Books by Kalamu ya Salaam

The Magic of JuJu: An Appreciation of the Black Arts Movement  /   360: A Revolution of Black Poets

Everywhere Is Someplace Else: A Literary Anthology  /  From A Bend in the River: 100 New Orleans Poets

Our Music Is No Accident   /  What Is Life: Reclaiming the Black Blues Self

My Story My Song (CD)

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Six. The Reconstruction Of A Poet (contd.)

While I did not belong to the "church" and was not a Baptist preacher, as "The Call Of The Wild," makes clear, I was a preacher. The  bible was not my text, my poems were.

            I also believed in the "spirit" and in "possession," after all I had been reared Baptist. I remember once in the choir stand when the spirit hit a young sister who was our age. She was thin, and my brothers and I were hefty. I never will forget being unable to hold her still when she fell thrashing to the choir floor. I looked into her eyes -- she was not there, something or someone else was, and she was making some sound, or should I say some sound was coming out of her, it was not screaming, it was something else. On other occasions I have felt myself almost crying (what do I mean almost -- I cried) just listening to a singer.

            Even though I left the church, I still believed. I still wanted to be a conduit for the spirit, for that spirit. Sometimes in poetry performances I reach it.

            In The Bluesman, The Musical Heritage Of Black Men And Women In The Americas, author and blues musician Julio Finn describes the role and function of the preacher in the prototypical Black church. Finn perfectly described the function I aspired to as a poet.

            When I recited my poems I was a preacher not simply in style but also in my inclination to instruct, to delineate good from evil, to inspire to prescribed action, and in my elucidation of the finer points of my religion (my ideology).

            I began "abandoning" the "politically oriented sun poem" in direct proportion to my own distancing from the practice of (as opposed to the belief in) socialism, revolutionary nationalism. This shift was moved from a push to a shove toward a fall by the general failure of the progressive movement to defeat capitalism and neocolonialism in the Third World. There was literally nowhere where we succeeded.

            Of course, I still wanted to be free. But when I look at the structure of my poetry after 1983, I notice that I am less inclined toward the sermon form on political issues. Now when I take up the sun poem, I speak not as a preacher from the pulpit but rather as a blues singer on a stage articulating hurt, pain, suffering and the withstanding of same. Now, I really have the blues.

            No longer is the blues simply a form that I feel is relevant, now, in the face of all the changes, all the disappointments, victories denied, now, me, my life is the blues. I am not singing from racial memory. I am not singing for effect. I am singing my own song.

            There is a confessional tone, a revealing of what life has been like for this traveler -- truth told, weathered by the weight of failures albeit buoyed by compassion for the world and leavened by a sincere appreciation of the ultimate great goodness of life that only realizing oneness with the world can bring.

            I still write sun songs, but now these are sagacious praise songs for my cultural traditions rather than optimistic revolutionary anthems. Whereas before I sang a song of my people and for my people as a witness, now, like the blues bards of old, I witness my own living for surely my living has become part of the history. Structurally, I am now more interested than ever in singing the blues -- there is a melancholic edge in my voice -- it's just that I don't have to go anywhere to find it because the blues has found me.

             Question: what happens when a poet who has functioned in a collective for over fifteen years and has had all of his poetry books published by a collective, suddenly finds himself alone? Answer: nothing -- literally nothing.

            Although I knew and was known to numerous influential people in the Black Arts Movement, I had never published a book with anyone outside of New Orleans, and only rarely had published single poems. Moreover, I was completely outside of the college lecture circuit. When the movement slowed to a trickle and my own involvement also shifted, I was left literally on the outside. I had to reorient myself and, in the process, I examined not only my own history, but also the entire body of African American poetry.

             From the very beginning, Black poetry has consisted of two trains running. One train accepted and emulated the Euro-centric literary traditions and the other train rejoiced in and propagated the folk based, orated (semi- or quasi- musical) indigenously developed African American expressions. This is not simply a question of theme or content but also a question of technique.

            A poet such as Michael Harper without question writes thematically from a Black perspective and his work is particularly expressive and suggestive of the music, however, over the years his techniques have become more Euro-centric in a literary sense. Is he therefore, less "Black." Of course not. He's just on the west bound train, that's all. The same is true of Jean Toomer. His book Cane is considered a classic of African American literature. Part of the reason that it has achieved that stature is because the technically accomplished ("brilliant" and "gifted" is how it is often described) poetry of Cane is generally rhymed, iambic pentameter and is therefore accessible to literary critics. Although its carrying coal, the poetry of Cane remains a westbound train.

            In the preface to the 1970 edition of Bontemps and Hughes' The Poetry of The Negro, coeditor Arna Bontemps writes: "If the compilers had sought for a racial idiom in verse form among Negroes, they should have concerned themselves with the words of Negro spirituals, with folk rhymes, with blues, and other spontaneous lyrics. These song materials, no doubt, suggest a kind of poetry that is racially distinctive, that lies essentially outside the literary traditions of the language that it employs. But the present anthology consists of poems written within that tradition, by Negroes as well as others."

            There we have it clearly stated: even Negroes have excluded the east bound train when dealing with literary concerns.

            Moreover, if both the poets and the poetry are perceived as threatening because they are on a train headed in the opposite direction, then is it not also understandable that there will be limited publication and support of this work? In February of 1994 I served on an NEA literature panel. It was expected that I would be familiar with the work of American poets and, in general, I was. One proposal we got to reference Haki Madhubuti. I was the only African American on the panel of eight or nine. No one else was familiar with Madhubuti's work.

            Haki Madhubuti has over a million books in print! He is America's best selling African American poet. I would have been considered "unqualified" to sit on an NEA poetry panel if I were unfamiliar with the work of a contemporary White poet who had sold more than a million books of poetry and was also the head of a major publishing company, but the reverse is not true.

            The majority of oral oriented, African American poets and poetry is unknown to America's general literary world. Most Americans have never attended a Black poetry reading nor heard any of the few recordings which are available. There is a wall of ignorance. Breaching that wall has not been my main concern, however.

            One of my goals has been to develop and articulate a theory of poetics from an Afro-centric point of view. I wanted the theory to be more than a simple description of a few techniques or a reductionism to "dialect" combined with overtly "Black themes and content." For me a major part of developing theory happens through the conscious praxis of writing poems with very specific goals in mind. While I am no less interested in writing political poetry, I am much more interested in investing the politicalness of the poetry into the structure of the poems.

            I think it is both fatal and facile to slip into the quagmire of using race to define aesthetics. At Ahidiana we defined Blackness as color, culture, and consciousness. I took the first for granted and set about the task of defining culture and consciousness.

            I began "constructing" poems which detailed a particular facet of social existence and which painted an overt picture easily grasped, but which also had an underlying political thrust. The politics of this poetry is sometimes unconsciously intuited by the audience or, at other times, subconsciously ingested.

            For example, "A Moment In A Mississippi Juke Joint," was written as a direct effort to deal with those who criticize social realism as unpoetic. Based on the old joke about Soviet movies of the sixties: Q: What do you call a Soviet romantic film? A: A Man And His Tractor. My effort was first to use the image of a tractor as genuine eroticism. Second, I wanted to deal with "peasants," which in my case was translated to Mississippi country folk. Third, I wanted to employ only those images that such people would know intimately. Fourth, I wanted to present these people with a positive sense of self esteem and an aesthetic of personal beauty based on an appreciation of their own features.
           

            By now I had also figured a way to make an oral statement and simultaneously make a textual statement: don't combine them, separate them. "A Moment..." uses a song fragment, "oh, you poor, love sick child," as a call and response device but that device is not written as part of the text. Instead, whenever I recite the poem, I explain the call and response to the audience. Thus, I achieve the participation of the audience as part of the orality of the performance, and, at the same time, I can develop the text without worrying about how to include the oral. Of course, this means that the poem on the page ceases to be recognize as a lyric. Were it not for this explanation, the reader would have no way of knowing that there is even a performance aspect tied to the poem. While this approach does not work in every instance, I have found it the most effective in allowing me to fully develop the oral as well as the textual potential of a given poem.

            Another example of this technique is the poem "Tasty Knees" which was written as a critique of male centered sex which defines the success of the sexual act in terms of male orgasm. I chose to deflate the penile fixation by ironically elevating it and then revealing the alternative. When I recite the poem, the tempo increases, mimicking the act of making love. I get louder and louder ending on the word "ejaculation" and then I deliver the deflating line "of course, I'm exaggerating." Invariably people laugh. But the critique is actually delivered by having the poet celebrate an aspect of the lovemaking which was not phallic oriented, namely the "tasting" of knees (thus, also, the title of the poem).

            Many people do not realize that much of the structure of what we have been taught as good writing is based on a patriarchal perception of copulation. Is it not true that the high point of a story or plot development is called the climax and if a story goes on too long after reaching a climax it is said to have "petered out"? These are the philosophical questions with which I was consciously dealing.