Poetry of the 1970s part 2

Clark Coolidge and audience
(including Lee Ann Brown and Eileen Myles)
photograph by Ben Friedlander

On Saturday morning the conference moved from the Orono campus to the Colby College Museum of Art, where there were exhibitions by Alex Katz and Joe Brainard, and plenary readings by Bernadette Mayer and Clark Coolidge, as well as a gallery talk by Ann Lauterbach on Joe Brainard's Nancy works. Mayer and Coolidge have both been closely associated with the "New York School of Poetry" and "Language Poetry," both of them having appeared in An Anthology of New York Poets (1970) and In the American Tree (1986), seminal anthologies representing the two "movements" respectively (the latter published by the National Poetry Foundation, incidentally). I don't imagine that any school or movement in the world of alternative poetry would not want either of these two poets to be associated with them, such are their achievements and their reputations. Their readings befitted their status. It was a great treat to hear them.

I didn't get to really see the Alex Katz exhibition. As always at this conference, there was much more offered than one had time to enjoy. I did view the Joe Brainard exhibition. I've been a Brainard fan forever and a fan of Nancy since Terry Winch turned me on to Ernie Bushmuller long, long ago. Not for nothing did the second issue of Dog City have Nancy on its cover, shown via power-point by Joan Retallack during the DC poets panel. Ann Lauterbach's gallery talk was a tender and moving reminiscence, as well as a finely detailed account of the Nancy works. It was another very memorable moment.

Ann Lauterbach
photograph by Tom Orange

Back at Orono, I attended the 4:30 p.m. panel "All Middle": Tom Raworth and Ted Greenwald, where Kit Robinson talked about (and read from the work of) Ted Greenwald, and Keith Tuma talked about Tom Raworth's Writing. These were two perfect matches. Like Clark Coolidge and Bernadette Mayer, Greenwald and Robinson fit within both New York School and Language Poetry parameters, although I don't believe that Kit has ever been speciifcally associated with the New York School; come to think of it, I'm not sure that Ted has, either. Of course, the key is disjunctiveness, maybe less obviously so in Greenwald; and both poets have tremendous wit that runs the range from disarming to fierce. Kit's talk about Ted's world was more than a reading, it was a kind of personal recognition of value; it brought to mind the focus of meditation in the first volume of The Grand Piano, the collaborate memoir by ten poets associated with San Francisco: love. Tom Orange has posted this video clip of Robinson reading from Ted Greenwald's You Bet. I just wished that Ted had been there to read some of Kit's work.

Keith Tuma and Kit Robinson
(+ Clark Coolidge right)
photograph by Diane Tuma

Anyone with more than a passing familarity with Tom Raworth's work would be familiar with Keith Tuma's attention to it. Just google his name and it will lead you to various examples of this, or, better still, read his "Collaborating with 'Dark Senses' " in Removed for Further Study: The Poetry of Tom Raworth, edited by Nate Dorward. Tuma's talk was a good complement to Robinson's: intimate, contemplative, and open rather than instructive, regarding Raworth's Writing. It was possible to sense in Tuma's approach a correlative to Tom's plain refusal to make himself the subject of his work, as respondent at this panel. As noted above, Tuma and Raworth was a perfect match. What Tuma's presentation gave me was a sense of possibility, a generous investigation of Writing as a text that resisted contexualization, but invited reading.

Where could one go from here? Exhausted and energized at the same time, I went to the 4:30 plenary panel, Queering the 70's, to hear Dodie Bellamy ("The Feminist Writers' Guild"), Kevin Killian ("John Wieners' Transvestite Passion") and Eileen Myles ("Queerness, Perforamance and Prose").

Eileen Myles
at the Queering the '70s reading
photograph by Tom Orange

These three were amazingly, fully present. Each one of them was courageous in their presentation, displaying a degree of humanity that obliterated any division between self and text, celebrating the moment and its context, totally giving. Dodie Bellamy provided what was for me the most telling line of the conference, "Back then we answered each other's telephones," (fairly accurate paraphrase). It underlined the difference between then and now, between the community of the 1970s, when poets enjoyed the luxury of greater connection with each other and with some kind of meaningful struggle, and the 2000's, when such connections must overcome increasing isolation exemplified by the cell phone. All three brought passion and humor to their recitations of history, and they made it clear why we were all there at Orono. It was a magnificent performance.

The last event I attended was the 8:00 p.m. plenary poetry reading at Minsky Recital Hall. No one has more gravitas than Tom Raworth. No one is more admired and respected. No one is more intense as a reader. No one has sharper wit or greater social relevance. His reading of Writing was really pretty good. Yes it was. Writing would have to be on any list of brilliantworks of the 1970s, and this might have been its definitive reading.

Tom Raworth
photograph by Tom Orange

There was so much at the Orono conference that I missed and wished I hadn't: just in terms of my DC compatriots, Barry Alpert's presentation on his legendary magazine, Vort, Chris Nealon's presentation on John Ashbery, and Kaplan Harris on "The Small Press Traffic School of Dissimulation." I missed readings by Fred Wah, Dodie Bellamy, Kevin Killian, Eileen Myles, Jayne Cortez, Ann Lauterbach, Nicole Brossard, and Rae Armantrout. And so much more. Browsing through the Poetry of the 1970s program, I was so sorry to have missed so much.
But that was a tribute to the value of the conference. To paraphrase dialogue from the end of a less than spectacular Howard Hawks movie, when one character asked another if he thought history would remember something, another replied, "I know I'll never forget it."

Poetry of the 1970s part 1

Photograph by Tom Raworth

Tina and Peter and I arrived at Orono in the evening of Thursday, June 12, the second day of the Poetry of the 1970s conference, in time to hear Bruce Andrews read at 7:30 at Minsky Recital Hall. He gave a fantasic reading, more or less a retrospective of his work through four decades. The eloquence and the biting humor of his work has never been more evident than it has been in recent readings, including the last two he gave at DC/AC in Washington. In the first of these, last year, he read from his "White Dialect" project, using language culled from midwestern vernacular, and in the second, this year, he presented another sequence based on Appalachian dialect. One goes to a reading by Bruce Andrews with all the expectations appropriate to his deserved reputation as someone whose body of work is a significant achievement in contemporary poetry. However, this does not prepare you for the experience of hearing him perform his dialect works. They are astonishing in their concentrated music and in their almost mystical delving into the depths of language. The text of Libretto from White Dialect Poetry may be found at /ubu editions There has been some discussion regarding social issues relating to the poet's attitude towards his sources, but this seems to me to be cavilling in the face of this extraordinary achievement.

Although I regretted having missed the reading given by Fred Wah on June 11, the reading given by Bruce seemed to me the perfect start for my experience of this event. I first read his work during my first months in the US when I was shown the initial series of chapbooks published by SOUP, including Bruce's Edge, and I continued to read his work from that point on.

Photograph by Tom Orange

I've heard him read many times in DC and in New York, and I know him some. There's no better representive of the poetry of the 1970s in my view. Also, the 1980s, 1990s & 2000s..

Barrett Watten, Steve Benson, Kit Robinson
photograph by Tom Orange

At 10:00 p.m. that Thursday evening in the Black Box Theater upstairs from Minsky Recital Hall, Barett Watten, Steve Benson and Kit Robinson read from The Grand Piano project, an experiment in collective memoir involving Rae Armantrout, Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Tom Mandel, Ted Pearson, Bob Perelman, Kit Robinson, Ron Silliman, and Barrett Watten, currently up to six of ten planned volumes. Like Bruce Andrews, these three poets and their Grand Piano cohort are famously associated with the creation of what became known as Language Poetry, a name that is useful in describing something that did not exist, actually, but was any number of events, positions, developments, etcetera. The Grand Piano project us all about recasting memory, memory as imagination, imagination as a collaborative ivvestigation. The reading was as much about a rendition of process as a rendition of text, complete with trading passages, overlaps, spontaneous composition being folded in, and I thought it was a riot, a gratifying riot, and, like the original texts, a perfect model of revisioning. There is an excellent report by Lytton Smith at thoughtmerge.

There was more of Barrett Watten at 10:30 a.m. on Friday morning, when he presented "Late Capitalism and Language Writing in the 1970s." I can't tell you what this was about, not because of any lack of clarity in the presentation, but because it was too perfectly integrated to allow a successful dismantling for the purpose of summary. The presentation was delivered under the designation, "Periodizing the 1970s" and one particular argument it contained was in resistance to the idea of Language Poetry as a period register or genre. I've gone to the Thesaurus three time already, writing this paragraph -- the anxiety of inaccuracy. Also, the presentation included a reading of Watten's poem "Tibet" and some well-worked power-point material. It was a completely exhilarating event, and this extended to the questions from the audience, most especially the first question, asked by Chris Nealon.

Barrett Watten at the banquet
Photograph by Tom Orange

The DC panel followed at 1:00 p.m., and at 2:30 p.m. I attended a panel titled "Fluxus, Intermedia, and Hypertext." This involved the one unhappy moment during the conference for me. Because of time restrictions, presentations by Patrick Durgin (on "Becoming Literature: Jackson Mac Low and the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E of Intermedia") and Kasey Mohammad (on "Bern Porter and Dick Higgins" Blank Structures and Found Poetics.") were cut short. Presented in abbreviated forms, these two statements whetted the appetite for more, given both the compelling material and the obviously outstanding work of the presenters. Patrick Durgin's work can be found here.

The 4:00 panel I attended was on Clark Coolidge, with presentations by Michael Golston, "Clark Coolidge and the Allegorical Imperative," Tom Orange, "The Uncollected Clark Coolidge," and Paul Stephens, "Coolidgean Ex-cavations: Landscape, Memory and Masculinity in the 1970s Poetry of Clark Coolidge," with Coolidge present as respondent. All three presentations were brilliant and absolutely convincing, but there was an amusing disconnect between the material presented and Coolidge's own perceptions, made evident by his response. Of course, this said less about the validity of the considerations of Golston, Orange and Stephens and more about their creativity. I came to Orono with some anxiety about the possibility of being exposed to academic posturing, but this was not the case. On the contrary, I always wanted more. Panels would end at a point where they might have started, at a point where extended discussion would have been in order, including this one, as well as Barrett Watten's after the comments/questions by Chris Nealon, Joshua Clover, Aaron Kunin and others, and the DC panel, expecially after the exhanges between Peter Inman, Barrett Watten and Bob Perelman. As Phil Metres asserted in his report on the conference, "Even though there is great beauty in the harmonies created at Orono (and there were also plenty of creative dissonances as well), a part of me always holds to the Blakean principle: There is no progression without contraries." I would have been happy to have had those harmonies and dissonances continued.

Around 7:00 p.m. I went back to my room and crashed like a house coming down.

The DC poets reading was at 11:00 p.m. in the Black Box Theater -- more about that in a separate post.

After the DC poets reading, I stuck around for the open reading, also in in the Black Box Theater, graced by the presence of Bill Howe. Rod Smith and Mel Nichols were among the readers, all of whom were more than worthy of full-length readings. My main regret regarding the conference was that I missed the other open readings. There was something about the poetry of the 2000s that gave great resonance to the poetry of the 1970s.

Bill Howe

photograph by Ben Friedlander

DC in the 1970s

Here is the substance of my talk during the DC panel at the Poetry of the 1970s conference at the University of Maine at Orono, somewhat extended.

I want to talk about validation.

I believe that during the 1970s we were the beneficiaries of a transition that had been going on for a long time. I’m talking about the shift from what had been an underground literature to what became an alternative poetry network. Among the crucial factors in this change were, first, a huge increase in the number of younger practicing poets during the 1960s, many of whom identified with the poetry and poetics that had been represented in Donald Allen’s anthology The New American Poetry. Second was the continued rise in popularity of public readings, which had begun with the celebrated performances of Dylan Thomas in America, and had blossomed with the advent of the Beat Generation. Third was the development of new and improved publication technologies such as offset printing and Xerox. Fourth was the intense interest in community fostered by the counter-culture. No doubt there were other factors, also.
(I have always preferred the term “alternative” to others such as “experimental” and “avant-garde,” because it is not a critical term but a descriptive one, referring to the publishing apparatus that allowed an separate poetry network to develop outside of the literary mainstream.

This new population of poets formed communities in cities across America (and in Britain and elsewhere), as well larger national and international communities independent of what Charles Bernstein has famously called “official verse culture.” During the time of the Beat Generation, the term “underground” was used to describe literature that was outside of the mainstream, known only to an “underground” audience until something of its form or content or both lead the established literary world to pay attention. Quite often it was a term used in a patronizing manner, intended to put whatever potentially offensive material was at hand in its place. This was the time of literary trials, when the publishers of such works as Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer, Howl and Lolita were prosecuted for obscenity. Validation at hat time came only via the established literary world, and was often critically qualified. By the 1970s, alternative poetry’s population was sufficiently developed to provide its own validation, with enough intellectual vigor and literary finesse to enter its own house justified.

It is impossible to talk about alternative poetry in Washington DC in the 1970s without talking about the Mass Transit readings above the Community Bookstore on P Street near Dupont Cirlce, and associated events and publications, such as Some Of Us Press and the reading series at the Pyramid Gallery, also on P Street, And it is equally impossible to talk about alternative poetry in Washington DC in the 1970s without recognizing the importance of Michael Lally, Lee Lally and Terence Winch, all of whom were crucial to the creation of the DC community, And it was at the time of Mass Transit in the early to middle 1970s that the poetry community was most closely aligned with the counter-culture. And it was the creativity and work of those involved at this time that made everything else possible.

What created such excitement and incredible energy during the 1970s in Washington was the fact that recognition and validation did not require endorsements from the established literary world. It was available through our own resources. Thanks to everyone and everything that had been represented in the New American Poetry we were all free of the oppressive conformity that had ruled poetry and writing previously. And as it was in Washington, so it was elsewhere in the US and abroad.

I believe that the alternative poetry network continued its transition to the point where it became to some extent a doppelgänger of the larger literary world. The enormous growth of Creative Writing programs at American universities created an ever-increasing flood of new, younger poets. The advent of Language Poetry with its emphasis on theory in some regards took alternative poetry back into the academy, previously one of the major resources of mainstream literary culture. As a result, alternative poetry has become a kind of demographic in which literary and academic careers are negotiated via alternative poetry publications, readings and so on. It is something of an industry now. This is not a complaint. I have the greatest respect for the younger generations of poets, those born in the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s. I think it is much tougher for them than it was for us who were born in the 1930s and 1940s and 1950s. In the 1970s there was a kind of intimacy in alternative poetry, a sense of shared projects and thinking, and even the illusion that one could pretty much have a sense of everything that was going on, and the knowledge of pretty much everyone who was involved. That was an illusion, of course, but it was possible to sustain it them. It would be nowhere near possible now.

As a footnote, I will say that my favorite personal account of the transition from underground to alternative poetry is in Aram Saroyan’s memoir, Friends in the World.
It was Aram who caused the most publicly dramatic conflict between alternative poetry and the established literary culture, when the latter was represented by President Ronald Reagan’s railing against “one word poems” being supported by the National Endowment for the Arts (soon thereafter to be eviscerated), because of his one word poem, “lighght.”

And as a footnote to my footnote, please know that Aram Saroyan’s Complete Minimal Poems is available from Ugly Duckling Presse.

DC at Orono

Retallack, Inman. Darragh, Lang, Dreyer, Rosenzweig
Photomerge by Tom Raworth

A group of DC poets (and DC expat poets) went up to Orono two weeks ago to participate in The National Poetry Foundation’s Conference on The Poetry of the 1970s, at the University of Maine. Tina Darragh, Lynne Dreyer, Peter Inman, Joan Retallack, Phyllis Rosenzweig and I constituted a panel to discuss Washington in the 1970s. The same group plus Diane Ward gave a reading. Kaplan Harris, Chris Nealon and Tom Orange presented papers. Rod Smith and Mel Nichols gave great support and read in one of the late night open readings. I was also glad to see Barry Alpert there. It was very gratifying to be there with everyone, and the whole conference was rewarding, inspiring, enlightening and fun. For me it was a completely new experience, since I’d never been to an academic conference before. Although I’ve taught at an art school for 40 years, I’m not an academic by training or inclination (not a pejorative statement). But this was just fantastic – a large gang of people all talking about and reading poetry. The one odd thing was how few women were involved. I’m not getting all PC here, it was just something you could not help noticing.

The conference schedule was intense. A typical day had five panels from 9:00 to 10:15 a.m. Then a single (plenary) panel from 10:30 a.m. to 1:00 p,m. Then five more panels at 2:30 p.m., and five more at 4:00 p.m. Following this, one (plenary) reading at 7:30 p.m. and another at 8:30 p.m. Then a group reading at 10:00 p.m. and open readings at 11:00 p.m. The fact that there were often five panels running simultaneously that you might want to attend was both frustrating and exciting. There are links to reports, photographs, and other material (including a link to ThoughtMesh where some of the papers presented at Orobo have been uploaded) at The National Poetry Foundation

I'm going to write about the DC panel and reading here and write about the conference in general elsewhere.

On Friday, June 13th at 1:00 p.m., there was the plenary panel: DC Poetry in the 1970s. Tom Orange introduced the panel. Joan Retallack presented a paper titled The New Spirit in Dog City, and remarks from the rest of the panel members followed, as well as questions and answers. Joan gave a really terrific account of the DC scene in the late 1970s, as expected, and ended with a powerpoint(?) display of pages from the two issues of Dog City magazine, which were published in 1977 and 1980 respectively. Peter and i had both prepared short statements and I had circulated mine to Joan and Tom and the rest of the panelists via email, but neither one of us read our statements. I felt totally anxious during the time before I was to have an opportunity to read, and I was particularly anxious about the possibility of my nervousnees being apparent to a room full of people that I so admired and respected, some of the best minds of my generation as it were (including the other panelists). Fortunately, I realized that I was feeling pressure to be something that I was not, and as soon as I decided to just be myself and to just talk, I was fine. I talked very well. We all did. The question and answer period was very lively. It was all very exhilarating. I loved it. And we finished on time, which was a serious rarity at the whole conference. My favorite moment came duringthe Q&A with a rhetorical question from Rod Smith. During my talk, I had mentioned that in DC during the Mass Transit days, the alternative poetry scene in DC was closely aligned with the counter-culture, at which point Peter interjected a remark (clearly humorous) that he had never used drugs during that time. Later, during the Q&A, Peter was engaged with Barrett Watten in a discussion of the apparently minimal interest shown in theory among the DC poets in the 1970s, at the end of which Rod asked Peter if he thought the fact that he had not taken drugs explained his lack of interest in theory back then.

I will compose an approximation (and slight extension) of what I said in my talk in a separate post.

Tina Darragh

Tina Darragh was the second DC poet I ever met. It was in London in 1972, when Tina came to London to record British poets for the Washington audiocassette poetry magazine, Black Box, as Andrea had done before her.

Jack,

Peter, and Tina

That was the connection. Andrea and I were living in a 3-bedroom house in Clapton, and the room Tina stayed in was my former room, a tiny room, with collages still on the walls, and so on, and Tina would write a poem called "The Poet's Room," which she would show to me years later. Tina seemed to be a very gracious young woman, warm, considerate and intelligent. I didn't know. Of course, I had no idea that Tina was soon to become one of my closest and most cherished friends of the next 35 years and beyond, or that she would be one of the poets that I would admire and respect so very much. I didn't know.

I didn't see Tina again until October, 1974, when Andrea and I returned to DC after a year in Berkeley. By that time, Tina had hooked up with my friend Pete (Peter Inman), and that was the beginning of a beautiful friendship (for me). I've been very gratified by the fact that Tina has received so much recognition in recent years. She deserves every bit of it. The magnitude of her achievements as a poet and of her generosity as a person warrant it.

Tina was born in 1950, and was raised in McDonald, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pittsburgh. She began writing when she was eighteen, and studied poetry at Trinity University in DC, where Michael Lally was teaching at the time. This lead to Tina's involvement in Mass Transit and the DC scene in general.

My sense of Tina's poetics reached critical mass during the readings that she and I did in Baltimore for a recording that was issued by Chris Mason on Widemouth Tapes under the title, Xa. Its's easy to recall the chant-like refrain, "just looking, just looking," and Tina's excursions into concentrated disassemblages of language. Tina's work is not a set of prescriptions for meaning, nor a set of designer accessories for your karma. It is more like a global weather system, complex. dynamic, multidrectional, unpredictable, a vast series of potential interactions. In that regard, her work is the opposite of P.'s work, to which it is connected in many ways. Tina's work is an open system, P.'s consists of closed systems. I don't know how true this is, in fact, but I'm going to do some reading and give it some thought.

Tina's first two books were sidestapled publications issued by Dry Imager, her own publishing venture. Both were roughly made collages. First came My First Play, published back to back with Michael Lally's Malenkov Takes Over. Here is a page:


The caption under the picture reads:

BIOLOGIST HAMILTON
Parthenogenesis on the roof.

The other two pieces of text are, "Just Us Girls" and Labortory Cheese."

Here's another page:

and here is the text from that page, enlarged:


There were hints of things to come, both in the undermining of conventional language structures and in the global social and political consciousness behind the words and images.
The came Living, a collaboration with Tim Dlugos, photobooth images, a recaptioned frame from the Nancy comicstrip, more bits of language, funny stuff.

Tina's final 1975 publication was my hands……to……myself, another Dry Imager moment. There were no dots in Tina's title, it's the only way I could indicate Tina's spacing. Describing this work as innovative is like describing James Brown as funky. It is a question of magnitude.

I always liked D. H. Lawrence’s pronouncement, “Trust the art, not the artist,” as well as Jack Spicer’s idea of the poet as a kind of radio, able to receive transmissions from the “invisible world,” I think he called it, as opposed to writing being all about “self-expression.” I like these ideas all the more these days, when people in the arts are obliged to be at least as serious about their “careers” as they are about their work. As far as Tina is concerned, it’s clear that she was tracking the same lines as the other poets who came to be associated with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, or, were receiving similar transmissions. What is most compelling to me now, rereading my hands to myself for the first time in a long while, and listening to Tina’s Xa recording, is how amazingly self-expressive Tina’s work was. That is to say, a Tina poem was a well made object/system of enormous energy, and a perfect expression of her character and personality. When one reads the first poem in my hands to myself, beginning, “just lookin’, just lookin’,” the rhythm of play between the word pairings of which the lines consist creates a thoroughly persuasive structure, based on dictionary progressions:

Charlie Chaplin / charge-a-plate
oatmeal / objet trouve
dictaphone / different
pidgin / piggyback
(the slashes indicate spaces that can’t be reproduced here).

This is all Tina enough, but when you hear her read the poem on the Xa recording, she interpolates the “just lookin’, just lookin’” phrase between each pairing, creating a more infectious and even more playful rhythm. So, in this case, I would say, “Trust the art and the artist,” because it is a perfectly well made object/system, and it is totally self-expressive, down to the social and political rage that’s always been in back of Tina’s work, and the unique Tina humor. This book was truly her debut as a poet, which is not to discount My First Play and Living. It’s extraordinary. Peter (Inman) now disavows his first book, What Happens Next (although I am deeply fond of it), and moved through a brief period of transition (P. Inman USA) to what became his “identity” as a poet. And to choose another poet from among Tina’s associates, Terence Winch’s Boning Up contains somewhat more conventional poetry than his signature works, which quickly followed. Tina emerged fully formed and rockin’.

The other factor that is clear to me after rereading my hands to myself and listening repeatedly to Xa, is the extent to which Tina creates a multiplicity of potential readings of each work, visually on the page, and vocally when she reads, and these two systems are in some ways kind of divergent. Of course, this idea might be applied quite comfortably to the work of many; but in Tina’s case it is emphatically true.

The year after that, 1976, Tina and Peter got married in McDonald. A small contingent from DC made the journey to Pennsylvania in two cars. When we arrived in McDonald, one of the cars stopped and someone went into a store and bought some rolling papers. By the time we arrived at Tina's home, they had already gotten the call, "The drug-addicts have arrived." It was a fabulous, unforgettable wedding. On the left side of the aisle were the massed factions of the Darragh tribe. The right side was almost empty, save for the small, huddled group of DC bohemian wannabes up front.

Paul, Pete, Tina, Potsy, Doug
Wedding day, 1976

Next came Pi in the Skye (Ferguson & Franzino), in 1980. Material from this text was also included in the Xa reading. Another element of the Darragh/Inman poetics interface begins to assert itself in this text: page as field, a convention given formal status by the poets of Projective Verse. In particular, "fragment of P.'s work -- Number One Son," looks a bit like a Charles Olson text. The visual element gets a good deal of emphasis in both Tina's and Peter's work. What's more, the vocabulary of "fragment" often resembles that of a P. Inman poem. Pi in the Skye is dedicated to "P. Inman and his work," so that it is, in effect, an extension of their marriage into the realm of poetics, a well-made marriage in which their practices would merge and diverge over the next 27 years (this far).

Listening to the sections of Pi in the Skye on Xa, you get a strong sense of Tina's expansiveness regarding connotation. She seems to be tripping through the linguistic mutations of the collective unconscious, like Deiphobe confronted by the spirits in Virgil's underwold, or like Greta Garbo in Queen Christina, rushing around the room, touching everything, so that she could install every object in her sense memory.

If the previous paragraph seems extravagant, or ridiculous, I don't mind. I don't mean to edit my thinking, looks like.

on the corner to off the corner was another debut for Tina, insofar as Douglas Messerli's Sun & Moon books were gathering prestige and Tina's publication in that series in 1981 was a step towards national recognition of her work. on the corner to off the corner was took its title from the Miles Davis recording, and has this inscription:

"in appreciation of Francis Ponge
for things that he has given us"

Here is a comment on Ponge's work, found at the library online:

"In the prose poems of Francis Ponge, coming as he does in an un-heroic age fashioned more by scientific than by classical studies, the direction is down rather than up, smaller rather than larger. The subjects of his allegories or fables belong to a lower world than that of the gods and heroes of antiquity, and are treated zoomorphically, as opposed to the anthropomorphism of an Aesop or a La Fontaine. However, like his Renaissance antecedents, he too is creating a new humanism. He states his purpose to be "a description-definition-literary art work" which, avoiding the drabness of the dictionary and the inadequacy of poetic description, will lead to a cosmogony, that is, an account - through the successive and cumulative stages of linguistic development - of the totality of man's view of the universe and his relationship to it."

http://www.kalin.lm.com/author.html

The 26 sections of on the corner to off the corner was do fit with "a description-definition-literary art work," as Tina rambles more-or-less ecstatically through her alphabet as cosmology. And the zoomorphic / anthromorphic aspect speaks durectly to Tina's informed humanism. Peter and Tina have shown consistent vigilance in matters of social conscience throughout the time that I have know them, without piety, pomposity, or pc policity. on the corner to off the corner is as radical a book of poetry as any published post-The New American Poetry of which I am aware.

By the time Striking Resemblance was issued by Burning Deck in 1989, Tina's work had been included in two significant anthologies: In the American Tree, edited by Ron Silliman, and published by the National Poetry Foundation, University of Maine at Orono, in 1986; and "Language" Poetries: An Anthology, edited by Douglas Messerli, and published by New Directions in 1987. Tina was one of four poets associated with DC in In the American Tree (P. Inman, Lynne Dreyer and Diane Ward were the others); and she was one of three in "Language" Poetries (P. Inman and Diane Ward were the other two). Ron Silliman also cited five other names of poets associated with Washington as candidates for a "volume of absolutely comparable worth" -- Michael Lally, Bernard Welt, Joan Retallack, Tim Dlugos, Doug Lang. There were some other, strong candidates, too: Terence Winch, Beth Joselow, and Douglas Messerli, for exampe.

There was no such thing as Language Poetry, of course. Small press magazines such as This, edited by Barrett Watten on the West Coast, and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, edited by Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein on the East Coast, had given focus to a particular set of poetics and particular concerns about theory and practice; and there was a more than sufficiently visible "movement" to deserve the name. The product of this movement was the focus of Douglas Messerli's anthology. While the value of that anthology was specific, the phenomenon it documented was too diverse to categorize, ultimately. (I'm not proposing that this was the purpose of "Language" Poetries -- just that what some took for a prescription was more of a lens, really.) The larger picture was that the movement was the epicenter of a continuing renaissance in American poetry that had been most recently documented at that time in Donald Allen's The New American Poetry. While In the American Tree gave full recognition to the movement, it also indicated an awareness of the larger picture, both in the breadth of its inclusions, and in its editor's introduction.

In the American Tree and "Language" Poetries could easily be aligned with other anthologies, such as the earlier An Anthology of New York Poets, edited by Ron Padgett and David Shapiro (1970), and Up Late: American Poetry Since 1970, edited by Andrei Codrescu, and published in the same year as "Language" Poetries. It was all good, as they say. In fact, Up Late could have been regarded as the "volume of absolutely comparable worth" proposed by Ron Silliman.

The point is that Tina Darragh was at the center of the Language Poetry movement, and had been recognized as such. And that Tina and Language Poetry were both connected to an ongoing American poetry renaissance. It was very gratifying to see Tina get the recognition she deserved, along with her DC poetry associates. The publication of Striking Resemblance was just as gratifying. Issued in Keith & Rosmarie Waldrop's great Burning Deck series, published out of Providence, RI, it was Tina's first book to be published outside of the Washington area. It began with Pi in the Skye, and contained three other pieces.

I've always assumed that D. H. Lawence's, "Trust the art not the artist," was intended to address both the issue of meaning, that the meaning of a work of art was not necessarily what the artist intended it to be, and to the issue of control, i.e., the artit's desire to control the reader's experience of the work. These issues are addressed readily in Striking Resemblance, in which process is of absolute concern. As Rod Smith wrote:

"Darragh is investigating investigation. One isn't led to conclusions. The manner in which she constructs a context for the investigation is itself the investigation.... When we learn to inhabit [this process] we'll have learned a lot."

And here is Tina:

"You know, in relational database structure there's a whole thing about webs… as opposed to hierarchically structured data bases where you have where you have the primary information up top and then you have these little boxes of secondary information and then you could have comment and other kinds of information off them. But the relational database structure is supposed to open up the possibilities of being able to retrieve the data in different ways."
(my italics)

Tina Darragh interviewed by Joan Retallack, AERIAL #5

In her interview with Joan, Tina cites the mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot, the creator of fractal geometry, as a kind of model investigator, capable of looking at data and seeing entirely new patterns. Tina's intellectual generosity in Striking Resemblance is such that she creates all her readers mini-Mandelbrots. One could write a book about this book. There is the focus on Raymond Chandler (in "Raymond Chandler's Sentence") and on James M. Cain in the last piece in the book (the title of which Blogger formatting prevents me from reproducing with any accuracy); the achievement here in creating object/structure forms, combined with immensely self-expressive material; and more besides. Taking a Montessori course, studying statistics, reading a collection of essays (Demystifying Social Statistics, a collection of twenty-two essays written by social scientists and statisticians), all of these activities are subsumed into the process of an autiobiography as process.

There are several moments here. One of them is indicated by dedications in Striking Resemblance, one to Susan Howe and another to Joan Retallack. At this point in time, the history of close connections between the women poets of the DC scene had evolved into a kind of secondary community, involving Tina, Joan, Diane Ward (even though she no longer lived in DC), Beth Joselow, Phyllis Rosenzweig and Lynne Dreyer, in various combinations of interchange, collaboration, and so on, through several years. If one thinks of Douglas Messerli has having proposed a kind of deliberate coherence with "Language" Poetries, and Ron Silliman as having configured more of a working "coherence" with In the American Tree (the bigger picture), then you could say that the camera was panning back to reveal an even bigger picture; and in some ways, too, a separate picture, within the original bigger picture, at its edges, and on the outside. This would eventually lead to Margery Margaret Sloan's seminal anthology Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women, which would include Tina, Lynne, Joan, and Diane.

Joan, Lynne, Tina

Another moment was indicated by the publication of AERIAL #5 in 1989, then in its third year, and clearly demonstrating the imminence of a second surge in the Washington alternative poetry scene. Aside from publishing younger poets such as Daniel Barbiero, Gretchen Johnsen, Joe Ross, Wayne Klein, and A. L. Nielsen, editor Rod Smith had published work by Terence Winch, Douglas Messerli, Joan Retallack, and Phyllis Rosenzweig, as well as Tina Darragh, and a connection between generations was made manifest. The Joan/Tina interview and work by both poets in the same issue all gave emphasis to this. What was more, Rod's publication (through several issues of AERIAL) of work by Rosmarie Waldrop, Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Gi Ott, Peter Ganick, Keith Waldrop, Elaine Equi, Susan Smith Nash, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Alan Davies, Julia Blumenrich, Jackson Mac Low, Hank Lazer, Andrew Levy, Ray DiPalma, Eric Wirth, Loris Essary, Janet Gray, Sheila E, Murphy and Stephen-Paul Martin, refreshed and extended DC's connections to the larger scene.

end of part one

Lee Lally

Back in the day, I used to shop at Count's Western Wear up in Tenleytown -- cowboy shirts, cowboy boots, and a suede vest which I still have, all beat up and way too small. The seamstress at Count's was Lee Lally, one of the key figures of the Mass Transit activities in the early to mid 1970s. I never did know Lee very well. I would see her around once in a while. She gave a memorable reading in the Folio Books series, with Lee Howard, and that was about it. I never spent time with her socially, really. The night of her Folio reading she was surrounded by friends after the reading. She was a really good reader. Very present, very good at
projecting feeling in an oblique kind of way, even when the content was very direct, there was always something very subtle going on.

There was a lot of passion and humor in her work, although the humor was subtle, too, as I remember it. Her SOUP chapbook, These Days, sold out its first run, I want to say one thousand copies, I'm not sure, and was reprinted. I don't have These Days anymore, but I remember it as a very well made set of poems, not so much confessional as confrontational, i.e., with the self, with her experience, with everybody and everything, with the world. And, clearly, it resonated through a lot of people's lives.

Lee and I liked each other. In our casual exchanges at Count's, I saw someone who was very watchful, probably as hypervigilant as I was, with a warm but wary countenance. I wish that I had known her better, Because of my lack of first hand knowledge of her, I asked Michael to contribute to this post. Here is what he wrote:


Michael Lally on Lee Lally

Lee and I met in the Spring of ’61. She was a high school senior and I was a college freshman about to be kicked out, after which we became faithful correspondents. That Fall she entered the University of Buffalo (she grew up outside that city) and had poetry published in their literary magazine. Another student published one of Lee’s poems as his own, causing a minor scandal! She also played guitar and sang (blues and old style country music) in local coffee houses, and drew and painted well, was a New York State merit scholar and the state women’s fencing champion, as well as a prize winning skier and a professional puppeteer. Oh, and she sang and danced in her Catholic girls high school in musicals, e.g. she played “Bloody Mary” in South Pacific.

In August 1964 she left her job as a puppeteer on an island amusement park in Lake Erie (Fantasy Island?) and gave up the U. of Buffalo and her friends, including a pre-med student she was engaged to, to marry me and move to Spokane, Washington where I was stationed as an enlisted man in the Air Force, meaning I made less than a hundred bucks a month.
The wedding was a last minute decision, after not having seen each other since we met in ’61, instigated by various changes in my life, including most of my scene in Spokane getting arrested on various drug and sex charges. I was playing regularly in Spokane area clubs, but soon gave up drinking and the night life and we spent time writing collaborative poems, playing music, drawing, reading books aloud, going to plays (I was in my first professional play there, and underground film) and hanging with my bohemian friends who weren’t in jail.

Lee claimed to have no interest in publishing or performing publicly or going back to school. She was an incredible seamstress and cook, as well as artist, writer and musician, so she kept busy. By the time we left Spokane in ’66, I was getting published regularly in little mags around the country as that phenomenon began to take off, while she said she was contented to just write things for me.

One of the people who published me, and paid me for my poems and a short story, was a woman who was convinced I was going to write the great American novel and wanted to be my patron. She put us up in a fancy apartment in Brooklyn Heights where we lived from February ’66 to June. Lee was jealous of the woman, so when my mother passed that May, we made arrangements to move in with my father in Jersey and left the patron, the apartment, and the money she was giving me to live on.
I went to work at Overbrook Hospital, while Lee cooked and took care of the house and my dad. By the end of the summer she was fed up with that role and a Spokane friend who had moved on to the U. of Iowa Writers Workshop convinced me to come out to Iowa City and try to get in, so I did, just days before the semester started.

Lee instantly became a well known figure in Iowa City, due to her style—partly her own creations, including a cape and granny boots before they were big—as well as her unusual looks—tiny but voluptuous, black hair and penetrating green eyes, a slightly deformed chin and lips from a car accident she told me, but her parents later said it was a congenital condition from childhood (she had a scar that wrapped around one ear and ran along the bottom of the jaw line to her chin, which had no bone in it but was constructed of tissue from elsewhere).

One of the first people we befriended, outside of our Spokane friends Roy and Karen Harvey, was Ray DiPalma, a poet in the graduate workshop (I didn’t have a BA so I didn’t get in the graduate workshop until the following year) who Lee dug, and later the poet Robert Slater, who adored Lee from the minute they met and had a deep connection with her. When Ted Berrigan came to the workshop to teach around ’68, he too fell under Lee’s spell and they had a special connection as well.

A lot of the younger women students at Iowa dug Lee, and when the feminist movement of that period began to take shape, they came to her and wanted her to lead them, which she declined. She was wary of my developing politics—like running for sheriff of Johnson County, Iowa on the Peace and Freedom ticket—which took me away from home and made me a target of right wing death threats as well as gave me opportunities to appear in various student and underground films etc. Especially after she became pregnant and gave birth to our daughter in February of ’68 and then became pregnant with our son in ’69.
I met Gary Snyder that year, who hand wrote, in a calligraphy style that Lee sometimes was paid to do, one of his poems for her, which we framed and now hangs in our daughter’s home.

Upon getting my MFA from the workshop in August of ’69 I wanted to move to San Francisco where all the action seemed to be, or to Chicago, where I was working with a project attempting to turn white street gangs into revolutionaries called Rising up Angry, but Lee insisted I have a job somewhere before we moved. Through the auspices of a famous writer at the just started American Association of Writing Professors (or something like that, unfortunately I can’t remember the writers name), who I had never met but nonetheless recommended me to Trinity College in DC, a Catholic girls school, and they hired me sight unseen for their English Department.

So, we left for DC via Buffalo (detouring around the traffic mess at Woodstock, where we had intended to stop but decided it was too much trouble) and New York and Jersey. Our first apartment was in Hyattsville, because everywhere else we tried in the city wouldn’t take us with one infant and another on the way. Until we reached a “garden” apartment complex next to a huge intersection where two major roads intersected and there were no sidewalks.

Lee and Michael with their children, Cailtlin and Miles

There were a lot of ethnicities in the complex—Korean, Mexican, everything except African-American—and a lot of white “country folk” who Lee instantly befriended (her mother had been a country girl from upstate New York and Lee had many aunts and uncles and cousins who grew up and still lived on farms where she had spent her summers as a kid). That’s where we were when our son was born, and where we often housed visiting radicals, like the gang kids from Chicago in for demonstrations in DC, or poets, like Ted Berrigan and Alice Notley, who were staying with us when our kids accidentally ate rat poison (Ted wrote about it in a diary style piece of prose that was later published in an issue of The World).
Ray DiPalma was there when our son was born (he is his godfather). The place was usually filled with people, either from out of town or neighbors or new DC friends. It was while living there that Lee ran into an old friend from Buffalo in a supermarket who talked Lee into joining her at a “consciousness raising session” with several women at the home of a woman who talked about how she only married her husband to show the guy she wanted to marry up, because he wouldn’t marry her and it was all his fault and—as if you could ever invent this shit—it turned out that the guy was me.

I had met her the winter before I met Lee, at another upstate New York college. She was a beautiful and brilliant Italian-American woman who edited her college literary mag. When I wouldn’t marry her, she married this other guy and had three kids and now was unhappy! For which Lee came back pissed off at me! That was the beginning of the end for us, though we didn’t see it.

On a pot run to the Midwest in ‘71, I cheated for the first time in our then seven years together and brought back more than the pot. After that, I slept on the couch for weeks, and Lee went to more and more meetings with her growing feminist network. That same year an anthology of “movement” poetry came out, Campfires of the Resistance, with some of my poetry in it, so I organized a reading by anyone in the DC area in the anthology, at the Institute for Policy Studies (if I remember correctly) at which a very large standing room only crowd showed up to hear us.

Lee and I had already encountered the local academic poetry scene, which didn’t interest us, and I had been organizing readings at Trinity by all kinds of outré poets since ’69, but after the Campfires reading I decided to start a weekly reading series at the new location for the Community Bookshop on P Street. Dave Mancuse had started the shop around the time I arrived in DC in its first location on M I think, but had recently moved it to P near Dupont Circle. Lee became a regular at the new reading series, which we pretty quickly called Mass Transit (forget who came up with the name) and out of which some of us started a magazine by that name.

Bruce Andrews, Lee Lally, Nathan Whiting, unknown student
at Trinity

By the time we rented a house on Emery Place in “Friendship Heights” in early ’72, Lee had become a full blown feminist and I had been affected by the ideas as well. That same year we started a press called Some Of Us Press, along with Terence Winch and Ed Cox and others. My idea was to publish a chapbook of poetry by a local poet every month, which we managed to do for awhile. Lee helped choose and design some of the books, one of which was hers, These Days, which gathered the poems she had started writing again under the impetus of her feminist education and experiences. Some were published in feminist and gay and women’s publications that were beginning to crop up around the country, and all had been tried out at Mass Transit.

Lee wasn’t much to talk about her emotions, and didn’t care for others speculating on what she was thinking or feeling, but her poetry made it clear. She later claimed that she hadn’t been writing much poetry since her Buffalo days because of sexism, and that it was the nuns in her high school and her artist and feminist friends (Lee had many women artist friends over the years, including Joan Hanor, who designed the SOUP logo) who gave her the inspiration to take up poetry again. I always felt a little hurt by that explanation, because I had encouraged her to write, to publish, to do music and all the rest, even to return to college, but she always resisted. I also helped her put These Days together and got some of the poems in it published (in the Trinity Record and December, etc.) but she didn’t acknowledge me, or any of her other male friends and supporters, like Terry or Slater or Ed Cox et. al. in the book, just women.

At any rate, once she returned to writing and sharing a more public kind of poetry, she was an instant hit. Feminists adored her work and These Days had an immediate impact on many women, as well as men. The title came from a song that a feminist singer/songwriter whose name I don’t remember wrote and sang at a concert Lee attended in DC around ’71 (there’s a plethora of songs with that title on Google but not the one that Lee was referring to).

The poems in it were influenced by the blues Lee loved (Memphis Minnie was a particular icon of hers) and old timey country (Mama Maybelle Carter another of Lee’s great influences and loves). And of course it was influenced by the sexual politics we were living through and experimenting out of. Lee had taken a female lover and encouraged me to take male ones, as part of what we thought was going to be the liberation of future generations from the bonds of gender and sexual discrimination. The house on Emery had quickly become a “commune” in which all kinds of people lived or visited (Valerie Salinas was famously dropped off on our porch after she got out of prison and ended up a good friend of mine but intimidated the women in the commune because she didn’t like their brand of feminism, as she went back to hooking for her money and claimed to enjoy it even though she preferred women for romantic and long time sexual relations, she made the point that her idea of feminism was to create a world where women could do whatever the fuck they felt like doing, not follow some politically correct dictums).
In ’74, I moved out of what by then had turned from a crazy collection of all kinds of lefties, to a strictly lesbian feminist collective. Lee remained in the house with the other women and our kids, and I moved to apartments in the Dupont Circle area until in Spring of ’75 I moved to New York where our kids joined me for the summer and our son stayed. Our daughter returned to DC and her mother and the commune.
Eventually the commune fell apart and Lee ended up with a boyfriend, a younger man whose nickname was “Boo” from the movie of To Kill a Mockingbird. Lee’s female lover, who she was with for several years before Boo, was nicknamed “Atticus” from the same movie. A favorite book and film of Lee’s I might add. What are the odds.

In early ’80, our daughter made the decision to come live with her brother and me in New York. The move was to take place at the start of the summer. But in March I think it was, Lee got sick and didn’t see a doctor and our daughter came home from school one day to find Lee unable to get out of bed. The boyfriend finally came home and took her to a nearby hospital, where they discovered a serious infection in her ovaries caused by an old IUD. During the operation to remove the IUD and the ovaries, Lee stopped breathing for a few minutes, and when they revived her, she was in a coma, which she remained in for six years before finally passing away.

There was a malpractice suit brought by the court appointed guardian for Lee (we were divorced by then and her parents signed over any rights). It ended up being I think the largest sum ever awarded in that part of the country, six million dollars. But they appealed and it was eventually reduced to two million, out of which the government took a third, the lawyers took a third and court costs, and the remaining money was used to care for Lee. Some of that money was invested by the guardian, and the kids ended up getting some after Lee passed.

By the time that happened, Some Of us Press had long folded and Lee’s These Days had been reprinted by a Baltimore feminist press called Diana’s (if I remember correctly). Lee accused the women at that press of ripping her off, by reprinting the book without giving her any royalties, and by understating the amount of copies printed and reprinted in several editions never marked as such, according to Lee. As of this date, they have never been accountable, or others who have reprinted Lee’s work, to Lee or to her children, though many of the same women claim Lee as a role model and an icon in their feminism.

I think a poem from These Days, “The Reading,” best expresses what I tried to recount here in terms of Lee’s relationship to her life and art:

The Reading

Sitting
listening
to the readers.
Painfully some try to decide fast
‘what two poems will make them love me?’.
Still sitting
hearing all the cries,
a different hand stretches
over air
to pat my belly.
I decided not so fast
but long ago
it didn’t matter.

Ahmos Zu-Bolton II

I did not know Ahmos Zu-Bolton. I heard him read one time, but I do not remember the context. We spoke a few times, and that was all. He was a man of enormous presence and charm, one of those people that you just liked and respected at first contact.

Ahmos was born Oct. 21, 1935, in Poplarville, Mississippi, and he died March 8, 2005, at Howard University Medical Center in Washington, D.C. He was 69 years old.

Solo Press published A Niggered Amen: Poems, in California, 1975. Ain’t No Spring Chicken: Selected Poems, was issued by Voice Foundation, Inc. in New Orleans, 1998. He was co-editor, with E. Ethelbert Miller, of Synergy D.C. Anthology, published by Energy BlackSouth Press, 1975.

Ahmos ZuBolton II and Haryette Mullen

Here's a post from Ethelbert Miller's blog:

Tuesday, March 08, 2005


Miss Walker, Miss Walker, your true love is dead
He sent you a letter to turn back your head


Ahmos Zu-Bolton was the author of A NIGGERED AMEN (1978) and AIN'T NO SPRING CHICKEN (1998). Yep. Little Zu was born in 1935. So he leaves us in his 70th year.

Here is what I wrote about him in my memoir FATHERING WORDS:

"He carried a bag of magazines or maybe it was just a pouch filled with goober dust, cat eyes and rabbit feet. The man was southern in the way he walked, dressed, and spoke. If it were earlier in the century, it would be a perfect example of the Great Migration. Here was the type of guy Langston Hughes would meet while in high school in Cleveland, the guy who spoke in the rhythms poets wanted to capture on the page. Henderson had introduced me to the blues and African American folklore. Ahmos Zu-Bolton introduced me to himself."

And here are three pages at Chicken Bones: A Journal:

the first, about Ahmos

http://www.nathanielturner.com/zubolton.htm

the second, a poem by Ahmos

http://www.nathanielturner.com/zubolton3.htm

the third, announcing a candlelight vigil for Ahmos

http://www.nathanielturner.com/candelightvigilforahmoszubolton.htm

Ahmos was part of the Mass Transit scene, and was in a couple of the mags.

Here's a poem:

The Basketball Star

We define:

Livewire Davis. The one
with the million-dollar jump-shot.

Livewire as bebop star:
torn between his body's genius
for fast breaks
and a questionmark called rage. Stumbling
thru a lifetime of all-star games
(he never hit the winning points
but was always a frontpager.

Livewire's days
were lawless theater
(except for the 8 o'clock class,
except for the poetry of bullshitting
with the women,
except for the ritual of practice:
run jump "shoot their eyes out"
defense
defense
except for the terrible puzzle of books
he was free.

& here is another

into my final books of poems

this is to say that i am
coming round the bend. the darkness
inside your flashes of light know me,
i throw you curves because i wanted to be
a pitcher, a sidearming hero you could turn to
in the late innings. (i would save the game
before my wounded brother got to
the shower.

but this ain't no playground
they told me - that & the fact
that i never mastered
the screw-
ball
is the reason i am here.


I was always an admirer of open parentheses.
& I will always be an admirer of this poet.

I need to get another copy of the Synergy D.C. Anthology, as well as copies of the two books by Ahmos.

If any of the Mass Transit folk would like to add more about Ahmos in a comment, that would be a big plus.

& here is more from Ethelbert Miller: some notes for an article on Ahmos Zu Bolton that was published in Eugene Redmond's Drumvoices Revue a few months after Ahmos died:

Spacedream Struggle

In his poem “Spacedream Struggle” one will find the use of Zu-Bolton’s favorite word- that word is “struggle.” One would have to look at other Zu-Bolton’s poems as well as his life to understand how he defines struggle.
Is it simply a racial one? It is an inner struggle to better define oneself?
Is it similar to the Muslim concept of Jihad, a struggle in which righteousness is a goal or objective.

Zu-Bolton’s three part poem begins after the conflict. If the first stanza we notice immediately that narrator of the poem is on a space ship. And he is heading home. One must ask the question – where is he coming from, and where is home? Is it earth? In the literature of many African American writers, the concept of home is a very important one. It can be a way of talking about the South as well as Africa. I think Zu-Bolton’s poem forces us to look at home in a much larger sense.

We find the narrator not in control of the ship and relying on music to determine its definition. Notice the reference the general reference to music in the poem and not to jazz or blues.

In the fourth stanza of the first section of “Spacedream Struggle” Zu-Bolton make one of those “Zu” leaps in his poems. A twist that defines logic and opens the door to his creative imagination.

“I am in the memorybanks/of the ship’s psychiatrist”

Why a psychiatrist? Why a person who treats mental disorders? Is this the person responsible for the care of everyone on the space ship? Why is there a psychiatrist on board in the first place?

And now one might wonder if this is a poem about inner space instead of outer space. We find the narrator becoming linked to the psychiatrist.
A joining of doctor/and patient; someone sick with someone well.

“He goes to sleep mumbling
and my voice takes-up
where he left off

In the second section of “Spacedream struggle” we find the narrator/psychiatrist fighting the Christians. So here it seems as if the use of the word “jihad” would not be out of place, in describing the conflict. What we find in Zu-Bolton’s poem is that Jesus is on his side fighting the Christians too. The narrator seems to have a kinship with Jesus, even as he rejects Jesus’ suggestion of turning the other cheek. Here Zu-Bolton places the words turn the other cheek in italics, as if spoken by Jesus. These words seem to be punctuated by the use of the word nigger.

The narrator and Jesus team up like a dynamic duo. They are fighting inside the spaceship and not outside. Jesus is fighting while standing on the narrator’s desk. It seems an interesting place to do battle.

If one was to look at the some of the larger questions raised by “Space Dream Struggle” one would find that Zu-Bolton is critical of the church and organized religion:

“I /had my back to the wall/sidekicking their preacher.

As Zu-Bolton describes the conflict taking place he relies on the visual use of white space on the page. He pulls in the folkloric reference to John Henry.
Along with a word like struggle, Ahmos would also frequently use the word dance, here we find “the ghetto in my eyes/was a firedance .” Dance must be viewed as ritual, as a term of engagement. Dancing underscores the movement of life as well as the language of the poem.

In the third and final section of “Space Dream Struggle” one finds the psychiatrist waking up, screaming and turning the narrator’s voice off.
It is the psychiatrist who gets up to leave and not the narrator. Payment is a bible. Why is payment a bible? What is the psychiatrist doing with a bible
in the first place? It’s also obvious that it is the psychiatrist who is not well.
Ahmos Zu-Bolton’s poem raises a number of philosophical questions about
religion as well as Jesus, and the role they play in political struggle.

Now,what follows the third section of Zu-Bolton’s poem is nothing but white space; about 2/3 of the rest of the page is blank. The absence of words seems to lead the reader back to the “weightlessness” mentioned at the beginning of the poem.

What one finds missing from the end of Zu-Bolton’s poem is a reference to the space ship. The narrator seems to be lost in space. One wonders if and when the music will lead him to his destination.

Spacedream Struggle

1.

It has been a long day
and I am on a spaceship
going home.

I am not
at the controls, so I lean back
in my weightlessness
and let the music
carry me.

Sleep
will disarm me, but
I surrender to it, being
the direction of the music
that the ship
chose.
I am in the memorybanks
of the ship's psychiatrist.
He is on the couch
spilling his life
to me.
I take it all down
in a shorthand that I can't read.
He goes to sleep mumbling
and my voice takes-up
where he left off.

2.

I fought the christians today.
Me an my man Jesus, who is
on the mission with me.
and who would have me
turn the other cheek
nigger.
But
we teamed up this morning, with
love in his heart and rage in mine
we turned the sky of this ship
into a battleground.

Jesus stood on my deck
turning both cheeks
at once. I

had my back to the wall
sidekicking their
preacher.

We fought the good fight.

The heat of battle
dripping
down
my body
like sweat,

the ghetto in my eyes
was a firedance
while
my fist
became John Henry's hammer
and the side of my feet
became the switch --
blade
they say we all
carry.

3.

The psychiatrist woke up
and turned my voice off. He
left convinced that he
was not as sick
as me.

(unable to reproduce the spacing of the original poem).