Books by Kalamu ya Salaam

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in the hot house of black poetry

another furious flowering

A report by Kalamu ya Salaam

Part I 

intro

we were standing in a parking lot somewhere, near and betwixt one of them hotels and one of them sad-shit chain-eateries that pass for restaurants in modern america; tony medina and i conversing in a black way, which is to say we were shouting good naturedly at each other, using the frantic wave of our hands as punctuation marks; our eyes big with surprise, delight at being with each other; and of course mucho toro poo-poo rolling off our tongues in affectionate embrace of each others bodaciousness. this is, after all, a report on a poetry conference.

i had asked tony what he was going to read. he had initially said he didn't know, and then like one of them expert yale graduates tacking his sailboat on a windy day, he reversed himself but kept heading forward, shouting "i know i can't do the same shit i did last time"-- last time being 1994 when the first furious flower was -- "cause you gon be putting this on the e-drum" (and he imitates me manically typing, his head bopping like a bubble head racing down some bronx street on the dashboard of a hooptie with shinny aluminum spinner-rims). tony shouts in time to the pantomimed typing of his hands held claw-like, "dis motherfucker read the same poems he read last time."

i laughed cause up underneath tony's talk was a hip observation (was in fact a charge to me, an expectation, a realization that my job was to be both map and compass, was to plot out where we was and to suggest which way we should be headed). so, ok, tony, here it is. here it is.

and, oh, by the way, i have a long standing rule of thumb, it's ok to call somebody a motherfucker, but don't write that shit down unless you is ready to go to war with that motherfucker. i recognize that part of what people expect is that i will be honest about my response: calling it like i see it, saying what i swallow in delight, and what i spit out in disgust at this banquet of poetry.

of course, i am not simply shit-talking about my professional peers, many of these are folk whom i know personally, so there is always the balancing act of being truthful on the black hand side, of making informed assessments of their work, juxtaposed against an interior concern for how my words affect my friends, particularly those whom i care about as people without necessarily liking the poetry that they do.

there is a whole school of literary criticism that makes a living on being nasty and haughty. i believe we must care for and about each other. some value art more than people, for me, people are the reason for art, one's self expression is but another way of saying one believes that heart is important, that these are the pieces of me that i value and therefore if one loves the heart that is offered one will be careful how one public assesses the sacrifice of that heart on the altar of art. yaknow, if you don't want my love, at least let me down easy. 

all of which is not to say that i will not take the hard line about some bullshit -- yall know me, if it stank, i'm going to say so. but, you know, no nose is perfect. we all have our deficiencies and shortcomings, my job as critic is just to be as accurate a map and compass as i can be. and hopefully that is what this report achieves. but that critical doing ought to be done with a sense of humanity. so yes, it is no blemish on my record of honesty to say i love these folk, for after all they are all family even the ones whom we call out and, when necessary janie-like shoot between their tea-cake eyes or dead up in the middle of their chests, dead up in their hearts cause it done got down to them or us. even so, even when we got to do that, we still should catch them when they fall because we love them. you know criticizing people we love is the hardest job in the world.

by the way, i encourage any and everyone who was there to send in corrections, objections, alternate views, whatever, send me your own furious flower report. i will post any and everything i can get (if your shit be too raggity, i will put a note at the top of the posting, but i will either post your stuff or not post it, won't edit nobody and won't say you can't say something).

the day before day one.

i am, as most of you know, a negro, well, actually, to be more accurate, i am negroidal, which, in these days of colons and condos (isn't it amazing how golddust twins can rhyme even when they ain't trying, how the servants of the rich and white can come out grinning with similar names that don't mean nothing but "yes sir, boss"), anyway, in these here days when to be negro has been given new meaning by those who stoop so low that  getting up is clearly no where on their minds, in these days it is much more accurate to say "negroidal" than negro, even if you spell negro with a capital "n," because in these days negro is no longer a field profession, negroness now come with a desk, a chair, a title, an office with a view, and a big ass position of supposedly international import, e.g. security adviser, secretary of state, when actually they still ain't nothing but the footstool next to the throne upon which the beasts rests their hooves and upon which neo-nazis stand when they try to up-raise their international profile pretending that they human and as proof pull out dummy-colorednesses to be their mouthpiece, negro's lips be moving but it be them boss doo-doo dribbling out, trying to fool us into thinking its coloreds talking and testifying that the men with their hands up the asses of these dummies are honest, god-fearing, well-intentioned leaders, sort of like calling on the puppet as an expert character witness for the puppeteer who is currently on trial for international crimes against humanity.

so, as i was saying before i interrupted myself, being negroidal, i can not start with day one, i must start before the beginning if i hope to accurately tell you what is going on, for after all, the world is moving, and if you want to catch something you got to run to where it is going to be, not to where it's at cause by the time you get to where it's at, it's going to be gone somewhere else--this is the higher math of action that most hipsters have to know just to get to the first level of hipness.

ok, so it was wednesday and my wife nia and i were trying to get on the last usairways flight for the day headed eastward to fly from new orleans to charlottesville, virginia. we were at the gate, had boarding passes in hand, about fifteen minutes before the bird was supposed to jump into the sky, smiling, it was early afternoon and it looked like everything was going to be ok.

i believe the guy taking the tickets and sticking them in the machine just before you step down the ramp must have been named murphy, cause he looked at us and said "you have boarding passes, but i don't see your tickets." what? this is what we had gotten at the front desk. i was sure we had not dropped any of the papers while dashing down the corridors, while slow-rushing through security.

this is the age of electronic madness. i will not bore you with details. we did not leave wednesday. i was traveling on frequent flyer mileage and 40,000 was not enough, i needed fifty but the company had neglected to tell me (how could they have "told" me when i never spoke with anyone--you know how this modern shit is, you go online and do your business and never actually breath a word into any person's earhole). well after forty-some phone calls and a half hour later, back at the front desk, a lady who was the supervisor finally broke it down about categories and how the computer had made our reservations and even coughed up boarding passes, but had declined to make tickets cause there was not enough mileage in the category i fit into rather than the category i had been booked into, and, hey, it's afterhours now, we are supposed to be off, what you want to do?

now here, dear reader, if you are still following this twisted logic, rather than going ballistic, i am standing there in front of my wife trying my black best to be manly, trying to handle up on this shit, and knowing i am poor, black and at this minute one foot in the gutter of an ugly situation. where i am going is not no major city, so only so many peoples fly there and it cost a lot if you book it in advance, to get there the day before by buying a ticket, well, let's just say such a situation calls for a plantinum card with no spending limit.

what i did was booked my wife on the next day's flight (which used 25 of the 40 thousand miles i had on usairways) and then sped back home to get on my computer to see how i was going to get my ticket and how i was going to get to james madison university by 4pm the next day which is when i thought i was supposed to be making a presentation--actually the presentation was at 4:30pm.

fast forward, when i got home, i had enough mileage to get a delta airlines frequent flyer ticket and that only cost $85 ($10 handling fee and $75 for last minute booking) and they only had one schedule that would do the trick and i had to leave new orleans at 5am, which means being at the airport for 4am, and it's close to midnight now.

oh yeah, i also had to deal with the hotel peoples again, and that was a whole other trip. when i first called the hotel they said call back in an hour cause something or the other was happening there and they couldn't do any reservations at that time or i could call their national 800 number, which i did and which duly told me to call back in fifteen minutes cause their computers were down. after some back and forth, i had got the reservation straight, and then later got it postponed to the next day, and . . . it was starting to get to me, but i figured this was the dirt out of which i was suppose to bloom if i wanted to make furious flower.

so, after all was said and done, i landed in charlottesville around 9:30 that morning caught the shuttle and headed on down the road to james madison. nia would come in later in the day when i would be making my presentation.

why am i telling you all this before saying a word about poetry? well because all this is telling us something about what is going on with this country, is telling us that if you are poor (without access to a computer and a credit card) you ain't getting shit done in america no more (airlines actually charge you extra to buy a ticket with cash at the counter--do you understand what i mean, they are charging us to use cash??!!!).

i, like the majority of black people, do not have an institutional affiliation (no white man standing behind me saying "this boy is ok"), i am out here on my own-ly, by myself-est, and i know that all of my other unaffiliated brothers and sisters, my folk unwired-up, my peeps who maybe got a little cash but very little credit, very, very few of us will be at furious flower, so automatically the discourse is going to be mainly the talk of what goes on in the house, not what happens in the field (since, of course, most of us present will be actual, or aspirant representatives of, co-inhabitors of the educational plantations of america. that is an ideological assessment, and whether one agrees with how i frame it, there is no denying that the economic and social position of the majority of the participants will frame the depth and direction of the discourse, or, to put it in more betta terms: what you eat and where your ass is at will shape what kind of shit you talk.

Part I / Part II  /  Part III  /  Part IV 

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updated 9 April 2008