Ramcat Reads #8
Kolin, Philip C. Emmett Till in Different States: Poems. Chicago: Third World Press, 2015. In the
metaphysical philosophy of Martin Heidegger, poiesis is "the essential agency of primary truth."
Seeking to rescue diverse human experiences from godlessness, Nathan A. Scott,
Jr. noted in The Poetry of Civic Virtue (1976) that
Indeed, Heidegger
considers any truly fundamental act of reflection to be an affair of
"poetizing," for it is the poet (der
Dichter) who is, in his view, far more than the thinker (der Denker), a proficient in the art of
"paying heed" to the things of earth.
And it is just the capacity for this kind of attentiveness that he
regards as the great casualty of those attitudes toward the world engendered by
a culture so heavily dominated as our own by the general outlook of scientific
positivism. For, in such a climate, the
sovereign passion controlling all transactions with reality is that of turning
everything to practical account: the furniture of the world is approached
predatorily, with an intention to manipulate it and convert it to use. (5)
In contemporary American culture, the sovereign passion is
irrational, regressive and hate-driven, and how Heidegger positioned
"paying heed" must be revised.
Poets and historians and readers
of poetry and history (narrative
reconstitution of verifiable facts) are also thinkers. We have no necessary and sufficient evidence
to prove that one camp or the other is more proficient in attending to the
glories and horrors of everyday life.
The point is nailed by Philip C.
Kolin's Emmett Till in Different States:
Poems (Chicago: Third World Press, 2015), and the coffin is nailed tightly
should we compare Kolin's extraordinary book with The Lynching of Emmett Till: A Documentary Narrative
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002), edited by Christopher
Metress, or with Devery S. Anderson's Emmett
Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015). Navigating back and forth between history and
poetry can't prevent the assaults of sovereign passion, but it can strengthen
us, perhaps, as readers to conduct defensive combat in 2016.
Kolin's poems on the iconic tragedy of Emmett Till urge us
to remember that acts of reflection can have the properties of a prism; they
can split enlightenment into component parts.
Unless I am blindly misreading
Kolin, he is encouraging us to discover the pragmatic linking of history
and poetry.
Emmett Till in
Different States follows in the tradition of Gwendolyn Books, Julius E.
Thompson, Langston Hughes, Richard Davidson, Audre Lorde, Bob Dylan, Wanda
Coleman, and Sam Cornish ---a few of
many American poets who remembered 1955, who used art and their aesthetics to
create a socially responsible prism or literature of everyday life to buttress
cultural memory. Kolin takes us into the territory of abrasive remembering, the
space where language gives birth to images of an iconic moment in America's
violent past. These morph into kindred
images of a terrible present. Kolin's
poems deliver us into the dread of an existential future. They demand that we abandon delusion, embrace
common sense to eschew spinformation, and make our peace with the unending
obligation of reckoning. A
life-promoting account of the furniture in our minds is a virtue not a vice.
As a title, Emmett
Till in Different States refers at once to Till's life and death in
Illinois and Mississippi and to the aesthetic states advocated by poetry and
history in concert with one another. We
have options in how to read Kolin's book, but two of them intrigue me. If one reads the forty-nine poems printed
between pages 7 and 72 and delays reading paratextual matter, one may hear a
long black song performed in many voices, a particular sonic remembering. On the other hand, if one reads the book from
cover to cover, one dwells on the architectonics of remembering, the structural
machinery of engaging history through the poetic prism of a different
consciousness. In this case, one moves
through the frames of Till's extended chronology (1902-2016), a prologue
extracted verbatim from parts of The Lynching
of Emmett Till: A Documentary Narrative, the multiple voices of the poems,
the notes on the poems, and Kolin's concise biographical sketch. These two states of experience are relevant
for cultural literacy and cultural memory, for the "paying of heed"
that the velocity of 2016 tries to deny us. Through the efferent and aesthetic
reading so nicely theorized in Louise M. Rosenblatt's The Read The Text The Poem:
The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work (Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1978), our minds can give rise to a third state of
awareness: the reconstituting in the dreadful contexts of 2016 of what Faedra
Chatard Carpenter calls "the well circulated, yet never exhausted story of
Emmett Till" and of how, as Devery S. Anderson aptly reminds us, the Till
case "remains an open wound not only in the South, but throughout
America." Like the poems in Frank X. Walker's Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting
of Medgar Evers (Athens: University
of Georgia Press, 2013), the poems in Emmett
Till in Different States invites us to stare all the ghosts of America in
the eye. It is significant that in the
final poem Kolin uses his Roman Catholic poetic sensibility to canonize Till on the feast of St. Moses the
Ethiopian, thus putting the domestic terrorism of lynching into the purview of
eternal verities and sending us back via
poiesis to the continent of mankind's
origins.
For 2016, I urge
those who say they "love" poetry to explore the territory of Kolin's
poetry and be born again in a baptism of blood.
We can perhaps manifest our
"love" for poetry and the sanctity of
human life and have better transactions with reality by walking in the
minefields of American and world
histories.
Laskas, Jeanne Marie.
Concussion. New York: Random House,
2015.
Although a trustworthy friend recommends the film
"Concussion" and the Internet
trailers featuring Will Smith are inviting, I have yet to see the movie. Based on Jeanne Marie Laskas's September 2009 GQ article "Game Brain,"(
http://www.gq.com/story/nfl-players-brain-dementia-study-memo ) the film will
probably have the impact of Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11," which
provoked me to utter angry words about a nation of sheep. I imagine "Concussion" is
sufficiently right-wing for no film critic to call it an "egregious
cinematic stinker," and certainly Dr. Bennet Omalu, upon whose life and
forensic work the film is focused, stood on his ground and produced testimony
regarding dementia pugilistica that even extreme, conservative critics might allow their hearts
to admit has merit. What their mouths
will say about Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy is a different can of
worms. For devout fans of football and
other American gladiatorial games, the film may provoke thirty seconds of
anxiety before they return to normal.
I have read Laskas's Concussion
and have cultivated more than a grain of admiration for Dr. Omalu as a Nigerian
American who poured determination and
Igbo spirituality through the alembic of Catholicism to become, despite
his agon with depression, a fine role model for African and African American
males. I shall not hesitate to say that
some immigrants are better models of the excellence to which we should aspire
than are some native sons. Laskas has
the prescience to grasp that Dr. Omalu's life history is as compelling as what
he discovered about tau tangle in the brain of Mike "Iron Mike"
Webster and published as the scientific paper
"Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy in a National Football League
Player" in the July 2005 issue of the prestigious journal Neurosurgery. Laskas is an accomplished, clever
writer. Her prose is conversational and
witty. There is a delicious edginess in
her weaving of an extended parable into the book about the relationship between
Dr. Omalu and Dr. Cyril Wecht, whose mastery of hubris makes Donald Trump look
like an inept neophyte. Even more tasty
is her cultivated muckraking of the National Football League, which continues
to value billion dollar profits more than the lives of professional football
players. After all, American players
are, like Roman gladiators, expendable and
replaceable. The bottom line is
to keep fans happy and money rolling in.
Ethics and morality count as much in the game as washed-up sex workers,
or to use language attributed to Dr. Wecht "malicious editorial pimps and
reporter prostitutes."
Dr. Omalu's rediscovery and exposure of what had been known
in the Western world for several centuries about the effects of brain trauma
has cost the NFL a pretty penny, thanks to an April 2015 uncapped settlement
that will cost the League about one billion dollars over the next sixty-five
years (Laskas 260). That's chump
change. The NLF knows it; the retired or
discarded, brain-injured players know it; the fans know it. But the American sports industry is an
improved version of Shakespeare's Shylock.
It will plead in no court for a mere pound of flesh. It will contract athletes to man up and be
patriotic about the consequences of concussions.
Miller, W. Jason.
Origins of the Dream: Hughes's Poetry and
King's Rhetoric. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2015. Miller's archival research is
first-rate. His astute interpretations
of how speech acts can function in social and political histories. Origins
of the Dream is an exemplary model for future inquiries about the confluence
of thought, poetry, and social action.
Norrell, Robert J.
Alex Haley and the Books That Changed a
Nation. New York: St. Martin's
Press, 2015. The ongoing hype from the publishing industry that books can
change a nation is a Eurocentric joke. An occasion for a good Asian or African laugh. The Autobiography
of Malcolm X did change some aspects of ideology among Americans who wanted
to decide whether to canonize Martin Luther King, Jr. or Malcolm X or both; Roots, as book and television series,
changed the tenor of conversations about
heritage among a significant number of African Americans and created interest
in research on ancestry and family history.
Neither Haley nor his writings changed the United States of America in
ways that can be confirmed by empirical evidence, and in 2016 empirical
verification counts for more than nostalgia.
Norrell's claim that "Haley wrote the two most important works in
black culture in the twentieth century" (227) is utter nonsense. What isn't nonsense, however, is his research
in extant Alex Haley papers and court documents, the crucial information that
drives inquiry about the nature of collaboration between Haley and Malcolm
Little/Malcolm X/El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, about the role of culture industries
in promoting or demeaning that book as
well as Roots, about Haley's court battles with Margaret Walker and Harold
Courlander. What Norrell does well is to
reopen interest in one day having an approximation of full disclosure in the
case of Alex Haley.
Scroggins, Mark. Intricate
Thicket: Reading Late Modernist Poetries.
Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2015. Amidst all the great noise we make about
poetry, prizes, and personalities as if we were at a great rally of Dadaists,
it is a relief to read Scroggins's blunt assertion: "Any attempt to
capture an inclusive picture of contemporary poetry --
even of a particular corner of contemporary poetry --in a given moment
is doomed to incompletion and partiality."
Intricate Thicket and other
works in the growing catalog of offerings from the Modern and Contemporary
Poetics series published by the University of Alabama Press remind us that we
have responses for everything and reassuring answers for nothing. Scroggins's assertion applies equally to vain
efforts to project inclusive histories or portraits of American literature and
culture.
White, Shane. Prince
of Darkness: The Untold Story of Jeremiah G. Hamilton, Wall Street's First
Black Millionaire. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2015. It is instructive to read this biographical
study of Hamilton, a man who used his remarkable intelligence to beat
nineteenth-century New York financiers at the racial games they loved to
play. It is instructive to consider how
White, an Australian professor of history, exposes the architecture of writing
history with the panache so often lacking among American historians who try to
tell a black story. It is most
instructive to remind ourselves that 21st century historiography must expand
its view of the multi-layered presence of African Americans in the never
finished narrative of what it means to be an American.
Wheelock, Stefan M.
Barbaric Culture and Black Critique. Charlottesville: University of Virginia
Press, 2015. Wheelock's very scholarly
examination of black antislavery writers, religion, and the drama of the
slaveholding Atlantic invites a new engagement with matters of race and
philosophy that Cornel West explored in Keeping
Faith (New York: Routledge, 1993).
Jerry W. Ward,
Jr. January 6, 2016
