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Hugging/ Less Mugging
Richard Bartee's Calling Card
By Matthew Paris When a man passes from us, the brazen finality of
his acts are set in vaporous stone; one can see the metaphorical
as well as the physical acts of one's life lives as a poetic act
speaking for itself. Richard Bartee's years of amusing and
enlightening rides on the D Train was a kind of experience in
which the resonances of being buried by choice in the maw of an
underground train. Going to Richard's three very well attended
memorials was an etude in seeing how somebody who was like no
other human being I ever met was measured by various tailors for a
store bought suit of banality. The best speech about him was made
by Al Sharpton. One saw Richard's capacious shadow at the last
through mirrors.
Everything Richard did including his absence at
these bashes was one more act of radical transformation. His
talent at wizardry was absolute; sometimes one could mistake his
alchemy for a banality. He was an Afro-American nationalist as
part of being for everybody; he saw others some thought enemies as
his comrades. He made a point of empowering White people as well
as Afro-Americans. He was a Christian in the high sense that he
saw in the life of Jesus the value and power of charity, healing,
talking to everybody, hanging with bums, criminals, even American
intellectuals.
He was a poet who decades before rap and hip-hop
attempted to weave an elegant and witty rhyming rhetoric out of
common street talk. He had all the formal credentials to accept
received ideas fashionable among the au courant craven; nothing he
did large or small was the same after Richard got through with it.
Nationally famous as Richard was in the Black
community, beyond its few poets the White world had heard of him.
His originality entirely eluded the American institutional world;
in the Black community where fewer are on tenure they could more
easily acknowledge his audacity.
Still Richard was like nobody. With his love of family, Richard
had some much of it in complex ways along with his friends that he
needed to be at a pay phone to juggle it all.
Richard by himself must have financed that utility generously. The
ultimate street person, he would take up a conversation with
somebody on the street; if it were not over, go home with him and
occasionally sleep over, still talking about life and death. The
man really took everything to the end and beyond. Am I going to be
one more unwitting Procrustean tailor? I hope not.
Richard probably touched the lives of more people
in America than all but movie and television stars. He translated
subway cars into spiritual temples, alchemized the solidarity and
yet intimacy of a hellish commute. The sudden appearance of a poet
guide, the amusing and witty verse of Richard Bartee, hearing his
urbane street wit as one hustled blindly through the bowels of the
Earth, changed the perception of armies of commuters from
aloneness in a great pit to sharing a communal trough but
exhilarating experience.
A bard whose intent was charity and light, not to
acquire money, Richard saw divinity and capacities for sharing
charity in a subway car. In the 70s if one sat in a subterranean
cage, if one was lucky, alone with one's interred myrmidons, was
happy to see Richard Bartee, a big man looking like the football
quarterback he had been, a sly smile on his face, dressed nattily
in a suit, dapper, reading two or three poems, offering them in
print for a few pennies, for nothing if one chose. Only Richard
saw the D train as a proper bully pulpit for poetry, a spa for a
good word from a man of the spirit.
Since then Richard has had his imitators, few of
whom knew of his genius, there at bottom to pick up some spare
lucre. Sometimes the first is the best. Richard picked the D train
for his poetic ministry filled with commuters to and from Brooklyn
and the Bronx who were mostly affluent, trying to avoid the
classical woes and desperations of mortality. Richard saw they
were souls who needed a boost as much as anybody. He made life in
that ineluctable underground world elegant and graceful for
millions of people for a decade with his poetry. Nobody had hired
him, Richard was entrepenurial; he wasn't at all about money. He
had a mission only he had recognized; he took up his prophetic
life with an intelligence singular to him.
Few on the D train knew that Richard also was an
indefatigable reader in public schools, ran various intriguing
entertainment spas in Manhattan downtown. A deeply modest man who
never took up the sinister and chilly machines of any publicity
engines, though he rarely spoke metaphysically, always morally, he
felt that one of the regulars among the faithful in his audience
was God.
If one got close to him rather in passing one got to hear shards
of a fantastical life Richard had lived, was still living.
Episodic, heroic, adventurous, Richard had taken plenty of lumps,
had even one dent in his head when he had been beaten by cops and
prison guards in Chicago during the 1958 Yippie riots. He was a
consummate maverick. Yet he spoke about his passing tormentors
only in a tone of remote, mild and detached sadness; he never
complained. His focus was always severely how justice might be
done for everyone on the planet. In arenas of civil rights he was
even for succor for the suburban affluent.
Richard was totally fearless, aggressively
standing for right action. If there was sometimes a kind of fluid
untidiness in Richard about getting things done, he always thought
of other people before he thought of himself. He would preach
about health remedies while selling water filters for a living; he
never noticed what he ate.
As a result, though physically an athlete, he
died at 59, most poetically while taking public transportation,
though the B-6 bus while going home, not a subway.
I've known lots of brilliant people; Richard was
one of the smartest men I've ever met. He not only had a startling
photographic memory; he would continually take the kernel of any
thought, bring it three or four steps beyond anybody else. Master
of the sound and sense of language. His poetry and fables were at
once simple, transparent, yet had both depth and urbane morality.
Aesthetically somewhere between Blake and Aesop, using an
Afro-American style that derived ultimately from sources in the
American streets as well as West African spirituality. Richard was
a true peripatetic. Like the lightfooted Hellenes, he had a lot of
wisdom to teach.
Richard, after publishing one book in the 70s,
became a pure performance poet like his street poet mentor "Bama".
He offered his Art on the fly. As a result his wisdom is now about
to transcribe two to three hundred tapes of his performances to
collect his later work in writing. It's hard to evaluate what he
did if one weren't there. I can testify that Richard had more raw
facility with words than any body I knew. He chose consciously to
create as radical a departure in rhetoric as this republic has
ever had in a long time. Now, debased, smutty, lacking ideas, it's
a commercial banality in hip-hop. He will be remembered as a
didactic poet like Dryden and Pope who stood for virtue as well a
connection with the past in all people as well as writing in the
common language of the present.
Of course one can't write about Richard without
speaking about the larger man; this is hardly true of all poets.
We'd like to know less than we do about most of them. I would
guess Richard's stunning memory led him rarely to write down his
poetry. He could recall it all along with the stories and anything
else he cared to conjure up; why bother? People with fewer gifts,
no moral checks, no other discernable talents were able to make
more of an impression in the larger literary world because they
accepted the normal way one had a literary career. Richard totally
eluded the larger literary world; he seemed to invent both poetry
and its uses as well as everything else.
Richard was not desperate for fame as some other
people are. He assumed with justice whatever he did would be
adorned by his gifts. A sterling athlete, a great blues and rock
and roll singer, he talked and touched the hearts of everyone.
Many people who have Richard's gifts are short on the capacity for
intimacy. Richard was even better as a close friend than he was as
a performer. Though he probably championed poetry more than most
of the Americana poets of his time combined beyond Allen Ginsberg,
his lack of large fame didn't seem to bother him.
Sometimes one loses people whom one had in the
first place. Richard was a heroic individualist in a craven time,
though he had gone to college, was a real intellectual, rich in
his own singular reading and education, articulate in a witty
style of his own, he had been a cop in Syracuse, dropped because
he wouldn't lie about a Black culprit the police wanted to frame.
Richard wasn't a person to pick his spots for acting with honor.
He would tell people in city buses or on the
streets not to badmouth women with whom they were intimate when he
saw a public marital fight. Richard was wide open, vulnerable,
fearless. He once told me that a woman he knew was trashing her
ex-husband; he said to her: "You shouldn't talk like that;
the man isn't here to defend himself."
There wasn't a subject he didn't illuminate by
his passing attention. There was uncannily no sense of struggle in
his talents, even in his gifts for moral inquiry. He didn't seem
to wrestle with internal self-contradictions; of course he had
them. It was part of his charm as well as his passion for charity
and virtue that Richard was an urbane New Yorker, never an
innocent.
One of Richard's main concerns was exploring
Afro-American culture. In deep ways the Black concern for a viable
nurturing past is most profoundly American. We are a big country
of diverse people including our Native Americans who are in
profound ways almost mortally deprived of memory. Richard wasn't
talking only about Black culture; he was moving as an American
deprived of recall from the uncomfortable specific to the hopeful
general. We all want to connect backwards into time to honor our
ghosts, to commune with our perished flesh. It was very African of
Richard to keep his poetry oral. African poets unless they are
influenced by colonialism don't write verses down. It was very
American of him to connect with his African side.
African poets have steely memories, focus on the
present, improvise from a lapidary honed craft, savor the always
fresh miracle of the instant. African culture isn't about measured
time, calendars, precise sciences of definable substances as the
thought of the West is. Masterful at blues and rock singing, many
of his verses and stories had a connection with Nigerian roots. It
was a typical practical healing direction for Richard. He went
straight at the problem. Richard's most well known fable, a very
long creation myth about a character named Nothing, is very
similar both in jocular tone and easy and suave profundity to old
African divine narratives, at once humorous and metaphysical.
Nigerians have exquisitely personal relations to
what we might call their saints, those who inhabit the upper
world. The West has a little of it in the first verses of the Book
Of Job and some of the dialogues between Abraham and God have the
flavor of Yoruba sacred lore. Richard's fables had that divine
intimacy and wit.
Richard's verse was way back in the 70s very much
in the manner of the couplets one can hear from the Virgin Islands
to Brazil as well as our own American blues that are part of the
repertoire of masters of this form. The style, which one only very
occasionally sees in any American verse of any kind; it is only a
shadow in the blues, more Carolina than Delta. The manner is
didactic but humorous, guiding, aiming to crystalize some
experience, giving it a pithy unsentimental comedic quality.
Richard's versions of this genre weren't at all laconic; they were
generously expansive. They preached for civil rights or against
cigarette smoking with the same good humor.
Richard was a tireless punster. His nimble mind
picked up every word he or others said in conversation for its
potential lateral significance. Gifted with this allusive
imagination that often focused on words as well as images sort of
the way James Joyce did, he didn't let a sentence go by without at
least thinking of some pun in the lateral anatomy of language that
illuminated the word itself. His puns weren't random; they might
be whimsical. They always enriched the linear drive of the word.
One might ask what value African poetry and
culture has to a world that is very aggressively trying to escape
into a realm of comforts and machines. Any direction away from the
human center invokes follies that eventually bring one back to
one's point of departure as a refuge from the excesses of any
linear trek. African culture is crystallized at that center. We
aren't going to escape its message anymore than we can flee our
nature.
Whether we should want to attempt to escape ourselves at all is a
deeper matter; some try, don't they?
Yet, let us not ever think that Afro-America
culture is marginal; it's central. If we think of the metaphysics
of Yoruba religion with its three worlds, mischievous divine
beings that can move back and forth from them, how we in the
middle worlds can implore their aid, we are looking at another
version of Keltic lore, the English middle earth of Tolkien, a
sense of cosmic place in the world that was yesterday everybody's
religion. When we savor the ten dimensional cosmos of which we
perceive only three dimensions according to our current
physicists, we might well wonder whether Richard in taking up
African ideas wasn't as usual right at the center.
In a curious way the European White colonial
depiction of African culture as closer to nature is true. Nature
doesn't have a direction, isn't leading anywhere in a simple
linear way, doesn't have resolutions that end the action of life,
hasn't got closed systems, beginnings and ends. Richard didn't
make a mistake when he re-invented himself as a sort of African
living in America; it's our incapacity as Americans to
acknowledged nature, irrespective of African culture, our notion
of Creation as a malleable slave, that has made us all at least a
little crazy. Richard didn't push his spiritual side on anybody;
his poetry appealed to everyone, transparent yet deep. Richard
wrote with a rhetoric that garnered life from spoken language yet
was artfully sculpted. Nurtured in the milk of severe spiritual
disciplines he practiced every moment of his life, with someone
less gifted than Richard his style could have been doggerel; it
certainly walked a tightrope with suave attractiveness, aiming for
the witty in the flimsy and filmy guise of the ordinary. It was
never obvious in the 70s that Richard was inventing a rhetoric
with both African roots and charged with an urbane modern music
that really didn't have too many American or non-American
antecedents.
Richard was not in any way a grumbling or dour
jingoist or separatist. He'd talk with people he civilly disagreed
with, honoring them no matter how crankish their opinions were. He
didn't gossip or trash anybody; evil and trouble at most roused
Richard not to indignation but problem solving or a desire to shoo
away vice as one would a mosquito.
I always wondered how Richard had developed from
a football star, a game which is all about mayhem, inflicting and
taking injury, to this elevated spiritual condition. I never heard
how he did it; it must have been a remarkable story. If one were
to tell his tale it would be about spiritual growth. I don't know
the details of how from a master of the primal American game of
focused violence and big man on campus for it as an high schooler
he become adept at loving his enemy, non-violence, seeing Creation
as a complex riddle directed by benign forces. I will miss his
memoirs.
Richard's utter fearlessness as a man defined him
centrally. Richard never shrugged or walked away from any dilemma.
Walking down the street with him was an adventure, almost scary
sometimes; he refused to turn away from anything. He was always
ready to joust with evil. He was in my life in this empire one of
the few. I think these are also the qualities that make a poet.
Richard helped other people to be brave because he was courageous.
When people saw that Richard stood up for justice, that nothing
happened to him beyond a few arrests they became themselves
through his example stronger in spirit. That is Richard's legacy;
it is the equivocal benefice of all heroes and poets.
Contact:
holycity@juno.com
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update 4 August
2008 |
