What’s African American about African American poetry? Fragments/(pieces of myth in the science, or is it pieces of time in the silence or is it The Loud Minority, deluxeremix edition, directed by Spike Lee, and starring Spike Lee and me (gotta have it) to get it), filmed from above with a free floating dolly so we look like we’re flying and falling at the same All/ways: an omni-directional demonstration of what it is and what it is, like when a question makes you so numb to answer you become its slant, To the Race Industry in crisis: obvious as an ear, though you are close to my heart, but you, Black and Beautiful Industry, it’s you I love! And poets won't save you. Pimps have a better chance, a chant that sounds so African it bends the shape of Louisiana into Yoruba, until the quiet comes. And into the quiet come some shy verses about inside feelings that earn you a whiskey and a seat at the piano. Julliard, grandscheme. You send a letter home to your parent(s): They won't exploit me I promise. I speak like a child learning to make the sound Ireverberate, go wild, go will, go subconscious, go Freud, go James Baldwin. Speak like a chill running up and down your spine when the singer’s voice cracks into lilt/falsetto/glow for short, an unlimited crevice/menace/mercy of double consciousness until you forget that you are the singer, that’s you up there singing, at least that’s your body, some kind of Coptic replica or whatever. Up where? Speak and you shall find— (The Tower of) Babel is to Babylon as the Cabin is to Uncle Tom. He's in there, speaking in tongues like these, plus sun, like he saw his mom being at the Pentecost each (and every) Sunday. And they say melanin is chaos. I heard it on the radio. I am the radio. I heard myself say it. I said on the FisherPrice boombox during a boomtime for doomsayers, shepherd-like, a little higher-priced at a high-class auction. White-collar price. This goes out to chaos. Hydrogen bomb. Atomic bomb. If they push that button... All I know is the girls were calm as smithereens, conned, dreaming backwards. I don't mean to be vulgar. It just so happens. I was weeping and then I saw a neon jesus (on my mind) and almost laughed, but it wasn't funny, it was like… math from the sunlord bleeding through the number runner's pretend storefront. Someday My Prince Will Come. (It was) Like a promise, like a sacrifice, solstice sliced into death and rebirth and best things, like the bull or the cow running into the proud fire, but it was Michael Jackson. Saint saint sinner saint, so sin/serious, hero, ya heard, scum, paint, to sniff, to smear, to pollock, to politik, to picture it from hearing it. It's painful to know him so clear (ly). He into whom everybody's Orpheus poem sinks as the Nile on Nihilism or designer drug window huddle, and blackface, afro to match, and as if to say... yo momma’s so black the only english she speaks is the singing, and the only singing she knows is the blues. Your hero’s so black you can’t see him no more. Oh, yeah? Oh, yeah. That's not a dis, though, that's a compliment. And where does the slang discome from— what’s some etymology, distance, comfort, or distortion by closeness. A musician on tour washing dishes at the club between gigs. Langston Hughes in Paris washing dishes at the gig between clubs. Love oh, love oh, careless love. That's Bessie Smith, almost at the hospital when the blood strokes midnight. We choose life! Dammit. Eternal life. Atum Ra, Ptah, Ma-At, Osiris, thief who stole my sad days, us-and-them usher-inners, how many of us black gods do you want. Stealing is not like earning but it blends in with want like a turn in the phrase please don't go, I wah-nt you to stay the sad banner preys (and prays and praise and preys again) right in front of the abandoned schoolhouse turned bootleg abortion clinic turned whorsehouse turned house of the rising sun, turnt out, turnt up, bout it! Where Sun Ra is to Miles Davis as...

Feed-Pod: The Feed You Need

FeedPod 10: What’s African American About African American Poetry

Counterspells Against Bullshit and Jive by Brightmoments on Mixcloud Light My Fire: A Counterspell Against Bullshit and Jive Shadow and Light. Shadow and Act. Faulkner and Ellison. Shade Tree and Time to Face the Sun. The rugged elegance of fame and fortune the hood rich way can lure anyone through the nondescript back door of his wildest dreams come true, toward rituals so sordid and raw he wonders if it was curiosity or a brisk curse that brought him there. But everything’s groovy for a while. Wine, weed, and women are flowing and you learn to make music on the monkey’s back, on that high ‘ocean-style’ wave.  That’s where Lee Perry sat or huddled or flew or dove in from; in the proud/prowed heart of Kingston, Jamaica’s finest recording studio, just before he torched it, set unapologetic fire to his own creation, the renown Black Ark. He was seated g-like, at the mouth of the fountain in audiocolor, quenched, shunning the show-tunes and battle hymns and monkeys on his mind, (by monkeys I mean anxieties, or the fear of fulfilling the white man’s onerous stereo/and radio/ types of the black man) so he sat there as a king and god and champion of black dignity, in a most plush and throne-like chair he could see, surrounded by such lucky machines and admirers and mirrors from dusk until dawn they were shoving songs into his heart like daggers and dragging his mind into the hive. It could all be so much simpler, he realized, as he burnt the whole thing down that lucky day. Every record, every vibration, every burden disguised as relief or comfort, every perfect circle of wax and wane we call a LongPlay: all into cinders and smoke until broken was the curse and revolving door of a life course superimposed on him by ambition, until he could make healing music again. This emission of the Feed comprises pieces that Lee Perry rescued from the rubble and reassembled. He brought the Ark out of the rouge and into the rain or reign (see also reine) where it is rendered an agent of hope and deliverance. Most basically, he cleared the party of bullshit and jive, he acted like a true Black Cop, and when the unwanted presences turned the quiet corner, he started the music again. He proved that we don’t always need electricity for black music, for we are electricity. So, here we enter his self-made universe in its Era of Good Feelings, in the rejuvenating discomfort of themes such as: How to celebrate a loss, how to eliminate the semantic structure that inverts loss and gain, how to be your own forest, how destruction is a myth or just a flipside of creation, positive, a pause/reset just when things get too theatrical or ridiculous, how to catch on fire and use the rising tempo to access a higher vibration until you’re a bundle of interdependent elements rolling across an omniscient void that is your total mind, how that changes the meaning of end of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing which I like to call by its nickname Do the Riot Thing, how misconstrued archetypes such as the diva (or the divine) and the collective (check out the Emerald Tablet) are meant to interact, how collectivity defragments (in and of and as) the black imagination, how that collectivity manifests today in both the ‘real’ and ‘cyber’ worlds, how they are different worlds, acting co-dependant though in need of behavior that honors their interdependency, how what they share is a commons, how their whole body is an ear, how to reread Gwendolyn Brooks’ The Preacher Ruminates Behind the Sermon in that context, how the diva takes one for the team by showing up in the places where gathering, especially gathering to listen to things together, feels most ominous, locations such as, in the fire, in the water, in the poem, in the music, in the moment, in the white man, as Frank O’Hara, or Kennedy, or King, or half-breed between these things, or their shared fantasy, which doubles as their shared fear, or All of these at once.

FeedPod 9: Counterspells Against Bullshit and Jive

Toward the Divine Feminine by Brightmoments on Mixcloud   You Can Get With This, or You Can Get With That: Thoughts on the Divine Feminine in the Everyday At the dawn of spring, volta of all that winter hush along the annual sonnet for amnesty repeated again and again in all the ways I’m so green, like soldiers and sprite brand and enticement and mint condition; I’m thinking about the divine feminine, the under and over-hyped spirit we call the so-called Diva from and to, over and under, and when we’re lucky, through ourselves and into and as, the delight of true integration. I’m probing the loophole in terminologies of the sacred that tends to undermine the radiance of worship or even acknowledgement of female archetypes with a grotesque and dulling commitment to patriarchy…How do we reunite the sensual and the alpha, substance and light… What is the opposite of penis envy? The wish to be penetrating without being obvious, the wish for an inner alchemy not situated along the axis of any one pendulum, but enacting a oneness that leaves the yet undissipated dumbfounded, in awe, resenting the awe. I’m examining the ways in which the erotic and the mundane are what cross to move that quiet sometimes pent up force in us we call the spirit; we call any breach in the mundane, and there is an arrivance, an event wherein the most casual gesture saturates our hearts with meaning and attachment, the everyday becomes the highest form of sensuality and that sensuality the only-only liaison between our environments and our imaginations. The Feminine I speak of is the agent of this everyday sensuality which refuses to separate the mind from the body, form from content. The goddess is this, and she has been relegated to muse and the muse to mistress, and thus we decorate and tattoo the human heart with the oppressive silhouette of our forced bias, by us/for us/but not of us, knots of us stuck in the lazy constituency of gender and bucking the wrong system. What I’m trying to say is you’re a slave. When we spoke about the sacred we meant the praise conditioned into the erotic to alleviate some of the tension there; the platonic arousal.  When they invented the slave they meant to tempt that word and meaning into the body and up the chuckle of its good dream music, escape route music, onto stages, such the black entertainer, such as the female as object and sales tactic aura backed-up and affronted, and what does that make the black female entertainer, I wonder? And then we invented the brisk dichotomy between the masculine and the feminine energies within us, willfully, to explain our willful slavery on biological terms, to reify or relive it by turning the self against the self and forcing one element of the facture to submit to the other—and it’s ruinous down to our very glands and organs, our throats are constricting around the boundary while even the boundary itself is letting go. I invoke the Divine Feminine as a gasp for air, as a be-all-end-all in the most literal sense of that phrase, be whole, behold, don’t be beholden. We hope that the reel of the tongueless bell is retraced and the voice of the Divine Feminine entity in the everyday, regenerated by the frantically muted and neuter we’ve put it through, and made new, and heard. This would mean that the most strong, talented, beautiful, ferocious, and tender women, and men, are no longer confronted with witch hunt vibes. That the mistrust of that other-worldly energy that these body-and-souls come with, that exists and is reflected in all men and women, but that some express most vividly— that that mistrust is transmuted into respect and sweet devotion and the great unlearning that renews us all. That we are no longer put on trial and trailed by haters, for our greatest gifts and deepest contributions to the culture. Mojo, Juju, Hoodoo, do what you gotta do. And as that casual divinity re-enters the human being story and the erotic and the devotional and t...

FeedPod 8: Toward the Divine Feminine

The Negro Artist and the Sacred Mountain (1) Begin With Denouement and You End Up In Synch This is about lifting the thumb from the bow. A talent for devotion goes black blooded to the over-soul and convinces us the aim is love which when we pierce it, enters us. That force of nature that always aims the hero’s heart toward trances and it’s nobody’s fault but his own. Here come Malik and them. Amos and Andy are somewhere in here too like a laugh track or a surveillance device or the clean black man in the numb cadillac driving down the rent. The succulents grow like so fiercely and you wear acacia crowns around the dream of empire high yellow pirates are circling, and we get high, we about to go get lifted now like sunrise how we open the blues up and let the blues blood come out to show them. You chose the first flower for how it sounds and another for how it looks in the red dark of township or worship or fast car, sweet double hipness— and more for how they feel under water or to the boss’ favorite son in trade, our lady of the sun trade. This pace is for her. It might as well be spring for her every hour of every day and all decoration is superfluous and invasive and makes us sluggish with safety. To escape we climb into the night like space suits, but the fugitive did not recognize this fast taste of night, stompin and stompin and…Am I brave enough for this? Can I understand devotion without idol worship or piety or the punctuated protestant quietness of some white men? What is it then? What is the sacred without a mainstream guideline or religion and how and where do we apply it in our lives then? Does lack of a devotion to one particular god make art more necessary, does it make art our devotional practice and us the arbiters or gods that we love and fear through it? Are we brave enough to be this devoted to ourselves, our beautiful back and gold selves, are we brave enough for this? (2) Synchrony and Her Cronies 1n 1926 Langston Hughes wrote The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain, an essay that urges black artists to revel in so-called blackness and to be beginning to see the light; to not fall into the traps of legitimation that tempt so many of us awkward/ backwards and into chasing after a culture that runs from us. Maybe if we’re lucky we turn that chase around or erotic and our work admits something of our truth that way but often all we do is dilute ourselves looking to dispel the color. Almost 80 years after Langston’s tender admonition and the more things change, the more they stay the same. What I explore here is a caveat in the equation Langston arranged to balance the social with the political, the clandestine and blatant space where the sacred resides for the black artist with what that space delivers. It occurs to me that praise rituals practically govern the black spirit and that the varying systems of faith brought to us by the white power structure’s spiritual-industrial complex and/or god-complex, prey upon this innate hunger we have to enter our own gifts and celebrate the hoodrich way, the main way, the ghettofabulous way and the monastic way chanting in each May there be peace, love, and perfection throughout all creation Am I brave enough for this? So I am as ashamed of the black artist who rejects the sacred as Langston is of the one who tries to lift the black off his alphabet like an inverse thief or broke down robinhood complex; I fear both stances are slumps that hinder the ancientfuture and create a kind of hipness that rips creativity to shreds. The racial mountain’s tendency to transmute into a sacred mountain for black artists, the tendency we share to use faith in higher forces to give us the strength to face the quotidian glories or our so-called race or as Fred Moten so brilliantly notes, I ran from and was still in it; it was so big I ran from it and was still in it, that is the quality whose scatological potency we face today,

FeedPod 7: The Negro Artist and the Sacred Mountain

Excerpts from a Manifesto by Brightmoments on Mixcloud Put it on a Record In the spirit of the spirit that guides us through this holiday season of syncretism and magic, myth and legend, ritual and renewal, cold fact and smoldering truth—this month’s edition of the Feed is dedicated to and excerpted from a “Call for an Archive of Afro and Astrosonics.” We will attach that call, but in preface and conjunction, the words and music included herein place our direct gaze onto some of the rare and out-of-print recordings of some underknown poets who work as musicians and publish their writing in the sleeves of records, as well as musicians who solicit poets and poetry and make it indispensable to their ensembles. We survey key recordings in this tradition and visit entire concerts that have been devoted to such work. We astral project ourselves into a level of our consciousness we often repudiate when pampered by the stark contrast between words and silence that characterizes a lot of poetry readings, in hopes of invoking the questions: what would it be like to have to memorize and improvise our written work for performance, to reinvent it each time we read for an audience based on the energy between ourselves and instrumentalists? How would we go about recording our books of poetry if given the opportunity to so, or even required to do so by our contracts, what equipment would we use, would we collaborate or make these solo albums? All of this this in time for our forthcoming 2012 Festivus special poetry album featuring The Roots and Harry Connick Jr…  But for real, we’re puttin’ it on a record, we’re seeing sounds, we asking ourselves what the future of recorded poetry and collaborations between poets and musicians can be, should be, is already, we’re reclaiming the inevitability of this work. With love.

FeedPod 6: Excerpts from a Manifesto

Tones for a Black President by Brightmoments on Mixcloud From Gil Scott Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon,” to Lord Beginner’s “General Election,” to most of Fela Kuti’s recording catalog, the list of classic protest songs that call out the tacit travesties of our political system with the deadpan force of the literal and exact, is long, robust, hope for the conversation on earth. Rather than compiling all of those in a necessary barrage, this round of our Feed is an attempt to capture, inhabit, and re-think the mood of the election upon us by way of an astrosonic map we keep crumpling up dejectedly, then uncoiling, navigating again with the joie de vivre of children, then crumpling again, then like young again, until much of the mood has to do with the dynamic between those two opposing gestures, the poetics of that dynamic, the town hall debate reimagined as a jam session we’re so close to walking out on when some anonymous poet stands up and recites the poem that makes us wonder, ‘what is all this joy and justice.’ What’s it like to be black in outer space. What’s it like to be black in the white house. In the town hall. In the towncar bumping Motown. How many poems and songs does it cost us to cross back and forth between consciousnesses as such, and should we write those records and let them sigh and gasp, always true to their fashion, until our imaginations slap us with another win and we act all inevitable together again. Let’s do this. Let’s try.

FeedPod 5: Tones for a Black President

In the Mecca by Brightmoments on Mixcloud   The year 1968 continues to light the way through the dark and incantatory matter of our archive. It’s the year in which poet Henry Dumas was killed by a New York Transit Authority Officer, the year in which we began keeping a closer eye on our data and the data thieves who shake it off its axis. It’s also the year in which Gwendolyn Brooks published her now out-of-print testament to Chicago tenement living, In the Mecca. This Feeding is a tribute to and invocation of that text. An excavation of the work and its tender, unflinching narrative. A first step toward a reprint. We start in the middle of a sentence and move in every direction at once. Look for the postlude After Mecca and more information on the text and its full context, on our Tumblr: http://feedpod.tumblr.com.   Featuring Moodyman Stokely Carmichael Lon Moshe Muhammad Ali Sun Ra Eddie Gale Spaceghostpurrp Donald Byrd Abbey Lincoln Fred Moten Norma Winstone & Michael Garrick Amiri Baraka Nina Simone Erimaj Tracie Morris Gwendolyn Brooks Clifford Coulter Etheridge Knight    Subscribe to FeedPod

FeedPod the Fourth: In the Mecca

  Subscribe to Feed-Pod & check out the new Feedpod Tumblr of greatness. In the summer 1970, reeds master Rahsaan Roland Kirk founded the Jazz and Peoples Movement in order to promote the visibility of the artform on mainstream television. Jazz musicians wanted to re-assert the dignity of their work to the very powers that threatened that dignity— a privately owned mass media that aggressively censored natural black inventions like collective improvisation. Their tactic: to collectively interrupt live tapings of talk shows, most notably the Merve Griffin Show and the Dick Cavett Show, and erupt into full jazz concerts with instrumentalists, poets, and singers all present and participating. Once the concerts were underway it was hard to wrest the artists from the screen without expressing that tacit hostility to their form that they were there to protest, and so jazz had a moment’s notice, and as a result musicians like Lee Morgan, Abbey Lincoln, Max Roach, and Rahsaan himself, did get the opportunity to present the less commercial face of Jazz music to the most commercial face their is— live nationally syndicated television programs. Out of this movement came experiments like David Sandborn’s show Night Music and the lesser known John Lewis Show. Today we have The Roots as “house band” on the Jimmy Fallon Show, which ranges from heartening to embarrassing depending on your mood. This month’s Feed is a compilation of the interruptions staged by the Jazz and People’s Movement. We went into the archives, the archives entered us, it was not science but it was so scientifical.  Featuring:  Rahsaan Roland Kirk  Yusef Lateef  The Pharaohs  Kain The Art Ensemble of Chicago Kamau Braithwaite Tony Williams  Cannonball Adderley  Count Ossie and the Mystic Revelation Last Poets Ahmad Jamal Edzayawa Max Roach The Watts Prohpets Jyoti Peter Tosh Mf Doom Alice Coltrane Amiri Baraka ASAP Rocky Billie Holday Norma Winstone Bobby Callender  Onra  Robert Creeley Langston Hughes  Freddie Hubbard Roy Ayers  Sun Ra 

Feedpod Episode 3: Reeds & Drums

 Subscribe to Feed-Pod And then in November of 1973 a fiendishly anonymous trumpeter who called himself the Country Preacher started making headlines all over the South. Rumours of what was called a ‘Vertigo of the Infinite’ that he conjured with his words and ‘preachments,’ piled one atop the other like bandits trying to breach the borders of your consciousness without id. Like all the good and spreadingest rumours, the more the stories corroborated one another the more impossible they seemed. And the disembodied truth gained muscle and tone that way, and provoked new myths. There was the myth of a fleet of outspoken deacon types delivering what they called ‘urgent messages for those who would be real,’ messages so diffuse listeners would fill in the blanks and create information out of their beautiful provincial nonsense. And the Country Preacher himself became the mythic leader of the pack and shorthand for that ritualized collective imagination that all too often gets streamlined into vapid gossip. People would make up stories about the Country Preacher’s love affairs, how many kids he had with how many different women, the healing power of his words, the dangers of attending his traveling church-like scenes, etc. He became more and more intangible and more and more irresistible. Sometimes he came off as a dandy and sometimes he was painted as a dedicated champion of chastity and all things monotonous. He embodied these two extremes and all of their illegitimate siblings birthed through his trademark slogan ‘nah it ain’t religion’ and abandoned and returned to again and again, proving that what we call glory is a contrivance predicated upon a certain amount of disgrace. Proving the incurable human obsession with binaries of vice and purification and the tension in the space where that obsession is fused with a seizing renunciation of itself, and songs become.  As far as the Preacher’s origins, It’s believed that one of the young teenagers who had traveled to Detroit with Amiri Baraka’s youth group The Spirit House Movers, to attend the commemorative concert sparked by Dumas’ killing in ‘68, had been so moved by the zeitgeist of Detroit and of the concert held during his visit, that he devoted himself to this transient role of Country Preacher evangelist dandy jive ass everything motherfucker of pure and utter greatness and trifling as he was righteous, he migrated through the southern states reading not from the Bible by God but from books of poems and lectures he had collected since Detroit in ‘68. His syncretism was intoxicating, his gospel was ‘while your eyes are watching god I’ll be watching the black maybe.’ He was deranged, lucid, bitter, unrepentant and free. No one is sure what he means by most anything he does to this day (he’s still giving regular sermons with same catchphrases and idiosyncrasies embedded within them), nor is deciphering their meanings a preoccupation, audiences are said to just listen, transfixed, and make catatonic exists. The silence is major part of the what we’ve been able to piece together of the Country Preacher’s illusive legacy. A legacy becoming as loose as we get in the grieving and jubilant space between disciplines that silence punctuates or punctures until we will it into muses and new musics. To this effect, it’s said that he travels with a dancer who wears only white lace, a plaintiff green bandanna, and as she dances the Country Preacher reads his sermons to the tempo she moves in. At the end of each and every preachment he improvises a trumpet solo riffing on Lester Bowie’s The Great Pretender, while she swings and chariots the frankincense. ‘Nah it ain’t religion,’ the goers chorus during their clumsy hushed exodus. For this installment of our podcast we’ve pieced together recordings of some of the Country Preacher’s sermons on the topic of Ohsun, the Yoruba goddess of ‘for love or money’ and other important prenatal questions completed by their incompletion....

Feed-Pod Episode 2: Oshun and the Country Preacher

 Subscribe to Feed-Pod Loose Tracklist Weldon Irvine Nancy Dupree Fred Moten Wu-tang John Coltrane Gil Scott Heron J Dilla Dexter Gordon Moodyman Amiri Baraka Ras Baraka L Boogie Michael Harper Theo Parish Sarah Webster Fabio Actress Bill Gunn David Henderson Percy Johnson Frank O’Hara Nico Brother Ah  

Feed-Pod Episode 1: Damballah

A monthly-ish, quasi-factual collage of events, music, and poetry. Compiled and composed by Harmony Holiday.

hubhopper

Feed-Pod: The Feed You Need

hubhopper