Showing papers in "Chicago Review in 2015"
Journal Article•
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TL;DR: Baraka's intentions, as a writer and as a man, are clear and unflinching: his first fidelity is to those whom he considers his people, including all people-especially but not only black people-beleaguered by the incessant struggle for equality against the obstacles that race and/or class jut out in front of them as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Calling all black peoplecalling all black people, man woman childWherever you are, calling you, urgent, come inBlack people, come in, wherever you are, urgent, callingyou, calling all black peoplecalling all black people, come in, black people, comeon in.-Amiri Baraka, "SOS"Dear Bosses and Tastemakers commenting with kid gloves on Amiri Baraka s SOS: Poems 1961-2013:The recent, posthumous collection of Amiri Baraka s ruthlessly beautiful and piercing and visceral poetry, edited by Paul Vangelisti and published last year by Grove Press, opens with an air of urgently festive exclusivity: the title track above beseeches union, revival meeting, impromptu festival- a true point of entry into the nature and texture of Baraka s work, his life, and his legacy. Dwight Garner's January 2015 review of the work fails to take into account the intensity of Baraka's commitment to this love call. Baraka's intentions, as a writer and as a man, are clear and unflinching: his first fidelity is to those whom he considers his people, including all people-especially but not only black people-beleaguered by the incessant struggle for equality against the obstacles that race and/or class jut out in front of them. He was loyal to this purpose even at the expense of his own ego. The consequence, from mainstream critics like Garner and establishment papers like the Times, is the tacit effort to undermine his work and message by way of too much hype and emphasis on his politics. The myopic focus here is always on statements Baraka made or ideas he championed or deployed as bait, particularly when he was a young man, without recognizing their origin in his frustration with the failure of the American promise, or their role in his active search for the equilibrium and the wisdom of experience to assuage that frustration. To honor the work presented throughout SOS is to review it with as much candor as Baraka himself had, and to remain as mercilessly eye-to-eye as he was, in the precarious and self-effacing stance he needed to enter to create the work, to be as generous as he was in that way.SOS is the collection of poems I wish I had encountered on a syllabus as an undergraduate at Berkeley, where instead I was asked to read the most polite black poets in the canon, or even in high school, when I scoured the canon for any semblance of a black-and-tan fantasy I could identify with. As Baraka knew too well, academic institutions are still often devoid of truly vanguard or rebellious black voices: or when they include them, they do so in murmur only. It was in a seminar taught by Margo Jefferson, during my first semester as an MFA student at Columbia, that I read Baraka's short story "The Screamers" and was reawakened to the sense that black lives matter in literature. Baraka's work struck me with its unapologetically Afrocentric and soulcentric tone, humbly honest at the expense of glamor-until the sheer truth becomes glamorous. That tone was there in the bravely original and vernacular prose of "The Screamers." It reminded me to work with what matters to me, with or without permission.In his subtly dismissive review, Garner reduces Baraka to sound bites by citing his more incendiary lines: for instance, "I've slept with almost every / mediocre colored woman / on 23rd street." Many lines from "The Screamers" seem to do a similar kind of thing: "But my father never learned how to drink," Baraka writes in a moment of autobiographical vulnerability. Taken in context, lines like this one reveal a key strain in Baraka's work and consciousness. He gave our literature something valuable with his ability to render the political and the poetic reciprocal by way of the deeply and often unflatteringly personal. These lines and tones manage to capture the tender disappointment that sometimes is what love is at its most enduring or least deluded.The meaning and value of the political in Baraka's work needs to be understood in this context. …
7 citations
Journal Article•
TL;DR: Hoyoot: Collected Poems and Songs as discussed by the authors highlights three distinct phases of Pickard's work: his apprenticeship as a youth in Newcastle to Basil Bunting and other Objectivist masters, when he applied the melopoetic principle of their modernist free verse to capturing the speech and songs of the Northern coal pits and factories (1968-1978); his defiance as an international poet-documentarian to Thatcherism, Reaganism, and their reactionary legacies, starting with topical and commemorative political poetry to expose the class warfare at the heart of rising neoliberalism
Abstract: Tom Pickard, hoyoot: Collected Poems and Songs. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2014. 298pp. £19.95Since his youthful days as the co-organizer of the Morden Tower poetry series in mid-1960s Newcastle, Tom Pickard has made it his project as poet, polemicist, and activist to earn recognition for Northern English workingclass culture as a living and legitimate culture. Pickard's career has seen him expand the scope of this project geographically and historically, documenting working-class struggle from strategic positions beyond his native Tyneside region, while mining the region's economic and cultural history for the radical traditions that could ground a national and international workingclass culture, hoyoot: Collected Poems and Songs, the most recent and complete gathering of Pickard's poetry, captures precisely these far-reaching dimensions of his ongoing career as a poet at once of dissidence and agitation, and of recovery and reclamation.Divided into three large chronological sections, hoyoot highlights three distinct phases of Pickard's work: his "apprenticeship" as a youth in Newcastle to Basil Bunting and other Objectivist masters, when he applied the melopoetic principle of their modernist free verse to capturing the speech and songs of the Northern coal pits and factories (1968-1978); his defiance as an international poet-documentarian to Thatcherism, Reaganism, and their reactionary legacies, when he began using topical and commemorative political poetry to expose the class warfare at the heart of rising neoliberalism ( 1979-1999); and his return as a master poet in his own right to the landscape and folklore of his ancestral Northumbria, where the ballad traditions of the Anglo-Scottish border have resurfaced in his poetry as both historical material and a living voice of protest, hoyoot expands on two previous, slimmer collections of Pickard's poetry-Tiepin Eros (Bloodaxe Books, 1994) and Hole in the Wall (Flood Editions, 2004)-adding significant detail to the political poetry of the 1970s and 80s and to the historical, documentaryoriented folk poetry of the past decade.For its stunning comprehensiveness, the present collection also brings with it a highly concentrated focus on Pickard's longstanding dual roles as an oral poet and an oral historian. It's no accident that the subtitle of hoyoot calls attention to the fluid boundary between poetry and song in his work: from the early lyric poems written for performance at Morden Tower, to the street-protest songs of Jarrow March, to the full-fledged "folk-opera" of The Ballad of Jamie Allan, Pickard's work over the years has been about breathing new life into working-class identity by insisting on the voice as the thing that holds it together through a history intent on destroying it.hoyoot arranges the poems of Pickard's first phase in a way that puts their themes into dramatic conflict: poems about love, sex, child-rearing and their affective bonds to ancestry and tradition are interleaved with poems about the life-sapping and destructive power of industrial capitalism. The regenerative promise of a growing family in "To My Unborn Child," a poem dedicated to the poet's son Matthew ("then I found you had been there / all time before me"), is quickly rechanneled into protests against economic servitude, as in "The Daylight Hours," an invective against the National Assistance Board officers who routinely threatened to break up the young family by denying them dole money:A hev gorra bairnan a hev gorra wifean a cannot see me bairn or wifeworkin in the nightso go way mr dolemanav got something else ti dothan spen me daylight hoursworkin for thouThis "song for dole wallahs," from High on the Walls (1968), Pickard's first volume of poetry, was written at a time when he lived as a "work conchy," by his own description-a "conscientious objector" to the forms of labor available to him as a young man marginalized by the depressed postwar economy of the industrial North. …
2 citations
Journal Article•
TL;DR: The Truth of My Songs: Poems of the Trobairitz as mentioned in this paper is a translation of the trobairits' poetry into modern hip-hop, with a tone borrowed from contemporary hip hop.
Abstract: The Truth of My Songs: Poems of the Trobairitz. Translated by Claudia Keelan. Richmond, CA: Omnidawn Publishing, 2015. 131 pp. $17.95Medieval culture, as Lee Patterson put it in 1990, has often been imagined as "an enigma to be solved rather than a living past with claims upon the present." Teaching and writing about medieval poetry is always difficult, a process of continual negotiation between strangeness and familiarity, distance and connection. Claudia Keelan takes up this problem of historical relation in her new book of translations, The Truth of My Songs: Poems of the Trobairitz, which aggressively modernizes the courtly lyrics of southern France's twelfth-century female troubadours (trobairitz). Keelan understands medieval poetry's simultaneous familiarity and strangeness as a problem for its contemporary reception, and she anticipates the potentially controversial consequences of her approach to translating it: the prior translations that inspired her, she says, "circulate in the circumstances of the translator's own writing present, which is, like it or not, the only living place of reception." This idea-that the life of a translated poem exists in its read present, rather than its originary past-is both a rationale and a problem of its own for Keelan's new translations. By weaving together "historic and contemporary particulars," to borrow from Louis Zukofsky, Keelan's poems breathe new life into the songs of the trobairitz, but through a patchwork of the modern and the archaic that often borders on pastiche.Keelan's approach to translation is a complicated one that deserves serious evaluation. She may be right that the texts of the medieval trobairitz songs call for rewriting rather than literal translation. These are lyrics written in highly codified poetic forms and idioms and with a strong self-awareness of a genre that appealed to a very specific social subset. Could there even be a way, then, to translate them literally? Doing so for many of these poems, Keelan argues convincingly, would produce English versions so obscured by idiom as to remain virtually untranslated. (Keelan notes, for example, that a line from one song, translated literally, would read, "One often picks the brooms with which one sweeps oneself.") Nonetheless, readers would be right to question the license Keelan takes with Ezra Pound's dictum that "all ages are contemporaneous." Pound's statement describes the empathie capacity of language in general and of literature more specifically. But Pound was also reflecting on the wonder that poetic language has the capacity to transcend what is alien between two scenes. So taking his offer of contemporaneity too much at face value runs the risk of losing the productive tension between the alien and the familiar. Poetry can offer readers a window into a world entirely other-historically, nationally, socially, linguistically- and imposing too much familiarity diminishes that world, dissolving what might otherwise grip the reader as unexpectedly relatable. Keelan's toofrequent transpositions of one idiom into another generates some discomfort, then, by collapsing the distinct historical experiences each one delineates. It may be the case that, in fact, each age has its own or indeed a multitude of specific contemporary vocabularies and attitudes, and that blithely assigning one to another does a disservice to both.The proof, though, must lie in the poetry. One of Keelan's primary techniques is to remake the diction of the trobairitz songs by importing a vocabulary and a tone she borrows mostly from contemporary hip-hop. In its best moments, the insertion of this deliberately youthful voice captures something important about the original poems themselves: their awkwardness, their efforts to express (as Keelan herself notes) teenage passions in a formalized, posed idiom, and their belonging to a system that seems to require integration into very specific social structures. "As I began translating these poems," Keelan explains, "I heard the sound of twelfth-century pop culture, a middle age's version of rap or hip-hop, the rebellious music of the young, whose love exists in a complex of concerns always personal, and yet indelibly set amidst a society seen as oppressive. …
1 citations