Tribute to Akilah Oliver, April 8, 2011

Last month, the poet, teacher, performer, activist, mother, sister, and friend to so many, Akilah Oliver (1961-2011), admired, respected and beloved by many in the poetry community, passed away suddenly. (I wrote up a little tribute, but have not yet posted it, so that's coming.) For many this has been great loss of an important and energizing creative spirit who died far too young. This Friday, April 8, 2011, in Chicago, the Midwest Naropa Writers and Red Rover Series are co-presenting A Toast in Your House: a memorial reading to celebrate the life & work of Akilah Oliver.

Here's the info. If you can come and celebrate her life and work, want to hear her poetry, and support the engagement with art and life that she represented, please do.

***

A Tribute to Akilah Oliver

FRIDAY, APRIL 8th
8-10pm

A Toast in Your House:
a memorial reading to celebrate
the life & work of Akilah Oliver

Featuring:
Adrienne Dodt
Krista Franklin
Jenny Henry
Jennifer Karmin + dancer J’Sun Howard
John Keene
Kevin Kilroy
Marie Larson
Todd McCarty
Marissa Perel

Hosted by Rebecca George
& Luis Humberto Valadez

at Outer Space Studio
1474 N. Milwaukee Ave
Chicago, IL

logistics --
near CTA Damen blue line
third floor walk up
not wheelchair accessible

$4 suggested donation
All funds will be donated to assist the Oliver family with the costs
associated with Akliah’s departure and to keep her work alive!

Co-presented by the Midwest Naropa Writers & Red Rover Series
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/redroverseries

AKILAH OLIVER was a poet, a dedicated teacher, and an inspiration to the lives she touched. Her books include An Arriving Guard of Angels, Thusly Coming to Greet (Farfalla, McMillan & Parrish, 2004), The Putterer’s Notebook (Belladonna, 2006), a(A)ugust (Yo-Yo Labs, 2007), and A Toast In The House of Friends (Coffee House, 2009).  She taught poetry in New York at The New School, Pratt Institute and The Poetry Project. She also taught at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, http://www.akilaholiver.com.

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What Happened to the New Translation of Dr. Zhivago?

This is was going to be a short post, because of limited time, but I wanted to register something literary and poetry-related I noticed during break that I said I'd blog about.  I had been jonesing for the Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translation of Russian poet Boris Pasternak (1890-1960)'s extraordinary and lone novel, Dr. Zhivago (1956), for which, along with his poetry, he was awarded the 1959 Nobel Prize in Literature, which pressure from the Soviet authorities fored him to decline. The novel itself was not published in Russia until 1988, in the pages of Novy Mir, a major Soviet literary journal, but it did appear internationally in 1957 because Pasternak had given a copy to Italian publishing magnate Giangiacomo Feltrinelli to smuggle out of Russia, which he did, and then promptly had the novel published in Italian, as Il Dottor Zhivago.

Since I'm trying to be concise, I will not delve into all the particulars of the novel, which covers the period from before World War I through the Russian Revolution to the subsequent Civil War there. The Russian authorities despised it (they thought it critical of Stalin, the Soviet State and its ideology, Marxism, counterrevolutionary, too formally experimental, etc.). It is not a conventional novel except in girth; it has a confusing plot, it cares little about fluid transitions between scenes, its mode of characterization can be jarring, and so forth. At the end of it Pasternak appends poems "by Yuri Zhivago," that you should read to fully appreciate the character's poetic gifts, but which mainly underline Pasternak's greatness as a poet. A novelist and poet I admire told me many years ago over coffee that he found Dr. Zhivago "tedious," and then, finally confessed that he hated it.  I was surprised, but with a bit of distance, I can understand why he did and why Dr. Zhivago isn't to everyone's taste. (David Lean's 1965 movie, starring Omar Sharif and Julie Christie was a popular success and a critical bomb, and only partially captures the novel's depth and grandeur.)

Yet, Dr. Zhivago repeatedly presents, at least from the impression I formed from the initial, 1958 English translation of the book, a powerful demonstration of Pasternak's poetic skill; again and again, his descriptions of the landscape, of people, of politics, all of it, come alive through metaphor, simile, synecdoche, metonymy, and other figurative means such that the world of the novel, the background and foreground, almost seem to bristle with life. I should note that the name of the protagonist Yuri Zhivago, points to this, as zhiv- in Russia is the root meaning "life," and Pasternak earlier had published a book of poems entitled My Sister, Life (1921), which had a tectonic effect on Russian poetry. After Stalin began his clampdown, Pasternak turned to prose, and published two books that are among my favorites for their lyrical strangeness and intensity, the short memoir Safe Conduct, and the stories, including the haunting "Aerial Ways" (I have probably read this story 10 times), which were part of A Childhood in Luvers.  Around the time of the shorter prose works he began writing portions of the long novel, and there are continuities of style. Again, the striking use of metaphors, which sometimes personify the landscape, are here, as are the idiosyncratic explorations of time and history, and so much else that flowers in the novel. And in the memoir-with-stories edition that New Directions published many years ago, the poet Babette Deutsch (1895-1982) translates with a flourish many (all?) of his poems included in that collection. Pasternak himself translated works from English and other languages, and Russians loved his translations of William Shakespeare's plays, even critics criticized for being too much Pasternak and too little Shakespeare.

I've already gone on too long. Okay, So let me get to it: Pevear and Volokhonsky are broadly acknowledged as among the most important and best translators from the Russian. Their version of Mikhail Bulgakov's (1891-1940) The Master and Margarita (1967) is so entrancing that I did not want to put it down, and it lodged in my brain for months.  They also famously rendered as whole as is humanly possible Leo Tolstoy's (1828-1910) War and Peace (1869), including leaving in the rivers of French (which was the social language of the Russian aristocracy of the novel's epoch) that fill the book, and they restored Tolstoy's peculiar uses of repetition, which the previous best-known English translation had shorn away. So it was with real eagerness that I grabbed the copy of Dr. Zhivago I saw on sale at one of the moribund Borders (RIP) here in Chicago; I was sure, given their proved skill, and the glowing reviews I'd read, that it would improve the earlier version by many bounds.

But, here's the thing: Pasternak is a poet. And as I began to read the new translation, I kept wondering, where are those poetic passages from the earlier, allegedly "flawed" 1958 version, by Max Hayward and Manya Harari, that I even underlined and noted years before? I don't read Russian, unfortunately for me, but I could see that a laxity, vaguenesses, the concision of Pasternak's imagery, appeared off compared to the earlier book. Again and again I found myself searching the text for those moments from Hayward's and Harari's version and finally realized that, for all their skill, Pevear and Volokhonsky appear to have blown this one a bit. Though likely more literal, the prose has become, well, "tedious" to me, though I haven't given it up yet, since I know the story and still do enjoy it. If you don't believe me, I've done you the favor of having already (not tonight, a week ago) typed up the earlier and their versions of some of the passages that caught my eye the first go-round. Which, I ask you, is more poetic? Is more compelling? Even as fiction? Now, I also wonder, were the critics who praised this new version even aware of this? If not, why not? How closely did they read the novel, and did they recall any of the earlier prose, which, as you'll see below, almost brands itself into your memory. I'll stop there because this has gone on far longer than I intended, but what do you think?

***

Dr. Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak (1890-1960), originally published in Italian translation from the Russian, in 1957.

English translation 1958, translated from Russian by Max Hayward and Manya Harari, "The Poems of Yuri Zhivago" by Bernard Guilbert Guerney, Wm. Collins Sons & Co., Ltd., London, with authorized revisions to the English, Pantheon Books Inc., New York, NY.

English translation 2010, translated from Russian by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, with an introduction by Richard Pevear, Pantheon Books Inc., New York, NY

Hayward & Harari (HH): Turning over and over in the sky, length after length of whiteness unwound over the earth and shrouded it. p. 4

Pevear & Volokhonsky (PV): From the sky endless skeins of white cloth, turn after turn, fell on the earth, covering it in a winding sheet. p. 4

HH: Crows settled on the heavy branches of firs, scattering the hoarfrost; their cawing echoed and re-echoed like crackling wood. p. 5

PV: Crows landed on the hanging fir branches, shaking down hoarfrost. The cawing carried, loud as the cracking of a tree limb.

HH: The half-reaped fields under the glaring sun looked like the half-shorn heads of convicts. p. 6

PV: The sun scorched the partly reaped strips like the half-shaven napes of prisoners. p. 5

HH: Neat sheaves rose above the stubble in the distance; if you stared at them long enough they seemed to move, walking along on the horizon like land surveyors taking notes. p. 6

PV: Its ears drooping, the wheat drew itself up straight in the total stillness or stood in shocks far off the road, where, if you stared long enough, it acquired the look of moving figures, as if land surveyors were walking along the edge of the horizon and taking notes. p. 5

HH: Gregariousness is always the refuge of mediocrities, whether they swear by Soloviëv or Kant or Marx. p. 9

PV: Every herd is a refuge for giftlessness, whether it's a faith in Soloviev, or Kant, or Marx. p. 8

HH: It was hard to keep one's eyes on the shimmering river, which, like a sheet of corrugated iron, reflected the glare of the sun. Suddenly its surface parted in waves. p. 10

PV: It was painful to look at the river. It gleamed in the sun, curving in and out like a sheet of iron. Suddenly it wrinkled up. p. 10

HH: Orioles kept making their clear three-note calls, stopping each time just long enough to let the countryside suck in the most fluting sounds down to the last vibration. p. 10

PV: At every moment you could hear the pure, three-note whistling of orioles, with intervals of waiting, so that the moist, drawn-out, flutelike sound could fully saturate the surroundings. p. 10

HH: A heavy fragrance, motionless, as though having lost its way in the air, was fixed by the heat above the flower beds. p. 11

PV: The stagnant scent of flowers wandering in the air was nailed down motionless to the flowerbeds to the heat. p. 10

HH: Russia, with its fields, steppes, villages, and towns, bleached lime-white by the sun, flew past them wrapped in hot clouds of dust. p. 12

PV: Past them in clouds of hot dust, bleached as with lime by the sun, flew Russia, fields and steppes, towns and villages. p. 11

HH: The rising sun had cast the long dewy shadows of trees in loops over the park grounds. The shadow as not black but dark gray like wet felt. The heady fragrance of the morning seemed to come from this damp shadow on the ground, with strips of light in it like girl's fingers. p. 17

PV: The sun was rising, and the ground in the park was covered with the long, dewy, openwork shade of trees. The shade was not black, but of a dark gray color, like wet felt. The stupefying fragrance of morning seemed to come precisely from the damp shade on the ground, with its elongated light spots like a young girl's fingers. p. 15

HH: ...and the boat was dragged in to shore as if by a boathook. There the stems were shorter and more tangled; the white flowers, with their glowing centers looking like bloodspecked egg yolks, sank and emerged dripping with water. p. 19

PV: The boat was drawn to the bank as if by a hook. The stems beecame entangled and shortened: the white flowers with centers bright as egg yolk and blood sank underwater, then emerged with water streaming from them. pp. 16-17.

HH: Purple shadows reached into the room from the garden. The trees, laden with hoarfrost, their branches like smoky streaks of candle wax, looking as if they wished to rest their burden on the floor of the study. p. 39

PV: Violet shadows reached from the garden into the study. Trees peered into the room, looking as if they wanted to strew the floor with their branches covered with heavy hoarfrost, which resembled the lilac streams of congealed stearine. p. 35

HH: In winter the street frowned with a forbidding surliness. p. 44

PV: In winter the place frowned with gloomy haughtiness. p. 39

HH: The weather was unseasonable. Plop-plop-plop went the water drops on the metal of the drainpipes and the cornices, roof tapping messages to roof as if it were spring. It was thawing. p. 44

PV: The weather was trying to get better. "Drip, drip, drip" the drops drummed on the iron gutters and cornice. Roof tapped out to roof, as in springtime. It was a thaw. p. 39

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Poem: May Swenson

Baseball season has officially begun, and I haven't blogged about it at all, not just because I've been busy, but because, to a degree surprising to me, I find myself less interested than in the past. I've been feeling this way with all professional sports, but whereas I could point to specific reasons (the strikes, the lockouts, the greed of the owners and many players, the misuse of public dollars to underwrite stadiums for millionaires and billionaires with little beyond ephemeral emotional and psychological benefits for the majority of people) for my waning interest in the NBA, NFL, the NHL (I still haven't gotten over their owner-labor crisis years ago), with baseball it feels as though it's struck suddenly. Perhaps it's maturity or just growing old.

Perhaps it's a deeper sense that rather than taking comfort in this pastime as the country and world fall apart, I find it more of a distraction than anything. Perhaps it was the refusal of superstar Albert Pujols, to accept a contract of somewhere around $200 million for 8 years, allegedly with an ownership stake in the team once he required.  This sort of contract would have been par for the course in the 1990s or even the money-crazy early 2000s, but since the economic crash? Not that someone already as rich as Pujols (who received a $100 million contract in 2004) or many of his peers would notice.

But--a little flame still catches for baseball. I have, in fact, glanced at the box scores of the Cardinals, Yankees, Cubs, and a few other teams. I have the free version of MLB Baseball on my phone. And I hope that the Cardinals, rather than the Cubs, can come back with a deal--say, one leg of the Saint Louis Arch?--to persuade their superstar to sign up again before a rival team snatches him. That is, if the rival team has the money to lavish on him as well.

Here then is a baseball poem, titled "Analysis of Baseball," by May Swenson (1913-1989, photo above by Laverne Harrell Clark © Arizona State University). Swenson was one the prolific 20th century American poets and a true original. An editor at New Directions until 1966, she later went on to serve as a writer in residence at a number of universities (this was the era before writers entered or even looked to the academy as a chief place of employment), conducted workshops at many different venues, and published 17 books of her own poetry and translations of other poets, as well as works for children, plays, and critical essays. Among her awards was the Bollingen Prize from Yale University Press. When I was younger she was very widely known and read, though I don't know if she's on minds and tongues as much these days, though she ought to be. Here then is her baseball poem, and yours.

ANALYSIS OF BASEBALL

It’s about the ball, the bat, and the mitt. Ball hits bat, or it hits mitt. Bat doesn’t hit ball, bat meets it. Ball bounces off bat, flies air, or thuds ground (dud) or it fits mitt. Bat waits for ball to mate. Ball hates to take bat’s bait. Ball flirts, bat’s late, don’t keep the date. Ball goes in (thwack) to mitt, and goes out (thwack) back to mitt.

Ball fits mitt, but not all the time. Sometimes ball gets hit (pow) when bat meets it, and sails to a place where mitt has to quit in disgrace. That’s about the bases loaded, about 40,000 fans exploded. It’s about the ball, the bat, the mitt, the bases and the fans. It’s done on a diamond, and for fun. It’s about home, and it’s about run.

May Swenson, “Analysis of Baseball” from New and Selected Things Taking Place (Boston: Atlantic/Little Brown, 1978). Copyright © 1978 by May Swenson. All rights reserved.

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Manning Marable (1950-2011)

It saddened me tremendously to learn of Manning Marable's (1950-2011, Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images) passing this past weekend from pneumonia after many years of battling sarcoidosis.  Marable had not long ago completed his magnum opus, his huge, deeply researched and richly revelatory biography (including, it has been reported, an outing) of Malcolm X (1925-1965), one of African-America's iconic figures.  The 600-page biography is slated to appear on store shelves tomorrow. I am planning to dive into the Malcolm X biography, entitled Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, as soon as I can, so I'll write more about that later, but I did want to point out that Marable was not just a major scholar--he taught history most recently at Columbia University, where he founded and directed the Institute for Research in African-American Studies, and where I met him in person at a conference in the late 1990s--but a lifelong Left activist and Black culture worker, who figured out a way to make this multi-pronged approach to life, scholarship, and political engagement work. Among his many achievements, in addition to teaching at the Cornell University, Fisk University, Colgate University, University of Colorado-Boulder and Ohio State University, he founded the journal Souls; served as chair of the Movement for a Democratic Society (MDS); served on the Advisory Board of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, the Board of Directors for the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network (HSAN); was active in the 1970s in the New Democratic Movement; and wrote, co-wrote, edited, or co-edited over 20 books, including the one that almost immediately made him famous, 1983's How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America (South End Press, 1983).

I can attest to the fact that this is a book people who probably have picked up few books of history (outside of school) over the last 30 years actually read, and discussed; I can recall being a 20-something in Cambridge and Boston, and hanging out with politically savvy, cult-nat types, and Marable's arguments were as fluent on their tongues as Marx's or anyone else's. Marable, to the little extent I knew him, was the kind of person who could easily and would have joined us, and chatted and listened to us, schooled us, without ever being pedantic or talking down. Even publishing with Boston's progressive South End Press was a noteworthy step.  Though he didn't know me from the wallpaper at the Columbia conference, he was pleasant, generous, funny, and encouraging, the very model of what I imagined and still hope the best professors would be like. And, I should add, he was not, at least in my experience, homophobic either. With his wife, anthropologist Leith Mullings, and Sophie Spencer-Wood, he published the beautiful volume Freedom: A Photographic Portrait of the African American Struggle (Phaidon, 2002), which offers not only indelible imagery from the long Black American struggle for freedom, but also the editorial expertise of leading scholars. The work represented something I wish more of the best scholars, especially those of color, would aim for: producing works that might allow non-academics to enjoy the fruits of their hard work and brilliance.

One of the things I most admired about him was his willingness to speak out. We don't have a media system that gives voices like his much hearing, but that never stopped him, nor did careerism or fear or indifference or the many other things that do curb people, however necessary--people have to live--these limitations are.  His passing is a great loss for Dr. Mullings and his family, for the history and African-American Studies professions, for African American scholars and thinkers, for politically engaged people on the Left, for Columbia University and his colleagues and students, and for the United States.  My deepest condolences to his family, and please, go buy his biography of Malcolm X if you can afford it.

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Poem: Joshua Marie Wilkinson

I am surprised I've never featured a poem by Joshua before, though I have mentioned him on this blog, I think, but he's a friend and local favorite, a wonderful poet and teacher and filmmaker and critic, who has lots of pots cooking wonderfully on the creative stove. Here is his bio from his blog:

Joshua Marie Wilkinson is a poet, teacher, editor, and filmmaker born and raised in Seattle. He is the author of five books, most recently Selenography, with Polaroids by Tim Rutili (Sidebrow Books 2010). His first film, a documentary about Califone co-directed by Solan Jensen, is called Made a Machine by Describing the Landscape (IndiePix Films 2011). He lives in Chicago. He's at joshuamarie |at| gmail |dot| com.

Actually he has many more books out--tiny gemstones of books--that you can find on his blog, which he made fun of in an interview with bomb, though blogs really old-hat now and established--and according to the New York Times allegedly being abandoned by the young'uns and some old'uns (Ron Silliman?). He also doesn't mention Rabbit Light Movies, his visual archive of poets reading their work and other fine things, or evening will come, the new online journal he edits. Or that he teaches at the fine university that I can walk to and have from time to time, Loyola University of Chicago.

Anyways, here's Joshua's poem, beginning "cuttings," from Selenography, and read it aloud and see if you can't hear his breaths as he reads, those "thes" hanging in the air:

cuttings
shoveled

up into a fortress
hiding behind where
the dead
woman bakes lemon
& mincemeat pies
we live inside the

seam of the wind the
breaker's froth the
swarm's
sleepy landing

a pond divided

by an upside-down moon more
animals learn to hollow
grow wary

& withhold their math from us

From Selenography, by Joshua Marie Wilkinson, with Polaroids by Tim Rutili.  Copyright © Joshua Marie Wilkinson and © Photography by Tim Rutili, Sidebrow Books, 2010. All rights reserved.

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Poetry Month + Poem: Camille T. Dungy

It's (Inter)National Poetry Month, and for all of April I'll be wearing a new hat, as the poetweeter at @harriet_poetry! (See the feed at right.) If you're on Twitter, please do join in.  Today I've asked people to tweet their secret cities (cf. Alberto Ríos) and what poetry book they'd print for free on McNally Jackson's Espresso Book Machine and give away if they could, while also quoting snippets of poets from Gwendolyn Brooks to Bhanu Kapil to Earl of Rochester to Gil Scott-Heron.  Also, I posted a link to Japanese-German poet Yoko Tawada reading her poetry, and links to other poems up today!

I'll still be tweeting when possible at @jstheater, and I'll aim to blog a poem here daily, though perhaps without the commentary of previous years. It's my 6th year in the blogiverse, by the way (actually back in February, if you can believe it!).

Also, a few congratulations are in order:

1) to my former student Michael Lukas, whose first novel, The Oracle of Stamboul (Harper, 2011), has appeared to great acclaim this past February!

2) to my former student Christopher Shannon, one of the houdinis behind CellPoems, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize!

3) to my former student Miriam Rocek, who will soon see one of the stories she wrote while an undergraduate published online!

***

Now, for the month's first poem, one of my favorites from the 2009 (was it two years ago that this book appeared?) anthology Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (Athens: University of Georgia Press), by its visionary editor Camille T. Dungy, whom I first met at Cave Canem back in 2001. She is the author of two highly regarded books, Suck on the Marrow (Red Hen Press, 2011), and What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison (Red Hen Press, 2006), and the forthcoming Smith Blue (Southern Illinois University Press, 2011), winner of the Crab Orchard Review Open Book Prize, and, in addition to the Black Nature volume, has coedited with Matt O'Donnell and Jeffrey Thomson From the Fishhouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great (Persea Books, 2009).  She's Associate Professor at San Francisco State University. And now her poem!

Language

Silence is one part of speech, the war cry
of wind down a mountain pass another.
A stranger's voice echoing through lonely
valleys, a lover's voice rising so close
it's your own tongue: these are keys to cipher,
the way the high hawk's key unlocks the throat
of the sky and the coyote's yip knocks
it shut, the way the aspens' bells conform
to the breeze while the rapid's drum defines
resistance. Sage speaks with one voice, pinyon
with another. Rock, wind her hand, water
her brush, spells and then scatters her demands.
Some notes tear and pebble our paths. Some notes
gather: the bank we map our lives around.

From Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, edited by Camille T. Dungy. Copyright © University of Georgia Press, 2009. All rights reserved.

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Glenn Ligon @ the Whitney Museum

Mirror, (2002), Coal
dust, print ink,
glue, gesso,
and graphite
on canvas
82 5/8x55 1/8 in.
Collection of Mellody
© Glenn Ligon

Last Friday, I traipsed over to the Whitney Museum to view Glenn Ligon: America, the first mid-career retrospective of Ligon (1960-), an artist who is perhaps best known for his wall-sized, oil and coal dust text paintings from the 1990s through today. (I must note immediately that his beautiful painting "Black Like Me #3 (Study)," from 1992, graces my first book, Annotations.)  The Whitney rightly devotes a floor to Ligon's oeuvre, which consists not only of the paintings but of drawings, prints, photography, and multimedia installations, including sculptures, which together suggest a coherent approach, across forms, that define the possibilities, and perhaps strike the limits, of what identitarian art might do. I use the term "identitarian" with advisement, since I think that Ligon's work exceeds being so easily categorized, but seeing this art, all of it of considerable technical mastery and distinction, a good deal of it even more beautiful when viewed up close (especially the oil text paintings!), brought me back to the core of what the earliest of these works suggest: Ligon's investigations into questions of identity, racial, sexual, social, political, cultural--his own and those of people around him, in America and outside our shores.

What the works also evoked for me, almost in the sense of setting forth a world, of calling into existence the moment of their creation and first appearance, the fraught period of the 1980s and 1990s, when identity-based art surged to the forefront of public consciousness and discussion, just as other genres, such neo-Expressionism and the second waves of minimalism, conceptual and performance art were waning, and I could feel myself reliving some of the debates I witnessed, that I participated in; I could feel the polemics in favor of (which I passionately was and still am) and against this work, which was and, I would argue continues to be important, especially given how crucial it is in reminding of the broader political, economic and social turmoils of that period. The era of the Reagan, Bush I and early Clinton presidencies has been reduced to a caricature these days (Saint Reagan! The greatest president ever! blah blah blah; George H. W. Bush has virtually disappeared; the relentless attacks against Clinton and his centrist policies, even before he was elected, now almost completely forgotten in the public discourse even as they mirror what Michael Dukakis, and later Al Gore, John Kerry, and Barack Obama have endured), but the brutality and ugliness of that period, the period of the AIDS pandemic's emergence, of the anti-affirmative action and anti-abortion fanaticism, of white racial retrenchment and the rise of the militia movement, of the anti-Japanese and anti-immigrant testeria, of supply-side economic's intellectual triumph and practical failure, of the lust for warmongering and the buildup of the military-industrial and security states, of the ramped-up deindustrialization of the country, of the rise of the crack epidemic, of the cultural wars in and outside the academy, etc., all of these forming the foundations for our current moment and yet phantasmal in our mass media, also all form the backdrops to Ligon's art.

Untitled (I Am a
Man (1960)
Oil and enamel
on canvas,
40x25 in.
Collection of
the artist.
© Glenn Ligon

Walking through each room, I felt something akin to the beating wings of Benjamin's angelus novus, but a black, queer, cosmopolitan, left-leaning, and indefatigable one, against my cheek: the now-time (Jetztzeit) of that earlier era, the era of my 20s, the period of Slackers, of Public Enemy, of Eleanor Bumpers and Tawana Brawley, of Do the Right Thing, of ACT-UP and Queer Nation, of the last glimmers of Gay Liberation, of Essex Hemphill and Marlon Riggs, of Audre Lorde still alive speaking out against Jesse Helms, etc., was there with me even as I was firmly in our present moment, with its host of grave concerns.  What I also began to feel, as I reached Ligon's pieces invoking the runaway slave posters, was that a great deal of this art was perhaps, in some ways, too much of its time; universal yes, and yet perhaps too anchored in that earlier moment whose issues are still with us, but in different ways. The retrospective, to put it another way, felt insistently historical, indexing not only Ligon's history, but the country's, the society's, my own. It felt--dated perhaps is too strong a word, but while the formal power of the work struck me as transcendant, especially the oil text pieces, a good deal of the other aspects of the work felt as if it reflected a moment that had passed, but also, as if it were in some ways trapped, as if in amber, in that moment.  In a sense, this underpins some of the past criticism of this work, and of similar art of this or earlier periods, which I must admit upsets me, in part because I worry that in viewing the art in this life I may be undercutting Ligon's achievement, that I am falling into the trap of arguing that art probing identity, particularly the identifications and intersectionalities so central to Ligon's work, cannot transcend its moment, cannot resonate beyond the particular contexts in which it was created; but another way of looking at it might be to say that some of Ligon's work does and will continue to do this, but some of it does and will not. Perhaps, as an artist I greatly respect suggested to me a few weeks later when we discussed the exhibit, what might benefit some of these pieces down the road would be for them to be exhibited with other works of this era, thus providing an even richer immersion in a conversation whose urgency we forget at our peril.

Notes on the Margins
of the Black Book
(1991-93), (detail)
91 offset prints
11 1/2x11 1/2 in.
(framed) 78 text
pages, 5 1/4x7 1/4
each (framed)
Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum;
gift of the
Bohen Foundation
© Glenn Ligon

I do want to call attention to one part of the exhibit that particularly took me back to the late 1980s and early 1990s, and somewhat shook me up.  That was Ligon's Notes on the Margins of the Black Book (1991-1993), his response to Robert Mapplethorpe's highly controversial 1988 volume The Black Book, which preceded Mapplethorpe's even more charged 1989 exhibit Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment. Ligon's exhibit essayed and assayed the responses, from a range of viewers, some famous scholars and critics like Stuart Hall to figures depicted in the portraits themselves to Mapplethorpe himself, figuratively and physically breaking down the book, image by image, page by page, to critique and open up ways of seeing, reading, understanding, and interpreting--which is to say, experiencing--Mapplethorpe's, and by extension, this society's, views of black men, the black male body, the black body, blackness itself. Ligon's interpretive practice here was and remains quite remarkable; it suggested in its richness some of the subsequent revisionings of Mapplethorpe's work by Kobena Mercer and others, while also demonstrating another powerful, effective and moving method of critique. (It would do us all a bit of good never to forget that art, and not just academic criticism, has this capacity, and when it does so effectively it can reach a great deal more people.) I recalled my own reading of The Black Book, my own youthful critiques and conflicts, at the power being accorded Mapplethorpe, at what I read as objectification, at my own insistent attraction to the images, at my desire for someone black, someone of color, to attempt something of this sort and the frustration I knew I would feel as it went ignored by the wider culture in ways that Mapplethorpe's art never would, and so on. Ligon in fact captures all these feelings and many more--some were his own, reflected in the range of commentary, the juxtapositions of image and text, the sheer panorama of visuality that both magnetized--and magnetizes still--as it overwhelms.  This was one aspect of the exhibit that reminded me of why Ligon is such an important artist, and why I hope he continues to make art, especially work that engages the themes and tropes of our times.

One thing I found surprising was that the exhibit did not include--or perhaps I missed them!--Ligon's playful photographic and digital projects from the mid-to-late 1990s, such as Feast of Scraps (1994-98), in which he juxtaposed family photographs with vintage gay pornography, many of the images featuring black men. One outgrowth or extension of this work appeared in his online Dia Center for the Arts project "Annotations" (no reference whatsoever to my book), which is available here (click on "Annotations"). This work struck me as opening out into really interesting possibilities in terms of the emerging queer studies and discourses on and around family, geneologies, filiations and affiliations, and so on, and its use of digital media also marked what I took to be new directions on Ligon's work. But as I said, I did not see this in the Whitney show, and perhaps missed it. If not, I hope that in a future show and in his work to come Ligon resumes it, especially because it was in conversation with some of the exciting work that Thomas Allen Harris has been undertaking around black families and geneologies but also prefigured the mainstream gay shift towards discussions of marriage, family, homonormativities (which Ligon was queering in very interesting ways), and LGBT relationships in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.  All in all, I highly recommend seeing the exhibit, and look forward to seeing another retrospective of his work several decades down the road.

Outside the Whitney Museum, Glenn Ligon's exhibit, signaled by the neon Negro Sunshine in the window.

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