A reading for the landmark anthology Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry edited by Camille T. Dungy. Contributors Tara Betts, Myronn Hardy and Kamilah Aisha Moon read overlooking the Hudson Valley. $5 admission. Co-sponsored with The Hudson Valley Writers’ Center. This venue is accessible by the Metro North train, directly above the Philipse Manor train stop. The Hudson Valley Writers’ Center is located at 300 Riverside Drive,
Sleepy Hollow, NY.

I do not do well in heat. I’ve managed to do some reading today, some writing. Some days that’s the best that you can hope for, but I’ve discovering that temperature extremes break my concentration completely. For the past two days, the only thing that has seemed to help me is water and sleep. This is why I’ve never been excited about bikram yoga (AKA hot yoga) because I am always on the verge of passing out in a bikram class.

I want to write about something sexier like designer bags or my favorite television show, but really, I’m thinking about starting another semester. I plan to turn in the syllabi tomorrow and finish reading some new poems from young sister poets. Today, I read Amy Gerstler’s book Dearest Creature. Since I read her book Bitter Angel and some of her other poems, I’ve been wanting to read Ghost Girl, Medicine, and Crown of Weeds. I’ve often sought out every book by a poet that I can find so I can so I can track their progressions or how they shift from one book to the next. I just appreciate when a poet exercises imagination, which Gerstler does well. I’ve always felt like a poem needs to tell a story and challenge some aspect of how we see poetry or the world, or both.

In the meantime, it seems incongruous with my desire to watch R&B videos or my wish that I had written lines from my favorite poems on the blacktop of our parking spot throughout the summer that is gone all too soon. In spite of my varied acts of pop confection and verse-inspired silly, I’m going to try to finish reading a few books every day and write every day. Some people think writers write every day, and they don’t. Really, there are fallow periods for some of us. I find myself thinking of writing at all these random moments. I even find myself dreaming about it. At other times, I find only music, books, and conversation as a stimuli for when the writing does come.

I used to write every day and do morning pages for a minimum of 30 minutes. I’d usually write in-class with my students, but I’ve found that they write for shorter time periods. Part of me wonders if there’s just so many distractions that make writing seem like a random act that is spurted onto the page without a need for revision. After all, stream of consciousness is genius, right? I’d say no, if the stream isn’t channeled.

So, if you want to share some of your favorite summer readings, I’d like to hear about them. I shared a few of mine on The Basin Blog earlier this summer. I’ll be sharing more with you soon.

One of the things that I enjoy most about writer’s residencies and workshops, even as I publish more, is hearing about other books that I haven’t read. Sometimes, it’s a bit like cracking open a watch to examine its gears, or even better yet, positing another portal or thread in the growing webs of narratives and ideas in my head.

While attending VONA, author Aurora Levins Morales suggested Joanna Russ’ book “How to Suppress Women’s Writing” which is a thinly-veiled science fiction treatise about the “Glotolog” who use various stratagems and threadbare reasons for why another group’s presence and language is faulty. As the book progresses, Russ leans more toward her own voice and struggles in placing women within the canon in terms of getting access to books and dismissal by colleagues who doubt the validity of women writing a variety of texts. Although this book is dated in parts, it has some strong quotes that I’d like share that strike me as resonant decades after the original publication of this particular book.

“The idea that any art is achieved ‘intuitively’ is a dehumanization of the brains, effort, and the traditions of the artist, and a classification of said artists as subhuman.” (p.91)

“When the memory of one’s predecessors is buried, the assumption persists that there were none and each generation of women believes itself to be faced with the burden of doing everything for the first time.” (p.93)

“Without models, it’s hard to work; without a context, difficult to evaluate; without peers, nearly impossible to speak.” (p.95)

“To read the visionary’s blazes of illumination as faulty structure, fantasy as if it were failed realism, to read subversion, as if it were nothing but its surface, is automatically to condemn minority writing, among which is the writing of women. When critics have to deal with a different English, there is also the ploy of reading the difference as if it were failure.”
(p. 127-28)

“There is a false center to ‘literature.’ It’s not only male, white, and middle class (or above) but also European East Coast. Whatever happened to that splendid burst of conscious American-ness which produced people like Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, Carl Sandburg, Sinclair Lewis, and (somewhat later) Thomas Wolfe? Criticism seems to find them embarrassing nowadays and prefers the expatriate Hemingway, the expatriate Eliot, and the expatriate Pound. It seems that the ‘universal’ does not include ‘American.’” (p. 128)

“But remember, one can’t get minority work into the canon by pretending it’s about the same things or uses the same techniques as majority work. It probably isn’t and doesn’t. (I would argue it does at times but plays with the constraints.) It may very well look like nothing ever seen before on earth. When science fiction first entered academia, the mistakes made about it by critics were grotesque. They continue to be, from time to time. This was due not only to a lack of scientific background–for example, some critics saw classic alien-background stories as nightmares, being unaware of the accuracy of the background and the delight in this as the story’s point–but also to a lack of any knowledge of the field’s history and conventions (including lack of the knowledge that it had a history and conventions). (p. 130, The first note in parentheses is mine and the italics in the last line are ones that I emphasize here.)

“If you don’t like my book, write your own.” (p. 130 It sounds a bit like teasing, but I think more of us should, whether sanctioned by academia or publishing houses, or not. In any case, it stresses the point that we should be finding as many ways as possible to document our work and our presence.)

I’ve been meaning to blog about Carolyn Rodgers since I sadly heard about her death back in April. I’ve watched a video of Carolyn Rodgers at Northwestern a couple of times and picked up one of her books that I wasn’t familiar with, but the one that most people know her for is How I Got Ovah-an emblematic collection of the Black Arts Movement that again points to the resilience of black women. The book was released in 1975 and was nominated for the National Book Award.

It was a nice surprise to come home to my husband and hear The Roots’ latest album, How I Got Over. The title reminded me of what The Roots did with Things Fall Apart (taken from Chinua Achebe’s novel of the same title) and Common’s Like Water for Chocolate (from Laura Esquivel’s novel that was adapted for a film). We heard so much of what we need to feel in music and what we need to resist now. I felt so moved by what I heard that I wrote a poem that summarizes what all the songs become in my listening head. I think I could make it longer and add more, but I wanted to capture this feeling of immediacy of writing right away that always changes with more listening and time. In any case, here’s the poem:

After Hearing How I Got Over
for The Roots & Carolyn Rodgers

Always start the piece with three Black women
harmonizing like honey buzz. Cymbals, kick drum
escalate into husky shadowed rhymes.
An epistle appeals to higher powers in skeptical
verse in chorus when the drum brings back cadences
of a morning’s start because all strive for illumination
when the world presses insistent as piano keys,
but everything changes, and change keeps us alive.
Drum steady as metronome clap carved from ancient
metals and marble, but even the frequency makes space
for the nostalgia of streets familiar as Marvin Gaye
or Curtis Mayfield asking Who’s worrying about you baby?
Someone needs to keep asking questions in this timber.
The elders cannot carry shields forever, and everyone
is growing older. Return to finger snap, soul clap.
Keyboards echoing flute open canvas of the day
that begins like fresh breath. Cascades fall into cycles
of shining light into corners where Thought stands
treading over the smack of beats familiar and fierce
as all contemplation could be. A studio speaker voice
requests a snare roll, then the pleas of doin’ it again
call to keep notes and lyrics breeding, multiplying
a brood of well-loved children who march toward fire
or is it residing in their rib cage, their well-lit eyes,
their quick feet, their quicker minds, their knife tongues,
or their palms hidden in the relentless knuckles of fists.
The band softens the volley of syncopation, reminiscent
of house parties with rhythm swinging until the break
marks flawless herk-jerk of bodies and head nods.
An infant cries, and a horn warns its listeners of lives
to come. A life consumed by consumption if absence
of thought exists. A tambourine rattles because who
always wants to be a customer? Create. Conclude. Silence.

I wanted to make some bread to go with the leftovers from the last recipe and the Spinach Bread from the Indian Vegan Kitchen cookbook sounded perfect. Here’s my take on the recipe:

2 cups of whole wheat flour (plus a little extra for rolling & flattening the dough)
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
1 1/2 cups fresh spinach, chopped and loosely packed It came out to about a handful for me.)
3/4 cups water
2 tbsp OVOO (plus a little extra while cooking, but not much!)

In a mixing bowl, combine flour, salt, cayenne pepper, and spinach. Make a well in the center of the flour and gradually add the water while mixing. (The moisture of the spinach and the type of flour may vary the amount of water needed.) The dough should be soft and easily roll into a ball. Knead the dough for 1-2 minutes until smooth and elastic. Cover and let stand for 10 minutes or longer. (I messed up a bit and almost forgot to add the spinach, so it was a little bit sticky for me.

Dough meet rolling pin...

When I added just a teeny bit of flour to the cooking panel and the rolling pin, I was able to roll out some nice pieces. One looked like this:

A small palak paratha

Heat tava (iron griddle or a pancake griddle). Adjust the heat and add a little oil. Take each ball and gently roll with a rolling pin (Good for shaking at husbands-to-be and chasing them).
As you gently roll the dough into a flat blob of bread, take your time, then gently brush them with a little oil and pop them on the griddle. Let them them get a little brown with a few dark spots on both sides and it will look like you got them from a good Indian restaurant.

You can serves this bread with any curry dish or eat it plain. JOY!

When I was finished, the flavorful spinach bread looked like this:

A plate full of palak paratha with a teeny bit of dough on the side.

I felt pretty blah today, so lovingly prepared vegan meal would cheer me up. Here’s my take on a recipe from one of my new cookbooks: “The Indian Vegan Kitchen” by Madhu Gadia.

I originally bought “The Indian Vegan Kitchen” because Rich and I give a lot of money to Satish Palace, an Indian restaurant that we LOVE in Montclair, NJ. Also, I promised that I wanted to cook more at home, so I figured I should make it interesting for myself. I was really surprised at how thorough this book by Madhu Gadia really was. It even breaks down the nutritional content! I’ve included that for both recipes, even though Rich and I had slightly bigger servings than indicated here. We still have leftovers for 2 or 3 meals.

A note on some of the ingredients: You can find asafetida in a Indian specialty market. It’s basically a spice powder that has a funky smell, much like the turmeric which can smell a bit like unwashed armpit. This smell disappears completely upon cooking. If you can find a store that focuses specifically on Indian food, you can probably buy a bigger than you need for a much cheaper price than a much smaller container of cumin at a regular grocery store. For example, the bag of cumin seed, a bag of turmeric AND the asafetida cost us $6 total at Urvesh Grocery, 230 N. Main Street, Passaic, NJ. Now, I’m stocked for some other recipes without having to make a mad store dash just for those spices. You can also order these spices online.

Gobh-Mirch Subji and Palak Couscous plated by yours truly

Cauliflower & Peppers (Gobhi-Mirch Subji)
Makes: 12 servings of 1/2 cup each
Nutrition Information Per Serving: Calories 84; Total Fat: 5 g (Saturated Fat: 0.5 g); Carbohydrate: 9 g; Protein: 2 g; Fiber: 3 g; Sodium: 309 mg.

1 whole head of cauliflower
1 green bell pepper, chopped
1 sweet yellow pepper, choppped
1 sweet red pepper, chopped
4 tbsp OVOO
1/2 tsp asafetida
2 tsp cumin seeds
2 coups of onion, chopped
2 tbsp ginger, peeled & grated
1 tsp turmeric
1 tsp salt
1 tsp cayenne pepper
4 tsps lemon juice

DIRECTIONS:
Wash off the cauliflower head. Carefully break the white florets free from the sturdy green stem. You don’t want to mash the florets. Each one should be about 1 inch, but I think breaking them down to a manageable 1-2 bite size is good. Chop the peppers and remove the membrane and seeds. Mix these vegetables together.
Heat oil in a nonstick pan with high sides so everything will fit easily later. Add asafetida and cumin seeds to the oil. Cook for a few seconds until the seeds get a little gold. Add onion and cook until the onion is transparent, then add ginger.

Now, you’re ready to add vegetables. Sprinkle with salt, turmeric, and cayenne pepper. We forgot we didn’t have coriander, but if you have it, add that too! Lift and turn the veggies as you stir so the spices are distributed evenly. Then cover with a lid and reduce heat. The veggies can cook for 10-12 in their own juice. You can add 1-2 tbsps of water if you think it’s about to stick to the pan.

Before transferring the food to a serving dish sprinkle with lemon juice. If you leave it covered in the pan, it will keep cooking and the veggies become mush.

Curried Spinach Couscous (Palak Couscous)
Makes: 6 servings of 1/2 cup each
Nutrition Information Per Serving: Calories 138; Total Fat: 3 g (Saturated Fat: 0 g); Carbohydrate: 24 g; Protein: 4 g; Fiber: 2 g; Sodium: 307 mg.

1 cup of couscous (about 1 box of Near East brand couscous)
1 tbsp OVOO
1 tsp ginger, peeled and grated
1 tsp ground cumin
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
2 tbsp mint leaves, chopped
1 1/2 cups of frozen spinach
3/4 tsp salt
1 tsp sugar
2 cups water

Heat a large nonstick fry pan. We added a little tiny bit of oil before adding dry couscous to roast for about 5 minutes. After 5 minutes, we remove the slightly browned couscous and set them aside on another plate. A tbsp of oil was introduced to the still hot pan and we threw in the unused chopped onion from the cauliflower recipe. The cookbook said spring onions, but we figured 1/4 of an onion would do.

After 2-3 minutes, add ginger, cumin, turmeric, cayenne pepper, and mint leaves. Stir well.

After the stirring, add spinach, salt, and sugar. Make sure the spinach is covered with all these wonderful spices. if you use frozen spinach. You will want to press the excess water out of the spinach before putting it in the pan. We used a 12 oz. bag of chopped spinach for our batch. Add the 2 cups of water and bring to boil.

When boiling begins, add couscous and thoroughly stir together all these ingredients. Reduce heat, cover with lid and allow it cook for 7-8 minutes until the couscous absorb the water. Transfer to serving dish so it won’t keep cooking and stick to the pan.

Honestly, I’m going to do Feel-Good Fridays. I will post a video, a picture, or a song that just makes me feel good or other people want to dance. Why? Because people get paid on Fridays and punch out from work. Because it may mark the crest of a party rising or a lover’s embrace. Because 5-6 days out of the week can be drudgery. I originally tried to do Funky Fridays on myspace where I posted songs connected to or derived from the funk (Thank you, Parliament, George Clinton, Del tha Funkee Homosapien, Ohio Players, Bootsy Collins, Joi, et. al.), but myspace has pretty much become the less popular social networking kid these days.

Our first F-GF entry was given to me last Friday. Since I’ve been open to pretty much reading in a variety of places, I was invited to feature at TheFUSE, the Friday night slam at the Infusion Tea Gallery in the Mt. Airy/Germantown area. It was an exciting night to see a young slam team come together on their finals night, and they were very responsive to the work. It was a good night to pass the hat, so I made up for not selling a lot of books. Philadelphia looked out for me. However, one of the charming things about last Friday was when Jane Cassady, one of the organizers slipped a tiny, neatly folded note into my hand. “This was in the hat with the money. I thought you might like it.” She smiled and I unfolded it. You may not be able to read it from the photo since it’s backwards, but I wanted you to see how small it was.

received at Infusion Tea Gallery in Philly, 4/30/10

It read as follows:
I wish I had a
coin, bill, or debit
card to drop in this
hat tonite, but …
whenever I can get
the funds, I’ll buy your
book and make a
necklace out of its pearls
for my friends

I have no idea who wrote it, but it felt nice to know that someone took the time to write it. Sometimes, people come to readings because they are looking for someone who talks about things that are relevant to them or reflect their experiences. I am aware that some people can’t afford a lot of things right now, but if we remember how valuable kindness, time, and effort are, we can do so much that a price tag only aspires to achieving.

If you didn’t already know, I am blogging a lot this summer. Hopefully, about poems, books, movies. I’ll even share some photos and videos, I’m sure.

In the meantime, expect to see me on a b o u t a w o r d, the blog of professor and author Ruth Ellen Kocher next week.

I’ll be blogging here as well, but for the month of May 2010, I’ll be the guest blogger for The Basin Blog, another tributary of the Tidal Basin Review.

Finally, there’s an official blog for the anthology of Bop poems that I’m co-editing with Afaa Michael Weaver, the creator of the Bop Poem. Visit Bop, Strut, and Dance to read the submission guidelines and see examples of Bops from Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Brandon D. Jackson, and G.E. Patterson. There’s more content to come to get you inspired to write Bop poems this summer.

Other than that, I’m disappointed that Harriet, the Poetry Foundation blog has decided to stop generating some of the best blog content that I’ve ever read online. Even though I don’t always agree with every writer featured, the range of the writers and their subject matter always made me want to check in. I figured I’d share a link to Oscar Bermeo, who’s made some cogent points about this very topic.

So, enjoy your clicking and surfing. I’ll be back with more soon.

“precedent: –noun 1. Law . a legal decision or form of proceeding serving as an authoritative rule or pattern in future similar or analogous cases. 2. any act, decision, or case that serves as a guide or justification for subsequent situations. –adjective pre·ce·dent 3. preceding; anterior.”

I promised myself that 2010 would be the year that I rededicate myself to blogging. So, here I am. there’s so many topics to discuss, and I feel like find a focus is difficult. I can always discuss books or poems, but I feel that there are so many things to discuss.

The repression of SB 1070, as well as banning of ethnic studies classes and teachers with accents is weighing heavily on my mind. On the other hand, I am praying for my cousin who works the border patrol and has been in close proximity to officers who have been killed. His job is maintaining the Mexican border who are nothing like the characters “Under the Same Moon”.

In this film, a bright and adorable little boy finds his way to his mother in the United States who is working to support him and her family back home. She misses her son dearly and is blatantly mistreated by at least one boss who threatens to turn her in to immigration. I am one of the people who thinks, if you work, you deserve a chance.

Since my cousin is career military and African American, he has seen more of some people’s criminal background checks than he’d ever like to tell me. He tells me, “It’s not like what you think, Tara.” When he has described the acts of felons and how many times he’s been called the “n-word”, even though he’s one of the few officers who knows Spanish, it reminds me how complicated race has become in communities of color.

It also reminds me that “us vs. them” is a reinforced mentality on a regular basis. This is also evident in the film “American Violet” when the main character (portrayed by Nicole Beharie) cannot find a job after she is arrested at her full-time waitress job and her former employer’s are threatened. The jobs that she applies for, at the lowest income possible, are given to Mexican Americans, and the hostility between the Black and Mexican characters is palpable. All of this revolves around safety and income, and how color, somehow threatens that.

This week, my fiance and I were hoping that the car bomb in Times Square was not set by a Middle Eastern man. Not because we wanted to blame a white man from a fringe group or something equally ridiculous when it comes to avoiding bloodshed, but because we know that every Middle Eastern man will be a suspect again.

I am not excited about the possibilities of racial profiling or the elimination of ethnic studies in any form. I am worried. Because all I can think of is the word precedent. Once the cornerstone is laid for one law, it is a foundation for others to build upon.

When I was in undergrad at Loyola University, I kept warning my classmates that the cut backs on affirmative action were going to impact funding for students of color, and that student loans were going to increase. I kept reading The Chronicle of Higher Education, and I felt the situation getting grim. When I completed my bachelor’s degree, my student debt was $15,000 which I managed to pay off in 2003 with a string of non-profit jobs and a shoestring, no-frills budget. Now, I meet college students who accumulate that much debt in one semester, and there are President Obama’s reforms on student loans going into effect. StudentLoanJustice.org and Reduce the Rate were already talking about this issue, but at least we’re addressing it…now.

This is why I get so aggravated and often quiet. People don’t always see the need to be critical AND pro-active until the concrete of a precedent has been set. Please, don’t be one of those people.

This weekend I’ll be reading from my book and talking about the intersections between politics and poetry with many poets I admire at the Split This Rock Poetry Festival in Washington, D.C. It will be good to see Lita Hooper, Curtis Crisler, and Antoinette Brim, especially since we’re all “press-mates” at Willow Books/Aquarius Press. If you want to see snippets of the last festival’s readings, visit their youtube channel.

There will be workshops, panels, and readings, but I’m also looking forward to checking out places that I’ve grown accustomed to-as if the capital could be home-Eatonville, Ben’s Chili Bowl, U Street (which keeps changing, changing, changing), and the Howard University campus. I’ll get to talk to old friends and make some new ones.

These days I look forward to trips, but I also look forward to what I call “nesting”. I want to cook vegan meals and garden. I want to re-organize my house and read the books that I’m falling behind on reading. I want to knit some days and others leave me just wanting to walk around my neighborhood or listen to records like I did when I was a teenager, dreaming of what it would be like to leave Kankakee, Illinois and be a writer. Well, I did both, so how do you transplant a sense of home? How do you create it?

I’m heading back to Kankakee at the end of April to read at the public library. I know I’ll see people I went to high school with. I’ll meet some of their kids, and the house where I used to live is empty. The tavern that I lived above when my parents were still together is empty, and with my grandparents gone, heir house is nearly empty too. My brothers are in the places that moved them. One is making music. Another is building decks and planting dreams of orchards with my nephew (and another to come).

I will be home with a fine brush of memory to dust so many familiar things. One of the B&Bs in my hometown was a beautiful, old house that was boarded up for years. As a teenager, I saw them renovate that home to its former glory. My fiance says that’s why you want a porch and a garden. This is what I knew, what I grew up with during part of my youth. Even when we lived in Section 8 housing, I lived between a highway and a cornfield. The large Kmart, where my mother sent me on countless errands, once stood in front of those apartments and is now long gone. I walked across the busy intersection to attend junior high when we lived there.

When my mother got a house, I made sure my brothers were ready for school, then caught my bus at Chicago Avenue and Station Street to go to high school. One of the sisters I rode the bus with introduced me to R. Kelly & Public Announcement on her headphones there. If we had only known then…We’d be dropped off there, me, Lonell, Marshall, Stephanie, Angie. There were trees on our block, and sometimes in the summer, shootings. I grew tomatoes on the side of my mother’s house, clipped the hedges, and mowed the lawn. I would walk to work when the library was still at 306 S. Indiana. Working at the public library was my first job and my safe haven.

It’s funny that now, I find myself going to different cities and meeting new people. Some of them who have never heard of Kankakee, and others who will probably never see it, unless they pass Exit 315 or those same apartments where I lived, just off I-57. When I go to other cities or even when I go to one of the places I call home, I feel like I am picking up bright, soft ribbons or shiny beads like a mockingbird looking for something to treasure. I am hoping each bauble helps me remember what the place might be like or what it was.