Slo' Dance

Poems by Ted Wilson

with an Introduction by Amiri Baraka

Introduction 

By Amiri Baraka

If this is a first book, it is only in the literal sense. Meaning, the presence the book projects is deep with accreted experience and its perception, rationales and their use as poetry reaches much deeper into the author and the reader than most firsts. The work tells us Wilson has been around the whole construct of art, writing and political commitment, and has even penetrated, with his knowing, the "hard heads and soft behinds" of both the aesthetic and social base of what he has witnessed. As living consciousness, in the day to day wasteland of Dis and concomitantly as an artist.

But to be an artist, a term so bitten by opportunism and dissembling distortion, one must re-remember constantly what it does mean. To Create, from the only essence that the goodness of the infinite creating comes from . . . Truth and Beauty (Dig Keats, DuBois), the candidate must, it seems, regard his own consciousness as capable of generating those qualities with as much materiality and certainty as the existing world.

So that when the work is somehow collected and presented, it must be the result of a sharp focus on the external and the internal. With such willful determination that it is the real we come away with, not just the banter of yet another subjective, usually privileged, but many times near tragic "notness."

We carry what we are as who these experiences, as the context of our motion through life, make us. It is, in the main, environment, and our perception, clear or unclear rationale or explanation of what is perceived, and then our use. Where we are and how we know and who we want to understand we are to become is material life, as culture, consciousness and the fundamental social life as we scramble for food clothing and shelter and the context of that.

Wilson I met in the 60s Black Arts eruption of mass and individual development. The period when "Revolution" was The main Trend in The World Today." Specifically as a mover characterized by the sometimes frantic but ultimately profound upsurge of the Afro-American people to redefine themselves, as an aggressive act of Self Determinism. Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Fidel Castro, The Black Panther Party, the Liberation of the African Nations from straight out colonialism, these were some of the dimensions of our growing, and Ted Wilson was an active and conscious player in that revolutionary motion. A cadre of the movement, however defined, that left much of the world with new understanding and a new era of multidimensional struggle.

So that Wilson is shaped by some of those concerns and has come to this place from that earlier place through a ubiquitous and formidable complex of events, processes, trends, ideas, reflections, reunderstandings, commitments. We are shaped by our lives as our lives and this is the self that reflects and recalls and thinks, creates, and destroys.

The Black Arts Movement in Harlem in 1960s was the social and aesthetic force that produced these affirmations:

          1. We wanted an art, a poetry that was BLACK, i.e. Afro-American in form and content, as recognizable as such as Petey Wheatstraw or Lady Day.

          2. We wanted an art, a poetry that came out of those close circuits of maledict, out of the tidy impotent classrooms and holy quarks of the IN. That would leave the alabaster whatnots of the Ain't and dance in the street so what they bee'd cd really be see'd. We wanted poetry that would mean something to the great masses of people, particularly we wanted to animate the lives of Black people and be animated by the whole of our mass selves.

          3. We wanted most a Revolutionary Art, an art that would help liberate Black people, an art that would help tear this whole playhouse of national oppression and racism rat down!

Sometimes, e.g. the story Willie, the surface can easily be seen in the light of the first two aspects of the rubric, but here the heart of the narrative is like an outline of consciousness acquired. An archetype which describes the dimensions of a particular culture, a particular time place and condition, and like the novel of youth growing to adulthood, is heaviest as a paradigmatic recall of that.

The poetry, as well, carries a specific history, even its speech and reference characterize a path a maintenance a reconfirmation of a certain social consciousness that is easily related from the natural context of its author's understanding. He is telling us, but initially re-telling himself.

He says "we are not writing for us but to us." Though the "to us" is, in practice, initially . . . emotionally and intellectually, "for us," particularly if its effect is to lift us reacquaint us with our strengths and weakness. It is the directness of its Use as literature . . . "like the music we play . . . ya digg?" that reaches beyond the page into our own becoming.

There are many contradictory reflections. "Black as my heart the night grows whiter," even a continuous undercurrent of agnostic indecision . . . as to what is real or real real or the unreal . . . but it grows incisive . . . "a narrow passageway/ a window of despair." Positing that that is how the real gets known!

Dance is full of colliding Yeses and Nos, as when he says, "no blues . . . a wheel of fortune . . ." but the book, if it is anything, is one material meaning of the blues, and the middle passage from "our favorite color" to such deep tragedy it haunts us all, even sweet even pretty, yo funky . . . "blues be good, be good be good . . . " at the margins of our consciousness "a night song."

The poet says he is "a passenger" . . . in what vehicle we wonder. Perhaps like Sun Ra's telling . . . " You on the spaceship Earth and you outward bound, destination unknown. But you haven't met the captain of the spaceship yet!"

That is the essence of the contradictory stances, except he is a passenger in and as his own own self. The coming consciousness of the reality of the personal vehicle and the larger vehicle given to him by his sense-world, that is real and his own reflection which is the poetry.

"We come here from Goree" . . . deep recall . . . "Space is the place . . . sorry but I can't take you . . ." Ra, direct, matter and its dissociative reflection. The whole spectrum of digging not yet clearly resolved, so that there is a constant reverberation as to what is believed and what is known what is thought what is actual.

Speech itself, the elder registration, precise in its twisting and specific touching. "Dap Daddy smiled a beaming smile/ all the while growling." If we recognize what is "Dap" who and where for is "Daddy," we know at once for the complete image, just exactly why he smile and be at same time inside wild. Yes, indeed.

The cultural motif like speech, is observation and history, registration and description. "The night was a flatted fifth," evoking a whole passion, period, way of looking at the world, place, art. We are swept with the familiar, but always renewed by the power of a precise digging, a reawakened feeling.

Wilson's title, as many of the pieces are political upfront and down under. Liberation is more than a statement, it is an emotional commitment. Hence, poems to people like the popular Pan-Africanist, Elombe Brath, his name something to conjure with, and the work draws someone not familiar with the person into the practice that is that person.

Mao sd, we must create art that is artistically powerful and politically revolutionary at the same time. It is a life's work, to bring the two modes of seeing which are actually inextricable in reality, to the conjunction of our rationale and use. Wilson is beginning, not as a persona, but as a public cultural worker, artist, to go to that awesome space around and within himself.

Source: Ted Wilson. Slo' Dance. Brooklyn, NY: Shamal Books, 2003 / Contact: Shamal Books, GPO Box 16, NYC 10116 (718) 622 4426