Post-Postscript for E. Ethelbert Miller
New Orleans, January 7, 2016
Dear Ethelbert,
Thirty-seven years after telling you "We need to review less and teach more,"
I repeat the assertion. I kiss tomorrow
goodbye as I write notes on the first seven issue of Callaloo and find ghostly happiness in rebroadcasting my 1976 open
letter to you with 1979 postscript. Is
this post-postscript necessary? Is it
being written by the ghost of remembering how you and I laughed as we ate
pancakes on a Sunday morning in Washington, DC in the mid-1970s? Let cultural memory and forgetting make the
decision. After all, history is a
wonderful trick bag, a philosophical opportunity for pulling a digital rabbit
out of a bespoke hat made in China.
At any rate, Ethelbert, I do want to read what reviewers
will say about The Collected Poems of E.
Ethelbert Miller. Ed. Kirsten Porter.
Detroit: Willow Books, 2016. They will
not know the pleasure of possessing first editions of Andromeda (1974), the long poem The
Land of Smiles and The Land of No Smiles
(1974), Migrant Worker (1978). Nor will they know what was meaningful (for
me if for no one else) in your writing
the lines
on ollie street
in deridder louisiana
13 spirits live in the house of zu
and amplifying them with references to russell chew and
the poet ahmos.
The reviewers may think they know what is the pre-future
of yesterday in the poem you wrote on the Hanafi Muslim Terrorist Takeover of
three buildings in D.C. March 9-11, 1977
as they surf the Internet to find out what The
Washington Post did not say then.
Bereft of pleasure, the reviewers may teach something to somebody. Or perhaps they will not. Perhaps they will send love poems to
oblivion.
On January 3, 2016, you wrote in E-NOTES WHEN THE NEWS IS
NOT ENOUGH. The Blog of E. Ethelbert Miller, with reference to your collected
poems
"I plan to ignore all reviews. I doubt if the book will be nominated for any
awards. Hopefully my work will find an
audience with hearts that care about the path human are on. So much African American culture is being
destroyed within."
Hopefully your collected poems will find their way to
China sometime in 2016 and be taught there in Wuhan, Nanjing, Beijing, and
other cities. In 2016, we need to review less and teach more.
In friendship,
Jerry
-------
The above can't be
contextualized without the below.
-------
1976 Open Letter to E. Ethelbert Miller with 1979
Postscript
Charlottesville
20 July 76
Dear Ethelbert,
Who reviews what, where a review does or does not appear,
for whom and to whom a review thinks he is speaking --- we
had discussed these matters within the past month. Yet, when I read the June-July issue of Small Press Review this afternoon, I was
surprised to find your non-review of Adesanya Alakoye's Tell Me How Willing Slaves Be.
Since Ellen Ferber's black and blue paper "Reviewing
Reviewing" appears in this issue, your jeremiad had good company. Ms. Ferber deals with some much-need-to-be-raised
issues about what the hell is going on in the reviewing colony. Less directly you raise the same issues about
Black reviewers. I hope your non-review
moves some people to buy Adesanya's book.
Because I have obligatory and personal connections with Energy BlackSouth
Press, I feel compelled to respond to your dropping a broadside on Black
critics.
Ethelbert, you tell readers things are so bad that you
have to write about a book published by a company for which you work. Adesanya's book came off the press in April. You must be patient, brother. Black reviewers are slow. Surely someone would have reviewed the book
by Christmas. CPT still holds the Black
mind in its grip. Things are not that bad.
Now you say Adesanya is one of Washington, D. C.'s better
poets. I agree. You also claim "the publishing outlets
for Black poetry in D.C." are underdeveloped. I agree.
But you overlook two important facts: 1) the publishing outlets for
poetry are underdeveloped nation-wide, and 2) the market for poetry is
flooded. Only a small number of people
who can read in this country read "literature" and a very elite group
(other poets and writers) reads poetry with any degree of regularity. Moreover, Washington is a bourgeois town, and
folks be interested in foxtraps not in
how willing slaves be.
You contend your action would not have been necessary if
folks would review books as well as add them to their collections. Folks do review books. I review between 12 and 16 books each year. You probably review as many or more. What you mean, I guess, is that people don't
review books by small presses or by authors who have not made a spectacle of
themselves. We published reviews of 13
books in four issues of Hoo-Doo. Obsidian
has published reviews of 7 books in four issues. Black
Books Bulletin is a review of books, is it not? I suppose what we need is a magazine devoted
exclusively to the reviewing of Black books.
But who would support it? Who would
read it?
You claim Energy BlackSouth has not received a single
review of the books it published. That
is not true. Synergy just got a
favorable review from Marlene Mosher in SPR
(June-July 1976). Your book The Land of Smiles and the Land of No Smiles got a rave review from Marlene
Mosher in the September 1975 issue of CLA
Journal. It is true that not one
word about Hoo-Doo has been
printed. But we must admit the idea of
reviewing a magazine would strike the Black critic as an avant-garde
undertaking. Do I have to remind you
that Black people are conservative?
Yes, Ethelbert, "all those Black critics out there
are just..." (just as adjective not adverb) and Energy BlackSouth's day
will come.
I can offer you a number of reason why Black reviewers
don't review as much as you think they should: 1) the outlets for reviews of Black
books are underdeveloped --- please
recall that some Black reviewers have hang-ups about publishing in non-Black
journals; 2) they don't review books they can't have a love affair with; 3)
they can't review many books because they know practically all the Black writers
in America; 4) they are too busy writing their own books to review anyone
else's books; 5) they don't get paid for doing reviews, so they feel prolific
reviewing is a waste. The list of
reasons could go no for several pages.
You cut your non-review before you began "cussing in
public." That was wise. It would be bad business to completely
alienate all the Black critics. But I
would have enjoyed seeing some good, old-fashioned, down-home, gut-bucket
cussin in print.
Now you have me thinking that well-conceived reviews
might be more important than some of the second- and third-rate poetry people
feel obliged to submit somewhere. Should
the remaining issues of the Hoo-Doo
Blackseries and the new magazine Synergy
publish fewer poems and more reviews? Should we show the people who don't
review how it should be done?
Sincerely,
/s/ Jerry
Tougaloo
29 June 79
Dear Ethelbert,
I have argued for several years that contemporary Black
literature, especially poetry, is read within an incestuous circle: poets read
poets, critics read poets and other critics, poets read their critics and react
in words read by other poets. Black readers not in the circle could give less
of a damn. Unless it is forced upon
them, they seem to maintain a careful distance between themselves and black
writing. Yes, they do read Ebony, Jet, Sepia, Essence, The Crisis
and Black Enterprise. They do peruse the major news magazines,
local newspapers, and professional journals and TV Guide. After all that heavy reading and the
attention they must give to twenty-four hours of non-stop radioed soul and the
television, they are too exhausted to read the "literature" in First World , Y'Bird, Obsidian, Nkombo,
Grio, Callaloo, Hoo-Doo, and other magazines devoted to nommo-magic. As
Haki Madhubuti said in "Black Writers and Critics: Developing A Critical
Process Without Readers" (The Black
Scholar, Nov/Dec 1978), "reading (or research and study) as a
necessary life enrichment experience is not foremost on the must do list of most black people
." We need to review less and teach
more.
