|
Books by Gwendolyn Brooks
In
Montgomery and Other Poems /
A Life of Gwendolyn Brooks (Kent) /
A
Street in Bronzeville (1945)
/
Selected Poems
(1963) / In the Mecca
(1968)
Riot
(1969) /
The Tiger Who Wore
White Gloves (1970),
Blacks
(1987), and
Children
Coming Home (1992) / Maud
Martha
(1953)
Report
from Part One: An Autobiography
(1972) /
Report from Part Two:
Autobiography(1996)
/
Jump Bad: A New Chicago
Anthology (1971).
* * * *
*
chicago report
on
gwendolyn
brooks writers conference
wednesday, 23 october to saturday, 26 october, 2002
By Kalamu ya Salaam
Part 1 of 2
we left the shirt-sleeve
weather of new orleans headed for chi in october. i had my coat,
and needed it. it was rainy and a little colder than cool when
we stepped out the airport at midway--speaking of which, the
walk from the gate to the exit was so long they should have
provided a shuttle flight to go pick up your bags.
i always dig the gwen brooks
conference. at 12 years running, this conclave is now the dean
of black writers conferences. haki madhubuti and staff at
chicago state university are to be congratulated for staying the
course, for doing what it takes to sustain and develop an annual
event such as this.
the gwen brooks conference is
a prime example of haki's exemplary dedication to institution
building. 2002 is also the 35th anniversary of haki's third
world press. while others give speeches and write about
revolution and black self determination, haki quietly and
consistently walks the walk that others only dream and talk
about doing.
there are many reasons that it
is difficult to sustain a program like the gwen brooks writers
conference, not the least of which is financial resources. what
haki has done is staked out territory at chicago state and used
the cache of his name and accomplishments as a foundation on
which he is erecting a program second to none. others, such as
skip gates at harvard, may have more money and more
institutional academic credibility, but no one has done for
black literature what haki has done with the gwen brooks writers
conference. year after year, haki has presented the major movers
and shakers of black literature.
and though there may be
quibbles about why not present so-and-so or how come this one
gets invited back on the regular while that one only appears
once or twice in 12 years, what there can be no equivocating
about is the fact this conference covers the waterfront of black
literature. additionally, haki and staff are building an mfa
program in creative writing at chicago state university, a de
facto black institution of higher education on the southside of
chicago. this is not easy work. just putting a capable staff
together can take years, and, for various reasons including
interpersonal dynamics, what looks good on paper, might not work
in practice. plus, you know we all have our personal biases, we
like what we like; we have history, both positive and negative,
with various individuals. what is remarkable about what haki is
doing is that personal history and political differences are no
impediments. this conference is dedicated to the literature and
as such haki invites writers of all stylistic stripes, all
genres, differing ideologies and individual identities, cross
generations and without gender exclusions or exclusivities.
haki has also been attempting
to establish a summer writer's retreat that was traditionally
held in upstate new york but which was moved to chicago this
year because the new york retreat center had been sold.
initially, haki planned to keep the retreat and the conference
as separate events but scheduling and resource pressures led to
holding the retreat workshops on wednesday and thursday, while
the conference as a whole ran from wednesday through saturday,
and was headquartered in the student union building.
one other wrinkle was
construction and remodeling work going on at csu meant that the
facility where the conference usually meets was unavailable so
retreat workshops and conference sessions were located in
different locations--the two workshops i led on creative
non-fiction were in one of the inner sanctums of the library,
deep within the maze of book stacks; without a map or a guide,
you weren't going to find it.
i think the retreat suffered
from the diffusion of energy as there was no central meeting
place for retreat participants and thus no centering of
energies. up at otisville, new york there was always a time when
everyone was together. we were isolated and that isolation
encouraged folk to talk with one another because there literally
was nothing else to do. such was not the case at csu. i missed
that.
we went straight from the
airport to my first workshop and the workshop went well. i
introduced the story circle concept, which i learned from
working with high schoolers in our students at the center
program back in new orleans. story circles were introduced to us
by john o'neal, one of the founders of the free southern
theatre. essentially, you sit all the participants in a circle
and you take turns telling a story based on something that your
either experienced or witnessed. the theme or focus point is
agreed upon in advance. each person has a set time period to
speak, we used three minutes. when one person is speaking
everyone else listens and there is no interrupting. we move
around the circle until everyone has had a chance to express
themselves.
the concept of story circles
may sound rather simplistic, but it is an extremely effective
method of building community and helping people to reach deep
within themselves and bring to the surface ideas and emotions,
events and experiences that we all have within but often don't
consciously recall on a day-to-day basis. in the process of
telling one's story, we not only get to know each other better,
but we also learn ourselves better as we compare and contrast
our stories with those of others.
participants in my workshop
ranged from beginning writers to veteran writers like sam
greenlee (the spook who sat by the door) and detroit-based
writer/activist ibn pori. our workshop went well and from the
reports of other workshop leaders, their workshops also went
well. it would have been good to have some wrap-up sessions when
we were all together so we could share our writer's retreat
experiences and reactions. on thursday, the hip-hop panel opened
the conference. moderated by quraysh ali lansana, the panelists
were: duriel haris, robert "scoop" jackson, bakari
kitwana and oscar brown jr. the presentations were all over the
place in a delightfully discursive way. bakari was the most
analytical, offering questions and insights based on his
important new book on the hip-hop movement, "the hip hop
generation: the crisis in african american culture." duriel,
who grew up on club music (mainly, and not surprisingly,
"house music") personalized her presentation in
telling us about relating to and supporting a nephew who is into
producing hip-hop.
scoop jackson, who has a new book coming out
on nike shoes, raised the crucial question, flowing out of the
new movie "brown sugar": when did you fall
"out" of love with hip hop? jackson noted that many
folk newly into their thirties were now facing the disconcerting
realization that they no longer loved the music they grew up on,
not because they don't want to but because they perceive that
the vibrancy and vitally of hip hop is gone. in terms of the
impact of his presentation as a performance, all of the
panelists were eclipsed by oscar brown jr., who sang, rapped,
emoted, story-told, insighted and enthralled the audience as
only an experienced and hip raconteur can do. in fact, it wasn't
so much what he said, as it was the way he say it and the
obvious deep and sincere sharing that he did. you didn't have to
agree with him to be moved by him.
after that panel, i had to
move over to the library for the second day of my workshop. we
were supposed to end at 1pm, in time to hustle back over to the
student union to hear omar tyree deliver a keynote address, but
our session ran over as everyone shared work that they were
doing, and i talked with participants afterwards.
at 2:15 i participated on the
anthology panel with keith gilyard who talked about putting
together the poetry anthology "spirit & flame,"
and paul coates of black classic press who published ethelbert
miller's new anthology, "beyond the frontier." i
really, really like keith gilyard. his spirit, his intelligence,
his humbleness. and paul and i go back decades, knowing each
other first as activists and then as followers of literature.
each of them was on point in talking about the process, problems
and particularities of putting together anthologies. typically
to my obstinate ways, i got up and talked a bit of theory about
"sounding"--how text was stripped of sound and
gesture, and how 21st century technology is making it possible
for us to put sound and gesture back together with the sense
(cognitive meaning) of language, hence text, sound and light
defined in neo-griot terms as books/internet (text), recordings
(sound), and digital movies (light). plus, i screened two video
shorts: "a luta continua" and "respect your
elders."
a luta was written by and
features paulette richards, the associate director of nommo
literary society, our writing workshop in new orleans. respect
was a story telling piece featuring aimee everett, a high school
junior in our students at the center program. both were well
received. some, indeed, many may ask what this has to do with
anthologies: well, i believe that anthologies of the future will
not simply be books. the future appreciation of our literature
will probably more accurately reflect the wholistic sense of
black cultural work which emphasizes interrelatedness rather
than discreet self-contained units. as i tried to quickly
indicate, gesture and sound are essential to a full appreciation
of our use of language, to our fullest creation of literature.
and though i define myself as a writer, i do not restrict the
term "writing" simply to mean to scratching symbols on
paper or on a computer screen.
i view writing as a concrete
means of recording speech and experiences, ideas and emotions.
my appreciation is that making a movie or an album is another
way of writing, and that each of the three modes has it's
strengths and weaknesses: text emphasizes sense, sound
emphasizes emotions, and sight emphasizes judgements/aesthetics
(our concepts of goodness and beauty). but you know, i only had
twenty minutes, so i riffed a few bars of neo-griot
conceptualizations and showed the videos and sat down.
afterwards, the brothers in
the audio visual department made a monitor available to me and
we wheeled it into the small room being used as a lounge by the
participating writers. i would spend most of the following day
in that room, talking with fellow writers and playing videos.
but back to thursday. there was a "media panel"
featuring chicago area media professionals. the panel was
moderated by brenda eatman aghahowa and featured: richard steele,
melody-spann-cooper, dawn turner trice and vernon jarrett, who
is considered the dean of chicago black journalists. i enjoyed
the panel for the glimpse and gist it gave of print and
broadcast journalists in chicago.
radio station owner melody
spann-cooper spoke about being raised in radio at wvon by her
father purvis spann. spann-cooper's presentation pinpointed one
of the major ways in which american entitled-ness and power gets
passed on from generation to generation. one learns early from
one's parents and from being immersed in the day to day workings
of a given profession; unfortunately, most of we people of color
seldom are immersed in a self-determined environment, in an
environment where ownership and control are in our parents
hands, and thus, although we may have a yearning for
self-determination in the form of economic ownership, there is
no day to day example. instead, most of us end up in
neo-slavery, working 9-to-5 for someone else's benefit. in fact,
rather than preparing us to build and develop our own
communities, far too many institutions of higher learning, do
nothing but turn out little wheels: bright young people whose
most fervent wish is to secure a "good job."
melody spann-cooper wanted
more, wanted to own a radio station. and, as is typical of the
american system, once folk of color get in a position to be at
the table, they chance the rules of the game. individual
ownership no longer can compete with corporate mega-media
conglomerates. there is a whole interlocking question of the
concentration of media wealth and productive capacity,
de-regulation of broadcasting, republican policies, capital
concentration, etc. all of which work together to mitigate the
effectiveness of individual ownership in a time of economic
globalization.
i think of chicago as the
black nationalist capital of america and that ideological
impulse manifests itself in terms of an emphasis on
entrepreneurship. while the other panelists offered insights,
what they offered is consistent with what one would hear in any
major city where black journalists and writers are working
within the existing system. what is delightful about chicago is
that one will always hear at least one someone, and usually more
than one, advocating a fierce dedication to self-determination
that runs as a parallel universe to those who are simply trying
to succeed within the mainstream.
this black fierceness was
particularly evident in vernon jarrett who walked away from the
kind of media jobs that many would damn near die to get. jarret
t's finely honed intelligence is unsurrendering in his
dedication to his people. and though jarrett could talk for days
about credentials and accolades, high profile positions and
rubbing shoulders with the movers and shakers of industry, he
chooses to focus on his personal experiences of sitting at the
feet of and learning from black giants such as dubois and
robeson, and sharing the importance of his work and reading
programs with high school youth.
i believe that it is
critically important for us to spotlight the insights and work
of people such as melody spann-cooper and vernon jarrett. it is
relatively easy to feature those who are doing well by
mainstream standards and to overlook those in the trenches,
carrying the torch for community building and self-determination
among our people. and on a program such as the gwen brooks
writers conference, i believe it would amount to treason, were
this emphasis to be absent. but, hey, this is chicago, haki is
at the helm, and no way is there not going to be an emphasis on
kujichagulia (self-determination).
i love this about the
conference. indeed, emphasizing self-determination is what gwen
brooks was all about not just in the focus of her writing, which
privileged and profiled the lives of the black working class,
but also in ms. brooks own daily doings which ranged from
holding workshops in her home and working in a community-based
program teaching gang members to appreciate reading and writing,
to personally funding writing programs and prizes, and moving
her writings from harper, a mainstream major, to third world
press, the leading black independent publisher. no other black
writing conference has this focused insistence and example of
self-determination. later that evening we had a poetry reading
featuring, in order of appearance: keith gilyard, kelly ellis,
gwendolyn mitchell, kalamu ya salaam, and sterling plumpp. we
were on a strict time clock because there was the "open mic"
competition to follow. i like listening to my poetic peers read,
even if i'm not stylistically moved by their work. i love the
opportunity to listen to and learn from how others do their
thing. some have a fine ear for phrasing and word combinations,
some display a laser-specific intelligence and attention to the
nuances of observation and description, others are just plain
funny or witty in their declaiming of life's ups and downs.
occasionally, i will hear someone who gets to fresh approaches
or unique, and often-oft-kilter, characterizations of familiar
situations.
on this particular panel, it
was kelly ellis who grabbed my attention. she read a hybrid
piece in a style sometimes called "prose poetry."
there was a narrative line about a driving trip south to new
orleans. but it was the phrasing and the attention to details,
what she selected to tell us and what she left out, the way she
hooked up the particulars, mashing and mixing insights and
reactions. if this were visual art, it would probably be a
mixed-media collage. more so than in her handling of more
traditional poetic modes, this piece stirred my imagination and
i was extremely glad to hear her take the risk of doing
something different.
 |
keith gilyard read a long
poem about a friend returned from jail. there were some
fine lines in that piece. gwen mitchell read
introspective portraits that focused on women and
sterling plumpp extended his blues aesthetic into the
realms of jazz. hearing sterling, it became immediately
apparent to me that plumpp is heavily influenced by
sonny rollins. later i asked plumpp about my observation
and plumpp acknowledged that yes, rollins was an
inspiration. a lot of people think that black poetry
that is music-based is simply a case of singing a song
or including song titles and musician names as
references, but a blues and/or jazz aesthetic in poetry
is much more profound than mere "listing" or
even performance imitation. |
those of us really into the
music, understand that the music is multifaceted. plumpp's work
is evidence of someone who understands the subtleties and
nuances of the music. i did two pieces: one build on variations
of lionel hampton's "flying home" and the second a
prose poem called "miles davis" that musically
utilizes miles' treatment of monk's round midnight. there was a
wonderful moment while i was performing. keith gilyard, who
plays trumpet, was sitting next to the podium. i got to the part
of the song where there is a staccato riff and trane blows in, i
could hear keith scatting the phrase in unison with me. that's
what i'm talking about, not just general references, but music
specific. keith and i laughed about it afterwards.
end of part 1 see
Chicago
Report 2 |
