Rebecca Alban Hoffberger

Hoffberger was born in 1952 in a pleasant middle-class suburb of Baltimore. At 15, she was accepted to college but opted to travel to Paris, where she had been invited to become Marcel Marceau’s first American apprentice. By 19, she had co-founded a ballet company. By 21, served as a consultant to a wide range of nonprofits. At 25, she was appointed a dame, the female equivalent of knighthood in the British honors system, for her work in establishing field hospitals in Nigeria. Subsequently, she studied alternative and folk medicine in Mexico.

Back in Baltimore as Development Director at Sinai Hospital for People Encouraging People, a nonprofit helping psychiatric patients return to the community, she was drawn to the imaginative artwork some of the patients there produced. Her interest increased with a visit to the Musée de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland, where the art of insane asylum inmates was displayed. Such influences eventually coalesced into a coherent concept for a national visionary art museum and education center.

Visionary art, according to a piece on Hoffberger in The New York Times, is regarded as one of the last uncharted fields for contemporary dealers and collectors. It “celebrates the work of self-taught artists whose primitive, naïve style, often studded with found objects, springs from a personal rather than a commercial vision. L’art brut, as the French artist Jean Dubuffet coined it: raw art.” How the AVAM concept of visionary art was realized is best described by Hoffberger herself. So, here’s what she has to say:

As Dervish philosopher and poet Rumi put it, “Conventional thinking is the ruin of our souls, something borrowed we mistake as our own.” There is actually very little fresh thinking in this whole, wide world, and what does exist may not necessarily be tied to blessing, real need or even viability. Audacity for its own sake isn’t enough.

In the effort to birth something bold and new, one must be coupled to meeting real need, to a vision for evolutionary innovation, not just making change for change’s sake. One must also be willing to be thought the fool. Really. Let us invoke Voltaire, who rightly observed, “It is dangerous to be right in matters on which established authorities are wrong.” Oscar Wilde, an audacious guy who paid dearly, cautioned, “If you are going to tell people the truth, make them laugh or else they will kill you.”

When I thought up the American Visionary Art Museum back in 1984, a new Baltimore City cultural “major” had not emerged in over 60 years. There were fears that establishing “The Visionary” would only serve to further divide the small “cultural pie” of available funding. So I sought out nontraditional arts funders and even went as far as bringing over $1.5 million in new funds from a truly audacious London-based source, Body Shop founder Dame Anita Roddick.

Birthing is easy; sustaining is a bitch. One must be faithful to the clear vision of founding essence while remaining audacious in the constant invigoration and endless creative enfoldment of that vision. I find that I like most of the “‘cious” words: precious, delicious, luscious, bodacious, tenacious, judicious and even conscious–but never vicious. May we be more audacious in generating the myriad ideas and actions needed to transform and delight ourselves, others and our swiftly depleting world.

American Visionary Art Museum’s Seven Educational Goals

1. Expand the definition of a worthwhile human life.

2. Engender respect for and delight in the gifts of others.

3. Increase awareness of the wide variety of choices available in life for all, particularly students.

4. Encourage each individual to build upon his or her special knowledge and inner strengths.

5. Promote the use of innate intelligence, intuition, self-exploration and creative self-reliance.

6. Confirm the great hunger for finding out just what each of us can do best, in our own voice, at any age.

7. Empower the individual to choose to do that something really, really well.

The AVAM opened on November 24, 1995 with a budget of  $1.1 million, operated by a staff of seven with a collection of 1500 objects, most of which Hoffberger had donated. These days, it boasts a collection of 4000 objects–including works by Ho Baron, Nek Chand, Ted Gordon, Clyde Jones, Leo Sewell, Vollis Simpson and Ben Wilson–as well as over 40 pieces from the Cabaret Mechanical Theatre of London, runs with a staff of 18, operates on a budget of $2.3 million and attracts some 70,000 visitors annually.

When the AVAM received the 1998 Urban Land Institute Award of Excellence, A. Eugene Kohn, a member of the selection committee, said, “The whole place speaks of creativity and excitement, but it also speaks of her [Hoffberger’s] passion. It’s one of those rare times when you’re not only impressed with the place but the person behind it.”

If you haven’t had the pleasure of visiting the AVAM to see what he means, here’s a little preview. Just click on the image to activate and control the slide show. And enjoy!

Note: Hoffberger and staff are currently busy preparing for the 2012 AVAM gala FUNdraiser and afterparty. If previous years are any indication, you won’t be bored.

The “Concerning Craft” series introduces Little Patuxent Review contributors, showcases their work and draws back the curtain to reveal a little of what went into producing it.

Dylan Bargteil, engaging his senses

Please meet Dylan Bargteil. Dylan is an undergraduate physics and math major at University of Maryland. He is Editor-in-Chief of the University’s literary journal Stylus and also an avid musician. He is interested in exploring community building, alternative methods of art distribution and display and motives for creativity and learning.

Here’s the poem by Dylan we published in the Winter 2012 Social Justice issue:

A Brown Spot

My best friend was a mortar man. Now he’s a machine gunner.
The United States Marine Corps killed 1,400 pigs this year.
They shoot the pigs with shotguns and rifles
to train infantry in triage. I imagine that means
trying to hold the pig’s guts in, trying to stop the blood
like plugging a hole in a dam with your finger.
My friend said maybe he learned something from it, he doesn’t know.

I had a dream that he was out on patrol and was shot
in the belly by a sniper. I dreamed his skin—
a plastic bag from a grocer, broken open
from the weight of the fruit inside. The plums tumbling
out. My hand instinctively reaches for them falling through
the air. They bruise so easily.

And here’s what Dylan shared with us about writing that poem:

My work is driven by sensory obsession. My primary approach to writing poetry is to engage as much as I can with how sounds and pacing work on my organs. I test out words by mouthing them to measure the contact between my tongue and hard palate, comparing “scratch” with “rake,” because I want the reader to experience an accurate tactile sensation. Pungencies like the smell of a pickle, the feel of greasy soot on the fingers and the burn of ice ground into a cheek occupy my head until I pull them out with the right transcription. I try for line breaks that move readers from expectation to realization with the subtle surprise of  their own dreams or the exact, skipping precision of cooking breakfast in the 15 minutes before they are late to work.

“A Brown Spot” came about as the result of an obsession with the slow elastic rip of plastic grocery bags. It sickened me. I kept thinking about my skin ripping the same way, as it sometimes does around my fingernails. The whole second strophe came together in my mind once I decided what I was actually going to write about, but I hadn’t yet determined the language. I was very particular with the words.

Shooting my character in the stomach was chosen because of the stomach’s vulnerability and tenderness, but the word that best reflects those attributes is “belly.” I “dreamed his skin” rather than imagined it to avoid resonance with the imagining in the first strophe and lend my character sympathy through the positive connotation of dreams or dreaming. Another sympathetic measure comes with the bag being “broken open,” which tempers the violence possible with ripping and tearing. The plum, with its deeply red interior and ripe softness, and the muted sound of the word is the appropriate symbol. The pairing with “tumbling” serves to further mute the plum, since the “um” sound is relatively louder in the second occurrence. In addition, the formation of the “t” in the mouth mirrors an ejection, creating the necessity for the plums to move “out[ward].”

The line break before “out” helps visually create the space that the plums traverse. The line break at “falling through” serves not only to further create space but also to open other possibilities on the next line for the reader (e.g., “the bag,” “my mind”) before they are closed by the quiet shock of settling on one, which I associate with dreams. Similarly, the break at “broken open” fits with the stutters, skips and slowdowns of a dream by delaying the realization of what comes next.

I do not make these careful choices with the goal of the reader recognizing them and thinking that I made the right choices but rather with the goal of the reader never seeing these seams. I want readers to have as natural an experience as possible so that they can feel as though the poem really happened to them in its fullness.

Note: If you missed hearing Dylan read at our recent launch event, you can still catch him on March 3 in Bethesda, MD at our Writer’s Center Social Justice presentation.

HCC creative writing students with individual copies of the LPR Make Believe issue. (Photo: Kate Chisolm)

I could (and did) link to appropriate websites, but this presented difficulties. First, I taught in a traditional classroom where only the instructor’s station was connected to the Internet. To read as a class, we would need a projection screen. Second, some of the linked works were as remote to my students as those in the text had been. I needed something current and local.

Little Patuxent Review provided an affordable and interesting solution. The publishers of LPR offered a student rate, and the Chair of the English and World Languages Division subsidized that with student fees. My students would have access to all that a text could offer at no cost beyond registration.

But would they enjoy this experience? Certainly, the journal was personal. In November, poets from the 2011 Maryland Writers’ Association anthology Life in Me Like Grass On Fire had read to an HCC audience that included my class. LPR Co-publisher Mike Clark and Editor Laura Shovan were among the presenters. Later in the semester, Co-publisher Tim Singleton gave a talk on the short, sweet topics of Twitter and haiku. How often do students get to meet those so closely involved with the publications that they read?

Looks like they like it! ( Photo: Kate Chisolm)

Anecdotally, I knew that my students enjoyed my experiment; I hoped that an end-of-semester survey would validate this. I had planned for students to complete surveys in the last week of class, but things got busy and only 10 of 19 participated. Statistically, the number may be too small for accuracy. Nevertheless, all 10 revealed that they had “very much” appreciated the absence of a book cost. When asked how much they missed a formal text, seven had circled “not at all.” All 10 indicated that creative writing concepts were well presented; most indicated that LPR provided “excellent” examples of creative works that had inspired their own growth as writers.

For my part, I remained enthusiastic about this project throughout the fall semester and am happily repeating it this spring, determined to collect more complete data and confident that the data will be equally positive.

This essay is part of a series inspired by our Winter 2012 Social Justice issue. The first one was posted September 2011, and all feature people who have helped make marginalized segments of our world more visible to mainstream America through poetry, prose and visual art.

Compared to others in the developed world, the United States is a young nation. Only 13 percent of us were over the age of 65 in 2010. And only 15 percent of those lived with their children, compared to 65 percent in Japan and 39 percent in Italy. Thus most of us have little day-to-day contact with the demographic that will–sooner or later–include each of us. That the elderly remain invisible to many is not only their loss but also ours.

My mother and me, drinking champagne at her 90th birthday party in Ellicott City, MD (Photo: David Cash)

My mother and me, a tad younger, in Altach, Austria (Photo: Viktors Jurģis, my father)

When my mother moved from Michigan to Maryland to live with me at age 83, it was a revelation. I already knew that she was smart and strong. (Any survivor of two world wars ravaging her homeland, Latvia, was that by definition.) What I didn’t know was how funny and fun-loving she could be once the burden of starting over in a strange land was lifted. The smiling lady who emerged was one that I recognized from old photographs of us as war refugees in Austria. I also didn’t know how hard it was to grow old and face death–my mother did “not go gentle into that good night”–and how much I would miss her once she was gone.

When I heard that Christopher Kennedy, renowned poet and son-in-law of a Latvian childhood friend, had lost his mother as well, I asked him to switch subjects for the essay he had agreed to post here. He was kind enough to go from addressing audacity, the theme of our upcoming issue, to the elderly. Not unrelated topics, as it turns out.

Chris, who heads the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Syracuse University and has authored poetry collections such as Encouragement for a Man Falling to His Death, winner of the 2007 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, was granted a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, which he is using to produce a major work about his late mother’s struggle with Alzheimer’s disease. Here’s what he said about her final years:

My mother passed away two months ago. Her heart stopped in her sleep. She was 95 years old and had been suffering from Alzheimer’s for the last three years of her life. She was, by any standard, an elderly person, but those last three years, difficult and troubling to be sure, allowed her to transcend the limitations age imposed on her.

By that I mean her proclivity toward time travel, which allowed her to experience the present populated with characters from her past. I was at various points her brother Tom, just home from reconnaissance over Anzio; her brother Joe, the star athlete; and her father William, the deputy sheriff. My job was to be a good character actor, slipping in and out of my roles as fluidly as she slipped from 2009 to 1945.

Of course, this was the upside. My first experience of her dementia, which I knew to be more than a “senior moment,” was when I was summoned to her assisted living facility. I was told that she had a vitamin deficiency and was dehydrated. I drove her to the ER. On the way, she told me very emphatically that she was not pregnant.

As she was 92 at the time, I had no reason to doubt her. But there was no irony in her voice; in fact, she was trembling. I began to ask questions about her concerns, and it became clear that she thought she was a teenager and I was driving her to the hospital to have the baby. She told me again that she couldn’t be pregnant. “I’ve never even dated,” she insisted. I wrote the following prose poem about the incident:

Memory Unit: Pregnancy Scare

On the way to the hospital, my 92 year-old mother tells me she can’t be pregnant. I’ve never even dated, she says. I don’t know what to say. I explain that she’s deficient. Vitamin B. Precautionary measures. But when I check her in, the woman at the desk says she’ll need to go to the fifth floor, the psych ward, where she spent a few weeks the year before. The doctor asks her to disrobe, and she tells him she’s not pregnant. He seems impatient, unwilling to humor her. I tell her it’s all right. No one thinks you’re pregnant, I say. The doctor excuses himself. He’s red-faced, impatient. A nurse appears with a hospital gown, tells my mother to put it on. Why? my mother asks, near tears. I take the gown from the nurse and set it down on the metal table next to where my mother sits. She’ll be fine, I say. The nurse seems about to speak, then thinks better of it. She looks at the doctor. They leave the two of us alone. Now what? my mother asks. I don’t know, I say. She says, the least you could do is ask me to dance.

Christopher Kennedy with his mother and father in a suburb of Syracuse, NY

I knew in that moment that my mother, as I had known her, was gone. Over the next three years, I learned about numerous other selves contained within her. I found out about the good speller, the shy teenager, the waitress, the bride, the young mother, the victim, the widow, the grandmother, among many other facets of the woman who gave me life. I gained a perspective on the elderly that I would never have had were it not for my mother’s illness. Interacting with those various selves gave me the opportunity to know more about my mother even as she lost more and more of the world around her.

A few days after my mother died, I prepared for her calling hours by helping to put together a photo collage. As I sifted through old pictures, I was struck by how happy she seemed. Whether it was walking down the street with her waitress friends or walking down the aisle with my father, there was a subtle joy that I had failed to see when she was alive. It occurred to me that I hadn’t been able to properly perceive her until I saw all those different selves, clustered together, smiling back at me, forcing me to acknowledge the depth of her person and the richness of her life.

Though my own mother remained as sharp as the proverbial tack until her death at age 91, medications administered to ease her pain took their toll. She became uncontrollably agitated at the hospital, and orderlies subdued her by strapping her into a straightjacket–baby blue, patterned with small pink flowers. It was a terrible time for both of us, but I still smile when I recall an incident that occurred after she was admitted to the ER for the last time. Lying there, doped up on OxyContin, plastered with Fentanyl patches, battered and bruised from a fall, she reached up and smartly slapped the face of a male nurse who had lifted her gown to assess the extent of her injuries. “How dare you!” she said.

Our elderly have fascinating stories to tell, and the telling benefits everyone. Whether through journal therapy, literary publications like Persimmon Tree or Passager that are set aside for seniors or more mainstream outlets, the more experienced among us can share their wit and wisdom and gain a greater sense of self-worth in the process.

And lest it be said that those substantially over 65 cannot compete with their younger counterparts, nationally acclaimed novelist Pauls Toutonghi, who worked with me in writing the original “On Being Invisible” piece, complied what could be construed as an answer to The New Yorker’s “20 under 40″: his own “8 over 80,” part of “In Praise of Older Men (and Women) Writers.” Not to steal his thunder, but here’s the list:

• Jamil Ahmad
• Toni Morrison
• William Kennedy
• Ursula K. Le Guin
• Nawal el-Saadawi
• Joseph McElroy
• Khushwant Singh
• Herman Wouk

I’m sure somewhere there are comparable lists of poets and visual artists.

Note: Since this piece was completed, another mother’s life was lost: this time, the mother of our Communications Coordinator, Eva Quintos Tennant. Emedita “Medy” Esguerra Quintos was born in Cotabato City in the Philippines in 1931 and died January 23 in a retirement community in Silver Spring, Maryland. She raised four children and touched countless lives as a physician, both in the Philippines and the United States. Defying a terminal cancer diagnosis since 1966 and fighting the effects of a recent, debilitating stroke, her final accomplishments, as itemized in Eva’s eulogy, included learning how to use Skype as well as trouncing the competition at Bingo and Mahjong.

Tara Hart's poem, first published in the LPR Spirituality issue, appears in the current Pushcart Prize anthology

As a young publication, Little Patuxent Review is more about publishing emerging writers and artists than about winning prizes. Still, toward the end of 2010, one of our contributing editors, Susan Thornton Hobby, nominated Tara Hart’s poem “Patronized,” which appeared in our Summer 2010 Spirituality issue, for a Pushcart Prize and--saints alive!–it won one. Tara’s 20-line poem consequently took its place in the 600-page tome, The Pushcart Prize XXXVI: Best of the Small Presses (2012 Edition).

Emboldened by our success, outgoing editor, Michael R. Clark, and our new editor, Laura Shovan, each nominated three pieces from our Winter and Summer 2011 issues, respectively. We are thus represented by Casey Cooke’s short story “Without,” Ann Eichler Kolakowski’s poem “Unmaking” and Gabriel Welsch’s poem “The Story of a River” from the Winter 2011 Water issue as well as Erin Christian’s short story “God Bless You With Rainbows,” Derrick Weston Brown’s poem “Touched” and Susan Thornton Hobby’s poem “Girl Queen of the Animals” from the Summer 2011 Make Believe issue.

Each year, most of the writers and many of the presses are new to the series. Therefore, we believe that each LPR-nominated piece has a good chance to win a prize and make its way into the next anthology. That each author has a good chance to follow in the footsteps of Raymond Carver, Tim O’Brien, Jayne Anne Phillips, Charles Baxter, Andre Dubus, Susan Minot, Mona Simpson, John Irving and Rick Moody, each of whom first gained notice through the Pushcart series. And that Little Patuxent Review can again join the hundreds of outstanding presses represented in each annual Pushcart publication.

Note: If you’d like a look at some of the contributors eligible for future LPR Pushcart nominations, join us this Saturday, January 28, at 2:00 pm at Oliver’s Carriage House in Columbia, MD for the launch reading of the Winter 2012 Social Justice issue.

JoAnn Balingit, Delaware's Poet Laureate

Like many Poetry Friday regulars, I often assign myself a blog project for National Poetry Month. In 2010, I took readers on virtual road trip around the United States, profiling each state’s poet laureate. (I made it as far as Idaho, 43^rd state.) Naturally, the tour started in Delaware, the first state to sign the US Constitution. That was my introduction to Delaware poet laureate, JoAnn Balingit. My NPM post includes a sample of one of Balingit’s works and a link to the rest of it. In 2012, her poem “Advisory” opens the Little Patuxent Review Social Justice issue.

Balingit’s latest chapbook Forage was the winner of the 2011 Whitebird Prize. The first section examines Balingit’s bi-cultural heritage. Her mother was born in the Midwest and, at age 19, married a 49-year-old immigrant from the Philippines.

“History Textbook, America” is one of the many standout poems. Balingit recalls finding scant mention of her father’s country of origin in history textbooks. That moment becomes a jumping-off point. The poet meditates on all that we lose when we emigrate, including a brother that she did not know her father had. Just days after her father died, “some man we didn’t know / called up. This is his brother, one more shock, / phoning for him.” The uncle does not have a chance to speak his name before the phone and, therefore, the family connection breaks: “a dial tone erased the Philippines.” The poem expresses our tenuous connection to others and to history.

Balingit’s mother speaks in “My Mother Explains My Father to Her Girls.” The poem describes growing up in the Midwest with a sense of connection to the Philippines. When the sun was setting on the family’s home, “his sky rose story-book, crammed with color.” The speaker’s future husband is “a man / from the islands with the climate of heaven…who grew up wearing hand-woven linen.” He wafts into her life, his voice, “fine as a line cast over water, / land and sink without a ripple.” A strong sense of longing pervades this poem, not only between the lovers but also in Balingit’s desire to understand her parents. Falling in love is beautifully described in the context of her father’s foreignness:

…You know
at dusk how sky melts with ocean into one
aqua plane from your toes
to the world’s curve you can’t tell

where you are from anything? So I fell
into your father’s voice—
…He glowed
like the boss’s mahogany.

The poem turns when the mother acknowledges the relationship will end in disaster, particularly for her daughters: “I know his silence / branded you as a vine over time will tunnel / the bark of a tree.” The speaker’s final request is that her daughters preserve some part of their father as they mature.

Even poems that don’t deal specifically with Balingit’s family history, such as “Never-Never Land,” refer to her background. “Never-Never Land” is subtitled “after Malay proverbs.” A list of folktale-like what-ifs, “where cats have horns / where turtles climb trees,” evolves into a real world indictment of the current global recession, “where the rich fall down / and the poor rise up like dough in earthenware.” There is a hint of anger in this poem, “the smell of fine clothing / graces an open fire” developing the title into an ironic statement about modern society.

The section closes with a series of poems that cross from imaginative into playfully surreal, including the flash piece, “The Pitch,” and the poem “My Life as the Fugitive, Tijuana.” Although several poems, including “Story I Learn at Forty-nine,” deal with family secrets and hidden stories, the theme is given a wild treatment in the final poem of this section, “Circus.” The speaker knows there are things she has not been told about her own history. Her reaction is both powerful and indicative of the strangeness of families.

I swallow my mother
like a sword in flames
and dare the lioness of her death to wake
me.

The duality of Balingit’s family has echoes in the second part of Forage. It opens with a series of nature meditations, of which “The Blue Spotted Salamander” is one of the strongest. In this section, animals, plants and rivers represent our wild selves, the part of humanity momentarily forgotten in the hum of technology but always available to an attentive mind. In “My Teenager Listens to his iPod as I Drive Back Roads to the Bus Stop,” nature symbolizes what the mother attends to and her child’s self-absorption:

If I take this curve slowly
we will hear the creek consulting on a fawn
that has shrunken to an acorn of thought
tossed in the roadside chicory.

Balingit's new poetry collection

Balingit expresses a longing for the days when, as parents, we constantly interpret and open the world for our young children. The speaker here wants to engage her silent teen in the natural world because that is what captures her own imagination.

At just 38 pages long, there is much to explore in Forage. Even the cover–the title is subtly separated into two parts and can be read as either “forage” or “for age”–plays with one of Balingit’s central metaphors. Landscape, whether it is a roadside creek or the colorful Philippine sunset, accompanies us through the stages and discoveries of life.

Note: JoAnn Balingit will be a reader at the LPR Social Justice launch event, held on January 28.

A journal like Little Patuxent Review requires a vibrant literary and artistic community to thrive–and even survive. In appreciation of the cultural entities around us, we present “Meet the Neighbors,” where we provide you with some personal introductions.

Recently, Little Patuxent Review partnered with Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, MD to put on a poetry contest like no other: the winning poem will not only be published in LPR and featured in a CityLit Festival reading but also enlarged dramatically for display in the library’s Cathedral Street windows. Last week, Lisa Greenhouse, a librarian involved in the poetry contest, gave LPR Editor Laura Shovan and Communications Coordinator Eva Quintos Tennant such a great tour of the Pratt that I thought you’d like a look around with her as well. So, please meet Lisa and see what she has to say:

Lisa Greenhouse

The Enoch Pratt Free Library’s Central facility is both the hub of an excellent urban public library system and the Maryland State Library Resource Center, a rich resource for all the libraries and library patrons of Maryland. It is an especially attractive destination if you care about poetry.

The Humanities Department should be the poetry-lover’s first stop. A walk through the long stacks (or guidance of a librarian) will reveal works of poetry representing all times and places, from Homer and Sappho in Greek to Derek Walcott and Anne Carson. The collection is strong in American, African-American and local poetry.

In each poet’s assigned Library of Congress call-number area, you will find the poet’s works, essays, interviews, biographies and critical works. Anthologies gather the best poetry, new poets, world poets, love poetry or Sufi poetry. If you need to write a sonnet or a pantoum or revise your poem, manuals such as The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetics or The Poetry Home Repair Manual can help. If you can’t remember where a nagging line of poetry comes from, one of the Granger’s indexes to poetry can come to your rescue. If you need a book that the Pratt doesn’t own, we can find it for you. Librarians love questions: please ask us!

The Pratt Periodicals Department holds more than 30 current English-language poetry magazines in print form and many more in electronic databases. From the British title Ambit at the beginning of the alphabet to the Yale Review near the end, browsing the Pratt current collection is a great way for aspiring poets to familiarize themselves with the gamut of publication options. The Pratt how-to guide Submitting Poetry for Publication in Little Magazines links to the submission guidelines of many of the magazines in the Pratt current collection.

Little Patuxent Review partners with the Pratt to put on a poetry contest.

Down in the periodicals stacks, the Pratt’s retrospective collection includes a full run of Harriet Monroe’s seminal Poetry magazine–from 1912 to the present–and a full run–1889 to the present–of Poet Lore, the oldest continuously published poetry journal in the United States. Pratt staff will be happy to retrieve these and other older works for any customer who wishes to peruse them.

The Pratt, which sponsored a rap contest that Tupac Shakur won at age 14, has a long tradition of celebrating poetic talent. The annual CityLit Festival, which the Pratt presents in partnership with Gregg Wilhelm and the CityLit Project, always includes a poetry component—this year, appearances by Edward Hirsch and Thomas Lux. The Poetry and Conversation series, an engaging mix of reading and Q&A, was launched in January. Future guests include Clarinda Harriss and Bruce Sager and two married couples, Jane Satterfield and Ned Balbo and Virginia Crawford and Sam Schmidt. Sonia Sanchez will visit the library on April 25, and Harriss will conduct free poetry-writing workshops on the first three Wednesdays in April.

With its colorful programs and deep collections, the Pratt is a poet’s or poetry-lover’s paradise. Come see for yourself. If you care for the near and far places where poetry goes, you’ll find our tag line to be true: “Your journey starts here.”

Note: If you’re a Marylander, it’s not too late to enter the Pratt poetry contest. The contest closes February 21.

Martin Luther King III (center) speaks at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial in observance of King's 83rd birthday anniversary on January 15, 2012. (Photo: AP)

I wrote this on January 16, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. King would have been 83 had he not died at the hand of an assassin on April 4, 1968. I remember this as if it were yesterday. I was 12 years old when he was killed, and I saw my home city of Washington, DC go up in flames. When I previewed the Social Justice issue, I felt something awaken in me that was distinctly different from what I had ever felt when reading any of the other issues. I was brought to tears and filled with a kind of acute empathy that comes from reading and seeing the extension of a collective history and presence that is closely aligned with my own experience.

My childhood in the Sixties, like that of many of my generation born in any major city in America, was overshadowed by the daily struggles for social justice that sent many into the streets, hospitals and jails. In Southeast Asia, young soldiers and innocent people alike were dying in horrible ways from bullets, bombs and Agent Orange. Soldiers–family members–were returning home, many damaged both mentally and physically. Some of them became homeless, others drug addicts and still others committed suicide.

I also remember watching the August 18, 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on my grandmother’s black-and-white television set and looking for my parents in that seemingly endless, indecipherable crowd. The energy was palatable even though I was separated from the crowd by miles and that TV screen.

Ralph Abernathy (center facing, short sleeves), leader of the Poor People’s Campaign, near the grounds of the US Capitol Building on June 24, 1968. (Photo: AP)

After King was assassinated, my folks took my sister and me to Resurrection City, the encampment on the Mall for the Poor People’s Campaign. This was the last major project King envisioned before he died. It took the fight for social justice in America beyond sit-ins to a well-orchestrated, well-thought-out “live-in” for thousands of people of all colors, some with families and children, seeking to bring notice to the plight of the poor. Resurrection City, documented by photographers, was designed by DC architect John Wiebenson and his students at the University of Maryland to function as a self-sufficient community. The press called it disorganized and dirty. For those who had trekked for miles to get to the Mall and dealt with the rain and mud, it was the last hope.

Today, information on issues affecting the health and well-being of individuals and nations is easily accessible through millions more pathways than in those revolutionary times, when so much acceptable toxic behavior was unleashed behind the locked doors of homes, institutions, corporations and governments and disguised as normalcy. Movements coalesced despite the absence of Facebook and Twitter, though. Stories were–and still are–twisted to suit the teller, but there were no eyewitness video hounds to disprove them on TV or in newsprint.

Unlike many children today, I heard and listened to the news. I heard about the riots in Chicago, Berkley and LA. The protests, the horror of the fire-hosings, the tear-gassing, the beatings of college students, women, anyone in the way of a police baton. I remember the sight of unarmed, defenseless people with blood running down their faces.

I knew who the Black Panthers were: a progressive, demonized group dedicated to social justice and change. I knew who Angela Davis, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., H. Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael, Huey P. Newton and many of the other game-changers in the constant fight for social justice were and met both Davis and Newton when I became an adult. I knew about SNCC, SDS and what those students risked to change the world.

I often wonder whether other children of my generation growing up in urban environments felt the same kind of constant, deep-seated tension that I did–a tension that eventually became my normal for many years–or whether that tension was peculiar to me because I was a budding poet, acutely aware of the chaos in the world around me.

Now, my generation and our elders are witnessing a world where our memory of place has been bulldozed, redesigned, re-purposed, and where, in some locales, the schisms of the past are no longer recognizable. While we have evolved ever so brilliantly with our 21^st Century appendages that connect us at the speed of light to every corner of Earth, we cannot ignore the fact that many dwell in the most base level of humanity. Our top-rated entertainment is rooted in cruelty, torture, manipulation, debasement, greed and indifference. These are realities to many, who do not find them entertaining in the least.

Occupy DC protesters in 2011 with the US Capitol Building in the background (Photo: AP)

Storyteller and mythologist Michael Meade talks about people having to be in the “right kind of trouble in order to change their lives.” In this first decade of the new millennium, we have “the right kind of trouble” all over the planet. The range is vast and crosses political, socio-economic, racial and religious boundaries. The tensions mirror those of the Sixties, and the gift–now as then–is that we poets, writers and artists can dive into this trouble eschewing shame to bear witness to the sorrow, rage and futility of perpetuating cultural evolution based on injustice. We are the witnesses for those whose ability to argue has been silenced and the advocates for what is intellectually promising, what is spiritually and physically sane.

The gift of this witnessing as reflected in the LPR Poets for Social Change panel discussion at the 2011 Baltimore Book Festival, the LPR blog series “On Being Invisible” and the pages of the upcoming issue of Little Patuxent Review speaks to the remarkable and horrendous aspects of humanity and covers a vast territory. There is the sexual, mental and physical exploitation of women and children, immigrant and migrant people and the irreparable consequences of war. There is the mis-education and disproportionate imprisonment of males of African descent and the resulting growth of the prison-industrial complex in America. There is the damage caused by corporate irresponsibility and greed and the man-made environmental catastrophes. There is the homelessness, invisibility, poverty, famine and, as Howard Nemerov says in his poem “Magnitudes,” “disasters drastically different from those we have to know about.”

If you are a thinking and feeling person, I hope you won’t put down the Social Justice issue without being filled, stirred, angered, saddened and perhaps moved to create some action–however small–of your own to teach, reach and empower those you touch to advocate for a more equitable social and cultural evolution for future generations.

We look forward to seeing you on January 28^th  and welcome your comments once you have read the Winter 2012 Little Patuxent Review Social Justice issue.

This essay is part of a series inspired by our Winter 2012 Social Justice issue. The first one was posted September 2011, and all feature people who have helped make marginalized segments of our world more visible to mainstream America through poetry, prose and visual art.

Not long ago, I learned that Russia has the third highest incarceration rate in the world (542 prisoners per 100,000 population). Given my background, I can’t say that I was surprised. (I was born in Latvia around the time that Soviet soldiers were piling my compatriots, including my mother’s brother, into cattle cars and transporting them to gulags in remote regions of the USSR.) Nor did I find it particularly remarkable that Rwanda, site of the 1994 Genocide, comes in as second highest (595/100,000).

What did come as a shock was discovering that my adopted country–the United States of America, where I sought refuge at age five from war and oppression–ranks Number One (a whopping 743/100,000). In fact, while my fellow Americans represent only about five percent of the world’s population, about one-quarter of the entire world’s inmates are housed in US prisons. What was even more disturbing was that it seemed as though many of those inmates never had the same shot at the American Dream that my family and I did, even though we had arrived at Ellis Island bereft of all our material possessions.

Over 60 percent of the adults that the United States has seen fit to imprison read at or below the fourth-grade level; in other words, they are functionally illiterate. More than half have a history of drug abuse or addiction. And a disproportionate number are non-Hispanic blacks (39.4 percent of the 2009 prison population compared with 12.6 of the general population, according to 2010 US Census Bureau statistics). Many neither had the means to make it in American nor the wherewithal to voice the injustice of it all.

Apart from the occasional, well-publicized prison riot, most remain invisible in a place that Nobel Prize-winning poet Joseph Brodsky has characterized as being “essentially a shortage of space made up for by a surplus of time.” A fortunate few in Jessup, MD, however, have gained notice due to the efforts of Baltimore poet, former head of the Towson University English Department, publisher of BrickHouse Books and Little Patuxent Review contributor Clarinda Harriss. Here’s Clarinda, in her own words:

Clarinda Harriss, seen twice at the Minás Gallery in Hampden, once through the artistry of Minás Konsolas.

The most visible I ever felt was when I first walked up a flight of iron stairs inside the Maryland House of Correction in the early 80s as a guest of the newly formed MHC Writers Club. I was a woman. I was nobody’s girlfriend. And I was white. The residents–you do not say “inmates”–were all male, and about 95 percent were black. Many were gray-haired, gray-bearded. Residents of MHC, better known as “The Cut,” stayed there a long, long time, usually for life.

My initial job–actually, I was never more than a volunteer–was merely to provide a female voice for Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls who have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf, read out loud in tandem with the Writers Club president. He wanted to convince the other members to work with him on a male answer to Shange’s choreopoem. The resulting For Colored Guys who Have gone Beyond Suicide + Found No rainbow became the best selling book that my venerable small press, BrickHouse Books, ever published and is about to go into a fifth edition. It has been performed on TV and stage and started me on decades of monthly visits to the Writers Club.

The Club owed its beginnings to a feminist scholar, Margaret M. Blanchard, who taught writing courses at The Cut, and owed its many years of flourishing to a visionary activities coordinator, Hannah Coates. Hannah said “yes” to things that other administrators said and are still saying “no” to. This is one reason why Margaret and I worked at the men’s instead of the women’s prison, where residents–then as now–were permitted far less visibility than their male counterparts.

The men at The Cut had figured out and were allowed to pursue a variety of ways to be visible: writing for the prison newspaper, The Conqueror, a mimeographed monthly that always struck me as remarkably uncensored; sporting interesting and highly decorative hairdos; fashioning beautiful hats from scraps of brocade and velvet gleaned from the prison’s upholstery shop.

At The Cut, I could communicate with Club members (and eventually other MHC writers as well) without having to include their DOC numbers on the envelopes. The administrators and guards knew them by name. Guards sometimes even sought Club members’ assistance in writing letters and papers. I witnessed more than one instance where a resident played Cyrano to a guard’s Christian. But, of course, those love letters went out under Christian’s name, not Cyrano’s. And many who died in The Cut ended up in anonymous graves.

The cover of the best-selling book of writings from inside the Maryland House of Correction

Amazingly, the handful of Writers Club members who created For Colored Guys… not only did not die “inside” but also (except for one, who got devoured by the street) defied prison statistics on recidivism to become solid, productive citizens “outside.” True, some deliberately maintain an aspect of invisibility, asking me not to emphasize their prison past when writing about them. That’s why their names don’t appear here.

But every one of them has his name on the cover of that book.

Clarinda’s fostering of American prison literature followed in the footsteps of authors like H.L. Mencken, who founded The American Mercury in 1924 and regularly published pieces by convicts, and Norman Mailer, who helped publish letters he had received from convicted murderer Jack Abbott as the 1981 bestseller In the Belly of the Beast: Letters from Prison. Public support for such efforts, however, has waxed and waned.

The Great Depression brought suppression, with prison manuscripts perceived as profitable subversive tools. The social and political unrest of the Sixties and Seventies engendered a renaissance of sorts. Prison writing made its way into paperbacks, periodicals and even major motion pictures. Then, the trend reversed again. New York State passed the “Son of Sam law” in 1977, making it illegal for convict authors to profit from their writing. And later in 1981, Abbott killed a man during a fight only six months after his release on parole, which Mailer had championed.

These days, one of the few remaining sources of support is the PEN Prison Writing Program, which published the 2000 anthology This Prison Where I Live: The PEN Anthology of Imprisoned Writers that includes the Brodsky quotation cited above.

Still, those incarcerated in the US prison system have managed to produce an impressive body of literature over the years. Notable books include:

• Richard Wright, 1940, Native Son
• Martin Luther King, 1963, Letters from a Birmingham Jail
• Etheridge Knight, 1968, Poems from Prison
• James Baldwin, 1974, If Beale Street Could Talk
• Angela Davis, 1974,  An Autobiography
• Miguel Piñero, 1975, Short Eyes: A Play
• Gayl Jones, 1976, Eva’s Man
• Mumia Abu-Jamal, 1995, Live from Death Row
• Howard Bruce Franklin (Ed.), 1998, Prison Writing in the 20th-century America
• Leonard Peltier, 1999, Prison Writings: My Life is My Sundance
• Jimmy Santiago Baca, 2002, A Place to Stand
• Cristina Rathbone, 2006, A World Apart: Women, Prison, and Life Behind Bars
• T.J. Parsell, 2007, Fish: A Memoir of a Boy in a Man’s Prison
• Michael G. Santos, 2007, Inside: Life Behind Bars in America

You are cordially invited to attend the reading marking the launch of the Winter 2012 Social Justice issue on January 28. Contributors presenting their work will include Clarinda Harriss, who has agreed to add a poem (“After Jessup”) about her experience at MHC to the one on Hurricane Katrina she is slated to read.