My Two Heads

Posted on May 22, 2013 by
Linda Joy Burke, Artscape, Baltimore, MD

Linda Joy Burke, Artscape, Baltimore, MD
(Photo: Dianne Connelly)

My first memory of a structured music environment comes from the fourth grade at Nativity, a Catholic school in Washington, D.C. The overexuberant nun insisted that we bend our thumbs at a ninety-degree angle, open our mouths, and stick the top of the crook between our lips so that they would form an oval. That was how we were supposed to sing the hymns and old Americana songs such as “Oh Shenandoah” that we were taught. It felt like torture to me, and I discovered early on that I often did it wrong. Even when I managed to get it right, I still could not carry a tune.

In high school, I went through the rite of passage that many kids go through: choosing an instrument to play. In my school, there were only two types of instruments: guitar and piano. I chose guitar because it was not what my sister played. I studied classical guitar and learned enough chords and strums to play a little folk music for church and a handful of other of the simple and popular songs of the early Seventies. I was barely competent. And, compared to other musicians, it was clear that I lacked a sense of complex rhythm and would never make it solo as a guitar player. I became the quiet backup player, happy to have my little time in front of people and sing the simple melodies as well as I could. After high school, it would be another 30 years before I played the guitar again.

As a young adult, I was slow to find my sense of rhythm; I did not learn how to dance until I was in my early twenties. Frequently, I attended music festivals, music clubs, free concerts and the like. At these festivals, where I had begun to perform and emcee, I was exposed to the drumming community. I had the privilege of seeing some of the best female drummers, including Edwina Lee Tyler, Olufunmilayo Jomo, Ubaka Hill of the Drum Song Institute, Jaqui MacMillan, Nurudafina Pili Abena, and Alessandra Belloni. But even though I loved seeing the women and admired how powerful and free they seemed to be, I was afraid to touch the drum. I believed that I could never learn the tempo or feel that I had the stamina to keep up with the rhythms if I played with others.

I was told by various drum teachers and students that my first drum should be one in which I could hear my heartbeat. To use the drum as a kind of meditation tool appealed to me. When I finally did buy a drum, I chose a Native American frame drum called a Four Winds drum. The only rhythm that I had to pay attention to was my own; it was not about being in a show, and there would be no worry of making a mistake.

I took my first workshop with a drummer and music therapist who used drumming and percussion as part of a treatment protocol for addiction and mental health issues. I loved the concept of using percussion and vocal exercises to deal with anxiety and stress, and I found the practice just physical enough for me to be grounding. I continued to study facilitation and eventually blended that work with storytelling and poetry. I spent two years working with a storytelling partner in assisted living and nursing facilities in the Baltimore area. Some of the people that we worked with had profound disabilities.

When the residents of the facilities arrived in the room where we worked, it was hard to tell if they were present, or if they understood why we were there. I remember one small and wrinkled woman who came wheeled in by a staff member. She sat bent over in her wheelchair with barely enough energy to tilt her head or to extend her fragile bird-like hand to take the shaker that I offered. My partner and I both noticed how sad she seemed to be. But when we came with our drums and bells and shakers and rain sticks, she smiled. We were told that she did not have visitors, had been institutionalized most of her life, and had eventually been abandoned by her family. The staff found her response to the music extraordinary, and there was a kind of awakening in that audience.

After attending a poetry workshop and finding it unsatisfactory for my learning style and assuming that there were others who needed a different approach as well, I created the Free Fall Writing workshop. The sessions began with percussion and continued with writing exercises done in meditative silence. In addition to percussion facilitation and drumming, I had studied Frederick Franck’s The Zen of Seeing: Seeing/Drawing as Meditation, which presented the concept of spending hours in silence “seeing” an object before drawing it. The combination of drumming and silence offered a perfect balance for my mind to focus on where it needed to be before I could put pen to paper.

I blended my practices into an experience that was very kinesthetic but that did not allow for small talk. Integrating percussion into the experience was like offering a portal to the participant’s inner self, unearthing memories and producing unexpected pieces of writing. I discovered, however, that most people have questions and want to know what to expect, so I abandoned the practice of no extraneous talk after the first year.

When I introduce the interactive music experience to a new group, I tell them that the group percussion is a metaphor for their neighborhoods: Dundalk could be the bells; Reisterstown, the wood; Columbia, the shakers; and Baltimore City, the drum or the heartbeat. If the participants are not musicians, it sounds a little crazy. People feel uncomfortable or do not trust themselves. They become self-conscious and look at me as if I have two heads. Once everyone has an instrument, even those who did not want to look silly are playing. And if there is at least one person holding the bottom or the main beat and everyone else is willing to let go of a little control, then this cacophony shifts to music and a profound inner listening occurs. People start to trust what they hear.

It is important for me to create an environment where participants can be vulnerable and can access their writing. In the early years when we let the writing do all of the talking, I noticed there were lots of tears. There is an instrument for that, usually a long rain stick or an ocean drum, and there is breathing. There are still tears, but these days I notice that folks are more wary about being overexposed in person and may not share their work.

Recently, I gave a non-traditional keynote address where the audience played with me during the introduction. When we were done, a woman thanked me for the music. “You never know who you’re going to touch,” she said. She shared that her husband had been taken seriously ill a couple of days before and she had been so worried that she could not sleep and barely ate. She told me that my program had helped her to relax and that she needed that because it had been a rough couple of days. Once after a church performance, a woman grabbed me and hugged me, thanking me profusely for my “ministry.”

I had never looked at what I do that way and found it humbling. It took distancing myself from the narrative that I could not sing and had no rhythm to understand that I could hear music in my head. The gift in that is profound, and I watch what happens when strangers come together in a shared experience of making music and writing stories.

Posted in Community Outreach, Maryland, Music, Musicians, Poetry, Teaching, Therapy, Writing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Multigenerational Music: Jesse Paris Smith and Patti Smith

Posted on May 14, 2013 by
Jesse Paris Smith and Patti Smith

Jesse Paris Smith and Patti Smith at The Noguchi Museum (Photo: Patrick McMullan Company, 2012)

The subject of intergenerational performers has been dear to my heart since I learned that my maternal grandmother’s family had broadcast a live AM radio show on Saturday nights from New York City in the Thirties and Forties. I was inspired to explore the topic further while attending Patti Smith concerts in NYC and Baltimore, where her son Jackson and her daughter Jesse joined her onstage. Since I am a musician and the theme of the upcoming LPR issue is music, I wanted to share what I learned. To get it right, I enlisted the help of Jesse Paris Smith, Patti Smith’s daughter.

Jesse describes her mother as “a true Renaissance woman,” which is evident from any bio. Known as “the Godmother of Punk,” Patti is a singer-songwriter, a poet and a visual artist. In 2005, she was named a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In 2007, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In 2010, she received the National Book Award for her memoir Just Kids and an ASCAP Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2011, she won a Polar Music Prize. And it won’t end there.

Jesse, whose guitarist father is the late Fred “Sonic” Smith, notes reverberations of Patti’s polymath persona in herself. Growing up in Michigan, Jesse recalls picking out melodies on the family piano. She never took it seriously until she heard her music teacher play Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag.” Soon she was taking lessons, and music was becoming increasingly important. But she never intended to become a musician, considering environmental science as a career. In a college essay, she acknowledged the difficulty of deciding. Then she received an acceptance letter that asked, “Why choose between music and science? Maybe you can find a way to combine them and do both?”

Jesse says that her mother never planned a music career, either. “I think she believed that as she was following a path to be an artist, poet and writer, it happened that way by chance and fate. Music became the common voice that allowed her to carry her thoughts in a broader way and to reach people in a more accessible manner.” Jesse acknowledges envying those who have one dominant capability that they master but concludes,

There are all different kinds of people, and finding your clear path and purpose sometimes includes following a lot of different paths, a lifelong pursuit of learning and ever expanding and growing. My mom has never stopped learning, expanding her mind and knowledge and following through with her creative endeavors and projects. She loves to be busy and loves to work and create. And that is very admirable.

When she was 16, Jesse collaborated with her mother on the album Trampin’:

…she wanted to do a version of the old gospel song where the title comes from. She had a vinyl of Marian Anderson singing it, accompanied by piano, but we didn’t have any sheet music. My piano teacher worked with me, transposing the vinyl to sheet music, working out a lovely arrangement for me to play. So our piano lessons for a while were focused on learning “Trampin’” in time to record it for my mom’s album. When I was ready to play it, we went to Looking Glass, Philip Glass’s recording studio in NYC, and played it for the first time together, and that first take is what is on the Trampin’ album. I’m not sure it was a take that my teacher would have been very proud of and maybe if we would have tried it a few more times it would have sounded better, but there is something very human and humble about going with that first take, especially since I was so young and it was a mother-daughter recording, our first meeting at the song after having our own journey with it.

Listen here and judge for yourself:

 

Jesse subsequently collaborated with other musicians in the Detroit and NYC areas and has been involved in many multimedia events, especially those in art galleries and museums. In particular, she has been working with Eric Hoegemeyer, a multifaceted musician, composer and engineer whom she met in Detroit and who eventually relocated to NYC, where Jesse now lives. She and Eric share Tree Laboratory, a studio in Brooklyn.

She considers the Patti Smith Band to be family, since she’s known the members all her life and feels she that she has learned so much about musicianship through watching and working with them. During her summers as a teenager, she was involved in behind-the-scenes aspects, learning about production, staging and touring. One summer, there was a change in the lineup. A keyboard player was needed, and she was asked to fill in. She still remembers the first song that she played with the group: “Pissing in a River.”

She describes working with her mother by saying, “She is a true performer, and it’s amazing to watch. The stage presence, confidence and energy she has is remarkable.” She credits her mother with helping her dive into new worlds.

She will do something like bring some poems, part of a book or stories or a letter to me, and we will talk about what is happening in it, what it sounds like, the mood of the different lines and parts of the text. And through looking at that and talking about it, write a piece of music that corresponds to it. Another way we will work is that I will write a piece of music and bring it to her and she will think of a piece of writing or look for something that she thinks fits with the music, and we will try it out. If it doesn’t quite fit, we will find another text that suits it better.

An annual event where Jesse and Patti present is a performance at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. They select an exhibit and create a musical program in response to the subject matter. Jesse also composes pieces, and her mother reads a variety of texts appropriate to the subject matter. In 2012, her tenth performance there, Patti paid tribute to Andy Warhol, her fellow traveler in the Seventies.

Jesse, Jackson and Patti Smith at Detroit Institute of Arts with Diego Rivera's fresco as a backdrop.

Jesse, Jackson and Patti Smith playing at the Detroit Institute of Arts with a Diego Rivera fresco as the backdrop. (Photo: Michelle Pesta Culkowski)

Jesse also performs with her brother Jackson, a Detroit-based guitarist. “When I play music with my brother and my mom, it feels even more like family. My brother is such a technically advanced and gifted musician, and when we all play together we just laugh and have fun.” She says the same about performing with Eric, who will join her and Patti in an upcoming Met performance this fall.

Making multigenerational music has worked well for Jesse:

My family and I, as well as Eric, have developed a rapport working and playing together, developing our language and collaboration skills. This has helped teach me to relax, breathe properly and find the right notes. It’s so wonderful to work with people who believe in you. Music helps you to develop in so many areas of your life. It helps you with your brain functions, with developing your creative mind and exploring different facets of the world, which leads you in all directions. Just like how on an instrument there are so many songs and pieces just waiting to be written and found. It’s the common language of the world. It is a pretty remarkable thing.

And what does Patti Smith herself feel about the future of her musical family? She says,

I feel very optimistic about our future, collectively and individually. We are all healthy, positive and diligent workers and have a loving and communicative relationship. Professionally, I believe we will continue to evolve. I look forward to recording and performing with both of them. The three of us together really magnify the memory of their father. Jesse and I are planning our own album. So, as Elvis Presley sang, “The future looks bright ahead.”

Note: For information about upcoming releases and events, check Patti Smith’s website. And keep an eye out for Jesse’s new site (jesseparissmith.com), which will go live soon.

Posted in Detroit MI, Essays, Music, Musicians, New York NY, Poetry, Singer-songwriters, Visual Arts | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

Reader Response: Written in Silence, Inspired by Sound

Posted on May 7, 2013 by

We love getting your reactions to the material that we post. If your message contains new information or images, we may even publish it as a separate piece. Here’s how I came upon–and combined–what two of our readers, one a member of the LPR staff, the other a contributor working on a post for our blog, sent me in response to my “LPR Loves…Acoustic Art.”

Jen Grow

Jen Grow (Photo: Bill Hughes)

I started my short piece on acoustic art by saying that when I sit down to write, I first turn on my computer, then turn on my music. I assumed that most creative types were similar in that respect to me and artist Jennie C. Jones, the subject of the piece. Turns out that I was wrong.

In the comments section of the posted piece, LPR Fiction Editor Jen Grow, a pleasant person who frequently has the good sense to agree with me, wrote the following paragraph (italics mine):

I never listen to music while I’m writing. However, I tend to obsess about music in a way that makes me listen to the same song or cd a million times successively. Something about the mood of the music allows me to access certain memories or emotions. That’s how I came to write a story in response to on a Patti Smith song…

That someone good writes in silence was interesting enough. But I had scheduled a piece by Lorraine Whittlesey about Smith for the middle of May, so I needed to know more.

First, I listened to Smith’s song “Don’t Say Nothing,” which Jen subsequently said had served as the inspiration for her story. It’s pretty good, so you might want to do so, too.

Then I read the story, “Fixed.” It is unpublished as yet but will be part of a collection that Jen hopes to put out next year. You can read it here right now by clicking on the link.

I might have been foolish enough to attempt to explain how the song relates to the story had Karen Garthe not saved me. Karen, you see, was slated to prepare a piece for the blog on how music drives the type of poetry that she pens. Instead, she sent me a work in progress that “demonstrates rather than analyzes” the role of music of her poetry.

Karen Garthe

Karen Garthe (Photo: Lisa Khan-Kapadia)

“I LOVE being surprised,” I replied. Then, to buy time while I figured out how on Earth to reproduce the poem’s complex formatting with the meager tools that this blog afforded, I sought her response to that acoustic art piece, expecting that she would describe the playlist that she used while working. Instead, she offered the following (italics mine):

…Curiously, I cannot imagine trying to write to any music but silence. The search for silence, peace and quiet…why I am practically a pilgrim of. If there is music on I will listen to it, it will take the foreground even if it is intended as background. It’s impossible for me to do anything but completely listen to music if it’s on, which is how come I’ll turn off the radio in a car if a conversation is being had, and why I become wildly distressed, even unhinged sometimes, by unwanted music/sounds, which includes (especially on the subway) other people whose earbuds are shrieking whatever awfulness. Never anything good, usually.

That said, nothing is more important to me than music and I couldn’t live without it. Music and Silence are my ideals…I’m a terrible autocrat here. It’s one or the other.

So I had another Jen on my hands. “Fine,” I said to myself. “I’ll present Smith’s song and Jen’s story while silencing my own analytic mind. And, as a matter of respect, I’ll do the same for Karen’s set. With no further comment from me.” Or some words to that effect.

So, listen to Karen’s inspiration, a section of pianist Glenn Gould’s radio documentary The Idea of North, part of his Solitude Trilogy. There’s a voice pileup at the beginning, a method that he has called “contrapuntal radio,” then Jean Sibelius’s Symphony No. 5.

And here’s “Hey Now,” Karen’s contrapuntal poem. But you’ll have to click on the link to read it as she sent it. I never managed to come up with a way to transfer the formatting.

I should end without another word. But I must add that more than poetry connects Karen to music. In the Sixties, she moved from Baltimore to New York City to attend the American Ballet Theater school and later studied with Merce Cunningham. And in the Seventies, she worked for The Wartoke Concern, managing Patti Smith, among others.

Posted in Baltimore MD, Craft, Music, New York NY, Poetry, Short Fiction, Writing | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

An Interview with Rebekah Remington

Posted on April 30, 2013 by
Rebekah Remington

Rebekah Remington (Photo: Stephen Jonke)

I find it hard to believe Rebekah Remington when she tells me that she’s dealt with failure. Rebekah is the winner of the 2013 Clarinda Harriss Poetry Prize for her chapbook Asphalt. It is a solid collection, marked by eloquence and vision. I believe it to be a success but am sympathetic to her remarks.

Of course she has dealt with failure. We all have. Just the process of writing this blog post, my first for Little Patuxent Review, has me pulling out my hair over possible failure. And when I read through “Little Invocation” and “I Call Her Inez,” the chapbook’s first and sixth poems, I think of the first rejection letter that I received. Like the speaker, I, too, “feel enough failure as it is.” I remember thinking, what do I do now?

When I ask Rebekah about the character Inez and the idea behind the piece, she replies that she once watched a video of the Elizabeth Gilbert of Eat, Pray, Love fame speaking about artistic inspiration. What did Remington take away from the video?

I think Gilbert’s main point was to put in your writing time. Don’t get too stuck on the idea of success or the idea of failure. When things don’t work out, blame it on the muse. I had experienced a lot of failure, so I decided to write about my love-hate relationship with my muse.

But who does she see in a positive light? To whom does she turn for inspiration?

“Mainly other poets,” Rebekah says. Elizabeth Bishop, Louise Glück and CD Wright are named. In particular, she mentions the recent collection Space, In Chains by Laura Kasischke, which earned the 2011 National Book Critics Circle poetry award. I have to look up Kasischke but immediately understand why Rebekah is drawn to her work. Kasischke has been hailed by critics for her honest but respectful portrayals of domestic life and the different stages of adolescence and adulthood.

There is a definite presence of the domestic life in Asphalt. And while Remington admits that she is unsure whether the book as a whole has a narrative arc, I can see recurring themes. Remington calls them “obsessions.” Those obsessions include motherhood, childhood, time and death. I thought that I saw some Asian references, particularly in “School Morning,” “Wanting” and the title poem. That is new to Remington.

It’s interesting that you noticed that. I really don’t know that much about Asian cultures. Before I had children, I saw a lot of foreign films. Probably some of the images stuck. I’m thinking of Raise the Red Lantern, Farewell My Concubine, To Live. I love the way film can transport.

More failure on my part? I would like to think of it more as subjective interpretation.

And, yes, a powerful film can transport the viewer. The same way a that powerful poem can transport the reader. For me, it was the beauty of the last two lines of the simple but earnest poem “Goat.” I mouthed the words over and over, loving how they came out.

The sky had taken on a shapeliness like
a flood plain
in an aftermath, an eerie pinkish
erasure.

Of course, I laugh when I learn that the ending of that poem did not come easily to Rebekah. She says that she rewrote it many times before coming to the above.

There is no mistaking the speaker’s role as a mother. Bits of train track and LEGO pieces, piano lessons and the pivotal moment of learning to ride a bike are strewn across the chapbook. And isn’t there an interesting relevance to those previous feelings of failure when it comes to motherhood?

One of the challenges of parenting is getting your children out in the world and exposing them to things. I’m not sure I’m good at that, but I’m trying.

When we place the mundane aspects of domestic life in the context of such serious contemplations, it is no wonder that poetic expressions about the domestic life can be so emotional and riveting.

The concept of time changes as well. Mothers such as the one in “In Praise of the Last Hour of the Afternoon” would “trade pearls for quiet” and cherish just a few more minutes in bed with the bedroom door locked in “January Morning.”

I find it understandable, if not comical, that in more than one poem we find Rebekah’s speaker thinking about how much she wants a drink.

Rebekah is far from being the only mother or writer who has doubts about herself. But, a perk to being creative types is that we have the benefit of blaming the self-doubts and feelings of failure on our muses. Blame it on Inez, Rebekah.

Rebekah Remington received her bachelor’s degree from Johns Hopkins University, taking classes taught by David St. John and Peter Sacks. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan. She is currently an adjunct professor at Towson University, where she teaches Introduction to Poetry. (I am sorry that we never crossed paths.) Her work has been published in Rattle, Ninth Letter and The Missouri Review. Once in 4th grade, she won a prize for a patriotic poem that she wrote in honor of the nation’s bicentennial celebration. She lives in Catonsville, MD with her husband and children.

The Clarinda Harriss Poetry Prize, sponsored by City Lit Project, was established in 2009 by poet and neurosurgeon Michael Salcman. He wanted to honor the poet, publisher and teacher Clarinda Harriss and her lifetime of service dedicated to the literary arts. Clarinda is the founder, director and editor BrickHouse Books, established in 1970 and, as such, Maryland’s oldest continuously operating literary press.

Michael is also the Little Patuxent Review Art Consultant and Clarinda a regular contributor to both LPR print issues and our blog, so there are connections. What’s more, the judge for the 2013 prize was poet Marie Howe, who happens to be featured in the upcoming LPR Summer 2013 Music issue. And previous prize winners include LPR print and blog contributor Bruce Sager (2011) and LPR Editor Laura Shovan (2010).

Blue Versus Blue

Carolyn Case’s 2012 Blue Versus Blue, oil on panel.

I know Clarinda as a poetry professor and BhB editor. After taking her poetry class at Towson, I interned for a year at BhB as an assistant editor. She has worked with Ogden Nash, partied with Michael Stipe and taught one of the best poetry classes that I have ever taken. My time spent with her is invaluable to me as a young writer, and I completely get why such a dynamic and delightful individual has a prize in her name.

Rebekah’s book will be published by CityLit Press. A painting by Carolyn Case, an artist teaching at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), will be used for the cover design.

Posted in Baltimore, Baltimore MD, BrickHouse Books, CityLit Project, Harriss Poetry Prize, Interviews, Maryland, Poetry, Towson University | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

What it Means to be a Musician and a Poet: Truth Thomas

Posted on April 23, 2013 by
Truth Thomas

Truth Thomas on the red carpet at this year’s NAACP Image Awards event, where his book Speak Water won in the poetry category.

I liked Truth Thomas the moment that I met him and soon came to appreciate his poetry. But I never knew how much until I heard him read “What The Snake Whispered in Eve’s Ear,” which eventually made its way into his book Speak Water, which eventually won him the 2013 NAACP Image Award for poetry. When he told me that he was a musician as well as a poet, it suddenly all made sense. (Click here to see for yourself.)

I don’t know that I’d go so far as to say, as Ezra Pound once did, “Poets who will not study music are defective.” And, after posting musician-poet Dylan Bargteil’s comment regarding my piece “There’s Reading, Then There’s the Reading,” I can’t even say with certainty that being a musician gives anyone an advantage when it comes to compellingly conveying the written word to a roomful of people. But I do know that when it comes to Truth, in particular, being both a musician and a poet creates a special synergy.

So I asked Truth how just how that works for him. Here’s his reply:

It is an honor and a privilege to be counted as a musician and to be called a poet. I am the confluence of both arts and identities, which has proved to be a lifelong joy. Many thanks to my sister Ilse Munro for her kind invitation to share a few words on the subject of my life as a musician and a poet.

I think it is important that I point out from the start that I only speak for one musician-poet, namely me. My respect and love of music and musicians, poets and versifiers is wholehearted, so my reflection must be a humble one. I would never presume to paint one life experience over the complexities of all my creative kin. Every artist is singular, and every artist’s journey is unique.

However, I do think that most musicians, poets and musician-poets would agree that to be good in any expression of art represents the acquisition of calluses. Some of those calluses must be born in the physical realm of the practice room, but the most important calluses to develop as an artist must be suffered by the soul. Any serious musician who attempts to make a lasting mark on the score of the world will endure rejection. The same world of rejection is enduring fact of the writer’s life. You have to be strong to deal with all of that. I am strong. I’ve had to be.

I came to music as a singer-songwriter and pianist in the early Eighties, signed to Capitol Records by Don Cornelius and known as Glenn Edward Thomas. I came to poetry in the same period. Of course, I was so consumed by music that any technical awareness of the poetry in my music was incidental. While I recognized that music and poetry were related, that fresh narratives and lyrics without clichés were important to songwriting, the idea that words could exist and captivate without music did not move me at the time. That epiphany would come years later, once I returned from Europe to the States and began my formal study of poetry.

Being a professional musician was then, as it is now, about gigging and making as much money as you can in that endeavor. Mind you, the record industry in the Eighties still existed as an entity that could potentially make an artist a great deal of money. Consequently, in that period of my life my focus—Don Cornelius’ focus—was on making hit records, not on making hit poems.

It is interesting to see the evolution—or dissolution—of the record industry over the years. It used to be broken in favor of the record companies. Now, it’s broken for everybody. That notwithstanding, if you can play you can still make a living in the Twenty-first Century music industry. While you may have to be more creative to redefine the record business in a way that makes that possible, it is possible. Again, you have to be strong. Perhaps the best answer to the question of what it’s like to be any kind of working artist must be penciled in on a page of strength.

The worlds of music and poetry are two different planets. That has to be stated plainly. Musicians often rely on ensemble interactions to hone their skills and to perform. The group is the thing for musicians, although there are exceptions. Composers write for orchestras and are exhilarated when their works are brought to life by fine families of instrumentalists. While poets may spend time with master writers in workshop settings, poets lean inward. They engage in a great deal of reading and solitary composition. Certainly poets—even iconic writers—get feedback from their peers, but the poet’s creative process is often a passionate solo expression.

My artistic life is both an ensemble collaboration and a hermit’s walk. I thank God for that. It is refreshing to spend time practicing and expressing art through music with other musicians after I have spent a great deal of time alone with the pen in poetry. I need the release that comes with company.

The experiences that I have had as a professional musician also inform my approach to poetry and the business of books. I don’t regard any competition other than the competition that focuses inward; that competition is only with me being the best writer that I can be. Similarly, I don’t regard any one group, canon, literary tradition or literary business approach as god, as something immutable to be worshiped, as something that cannot be challenged and creatively transcended.

In fairness, while the territories of music and poetry are different, there is significant overlap. Most musicians want to be heard, as do most poets. Big egos, big hustles and big cliques abound in both artistic settings. There is no sugar-coating that. However, the creative weight of both genres is significant and of equal value, at least for me.

Without question, many poets write while immersed in music. Langston Hughes often wrote in blues clubs. He also traveled with a typewriter and a record player for his 78s. Conversely, many musicians are inspired to create compositions as a result of their encounters with poetry. The iconic song “Strange Fruit,” popularized by Billie Holiday, was inspired by a poem written by Abel Meeropol.

And serving on literary journal editorial boards such as those of Little Patuxent Review and Tidal Basin Review feels a lot like musical collaboration. No doubt, any thoughtfully published journal is something akin to a symphony of words. Still, a legitimate orchestra-like composition comprised entirely of poetry would be a wonderfully satisfying piece to witness. I’m still waiting to hear it.

There are times when I feel that I exist between two worlds, and balancing those two artistic residences is difficult. As previously mentioned, to be an artist of note in any genre requires hard work. Music is all-consuming. Poetry is equally so. There are only so many hours in a day. As both music and poetry are so much a part of me, the quest to master both art forms—and to succeed on a high level—never dissipates. For me, the challenge is finding the time to invest to be great in both genres. Yes, it’s a strength walk, a faith walk and a journey that requires a great deal of discipline.

Fortunately, God has blessed me with a supportive family. He has also guided me at every stage of my artistic journey. When the time was right, I was blessed to have a recording contract with a major record label. When the time was right, I was blessed to have publishing success and, most recently, to win the NAACP Image Award for poetry. Despite high artistic ambitions, I do not know what lies ahead. But I trust God. Perhaps the best insight that I can offer is that creativity cannot be controlled—or balanced evenly like scales—when it comes to growth and achievement. Being an artist is less a matter of managing talents and more a practice of yielding to them.

I am grateful for all the great musicians and musician-poets who continue to inspire me: Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Roy Nathanson, Bob Marley, Curtis Mayfield, Gil Scott-Heron, Nina Simone and Patti Smith, to name a few. It is always good to know that you are not alone, even as a poet who writes alone. To be able to put a song on by a great artist is almost like an ensemble experience.

I suspect that when the Little Patuxent Review Music issue launches this summer, the act of reading will feel like a similar ensemble experience for all who have the good fortune to absorb it. My hope is that our audience will give themselves over completely to it, just as our editors and contributors have given themselves over to creation of a one-of-a-kind piece of musical literary art.

Now, I know that I shouldn’t spoil what Truth shared by being that annoying aunt who can’t resist pulling out those long-lost photographs you wished would stay that way and showing them to strangers. But here is how our award-winning poet looked and sounded back in the days when the creator of Soul Train signed him. I’d say it was pretty good.

Truth Thomas is a singer-songwriter and poet born in Knoxville, Tennessee and raised in Washington, DC. He studied creative writing at Howard University and earned his MFA in poetry at New England College. His collections include Party of Black, A Day of Presence, Bottle of Life and Speak Water, winner of the 2013 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry. His poems have appeared in over 70 publications, including The 100 Best African American Poems, and been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He serves on the editorial boards of Tidal Basin Review and Little Patuxent Review, guest-editing the Social Justice issue for the latter, and is the founder of Cherry Castle Publishing. A former writer-in-residence for the Howard County Poetry and Literature Society (HoCoPoLitSo), he currently serves on the HoCoPoLitSo board. 

Posted in Books, Music, Musicians, NAACP Image Award, Poetry, Poets, Writing | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

LPR Loves…Acoustic Art

Posted on April 17, 2013 by

We keep coming across amazing material that doesn’t fit neatly into any of the pieces that we’re preparing. So we started the “LPR Loves…” series, where we simply share it with you without too much additional comment.

Soft Gray Tone with Reverberation

Jennie C. Jones’s Soft Gray Tone with Reverberation, 2013.
Acoustic sound absorbing panel and acrylic on canvas.

When I sit down to write, I turn on my computer. Then turn on my music. And don’t give the latter much more thought than the former. Jennie C. Jones, a Brooklyn-based visual artist, also had a soundtrack for her work. Only one day she started to give it some serious thought.

The result was worthy of a $50,000 Wein Prize, awarded annually by the Studio Museum in Harlem to an African-American artist and started by George Wein, a promoter who founded the Newport Jazz Festival, in honor of his late wife, a longtime trustee of the museum.

Jones creates visual and acoustic abstractions that explore the histories of music and sound. Calling her approach “listening as a conceptual practice,” she is influenced by the Fifties and Sixties, drawing upon experimental jazz and minimalist art and embracing improvisation, found objects and the material culture of music.

Here’s Jones in her own words and images:

Jennie C. Jones from Smack Mellon on Vimeo.

How does your playlist influence your creative work? Leave a reply to let us know.

Posted in Brooklyn NY, Jazz, Minimalism, Music, Studio Museum in Harlem, Visual Arts, Wein Prize | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Book Review: Kathleen Hellen’s Umberto’s Night

Posted on April 8, 2013 by
Umberto's Night

Kathleen Hellen’s award-winning poetry book

Kathleen Hellen’s Umberto’s Night won the 2012 Jean Feldman Poetry Prize. Its black cover, with an apocalyptic image of a city under an atomic fireball, hints at much of the content, made explicit by an epigraph from Umberto Eco’s Travels in Hyperreality: “as if along a river, you go by an invaded city…the city burns like a match…everything collapses in flames…”

The flames—sometimes literal, sometimes figurative—describe the pain carried by the speakers and characters observed in these finely crafted poems. There are drug addicts, ex-cons, murder victims, Vietnam veterans, blue-collar workers, slapped children, all vividly detailed in compact phrases. Their stories are stories of violence, whether on city streets, in battlegrounds or echoed ironically on a football field.

Hellen delivers her vivid and sometimes horrific images with exquisite beauty in poems that are meant to be read aloud. Listen to the half-rhyme and guttural consonants in these lines from “Reruns of Lassie”:

No chance of Timmy asking: “What is it, Lassie?
Who needs help?” No dog at all. Or gone.
Devoured by wolves. The dogs with bigger teeth.

The book is divided into five sections. The poems in Part 1 are told in a variety of voices—a teacher, a lover, a woman under arrest. They portray Baltimore as “a town too old for beginnings,” a city that swallows up A-students into unrelenting violence. In “Nine Circles,” a little boy experiences gunfire as a

ringing in his ears

that left a hole
in her thigh
the size
of a button.

In “Eight,” the speaker asks “who got shot in Druid Park? / whose throat was cut?”

Part 2 seems to follow the arc of a relationship that ends, as too many relationships do, in domestic violence. Here are scenes in a courtroom with a blasé judge who “has heard it all,” a victim who can feel her attacker “here in the bones of my throat” and poems filled with images of menacing hands, scars and cuts.

Yet the final poem in this section, “Palpable,” has two lovers in front of a late-night bakery, writing “love / backward on the glass” as they admire a display of glazed fruit tarts and watch the bakers with pans of freshly baked sweet rolls. Are these the same people who, earlier in this section, met on the Internet and then in person? If so, is this a flashback? Or simply a warning that any relationship might end badly, and that whether it will—or won’t—may be foreshadowed by “a drunkard’s quilt”?

Part 3 contrasts the foreignness of war with the domestic, day-to-day coping on the home front. Both soldiers and those left behind search, mostly unsuccessfully, for love. Nightmare images occur throughout this section: a football game morphs into a real battlefield, a year “shell shocked,” Vietnam slipping into innumerable conflicts in the Middle East. People and memories seem to become “[l]iving holographs”:

The night inside a night until
attention must be tipped
to darkness in its layers.

The final poem in this section leaves us in the “blackest Appalachians,” leading us right into Part 4’s mining and steel mill towns along the polluted Monongahela River. The night is lit by “a Frankenstein” of coke furnaces. The air smells sulfuric. Factories close, workers are laid off, their children go hungry. In the poem “A Pillar of Fire by Night,” Hellen gives us mattresses “in exodus,” offices “tight-lipped in their failures,” a way of life that was “there, then it wasn’t.”

Kathleen Hellen

Kathleen Hellen

Part 5 moves between disasters of varying scale, from those affecting millions, such as Hurricane Irene, to a car accident, from which the speaker escapes in the nick of time. Dandelions “implode” as they are mowed down; people, like comets, “burn out long before the accident of touch.” We lose those we love, see their ghosts in puddles or in dust. Through it all, these poems argue, hope persists, sometimes shaped like a daffodil, sometimes the human heart.

In addition to Umberto’s Night, Hellen has published The Girl Who Loved Mothra. Her poems have appeared in a range of journals and been featured on WYPR’s The Signal. In addition to the Feldman prize, she has received awards from H.O.W. Journal, Washington Square Review, Thomas Merton Institute and  Appalachian Writers Association. Her work has been supported by grants from the Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts and Maryland State Arts Council.

Note: Pat Valdata will appear this Saturday at our CityLit Festival reading.

Posted in Book Reviews, Jean Feldman Poetry Prize, Poetry, Poets, Washington Writers' Publishing House, Writing | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment