! NERUDA !

Neruda punches a hole in my heart. He uncorks on me with Tysonic fists and bites at my flesh – He’s a cannibal of poetry, bodily and effervescent.

As night fades to black I listen to “Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines”.

I weep.

The beautiful lines cut trails into my skin like Goths razor their arms. As violins play, he shines a spotlight on a vast emptiness in my heart where once existed a fount of love.

The night is shattered / and the blue stars shiver in the distance.

I shiver with those stars, a bloody mess. A knife sunk in my living flesh.

Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) captures my sprit de coeur the way no other writer can other than Rumi. He does so consistently, romantically, politically, grabbing the heart’s tendrils and yanking them, as in the poem above and then again in “I Like For You To Be Still”.

But so much depends on the reader and the translator when it comes to literature. The readings by Andy Garcia and Glenn Close wound me and salve me simultaneously.

They capture his meaning like no others I’ve heard.

Neruda, the god of Latin poetry and all things beautiful, magical and romantic.

Born in Chile, a winner of the Nobel Prize, he is the perfect starting point for a study of metaphor, geography, history and other wild-eyed romantic poets, for he is in a league that very few play in.

Professors and lovers of verse and romance know what I mean.

To read his verse is to alter your perceptions, so that you can then read Rimbaud, Whitman, Lorca and all the other verbal freaks.

He lived a life that umpteen bios have attempted to tell. He was street poet, scholar, senator and outlaw. In his oeuvre lives a vast reservoir of wisdom, sadness and vivid tales. He writes about dictators and freedom fighters, seducers and jungles. He writes about the Spanish Civil War. He writes about the smallest, insignificant things like tomatoes and makes them fiery, cool, fertile and profound.

For example in “Ode to Tomatoes” (translated by Margaret Sayers Peden), Neruda personifies salad and creates a bowl filled with anarchy and marriage. He uses verbs like Van Gogh used paints: run, invade, ease, take, shed, murder, sink, populate, wed, pour, add, hoist, bubble, knock, come, display, offer.

We know, ultimately, he is not talking about a tomato. He is talking about a really cool citizen.

Neruda is ripe for any doctorate or master’s thesis. You can attack his body of work from all angles: imagery, theme, metaphor, tone, language, personification, form, history, psychology, philosophy, sociology.

I am left to wonder if it was the streets that made the poetry. Or was it the poetry that made the streets? Remember Paris in 1968?

THE DUTCHMAN & THE SLAVE

BY LEROI  JONES, AKA AMIRI BARAKA

I never liked Leroi Jones - aka Amiri Baraka – because I’m a White guy.

That said, The Slave and The Dutchman must be read.

Written at a time of racial unrest – early 1960s – Baraka's plays stand out for their philosophical depth.

In The Slave hordes of Black militia bombard a city. As the urban landscape gets flattened, the interracial characters sling mud at each other. A White woman, her White boyfriend, and her Black ex-husband - who has fathered her two children - debate on whose cause and identity is most righteous and authentic.

While race war in the age of Obama may seem passé, The Slave remains an essential read that delves into meanings of existence, what Sartre would call the philosophy of existentialism. The play resembles Camus’ The Stranger in the main character’s alienation from the racial other.

The interracial relationship, their interracial children clearly symbolize larger fates. The handling of these characters is Baraka's prophecy.

Bravely writing in the year of the U.S. Civil Rights Act (1964) when miscegenation still ranked as taboo, Baraka spares no punches in either play and holds court on many of the academic concerns of the day.

The formation of identity, or, as Jones puts it, “the total beautiful structure of the beautiful soul”, figures strongly in the concerns of both plays’ protagonists. Jones deftly alludes to several major topics of academic discourse, including DuBois’ double consciousness, Western society, Freud, Nazism and the tradition of slave revolt.

The Dutchman is also set in the urban jungle, this time Manhattan and takes place entirely on a subway. Once again, the major theme is race relations. Again there is an interracial couple at the center of the plot. If you bear in mind that Baraka was married to the White poet Hettie Jones (with whom he fathered two children) prior to his moving to Black Nationalism, both plays come across as works of autobiography.

Additionally, the plays were produced less than a decade after the infamous Emmett Till murder. Till, an African-American, was killed for allegedly whistling at a White woman in Money, Mississippi.

The Dutchman is rife with questions of identity.

In 2009, as the Black middle class grows and the dreams of success are being realized by so many, these stories come across as unnecessarily antagonistic. However when placed in the context of the time they were written, The Slave and The Dutchman are incredibly brave pieces of literature. Of course there are many who will disagree and will say that race is still the central fact of our time. I suggest the stories are to be read as primers for Philosophy 101.

Imagine This...

(a musing on the the European Renaissance, Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, and Lavon Rucker's review of The School of Night.)

Leonardo's notebooks, Marlowe's plays, Galileo's bravery, Pericles' vision: these are a few of the ingredients that went into the European Renaissance.

During the European Renaissance, two worlds existed: the secular and the religious.

Imagine this: Christopher Marlowe, the the 16th C. laureate of atheism and author of Dr. Faustus, ambles down a London lane. Well-dressed, erudite, he holds a book concerning cosmological theories. Along the way, he encounters a barefoot farmer. The bumpkin has not bathed in a week. He slept with his livestock the night before.

(This was an encounter often played out and if you walk around today, sadly, you still encounter people who live in ignorance and dire straits. The cause of this is often political chicanery and greed.)

“Have you read Copernicus?” asks Marlowe.

“Who?” the man asks.

“Have you heard of heliocentrism?”

“Huh?”

“Copernicus? Galileo?”

At the sound of Galileo’s name the man shrieks and runs off down the lane. The powerful Church ostracized Galileo for the crime of free thinking.

Under England's Church and Queen, too much free thinking was illegal. Is that the case today in America? Do we have our own dogma about the free market, our own racism against the Arabs of the Middle East, our own class and cultural stereotypes about art, sexuality, lifestyle, politics? Are we afraid to challenge the two-party duopoly that runs this country?

Look at the “Renaissance Man” Leonardo Da Vinci, who was similarly criminal as he transgressed the bounds of church propriety by digging open graves to perform studies on cadavers. Where would we be today if we followed the laws of the Church that declared the internal organs off-limits?

Scientists and artists of the European Renaissance, beginning in Italy during the 14^th Century, waged war against religious dogma. 

The Scientific Method was the great invention of the day. Great changes in the educated person’s sensibility took place once the Church lost its powerful sway over reason. This revolution – occurring economically, scientifically, and artistically – reflects itself in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, with a main character hungry for secular and sensuous knowledge.

As monasteries dissolved throughout Europe and were ceded to enterprising capitalists – noveau riche – the scientist-artist turned vice into virtue, lust was good and humility bad.

Where the Church called for man to be humble and a non-entity before God, Da Vinci, Galileo, Copernicus, Michelangelo, Marlowe and the rest of the intellectual outlaws lived zestfully with a lust for life, power, and understanding.

During the Renaissance, Columbus traveled to North America and scholars revisited ancient Greek texts from the days of Pericles. As the intellectual outlaws developed their knowledge and personalities, viva activa was held in high esteem. One had to be agile and alive to advance mentally. The great poet of the time Milton demanded that one get out from “cloistered virtue”.

Today, a great poet might demand that you “Get off the fucking couch!”

During the Renaissance we see strong regard for statesmen, soldiers, civil servants, and men who took care of family. The doctor of theology became a “book worm” and often disparaged.

Short Eyes

Miguel Pinero's Tapestry of Grit and Humanity

Miguel Pinero tackles the most controversial of all subjects; that is, sex between an adult and a child. In Short Eyes, for which he won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1974, he puts a suspected child molester into a prison, the most unforgiving of places for such a person. Pinero’s portraits of the inmates and the prison culture reveal humanity where perhaps society sees none.

“Short eyes” is prison slang for child molester.

At times very funny, filled with lots of slick prison humor, Short Eyes exists on several planes. Pinero uses the child molester's experience inside the prison, a place Pinero was very familiar with from the time he was a teen, as a vehicle to discuss cultural diversity, morals, values, religious and racial clashes, slang, soul, snitching and codes of secrecy, murder, integrity, humanity, sexuality, and civil rights.

It is a beautifully written, gritty tapestry of colors, sights, and sounds. By writing about prison and focusing on the wisdom of the criminal and the street, Pinero falls into the same category as the other poet of the streets, the Frenchman Jean Genet.

Ultimately Short Eyes is a moral tale, for it forces a major question. And that is, in prison, where inmates are supposed to be reformed, are they really being made worse?

In the 1970s, Pinero and Miguel Alguerin founded the legendary Nuyorican Poets Café in Alphabet City, New York. Pinero died at the young age of forty-one due to liver cirrhosis.

 








Zoot Suit  
The Luis Valdez Masterpiece

Luis Valdez is the author of Zoot Suit, a hard-hitting and funny play set in Los Angeles in the 1940s. It tells the tale of Henry Reyna, a fictionalized version of Hank Leyvas, the bedeviled Angeleno accused of murder and a host of other crimes.

Leyvas was part of the Pachuco culture, a subculture that rose up during the Depression in the Southwestern section of the United States, and in 1942 Leyvas found himself in the middle of a full-scale backlash.

The U.S. was mired in World War II and Los Angeles had just rounded up Japanese-Americans into concentration camps. The country was in reactionary mode and looking for more scapegoats. They found the Pachucos.

Regularly lambasted by the press, Pachucos came to be known in LA as roughnecks and renegades, when in reality many of them were simply flamboyant dressers with a penchant for dancing and romance.

Leyvas was the main defendant in the infamous Sleepy Lagoon Murder trial. He was one of 600 Pachucos arrested in one day. He was convicted but the decision was later reversed upon a ton of public pressure to release him and several other Pachucos. Looking back now, the case of Hank Leyvas and the demonization of the Pachucos was a classic case of police profiling and the lurid press jumped on the bandwagon in order to sell newspapers.

Valdez expertly uses this infamous piece of LA history to highlight several themes. One obvious theme being justice. In the play when the murder conviction is overturned there is an honest feeling of elation for the Pachucos who had been wrongly accused.

A second theme is America’s woeful tendency to demonize its own citizens. Why would the largely-Latino Pachuco culture have to endure police profiling? Latinos were signing up for the military in droves. They obviously loved their country. The mass arrests of Pachucos based solely on the flimsy evidence of wearing a Zoot Suit is an incident in Los Angeles history that will go down in infamy. That and the riots that occurred less than one year later when agitated marines waged war against the Pachucos in the LA streets for a week were equally disgraceful.

But the last and most joyous theme Valdez highlights is the trés cool Pachuco culture.

Zooted up in fine jackets that draped down to their knees, sporting pork pie hats, platform shoes, long watch chains and a defiant gaze upon the world, the Pachuco is revealed in all his flair. Not only the dressing style but the music, the language, the home life and culture of the Latino is celebrated. Valdez also points out in his play that the Zoot Suit style applied to women, Blacks, Asians and Whites. A fierce celebrant of Latino culture, Valdez is also proud to be an American and promotes tolerance of diversity.

I recently had great success in teaching this play to my Latino and Black students in South Central Los Angeles. The cultural relevance of the play, with descriptions of home life, parties, and interactions with the police had an immediate impact on the students. The intermittent use of the Calo language and references to the 38^th Street gang, the ultra-hip character El Pachuco and his stylish Zoot Suit, it all resonated with the students because they are things the students see and recognize on a regular basis. There was a high-level of class participation in performing and analyzing Valdez’s masterpiece. It is proof that cultural relevance is the first criterion in developing curriculum.

I see the most brilliant explosions of life: graffiti, Craftsman architecture and Latino styles. But I also see homelessness, crackheads, and the sickly. 

Beauty melds with death, like in Van Gogh’s Sunflowers.

In the case of Arthur Rimbaud’s beautifully tragic and ironic poem, “A Sleeper In The Valley”, we see an intense depiction of beauty melding with death.

Rimbaud was the enfant terrible of boho Paris in the 1870s. Born in the little town of Charleville, he studied Latin as a youth and excelled in his studies. By sixteen, however, he was a proto-punk, disgusted with the Catholic Church, growing his hair long, flicking carefully-cultivated lice at priests, and writing “merde á dieu” on the steeple door. The Prussians had invaded France. Prussian soldiers roamed the country. Soon young Arthur would be running off to Paris to support the commune of 1871 and puke on the avante garde of French poetic society.

This rebellious façade that Rimbaud built for himself hid a sensitive perception, which bore poems about race, love, nature, and war. He was a humanitarian at heart.

He combats ugliness with beauty. Then, when the reader has been entranced by the wonders of nature that he portrays, he pulls away the drapes and reveals the horrible truth. It is a potent mix.

A green hole where a river sings;

Silver tatters tangling in the grass;

Sun shining down from a proud mountain:

A little valley bubbling with light.

Rimbaud treats the reader to a pretty mountain image. We are pulled into this bucolic world and smile inwardly at the graceful music of his verse.

A young soldier sleeps, lips apart, head bare,

Neck bathing in cool blue watercress,

Reclined in the grass beneath the clouds,

Pale in his green bed showered with light.

Rimbaud focuses on the intensity of light touching this peacefully resting soldier, who has seemingly put down his gun for a snooze in the cool grass. Only once we read the entire poem do we realize how haunted these lines are.

He sleeps with his feet in the gladiolas.

Smiling like a sick child, he naps.

Nature, cradle him in warmth: he’s cold.

The appeal is to Mother Nature to warm this pale, sick child of the earth. Each image-beat Rimbaud lays down is alternatingly luscious and mean. He simply sets the disarmed reader up for the shocking ending.

Sweet scents don’t tickle his nose;

He sleeps in the sun, a hand on his motionless chest,

Two red holes on his right side.