after the night years (PoemTalk #39)

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On PennSound's Etheridge Knight page we offer single downloadable mp3 recordings of every poem Knight read at a memorable February 25, 1986 reading. The introduction to the reading was given by Gwendolyn Brooks herself - she who had long been an encourager of Knight. "Don't let us lack hard rock," she says at one point in this intro, addressing herself directly to Knight. She reminded her audience of a poem Knight had written in response to her very early poem, "Truth," in which she (as she reminded us in '86) had equated truth with sunshine. And Brooks read the opening lines of Knight's "The Sun Came," and then invited Knight up to the podium with the command to "open your mouth." Open it he did, Etheridge Knight did, and along the way performed "The Sun Came" himself.

Is Knight's poem a rejoinder or counterargument to Brooks' "Truth" in any sense? There is no easy answer to this question. For this episode of PoemTalk Al Filreis gathered Tracie Morris, Josephine Park, and Herman Beavers to talk through the relationship between the two poems and between these two poets. Enabled by Tracie's sense of the lived authority of Knight's voice ("the Joe Williams of modern poetry"), by Jo's close reading of his performed meter, and by Herman's attention to the jailed figure of Knight, we soon realize that Brooks invites a dialogue by way of a key religious trope, and that Knight has responded by figuring Malcolm X as Jesus Christ. Summoned by Brooks to testify about Jesus, Knight associates Malcolm with the end of darkness. Christian regret (we did not sufficiently know him until after death) sparks Knight's angry, sad, sorrowful expression of our having "goofed the whole thing"--that our ears should have been, but weren't, equipped to hear the "fierce hammering." The sun comes. So Malcolm comes. Did the light of each or either reach the cell of the speaker? It seems that it did not (although the poem itself is our only evidence otherwise). Who comes? Mal (evil, danger, etc.) comes. (The way Knight emphasizes the repeated "MALcolm" makes this double sense clear.)

But back to the question of possible rebuke. Herman hears some counterargument in Knight, Tracie less so. One of those rare disagreements on PoemTalk. The discussion among all four is at its most interesting here, and there's some good talk about Brooks' sheer power and pull as a poetic personage. Finally, Herman summarizes this segment of the discussion as follows, speaking in Knight's voice: "I'm honoring your influence by taking it in a direction that you would not take it." It = the problem of the instance of the sun; the possibility of radical opportunities.

Here is the recording of Knight reading his poem. And here is Brooks' introduction. And here is a PDF of the text of the Knight poem provided by the University of Pittsburgh Press, and also here below (click on the image for a readable view):

if nothing ever ended (PoemTalk #38)

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Linh Dinh, Julia Bloch, and Frank Sherlock joined Al to talk about a poem published in Norman Fischer's book, Turn Left in Order to Turn Right (O Books, 1989). The poem is "I'd Like to See It" (text; audio). When Fischer was interviewed by Charles Bernstein for a "Close Listening" program in 2006, he read six poems from that 1989 book, including our poem. These six readings, and a great many more, are available on Fischer's PennSound author page. His own web site also includes other recordings of poetry, and also talks.

Fischer is the former abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center, and is the founder of and a teacher for the Everyday Zen Foundation, a network of communities and projects. He began publishing poetry in the late 1970s and in those early years especially his writing was associated with that of the Bay Area Language Poets.

Fischer wrote the following prefatory statement to Turn Left in Order to Go Right:

Occasionally when people ask me about Zen practice I say it's not the usual kind of activity in that you can't really try to do it. If you try to move toward it it always seems to be somewhere else. The harder you try the worse it gets. But you can't not make any effort either; in fact you have to make a mighty effort, but in another direction. It's a little like turning left in order to go right.

This sense of quasi-nonintentional misdirection, our Talkers felt, is a key to understanding the way Fischer in "I'd Like to See It" deploys the refrain, "I'd like to see it that way." Does it demand or expect the seer to see a certain way? Does it express desire? And how variously? Does it imply a program for a better future? Ah, but--as Linh Dinh points out--it seeks an end to war but wonders if wanting war to end would ever end it. "[W]ould my wanting / To end it ever end if nothing ever ended / I'd like to see it that way." Julia Bloch observes that the refrain both "swerves away from the intention" going on in any line preceding it "and also modifies it." At one point, grappling with the poem's refrain, Al puts it this way: "What I have now is not the way I'd like to see it. Or it could mean: the way I'm seeing it is the way I'd like the world to be, which happens to be the way it is because I observed it. One way or other, there is a difference between the way the world is and the way the world is if he is able to see it the way he'd like to."

Frank Sherlock reminds us that Zen practice and jazz, cognate fields and modes of (non)thought especially in the U.S., produce a series of variations that focus our attention on modes of thought rather than on the subject matter of the poem (war, air pressure, one's birthday, "daily objects," a chimney). Frank reminds us of Fischer's adage: "To be without content, but full of light," where light equals (in this case) compositional process, the proceedings of a thought variously through unanticipated contexts.

Steve McLaughlin engineered this episode of PoemTalk, and, as always, edited it. Next time on PoemTalk, Tracie Morris, Herman Beavers and Josephine Park talk with Al about a poem Etheridge Knight wrote as a direct response to Gwendolyn Brooks, and we'll treat our listeners to a recording of a poetry reading in which Brooks introduced Knight and mentions (and quotes from) his rejoinder-poem.