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@Toltecjohn: Pablo Neruda 'I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul' >> a poem http://t.co/IWJg8bkT


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Invitation to Love

Invitation to Love
by Paul Dunbar

COME when the nights are bright with stars
          Or when the moon is mellow;
Come when the sun his golden bars
          Drops on the hay-field yellow.
Come in the twilight soft and gray,
Come in the night or come in the day,
Come, O love, whene'er you may,
          And you are welcome, welcome.

You are sweet, O Love, dear Love,
You are soft as the nesting dove.
Come to my heart and bring it rest
As the bird flies home to its welcome nest.

Come when my heart is full of grief
          Or when my heart is merry;
Come with the falling of the leaf
          Or with the redd'ning cherry.
Come when the year's first blossom blows,
Come when the summer gleams and glows,
Come with the winter's drifting snows,
          And you are welcome, welcome.

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond             

by E. E. Cummings

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond

any experience,your eyes have their silence:

in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,

or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me

though i have closed myself as fingers,

you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens

(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and

my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,

as when the heart of this flower imagines

the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals

the power of your intense fragility:whose texture

compels me with the color of its countries,

rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes

and opens;only something in me understands

the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)

nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

Haiku

The light of a candle

 is transferred to another candle

 spring twilight.

The Light of a Candle by Yosa Buson as translated by Yuki Sawa and Edith Marcombe Shiffert

As part of National Poetry Month, I'll explore the different forms of poetry.  Let's begin with one of my favorite, Haiku.  

A traditional Japanese haiku is a three-line poem with seventeen syllables, written in a 5/7/5 syllable count. Often focusing on images from nature, haiku emphasizes simplicity, intensity, and directness of expression.  Last year, one of my favorite poets, Sonia Sanchez published a book of Haiku poems.  This week she published one on her website in remembrance of African American sculptor, Elizabeth Catlett.  Read it here.

I found this history of haiku on poets.org.  Haiku began in thirteenth-century Japan as the opening phrase of renga, an oral poem, generally 100 stanzas long, which was also composed syllabically. The much shorter haiku broke away from renga in the sixteenth-century, and was mastered a century later by Matsuo Basho, who wrote this classic haiku:

An old pond!
 A frog jumps in
 the sound of water.

Among the greatest traditional haiku poets are Basho, Yosa Buson, Kobayashi Issa, and Masaoka Shiki. Modern poets interested in the form include Robert Hass, Paul Muldoon, and Anselm Hollo, whose poem "5 & 7 & 5" includes the following stanza: 

round lumps of cells grow
 up to love porridge later
  become The Supremes

Haiku was traditionally written in the present tense and focused on associations between images. There was a pause at the end of the first or second line, and a "season word," or kigo, specified the time of year.

As the form has evolved, many of these rules--including the 5/7/5 practice--have been routinely broken. However, the philosophy of haiku has been preserved: the focus on a brief moment in time; a use of provocative, colorful images; an ability to be read in one breath; and a sense of sudden enlightenment and illumination.

This philosophy influenced poet Ezra Pound, who noted the power of haiku's brevity and juxtaposed images. He wrote, "The image itself is speech. The image is the word beyond formulated language." The influence of haiku on Pound is most evident in his poem "In a Station of the Metro," which began as a thirty-line poem, but was eventually pared down to two:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd

 Petals on a wet, black bough.

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5782 

The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain

"The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain"

by Langston Hughes

The younger Negro artists who create now intend to express
our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame.
If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not,
it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly, too.
The tom-tom cries, and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people
are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure
doesn't matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow,
strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain
free within ourselves.

Context of the poem:
Langston Hughes was a leader of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. He was educated at Columbia University and Lincoln University. While a student at Lincoln, he published his first book of poetry, The Weary Blues (1926), as well as his landmark essay, seen by many as a cornerstone document articulation of the Harlem renaissance, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.”

Earlier that year, Freda Kirchwey, editor of the Nation, mailed Hughes a proof of “The Negro-Art Hokum,” an essay George Schuyler had written for the magazine, requesting a counterstatement. Schuyler, editor of the African-American newspaper The Pittsburgh Courier, questioned in his essay the need for a separate African-American artistic and literary tradition.

Understanding a fellow African American poet’s stated desire to be “a poet—not a Negro poet,” as that poet’s wish to look away from his African American heritage and instead absorb white culture, Hughes’ essay spoke to the concerns of the Harlem Renaissance as it celebrated African American creative innovations such as blues, spirituals, jazz, and literary work that engaged African American life. Notes Hughes, “this is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America—this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible.”

His attention to working-class African-American lives, coupled with his refusal to paint these lives as either saintly or stereotypical, brought criticism from several directions. Articulating the unspoken directives he struggled to ignore, Hughes observes, “‘Oh, be respectable, write about nice people, show how good we are,’ say the Negroes. ‘Be stereotyped, don't go too far, don't shatter our illusions about you, don't amuse us too seriously. We will pay you,’ say the whites.”
Read Langston Hughes full essay here:  http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/essay/237858



More about Langston Huges:  http://experiencinghistory.blogspot.com/2012/04/negro-speaks-of-rivers.html

Sentences

Sentences

by Quincy Troupe

movement of time through the music of space,
eye hear a bell ringing blue in sentences,

the language spoken in sleep becomes an echo here,
a translation when written down on white paper,

in the air, when spoken, words seem like a dream
pulsating through ether in blue melodies of tongues

weaving inside sentences, packed with local
idioms, carved from blue spaces by human breath,

sounds rooted in voices here evoke metaphors
coursing blood-deep, form ancient tribal gestures,

where words fixed in geographic locations repeat
through reverberating memory, bring recognition

ricocheting through a collective truth, perhaps
then language can evoke a shared history,

music, when sentences mirror rhythms of tongues
poetry rises like suns birthing circles of love

Read more about Quincy Troupe and his poetry on his website:  http://www.quincytroupe.com/index.html

Black Boys Play the Classics

Black Boys Play the Classics

 By Toi Derricotte

The most popular “act” in
Penn Station
is the three black kids in ratty
sneakers & T-shirts playing
two violins and a cello—Brahms.
White men in business suits
have already dug into their pockets
as they pass and they toss in
a dollar or two without stopping.
Brown men in work-soiled khakis
stand with their mouths open,
arms crossed on their bellies
as if they themselves have always
wanted to attempt those bars.
One white boy, three, sits
cross-legged in front of his
idols—in ecstasy—
their slick, dark faces,
their thin, wiry arms,
who must begin to look
like angels!
Why does this trembling
pull us?

A: Beneath the surface we are one.
B: Amazing! I did not think that they could speak this tongue.



http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171607

Jacket Notes by Ishmael Reed

Jacket Notes

Being a colored poet
Is like going over
Niagara Falls in a
Barrel

An 8 year old can do what
You do unaided
The barrel maker doesn't
The you can cut it

The gawkers on the bridge
Hope you fall on your
Face

The tourist bus full of
Paying customers broke-down
Just out of Buffalo

Some would rather dig
The postcards than
Catch your act

Amile from the drink
It begins to storm

But what really hurts is
You're bigger than the
Barrel

Poet, essayist, and novelist Ishmael Reed was born in 1938 in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He was raised in Buffalo, New York, and attended the University of New York at Buffalo.

He is the author of several collections of poetry, including: New and Collected Poems 1964-2007 (Da Capo Press, 2007); New and Collected Poems(Atheneum, 1988); A Secretary to the Spirits (1978); Catechism of D Neoamerican HooDoo Church (1970);Chattanooga (1973); and Conjure(1972).

Reed has also written numerous novels, including: Japanese by Spring(1993); The Terrible Twos (1982); Flight to Canada (1976); The Last Days of Louisiana Red (1974); Yellow Back Radio Broke Down(1969); and The Free-Lance Pallbearers.

Among his plays are Mother Hubbard (1982) and The Ace Boons(1980). He is also the author of collections of essays: Airing Dirty Laundry (1993); Writin' is Fightin': Thirty-Seven Years of Boxing on Paper (1988); God Made Alaska for the Indians: Selected Essays(1982), and Shrovetide in Old New Orleans (1978).

Reed was a cofounder of Yardbird Publishing Co. in 1971 and also founded Reed, Cannon, and Johnson Communications in 1973. With Al Young, he co founded Quilt magazine. Reed has also edited a number of anthologies.

Among his honors and awards are the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award, a Guggenheim Foundation Award, the Lewis Michaux Award, an American Civil Liberties award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the California Arts Council. Reed has lectured at numerous colleges and universities. He served as a lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley for thirty-five years. Ishmael Reed lives in Oakland, California.

sources:  

http://www.math.buffalo.edu/~sww/reed/reed_ishmael_poetry.html

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/750

Is It Because I'm Black?

In honor of Black History Month....

Is It Because I'm Black?
by Joseph Cotter

Why do men smile when I speak, 

And call my speech 

The whimperings of a babe 

That cries but knows not what it wants? 

Is it because I am black? 

Why do men sneer when I arise 

And stand in their councils, 

And look them eye to eye, 

And speak their tongue?
Is it because I am black?

Joseph Seamon Cotter Sr. (February 2, 1861 – March 14, 1949) was a poet, writer, playwright, and community leader raised in Louisville, Kentucky (but born in Nelson County, Kentucky)] Cotter was one of the earliest African-American playwrights to be published. He was known as “Kentucky’s first Negro poet with real creative ability.” Born at the start of the American Civil War, raised in poverty with no formal education until the age of 22, and living through a time of monumental change, Cotter also became an educator and an advocate of black education.