http://www.barnstablepatriot.com/home2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=22205&Itemid=34
Sep 10 2010
by Joe Gouveia
Finally, the return of Askia Toure to Cape Cod is going to happen,
nearly five years since his last visit. This great and historic poet
will read on Thursday, Sept. 30, at 7 p.m., at the Cultural Center of
Cape Cod, 307 Old Main St., South Yarmouth. Open mic precedes the
featured poet; poets of all ages are welcome.
I've heard the arguments, can even quote well-known poets who have
said things to me like, "It's not that I don't like political poetry,
there just isn't much good political poetry out there," and "I
consider myself primarily a performer." I've heard poets react to
literary controversies by saying, "it's poetry, it's supposed to
lie." And I've listened to poets lay claims such as, "I am a poet of
the people," then watched those poets disappear, never to be heard by
their people again after a few short years of popularity found the
next new wordsmith fad to come along some refer to these as
poetasters. I call them Whar-hollas: they got their 15 minutes and
sat down (unless they were Slam poets; then they only got three minutes).
Whatever the case, one thing I find in America's contemporary poetry
scene is what Yeats observed: "The worst are full of passionate
intensity/while the best lack all conviction." Poets are either busy
arguing over what real poetry is and/or coming from a place of, "I'm
just trying to get famous and make my ego feel good," as I call it.
Sometimes for me, believe it or not, the poetry starts to get old,
and oftentimes fast.
I don't know that I'd call Askia Toure old, but I'd certainly call
him an Elder amongst contemporary American poets. Without giving up
his age, I will say that he was the co-founder of the Black Arts
Movement in America's late '60s early '70s. He and Amiri Baraka
(then Leroi Jones) opened up stages for poets and wrote of the times
in ways that were not only political, but dammit, Askia wrote poems
that didn't lie, was great poetry, political or no, and he is full of
so much passionate intensity as one of the best lacking nothing that
he allowed himself to be called whatever he got called. He was too
busy calling out in his writing than to worry about what his image
may or may not be.
Askia Toure is a poet who started out on a mission, to better our
shared experiences as fellow human beings on this planet with words,
rather than concern himself with vanity and PoetryWood. In the Askia
Toure '60s, the argument amongst poets was whether they were
primarily political activists or primarily writers. The thought of
being "performers" never entered their heads, because performers they
already were just look at the track record.
Toure is one of the pioneers of the Black Arts/Black Aesthetics
movement and the Africana Studies movement. A modern renaissance man,
he is also a
political activist, having served with the Student Non-violent
Coordinating Committee's Atlanta Project and is a co-author of SNCC's
"Black Power Position Paper" (featured in The New York Times), which
influenced the direction of the Civil Rights Movement toward the
Black Power revolution.
The "primarily" activist v. writer split was going down when Askia
was an illustrator for Umbra Magazine (as he started out and studied
first as a visual artist), which was out of the Whitman tradition in
poetry of establishing a nationality's own distinctive voice. The
idea was less about popularity and more about community and culture.
Poet Ishmael Reed says it best: "What Black Arts did was inspire a
whole lot of Black people to write. Moreover, there would be no
multiculturalism movement without Black Arts. Latinos, Asian
Americans, and others all say they began writing as a result of the
example of the 1960s. Blacks gave the example that you don't have to
assimilate. You could do your own thing, get into your own
background, your own history, your own tradition and your own
culture. I think the challenge is for cultural sovereignty and Black
Arts struck a blow for that."
Toure certainly pioneered the doing in Reed's statement, and
sometimes with shorter poems than we usually see in poems of the polemic:
SURVIVAL: A CHANT
(for Malcolm, Martin and Medgar)
Paint this joy upon the World's canvas;
that despite lynching, bombing,
dirty deeds, we living seeds of a Bantu
Nation live and breathe amidst the trials
and madness of Anglo-sponsored
profiteers, spawn of puritans, new breed
pioneers raping this world with Saxon greed.
We are Thirty Million strong, bred from auction
blocks of chained chattels. Slaves!--bought and
sold like tamed cattle--now produce astronauts,
rocket scientists, while sermons from
slain kings rattle in America's frigid ears.
Askia Toure is a poet who also creates his own personal mythology, as
can be seen best in his books such as DawnSong and From the Pyramids
to the Projects. When the Black Arts Movement continued to split in
the early '70s, Askia and Larry Neal, an African-American scholar,
poet and professor at Yale University, worked together as young poets
to make a cultural difference in society with art. Neal has written
essays, particularly "The Negro in the Theatre" (1964), "Cultural
Front" (1965), and "The Black Arts Movement" (1968), that are as
iconic as Toure himself in defining and shaping the Black Power
movement. It is no wonder that he was awarded the Gwendolyn Brooks
Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996.
This man, this poet, is not just another flashy name in the pan of
American literature. No, this is a lesson in Pan-Americanism, Unity &
Struggle, and in more recent years, his works have been on ecology.
Establishing not solely his own voice, but his own distinctive
mythology, are among the many things that make an Askia Toure reading
memorable. His imagination for mythology is seen as his identity, an
identity of poet-in-the-trenches, and a task he doesn't take lightly.
As he says in ending his poem "Osirian Rhapsody: A Myth (for Larry
Neal and Bob Marley)":
He said he was seeking the wind, / the summits / of its / birth:
those legendary heights / composed of ice and snowdrift / blue rocks
of morning / tantamount / to time's crystal beginnings / beyond the
syllables / of endeavor: visions rooted in / forever, / wafted in the
silence of our dreams. / He was a tall, hawkish man, / aquiline-eyed,
rangy / filled with / strange longings / silent passion / danced in
his voice: a poet, / some say, his angular figure draped / around
Askia Toure will read at the Cultural Center of Cape Cod, 307 Old
Main St., South Yarmouth, on Thursday, Sept. 30th at 7 p.m. Open mic
precedes the reading. All poets welcome.
.
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