Nikki Giovanni bequeaths copyrights to Virginia Tech

BLACKSBURG — Poet and activist Nikki Giovanni plans to turn over her copyrights to Virginia Tech after her death.

President Charles Steger said yesterday that Giovanni and Virginia Fowler, both English professors at Virginia Tech, have pledged a joint donation to the school’s $1 billion capital campaign that includes copyrights to Giovanni’s literary works.

The joint gift includes an $800,000 bequest. The university will become the trustee of Giovanni’s estate and will own the copyrights to her 30 books, recordings and other materials.

English department chairwoman Carolyn Rude says royalties and fees from the copyrights will support a visiting arts and humanities speaker series and a student-opportunities fund.
[source...]

Vanderbilt’s Pruitt named a Top 40 poet by Essence

A poet at Vanderbilt University was named one of "Forty Favorite Poets" by Essence magazine in honor of its 40th anniversary.

Stephanie Pruitt, who will receive her Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing May 14 at Vanderbilt’s Commencement ceremonies, was listed alongside such luminaries as Maya Angelou, Lucille Clifton, former Poet Laureate Rita Dove, Marilyn Nelson and Gwendolyn Brooks. 

“I did a double take when I saw my name in the proximity of so many of the writers I have long admired,” Pruitt said. “It’s nice to be recognized and I take this as a nod that I’m moving in the right direction, but success for me comes one poem at a time.”

Pruitt, a native of Nashville, has received the 2010 Academy of American Poets Prize and the 2009 Sedberry Prize, and was a finalist for Poet and Writers’ Maureen Egen Award.

Her current projects include a manuscript of historically inspired poems exploring the lives of two half-sisters from 1840-1860 as they escape from a Middle Tennessee plantation and settle in the North. In preparation for writing the narrative and lyric poems in her collection, Pruitt did research in a number of historic sites and archives around the United States, many in Tennessee including Belle Meade Plantation and The Hermitage, President Andrew Jackson's home.  Her poems present a constructed narrative with a backbone of documented, historical places and occurrences.

Here’s an excerpt from Pruitt’s poem Black Pepper 1841:

Knowing one day, others may run
cook stows it away
in apron pockets as she prepares
a meal she will not sit down to eat

Teaspoons of crushed black gold
coating boot heels with hope
that it will defeat the hounds
Let those well seasoned feet run.

Vanderbilt launched its MFA creative writing program in 2006 and has already won national attention. Poets & Writers magazine ranked the program No. 18 in the country in its November/December 2009 issue. The magazine evaluated programs in eight categories, including size, length of study, cost of living, teaching load and curriculum focus. P&W found Vanderbilt – which admits three poetry and three fiction writers to its program each year – to have the fourth most selective program in the country. 

Faculty in the MFA creative writing program includes fiction writers Tony Earley, Lorraine Lopez, Alice Randall and Nancy Reisman; poets Mark Jarman, Sandy Solomon, Beth Bachman, Kate Daniels and Rick Hilles; and nonfiction writer Peter Guralnick.

For more information, visit http://www.vanderbilt.edu/english/creative_writing.
Media contact: Jim Patterson, (615) 322-NEWS
jim.patterson@vanderbilt.edu
[source...]

Derek Walcott, Man of Many Voices

Illustration by Joe Ciardiello

An Afternoon with Derek Walcott

01 May 2010
Time: 15:00
Venue: Lakeside Theatre

The University of Essex is proud to present Visiting Professor of Poetry Derek Walcott.

In the first visit of his two-year appointment to the post, the Nobel prize-winning Caribbean poet will be in conversation with Professor Marina Warner and Dr Maria Cristina Fumagalli of the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies. This afternoon, Derek Walcott will be looking back at more than sixty years of writing, painting, theatre directing and teaching, as well as reading from his latest volume of poetry, White Egrets.

"In these exquisitely poised and potent poems, language stands as the thinnest possible lens between the poet and the world he describes..."

The Guardian on White Egrets
Tickets: Admission Free. Please reserve in advance.

Booking information:
Ticket Hotline: 01206 573948
Book Online: Online booking is currently being updated.
In person: Lakeside Theatre, Square 5
Monday – Friday 8.30 – 4, Saturday 10 – 2

Mercury Theatre, Colchetser
Mon – Saturday 10- 8
[source...]

Calabash 2010

Get the goods at Geoffrey's place.

Happy birthday, Chinua!

akifreetheword.wordpress.com

Play list, thanks to Nancy

Keziah Jones has a sound all by himself. I actually think this is an incredible song, but I like another one better: "All Praises" -- but no video with decent sound out there. Another song, "Wet Questions", is a marvel as well. Keziah used to play in the Paris underground before becoming famous (with "Rhythm is Love"). As a matter of fact, he was back last year in the Paris underground where he did a concert gratis, I guess for old time's sake. Great guitarist.
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Steve Kekana is a blind South African, late '70s hit-maker. He has rhythm and had the voice to back it all up with. He's of the same generation (and sound) as Babsy Mlangeni and Mpharanyane and The Cannibals.
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TKZee are the front group (IMHO) in as far as Kwaito goes. Kwaito is the South African sound of the '00s. If you've seen the film "Tsotsi" then you have heard and been struck by Kwaito. If you haven't seen "Tsotsi" then you should. The word itself means thug. Zola is another Kwaito artist that I have come to appreciate. He has a mature sound, despite the fact that the genre is relatively young. Check out Mdlwembe, from the movie "Tsotsi".
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Shosholoza, the unofficial national anthem of South Africa. I saw these guys wearing gumboots and hoped they would gumboot-dance (liphotha in Sesotho), but I guess that was for a different stage of their concert. I used to belong to a choir just like this one, but because it was in Lesotho, no white choir-mates. And we did liphotha a well.
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Sankomota is a Lesotho group that close to every Mosotho will have grown up with. The lead singer is Tšepo Tšola, who started here, then toured the world with other singers, such as the great Hugh Masekela. Tšepo is back in Lesotho, sober and clean, and making music more than ever. Some time ago I posted a tune of his that I enjoy, called Joala. And there you have it, a play list that I thought of when my pal Nancy sent me some songs I enjoyed. I hope that you, Nancy, will in turn like these.
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I am not in love
But I'm open to persuasion
East or West
Where's the best
For romancing

With a friend
I can smile
But with a lover
I could hold my head back
I could really laugh
Really laugh

Thank you
You took me dancing
'Cross the floor
Cheek to cheek
But with a lover
I could really move
Really move
I could really dance
Really dance
Really dance
Really dance
I could really move
Really move
Really move
Really move

Now if I can feel the sun
In my eyes
And the rain on my face
Why can't I
Feel love

I can really love
Really love
Really love
Really love
Really love
Love love love love
Love love love love

Now I got all
The friends that I want
I may need more
But I shall just stick to those
That I have got
With friends I still feel
So insecure

Little darling I believe you could
Help me a lot
Just take my hand
And lead me where you will
No conversation
No wave goodnight
Just make love
With affection

Sing me another love song
But this time
With a little dedication
Sing it, sing it
You know that's what I like
Once more with feeling
Give me love
Give me love
Give me love
Love...

This is the kind of stuff we were listening to as 15 to 18 year olds in Lesotho. And I can't erase none of it from my mind. We liked everything, in fact, and the airwaves were filled with this sound, and that of Bob Marley and Peter Tosh, local sounds such as Hugh Masekela (whom I'm seeing at the end of next month... yay!) and Harari and Jonathan Butler (Stevie Wonder doing a Jonathan tune), Abdullah Ibrahim, jazz, blues, a traditional Sesotho sound called Famo, R&B, Motown, the philly sound, etc. And then I left home. But the sounds and with them smells, looks, are still here.

The Rabbit with the Droopy Ear

Dear Michael (2)

The wound cannot close; language is a formal exit
is what exits from the wound it documents.
The wound is deaf to what it makes; is deaf
to exit and to all, and that is its durable self,
to be a mayhem that torments a city. The sound
comes first and then the word like a wave
lightning and then thunder, a glance then a kiss
follows and destroys the footprint, mark of the source.
It is the source that makes the wound, the wound
that makes a poem. It is defeat that makes
a poem sing of the light and that means to sing
for a while. The soldier leans on his spear.
He sings a song of leaning; he leans on a wound
to sing of other things. Names appear on a page
gentian weeds that talk to gentian words, oral
to local, song talk to sing (Singh), and so
he goes on with the leaning and the talking.
The wound lets him take a breath for a little
because it is a cycle of sorts, a system or a wheel
a circle that becomes a wheel and is not a sound
at all, the idea of a sound and the sound again
of an idea that follows so close; say light
and then is there light or a wound, an idea of being
itself in the thing sound cancels. Is there ever a spear
a soldier that leans in, a song that he sings
waiting for a battle? This soldier is only a doorway.
Say that book is a door. I say the soldier
and the local, the word and the weed, the light
and the kiss make a mayhem and a meeting.
So then that the voice may traverse a field
it transmits the soldier on a causeway to the city
leaning on a spear and talking, just after the wound opens
that never creaks and closes, and has no final page.
© Mark McMorris
[source...]


Mark McMorris was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1960. He holds several degrees from Brown University, including an M.A. in Creative Writing (Poetry), an M.A. in Greek and Latin Studies, an M.A. Comparative Literature, and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature.

His collections of poetry include Entrepôt (Coffee House Press, 2010); The Café at Light (Roof Books, 2004); The Blaze of the Poui (2003), which was selected by C. D. Wright for the 2002 Contemporary Poetry Series and was also a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; The Black Reeds(1997), winner of the Contemporary Poetry Series prize from the University of Georgia Press; Moth-Wings(1996), and Palinurus Suite(1992).

Carolyn M. Rodgers: 14 Dec '45 -- 2 April '10 (RIP)

Carolyn M. Rodgers grappled with issues of African-American identity and culture with poems that took first flight during the vibrant Black Arts Movement of the late 1960s.

A longtime educator and resident of Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood, Ms. Rodgers, 69, died of cancer Friday, April 2, in hospice care at Mercy Hospital, said her sister Nina R. Gordon.

As a young woman on the South Side, Ms. Rodgers studied with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks and at workshops put together the Organization of Black American Culture, a noted literary collective.

She quickly became recognized for poetry that delved into the problems and challenges facing African-American women while ultimately celebrating women's ability to overcome.
[more...]

Testament

child,
in the august of your life
you come barefoot to me
the blisters of events
having worn through to the
soles of your shoes.

it is not the time
this is not the time

there is no such time
to tell you
that some pains ease away
on the ebb & toll of
themselves.
there is no such dream that
can not fail, nor is hope our
only conquest.
we can stand boldly in burdening places (like earth here)
in our blunderings, our bloomings
our palms, flattened upward or pressed,
an unyielding down.
© Carolyn M. Rodgers
[source...]

Canopic Jar 24

Canopic Jar #24 is out, ladies and gentlemen, and the editors are proud to have such a diverse population of writers. The issue features:

p o e t r y
charles.ghigna
christine.reilly
ciretta.carroll
curt.eriksen
elisabeth.serafimovski
grace.andreacchi
greg.kosmicki
joyce.ellen.davis
liesl.jobson
mathew.staunton
rethabile.masilo
tammy.ho.lai-ming & reid.mitchell
tim.pfau


p r o s e
jeff.bumpus
nelson.l.eshleman
roger.real.drouin
will.d.campbell
william.alexander


v i s u a l a r t
allison.acree.hunt
césar.biojo
dale short


We are already accepting submissions for Canopic Jar #25, yes, twenty-five. So sharpen those pencils and send us that work. Remember, we accept work by e-mail or by snail-mail, we accept previously published material, as long as you tell us where it has appeared, and we like to respond quickly. Now, to work.

Poem of the Day

King Memorial

The Cross

This is how it happened
Jesus Christ had to die
No matter what
He just had to die
Pontius Pilate kept saying: no
Caiaphas pressured him so much
That the man Jesus was condemned
Since he had not eaten for two days
He was overcome by weakness
Walking up Mount Olive
With two pieces of wood on his back
He kept falling down and getting up
Pilate was watching him with pity
All the Roman soldiers were watching too
When at that time a Black man happened to pass
Simon the Cyrene
A big Black man
As big as Paul Robeson
Happened to pass
He looked at the scene through the eyes of a Black man
Pilate felt what was in that Black man’s heart
And signaled the soldiers
They all fell upon Simon
And mercilessly beat him
Then they ordered him: take up the cross and carry it
Simon picked it up with one hand
He took it from the white man
He ran with it
He started to sing
He began to dance
He danced and sang
He ran up the hill
Leaving everyone behind
He ran down the hill, he sang, danced and danced
He made the cross turn on his head
He threw the cross in the air
The cross stayed in the air and whirled by itself
Everybody yelled: Miracle
The cross came back down
And Simon caught it
He danced his head out
Giving it back to Jesus
Since that time, whenever a cross is too heavy
A burden too great for the white man
They call a black man to carry it
And then we sing and dance
We beat the drum and play the flute
Our backs are strong
We take the cross and carry
Take and carry the sins and crimes of the world.
© Felix Morisseau-Leroy
Translated by Marie-Marcelle B Racine
[source...]

In the Village(by Derek Walcott)

I

I came up out of the subway and there were
people standing on the steps as if they knew
something I didn't. This was in the Cold War,
and nuclear fallout. I looked and the whole avenue
was empty, I mean utterly, and I thought,
The birds have abandoned our cities and the plague
of silence multiplies through their arteries, they fought
the war and they lost and there's nothing subtle or vague
in this horrifying vacuum that is New York. I caught
the blare of a loudspeaker repeatedly warning
the last few people, maybe strolling lovers in their walk,
that the world was about to end that morning
on Sixth or Seventh Avenue with no people going to work
in that uncontradicted, horrifying perspective.
It was no way to die, but it's also no way to live.
Well, if we burnt, it was at least New York.

II

Everybody in New York is in a sitcom.
I'm in a Latin American novel, one
in which an egret-haired viejo shakes with some
invisible sorrow, some obscene affliction,
and chronicles it secretly, till it shows in his face,
the parenthetical wrinkles confirming his fiction
to his deep embarrassment. Look, it's
just the old story of a heart that won't call it quits
whatever the odds, quixotic. It's just one that'll
break nobody's heart, even if the grizzled colonel
pitches from his steed in a cavalry charge, in a battle
that won't make him a statue. It is the hell
of ordinary, unrequited love. Watch these egrets
trudging the lawn in a dishevelled troop, white banners
trailing forlornly; they are the bleached regrets
of an old man's memoirs, printed stanzas.
showing their hinged wings like wide open secrets.

III

Who has removed the typewriter from my desk,
so that I am a musician without his piano
with emptiness ahead as clear and grotesque
as another spring? My veins bud, and I am so
full of poems, a wastebasket of black wire.
The notes outside are visible; sparrows will
line antennae like staves, the way springs were,
but the roofs are cold and the great grey river
where a liner glides, huge as a winter hill,
moves imperceptibly like the accumulating
years. I have no reason to forgive her
for what I brought on myself. I am past hating,
past the longing for Italy where blowing snow
absolves and whitens a kneeling mountain range
outside Milan. Through glass, I am waiting
for the sound of a bird to unhinge the beginning
of spring, but my hands, my work, feel strange
without the rusty music of my machine. No words
for the Arctic liner moving down the Hudson, for the mange
of old snow moulting from the roofs. No poems. No birds.

IV

The Sweet Life Café

If I fall into a grizzled stillness
sometimes, over the red-chequered tablecloth
outdoors of the Sweet Life Café, when the noise
of Sunday traffic in the Village is soft as a moth
working in storage, it is because of age
which I rarely admit to, or, honestly, even think of.
I have kept the same furies, though my domestic rage
is illogical, diabetic, with no lessening of love
though my hand trembles wildly, but not over this page.
My lust is in great health, but, if it happens
that all my towers shrivel to dribbling sand,
joy will still bend the cane-reeds with my pen's
elation on the road to Vieuxfort with fever-grass
white in the sun, and, as for the sea breaking
in the gap at Praslin, they add up to the grace
I have known and which death will be taking
from my hand on this chequered tablecloth in this good place.

© Derek Walcott
[source...]