Celebrate Black Historical Outings
Apologies for not replying or posting recently; I am under a few kinds of weather, but improving. So many thanks for everyone's suggestions on the last post.
I missed Celebrate Bisexuality Day and National Poetry Day, I may not get to any events for Black History Month, and I can't find anyone to receive my glad tidings for Coming Out Day.
I offer, as an amalgam of the above, four of my favourite black queer poets: two from the 1920s, two recent.
Countee Cullen - first wife left him when he told her he liked chaps. Second wife worked out better. Uses traditional poetic forms to talk about black American experience around the 1920s - I like to read him with Hughes (see below) who was working at the same time with very different rhythms. "What is Africa to me: Copper sun or scarlet sea..."
Langston Hughes - sexuality ambiguous, poems awesome. Best known include "I, Too, Sing America" and "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" (link includes him reading it) and a lot of brilliant jazz-infused poetry, including the one below the cut - I love it, the rhythm's fantastic and I like the odd resonances with TS Eliot's pub scenes in The Waste Land.
The Cat and the Saxophone (2am)
EVERYBODY
Half-pint,-
Gin?
No, make it
LOVES MY BABY
corn. You like
liquor,
don't you honey?
BUT MY BABY
Sure. Kiss me,
DON'T LOVE NOBODY
daddy.
BUT ME.
Say!
EVERYBODY
Yes?
WANTS MY BABY
I'm your
BUT MY BABY
sweetie, ain't I?
DON'T WANT NOBODY
Sure.
BUT
Then let's
ME,
do it!
SWEET ME.
Charleston,
mamma!
!
Essex Hemphill - writing of and around AIDS, brilliantly. "You are not to touch other flesh/ without a police permit / You have not privacy-- / the State wants to seize your bed / and sleep with you. ... You are not to touch yourself/ or be familiar with ecstasy." On father/son relationships: "I wanted tenderness/ to belong to us/ more than food or money."
Jackie Kaye - her first collection, The Adoption Papers, is written in her own voice and those of her mothers. Balances between comedy and poignancy - in one poem, her Communist mother frantically 'cleans' her flat of all the political material before a social worker's visit (bust of Marx goes to the back of the cupboard).
I missed Celebrate Bisexuality Day and National Poetry Day, I may not get to any events for Black History Month, and I can't find anyone to receive my glad tidings for Coming Out Day.
I offer, as an amalgam of the above, four of my favourite black queer poets: two from the 1920s, two recent.
Countee Cullen - first wife left him when he told her he liked chaps. Second wife worked out better. Uses traditional poetic forms to talk about black American experience around the 1920s - I like to read him with Hughes (see below) who was working at the same time with very different rhythms. "What is Africa to me: Copper sun or scarlet sea..."
Langston Hughes - sexuality ambiguous, poems awesome. Best known include "I, Too, Sing America" and "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" (link includes him reading it) and a lot of brilliant jazz-infused poetry, including the one below the cut - I love it, the rhythm's fantastic and I like the odd resonances with TS Eliot's pub scenes in The Waste Land.
The Cat and the Saxophone (2am)
EVERYBODY
Half-pint,-
Gin?
No, make it
LOVES MY BABY
corn. You like
liquor,
don't you honey?
BUT MY BABY
Sure. Kiss me,
DON'T LOVE NOBODY
daddy.
BUT ME.
Say!
EVERYBODY
Yes?
WANTS MY BABY
I'm your
BUT MY BABY
sweetie, ain't I?
DON'T WANT NOBODY
Sure.
BUT
Then let's
ME,
do it!
SWEET ME.
Charleston,
mamma!
!
Essex Hemphill - writing of and around AIDS, brilliantly. "You are not to touch other flesh/ without a police permit / You have not privacy-- / the State wants to seize your bed / and sleep with you. ... You are not to touch yourself/ or be familiar with ecstasy." On father/son relationships: "I wanted tenderness/ to belong to us/ more than food or money."
Jackie Kaye - her first collection, The Adoption Papers, is written in her own voice and those of her mothers. Balances between comedy and poignancy - in one poem, her Communist mother frantically 'cleans' her flat of all the political material before a social worker's visit (bust of Marx goes to the back of the cupboard).