Tree Burning
Looking to find be two good hands
from one good god almighty – Ruth Forman
My fingers march the black forest,
your unkempt afro as perfect
as olive leaves, hold my tips tight
together, rub out imperfections
in the mud of your day, work them
in the shape of your chartered roads,
color-coding your mapped back
in case some traveler gets lost trying
to journey you, smooth you out.
- Melanie Henderson
Dash
Brief line behind birth,
wet paste wiped from unfirm scalp,
pubescent toads, divorce disgust,
marriage & more black lines,
thickly short, levitating flower
of gestation longer than love’s lifespan,
as ominous as its end, you bloom
my adoration of living poets;
dead poets have diminished
your boldness, gravity, a natural tear
for the wonder of what color sun
will succumb to your right hip.
- Melanie Henderson
Thoughts on ‘82
The year I was born, my grandmother hummed so many bridges between jazz and blues under the weight of thick black eyeliner and the blue shadow of U Street days. The younger music got muffled under laps of the rosary.
In between the first and second job and 3 square meals for me and my older brother, my mom lit our house’s yellowing panels with new crooners (and squealers): Miki Howard, Taja Seville. My mother’s blues was Phyllis Hyman. I learned the mood of a color both exuberant and dark as the bottom of the Anacostia River. There was always blues-influenced GoGo, but blue is not what I remembered about GoGo. It was the gray corners, the thick, white plastic buckets, the green, red or ash-colored milk crates, the sticks (and sometimes, they were just thick twigs), a brother all piled on the corner near Woody’s or somewhere in Chinatown. The blues was there, but it seems only Chuck knew it.
My encounters were brief until I slowly sought new encounters with old voices, instruments, Miles, Billie, Coltrane. They were distant Aunts and Uncles who I had heard of but never knew, kin whose blues wasn’t mine. When I first heard a recording of Hathaway singing, For All We Know, the startling tears let me know Janet Jackson hadn’t been doing her job though Pleasure Principle and Nasty were still the jams. The Cosby Show intros and outros sang to me sometimes when I was busier following the swing of little Rudy’s thick fuzzy ponytail and digging Denise’s shoulder-baring tops.
Somehow blues, jazz became a mechanism for writing, a guiding rhythm for what I perceived as poetry. I didn’t recognize any blues or jazz in my own, but others recognized it in poems about caviar and cognac or Kim Jong Il. The fact that it was felt made me want to up my game, dig more blue-ly. I can’t funk with the ancestors lightly.
What kind of sorrow is worthy of consumption, bedtime whistles from saxes? I didn’t know. Still don’t. There’s something missing and there when I write, when we write. It’s there heavy at the bellies of our fingertips, in the arch of phalanges like faith, a belief in darling remnants or blue-black angels.
- Melanie Henderson
Washington, DC Poetry Tour
Our nation’s capital through the eyes of its great poets.
(Courtesy of the Poetry Foundation)
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/article.html?id=238226
——
NEWS FROM POETRY FOUNDATION
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE November 19, 2009
Poetry Foundation Launches Poetry Tour of Washington, DC
Free downloadable audio tour shines a literary light on the nation’s capital.
CHICAGO-The Poetry Foundation is pleased to announce the launch of the Washington, DC, Poetry Tour. The interactive tour, freely available at www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrytour <http://thepoetryfoundation.createsend3.com/t/r/l/huhudj/l/r> , reveals our nation’s capital through the eyes of its great poets, including Walt Whitman, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Elizabeth Bishop, among many others. From the hallowed halls of the federal buildings to neighborhood side streets, the tour features poems written in and about DC, as well as original photographs by poet Thomas Sayers Ellis.
Narrator and inaugural poet Elizabeth Alexander leads the tour from the stacks of the Library of Congress to Civil War battlefields to the Capitol steps, from the National Zoo to the U Street Corridor to the Busboys & Poets Café. Archival recordings from canonical poets including Langston Hughes, Robert Hayden, Sterling Brown, Randall Jarrell, and Ezra Pound chronicle DC’s rich literary history, while contemporary poets such as Linda Pastan, Quique Avilés, Yusef Komunyakaa, Naomi Ayala, A.B. Spellman, and Jane Shore share their experiences, through both poetry and commentary, of national monuments and monumental poets alike.
The DC Poetry Tour presents the development of the capital’s poetry scene over the last century and a half, from its interplay with musicians Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, and Ben Webster, to the creation of the office of poet laureate, to the legendary literary salons hosted by Georgia Douglas Johnson, to the multifaceted work of numerous poet-activist groups. Local poets and scholars-including E. Ethelbert Miller, director of the Afro-American Studies Resource Center at Howard University; David Gewanter of Georgetown University; and Kim Roberts, editor of Beltway magazine-provide the framework for understanding the moments and movements that have shaped DC’s literary culture.
Listeners to the tour, which includes 34 stops throughout the National Mall and Northwest DC, learn that Washington is not only our government’s headquarters but an important American literary capital as well. Historical images and artifacts provide a glimpse into DC’s storied past, while photographs by poet Thomas Sayers Ellis, who was born and raised in Washington, give viewers an inside look at DC’s neighborhoods and people. Poem text is presented along with original audio recordings and archival images, as listeners step into the national arenas that continue to inspire poets today.
“Tracing the history of American poetry against the culture and geography of our national capital helps readers develop a better sense of our shared literary heritage,” notes Anne Halsey, media director of the Poetry Foundation. “Poetry lovers visiting Washington can download free audio tours and maps to take guided poetry walking tours of the National Mall or Northwest DC-but you don’t have to be in DC to explore the city’s literary history. The full multimedia tour can also be experienced virtually at poetryfoundation.org/poetrytour.”
Beginning at the Library of Congress-the home of the first Poetry Consultant, Archibald MacLeish-the tour discusses the contributions of such heralded poets as Robert Lowell, Robert Frost, and William Carlos Williams. MacLeish declares, “A poem should not mean / But be.” Later, Williams fashions a modernist American poetry: “Never reverse a phrase that is your language as you speak it . . . Then you’ve started to create a culture in your place as you are.”
Contemporary poets from throughout the Beltway also present poems. Poets such as Brian Gilmore, who relates his personal interest in Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Myra Sklarew, who discusses May Miller, recognize the influence of their predecessors, reflecting upon them as President John F. Kennedy did when he spoke of Robert Frost: “Our national strength matters; but the spirit which informs and controls our strength matters just as much. This was the special significance of Robert Frost.”
The Washington, DC, Poetry Tour, an original production of the Poetry Foundation created in collaboration with Tierra Innovation, was written and produced by Curtis Fox. Special collaborators on the project include Grace Cavalieri, Katie Davis, Patricia Gray, E. Ethelbert Miller, and Beltway magazine editor Kim Roberts.
For more information, go to http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrytour <http://thepoetryfoundation.createsend3.com/t/r/l/huhudj/l/y>
Anatomy of the GoGo Shake
Rock your GoGo : hips more bottom than Louisiana : strut : grandma says slow your gogo : magic lifting off dark flesh : flow gogo : vibrating base drawn : about silhouettes : inky, stinky shadows : rippling from speakers : the stage resituated in a woman’s freedom song : linoleum spreading for sweat : the most African promise : in her pocket : vulnerable : open-palmed praise : of thick labor : rhythm freed from tall standing sugar : canes : feet feed from bloody soil : rise up as water : a xylem trance : and Big G calls your name, “goddess of a water dance.”
- Melanie Henderson
The Root Rewrites the Western Canon
http://www.theroot.com/multimedia/root-rewrites-western-canon
Notes from a Failed Hand Dancer
Maybe too young to know a rhythm : to know : rhythm is dynamic : made : not taught : who dares teach steps : sedentary as mountains — to aim for spirituals : about big rocks : gospels : might be : a better angle : baptisms : the mountaintop : welcome to a church of faithfuls : gathered about a mountain’s low old hips : gleefully emptying eye sockets : exchange for dipped hands : guiding : trusted hands : a mass of dignified followers : asking to be lead : knowing an inspirited sway : a swing of robed bodies : will follow : shook pews : balls of feet : weighted : unseated at the right hand of a brother : the float is not about tippies : toes sprinkling : dew eating a Sunday morning of porous earth : grabbing for parted light.
- Melanie Henderson
(left to right: katey richie, derrick weston brown, fred joiner, truth thomas, randall's long-time friend, melanie henderson, randall horton, d'ana downing)
