone. One such example is a conversation between two adversaries who are often pitted against each other; two adversaries who, in the heat of battle, believe one to be the master of the other, yet each are one and the same; and so Soyinka offers us a discussion between a...

Civilian and Soldier

 

My apparition rose from the fall of lead, Declared, 'I am a civilian.' It only served To aggravate your fright. For how could I Have risen, a being of this world, in that hour Of impartial death! And I thought also: nor is Your quarrel of this world. You stood still For both eternities, and oh I heard the lesson Of your traning sessions, cautioning - Scorch earth behind you, do not leave A dubious neutral to the rear. Reiteration Of my civilian quandary, burrowing earth From the lead festival of your more eager friends Worked the worse on your confusion, and when You brought the gun to bear on me, and death Twitched me gently in the eye, your plight And all of you came clear to me. I hope some day Intent upon my trade of living, to be checked In stride by your apparition in a trench, Signalling, I am a soldier. No hesitation then But I shall shoot you clean and fair With meat and bread, a gourd of wine A bunch of breasts from either arm, and that Lone question - do you friend, even now, know What it is all about?

 

-- Wole Soyinka"Civilian and Soldier"

Voices and Soul




13 July 2010

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Tuesday's Chile, Poetry Editor



When all seems hopeless, when the hyena cackle of defeat is biting at pant cuffs and frayed nerves; when the crushing weight of today is laying low; when the heat stroke of burned out ambitions are sweating inside an oppressive solitary cage, a cage that is bolted in a boxcar rattling along this penal colony rail road earth; it is important to remember...

destiny

under volcanoes & timeless years within watch
and low tones. Around corners, in deep caves among
misunderstood and sometimes meaningless sounds.
Cut beggars, outlaw pimps & whores. Resurrect work.
Check your distance blue. Come earthrise men
deepblack and ready, come sunbaked women rootculture on the move.
Just do what you're supposed to do, what you say you gonta do
not the impossible, not the unimaginative,
not copy clothed as original and surely
not bitter songs in european melodies. Take hold
do the necessary, the possible, the correctly simple
talk of mission & interpret destiny
put land and selfhood on the minds of our people
do the expected, do what all people do
reverse destruction. Capture tomorrows

-- Haki Madhubuti

(Merced River, El Portal, California / copyright Justice Putnam)

Voices and Soul




29 June 2010


by Justice Putnam
Black Kos, Tuesday's Chile, Poetry Editor

Much has been written about Gwendolyn Brooks' poem, The Ballad of Rudolph Reed. It has been speculated that Brooks was condemning the reaction Reed took to the injury of his daughter by racists in his new neighborhood; that he was at fault for moving into a white enclave he should have been wise enough to avoid. Others have speculated that she was advocating his reaction and that he was justified in spite of the tragedies that followed.

Still others state that she was simply recording the facts.

I say it is none of these. I say that Brooks is showing that all reactions don't arise out of a vacuum; that for every action, there is indeed, a reaction. Whether the actions and/ or reactions are justified, is up for the reader to conclude.

What is certain is that a man and woman have a breaking point, no matter how oaken they may be; that a man and woman can only be pushed so far.

What is certain is that tragedy upon tragedy has been perpetuated on the Black in America; and any reaction, whether rioting in the streets or taking vengeance on the perpetuators of hate, arises not out of one instance that set the world ablaze; but many instances. What is certain is that few will remember or care what caused the reaction, save for those who reacted; and no bandage after the fact will lessen the pain of the tragedies that occurred; and are bound to occur later.

The Ballad of Rudolph Reed


Rudolph Reed was oaken.
His wife was oaken too.
And his two good girls and his good little man
Oakened as they grew.

"I am not hungry for berries.
I am not hungry for bread.
But hungry hungry for a house
Where at night a man in bed

"May never hear the plaster
Stir as if in pain.
May never hear the roaches
Falling like fat rain.

"Where never wife and children need
Go blinking through the gloom.
Where every room of many rooms
Will be full of room.

"Oh my home may have its east or west
Or north or south behind it.
All I know is I shall know it,
And fight for it when I find it."

The agent's steep and steady stare
Corroded to a grin.
Why you black old, tough old hell of a man,
Move your family in!

Nary a grin grinned Rudolph Reed,
Nary a curse cursed he,
But moved in his House. With his dark little wife,
And his dark little children three.

A neighbor would look, with a yawning eye
That squeezed into a slit.
But the Rudolph Reeds and children three
Were too joyous to notice it.

For were they not firm in a home of their own
With windows everywhere
And a beautiful banistered stair
And a front yard for flowers and a back for grass?

The first night, a rock, big as two fists.
The second, a rock big as three.
But nary a curse cursed Rudolph Reed.
(Though oaken as man could be.)

The third night, a silvery ring of glass.
Patience arched to endure,
But he looked, and lo! small Mabel's blood
Was staining her gaze so pure.

Then up did rise our Rudolph Reed
And pressed the hand of his wife,
And went to the door with a thirty-four
And a beastly butcher knife.

He ran like a mad thing into the night
And the words in his mouth were stinking.
By the time he had hurt his first white man
He was no longer thinking.

By the time he had hurt his fourth white man
Rudolph Reed was dead.
His neighbors gathered and kicked his corpse.
"Nigger--" his neighbors said.

Small Mabel whimpered all night long,
For calling herself the cause.
Her oak-eyed mother did no thing
But change the bloody gauze.

-- Gwendolyn Brooks

Voices and Soul





22 June 2010

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos, Tuesday's Chile Poetry Editor

With Father's Day just past, I want to pay homage to fathers old, current and new; I want to pay homage to the fathers who are there every day and the fathers who can't be.

I asked my dad, in a more maudlin time just after the birth of my own son almost thirty-three years ago, how I could be a better son?

"By being a good father," he said simply.

When my grandson was four, I wrote the following that has been published a few times in the intervening years. A simple suggestion from a father to a son. Because a father will always wonder if he's done enough; he will always wonder if his mark was for good or ill; and if he is truly the contemplative sort, he will also wonder if there is ever a balance...

On Poetry and Fathers

by

Justice Putnam


The one thing
That always amazed me

Even from the
Earliest moment
Of your life

Was the utter trust
You had in me

And I was struck
At the time
By the amount
Of doubt

I had in myself.

Even though
Your mother and I
Had half a year
To practice breathing

I doubted that
I could remember
Properly when to
Encourage the right
Breath

And when the doctor
Said I could assist
And I finally held
You

Gray and small

I thought to that
Distant day
When you would

Hold your own son
In the same way

And I thought of
The resolve you would
Have

Just as I had

To love
Like no other
Father has loved.

So the years pass

And I doubt
You felt the
Prayer of love

Over that distance
And separation
You grew in.

A correspondence
Is a poor substitute
For a kiss

Yet each word
Was a universe
Of touch

I doubt it
Was enough.

I cannot now
Apologize

For all that you
Went through

I wish it were
Otherwise

But mere words
And sentiment

Are hollow.

You are now
A father

Kiss your son
While you can

Circumstance

Has a way
Of intruding
Upon the best
Of plans

And apologies

Become terrible
Temptations.


© 2004 by Justice Putnam
and Mechanisches-Strophe Verlagswesen

(Avocado Orchard, Irvine California / copyright Justice Putnam)

Voices and Soul



15 June 2010


by Justice Putnam
Black Kos, Tuesday's Chile, Poetry Editor

Returning with a drug habit he acquired while serving in Korea, Etheridge Knight was arrested for robbery and sentenced in 1960 to eight years in Indiana State Prison. While serving time, he began to write poetry and corresponded with members of the burgeoning Black Arts Movement; Gwendolyn Brooks was one and enthusiastically championed him and his prison poetry. His first volume "Poems From Prison" was published in 1968 while he was still incarcerated. It was an immediate success and he continued to write while out of prison, receiving grants and honoraria from The Guggenheim Foundation and The National Endowment of the Arts, among others. In 1990, at the age of 49, Knight earned a Bachelor's degree in American Poetry and Criminal Justice from Martin Center University in Indianapolis. He died the next year of lung cancer.

The Idea of Ancestry


Taped to the wall of my cell are 47 pictures: 47 black
faces: my father, mother, grandmothers (1 dead), grand-
fathers (both dead), brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts,
cousins (1st and 2nd), nieces, and nephews.They stare
across the space at me sprawling on my bunk.I know
their dark eyes, they know mine.I know their style,
they know mine.I am all of them, they are all of me;
they are farmers, I am a thief, I am me, they are thee.

I have at one time or another been in love with my mother,
1 grandmother, 2 sisters, 2 aunts (1 went to the asylum),
and 5 cousins.I am now in love with a 7-yr-old niece
(she sends me letters in large block print, and
her picture is the only one that smiles at me).

I have the same name as 1 grandfather, 3 cousins, 3 nephews,
and 1 uncle. The uncle disappeared when he was 15, just took
off and caught a freight (they say).He's discussed each year
when the family has a reunion, he causes uneasiness in
the clan, he is an empty space.My father's mother, who is 93
and who keeps the Family Bible with everbody's birth dates
(and death dates) in it, always mentions him.There is no
place in her Bible for "whereabouts unknown."

-- Etheridge Knight

Voices and Soul



08 June 2010

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Tuesday's Chile, Poetry Editor

Two quotes by Malcolm X resonated with me during my early childhood in Oregon; and resonate still.

"We didn't land on Plymouth Rock, my brothers and sisters, Plymouth Rock landed on us!"

and

"I have no mercy or compassion for a society that crushes people, and then penalizes them for not being able to stand up under the weight."

Many things have been written and speculated about the Rap Artist, Tupak Shakur. He was certainly a child and man of his times; and he died far too early. His social commentary and poetry of the human condition; particularily, the conditon of black men and women, is certainly informed by the two quotes I cited. His poetry addresses the plain facts of what it is to live under a dual system of Due Process and Equal Protection. It might be argued that the "apartheid" Jim Crow laws were overturned in the public and private arenas; but Shakur saw how that Jim Crow mentality is alive and well in the most cherished of our "Ideals." Because when millions of black men and women are incarcerated and war criminals walk free, one would think that...

Liberty Needs Glasses

Liberty Needs Glasses
excuse me but lady liberty needs glasses
and so does mrs justice by her side
both the broads r blind as bats
stumbling thru the system
justice bumped into mutulu and
trippin on geronimo pratt
but stepped right over oliver
and his crooked partner ronnie

justice stubbed her big toe on mandela
and liberty was misquoted by the indians
slavery was a learning phase
forgotten with out a verdict
while justice is on a rampage
4 endangered surviving black males
i mean really if anyone really valued life
and cared about the masses
theyd take em both 2 pen optical
and get 2 pair of glasses

-- Tupak Shakur

Voices and Soul




01 June 2010

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Tuesday's Chile, Poetry Editor

In the middle of August 1936, soldiers loyal to Franco arrested Federico García Lorca. Considered by many to be the premier poet of the early 20th century, Lorca wrote the following poem in 1929 while a student at Columbia University. It was published posthumously. The Gacela (gazelle) of the poem is a symbol for a young black man who was lynched in the state of South Carolina early in 1929; though it might have been a prescience of Lorca's own death. A few days after his arrest, he was executed and his books burned in Granada's Plaza del Carmen. To this day, even after 35 years since Franco's death, the grave of Federico García Lorca remains a mystery.

Gacela of the Dark Death

(translated by Robert Bly)


I want to sleep the sleep of the apples,
I want to get far away from the busyness of the cemeteries.
I want to sleep the sleep of that child
who longed to cut his heart open far out at sea.

I don't want them to tell me again how the corpse keeps all its blood,
how the decaying mouth goes on begging for water.
I'd rather not hear about the torture sessions the grass arranges for
nor about how the moon does all its work before dawn
with its snakelike nose.

I want to sleep for half a second,
a second, a minute, a century,
but I want everyone to know that I am still alive,
that I have a golden manger inside my lips,
that I am the little friend of the west wind,
that I am the elephantine shadow of my own tears.

When it's dawn just throw some sort of cloth over me
because I know dawn will toss fistfuls of ants at me,
and pour a little hard water over my shoes
so that the scorpion claws of the dawn will slip off.

Because I want to sleep the sleep of the apples,
and learn a mournful song that will clean all earth away from me,
because I want to live with that shadowy child
who longed to cut his heart open far out at sea.

-- Federico García Lorca

Voices and Soul




18 May 2010

by Justice Putnam,
Black Kos Tuesday's Chile, Poetry Editor


João da Cruz e Sousa was the son of freed slaves, born on the island side of what is now Florianopolis, in Southern Brazil. A pioneer of Symbolism in Afro-Brazilian literature, he was nonetheless shunned by his late 19th century peers. Fluent in French, Greek and Latin; and also a graduate of Math and Science taught by Fritz Mueller; Cruz e Sousa's intellectual contemporaries did not understand him and he held their work with contempt and disdain.

A racist mediocrity and the Parnassian Criticism that was currently en vogue, elicited the following anonymous "poetic review" of two collections he released in 1893, "Missal" and "Shields":

"A spiritualizing,
half-wit dunce
brought up
in distant Mozambique
has picked at true Art
with his beak

Swaying sickly,
with sonorous grunts.

And all the blacks from Senegal
do a buck-and-wing
as they caterwaul

and hail him
with rockets exploding in the air."

It's not hard to wonder why then, this little-studied Modern Renaissance Man, this Abolitionist Man of Letters harbored a...

Sacred Hate


I bore,
like corpses lashed
lashed to my back
and incessantly
and interminably rotting,
all the empiricisms of prejudice,
the unknown layers
of long-dead strata,
of curious
and desolate
African races
that Physiology
had doomed forever

to nullify with the mocking papal
laughter of Haeckel!

All the doors and passage-ways
along the road of life are closed to me,
a poor Aryan artist-yes,
Aryan,
because I acquired,
by systematic study,
all the qualities of that great race.
To what end?
A sad black man,
detested by those with culture,
beaten down by society,
always humiliated,
cast out of every bed,
spat upon in every household
like some evil leper!

But how?
To be an artist and black?

O my hatred,
my majestic malice
my sacred,
pure and benign
malevolence
anoint my forehead
with your pure kiss
so that I may be both
proud and humble

Humble and generous

to the meek
but haughty to those lacking Desire,
lacking in Goodness and faith,
who know not the lamp of the gentle,
fecund sun.

O my hatred,
my blessed emblem
which flaps in the wind
of my soul's infinity
while the others' banners
droop Hearty,

benign hatred be my shield!
against those villains of love,
whose infamy resounds from the
Seven Towers of Mortal Sin.

-- João da Cruz e Sousa

Voices and Soul

11 May 2010

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos, Tuesday's Chile
Contributing Poetry Editor


One of the many benefits of living in the San Francisco Bay Area is being able to listen to the flagship Pacifica radio station, KPFA. Hard Knock Radio is a show on KPFA that interviews Hip Hop and Rap artists weekdays at 4pm. This week's poet, Rocky Rivera was interviewed recently on Hard Knock Radio. My son, Israel Putnam/IzzyMaq has had some regional success in the Northwest with his Hip Hop/ R&B stylings, so I like to think that I have developed an "ear" for Hip Hop that belies my generational Punk origins.

Rocky Rivera is the Hip Hop persona of a young Filipina who spends her time between Los Angeles and the SF Bay Area. Some statements from her Hard Knock Radio interview resonated with me. One in particular, about the origins and direction of Hip Hop/ Rap, stood out more prominently,

"It's not about being a gangster, it's about being a guerrilla. It's not about bling, it's about survival."

This week's poem; and yes, Hip Hop/ Rap is certainly poetry, pays homage to the Filipina revolutionary, Gabriela Silang, who was executed in 1763 after leading insurrectionists against the Spanish Crown when her husband, Diego Silang was executed earlier that year; Black Panther, Angela Davis and the four school girls killed in the Birmingham church bombing; and United Farm Worker activist, Delores Huerte.

Along the way, Rocky Rivera packs a lot of history, with a strong back-beat, into this poem/ song about strong women who changed the world, with power and...

Heart

Left him on a Tuesday
Found him on a Sunday
Cried when I saw my
Hankerchief in his suitcase
Letter folded neatly in his pocket
With my perfume
Knew that he was lying when he
Told me he’d be back soon…
I couldn’t sleep the night
He left me with a promise
That he’d always keep me close
When the struggle got the hardest
So I…wiped the tears
Tied the hankerchief around me
Rallied up the troops
So we could
Find the Spanish army
It was time to stop the cryin’
Time to start the fightin’
Love was the beginning
But my people steady dyin’

And so I promised him the same thing
Gabriela blast in the name of the Philippines

I could hear em in the back of my mind
They said “Please don’t break my heart”
It could only be a matter of time…

Studying overseas
When I heard about the blast
And I knew the little girls
Who were killed in Alabama
It was Carole, Addie Mae
Cynthia & Denise
The Klan got away
In cahoots with the police
Knew that it was coming
When the Panthers started forming
So I booked the first flight to the states
In the morning
To show them my solidarity
Tightened up my afro
Books in my hand
Revolution in my heart
So I used my education
To combat the injustice
It was more
Than Malcolm X and Martin Luther
In the trenches

Sistah soldiers put ya rifles up
Angela Davis ride when the Klan try to light us up

I could hear ‘em in the back of my mind
They said
“Please don’t break my heart”
It could only be a matter of time they said

It was modern day slavery
Livin’ in the Valley
Stockton, California
Pickin’ grapes with my family
And my people broke they backs
Just to make a couple bucks
While the whiteys in the town
Ridiculed us in they trucks
So I
Picked up the megaphone
Shouted to my people, El
Pueblo Unido
Jama Sera Vencido
…Told em to stick together
Demand to be treated equal
Otherwise
These fucking crackas
Will continue to abuse us
Threw me in the slammer
20 times and some change
Yeah they broke a couple ribs
But the spirit remains

Do it again in a heartbeat
Para mi gente
Dolores what they call me

-- Rocky Rivera

(used with permission of the author)

(On Starlight and Fire, Keck Observatory Mauna Kea, Hawai’i / copyright Justice Putnam)

Voices and Soul



4 May 2010

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Tuesday's Chile
Contributing Poetry Editor


Percy Shelley's sonnet, Ozymandias, was published in England in 1818. Earlier that year, Percy, with Mary Shelley and their children; and along with his sister-in-law Claire Clairmont, mother of Byron's child, expatriated to Bagni di Lucca, Italy. In the late summer, they moved to Este, near Venice to be closer to Byron's villa. At a time when the "Exceptionalism" of British colonial reach was unquestioned; in fact, exalted in verse, theatre and the academy, Shelly acknowledged the erosion Time has on all leaders and empires:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".

-- Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Ozymandias"

Jamaican-born Claude McKay certainly channeled Shelley, when in 1922, he questioned the "Exceptionalism" of an America that held the "hand that mocked them and the heart that fed." McKay saw also, though few will admit the obvious erosion of Time, that even for America, there will be a future where the "lone and level sands stretch far away."

America


Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger's tooth,
Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth!
Her vigor flows like tides into my blood,
Giving me strength erect against her hate.
Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood.
Yet as a rebel fronts a king in state,
I stand within her walls with not a shred
Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer.
Darkly I gaze into the days ahead,
And see her might and granite wonders there,
Beneath the touch of Time's unerring hand,
Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.


-- Claude McKay

(House Ruins of Poet St Pol Roux, Brittany, France / copyright Justice Putnam)