THE E MAGTREVE DE BLUES- Leon DamasWELCOME TO THE E-MAG: A Sunday kind of love.On Sundays I invite other writers to share my E-Space and contribute their own E-Notes. Today my guests are Michael O'Keefe, Chenjerai Hove, Sarah Browning and Ed Ochester.
# 1
O'Keefe
November 6, 2006
I am following my standard practice of getting up; doing a meditation that feeds all the hungry spirits of known and unknown words, and then writing. After graduation from the Creative Writing Seminars at Bennington College, I learned two things. In order to write, you have sit down and actually write. Thinking about writing is not writing. In order to write well, you have to read those that have. This duel realization cost me thirty thousand dollars. I highly recommend it.
I’ve been rummaging around secondhand bookstores and gotten into Mary Shelley, Randall Jarrell, Sartre, Kafka, and a host of others. I am writing the great American novel about a monster, created from scratch by a renegade medical student, who becomes a poet, and cannot get out of a castle that may or may not be employing him.
After adhering to strict discipline and writing at least three pages of narrative gems, I attend a yoga class. In this particular class, the temperature is kept at 104 F for ninety minutes. After five minutes, one’s eyes are clouded over with sweat. This lends a halo effect to me and my classmates that lasts the entire class. The teacher, who talks ceaselessly while we wrap our bodies in knots that no seaman could unravel, describes in minute detail what one does and does not do with one’s body in order to complete the class. They have no halos around them while they teach because they talk too much. Only the quiet, long suffering students, achieve the halo effect. One should not necessarily construe that this is due to any special status of the students but assumptions have been made and not just by me.
After class, I eat a lunch of wheatgrass and bran and return to the other half of my literary life. I read. Sometimes I read for up to fifteen minutes a day before falling asleep and napping until around 5 PM, whereupon, I rise and enjoy a hearty dinner of pomegranate seeds on white toast. Then I watch sports on TV, my only indulgence of the day.
While I cannot presume to advise each and every one of you reading this to follow my lead, one can hope. Just think what a life of fasting, studying, and sweating has done for me and set your own course to adventure, or don’t. See if I care.
Michael O'Keefe became an actor after his parents dropped him as a child. He's recieved both Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations, though little is known about the connection between the nominations and his early childhood.
Most recently he's appearing opposite George Clooney in his new film, "Michael Clayton," and with Catherine Keener in her film "American Crime," which was selected to be at Sundance in 2007. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from Bennington College and is currently working at a Starbucks, like most graduates, until his parents set up him in a steady job. Contributions to defray the costs of Mr. O'Keefe's education can be sent to the O'Keefe Relief Fund.
www.michaelokeefe#2
HOVE
This week has been a cold one, rainy and windy, with those harsh winds from the sea. I could have been blown away like a leaf. So I decided I will read the memoirs of Geoffrey Nyarota, the most persecuted Zimbabwe newspaper editor now in exile in the United States.The experience of reading the book titled 'Against The Grain,' was like me clandestinely going back home,sneeking into all those places which I am now not able to visit.
Talking to all the journalists who have been either arrested or tortured, those who now know what freedom of the press is all about. It was so painful to be so intimately in touch with my own psychological and geographical landscape, yet emotionally feeling already detached and afraid to know it after five years in exile in the cold whether of Norway.
A good book is a journey into myself and into the world out there.Then it made me go back to my own work after two days of reading this sad but hopeful story. I went back to work on my latest poetry anthology(untitled) which I always seem to abandon because of my travels.I felt so bad on realising that some of the poems are scattered all over the place. Assembling them again became like the work of a surgeon putting back the scattered pieces of the human body in search of life once more.
When I read about my cruel, beloved homeland, Zimbabwe, the anguish in my soul always sends me back to my poetry. The journey never ends until I touch the pieces of paper with new lines and then smile again,feeling that at least in the fragility of exile, one can write beautiful lines, echoes of a life that has been and might never be.
The yearning is also so beautiful, the nostalgia for the voices of my street, the shouts of the market women, and the ruthless but profoundly gentle drivers of those little mini-buses which seem to carry the greatest number of passengers in the world. Twenty can fit into a mini-bus normally designed to carry eight.What a miracle!In all this search, I once again feel the wanderer that I have been for five years, especially that my contract with Norway ends soon. Maybe I will end up in other lands soon, in the UnitedStates, teaching once again, in some college, university, or somewhere.
Born in 1950s in the south of Zimbabwe, Chenjerai Hove is a Zimbabweanpoet, novelist and columnist who lives in exile in Norway. His novels include the award winning novel,'Bones' which was the best African book in all categories in 1989. Other novels include 'Shadows' and 'Ancestors'.Hove's poetry anthologies include'Up In Arms', 'Red Hills of Home', 'Rainbows in the Dust', and 'BlindMoon. Currently, Chenjerai Hove is Guest Writer of the City of Stavanger, Norway.
#3
BROWNING
My week as a poet-activist-mother
A big week in this life. Background: I am the coordinator of DC Poets Against the War and we are planning a festival of poetry of witness, to be held in DC in March, 2008. It’s a big step for us – we haven’t done anything on this scale previously. But we’ve lined up many of our favorite poets who write poetry engaged with the world: Ethelbert, of course, and Lucille Clifton, Naomi Shihab Nye, Joy Harjo, Galway Kinnell, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Mark Doty, Patricia Smith, and many others. The excitement is growing.
But we didn’t have a name. It’s been challenging, with many brainstorming sessions, some fueled by caffeine, some by alcohol. I’ve read endless poems by Langston Hughes, Essex Hemphill, June Jordan, Walt Whitman, Muriel Rukeyser, Gwendolyn Brooks, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich. Nothing had popped for me. I suggested finally Provocations: Poetry of Witness and, given the lack of anything else, folks were starting to warm to it. It wasn’t ideal, but I was feeling desperate: the deadline for copy for an ad in the AWP program book (for the 2007 AWP conference in Atlanta) was looming for Friday and we needed a name.
Then Tuesday, I had my monthly breakfast ritual with Ethelbert: I pick him up at 8:15 and we get breakfast at a café and talk the many overlapping poetry and personal issues in our lives. This month we chose Savory in Takoma Park – it’s quiet and we’re not likely to run into people we know. In the basement room, Ethelbert challenges me to try one more time, to find a name for the festival rooted in a poem by one of our forebears. I am in despair, but I know he’s right : something more lyrical would be better and would be an immediate entrée to the themes of the festival, if we could invoke a poet model from the past.
So, after dropping E at Howard U., I set myself up at Busboys & Poets and read all day (until 2:30 that is, when I have to leave to pick up my son and go grocery shopping, as Tuesday has been my Baseball Mom day, the afternoon of Little League practice – until this week, when the season is finally over). I read every poem Langston Hughes wrote and in the 1930s and ‘40s. I read more Rukeyser. I write down a number of excerpts from both poets. (Read them on my blog at:
http://sarahbrowning.blogspot.com/.) I go home to think.
Over the next two days, the possible names percolate. Finally, Thursday morning I make a choice and it is done: Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation and Witness. Here is the citation from Langston Hughes:
Don’t you hear this hammer ring?
I’m gonna split this rock
And split it wide!
When I split this rock,
Stand by my side.
I email it around for comment. Everyone likes it! We are done. Now, of course, I have to write copy for the ad for the AWP program book and get it to the designer (we got an extension…); write the copy for the web site and get it to the web designer (both these lovely people are volunteering: Nancy Bratton and Michael Heroux, respectively – all praises); contact all the poets who’ve committed to participate; write the fundraising letter; write myriad grant proposals; reserve the URL, etc., etc. It’s exciting and terrifying. I go to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts on December 8 for two weeks and the list of things to do for the festival before I leave scares me.
But as Ethelbert reminded me at breakfast, this is the life I want to be living. On Monday morning, I got together with my friend Yael to write and she wrote the most moving, painful, and beautiful poem about torture. How is that possible? She did it. I wrote about my son spraining his ankle in his last little league game of the season, sliding into third. My second baseball poem, the first written last year about not standing during the singing of God Bless America at RFK Stadium during the second inning stretch. I simply can’t ask a god I don’t believe in to bless the country that is exacting untold suffering on another country. And yet, sitting while everyone around me stood felt only like a gesture. The poem, still in the notebook, wrestles with that uneasy feeling. Perhaps I am still uneasy; the poem is still in the notebook.
Wednesday evening DC PAW gave a reading with Esther Iverem at the Shepherd Park Library on Georgia Avenue for Veterans’ Day. It’s a beautiful neighborhood library and everyone should use it more. We were late getting a group together to read and late publicizing the reading but still had a good crowd of 15 or so. A poet new to us all, Dr. Kyi May Kaung, an exile from Burma, read for the first time with the group. Very moving – in a straightforward voice, with simple language, she detailed the daily experience of living under, and resisting, dictatorship: the fear, the unknowing, the not-writing-down. Esther also read and so did Richard Peabody. I discovered that they were meeting for the first time. It is striking how often this work for peace brings people together – it gives me great pleasure.
Tonight, Saturday, I’m just back from a party for Brandon Johnson’s new book Love’s Skin, published in the Hilary Tham Capital Collection by the Word Works. Brandon gave a terrific reading – his poems are mini-movies, whole stories wrapped into poem packages a page or two long. I loved the characters, their voices, the rhythm of the language that moved them through the problem to the solution, however the poem might resolve. My own book of poems, Whiskey in the Garden of Eden, is forthcoming in the Capital Collection next year, which adds to the thrill. Congratulations, Brandon.
#4
OCHESTER
Hi Ethelbert,
Thanks for inviting me to participate in the EM network.
I've been working today at some finishing touches on UNRECONSTRUCTED, my new and selected poems that'll be published next fall by Autumn House, and on an anthology of poets in the Pitt Series that'll be out next spring.
I think it's a terrific, readable book, and would urge folks to check it out for possible class use:American Poetry Now: The Pitt Poetry Series Anthology (early 2007):Jan Beatty, Wanda Coleman, Billy Collins, Denise Duhamel, Russell Edson,Lynn Emanuel, Edward Field, Barbara Hamby, Bob Hicok, Etheridge Knight, TedKooser, Larry Levis, Sharon Olds, Alicia Ostriker, Cathy Song, Dean Young,Afaa Michael Weaver, David Wojahn and many others in the Pitt Poetry Series.
After that, Britt & I visited my mother (as I mentioned before, she'll be100 in January); she does have onset Alzheimer's but right now she's still as contrary and pissy as ever--she blames the nurses for soiling her diapers.
And we listened to the Pitt football team go down in flames(again). But this whole week we've had a good glow about the election.America is enough to break your heart and drive you crazy--a step and a halfback for every two steps forward--but it looks as though, possibly, it maybe starting once again to heal itself after this terrible waste of life and money under evil monopoly capitalism.
And speaking of evil: we finally got rid of Senator Rick Santorum in Pennsylvania, the only human being I've ever met who literally looks like a prick with ears. As old as I am, and I'm old enough--as Charlie Rangel says about himself--not to buy green bananas, I've never been more pleased about the outcome of a Senate race.
I miss you, man, and hope to see you soon.All good wishes--Ed
