Our television and radio airwaves and our social media timelines are replete with laments for the inability of Americans today to have “civil” conversation or “nonviolent” debate about the issues which have and continue to set us at odds politically, culturally, and socially. I sincerely want this book to, in some way, enable or contribute to the type of dialogue that serves as anodyne to the kneejerk vitriol and performative rebuffing that we—and most unfortunately our children—wittingly and unwittingly consume on a daily basis.
​
I am, though, particularly sensitive to the terms of any conversation in which I participate. Living in Washington, D.C., knowing people who serve at the State Department and seeing the White House as a stage for the theater of international relations, it is amazing to think about how many of those multinational conversations do or do not happen based on all the behind the scenes terms settling. (America doesn’t talk to you publicly unless the terms and conditions leading into that dialogue are amenable to America.) And while many of us—as individuals or collectives—do not possess the power to forcibly negotiate the terms of the conversations that shape, if not define, our rights and freedoms, I wrote this book. And, as far as this book’s entry into the conversation about justice and racial dynamics in America is concerned (while those are far from the book’s only themes), there are some implicit terms of this text which I would like to make you aware.

1. I am writing this note to you on the eve of the “Unite the Right” rally planned for the weekend of August 11th, 2018. This rally is envisioned as a commemoration or reprisal of the violent 2017 rally in my college home town of Charlottesville, Virginia. I respect the efforts of organizers and activists who will be showing up to make these nazi-identified “white” supremacists feel unwelcome, but I personally will not be going downtown tomorrow. One of the images seared into my mind from that sad event the year prior is the artistically fortuitous photo of Marcus Martin—his body mid-tumble back towards the ground after being struck while pushing his fiancé out of the way of Alex Field Jr.’s murderously guided Dodge Charger. (And let us remember that Heather Hyers’ death was the most tragic outcome of that moment.) In the days after, we saw the sympathies of various media and their audiences—from CNN to the Ellen Show—turn towards Martin and his family. Yes, he was a hero but, more importantly as a player in the American narrative, he was a particularly and explicitly wounded blk person. What he believed in, what he expressed as his intentions in travelling to Charlottesville—in one interview wearing a shirt reading “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention”—are things he and many blk people believed before he became a victim of “white” supremacist violence. But it is a particular frustration of blk people in America that our voices and our laments regarding injustice do not become worthy until we are wounded to a suitable degree. (One of the persistent cognitive struggles of people who consider themselves “white” regarding the NFL player protests is reconciling how people making hefty salaries—though if they are being paid that, how much are their employers making?—could possibly be experiencing, or be fearful of, harm they need to protest.) I have thus decided that the word/term “hurt” will not appear in this book, knowing that for some it will be a challenge to engage in a conversation about the impacts of racist thought with a blk voice that is not presenting nor being presented as wounded. (Some may even take it, tonally, as a form of aggression.) I ask that you understand this as my attempt to encourage people to not need that particular empathy crutch to listen sincerely to what blk people—or any structurally marginalized or oppressed people—have to say.
   
   
2. One of my favorite bits of language from the floor of Congress (what I refer to as “C-SPAN language”) is the admonishment lawmakers receive to “refrain from engaging in personalities toward the President” in their floor speeches. While it is a norm whose upholding is meant to maintain some ideal of decorum, I actually find it to be sound rhetorical advice as well. You will not find the current president, who I will not name, present in this book either. He is a symptom of much pointed and sustained messaging, dog whistling, and other manipulation at play while I was writing this book and, honestly, hundreds of years prior. For me, the most vulnerable thing about writing this book is choosing to take on, rather than the figurehead atop the bully pulpit, the ambient and internalized “white” supremacy that broad swaths of the population do not realize or are not willing to accept that they ascribe to. That includes people I know, people I called colleague, people who, likely, will make up the majority of the potential market for this book. (Reading some of the early reviews—which have, to date, all been written by Caucasian-Americans … mostly male—the focus on the book’s insights being “harsh” or uncomfortable have already made clear for me the uphill climb this book with have in regard to readers and critical reception.) While poetically engaging the President specifically in poems may be the catharsis or art therapy du jour (as was writing poems about George Bush II for most of the aughts), I am choosing to engage the attitudes and individuals who installed this current President—as after he is gone, they will remain and potentially be more entrenched than ever.
   
   
3. When I write/speak about “whiteness” in the book, I am doing so under the assumption (arguably a fact) that “whiteness” is choice—that people are not born “white” as much as they take on, surrender to, and/or sustain “white” identity. Thus what I ask that you do not assume is that I am talking about you specifically when I use the terms “white” or “whiteness” in the book. I do not assume that every Caucasian or European-descended person I encounter actively identifies as “white” or wants to uphold “whiteness” (though many reveal their intentions with what they say or do). I cannot do that because race creates an oppositional, zero sum dynamic and I don’t want to move through my world in a constant state of facing an enemy. (The term “racial harmony” is itself an oxymoron because if you require race in order to navigate engaging with other human beings, you are more interested in efficiency—most likely capitalist efficiency—than harmony.) So when you see the word “white” … relax your defensive stance. Take a breath and know it is not an immediate indictment of you, reader, who I do not know. But if you see the words “white” or “whiteness” and have to pause to have the conversation with yourself (or others) about how you identify with “whiteness” or my depictions of it, I think that is healthy—whatever the outcome—because you will be able to carry that awareness forward with you.
   
   The other side of this, though, is that even if one does not actively choose to be “white” they may still have access to the historically or contemporaneously generated strategic advantages of “whiteness.” As a cishet man, or male-identified, I cannot say I feel a particular fealty or affinity towards being a man, yet that does not mean I am not aware of the everyday privileges of being male in this society. Facing up to those privileges is uncomfortable because it means I have to also consider what that means for those not afforded those privileges, and I then have the choice to move through the world according to that awareness. Or not to. (Also true for my class status. Also true for my being able-bodied. Etc.) And this isn’t me performing righteousness, because I also fail at maintaining this awareness too, but I am saying this to suggest that if I as a blk man in America can pause to make those considerations—which is what many other remarkable writers today encourage me to do—hopefully you can as well.

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​"If ya don't know, now you know": I'll be publishing a new book in 2018 with Northwestern University Press. Northwestern? What happened with you and UGA? You want me to fight them for you? No, no. Things are fine with UGA. We hope to get some version of a new and selected edited in the near future. In fact, I thought that was what I was working on, but the "new" part took on its own book-life. I looked up, and there was an unexpected full manuscript of new work.

I've never happened upon a new book project. My books have always been planned out. (In fact, my next two collections of poems, not including the new and selected, are planned out). But after working with Erika Stevens editing what was an N&S project, I showed that to Parneshia Jones at Northwestern and she made me a believer that there was a critical mass of new work. And even from that moment, which was about summer 2016, the manuscript has changed and tightened so much. That is one thing I am always telling beginning writers. No matter how much editing you think you've done, there is an extra degree of scrutiny you gain access to once you know--know for certain--something is going into the perceived permanence of print publication.

Nikky Finney has always been a role model for me (she even trained my earliest poetry teacher--Kyle Coma-Thompson--who I consider the Qui Gon Jinn to my young Obi Wan). So to join her and other hard-working humble-brilliant blk woman poets like Patricia Smith and Vievee Francis at NWUP . . . I feel like Kevin Durant getting to go to Golden State.

Oh, yeah. The book is called ANAGNORISIS--that moment of recognition, or awareness,  the hero endures in a traditional tragedy--be that an awareness of the true nature of a deed or of one's own vulnerability. My book focuses on the American atmosphere around the time that Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson, Missouri. At that time, I was preparing for a three month return trip to China. Passing through that "East"/"West" threshold, at that particular moment, something about the vulnerability and exhaustion I was feeling in America as a blk man synced with the vulnerability and exhaustion I felt at times in China. (And otherness--my g-d, the otherness.) 

It's an ambitious book, and I am still finding the language to properly describe it, but I feel good about what will land before readers' eyes. Honest Engine, for me, was a labor of refinement--wanting to get everything as right as even as I could to make a prize-winning book. This new book is different. It is a book of release, of freedom of speak. And just getting to that point with one's voice is an accomplishment.

Preview: Two key poems from the book will be in print this summer. Tin House has "In 2016, the African-American Poet Kyle Dargan Is Asked to Consider Writing More Like the African-American Poet Ross Gay." And Gulf Coast has "Another Poem Beginning with a Bullet." If you want to know what I'll be working with in 2018, you can start there.

1
~KGD

Bettering American Poetry is a new anthology project forthcoming from Blazevox Press that I am really honored to be a part of.

Why another yearly anthology you ask? Here is an answer from the editors:

Our goal is to model a collaborative editorial venture that breaks with the anemic capitalizing tradition and goes ahead of institutional efforts that rank poems as the “best”. The “best” hides the subjective goals and values of the few determining what work should receive visibility and reward. The “best” implies that some voices should be prioritized over others. We wish to challenge the idea that a few gatekeepers should oversee the publishing order each year by actively defining and maintaining a hierarchy of voices, an order that replicates the status quo that tokenizes and marginalizes difference.

This is some important push-back work--the type of thing that reminds those of us considered "diverse" voices that we need not fit ourselves to the priorities of the literary establish as we seek to claim our space in the literary landscape.

The VIDA Lit website is hosting a series of interviews with anthology contributors. You can read my own interview here, but check out other contributors too, like Hanif Abdurraquib, Natalie Eilbert, and Cynthia Cruz.

You learn some things after three books, or at least you should. Some of it is knowledge related to the craft of writing and some is savvy related to the business of publishing. Writing (and publishing) keeps you learning.

It took 2015 and my publishing this fourth book--one I bled for--to learn not to invest too much energy in the value system of the literary world, or maybe even the literary world period. (PoeBiz is what Rita Dove taught me to call it.) Most certainly, I made strategic investments of energy and time and resources in promoting the book because I owed it to the art product and to my press for allowing it to become an art product. Beyond that, though (after I weathered not being long-listed for the National Book Award, which hurt me more that I would now be comfortable admitting), I had to do a lot of internal work to divorce the reception of the book--which, as you can see below, has not been disappointing--from my personal value of myself as a writer and my work. (In my reading copy of HONEST ENGINE, I keep a postcard Charles Wright sent me after he read the book. I've gone back to it often throughout the year. To have genuinely made an impression upon my former teachers--Lisa Spaar, Rita Dove and Chuck, those who have invested so many different things in my growth--reaffirms my belief in the journey's worthiness.)

The global community of readers and writers is real. The "literary world" is not. It is  a construction of the trade publishing world and the value and aesthetic shaping institutions that assert influence through prizes and fellowships. There is nothing wrong with playing that game, but a game is all it is. It is a field you place your heart upon for it to be whacked around, not the type of field you plant your heart in if you want something to grow over time. I'm thankful for the opportunity to learn that while living with this book this year.

On the 2016 horizon, look for new work from me in POETRY magazine, AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW and PUBLIC POOL (a new venue I am excited about). I am also excited for new books by writing comrades (such as Dana Johnson, Tyehimba Jess, Victor LaValle and Camille Rankine) and writers I just admire (like Ocean Vuong and Larry Levis).

I really don't believe in "best" books. (The judge always matters and the judge, depending on the public he or she is accountable to, is always wrong.) Nevertheless, I am thankful to have been read by these readers this year, and I appreciate their letting the world know that they read me.

2015 ROUNDUPS

Beltway Poetry Quarterly: "Beltway Poetry Best Books of 2015"
Mosaic Magazine: "Best Books of 2015" 
Split This Rock: "2015 Poetry Books We Loved"
The Millions: "A Year in Reading" by Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Boaat Press: "My Thirteen Favorite New Poetry Books of 2015 (So Far)" by Kaveh Akbar
Medium.com: "Ten Poems I Really Love That Were Published On The Internet In 2015" by Hanif Abdurraqib

BOOK REVIEWS

The Collagist: "HONEST ENGINE Reviewed by Michael VanCalbergh"
Los Angeles Review of Books: "Rigoberto González on BRIGHT DEAD THINGS and HONEST ENGINE and LOOSE STRIFE"
Washington City Paper: "HONEST ENGINE Reviewed by Tanya Paperny"
The Rumpus: "HONEST ENGINE Reviewed by Lauren Swearingen-Steadwell"
Washington Independent Review of Books: "April 2015 Exemplars: National Poetry Month’s Best Picks"

REACTIONS

Colorado State English Department: [Recap] "Creative Writing Reading Series: Kyle Dargan"
Ploughshares Blog: "Reading Kyle Dargan’s HONEST ENGINE During the Baltimore Riots"
Furious Flower: "Comprehensive Humanity: Kyle Dargan on Loss, Learning, and Language"

MEDIA SPOTS

WAMU 88.5: "Bookend: 'My First English Teacher Was Hip-Hop' "
Voice of America News: "House Parties Build Community Around Creative Arts"
The RightSide with Armstrong Williams

SOME THINGS I WROTE

The Rumpus: "The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Informing Form"
Ebony.com: "Saul Williams Takes on the ‘US (a.)’ [INTERVIEW]"

Quick update to tell you about a new and important project I was involved with published by ShoutMouse Press.

Many of us have been literally and digitally "shouting" about the recent police killing of African-American men and women (AND WOMEN) across the country, but have we taken equal time to listen to our young people who will inherit this chaotic world and any of the problems we will fail to solve in our lifetimes? They are caught up in all of this as well, and if you are not sure how, then you need to read and listen to their urgent, heartbreaking and inspiring narratives about coming of age in America's darker corners (dark not because the sun isn't rising but because we aren't fully opening the blinds for them).

You'll find many such narratives in OUR LIVES MATTER, a the new story project book from students at Ballou Senior High School in southeast Washington, D.C. Buy this book. Share it with other young people and use it as a tool to educate yourselves and initiate conversations with others. Below is my foreword to the book, but it is in no way an attempt to validate what's inside, as these stories need no validation. They are all inherently worthy.

Man, I know. Haven't been writing in this journal space, but I really have not been sure what is worthy words lately. I want to let people know about what has been going on with HONEST ENGINE and my creative process in general, but every other week police officers kill some private African-American citizen and I'm not really sure what bearing my writing has on these events. (A recent post by Daniel Peña on the Ploughshares blog suggests there may be some bearing, but I don't think that is for me to say as the author.) Personally, I do not want to read poems about it. I want to vote people out of office, I want to hold people accountable for the government policies that have resulted in impoverished ghetto communities where it then becomes the policy--the legal policy--for police to harass, chase, and arrest anyone who runs, reasonable suspicion always assumed.

(Once, as a "joke" during campus visit week, my college friend C, who is Irish, and I planned to run across campus with him chasing me with a whip--an attempt to bring the racial history of the place, and its subconscious, to the fore. I'm glad we didn't do that--would have been expelled likely--but I increasingly feel like it would have been justified performance art. Aside over.)

Some poetry and protest news you should be aware of: #BlackPoetsSpeakOut will be organizing a reading on Friday, May 29th in Baltimore (event link). I haven't decided if I am going to participate (again, I am still uncertain about poetry's place in what is going on in America), but I'll be there in solidarity either way.

And the day before, Thursday Wednesday 28th, I will be participating in the Breakbeats Poet reading at Upshur Street Books here in D.C.--Petworth (event link). The Breakbeat Poets is a really important anthology that firmly recognizes the voices--the diverse voices that all found some home in the hip-hop era--who will be shaping, through poetry, the conversation about who we are going to be as Americans living right now. The silences that can no longer be endured will be broken by these writers, and I am honored to be included in the anthology and representing for the D.C. contingent at this reading.

I have been writing about what's happening, but it's "slow food" writing. It is very important that what I say be as close to pitch perfect as possible--something like a rifle shot. That is how I feel about engaging people who scoff at the idea of needing to state that "black lives matter," that I may only have a very small window of opportunity to penetrate/pierce them. It's stressful. Sometimes you think, "I need to finish and maybe publish this poem now before it becomes irrelevant" (not that such things actually happen to strong, effective poems), but it is fairly clear--sadly clear--that any writing about the State killing of people in brown bodies is not not going to be irrelevant anytime soon.

It is stressful releasing a book in this digital era. Don’t let anyone convince you of the contrary.

My whole game plan—most of which is a solo effort—was designed around Honest Engine coming out, well, yesterday, April 1st, 2015. When the book showed up in my office in late February, three weeks early, it sent me into a bit of a promotion panic.

I was nowhere near as deliberate with my first three books. To me, those books were all just blessings.The mere opportunity to have them in print was enough for me—everything else was excess good fortune. I never planned any book tours or sketched out a marketing strategy. What came came, and good things came—a review in the Times; write-up in the Star-Ledger or Washingtonian magazine. All that back when, honestly, I didn't know enough to care.

But now I do care. Honest Engine is a different book. The structuring and the writing were conscious in ways that were not true for the other books. I fought for what’s in Honest Engine as one fights against a hard and bitter wind knowing there is a warm place, however far away, where one’s bones might be able to eventually rest. I usually send my manuscripts to one former teacher in particular as they near completion, and, despite her busy schedule as one of the grande dames of American letters, she always found a moment to respond. I did not send her the manuscript for Honest Engine because I knew, in terms of evolution, it was what the other three books had laid the foundation for in terms of revelations and mistakes and the gradual unwinding of what had been, in my other books, a very well-wrapped speaker. I knew she would see that because I’d finally—after ten years—gotten to the point where I could see my poems—their strengths, their holes—as she could.

Since the book has been in print—early—I’ve had three readings. One was, if we are just talking numbers, not that great in Boulder, Colorado. (Though I had a very sincere conversation one of the eight people in attendance who was an aspiring writer.) The other two were at Colorado State University and the University of Virginia (my alma mater)—both great audiences who bought all the books. And while I do remember feeling so fortunate and enthused after those moments . . . one returns to the internet and to the stagnant Amazon sale rank or lack of buzz on twitter and begins to question if the work is connecting with anyone in that broader realm beyond all the hands one can shake and all the eye one can look within. I often find myself buried under that uncertainty, my brain throbbing with the frustration of not being recognized for the work I’ve cared about most.

The best moment of this process thus far has been the ride back from the Virginia Festival of the Book. I stopped a Target in one of the new shopping centers creeping their way north on US-29 and bought the new Kendrick Lamar CD. (Yes, the CD. I needed to be able to play it in the rental car and I was fascinated enough by the project to know I wanted it in a physical form, not just ethereal data.) Listened straight through from the edge of Charlottesville to Gainesville, and by the time I got to the imagined (or rather repurposed) dialogue with Tupac at the end I was so entranced that I also smashed into the a row of cars stopped at an intersection. Not joking. I was wearing my seatbelt, but the car would have gotten totaled. I had to pull off the road for a second and collect myself (read: thank the ancestors for not yet calling me home for my foolishness).

I’d spent so much time in the past few weeks stressing about the marketing and business side of art—my own art—that I’d forgotten or thoroughly distanced myself from the joy of getting lost in the aesthetic forensics of experiencing art that challenges you. Listening to To Pimp a Butterfly over and over for the rest of that weekend gave me some ideas for structural challenges I want to confront in my next collection of poems, as regardless of what happens with Honest Engine there will be a next collection with new challenges. Up—and over a higher bar—is the only direction to go on this path. The ego get the upper hand at times—hell, it might get you all the way into that anxiety arm bar—but as long as you don’t tap out--

So thank you to Kendrick Lamar for releasing something else for me to be invested in while I am in the midst of rolling out my own project. And for simply recording the album. It isn't perfect [he says in response to To Pimp a Butterfly's critics], but no piece of art is. Nor is that the point, I'd argue.What can you and what do you learn from it--about the craft and about yourself? That's how I judge art in this existence we'll never understand, and even when introducing my art to the world, the best thing is being on the receiving end of art.

(This is inadvertently turning into a hip-hop journal, but so be it.)

P.S. Here is the original Honest Engine cover art next to the To Pimp a Butterfly album cover. Would have made for an interesting conversation, huh, America?

Late night—should be asleep, but I’m listening to Paid in Full, as always amazed at how long “My Melody” runs at eight seconds shy of seven minutes. It isn’t a song with superfluous space either. Eric B.’s stunts and scratches are like verses in themselves. Wherever you try to cut, you are going to excise something classic (though maybe that is nostalgia talking).

The world has become an increasingly ruthless battlefield. The war over a seeming limitless resource—attention (which certainly does have a limit). And though it is often misleading to make comparisons across time, I think “My Melody” would have a difficult time securing media space in the present media landscape where so much of what we consume (or what we are encouraged to consume) is compressed and quickly digestible (if you can even call what most of us do with media “digestion”). Yes, there are pieces such as Frank Ocean’s “Pyramids”—running almost ten minutes—but I’ve never heard the song or seen the video broadcast entirely (not that I actually watch television or listen to anything but NPR).

These contemplations often bring me back to what I find frustrating about so much contemporary poetry—the lack of urgency, the ignorance, or unwillingness to accept, that it too exists on that battlefield where a high-tech war is being waged over the attention of human being. Were it something I could shout at journals, or at readings or even at my students sometimes, it would be this: “Interesting isn’t good enough!” Or, even more of an egregious assumption, merely interesting to you as the author.

I am not suggesting that curiosity and/or obsession are futile or unworthy spaces from which to begin writing, but in a world where so many screens—our tablets, our phones, our glasses and even watches—are competing for our attention (and we are, by nature, more visual- than text-sensitive), shouldn't poems have an awareness of not only how they may be interesting but also compelling, how they intend to attempt compulsion? Compulsion not propaganda—the latter has a more specific, too specific, ideological aim. But I see nothing wrong with writing that takes as its task compelling people to reengage and consider their humanity. A writer just acting out some curiosity on a page and hoping the reader comes along for the ride is, to me, an increasingly unrealistic desire. The work of poetry—the “labor,” as Amiri Baraka said—is to use language to communicate, to connect and pull us out of the orbits we have established around ourselves. I know the sensation of reading a poem that compels me to feel. I know the numbness of reading a poem and waiting for it to decide what, if anything, is the import of its words—its significance to me as a human being and not some idea-addicted text glutton. And I am a generous reader—it’s my job to be—so imagine everyone else for whose attention you are competing. And why are we writing if we are not seeking to communicate to, or connect with, as many fellow human beings as possible? The assumption that poetry is niche--is that a product of people’s reading habits or a product of poets' approach to poetry—what it is; how it speaks; and who should be reading it?

Writing, or rather getting a piece to the point where I am ready to release it to the world, has become much easier for me since I stopped thinking about creation as a relationship between myself and the art and started thinking of it as, primarily, a relationship between the art and the world. As a writer, that is a world of difference when it comes to accountability and focus.

There really are no “radio edits” in poetry. You have to deal with the whole as the author intended. Poets don’t have deejays to chop them up and make their art easier to consume. And I am not suggesting that it is towards “ease” that poets should be aspire but, rather, human urgency—so that when you do get that one moment before a modern readers’ eyes, a moment cached in a blur of other interesting stimuli, your poem is more than just that, written stimuli. Imagine, in that moment, that your poem allows readers to experience the implication of their own humanity in your work. It would likely transcend fodder. It would stem the acceleration of our days—not click-bait but stay-bait. That’s how I feel when I listen to “My Melody.” I know there are a million things flying around my head, but I also know that I want to be present this the song because it has made the effort to reach into me as opposed attempting to project itself on me, assuming I’ll be there to act as its screen.

I guess I could have just said sincerity beats assumption and saved myself six paragraphs. I could have said sweat the technique, too.

For some who entered their teenage years in the nineties, watching SportsCenter was a form of devotion. I used to wake up at 6 AM to watch the early airing so I would still have time to shower eat breakfast and get ready for school. That SportsCenter post-theme song saxophone vamp announced morning for me. More likely than not, I'd already seen most of the highlights from the late edition the night before, but that didn't matter. You watched SportsCenter for the verbal brio of the hosts--how they described what you already knew. Olbermann. Patrick. Kilborn.

Stuart Scott was different because he was down. It was rare that you saw a "down-ass" African-American man at the SportsCenter host table. By down, I mean Scott was as composed and smooth as his counterparts, but he spoke the language of the subjects, the predominantly African-American athletes. His diglossia transitioned between "standard" and "black" English in a way that flouted the idea that you couldn't go to the top without scorning the language you learned and spoke when you were at the "black" bottom (the "bottom" as an equally relevant cultural realm and not a terminal point on a hierarchy). He conducted energetic, sharp, and casually intelligent interviews that managed to convince you that he and his subjects were "homies" who shared a mutual respect.

I lost my grandmother to cancer. It took her so fast it felt like a blur. Maybe being out of the country this fall has enhanced this feeling, but, to me, it seems like it was just yesterday that he announced he was battling cancer. In reality, it has been about a year, and--sadly--so go these things.

In my twenties, I attempted to write a book of hip-hop-inspired poems--"T.H.U.G.: A Truncated History of Urban Griots." I lost faith in the project and abandoned it. Since, some of the poems have popped up here and there. One of the poems that never surfaced was "Don't Hate the Player"--not quite a tribute, but definitely a gesture to Stuart Scott. It wasn't one of the better poems, but I will post it here in memory of a man who brought a lot of wonder to my young sports fanship.

DON'T HATE THE PLAYER

Scott's never ending attempt to bring a hip-hop flavor (or should I say "flava") to ESPN has done nothing but turn off countless viewers. We don't care if you're African-American. So are many other reporters and they don't make idiots out of themselves and shove their "blackness" down our throats. We also don't care if Michael Jordan is one of your homies.
~Random Cyber-Hater, http://www.carolinasucks.com/stuartscottsucks.htm


When a fifteen foot putt echoes
first Samuel chapter 16 verse 12,

is it hip-hop at play? The lord
said you got to rise up. 

Soul-man commentary—sports
highlights seasoned with neck bones, 

street salts and Sunday-morning
inflection. Every game and ball

demands its heralds. Men with air
in their soles leap in ways that render

gravity insecure--later hoping to earn
the staple stamp of Booya

on the six o’clock Sports Center.
Got to do better than that player.

Swish five trifectas? You might
garner an it’s getting hot in herre.

Where Dan Patrick will easily give
an en fuego (gringo accent and all)

Stuart Scott will make you work--
for he knows a black star

must shine that much harder
to avoid being charted as a hole.

One of D.C.'s (and thus the nation's) literary gems is Beltway Poetry Quarterly, founded and still edited by Kim Roberts. For the new year, Beltway has released a rich and diverse issue dedicated solely to the sonnet, co-edited by Michael Gushue. I was fortunate enough to be featured in the issue, but let me first note some of the other poems I think are worth reading first. There is "Brown Sonnet" by Tony Medina, "Scars of Last Year's Leaves" by Myra Sklarew, and "A Blizzard Blues" by Melanie Henderson.

As for my piece, "Failed Sonnet After the Verdict," I appreciate the piece being highlighted in the issue's introduction, but I have some concern about how it was characterized. 

Have you ever read Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia? As an African-American graduate of Mr. Jefferson's university--U.Va.--the text has always been of particular interest to me. It holds some "interesting" insights into Jefferson's mind, though nothing shocking when situated in historical context:

A black, after hard labour through the day, will be induced by the slightest amusements to sit up till midnight, or later, though knowing he must be out with the first dawn of the morning. They are at least as brave, and more adventuresome. But this may perhaps proceed from a want of forethought, which prevents their seeing a danger till it be present. When present, they do not go through it with more coolness or steadiness than the whites. They are more ardent after their female: but love seems with them to be more an eager desire, than a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation. Their griefs are transient. Those numberless afflictions, which render it doubtful whether heaven has given life to us in mercy or in wrath, are less felt, and sooner forgotten with them. In general, their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection. To this must be ascribed their disposition to sleep when abstracted from their diversions, and unemployed in labour. An animal whose body is at rest, and who does not reflect, must be disposed to sleep of course.[1]

Why am I bringing this up now? Well Michael Gushue, who I respect and am sure meant no harm by it, suggests in his introduction  that my poem represents "anger." And I just want to remind people that you have to be mindful about situating the emotional responses of "black" people on a binary spectrum of either rage or ecstasy. There is a lamentable history in America of denying "black" people their emotional complexity. There is, I'll say as the author, no anger in the poem. Sadness, maybe, but not an acute sadness about Trayvon Martin; more so a sadness about the fact that there are people who need dead "black" bodies to feel safe in America--sadness for what the insides of their minds and hearts must look like.

This isn't beef at all, nor an attempt to single out Michael, just a note--an amicable one--about being mindful about how to characterize our (negroes) emotional reactions to what we have been facing in recent times.