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Book Review: Something About the Blues: an unlikely collection of poetry, by Al Young

(Published Jan. 28, 2008 in BC Magazine)

The poetry in Something About the Blues is beautiful, captivating, painful, powerful, sometimes soothing, and often thought-provoking. Highly recommended.

There is something about the blues that grabs hold of you and moves you, physically and emotionally, that transports you to places past, present and imagined, something that taps into the deepest elemental parts of you to soothe and sometimes heal. It's easy to lose yourself in the blues. Its history runs deep and its influence on other forms has been enormous. The blues, Al Young writes in the introduction to Something About the Blues: an unlikely collection of poetry, is "[b]eaded and threaded throughout America's musical mosaic." But the blues, like poetry, is difficult to describe, define, confine. "[T]he blues," he writes, "will always be dramatically unpredictable, sometimes torturous and sometimes pleasurable," and "[e]ver resistant to classroom analysis," for the blues dwells largely "in a feral state; blues truth is wild and menacing."

Something About the Blues is blues poetry. Though I've often listened to and lost myself in the blues, and have immersed myself in various kinds of poetry, I must confess that I was largely ignorant of the blues in poetic form until I had the good fortune to read this collection. The first to popularize blues poetry was Langston Hughes, born in Joplin, Missouri in 1902, and best "known for his insightful, colorful portrayals of black life in America from the twenties through the sixties" (learn more about Hughes at Poets.org). It is fitting, then, that Young opens his collection of blues poetry with Hughes' beautiful and haunting poem, "The Weary Blues." This poem, read by Hughes himself, also opens the accompanying CD. It serves as a wonderful introduction to the spirit of blues poetry and sets the mood perfectly.

Al Young, born in 1939 in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, was raised first in Mississippi and then in Detroit, Michigan. He attended the University of Michigan from 1957-1960, co-editing Generation, the campus literary magazine. In 1961 he settled in Berkeley, where he held a number of odd jobs--folksinger, lab aide, disk jockey, medical photographer, clerk typist, employment counselor--before graduating with a degree in Spanish from U.C. Berkeley. He has taught creative writing and literature at various universities, has received numerous honours, including, inter alia, Wallace Stegner, Guggenheim, Fulbright National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and the PEN-Library of Congress Award for Short Fiction. Young has written a number of poetry collections, several novels, three musicals, and numerous screenplays. He was appointed Poet Laureate of California in 2005 by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Everything in Something About the Blues is to some extent a meditation on the blues. This collection attempts to say something about the blues -- its origins, history, themes, essence and power. Whether through dedications, tributes, or other mention, many jazz and blues greats make it into this powerful collection -- Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Lester "Pres" Young, Marian McPartland, Ella Fitzgerald, Lead Belly, Vernon Alley, Harry Connick, Jr., Lena Horn, the James Cotton Band, Gene Ammons, Benny Carter, Johnny Hodges, Clifford Brown, Billie Holiday, John "Dizzy" Birks Gillespie, Malcolm X, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Jackie McLean, James P. Johnson, Langston Hughes, and James Brown. Some poems allude to and play with poetry from the Western "white" Canon, while others address, more specifically, issues of racism and systemic discrimination, of exoticization, othering and hybridity, as well as of terrorism and environmental racism. Some of these topics go well beyond the traditional themes of the blues. And then some poems are of a more playful nature, more earthy and sensual.

The poetry in this collection, like the blues, is raw and elemental. It rarely indulges in complex symbols, extended metaphors, or florid language. It is less constrained by meter and rhyme, but characterized by the liberal use of alliteration, assonance and internal rhyme, enjambment, repetition, and rhythm. It's language is, on the whole, clear, direct, hard-hitting.

There is one poem, just a little into the book, that captures so much of the often contradictory nature of the blues. "The Blues Don't Change" addresses the blues directly:

And I was born with you, wasn't I, Blues?
Wombed with you, wounded, reared and forwarded
from address to address, stamped, stomped
and returned to sender by nobody else but you,
Blue Rider, writing me off every chance you
got, you mean old grudgefulhearted, table
turning demon, you, you sexy soulsucking gem.

The blues is a contradictory character, both wombing and wounding you. You bear its stamp, yet also feel stomped on, moved from place to place, returned to sender, and written off by the blues. The blues stings where you can't scratch and moves you "from frying/pan to skillet" just as it moves you to wiggle your body, juggle your limbs, loosen that goose, up your voice, open your pores, and roll your hips and lips.

The blues is characterized as a grudgefulhearted (neat word), table turning demon who is also -- here begins another wonderful twist -- a sexy soulsucking gem, a "[b]lue diamond in the rough" who "can't be outfoxed don't care how they cut/and smuggle and shine you on." And, in a note to students and theorists, the blues is "too dumb and stubborn and necessary/to let them turn you into what you ain't/with color or theory or powder or paint." You can never, the poem suggests, fully capture or contain the blues. And it is its contradictory, shape-shifting nature that allows the blues to stay forever fresh and current.

The impossibility of capturing the blues completely is also addressed in "Detroit 1958." "Only parts of the pain of living/may be captured in a poem or/tale or song or in the image seen," goes the first stanza. In the blues, as in life, "[s]adness is the theme of existence;/joy its variations." The blues merely imitates the pain of life, but, in another apparent contradiction, it is, "as the man sings,/'The bitter note makes the song so sweet."

There is plenty of bitterness in Young's poetry, though it is not consumed by it. And sometimes that bitterness also comes out in poems alluding to and playing with poems from the Western canon. "The Lovesong of O.O.Gabugah" is a good example, an obvious allusion to T.S. Elliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," a lengthy, meandering, metaphorically dense poem about an aging, indecisive, isolated urban man walking along foggy half-deserted streets on his way to what sounds like a high society party in order to woo a particular woman. But he doesn't dare. His indecisiveness and insecurity are the focus of the poem, and the reader--aren't we lucky--gets to accompany Prufrock and listen in on his inner dialogue.

Though parts of Elliot's poem suggest a somewhat tongue-in-cheek nature, Young's "The Lovesong of O.O. Gabugah" lies in sharp contrast. The tone, right from the start, reflects a rougher context, a very different reality. Instead of "Let us go then, you and I," we get "Time to split now, you & me." The narrator of Young's poem, presumably a black male, also takes his reader along on a walk through an urban landscape, "past alleyways & neon signs/& people waitin in movie lines." But he has no time for lengthy reflection, comparing himself to this or that dramatic figure, to Hamlet, or even Polonius the Fool, or wrapping his emotional insecurities in fancy, drawn-out metaphors. He is physically in danger. If he so much as stops too long near the people waiting in movie lines, he fears getting zapped. What we witness here is something much more grim -- "[t]he snowy line. . . whooshed up the chimney clean, burnt out a nose,/& sniffin all there was to know about July,/just blew its ownself out, forget the rose." Our guide here is not on his way to a high society party where well-dressed ladies discuss Michelangelo. He is headed to a place where he can forget his misery by blowing himself out with cocaine.

One piece in this collection, more short story than poem, addresses a form of oppression and source of misery one wouldn't necessarily expect in a blues collection. "Silent Parrot Blues" discusses environmental racism, a fairly new and academic concept that links racism, a common theme in the blues, to the environment, an uncommon one. It is prefaced by a quote from Myrla Baldanado, Statement Coordinator: People's Task Force for Base Clean Up, that explains what environmental racism is -- forcing people of colour "to bear the brunt of the nation's pollution problem." The story begins with Young encountering a listless, raggedy, broken parrot kept in a dark supply closet by a building superintendent. As he walks back to his apartment, arms full of laundry and disturbed, he meets his intellectually curious hallway neighbor, Briscoe, a veteran of the American War in Vietnam.

Through the conversation with the well-read and socially-aware though rough around the edges Briscoe, a good amount of ground is covered on the topic of environmental racism. Briscoe wants him to take his parrot story straight to the mayor and city council, because, as he puts it, "white people don't like that shit. They hate it -- mistreating birds and animals. . . They won't stand for it. . . . In fact, they're prepared to make your ass extinct in a minute before they'll let anybody fuck with a timber wolf." Young goes on to talk about Romanticism and its role in creating an industrial and post-Industrial society in which humans are seen as separate, apart from, and above nature. He then links that kind of thinking back to the "English romantics -- Shelley, Byron, Keats, Thomas Gray, Samuel Coleridge, and William Blake, among others -- [who] did their part to exoticize nature." He goes on to mention Thoreau, and not very flatteringly either, as well as Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Fennimore Cooper, Washington Irving, and the poetry of Poe and Whitman. Their kind of thinking has led to the dumping of all manner of dangerous waste, as Briscoe points out, "where black people and Mexicans and Indians live." While people of colour, more than anyone else, bear the brunt of the world's pollution problem, Young does point out that poor whites are also affected.

By including environmental racism in this collection, as well as, in "Your Basic Black Poet," cultural hybridity, Young updates the blues. If the subject matter, the inspiration that often gives rise to and feeds the blues is the highs, though more often the lows, of people oppressed, then these topics belong in the blues of an increasingly complex and globalised society.

In Something About the Blues," Al Young, as the title suggests, says something about the blues. In his "Statement on Poetics" at the end of the collection, Young says that "[a]fter 60 years of listening, I still feel as though I can't get started; as though I have so little to say about jazz and the roles all music continue to play in that curtainless sun-room in the mansion of my life, where thinking and telling take bloom." Though a force as elemental and dynamic as the blues can never be entirely captured and contained, Young does manage to say a great deal about the blues in this collection, and the spirit of the blues certainly moves within and through it. The inclusion of a CD with various live readings brings the poetry even closer, making it come to life. Unfortunately, the sound quality of the CD is not always consistent--the volume and clarity change from reading to reading, which is a bit disconcerting. It may be because they were recorded at different venues, without sufficient audio post-processing. And perhaps this is only a problem on the advance copy. Overall, the more time is spent with Something About the Blues, the more emerges that is beautiful, captivating, painful, powerful, sometimes soothing, and often thought-provoking. This collection of blues poetry comes highly recommended.

The Life of a Creative Offering: Independent and yet Dependent

I was doing some research on Ecotecture (word-blend of ecology and architecture) and came across the following quote from Picasso that can be equally well applied to literature--to poetry, short stories, and novels.

A picture is not thought out and settled before hand. While it is being done, it changes as one's thoughts change. And when it is finished, it still goes on changing, according to the state of mind of whoever is looking at it. A picture lives a life like a living creature, undergoing the changes imposed on us by our life from day to day. This is natural enough, as the picture lives only through the man who is looking at it.

Picasso from a 1935 interview with Christian Zervos. (found at Ecotecture Canada)

A work of fiction is the same way. No matter how much thought and effort a writer may have put into a story-- perhaps growing it out of, and around, an overarching concept or leitmotif, forming and refining characters, laying out plot elements, and then revising, refining, focusing, clarifying, culling, and polishing--to bring it to life, as soon as it is published and out of the author's hands, out of the author's control, it begins a life of its own. It is an independent, living creature. As long as it has a reader, it is alive. But it grows and changes.

People change from childhood into adulthood, and continue to change and grow and be modified by the impact of life experience. People change when they cross national, cultural, religious, linguistic and political borders, even if certain core elements remain relatively fixed. And so it is also with the work of fiction. Even if unchanged in a literal sense, an ancient Arabic, Greek, Indian, Persian, or Roman story, an Old English or Norse poem, or for that matter a Victorian, or even modernist novel, is a different creature now. It no longer means what it did in its own time and place. It has a life of its own, but is utterly dependent upon the reader. The author gives it birth, but it is the reader alone who keeps it alive, the reader alone who nurtures it, changes it, and sometimes revives it.

NOD: Something About the Blues

From "See, See, Moon."

But when the blues overtakes you,
every little once in while,
bluegummed moon, all explanations fail
it seems, but no, the blues
by any other name would be
just as funky.
Why should it be so difficult
to pin the color of your sorrow?

NOD: Something About the Blues

Here's another taste from Something About the Blues. This particular selection is from a poem entitled "The Blues Don't Change." There is a sense, almost, of the Blues being not only a persistent undercurrent, an elemental force, but indeed a kind of trickster figure.

And I was born with you, wasn't I, Blues?
Wombed with you, wounded, reared and forwarded
from address to address, stamped, stomped
and returned to sender by nobody else but you,
Blue Rider, writing me off at every chance you
got, you mean old grudgefulhearted, table
turning demon, you, you sexy soulsucking gem.

It's difficult to quote only a part of this poem. The whole thing is so powerful, works so well, is so necessary, that plucking a sentence or fragment out of a stanza just seems wrong. But the one stanza above can meaningfully stand there on its own.

NOD: Something About the Blues, by Al Young

There won't be many NODs for Something About the Blues. Maybe a two or three. I do, after all, intend to have my review of this collection of blues poetry up sometime this week. Sooner than later.

Anyway, here's the first. It provides a broad introduction to the blues, and ties it to poetry as well.

Beaded and threaded throughout America's musical mosaic, the blues make you feel and hear. Sometimes you can count them off in measures and beats, but largely they dwell in a feral state; blues truth is wild and menacing.

Like poetry, the blues will always be dramatically unpredictable, sometimes torturous and sometimes pleasurable.

Letters of Ted Hughes

I came across a review by Tom Paulin in the London Review of Books entitled Entrepreneurship which I found quite interesting. Anyone interested in Ted Hughes and his relationship with Sylvia Plath, in particular, but also with others, this, and the book it reviews, might be of interest.

For me it is not just an interest in Hughes and Plath, but also in the letter as an artifact, and in the disappearance of that form of correspondence and self-revelation. More on that some other time.

Anyway, the book in question is Letters of Ted Hughes edited by Christopher Reid.

Hankering After Good Literary Fiction Titles for Review

I've gotten into a non-fiction groove for quite some time now, not because I wanted to review more non-fiction than fiction, but rather because I've seen very few fiction titles offered through blogcritics of interest to me. While I haven't done a thorough analysis of blogcritics' offerings, it seems to me that there is much more, in terms of books, in non-fiction, while the bulk of fiction is genre-based.

Non-fiction reviewing is great, don't get me wrong. I've read and have written on some very interesting books lately, and there are, if you'll glance at the 'Upcoming Reviews' module in the sidebar, some very interesting and informative books coming up in the next month or so. As for genre fiction, though I acknowledge its place, it's not really my thing.

I have been in contact with Sourcebooks and am awaiting some poetry collections--"Poetry Speaks Expanded" and "Something About the Blues." I am looking forward to those, but I am also hankering after some really good literary fiction. I've been eying the books short-listed for the Giller, Governor General's, and Man Booker Prizes.

Anyway, I hope to get back into literary fiction after the current pile of 'upcoming reviews' are done. Here's a call to publishers, publicists and authors to send me books of literary fiction for review. Though I am just one person with a day job and therefore cannot promise to review all books sent me, I am certainly always open to receiving review materials.

Book Review: Teeth. by Aracelis Girmay

(Published Oct. 9, 2007 in BC Magazine--Book Review: Teeth by Aracelis Girmay)

Teeth is, whatever one's stylistic preferences, an important collection of poems. Girmay's is a bold and fresh voice in poetry.

Aracelis Girmay's poetry collection, Teeth, though rather new on the scene, is no timid voice on the poetic stage. The poetry of Teeth is often bold, brave, and dark, but also joyously triumphant. It is both a poetry of protest and of celebration. It rails against discrimination, despair, death, rape, and war, and celebrates the enduring beauty, strength and perseverance of peoples, languages and cultures.

Aracelis Girmay is a writer of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. She was born and raised in Southern California and has a degree from Connecticut College and an MFA from NYU. Girmay is a current Cave Canem Fellow and former Watson Fellow, and her work has appeared in Callaloo, Bellevue Literary Review, Indiana Review, Ploughshares, and MiPOesias Magazine, among others. She has worked as a writer-in-residence with the Community-Word Project and Teachers & Writers Collaborative, as well as the CARE project in her native Santa Ana, and believes her work as writer and educator to be integral to social change. Teeth, published by Curbstone Press in June 2007, is her first collection of poetry.

Girmay begins her collection with a poem of protest entitled "Arroz Poetica." The title alludes to Horace's Ars Poetica, a long epistolary poem on the art of poetry. Girmay substitutes 'ars' (art) with 'arroz' (rice). Instead of discussing the art of poetry, this poem discusses poetic rice, as in rice as a metaphor, a symbol of protest. It opens with a friend's suggestion that everyone against the war should protest by sending George Bush little bags of rice inscribed with "If your enemies are hungry, feed them."

The rest of the poem argues, essentially, that her enemies

are not hungry.
They are not standing in lines
for food, or stretching rations,
or waiting at the airports
to claim the pieces
of the bodies of their dead.

Rather, her enemies "ride jets to parties... eat meat & vegetables at tables/ in white houses where candles blaze, cast/ shadows of crosses, & flowers." Her enemies, dressed up in "ball gowns & suits & rings" sit around "to talk of war in neat & folded languages/ that will not stain their formal dinner clothes/ or tousle their hair." Her finger points directly at George Bush and his administration as the real enemy, and she will not send him worked for rice while the death toll rises, while the "radio calls out/ the local names of 2,000/ U.S. soldiers counted dead since March," but "will not say the names/ of an Iraqi family trying to pass a checkpoint." The imagery is powerful and personal.

While the opening poem is about war directly, there is much else in this collection that is dark, about discrimination, despair and death. Particularly powerful and disturbing is "Sudan," a poem about rape in Darfur. It paraphrases a line from the Darfur Testimonies: "You are black, woman,/ & you are/ our slave." She connects it to similar atrocities committed much closer to home — "Or, it is not Kornei, & it is not Sudan, & her/ children are not in a field, but in the next room,/ waiting." There are also poems referencing inequality in America, both past and present.

Not everything in this collection is dark and depressing, however. The poems I enjoyed most in this collection are, on the surface, about food. "Ode to the Watermelon" is a celebration of enduring symbols and pleasures despite oppression and slaughter. In Palestine, where it is forbidden to fly their own flag, the watermelon with its red and green and black is raised in its stead. There is beautiful language in this poem — ripe, playful, sexy.

The watermelon is a "Ripe conjugationer of water & sun... bandera of the ground,/ language of fields," a symbol of hope, wafting its scent even under the blade. Addressing the watermelon directly,

Men bow their heads, open-mouthed,
to coax the sugar
from beneath your workdress.
Women lift you
to their teeth

And most hopeful,

yours is a sweetness
to outlast any slaughter:
Tongues will lose themselves inside you,
scattering seeds. All over,
the land will hum
with your wild,
raucous blooming.

(Listen to Girmay read from this poem)

Also celebratory and rich with meaning, and also about food, is "Scent: Love Poem for the Pilon." Food is used wonderfully here in both it's literal and metaphoric senses. The narrator is thankful for the Mercado, for chopped onions, oregano, salt, cloves, red beans, black beans, and rice. She is "thankful for the kitchen table:/ block of wood, & nails,/ & the carpenter's hand," thankful for the pepper grinder, "the clean smell of tomatoes & cilantro."

And most potent and most pregnant with meaning, she is thankful...

...for the pilon
that burst the knots of garlic,
thankful for the way it always worked & worked
under a fist. How, even now, after washes with limes
& soaps, the scent of what it's opened
still lingers there.

The pilon, the pestle and mortar, and the garlic whose smell endures all cleaning attempts, are powerful symbols of the endurance of culture, the lingering aroma that cannot be washed away. Food, perhaps the most tangible, most palatable marker of culture, is used wonderfully in this poem to celebrate its enduring power.

The apparent lack of structure in this collection, and the seemingly arbitrary line breaks, though common in modern poetry, are uncomfortable for me. I prefer more structural constraint in poetry, more devices, both visual and auditory, to set it apart from prose. But that is largely a matter of personal preference. Girmay employs some wonderful imagery and clever language. But most importantly, she tackles serious subject matter, giving voice to those who are often unheard. She is at her best, it seems to me, when approaching serious subject matter obliquely, at an angle, as in "Ode to the Watermelon" and "Scent: Love Poem for the Pilon," rather than head-on, as she does in "Arroz Poetica."

Teeth is, whatever one's stylistic preferences, an important collection of poems. It's a bold and fresh voice in poetry.

Update: Teeth Review Submitted--Waiting for Publication

My review of Teeth has been submitted to Blogcritics Magazine. I will post it here as soon as I get word that it has been published there.

Now it is, unfortunately, to sleep and then to work at my day job. And tomorrow I begin reading Adland: a Global History of Advertising, by Mark Tungate.

NOD: Teeth

(from "The Piano")

I remember her wide body & how she flipped
out over the side, & there was nothing we could do,
& how she crashed into the street
with her hundred teeth & voices,
& there was nothing we could do
but run out into it, the street, I mean, keys
splintered like bones.

NOD: Teeth

I have been posting NODs (nugget of the day) while reading books for review. I'm finding it more difficult to do with a book of poetry. How do I choose a nugget out of a poem? If I pull a little piece and show it to you, will its power still transmit?

As much else on this site, if it doesn't work, I hope you will let me know. There may only be a couple of NODs from Teeth anyway, as I intend to write the review and have it posted by Monday at the very latest.

Here we go then:

(from "Ode to the Watermelon")

Men bow their heads, open-mouthed,
to coax the sugar
from beneath your workdress.
Women lift you
to their teeth.
Sandia, dia santo,
yours is a sweetness
to outlast slaughter:
Tongues will lose themselves inside you,
scattering seeds. All over,
the land will hum
with your wild,
raucous blooming.