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Bio-Sketch
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Yictove, New Orleans born, has voiced his poetry in
venues throughout the United States, as well as abroad. Yictove has produced/hosted a poetry series on
cable in Newark, New Jersey, performed as a poet in the schools
courtesy of the Geraldine Dodge Foundation, worked as a creative
writing instructor in the Safe Haven program/YMCA in East
Orange, New Jersey, and directed as poetry series in New York
city's Knitting Factory.
Yictove has left his magical
fingerprints everywhere. He writes with the resonance of a
native New Orleans bluesman, the sharp eye of a New York City
street poet, the rolling rhythm of a Jamaican dub-poet, and the
vision of a prophet circling the modern Jericho. These poems are
alive, whispering and booming, testifying to what Yictove means
when he says: "Tongues that do speak the truth / are
remarkable to listen to."
—James Nolan, author What Moves Is Not
the Wind
This "Brother/Man" from New Orleans
who has touched spirits on one shore and the next has come touch
base with ours. He speaks of the conditions that are within our
control, and the necessity for some changes of the urgency in
the need to learn to learn how to truly love ourselves in order
to be free enough to open up and learn to love each other.
Offering no panacea, he speaks of the reality of the hard work
intrinsic in the finding of solutions. He is a believer in the
wondrous results of honest attempts at communications with our
lovers, families and friends--a direct path to broader
communications with our people.—A.H. Reynolds
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I hope my oil painting “My Friend
Yictove” is pleasing to your visual senses. Do
remember, I’m an “Expressionist”…which gives me some
leave way to play with what I see realistically, so some
things in this painting may have been altered a bit from
the original photo I had to work from. I’m not really
concerned about sales…I am however concerned about a
Yictove print hanging in one of the New Jersey Public
Libraries for the students Yictove so loved and the
community he cared for so much to view and embrace. If
you’re interested in assisting with this…please let me
know, or let Yictove’s daughter know.
Bev Jenai
Yictove (Eugene Turk) made his transition suddenly
Saturday evening, July 28th 2007.
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Table
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Yictove's spirit
was called up today! Folks gathered around his daughter
in from China and his family and held them fast. Of
course, poetry was read and, of course, we all
acknowledged that, prolific artist that he was, Yictove—and
the word Yictove means "he will write" according to his
fellow Israelites—Yictove was watching, writing yet
another poem to document the moment, making us feel soft
and retrospective in places we had never felt before,
nodding our heads "yes" with a psychological bend to our
collective neck, and that he was doing all of this in
the name of love, without raising his voice, just
raising his pen. One sister sang a blues song.
Zayid Muhammad led
a clapping session . . . "Let us give this great man one
more round of applause." Amiri Baraka blessed him with
words.
Jacque Johnson was there
when Yictove died. Thank God someone was. She described
his death for us at the memorial service, and it sounds
as though he had a stroke (she could not understand his
speech) and a heart attack (after a while he just fell)
and the entire episode took about 30 minutes, I think
she reported. Jacque explained that he died
peacefully, as he lived.
He spoke to her as he was passing over uttering
beautiful words. We should all exit with such grace.
—Sandra West
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In future
we be
missin your
sunday evening poems
delivered your careful way
through the long distance line
like a new orleanian midwife
In
Future--Elegy for Yictove |
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From the one book of his
I have, a
Blue Print,
of a life seemingly quickly lived but deeply
felt. Yictove became a coordinator of
readings at the Knitting Factory and at the
East Orange Public Library.
Soft spoken, introverted
it would seem, appearing, disappearing, yet
leaving his trace, singular, but like all of
us, leaving traces, prints of our blues our
blues lives. Now the brother follows the 9th
Ward of his native Big Easy, deeply
appreciated but now part of the legend of
what we took for granted some of the things
that made us happy, now gone gone gone.—Amiri
Baraka 8/1/07
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I will always remember the artistic genius that lived in
my brother. The way that he made words have new life
from the written to the spoken word was something of an
art in and of itself. As he spoke his voice boomed and
oozed giving words new meaning. The Knitting Factory and
the Library (East Orange Public Library) gave him the
opportunity to help others grow and cultivate in the
arts he so loved. He was a gentle teacher and had a gift
with people of all walks of life. Not long ago he was in
New Orleans and performed with Kid Jordan’s band an
impromptu jam session where he read When the Dewdrop
Drops. Though the performance was not rehearsed
it was amazing in every sense, exemplifying the artist
he truly was.
—Consuello
Battin: Sister
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Source: D.J. Soliloquy
(Thrown Stone Press, 1988)
This "Brother/Man" from New Orleans
who has touched spirits on one shore and the next has come touch
base with ours.
He speaks of the conditions that are within
our control, and the necessity for some changes of the urgency
in the need to learn to learn how to truly love ourselves in
order to be free enough to open up and learn to love each other.
Offering no panacea, he speaks of the reality of the hard work
intrinsic in the finding of solutions.
He is a believer in the
wondrous results of honest attempts at communications with our
lovers, families and friends--a direct path to broader
communications with our people--A.H. Reynolds
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Yictove has produced/hosted a poetry series on
cable in Newark, New Jersey, performed as a poet in the schools
courtesy of the Geraldine Dodge Foundation, worked as a creative
writing instructor in the Safe Haven Program/YMCA in East
Orange, New Jersey, and directed as poetry series in New York
City's Knitting Factory. Cover art:
Lorraine Williams
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The Warmth of Other Suns
The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
By Isabel Wilkerson
Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, a sharecropper's
wife, left Mississippi for Milwaukee in
1937, after her cousin was falsely accused
of stealing a white man's turkeys and was
almost beaten to death. In 1945, George
Swanson Starling, a citrus picker, fled
Florida for Harlem after learning of the
grove owners' plans to give him a "necktie
party" (a lynching). Robert Joseph Pershing
Foster made his trek from Louisiana to
California in 1953, embittered by "the
absurdity that he was doing surgery for the
United States Army and couldn't operate in
his own home town." Anchored to these three
stories is Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist
Wilkerson's magnificent, extensively
researched study of the "great migration,"
the exodus of six million black Southerners
out of the terror of Jim Crow to an
"uncertain existence" in the North and
Midwest. |
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Wilkerson deftly incorporates sociological
and historical studies into the novelistic narratives of Gladney, Starling,
and Pershing settling in new lands, building
anew, and often finding that they have not
left racism behind. The drama, poignancy,
and romance of a classic immigrant saga
pervade this book, hold the reader in its
grasp, and resonate long after the reading
is done.
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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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Life on Mars
By Tracy K. Smith
Tracy K. Smith, author of Life on Mars has been selected as the winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. In its review of the book, Publishers Weekly noted the collection's "lyric brilliance" and "political impulses [that] never falter." A New York Times review stated, "Smith is quick to suggest that the important thing is not to discover whether or not we're alone in the universe; it's to accept—or at least endure—the universe's mystery. . . . Religion, science, art: we turn to them for answers, but the questions persist, especially in times of grief. Smith's pairing of the philosophically minded poems in the book’s first section with the long elegy for her father in the second is brilliant." Life on Mars follows Smith's 2007 collection, Duende, which won the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, the only award for poetry in the United States given to support a poet's second book, and the first Essence Literary Award for poetry, which recognizes the literary achievements of African Americans. The Body’s Question (2003) was her first published collection.
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Yvette’s cookbook is a 2011 bestseller
GREAT BAY, St. Martin (July 31, 2011)—It’s official. It’s a bestseller! From Yvette’s Kitchen To Your Table – A Treasury of St. Martin’s Traditional & Contemporary Cuisine by Yvette Hyman has sold out, according to House of Nehesi Publishers (HNP). In a record seven weeks after its June 2011 release here, less than 80 copies of the cookbook are left in bookstores and with the author’s family representatives charged with distribution, said Jacqueline Sample, HNP president. The decision on whether to reprint a new batch of From Yvette’s Kitchen … lies with the family of the late award-winning chef, said the publisher.“We are very thankful to the people of St. Martin for embracing Yvette’s cookbook. The visitors to our island also bought many copies of this beautifully designed book of the nation’s cuisine,” said Sample.From Yvette’s Kitchen is made up of 13 chapters, including Appetizers, Soups, Poultry, Fish and Shellfish, Meat, Salads, Dumplings, Rice and Fungi, Breads, and Desserts. |
The 312-page full color book includes recipes for Souse, the ever-popular Johnny cake, and Conch Yvette’s. Lamb stew, coconut tart, guavaberry, and soursop drink are also among the over 200 recipes à la Yvette in this Treasury of St. Martin’s Traditional & Contemporary Cuisine, said Sample.“We hope that this cookbook’s success also adds to the indicator of the performance and importance of books published in the Caribbean,” said Sample.The other HNP book that sold out in such a short time was the 1989 poetry collection Golden Voices of S’maatin. That first title by Ruby Bute had sold out in about three months and has since been reprinted, said Sample.
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The Gardens of Democracy: A New American Story
of Citizenship, the Economy, and the Role of Government
By Eric Liu and Nick Hanaper
American democracy is informed by the 18th century’s most cutting edge thinking on society, economics, and government. We’ve learned some things in the intervening 230 years about self interest, social behaviors, and how the world works. Now, authors Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer argue that some fundamental assumptions about citizenship, society, economics, and government need updating. For many years the dominant metaphor for understanding markets and government has been the machine. Liu and Hanauer view democracy not as a machine, but as a garden. A successful garden functions according to the inexorable tendencies of nature, but it also requires goals, regular tending, and an understanding of connected ecosystems. The latest ideas from science, social science, and economics—the cutting-edge ideas of today—generate these simple but revolutionary ideas: The economy is not an efficient machine. |
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It’s an effective garden that need tending. Freedom
is responsibility. Government should be about the
big what and the little how. True self interest is
mutual interest. We’re all better off when we’re all
better off. The model of citizenship depends on
contagious behavior, hence positive behavior begets positive behavior.
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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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If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
1950
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
____ 2005
Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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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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ChickenBones Store
(Books, DVDs, Music, and more)
update
18 August 2012
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