Tag: poetry

politics

Praise Song for the Day

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I was very impressed by the poem “Praise Song for the Day” that was written and read by Elizabeth Alexander at the Inauguration, though I was surprised that the current Poet Laureate Kay Ryan did not perform this job.
The poem was straight forward and profound at the same time, something that is often difficult to achieve in poetry, and I looked all day for the text of this beautifully simple poem. I liked how it described the every day and especially the stanza which reads, “We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed; words to consider, reconsider.” That is what I do with this blog – meet you with my words, sometimes taken from others, sometimes written by myself. We lurch along this life, moving from one moment to the next, never realizing except in extreme circumstances what is routine and what is exceptional.
Thanks to the Grey Lady and CQ transcriptions, below is a transcript of the inaugural poem. If you missed it the first time or couldn’t wait to read it again, enjoy.
“Praise Song for the Day”
Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each others’ eyes or not, about to speak or speaking. All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues. Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair.
Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.
A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky; A teacher says, “Take out your pencils. Begin.”
We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed; words to consider, reconsider.
We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of someone and then others who said, “I need to see what’s on the other side; I know there’s something better down the road.”
We need to find a place where we are safe; We walk into that which we cannot yet see.
Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.
Praise song for struggle; praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand-lettered sign; The figuring it out at kitchen tables.
Some live by “Love thy neighbor as thy self.”
Others by first do no harm, or take no more than you need.
What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.
In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp — praise song for walking forward in that light.

literature

Imaginary Menagerie

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In the end, it was
as in the beginning; no one
learned anything. What was alive
was killed and posed,
stuffed, put on display. The remaining live
wandered around amongst the dead,
wondering what they looked like
when they were alive and in the positions
in which they were now posed, which the live
could have witnessed in life
had they not killed
the now
dead
– Barbara Tran

ramblings

NOLA Relief NYC

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I am still so upset about this tragedy that I can hardly speak or think about it without getting red in the face so I’ll leave my blistering criticism of the federal government’s reaction (it took 4 days!?!?) for another post.

In conjunction with my cousin Jimmy, proprietor of Jacques-imos, and the president of the NYC Tulane Alumnus Association, I have launched Nola Relief NYC, a site dedicated to information related to the New Orleans Hurricane Katrina Relief Effort that is going on in the Greater New York City Area. There are going to be many, many, fundraising events in the NYC area. This site will be listing all NYC fundraising events that are being held in conjunction with the NYC Tulane Alumnus Organization. There is already one planned at Jacques-imos for Wednesday, September 14th. It will be a night of food, drink, and live New Orleans music. We will celebrate while we mourn in the greatest of New Orleans’s traditions.

The copy below is from an email that Jimmy sent out yesterday:

Most of you have watched this weeks events in New Orleans and The Gulf Coast in horror. As many of you know, we operate a New Orleans restaurant here in NYC, Jacques-Imos, and have two restaurants New Orleans. Our sister restaurants, Jacques-Imos New Orleans and Crabby Jack’s of Jefferson Parish, employ more than 85 people.

To date, we have only heard from 5 of these employees. We have reason to believe that more than 60% of the homes of our employees have either been destroyed or looted. The personal stories we are hearing from our friends and employees down in New Orleans are horrific, often worse than what we are hearing on the news. Here in NYC, our staff has been personally effected by the events as more than 70% of our employees are from New Orleans. Due to Katrina’s wrath, Jacques-Imos NYC has become the orphanage of New Orleans’ residents and refugees in NYC.

For those of you who have been touched over the years by the majesty and charm of New Orleans, for those who simply want to help the people of The Gulf Coast, please come by Jacques-Imos NYC on Wednesday, September 14th, to show your support. 100% of the proceeds will go to relief efforts in New Orleans. For those of you in a position to donate something that can be auctioned off that evening, please email me or call me Jacques-Imos, 212 799 0150. Whether it be a weekend at a home in the Hamptons or in St. Maarten, 20 cases of Abita beer, plane tickets to Miami, a years subscription to the NY Times, we’ll take any and everything that we can auction off. Again, 100% of the proceeds from the evening are going to the American Red Cross.

Finally, there is a real need to find short term housing in NYC for our New Orleans employees and New Orleans friends. If any of you have access to apartments in the NYC area that we can rent please let us know or send an email to info@nolareliefnyc.com. Everyone from New Orleans is in the same boat. Many of the financial institutions in New Orleans are very local as opposed to what we have here in NYC. Therefore their ATM and Credit Cards are not working. We are looking for large and small affordable apartments in NYC.

Please do what you can. Open your hearts. Open your homes. Open your wallets. Let’s make a difference when obviously our government has failed to do so. After the jump, feel free to read a poem I wrote about Nawlins after I visited the the city for the first time – Jimmy took me to Jazz Fest and I just fell in love with Nawlins. It was written during my sophomore year and included in my intermediate creative writing class portfolio.

Nola by Jeff Lipson

It came from out of the bayou,
a sound of jazz and of zydeco,
a sound of the blues and of funk,
a smell of gumbo and of jambalaya,
a smell of po boys and of crawfish
a sense that I found a home.
Black child eyes the crowd,
feet blazing away on the sidewalk,
dancing hard, dancing out of love,
dancing for me,
and I smile,
throw a dollar in the hat for his effort,
and he smiles back.
Seventy year old black man,
blind but never beaten,
damns his frail body, athritic fingers,
joins his friend down at the Howlin Wolf,
gets his remedy
jamming the night like he did in ’58
except there are white folk swaying in the crowd
swaying to his mastery,
smiling with love at the negro layin down the groove.
The nights are wet, are humid,
fifteen foot shutters seal doors and windows,
wrought iron gates protect secluded gardens,
they’re everywhere in the Quarter didn’t you know,
and the street names are in french,
and the city seems ancient,
and the city is ancient
and my ticket says I have to go home,
cab speeds away toward the airport,
up 36 hours and still ready for more,
I say I will call this place home.

literature

The Dark Tower V Commala poems

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When Roland danced at the town meeting place in Calla Bryne Sturgis:
Come-come-commala
Rice come a-alla
I-sissa ‘ay a-bralla
Dey come a-folla
Down come a-rivva
Or-i-za we kivva
Rice be a green-o
See all we seen-o
See-o the green-o
Come-come-commala!
Come-come-commala
Rice come a-falla
Deep inna walla
Grass come-commala
Under the sky-o
Grass green n high-o
Girl n her fella
Lie down togetha
They slippy ‘ay slide-o
Under ‘ay sky-o
Come-come-commala
Rice come a-falla!

When Andy was leading the town’s children down the street before the great battle:
ANDY
Commala-come-one!
Mamma hada a son
Dass-a time ‘at Daddy
Had d’mos’ fun!
CHORUS
Commala-come-come!
Daddy had one
Dass-a time ‘at Mommy
Had d’mos’ fun!

ramblings

Pharewell

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I went four for five in my not so long goodbye
with a frown turned upside-down into a smile at the end
not on the soft velvety green of an upstate phairway
but on the gritty asphalt of my world capital
in the canyon of heroes is where my music stopped.
My run was bookended by skyscrapers
metal carcasses of the past
modern gleaming glass slabs of the present
between them a great north wood wrapped inside of traffic.
The music was a quick flowing stream of sonic love
rushing at breakneck speed into oblivion:
through a rain slick evening with glowstick sized drops it buzzed,
through a humid night that stuck you to your seat if you dared use it it thumped,
through a dark star-filled sky full of haves and have-nots it grooved,
through a clear blue sky that poured down on the concrete stalagmites it jammed,
through it all swirled the magical sounds of overflowing joy,
a wail of strings and keys and drums dancing with both structure and mayhem
and language fails to provide a better word than ‘smile’ which is a shame
for we all were well beyond ‘smiles.’
Encore! Encore! Then handshakes and rueful smiles,
a scattered goodbye made on a street corner and then nothing more,
except songs, pictures and memories to download to anyone
who wants to hear and see what once was.
I merely blinked and ten years had passed by.
Neon strobbed all around as I thought back to the mountains,
about the show I had seen two nights before,
about the cold walk back to the car with no light to guide us.
“I am significant!” screamed the dust spec into the night air,
“This is significant!” bellowed the waves from the stage
but an ancient kernel of truth, that this too shall pass,
kept haunting me, that it’s over,
this note is over, this song is over, this whole scene is over,
this whole era is over, is it the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning?
Where do I go from here but home? And then what?
Those thoughts had disappeared when I heard the Broadway reprieve news
One more time! A precious gift not to be squandered and it wasn’t
a reprieve that ended with a fitting “…Reprise”
an up-beat ending that left you amped, not a down-beat ending that left you sad
but after the fist pumping and clapping had ceased there was and is still sadness
it cannot be escaped, where there is loss, there is sadness.
“I hope we passed the audition” said the red one as he passed by the mic,
the last time I would hear his voice with those others beside him,
and I looked up past the fifty stories of brick and glass and steel,
saw the azure sky dotted with wisps of white and grinned.
We both passed the audition and we will both move on
and this too shall pass, but I will never forget.

ramblings

Open Mic

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I remembered last night with brutal clarity why I stopped writing. On a stage at an open mic night stood writer after writer, each speaking to a generally supportive yet ambivalent crowd. A number of things leapt out at me as they recited their wares.

One, their poems were carbon copies of each other. Their images were pure stock footage; waves in the ocean, moonlight shimmering through a window.

Two, they were blunt. They were straight ahead no-nonsense.

Three, they were infused with a pop sensibility; earnest, naive and shockingly bland. Perfect for the angst-ridden masses.

Four, they were read with a hip-hop, rhythmic bounce. The first one who read paused at certain words, drawing them out before continuing on. I had heard that style before -many, many times. Then every poem afterwards sounded the same, the way white men and women do when trying to sound black. It wasn’t as if this was happening in a white filled vacuum. There were a number of black men and women in the crowd. At one point, a man read a poem and of course it was in the same style as all the others. Yet his flow (it wasn’t a reading so much as a flow, its all about the flow now, the flow of information from one node to another, from my fingers to your eyes) did not sound authentic. It sounded like a white man trying to sound black. The difference was the man uttering the words was black. Things just didn’t seem right.

Then it hit me: I had deemed the entire scene suspect. I didn’t believe anything that was said. Each poem was a high-minded attempt at greatness and each a was an utter failure. Their common mistake was that they did not go with the flow, they didn’t follow the current’s path. They regurgitated that which was there.

The reason I stopped writing is because I started to criticize my work the same way that I had criticized those who had taken the stage that night.

Fairly or unfairly I made that characterization. As in Hollywood, once one is type cast, one can find it very tough to break out of that mold.

ramblings

The First Step

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You are reading the first entry of my very own web log. Hopefully, 100 years from now a researcher, in his attempts to learn more about the late 20th and early 21st centuries, will discover these words on a server somewhere. I hope he or she finds what I wrote to be interesting, witty and relevant. If not, oh well, because it was interesting, witty and relevant to me.

In honor of my first step, a poem by Mr. J.R.R. Tolkien:

The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.