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Books by Lorenzo Thomas
Dancing on Main Street /
Sing the Sun Up /
Chances
Are Few
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The
Cruelty of Age
in Lorenzo Thomas' “Tirade”
A Critical
Analysis by
Van G. Garrett To mature in age is to see the world change
and reinvent itself. An experience that makes one wise, elated,
melancholy, and fearful. It is the infusing and blending of the
bitter and sweet, which produces a metaphorical wine, imbibed or
rejected.
Widely-published poet Lorenzo Thomas, known
for his instrumental role in the Black Arts Movement, explores
the life-altering ‘wine-making process’ in “Tirade”
taken from his latest book
Dancing on Main Street :
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Tirade
By
Lorenzo Thomas
Now I know old age is
cruel
It brings fears you never
knew
There is a hazard in the
morning sun,
A thirty percent chance
This day will pass without
The birth of a regret
Or the blossoming of a
sorrow
So well behaved and mild
Shyly, patiently
Gaining courage all these
years
Blurting into the bliss
You’ve sown around you
These passions make your
life last longer
Waiting for the day
You can no longer push
them away.
Arms weakened,
Your heart grows stronger
And wisdom clinging to you
like a child
To her broken doll,
You may finally sort
everything out
And end with nothing
Left to fear tomorrow *
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In the poem’s invocation the reader
discovers “old age is cruel” and it supplies fearful
uncertainty, trepidation.
The functionality of the poem, however, works
well, as its reflective tone narrates ironies and contrasts with
lips pressed by maturity and experience that illustrates growing
old is not a completely cruel phenomenon.
Lines like, “This day will pass without/
The birth of a regret,” “ the blossoming of a sorrow,”
“These passions make your life last longer”, and “Arms
weakened, / Your heart grows stronger” create a stream of
consciousness that is descriptive and lucid. These lines are not
pedantic ramblings searching for thoughts or flightless words
looking for a nest, rather this meditative verse is aware of the
brilliance and power of poetry and it skillfully utilizes
deliberate pauses and well-structured line breaks for emphasis
and pacing.
Additionally, “This day will pass without/
The birth of a regret” exemplifies how Thomas not only crafts
the opposites “passing” (or death) and “birth” (or
life), but he enjambs the line to create the motif of being
pregnant with ideas of regret, fear, and sorrow, explored in
forthcoming lines, where he contends uncertainty perpetuates
life and causes one’s heart to grow stronger. If one is not
wise he/she may shun these occurrences and “finally sort
everything out/ And end with nothing/ Left to fear tomorrow”,
a revelation life and uncertainty is synonymous.
Lorenzo Thomas’ “Tirade” is a poem that
comments on growing old—gracefully. It is a wise poem that
“clings to you like a child to her broken doll,” and unlike
a “traditional” tirade it allows the reader (young or old)
to become empathetic, because he/she has the luxury of
processing lines that have the capacity to move with a delirious
momentum. A momentum not only found in “Tirade,” but a
jetting and spiraling magnetism experienced in 143 other pages
“wine-pressed” with maturity and experience in the vineyard
of Dancing on Main Street.
Lorenzo Thomas is a recipient of two
Poets Foundation awards and the Lucille Medwick Prize. He is a
founding member of the Umbra workshop, and his poems and reviews
have been published in Callaloo, African American
Review, The Paris Review, and elsewhere.
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*
Van G. Garrett, a writer,
photographer, and teacher from Houston, TX can best be described
as a “contemporary courier of creativity.”
Garrett, a 1999 graduate of Houston Baptist University,
has a BA in English (with an emphasis in creative writing) and
Mass Media (with an emphasis in print) which he has utilized as
demonstrated by his various publications and honors. He was awarded the Danny Lee Lawrence prize
for poetry in 1999, a 2002 Callaloo
Creative Writing Fellowship for poetry, and his poems have
appeared in Rolling Out,
Life Imitating Art, Swirl,
Drumvoices Review, Curbside
Review, Shanks’ Mare, Urban Beat,
E! Scene and
elsewhere. His photography has appeared in Source, has been contracted by Capitol Records, and has been on
display at the Museum of Fine Arts of Houston.
v.g.garrett@usa.net
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest /
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update 8 July 2008
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