#the plume anthology of poetry

[tamsoj]

Kelli Russell Agodon, "Waltz of the Orbital Decay in Our Relationship," from The Plume Anthology of Poetry 4

[majestativa]

How lovely she moves […] a beauty in double-plumed headdress.

Anonymous, Echoes of Egyptian Voices: An Anthology of Ancient Egyptian Poetry, on Nefertari

[themadscene]

Means a lot to have Martha Serpas, my first poetry mentor, write this intro for my poem in the latest Plume anthology.

[blackkudos]

Georgia Douglas Johnson

Georgia Blanche Douglas Camp Johnson, better known as Georgia Douglas Johnson (September 10, 1880 – May 15, 1966), was an African-American poet, one of the earliest African-American female playwrights, and an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance.

Early life

She was born as Georgia Blanche Douglas Camp in 1880 in Atlanta, Georgia, to Laura Douglas and George Camp (her mother's last name is listed in other sources as Jackson). Both parents were of mixed ancestry, with her mother having African-American and Native American heritage, and her father of African-American and English heritage.

Camp lived for much of her childhood in Rome, Georgia. She received her education in both Rome and Atlanta, where she excelled in reading, recitations and physical education. She also taught herself to play the violin. She developed a lifelong love of music that she expressed in her plays, which make distinct use of sacred music.

She graduated from Atlanta University's Normal School 1896. She taught school in Marietta, Georgia. In 1902 she left her teaching career to pursue her interest in music, attending Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio. She wrote music from 1898 until 1959. After studying in Oberlin, Johnson returned to Atlanta, where she became assistant principal in a public school.

Marriage and family

On September 28, 1903, Douglas married Henry Lincoln Johnson (1870-1925), an Atlanta lawyer and prominent Republican party member who was ten years older than she. Douglas and Johnson had two sons, Henry Lincoln Johnson, Jr., and Peter Douglas Johnson (d. 1957). In 1910 they moved to Washington, DC, as her husband had been appointed as Recorder of Deeds for the District of Columbia, a political patronage position under Republican President William Howard Taft. While the city had an active cultural life among the elite people of color, it was far from the Harlem literary center of New York, to which Douglas became attracted.

Douglas's marital life was affected by her writing ambition, for her husband was not supportive of her literary passion, insisting that she devote more time to becoming a homemaker than on publishing poetry. But she later dedicated two poems "The Heart of a Woman" (1918) and "Bronze" (1922) to him; these were praised for their literary quality.

Career

After the Johnson family moved to Washington, D.C., in 1910, Douglas Johnson began to write poems and stories. She credited a poem written by William Stanley Braithwaite, about a rose tended by a child, as her inspiration for writing poetry. Johnson also wrote songs, plays, short stories, taught music, and performed as an organist at her Congregational church.

Poetry

She had already begun to submit poems to newspapers and small magazines when she lived in Atlanta. Her first poem was published in 1905 in the literary journal The Voice of the Negro. Her first collection of poems was not published until 1916.

Johnson published a total of four volumes of poetry, beginning in 1916 with The Heart of a Woman. In the 21st century, her poems have been described as feminine and "ladylike", or "raceless". They have titles such a "Faith", "Youth", and "Joy".

Her poems were published in several issues of The Crisis, the journal of the NAACP that was founded and edited by W. E. B. Du Bois. "Calling Dreams" was published in January 1920, "Treasure" in July 1922, and "To Your Eyes" in November 1924.

During the 1920s, Douglas Johnson traveled extensively to give poetry readings. In 1925 her husband died, and she was widowed at the age of 45. She had to rear their two teenage sons by herself. For years she struggled to support them financially, sometimes taking the clerical jobs generally available to women.

But as a gesture to her late husband's loyalty and political service, Republican President Calvin Coolidge appointed Douglas Johnson as the Commissioner of Conciliation, a political appointee position within the Department of Labor. In 1934, during the Democratic administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, she lost this political appointee job. She returned to supporting herself with temporary clerical work.

Johnson's literary success resulted in her becoming the first African-American woman to get national notice for her poetry since Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. In 1962 she published her last poetry collection, Share My World.

The Heart of a Woman

Johnson was well recognized for her poems collected in The Heart of a Woman (1918). She explores themes for women such as isolation, loneliness, pain, love and the role of being a woman during this time. Other poems in this collection consist of motherly concerns.

Bronze

Johnson's collection published as Bronze had a popular theme of racial issues; she continued to explore motherhood and being a woman of color. In the foreword of Bronze she said: "Those who know what it means to be a colored woman in 1922- know it not so much in fact as in feeling ..."[1]

Plays

Johnson was a well-known figure in the national black theatre movement and was an important "cultural sponsor" in the early twentieth century, assembling and inspiring the intellectuals and artists who generated the next group of black theatre and rising education (16). Johnson wrote about 28 plays. Plumes was published under the pen name John Temple. Many of her plays were never published because of her gender and race. Gloria Hull is credited with the rediscovery of many of Johnson's plays. The 28 plays that she wrote were divided into four groups: "Primitive Life Plays", "Plays of Average Negro Life", "Lynching Plays" and "Radio Plays". The first section, "Primitive Life Plays", features Blue Blood and Plumes, which were published and produced during Johnson's lifetime.

Like several other plays that prominent women of the Harlem Renaissance wrote, Sunday Morning in the South (1925) was provoked by the inconsistencies of American life. These included the contrast between Christian doctrine and white America's treatment of black Americans, the experience of black men who returned from fighting in war to find they lacked constitutional rights, the economic disparity between whites and blacks, and miscegenation.

In 1926, Johnson's play Blue Blood won honorable mention in the Opportunity drama contest. Her play Plumes also won in the same competition in 1927. Plumes is a folk drama that relates the dilemma of Charity, the main character, whose baby daughter is dying. She has saved up money for the doctor, but also she and her confidante - Tilde - don't believe the medical care would be successful. She has in mind an extravagant funeral for her daughter instead - with plumes, hacks, and other fancy trimmings. Before Charity makes a decision, her daughter dies. Plumes was produced by the Harlem Experimental Theatre between 1928 and 1931.

Blue-Eyed Black Boy is a 1930 lynching genre play written to convince Congress to pass anti-lynching laws. This lesser known play premiered in Xoregos Performing Company's program: "Songs of the Harlem River" in New York City's Dream Up Festival, from August 30 to September 6, 2015. "Songs of the Harlem River - a collection of five one-act plays including Blue-Eyed Black Boy also opened the Langston Hughes Festival in Queens, New York, on February 13, 2016.

In 1935, Johnson wrote two historical plays, William and Ellen Craft and Frederick Douglass. William and Ellen Craft describes the escape of a black couple from slavery, in a work about the importance of self-love, the use of religion for support, and the power of strong relationships between black men and women. Her work Frederick Douglass is about his personal qualities that are not as much in the public eye: his love and tenderness for Ann, who he met while still enslaved, and then was married to in freedom for over four decades. Other themes include the spirit of survival, the need for self-education, and the value of the community and of the extended family.

Johnson was one of the only women whose work was published in Alain Locke's anthology Plays of Negro Life: A Source-Book of Native American Drama. Although several of her plays are lost, Johnson's typescripts for 10 of her plays are in collections in academic institutions.

Anti-lynching activism

Although Johnson spoke out against race inequity as a whole, she is more known as a key advocate in the anti-lynching movement as well as a pioneering member of the lynching drama tradition. Her activism is primarily expressed through her plays, first appearing in the play Sunday Morning in the South in 1925. This outspoken, dramatic writing about racial violence is sometimes credited with her obscurity as a playwright since such topics were not considered appropriate for a woman at that time. Unlike many African-American playwrights, Johnson refused to give her plays a happy ending since she did not feel it was a realistic outcome. As a result, Johnson had difficulty getting plays published. Though she was involved in the NAACP's anti-lynching campaigns of 1936 and 1938, the NAACP refused to produce many of her plays claiming they gave a feeling of hopelessness. Johnson was also a member of the Writers League Against Lynching, which included Countée Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Fauset, and Alain Locke. The organization sought a federal anti-lynching bill.

Gloria Hull in her book Color, Sex, and Poetry, argues that Johnson's work ought to be placed in an exceedingly distinguished place within the Harlem Renaissance, and that for African-American women writers "they desperately need and deserve long overdue scholarly attention". Hull, through a black feminist critical perspective, appointed herself the task of informing those within the dark of the very fact that African-American women, like Georgia Douglas Johnson, are being excluded from being thought of as key voices of the Harlem Renaissance. Johnson's anti-lynching activism was expressed through her plays such as The Ordeal, which that was printed in Alain Locke's anthology The New Negro. Her poems describe African Americans and their mental attitude once having faced prejudice towards them and the way they modify it. Isolationism and anti-feminist prejudice however prevented the sturdy African-American women like Johnson from getting their remembrance and impact with such contributions.

S Street Salon

Soon after her husband's death, Johnson began to host what became 40 years of weekly "Saturday Salons" for friends and authors, including Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Anne Spencer, Richard Bruce Nugent, Alain Locke, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Angelina Weld Grimké and Eulalie Spence — all major contributors to the New Negro Movement, which is better known today as the Harlem Renaissance. Georgia Douglas Johnson's house at 1461 South Street NW would later become known as the S Street Salon. The salon was a meeting place for writers in Washington, D.C. during the Harlem Renaissance. Johnson's S Street Salon helped to nurture and sustain creativity by providing a place for African-American artists to meet, socialize, discuss their work, and exchange ideas. According to Akasha Gloria Hull, Johnson's role in creating a place for black artists to nurture their creativity made the movement a national one because she work outside of Harlem and therefore made a trust for intercity connections. Johnson called her home the "Half Way House" for friends traveling, and a place where they "could freely discuss politics and personal opinions" and where those with no money and no place to stay would be welcome. Although black men were allowed to attend, it mostly consisted of black women such as May Miller, Marita Bonner, Mary Burrill, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Zora Neale Hurston, and Angelina Weld Grimke. Johnson was especially close to the European-American writer Angelina Grimké. This Salon was known to have discussions on issues such as lynching, women's rights, and the problems facing African-American families. They became known as the "Saturday Nighters."

Weekly column

Between 1926 and 1932, she wrote short stories, started a letter club, and published a weekly newspaper column called "Homely Philosophy."

The column was published in 20 different newspapers, including the New York News, Chicago Defender, Philadelphia Tribune, and Pittsburgh Courier and ran from 1926 to 1932. Some of the topics she wrote on were considered inspirational and spiritual for her audience, such as "Hunch," "Magnetic Personality," and "The Blessing of Work." Some of her work was perceived to help people cope with the hardships of the Great Depression.

One of the articles that focused on spirituality was "Our Fourth Eye", in which she wrote that "closing one's natural eyes" to look with the "eyes of one's mind". She explains that the "fourth eye" assists with viewing the world in this way. Another essay of Johnson's, "Hunch" discusses the idea that people have hunches, or intuition, in their lives. She goes on to explain that individuals must not quiet these hunches because they are their "sixth sense- your instruction".

Legacy

Throughout her life she had written 200 poems, 28 plays and 31 short stories which is a pretty great achievement to have especially during this period of time. In 1962, she then published her last poetry book called "Share My World". Throughout "Share My World" and the poems inside, they reflect on love towards all people and forgiveness which shows how much wisdom she has gained throughout her entire life. In 1965 Atlanta University had presented Douglas with an honorary doctorate of literature which praised her for all the accomplishments she has had and for the great woman she was and still is known as.

When she died in Washington, D.C., in 1966, one of her sister playwrights and a former participant of the S Street Salon, sat by her bedside "stroking her hand and repeating the words, 'Poet Georgia Douglas Johnson'".

Johnson received an honorary doctorate in literature from Atlanta University in 1965. In September 2009, it was announced that Johnson would be inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame.

Major works

Poems

The Heart of a Woman (1918)

Bronze (1922)

An Autumn Love Cycle (1928)

Share My World (1962)

The Ordeal

Plays

A Sunday Morning in the South (1925)

Blue Blood (1926)

Paupaulekejo (1926)

Plumes (1927)

Safe (c. 1929)

Blue-Eyed Black Boy (c. 1930)

Starting Point (play) (1930s)

William and Ellen Craft (1935)

Frederick Douglass (1935)

And Yet They Paused (1938)

A Bill to Be Passed (1938)

[finishinglinepress]

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Margaret Hasse, originally from Vermillion, South Dakota, received a B.A. in English from Stanford University. in 1973. Soon after, she moved to the Twin Cities of Minnesota where she has been active in the literary community as a poet-in-the-schools, among other work. Six of Margaret’s full-length poetry collections are in print, including Summoned (2021). A collaboration with watercolor artist Sharon DeMark during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in Shelter (2000), a collection of poems and paintings. Margaret has been an editor of three anthologies, most recently Rocked by the Waters, poems of motherhood, with co-editor Athena Kildegaard. For her poetry Hasse has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Independent Publishers Association, among others.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR The Call of Glacier Park by Margaret Hasse

I visited Glacier Park in 1955, saw my first glacier, and have chased that inspiration ever since. Margaret Hasse‘s beautiful collection portrays that indescribable presence with poems that are vivid and alive.

–Will Steger, polar explorer and champion for climate action

Margaret Hasse has written a poet’s guidebook to Glacier Park, filled with images that anyone who has had the great luck to hike and camp there will recognize: “bear grass plumes,” switchbacks, huckleberries. Yet, just as in the best travels, these poems offer the unexpected—a “crepuscular sow” coming out of her cave in spring, a list of specific healing properties of wildflowers, streams tossing “their jumble of silver off the sides of ridges,” and animals who might interpret our recent passing as “smelly ghosts”—opening our eyes to the fresh and miraculous properties of life on earth.

–Melissa Kwasny, Poet Laureate of Montana and author of Pictograph and Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today, among others

Margaret Hasse’s poetry brings back a wealth of memories of my lifetime of adventures in Glacier National Park. As a park historian, I used a 1926 diary and a photo album of Gladys Johnson, Margaret’s mother, to create a display (hosted by East Glacier Lodge) about Gladys as a young woman in the park. Gladys’ descriptions are vibrant. Margaret’s poems show that the daughter inherited her mother’s physical spunk and way with words

–John Chase, teacher and historian

In The Call of Glacier Park Margaret Hasse takes you along a winding trail into the deep and mystical wilderness of the place where her mother once worked and hiked the trails. Her words, always elegant and perfectly chosen, brim with emotion and promise. Take this journey with her.

–Bill Meissner, author of The Mapmaker’s Dream, Circling Toward Home, andLight at the Edge of the Field, among others

Please share/please repost [PROMO]

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[sroloc--elbisivni]

on names

(sorry for long post--i have many thoughts on what i call myself, and because this is probably going to come up in the future, i wanted it in a public place.)

my family has called me ‘nina’ since i was born.

on this blog, i list my name as ‘n. jay’. because when i first started going on the internet, i hadn’t even considered taking another name. so when i started to make friends with people, ‘nina’ was what i introduced myself with. it took me another two years to figure out i was nonbinary, and another three of thinking about different names to understand that i liked ‘jay’ best, and another several months of slowly putting it into practice while i tried to figure out what i wanted.

my family has called me ‘nina’ since i was born, but the name feels wrong to me.

i’ve never had a name that felt completely right. when i was younger, i used to whisper strings of syllables to myself, convinced i’d hit on some sort of ‘secret name’ that would settle into place like a cloak and a shield and armor and a hug. it never really happened. when i figured out that i was nonbinary, the feeling of the name i used being wrong only settled further into place, but at least at that point, i could pin it on exactly why--’nina’ is obviously, explicitly, glaringly feminine. 

my family has called me ‘nina’ since i was born, but that is a girl’s name, and i am not a girl.

and my not being a girl is not enough to not make the name not a girl’s name, because it doesn’t work like that sometimes. i look feminine enough in person, even with short hair. even with bound breasts. i understand that there isn’t One True Way to be nonbinary, One True Way to look nonbinary, but sometimes looking feminine is hard. it’s hard, and it hurts, and I like being able to make strangers play Guess My Gender, to make them uncertain of their assumptions. i want to be able to fold myself into uncertainty, because i spend my life being uncertain of who i am, and feeling like strangers know more about who i am than i do is scary and unsettling. i don’t like it when people can look at me, can read about me, and assume ‘girl’, because it tips the sliding scale far too far. feminine looks, feminine name, assumptions made, done. i liked jay because it’s a derivative of another part of my given name, because it sounds like a bird, because it’s too short to nickname further, because it leans more masculine enough to help me feel like i’m pulling off my personal balancing act.

my family has called me nina since i was born, and so has everyone else.

for class assignments senior year of high school, i started marking my papers as ‘N. <lastname.> that helped, a little, but it wasn’t enough--because everyone at school still called me ‘nina,’ because i sang in an all girls choir, because i lived in small town maine, because even in the theater club where i could crossdress to play the milkman in ‘Our Town’ the unofficial leaders made transphobic jokes and everyone laughed. even for a name that feels wrong, changing to a different one, even in your own head, is hard, and i did not have many friends but i had many acquaintances, and i just wanted to get out of high school, so i didn’t tell anyone squat. i trained myself to write down ‘N. <lastname>, and i changed my blog description, and then changed it back, and then again, and i thought for a long time. a publishing company contacted me for three poems for an anthology and i submitted them as ‘J. Egan’, pulling from an old family name, and made a poetry blog using the same nom de plume.

my family has called me ‘nina’ since i was born and i don’t know how to make them stop. 

my family has called me ‘nina’ since i was born and i’m not sure if i want them to stop.

i’m not sure about ‘jay’ yet, even after over a whole year of thinking about it. even after testdriving going by my last name alone while working at an elementary school. even after a whole bunch of other things. i don’t know if i want to change it legally. i don’t know if i’ll change my mind in a few years. i don’t know if i like it enough. ‘nina’ may not fit right, but it hasn’t been fitting right for a long time, and from people who know me, it’s fine. it’s not uncomfortable. the people online who call me it are people i’ve known for years. i know there are no assumptions from them. Jay is comfortable as a stage name, as a business name, as a first impression. ‘nina’ is alright when i know it’s from people who mean well, who know i’m not a girl, who know me and are used to knowing me by that name. i list my blog as ‘n. jay’ so hopefully, people who have heard of me will understand why i’m responding to things addressed to ‘nina’, but i don’t want to be introduced that way. i don’t want to introduce myself that way.

the only exception is for my close family, my parents and brother and uncle and aunts, because i know that’s always the name they’re going to see when they look at me, because that’s the name i know how to answer to and i know how they say it when i’m in trouble or needed or not listening or loved, because my changing my name is concerning for them, because i’ve had the whole ‘being nonbinary’ conversation with my father at least three times and still feel like i’m getting nowhere, and holding them to an impossible standard is just going to hurt everyone. 

my family has called me ‘nina’ since i was born but i’m not going to be with my family forever.

the university i’m attending in the fall has an option for ‘preferred name’ and today i changed it to make sure it read ‘jay <lastname.>’ i introduced myself that way there when i was visiting earlier this spring, because it was the only place where my mother didn’t go on campus with me, and i knew i wouldn’t have to explain to her or warn her or have other people hear her call me something else. the head of my major’s department and my advisor emailed me to introduce themselves, and when i carefully emailed back to explain ‘my preferred name’, i got a courteous email back within ten minutes thanking me for telling them and asking what my preferred pronouns were and i had to stare up at the sky for a minute and feel like my chest was going to burst--in a good way, in a very good way.

my family has called me ‘nina’ since i was born, and many dear friends have called me ‘nina’ since they met me. if you call me nina, i’m not mad at you. i’m not trying to chastise you, or warn you off, or make you feel bad, because i’ve had a very nascent year where i retreated from a lot of things, and i know that most people who still call me by my given name are people who have known me for a while, who care about me, who understand me on many levels, who would probably call me something else if i asked them to. that is not what this post is, or if it is, it is a very soft ask. i am scared, and i am uncertain, and your use of my given name is just as or more often a support than it is something uncomfortable. 

many people, including many good friends, call me or have introduced me in mixed company as jay. i want to thank all of those people, especially those who have dropped the name in casual conversation, or tagged me as it, because you have all helped me feel a little more secure, a little more comfortable and safe and happy in reaching for a new identity. 

i’m not sure what my name is yet. i know what it has been. i know what i hope to make it. i know what people call me. for today that’s going to have to be enough.

[senchais]

fr | writing

hi friends! this list is basically a mash of literature/writing-related words...?

quizlet link

【 books/writing forms 】

l’anthologie (f) | anthology

le brouillon | draft

le dictionnaire des synonymes | thesaurus

épistolaire | epistolary

l’épopée (f) | epic

la nouvelle | short-story

la pièce de théâtre | play

la poésie | poetry

la prose | prose

la rédaction | essay

le roman | novel

【 poetry 】

la césure | caesura

le mètre | metre

la rime | rhyme

la strophe | stanza

le vers | verse, line of verse

【 literary devices 】

l’allégorie (f) | allegory

l’allitération (f) | alliteration

l’anaphore (f) | anaphora

la comparaison | simile

l’hyperbate (f) | hyperbaton

l’imagerie (f) | imagery

la litote | litotes

la méiose | meiosis

la métaphore | metaphor

l’oxymore (m) | oxymoron

【 people in the writing process 】

le/la dramaturge | playwright

l’écrivain (m) | author

l’éditeur/éditrice | publisher

l’égérie (f) | muse/creative inspiration

le rédacteur en chef/ la rédactrice en chef | editor (of a newspaper)

le réviseur/la réviseuse | editor

【 punctuation 】

l’apostrophe (f) | apostrophe

les deux-points (m) | colon

les guillemets (m) | quotation marks (« »)

la parenthèse | parenthesis/bracket

le point d’exclamation | exclamation mark

le point d’interrogation | question mark

le point (final) | full stop

le point-virgule | semi-colon

les points de suspension (m) | ellipsis

la ponctuation | punctuation

le tiret | dash

le trait d’union | hyphen

la virgule | comma

【 words 】

la consonne | consonant

l’espace (f) | space

la lettre | letter (of the alphabet)

le mot | word

le paragraphe | paragraph

la phrase | sentence

la syllabe | syllable

la voyelle | vowel

【 extra 】

la bibliothèque | library

la librairie | bookstore

la littérature | literature

la grammaire | grammar

l’orthographe (f) | spelling

le stylo plume | fountain pen

la tranche | spine (of a book)

[m58]

three from Anatoly Kudryavitsky

White Desert Sun

A 'Perl' Prayer

`#!/usr/bin/perl`, who has left me, return !$?; Rescue me from `eval 'eval <STDIN>';` Like a reference book, `open(ME, <STDIN>);` Prompt me to select the right (actionType => ""), Help me to get ({wanted => \&wanted} (if defined) I’ve been trying to regenerate_ my $generation (); I strived to Find::find $target + abs( $target - $result I breathe your `name = *File::Find::name;` Your $word is my @command If you are cross with me,      use strict;      use warnings;      use Math::Complex;      use subs qw(system); I'm too $old = select(STDOUT) I walked a long distance(my $p2); I am close to the exit;<<----Ends the script I am ready to die("Invalid genotype"); When my time comes, Cwd (); #<<-----Move this up to the Used file

The New Person

A ‘Java’ Dossier Printout

public class new Person("Adam", { private int getGender) {        "MALE"); public static void interviewing() {     switch (getLocationIndex (location)) {     case  LOCATION:              Lost in career fields ();     case  EDUCATION:              Majored in escaping from reality ();     case  OCCUPATION:              Odd-jobs man ();     case  WORK HISTORY:               Plentiful ();     case  PERSONALITY:               Dreamer of dreams ();     case  WEAKNESSES:               Has obvious gaps in the memorised past ();     default:               transitioning from the workforce toward               a greater force ();     System.out.println("Useless");       } }

The Swallowed Sun

An Excerpt from the ‘Python’ Inquest Paper

#!/usr/local/bin/python datetime.date(1989, 12, 7) def GetMetaData(invid,quarter): def usage():  print ' Find all quarter data associated with the investigation ID'  print ' Investigation ID: searching for the Sun'  print ' We are looking to find those who wrote about rosy clouds             and brown sun-tan'  print ' those who know the words "sunset" and "dawn"'  print ' --quarter  Kepler quarter (integer number)'  if (len(line[0]) > 0 and            'Kepler' not in line[0] and            'integer' not in line[0] and            'no rows found' not in line[0]): # +---+---+---+---+ # | H | e | l | p | # +---+---+---+---+

#! python now = date.today() def GetMetaData(invid,quarter): def usage():  print ' Find all quarter data associated with the investigation ID'  print ' Investigation ID: searching for those who were searching             for the Sun'  print ' Rise from your ashes'  print ' Answer the summons'

Anatoly Kudryavitsky lives in Dublin, Ireland, and in Reggio di Calabria, Italy. His poems appear in Oxford Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, The North, The Prague Revue, Plume, BlazeVox, The Honest Ulsterman, Cyphers, Stride, The American Journal of Poetry, etc. His most recent poetry collections are "The Two-Headed Man and the Paper Life" (MadHat Press, USA, 2019) and "Scultura Involontaria" (Casa della poesia, Italy, 2020; a bilingual English/Italian edition of his selected poems). His new collection entitled "Sky Sailing" is due from Salmon Poetry in 2022. His latest novel, "The Flying Dutchman", has been brought out by Glagoslav Publications, UK, in 2018. In 2020, he won an English PEN Translate Award for his anthology of Russian dissident poetry 1960-1980 entitled "Accursed Poets" (Smokestack Books, 2020). He is the editor of SurVision poetry magazine.  

[acrossthewavesoftime]

Thank you so much for the tag, @copper-haired-cuddlebug! I knew right away which letter you meant:

dear CROSBIE,

I fear some misadventure has happened to ANDRÉ; I have to offer myself & my Corps for any Coup that might assist him; I have forty Cavalry as gallant men as ever were in the field; & horses capable of marching seventy mile without halting-

I have often risked my life, but never as with so much pleasure, in a case where attachment to my General, private Friendship & public duty, all call upon in the most feelg. manner-

I am in the greatest Anxiety & distress

Yours Affectionatly J G SIMCOE

At Mr. WEIRs

[September, 1780.]

University of Michigan, William L. Clements Library, Sir Henry Clinton Papers, Volume 124, folio 45, transcript via: The On-Line Institute For Loyalist Studies [accessed 3 October 2021].

I've no idea who "Crosbie" is (a fellow military officer, I guess), but given how frank Simcoe allows himself to be and taking the very informal complimentary close into account, they must have been friends.

As for Simcoe's and André's relationship, his biographer Mary Beacock Fryer asserts that "In Andre, Simcoe found another kindred spirit. The bond was similar to the one he had established with Edward Drewe before he was invalided home." (John Graves Simcoe. A Biography, p. 40). This statement intrigues me, given that Drewe and Simcoe were friends since they had been children in Exeter (by the way, Drewe wrote a somewhat homoerotic poem for Simcoe when he was invalided home, which Simcoe submitted to an acquaintance intent on publishing an anthology of poetry by Devon and Cornish amateur poets later in life).

In his biography, it also says that André replied to letters Simcoe wrote to Clinton during his captivity; I could well imagine that part of Simcoe's despair at hearing of André's capture was rooted in the fact that his friend had helped him, but he was not allowed to help André in return in a very similar situation.

André's death affected him greatly; his biographer quotes him as remarking that "Posterity will pass judgement on Washington over André" and he ordered the Queen's Rangers to add a black and a white plume to their hats in mourning (John Graves Simcoe. A Biography, p. 57).

Clinton and André’s friendship in the war

Sir Henry Clinton was utterly distraught at John André’s death because not only had he lost a valuable officer, he’d lost a beloved friend

By 1779, Clinton had become isolated among his fellows in the army. He’d broken with senior and junior officers, was having a troubled relationship with his previous friend Lord Cornwallis, and was generally in a wretched, stressed state due to heading an army

Clinton had recently broken with his two aides, Drummond and Rawdon, who had originally been close to him. Rawdon resigned his post as adjutant general. John André was appointed to the post

André had originally been a follower of Howe, Clinton’s predecessor and rival, so with the change of command in 1778 it had seemed unlikely André would be welcomed into Clinton’s military family

Through the help of General Grey, Clinton decided to take André on, and the two became friends. They were quite similar, and Clinton seems to have seen André as a younger version of himself. They were both musically inclined, artistic, and loved the theatre. They both enjoyed poetry, and a poem written by André was kept by Clinton. André was also a hard worker and a gentleman, which appealed to Clinton, an aristocrat who took his own job seriously

In the post of adjutant general, André became Clinton’s right hand man. But he also became his best friend. During the siege of Charleston in 1780, Clinton had a massive falling out with Cornwallis. It was André who counselled him through this time and supported him.

By Summer of 1780, André was Clinton’s “first friend and confidant,” his constant companion.

The last day the two would see each other (the day before André was to meet Arnold) was spent quietly in each other’s company. Together they also visited the Riedesels and their young children, friends of Clinton. Missing his own small children in England, Clinton sought a distraction from the impending departure of André

After André departed, Clinton would never see his friend again. Clinton was horrified that André had been captured and was to be tried as a spy. Desperately he tried to save André’s life, writing a series of letters to Washington trying to explain a way André could be released. It was no use

It seems André was just as crushed at leaving Clinton behind, bursting into tears when talking to the Americans, “Clinton has been to good to me, he has been lavish of his kindness. I am bound to him by too many obligations and love him too well to bear the thought that he should reproach himself.”

Knowing he was to die, André wrote a final letter to Clinton, absolving him of blame and saying an emotional farewell:

With all the warmth of my heart I give you thanks for your Excellency’s profuse kindness to me, and I send you the most earnest wishes for your welfare which a faithful, affectionate and respectful attendant can frame

Clinton received André’s final letter and wrote a reply that probably did not arrive until after André was dead. Clinton was shocked at André’s fatalistic tone, adding

God knows how much I feel for you in your present horrid situation, but I dare hope you will soon be relieved from it...believe me Dear André ever your faithful affectionate humble servant, H. Clinton

Clinton blamed himself anyway, weeping when he heard the official story from a witness that André had been hanged. Clinton could not cope with the death of his adored friend, and actually could not function for some days afterward. He had not felt such grief since the death of his wife in 1772

Luckily, an old friend was on hand to comfort him, and Clinton recovered, but he was haunted by it ever after.

As he wrote in his memoirs years later,

But the subject affects me too deeply to proceed, nor can my heart cease to bleed whenever I reflect on the very unworthy fate of this most amiable and valuable young man, who was adorned with the rarest endowments of education and nature and, had he lived, could not but have attained to the highest honours of his profession!

Sources: Portrait of a General by W.B. Willcox

Valiant Ambition by N. Philbrick

Washington’s Spies by A. Rose

Turncoat by S. Brumwell

The traitor and the spy by J.T Flexner

[pussymagicuniverse]

lola the human vagina at U.C. Medical School, Tlaltecutli By Starlight in Puerto Escondido, + I Prefer Pussy

lola the human vagina at U.C. Medical School

For 25 years, Lola spread her legs for the gynecology rotation, decades of eager interns staring into her nether regions like it was virgin territory.  

Beginning with the labia, the Attending physician explained their function, pulled the lips apart like a flower, then inserted the speculum, so they could see all the way in.  

Many had not seen a vagina up close since birth.

Lola assured me she provided a service. I make sure they see me as a whole person, she said.  

It paid well, and was almost respectable, good money for a girl with no college. 

I make a difference, she said proudly. Not one of those young doctors will ever look at a pussy the same way, again. 

I try not to laugh. I too tell myself lies.

• 

First published in DIODE, 2019

•

Tlaltecutli By Starlight in Puerto Escondido

I buy her tequila shooters at the Cafe del Mar. She is exquisite, this woman, named for the Mexican goddess of the earth, her eyes the infinity of a moonless night. We’re alone at the bar. I am the unwilling sacrifice, she cautions. I watch as she swallows the sun. I should heed her warning. Instead, I follow her under the pier, where the wind moans exactly like Tlaltecutli, my lips at her throat, as I tongue my way down her small, brown reticence. Te quiero, she sighs, breath the clove of her cigarettes. That night, under the pier, my hunger fueled by tequila and the musk of her hair, I finger her inside her cut-off jeans, embroidered with crossed bones and skulls, while she clings to me, eyes shut, and we sway to the narco-corrido music blasting from some homeboy’s boombox, carried on the breeze. It is a steamy September night, the sand still warm from the hot sun’s kiss, the beach deserted. Tlaltecutli opens her eyes, two blue-black, smoldering coals. I am the great Tlaltecutli! Her deep-throated wail. Ravish me, plunder me! Tear me apart! She’s crazy drunk, wanton. A vortex, she sucks me in. My mouth finds hers while my fingers bore their way inside her. And when her legs buckle, and her eyes glaze over, I hold her; my fingers impale her until she erupts. Horrified, I watch her body cleave in two. Her arms wrench apart; her agonizing screams pierce the night. I should run, leave her there. But I can’t. My legs are sinking in the sand. Tlaltecutli speaks to me with murder in her mouth. They say nothing will grow until I am moistened with the blood of sacrifice.

She pulls me down, into her madness. It’s where I want to go.

•

First published in DARK INK Anthology 2018 Moon Tide Press

•

I Prefer Pussy (a little city-kitty ditty)

I prefer pussy, as in cat  as in willow as in chases a rat  as in raised on a pillow. 

I prefer pussy, as in riot as in foots as in pussycat doll as in puss-in-boots  

I prefer pussy, as a twat it is not, nor is it a beaver, a clam or a cleaver.  

I prefer pussy to  nookie or gash,  it isn’t a box, or a cave or a slash.  

I prefer pussy to snapper  or snatch, far better  than taco or  slit or man-catch. 

I prefer pussy, ‘though  rosebud’s not bad,  and muffin sounds homey, and cooch makes me glad. 

I prefer pussy, as in whip as in flower, as into it you slip - as in I have the power. 

•

First published in KYSO Flash, 2016

Alexis Rhone Fancher is published in Best American Poetry, Rattle, Hobart, Verse Daily, Plume, Cleaver, and elsewhere. She’s authored five collections, most recently The Dead Kid Poems (KYSO Flash, 2019). A multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, Alexis is poetry editor of Cultural Weekly. www.alexisrhonefancher.com

[arablit]

Sunday Submissions: 'Project Plume' Looking for Women's Writing in Arabic

Sunday Submissions: ‘Project Plume’ Looking for Women’s Writing in Arabic

Project Plume is a new magazine that aims to publish English translations of women’s writing in a seasonal anthology:

The publication, they write, aims to “promote high-quality literature that dazzles and refreshes perspectives.”

Each issue will feature poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction translated from a chosen language and centred on a common theme. Issue Zero will focus on Czech texts,…

[tamsoj]

Ralph Angel, "Burning," from The Plume Anthology of Poetry 4

[yespoetry]

Andi Talarico: I Want Everything

I want you to Read this Very Slowly, and then I want you to Read it Again

“I want everything.” – Anne Carson, Decreation

I want to forgive my body its gaping appetite

I want permission to sample, inhale, consume

I want, now, to be a cacophony of pleas, a full round of echoing ache,

to see your mouth a great O of understanding

I want to hold you for so long that my arms forget arms,

I want you to hold me longer yet,

so long that your body forgets it is a body

I want my empty places filled in, pushed against

I want the metaphors of plow and field to pale against this true thing, this very real fuck of spit and gasp and hair and thrum

I want to not call it primal

I want it titled and plumed

I want it high and low

how Mistress is both ordained woman of the house

and the fucked lover on the side

Make me each, give me all, adoring scorn,

I want everything.

Andi Talarico is a Brooklyn-based writer and reader. She’s the curator and host of At the Inkwell NYC, an international reading series whose New York branch meets at KGB Bar. She’s taught poetry in classrooms as a rostered artist, and acted as coach and judge for Poetry Out Loud. In 2003, Paperkite Press published her chapbook, Spinning with the Tornado, and Swandive Publishing included her in the 2014 anthology, Everyday Escape Poems. She also penned a literary arts column for Electric City magazine for several years. When she’s not working with stationery company Baron Fig, she can be found reading tarot cards, supporting independent bookstores, and searching for the best oyster Happy Hour in NYC.

[hellosaltysaladcollectionstuff]

DURING AND AFTER the Cuban Revolution, many US poets and artists who came of age in the Lower East Side art and poetry scene of the 1950s went on to express sympathies for the Latin American political left. Yet, only a few went beyond faddish appropriations of revolutionary style in order to sustain a literary culture of deep transnational social commitments. One such figure is Margaret Randall (b. 1936), whose remarkable six decades of work as a poet, translator, editor, activist, and scholar include her direction of the renowned bilingual literary magazine El Corno Emplumado (The Plumed Horn, 1962–1969), founded with her then-husband Sergio Mondragón in Mexico City, where the Mexican student movements left profound marks on her political outlook. Soon, she became a fixture of the Latin American literary left during a decade of residence in revolutionary Cuba (1969–1980), followed by four years in the Nicaragua of the Sandinistas (1980–1984). When US authorities attempted to deport Randall upon her 1984 reentry into the United States, her five-year legal case, defended by the Center for Constitutional Rights, helped to end the 1952 anticommunist legislation known as the McCarran-Walter Immigration and Nationality Act. 

In March 2018, I sat down with Randall and her partner, the artist Barbara Byers, at their modest home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, not far from where Randall grew up. They had recently returned from Ciudad Juárez, where Randall was the second US citizen to receive the Medal for Literary Merit from Literatura en el Bravo, and from Cuba, where they travel frequently for literary collaborations, talks, readings, and exhibitions. As our conversation unfolded, I became increasingly astonished by the prolific pace of her most recent publications as a cultural historian (including books on Che Guevara, Haydée Santamaría, and Cuba’s global solidarity programs) and especially as a literary translator. These translations, many published by underacknowledged small presses, include dense multi-voiced books such as The Oval Portrait, co-authored by 35 Cuban women and edited by Afro-Cuban poet Soleida Ríos. We conducted the following interview about her translation work by email from April 15–25, 2018. This interview also continues a conversation we filmed at Northwestern University in spring 2017, about Randall’s place in the Mexico City and Cuban avant-gardes of the 1960s and 1970s.

¤

HARRIS FEINSOD: It is hard to keep up with your stunning pace as a translator in the last few years. I count at least 10 standalone collections of poetry in print since 2017 and several others on the way. I hope we can talk about many of these projects, but would it be fair to say that your renaissance as a translator begins with your anthology Only the Road/Solo el camino: Eight Decades of Cuban Poetry (Duke University Press, 2016)?

MARGARET RANDALL: It’s an interesting question, and one I’ve asked myself. It’s true that my renaissance as a translator, as you put it, began with Only the Road/Solo el camino: Eight Decades of Cuban Poetry. I’d been translating on and off for years, beginning in the 1960s when we had El Corno Emplumado and wanted so much to make poetry in Spanish available to an English readership and vice versa. I’d translate a few poems by one or another poet. Back then, I rarely attempted a whole book. Exceptions were Otto René Castillo’s Let’s Go!, published in London by Cape Goliard in the early 1970s, and two book-length poetry collections that never saw publication: Carlos María Gutiérrez’s Prison Diary that won the Casa de las Américas poetry prize in 1970 — I was on that jury, along with Ernesto Cardenal, Roque Dalton, Cintio Vitier, and Washington Delgado — and a book about Vietnam by Roberto Fernández Retamar; I can’t remember the name of that book right now. In any case, neither the Gutiérrez nor the Fernández Retamar books were ever accepted for publication. Back then, I thought of myself as a very occasional translator. For years I concentrated mostly on my own poetry, as well as on doing oral history and essays.

What led you to conceive of an anthology of Cuban poetry today?

In the 1990s, I began returning to Cuba, first to take groups of US women down, and then to attend cultural events of one sort or another. I had long been interested in Cuban poetry; I’d produced two collections. In late 1978, Colorado State University brought out These Living Songs, a compendium of 15 very young Cuban poets. In 1982, a small Canadian press published Breaking the Silences: 20th Century Poetry by Cuban Women. Two and three decades later, I could see that Cubans were continuing to write very fine poems. The small island has long produced a great number of excellent poets, especially considering the size of its population. And I wasn’t only interested in the individual poets, but also in their development within a very different context from our own. In Cuba, as you know, the arts are very well supported. Despite tremendous economic problems, poetry is respected, and poets are encouraged to write, perform, and publish. I myself, when I lived in Cuba, had been part of that poetry scene.

So, I found myself excited by what I was reading. I can’t even remember the precise moment in which I decided to do the anthology. I do remember that when I presented the idea to my editor at Duke University Press, she was immediately enthusiastic.

Did you feel a particular political imperative to take on this project?

I’d say it was more of a literary imperative with political dimensions.

One of the most groundbreaking dimensions of Only the Road is the representation of women poets. These women represent an extraordinary diversity of standpoints — from poets of bourgeois elegance like Dulce María Loynaz to Afro-Cuban poets like Lourdes Casal and Nancy Morejón to younger writers like Anisley Negrín. Did you build on previous translations like Breaking the Silences? Can you tell us how your experiences in Cuba have shaped your commitments to feminism?

I’m glad you noticed the high percentage of women included in Only the Road. Almost half, which is extremely unusual for a national survey of this kind. Of course my feminism has something to do with this; I see and hear women, which not everyone does. Still, because using a different measure would have been unfair to the anthology as well as to the poets in it, quality was my first criteria. There’s an interesting story linking Breaking the Silences and Only the Road. The youngest poet in the first book was Chely Lima, 19 at the time. When I was reading for Only the Road, I wondered what she was up to and looked for recent books. I learned she had left Cuba and I didn’t track her down in time to include her in the new book. Later, I did find Chely, now living in Miami but as a man, and still writing groundbreaking poetry. One of the individual books I recently translated, and that The Operating System in Brooklyn published in 2016, was What the Werewolf Told Them. It’s an extraordinary collection about Chely’s own transition, and The Operating System produced a very beautiful bilingual edition.

Anthology projects require you to translate in so many different styles and registers. Chely’s transition suggests how voices might change in the arc of an individual life. I’m reminded of Octavio Paz’s remark that every poem offers a unique and unrepeatable expression of “something lived and suffered.” How do your translations negotiate between so many different voices?

I think poets can be very good translators of poetry, but there are dangers. The first thing one must avoid is imposing one’s own poetic voice. The challenge is to find the voice of the person you are translating and to figure out how to present it — with all its syntax, rhythms, inflections, and other characteristics — in an entirely different language. One of my biggest challenges in this respect was actually a book I recently translated that wasn’t poetry but prose. It’s The Oval Portrait, published by Wings Press in 2018. This anthology, which appeared in Cuba several years earlier, brings together 35 Cuban women, each of them writing in the voice of another: sometimes an imagined character, sometimes a historical figure. I had to find the writer’s voice and then also that other voice in which she chose to speak. When approaching a translation project, whether poetry or prose, I first read the book several times. I familiarize myself with the writer’s culture, time, and mode of expression. Then I experiment in an effort to see how I can best reproduce all that in English.

People you’ve met during return trips to Havana and Matanzas have inspired some of your recent translations. How have these encounters led to the projects you’ve taken up? I’m thinking of books like Transparencies, by Laura Ruiz Montes, who edits Ediciones Vigía. Did that arise from your work with Vigía?

In 2013, when I was in Cuba to do the fieldwork for my book about Haydée Santamaría, I asked a friend to take me to visit Vigía. The handmade book collective is famous far beyond Cuba’s borders. Many poets would love to have a book published there. It was on that trip that I met Laura Ruiz. She gave me a book of her poetry, and I fell in love with her work. That led to my translating Transparencies. On another trip to Cuba, this time for the 30th anniversary of Vigía, I met another excellent Matanzas poet, Alfredo Zaldívar. I translated a book by him, and Red Mountain Press published both those collections. Coincidentally, Alfredo was one of Vigía’s founders. He now directs Ediciones Matanzas. But I should make it clear that I don’t translate people because they are friends. It’s the work that inspires me.

Vigía has also published poems by you in translation, has it not? What have been your experiences with translators bringing you over into Spanish?

I’ve had the good fortune of having had two books of mine produced by Vigía: La Llorona in 2016 and When Justice Felt at Home/Cuando la justicia se sentía en casa in 2018, both in gorgeous hand-made limited editions created by Elizabeth Valero, one of Vigía’s talented designers. The first of these was translated by María Vázquez Valdez, a fine poet in her own right, who has been generous in rendering several of my books into Spanish for publication in Mexico. The second was translated by the Cuban poet Víctor Rodríguez Núñez and the North American Katherine M. Hedeen, literary giants who have also been very attentive to my work over the years. Recently, the fine Cuban poet and translator Israel Domínguez rendered a collection of my poems into Spanish for publication on the island. I’ve been very lucky that such sensitive talents have taken an interest in my work.

Translating Cuban literature has always been something of a family affair for you. Your mother, Elinor Randall, produced some landmark translations of José Martí. Can you tell us about her work? Did she come to translation through you, or did you come to it through her?

My mother devoted a great many years of her life to translating. Although she worked with several authors, José Martí was her passion. She was still polishing some of those translations a few days before her death at almost 97. I was actually the one who suggested my mother translate Martí. When I went to live in Cuba, in 1969, I was asked to translate an anthology of his work. At that point, he was much too difficult for me. I passed the task on to my mother, and she flew with it.

Perhaps the first translation of yours that I encountered was Let’s Go!, your collection of poems by the slain Guatemalan revolutionary Otto René Castillo. Recently you translated another militant poet, this time a young woman named Rita Valdivia, who was radicalized in Europe, trained in Cuba, and killed in Bolivia in 1969. How did you come to Valdivia?

I’ve actually translated quite a few of the “guerrilla poets”: Roque Dalton, Otto René, Carlos María Gutiérrez, among others. I came to Rita Valdivia purely by accident. I was on tour with my Cuban anthology, and in Chicago met a young Venezuelan poet named José Delpino. José mentioned Rita over lunch one day. I had never heard of her, but several years earlier, I had written a book about Che Guevara, Che on My Mind. It’s long bothered me that when speaking of Che, people almost always ignore the women who fought alongside him, Tania being the token exception. I knew that the 50th anniversary of Che’s death in Bolivia was coming up and decided to research Rita’s life and find and translate what I could of her poetry. By the time I had that little book, The Operating System offered to bring it out quickly to help commemorate the anniversary. Rita’s poems surprised me. They are not your typical “guerrilla poetry,” but rather lyrical in nature, almost surreal at times. She died at the age of 23 without having published a book. Had she lived, I have no doubt she would have become one of Latin America’s important poets.

In a short biography you’ve written of Valdivia’s life, you reflect: “How many unremembered men and women took part in the social justice struggles of the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s?” Do you view translation as a means of remembrance for writers and revolutionaries like Castillo and Valdivia?

I think we must remember them in many ways. Translating and publishing their work keeps their legacies alive. We must be vigilant, because the history we are given is sometimes very different from the history that happened.

In the 1970s, testimonial literature offered writers a path toward vigilance for historical truth. I’m thinking of your books Cuban Women Now (1974) and Sandino’s Daughters: Testimonies of Nicaraguan Women in Struggle (1981). Both testimonials and translations are often evaluated in terms of “fidelity,” whether toward history or toward another language. How do you think about the problem of fidelity in translation and/or testimonial? 

Fidelity is key, but fidelity is not always simply a telling of “facts.” Real fidelity depends upon being able to recreate context, culture, the deepest meaning.

You mentioned your translations of Roque Dalton. I’ve always admired the Poemas clandestinos he published in newspapers and magazines toward the end of his life. This topic brings us back to the question of multi-voiced texts, since Dalton invented five distinct revolutionary personae with their own biographies and literary styles. You once told me you thought you could hear your own conversations with Dalton inflecting the persona of Vilma Flores in the Poemas clandestinos. What were those conversations like?

In our last conversations, before Roque left Cuba to return to his homeland and take part in the revolutionary struggle there, we had a few heated discussions stemming from what I perceived as his very male-centered gaze and my burgeoning feminism. When I read his Vilma Flores poems, I thought I heard echoes of those conversations.

What are you translating now?

I’m involved in a very exciting project, a book by another Cuban poet, Gaudencio Rodríguez Santana. He’s also from Matanzas, and I met him on a recent trip to the Book Fair there. I read his book, Economía nacional (The National Economy). It uses the collapse of the sugar industry as a metaphor for the problems currently confronting the Revolution. Producing sugar in Cuba was important, as you know: central to the country’s identity. The industry’s demise has affected thousands of people whose way of life was intimately linked to its production. Gaudencio’s poetry is profoundly original and very powerful. He is able to capture images, sounds, smells, a whole way of life that is dying. His are the kinds of poems that make me want to keep on translating.

¤

Harris Feinsod is the author of The Poetry of the Americas: From Good Neighbors to Countercultures (Oxford University Press, 2017), the co-translator of Oliverio Girondo’s Decals: Complete Early Poems (Open Letter, 2018), and the director of Open Door Archive. He is associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at Northwestern University.

The post Historical Fidelity: Margaret Randall on Translating Cuban Poetry appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books https://ift.tt/2LlVwnK

[blackkudos]

Georgia Douglas Johnson

Georgia Blanche Douglas Camp Johnson, better known as Georgia Douglas Johnson (September 10, 1880 – May 14, 1966), was an African American poet, one of the earliest African-American female playwrights, and an important participant in the Harlem Renaissance.

Early life

Johnson was born in Atlanta to Laura Douglas and George Camp (her mother's last name is listed in other sources as Jackson). Her mother was of African and Native American descent, and her father was of African-American and English heritage.

Much of Johnson's childhood was spent in Rome, Georgia. She received her education in both Rome and Atlanta, where she excelled in reading, recitations and physical education. She also taught herself to play the violin, which developed into a lifelong love of music that appears in her plays, which make distinct use of sacred music.

Johnson graduated from Atlanta University's Normal School 1896. She taught school in Marietta, Georgia. She left her teaching career to pursue her interest in music in 1902, attending Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio. She wrote music from 1898 until 1959. After studying in Oberlin Johnson returned to Atlanta, where she became assistant principal in a public school.

Marriage and family

On September 28, 1903, Johnson married Henry Lincoln Johnson, an Atlanta lawyer and prominent Republican party member. They had two sons, Henry Lincoln Johnson, Jr., and Peter Douglas Johnson (d. 1957). Johnson claimed her husband was not very supportive of her writing, preferring her be to a home-maker instead. Her husband's job as a lawyer forced them to live in Washington, D.C., away from the literary center in Harlem. He died in 1925 when she was aged 45 and she was left to take care of their sons, who were teenagers at the time. Even though her husband often criticized her career as a writer, she published two poems dedicated to him: "The Heart of a Woman" (1918) and "Bronze" (1922). Johnson lived in Washington for the last 50 years of her life. After her husband died, she struggled at first with some temporary jobs. As a gesture of appreciation for her husband's loyalty and service to the Republican party, President Calvin Coolidge appointed Johnson as the Commissioner of Conciliation in the Department of Labor.

Career

Johnson's husband accepted an appointment as the Recorder of Deeds from United States President William Howard Taft, and the family moved to Washington, D.C., in 1910. It was during this period that Johnson began to write poems and stories. She credited a poem written by William Stanley Braithwaite about a rose tended by a child, as her inspiration for her poems. Johnson also wrote songs, plays, short stories, taught music, and performed as an organist at her Congregational church.

Poetry

She began to submit poems to newspapers and small magazines. Her first poem was published in 1905 in the literary journal The Voice of the Negro, though her first collection of poems was not published until 1916. She published four volumes of poetry, beginning in 1916 with The Heart of a Woman. Her poems are often described as feminine and "ladylike" or "raceless" and use titles such a "Faith", "Youth", and "Joy". Her poems appeared in multiple issues of The Crisis, a journal published by the NAACP and founded by W. E. B. Du Bois. "Calling Dreams" was published with the January 1920 edition, "Treasure" in July 1922, and "To Your Eyes" in November 1924.

Plays

Johnson was a well-known figure in the national black theatre movement and was an important “cultural sponsor” in the early twentieth century, assembling and inspiring the intellectuals and artists who generated the next group of black theatre and rising education (16). Johnson wrote about 28 plays. Plumes was published under the pen name John Temple. Many of her plays were never published because of her gender and race. Gloria Hull is credited with the rediscovery of many of Johnson's plays. The 28 plays that she wrote were divided into four sections: "Primitive Life Plays", "Plays of Average Negro Life", "Lynching Plays" and "Radio Plays". Several of her plays are lost. The first section, “Primitive Life Plays,” features Blue Blood and Plumes, which were published and produced during Johnson’s lifetime.

In 1926, Johnson's play "Blue Blood" won honorable mention in the Opportunity drama contest. Her play "Plumes" also won in the same competition in 1927. Johnson was one of the only women whose work was published in Alain Locke's anthology Plays of Negro Life: A Source-Book of Native American Drama. Johnson's typescripts for ten of her plays are in collections in academic institutions. Blue-Eyed Black Boy is a 1930 lynching genre play written to convince Congress to pass anti-lynching laws. This lesser known play premiered in Xoregos Performing Company's program: "Songs of the Harlem River" in New York City's Dream Up Festival, from August 30 to September 6, 2015. "Songs of the Harlem River" also opened the Langston Hughes Festival in Queens, New York on February 13, 2016.

Anti-lynching activism

Although Johnson spoke out against race inequity as a whole, she is more known as a key advocate in the anti-lynching movement as well as a pioneering member of the lynching drama tradition. Her activism is primarily expressed through her plays, first appearing in the play Sunday Morning in the South. This outspoken, dramatic writing about racial violence is sometimes credited with her obscurity as a playwright since such topics were not considered appropriate for a woman at that time. Unlike many African-American playwrights, Johnson refused to give her plays a happy ending since she did not feel it was a realistic outcome. As a result, Johnson had difficulty getting plays published. Though she was involved in the NAACP's anti-lynching campaigns of 1936 and 1938, the NAACP refused to produce many of her plays claiming they gave a feeling of hopelessness. Johnson was also a member of the Writers League Against Lynching, which included Countée Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Fauset, and Alain Locke. The organization sought a federal anti-lynching bill.

Salons

Soon after her husband's death, Johnson began to host what became 40 years of weekly "Saturday Salons", for friends and authors, including Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Anne Spencer, Richard Bruce Nugent, Alain Locke, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Angelina Weld Grimké and Eulalie Spence — all major contributors to the New Negro Movement, which is better known today as the Harlem Renaissance.

She was especially close to the European-American writer Angelina Grimké. Johnson called her home the "Half Way House" for friends traveling, and a place where they "could freely discuss politics and personal opinions" and where those with no money and no place to stay would be welcome.

She died in Washington, D.C., in 1966.

In September 2009, it was announced that Johnson would be inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame.

Major works

Poems

The Heart of a Woman (1916)

Bronze (1922)

An Autumn Love Cycle (1928)

Share My World (1962)

Plays

Blue Blood (1926)

Plumes (1927)

Frederick Douglass (1930s)

Paupaulekejo (1926)

Starting Point (play) (1930s)

A Sunday Morning in the South (1925)

And Yet They Paused (1938)

A Bill to Be Passed (1938)

Wikipedia

[tamsoj]

Nin Andrews, "Song of the Orgasm," from The Plume Anthology of Poetry 4