Poetry Beat

Canadian poet visits Buffalo tonight

As the resident of a "border town," I've always been puzzled by how much Canadians know about the minutiae of American culture, while Americans are oblivious to everything that occurs up North save for hockey scores, a few rock bands, and the real estate market in Toronto.

Most Americans tend to think of Canadian culture as a slightly more earnest and less materialistic analog to their own.  Think of the high seriousness with which the work of three of Canada's best contemporary fiction writers--Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondatjee and Alice Munro--is regarded by readers in U.S., and you'll probably wonder why a Canadian poet hasn't similarly "crossed over."

A chance to remedy this situation (at least for one evening) occurs this evening (May 31) at 7 p.m. at Talking Leaves Books, 3158 Main St., when George Bowering, Canada's first poet laureate (2002 to 2004) reads from his latest book Vermeer's Light: Poems 1996-2006.

Although I'm familiar with Bowering as one of several prominent Canadian "West Coast" poets affiliated with the avant-garde poetry journal TISH, I'm embarrassed to admit that up until last week I had no idea of how substantial and adventurous a body of work he had produced.

With 27 collections of poetry, 11 novels, a half dozen story collections, and more than 12 books of non-fiction on topics ranging from Canadian history to baseball to his credit (not to mention two Governor General's Awards), it's no wonder that Bowering--who as born in British Columbia's Okanagan Valley in 1935--was a consensus choice for the title of first "Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate" in 2002.

For Buffalo audiences, there should be additional interest in that as a student at the University of British Columbia in the late 1950s, Bowering was greatly influenced by the "Black Mountain" school of poets including Robert Duncan, Charles Olson and Robert Creeley (who served as his Master's thesis adviser).

In every interview or writing philosophy statement that I've been able to locate, he continues to credit Olson and Creeley (both taught at UBC in the early 1960s, shortly before coming to UB) as mentors and enduring influences on his work.

Why is Lucille Clifton under appreciated?

This is a follow-up to my previous posting on Buffalo native Lucille Clifton, who accepted one of the literary world's highest honors, the 2007 Ruth Lilly Prize for lifetime achievement in American poetry this past week in Chicago.

I've long thought that Clifton was under appreciated in her hometown and have often wondered why.

It's true that the Arts Council in Buffalo and Erie County honored her as one of their artists of the year in 2004 and Just Buffalo Literary Center has sponsored at least two events in which she was featured in the last decade, but if you asked the average Buffalo area resident about Clifton, I'd bet less than one in 10 could identify her correctly. 

Compare her name recognition in Buffalo to another woman writer of her generation who has had a comparably long and distinguished literary career--Joyce Carol Oates (born in 1938 in Lockport, while Clifton was born in 1936 in Depew)-- and you'll see my point.  Both Oates and Clifton left the Buffalo area as young women, but only Oates is still claimed by the community at large as "local."

The news that Clifton is the first African-American woman to receive the Lilly Prize in its 21 year history ought to be a special source of pride to our entire community, and the fact that she graduated from the former Fosdick-Masten (now City Honors) High School in Buffalo at age 16 in 1952 ought to be as much a part of local lore as Oates' graduation from what is now Williamsville South High School three years later.

It would be very disappointing indeed if this were simply a matter of race, but I'm not sure of where else the discussion can begin.  Readers, I ask you for your thoughts on the matter.   What will it take for Clifton to get the recognition she deserves in the city of her origins?   

Lucille Clifton wins poetry prize

At an ceremony held Wednesday night in Chicago, Buffalo area native Lucille Clifton accepted the 2007 Ruth Lilly Prize for lifetime achievement in American poetry from the Poetry Foundation. 

Clifton is the first African-American woman to receive the prestigious award in its 21 year history.

The three-person selection committee issued a statement that read in part: “ Her poems are local and funny, and have their own particular idiom; they speak big things in quiet ways, and she’s voracious in the subject matter she takes on, spanning city and country, speaking for the unspoken, the sacred, and the invisible. Clifton has added enormously to the representation of the African-American experience in poetry and has been a kind of historical consciousness for her people and a public consciousness for us all.”

Clifton was born in 1936 as Thelma Lucille Sayles into working class family in Depew. She was raised in Buffalo (her family lived on Purdy Street).

She is the author of 11 selections of poetry including Good Times (selected by the New York Times as one of the 10 best books of 1969), Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980, and Next: New Poems (both of which were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1988, marking the first time in history any author had two books selected as finalists in the same category for the award).

Clifton's Blessing The Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000 won the National Book Award in 2000.

She and Fred Clifton married in 1958 and remained in Buffalo until 1960, when they moved to the Washington, D.C area. A long series of teaching appointments followed along with numerous literary awards. She was Poet Laureate of the State of Maryland from 1979 to 1985

Clifton, who now lives in Columbia, Md., has also published more than 20 books of children's literature, most of them focusing on African-American history and stories about the black family. 

The Ruth Lilly Prize is administered by Poetry magazine and its parent organization The Poetry Foundation and carries with it a $100,000 cash award. Past winners include UB professor and Buffalo resident Carl Dennis.

Nobel Prize winners to visit Buffalo

With the spring reading season more or less behind us--this month's "If All Buffalo Read the Same Book" project featuring Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God is the last major component of high profile literary programming before the relaxed pace of summer -- interesting news comes from Just Buffalo Literary Center's Artistic Director Michael Kelleher.

He tells of a major series of events featuring four major figures in World Literature visiting Buffalo for one day residencies beginning this November and extending through April of 2008.

The series, called "Babel," is co-sponsored by Just Buffalo, Talking Leaves Books and Hallwalls, and will focus exclusively on International (i.e., non-American) authors whose works are noteworthy for their broad and humanistic global vision. Just Buffalo plans to do "If All Of Buffalo Read The Same Book," projects around each author's visit in the month prior to their arrival.  Here's the lineup, along with the book titles that will be featured in the reading project:

November 8: Orhan Pamuk, Turkey, 2006 Nobel Prize Winner, Snow
December 7: Ariel Dorfman, Argentina/Chile, Death and the Maiden
March 13: Derek Walcott, St. Lucia, 1992 Nobel Prize Winner, Selected Poems
April 24, Kiran Desai, India, 2006 Man Booker Prize Winner, The Inheritance of Loss

This will be a subscription series and tickets for selected events--which will take place at Hallwalls and The Church on Delaware Avenue--in all four visits will be available later this summer from Just Buffalo.  A press conference is planned for next month to announce details, including the awarding of a grant of $323,000 from Buffalo's Oishei Foundation to underwrite the series over the next three years.

Urban Epiphany 2007 now available online

If you happened to miss part or all of Urban Epiphany 2007, the sixth annual installment of Buffalo's most inclusive literary community gathering and marathon-style reading on April 29th at the Unitarian Universalist Church on Elmwood Avenue, extensive sound files of the event are now available online courtesy of Buffalo area poet Robb Nesbitt (who recorded and served as sound engineer of the project) for local media activist Richard Wicka's new internet radio community thinktwiceradio.com.

Seventy two of the eighty one poets who (by my count) read at the five hour event on the last Sunday afternoon of National Poetry Month can be heard here (just click on each name), reading in the (approximately) two minute segment format that has proven so successful in making Urban Epiphany democratic and accessible in its appeal to both established community voices and talented newcomers alike.  A gallery of 75 photos of particpating writers Nesbitt took at the reading is also available at the same site.

If one single event on the calendar each year can be said to best represent the open-minded, participatory spirit of the Buffalo area literary community, Urban Epiphany is it.  Much credit must go to event co-founder and host Celia White, a young woman who has parlayed her organizational skills and the community's goodwill into what is quickly becoming a Buffalo area institution.

Speaking of Ms. White, her new collection of poems Letter was published earlier this month by Ambient Press.  A book launch reading and reception in conjunction with the release is planned from 3 to 5 p.m. on Sunday, May 27th at Rust Belt Books, 202 Allen Street.

Exploring spirituality

Two of the finest poets to emerge from the Buffalo area literary scene in the 1980s return on Wednesday to read in Earth Daughter's Gray Hair Reading Series at 7:30 p.m. at Hallwalls, 341 Delaware Ave. (near Tupper).  Both Anne Elezabeth Pluto and Nita Penfold are strong, independent-minded feminist writers very much in the tradition of Buffalo's Earth's Daughters Collective. 

Although both happen to live in the greater Boston area now, there's a lot more than geographical proximity that makes them an appropriate pairing for the Gray Hair Reading Series.  While their work differs quite markedly in form, these women are at the forefront of contemporary writing on spirituality and religious themes from a feminist perspective.

Anne Elezabeth Pluto, a Brooklyn native of Russian Orthodox heritage who lived in Buffalo from 1976 to 1983, earned her Ph.D at the University at Buffalo (her mentors were Robert Creeley, Leslie Fiedler and Art Efron) and co-programmed (with yours truly) Hallwalls' "Fiction Diction" Reading Series from 1981 to 1983.  A poet (The Frog Princess and Unnatural Acts), playwright (I Enjoy Being a Girl), Shakespeare scholar and fiction writer, she is now professor of theater and literature at Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass., where she founded and is artistic director of the Oxford Street Players, a Shakespeare-based theater company.

As a longtime friend, I must admit to a certain bias in reading her work.  That said, by any objective measure the work is extraordinary in both its language and its world-view. There is a powerful sense of ritual, tradition, and religiosity in her poems, and anyone who reads them closely will be impressed by how successfully she integrates Orthodox Christian imagery and iconography with bodily experience to create an eroticism of everyday life.

In her collection Unnatural Acts, the mysteries of the spirit and the mysteries of the flesh converge through the transforming power of language.  What she does with the Russian Orthodox symbology of her faith—her subtle inversions and subversive feminist readings of it—are absolutely original in my reading experience.  No one I know writes more effectively about cultural identity, the politics of personal intimacy, or the carnal manifestations of religious bliss.

Stylistically, Pluto favors Open Form--short, dense, breath-determined but expressive lines featuring strong images and powerful, sometimes incantatory cadences.  Her recent work shows some Dickinsonian influence--particularly in its extensive use of dashes--but there is such self-assuredness in her voice that she is confident in taking risks that would terrify lesser poets. Imagine for a moment that Anna Akhmatova had somehow decided to flee Stalinist St.Petersburg and miraculously ended up at Black Mountain College in the 1950s with Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, et al.   That voice would sound a whole lot like Annie's.

Here she is, for instance, (click on link)  Reading "Unnatural Acts"

Nita Penfold grew up in Buffalo's Southtowns and came onto the literary scene here as a talented young writer (she was known as Bonita or even "Bonnie" back then) chiefly through her involvement with Earth Daughters and the former Niagara-Erie Writers.  By the late 1980s, she had moved to New England, received her master's degree in creative writing at Lesley University (where Anne Pluto, coincidentally, had been hired) and began what has become her life's journey exploring the ways in which art and literature help us to understand both the nature of divinity and our experience of it.

In my 20 years of selecting the poems for The Buffalo News Poetry Page, she has become perhaps the most faithful and popular of our exiled "Buffalo native" contributors, and the range of her other writing and teaching activities is almost too extensive to keep track of.  Her collections of poetry include “Mile High Blue Sky Pie” (Pudding House, 1998), “Woman With The Wild-Grown Hair” (Pudding House, 2002) and “They Stand Up in Broken Shells”, winner of the 2006 Writer’s Digest Self-published Book Award.  In 2004, she edited the anthology "Hunger Enough: Living Spiritually in a Consumer Society" for Pudding House Press.

From a formal standpoint, her work recalls Free Verse in its vernacular style, and Whitman's long lines and expansive projections of the spirit in particular.  Penfold, who received her doctor of ministry degree in creation spirituality in 2002, explores the idea of a gender-neutral, antinomian theology expressed not through rhetoric, but gentle humor and a profound appreciation for the spirituality that resides in the particulars of our common experience.

Nikki Germany is the winner

It was a tight contest--full of thrilling rushes, dramatic comebacks and clutch performances that finally ended in an exciting come-from-behind victory.  No, we're not talking about the Buffalo Sabres Friday night overtime victory over the New York Rangers in the NHL playoffs.

The other contest in town that night was the second annual Buffalo Poetry Slam Championship in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery's Clifton Hall, which saw eight finalists compete for four slots on the Buffalo Poetry Slam Team that will compete in the National Poetry Slam Aug. 7-11 in Austin, Texas.

In an evening when urban hip-hop stylists outpointed cooler ironic types and women generally outscored men, Nikki Germany rallied from the middle of the pack with strong second and third round performances to narrowly edge last year's champion Howard Smith and win the 2007 Buffalo Poetry Slam Championship.

Germany, who currently lives in Lockport, and is an accomplished performance poet scored well with three-minute pieces that dealt with body image and self empowerment issues, an angry and vulnerable repudiation of a former lover, and a powerful closing piece "I Want To Be That B----" that took a familiar gender stereotype and reclaimed it as an assertion of feminist prerogative.

One didn't need to wait for the randomly chosen slam judges' scores to realize that her final piece was a momentum turner.

I won't claim any special expertise when it comes to evaluating hip-hop poetry--the last time I checked, my "street credibility" was less than zero--but any close listener will recognize that what differentiates Germany's work from her peers is the sophisticated use of enjambment and internal rhymes, her jazz-influenced use of inflection and line breaks, and ability to superimpose a monologue-like narrative over a fairly complicated rhythmic scheme.

If you'd like to sample some of Nikki Germany's work for yourself--listeners should be warned that some of her work contains "coarse language"--you can do so at her Myspace page.  Here is a link to that page:  www.myspace.com/nikkigermany

Finishing a close second to Germany was last year's winner Howard Smith, whose body of work is probably the most consistently excellent of any Buffalo-based spoken word artist.  I've never seen him give a sub par performance, and there's no mystery why.  As I was approaching Clifton Hall from the Francis Bacon Exhibition Opening Friday night in the Albright-Knox's Main Building, Smith was alone pacing the sidewalk vehemently rehearsing his one of his pieces.

His work is notable for its linguistic intensity--think of it as a torrent of urban vernacular language pouring into the room like a well spring, or perhaps to use a more appropriate simile, a fire hose.  In fact, the sheer velocity of his work over the length of a three minute piece poses some problems in terms of its comprehensibility.  It's not as if he's speaking nonsense, it's more like one requires special listening skills, and maybe some recording equipment with playback capabilities, to parse all his sentences.

Finishing third and fourth in the competition, and thereby earning the final two slots on the Buffalo Poetry Slam team were one young woman known as Nickie D. (whose smart and edgy rap based performances led the competition through two rounds) and another known as Lovely, whose performance style one might call "urban confessional."

Il in all, this was a terrific evening.  Special thanks go to Gabrielle Boulaine, who hosted and coordinated the event for Nickel City Poetry Slam, Inc., and Michael Kelleher of Just Buffalo Literary Center, the event's co-sponsor, whose cell phone text messages kept me up to date on the Sabres score. 

Poetry slamming at the Knox

Whether you’ve never attended a Poetry Slam or you’re a close follower of the slamming circuit, you won’t find a better opportunity to experience the sui generis mix of hyperbole, pathos, and linguistic fireworks set to hip-hop rhythms that characterize this spoken word art form than tonight’s second annual Buffalo Poetry Slam Championship at 7 p.m. in the Albright Knox Art Gallery’s Clifton Hall.

Competing for four slots on the Slam Team that will represent Buffalo at the National Poetry Slam in Austin, Texas Aug. 7- 11, will be eight semi-finalists—all dynamic performers on the Buffalo area scene—including N’Tare Ali Gault (a veteran  spoken word artist who divides his time between New York City and Buffalo), last year’s Buffalo competition winner Howard Smith, Nikki Germany, Jim Antonik, a young woman performer known as Lovely, James Cooper III, MC Vendetta (AKA Jana Willoughby), and Knickie D.

Also making special appearances will be former National Slam Champions Lynne Procope and MAarty McConnell, making this a unique opportunity for Buffalo audiences to witness spoken word poetry at its highest level of accomplishment.

While admission to all other Nickel City Poetry Slam events (hosted by Gabrielle Boulaine) that take place on the first Friday of every month in Clifton Hall are free (courtWesy of its co-sponsors Just Buffalo Literary Center and the Albright-Knox’s Gusto at the Gallery Program), admission to this championship round of the monthly competition is $12, with the proceeds going to travel and lodging arrangements for the eventual Buffalo Poetry Slam team.

In a sense, of course, the recitation of poetry as popular entertainment is as old as civilization itself.  All the great epics, myths and sacred texts of the world’s religions began as the transcriptions of the living memories of bards and prophets. Even after the canonization of literature, the tradition of traveling troubadours and courtier poets competing for the patronage of royalty extended into the 20th century.

The contemporary phenomenon known as the poetry slam began as entertainment inthe Chicago bar and jazz club scene (notably the Get Me High Lounge and Green Mill Jazz Club) of the mid-1980s as an “open mike” night competition involving “old school” jazz and beat poets, younger “dub” poets and hip hop artists, and more conceptual “performance poets” of the Jackson MacLow/Fluxus School.  Within months the format proved so popular that it migrated to New York City (the Nuyorican Poets Café), Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and eventually most of the major urban centers across America.

Poetry slams have been a part of Buffalo’s cultural scene since the early 1990s at several locations, frequently under the sponsorship of Just Buffalo Literary Center, but also notably for several years at the Em Tea Cup Coffee House on Oakgrove Avenue near Humboldt Parkway.      

While the official “rules” of slamming are minimal, they stipulate a 3 minute time limit for each spoken word performance, the banning of all props, costumes and musical or rhythmic accompaniment, and require that scoring of the performances is done by a panel of judges chosen at random from the audience.

In many venues across the country where poetry slams are held—particularly on the club circuit—audience reaction tends to be raucous, with jeering and heckling as well cheering regarded as acceptable behavior.  Here in Buffalo, however, the setting, sponsors and our general reverence for poetry is such that audiences at the half dozen or so slams I’ve attended at the Albright-Knox are unfailingly courteous and supportive of all the performers, reserving their disapprobation for the occasional inconsistent scoring on the part of the judges.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the poetry slam phenomenon is the wide range of linguistic expression and performance styles it accommodates.  Even if you don’t take a rooting interest in the competition, there is always the way in which it places certain transformative pressures on language itself.  You don’t need to be a linguist to recognize new demotic rhythms and grammatical variants introduced into the performances in the heat of competition.  It’s like listening to our language evolve within one’s own earshot.