A Quote by Carolyn Forche
Blood Dazzler is Patricia Smith's impassioned lyric chronicle of a beloved city in peril, a city whose people were left to die before us all, a people who were the heart of our country and lifeblood of our culture. After rising water, winds and abandonment, after our failure and neglect, comes this symphony of utterance from the ruins: many-voiced, poignant, sorrowful and fierce. This is poetry taking the full measure of its task.
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American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them, we die long before women do, with our hearts exploding or our blood pressure rising or our livers eaten away by alcohol because that lake of grief inside us has no outlet. We, men, die because our faces were not watered enough.
I remembered some people who lived across the street from our home as we were being taken away. When I was a teenager, I had many after-dinner conversations with my father about our internment. He told me that after we were taken away, they came to our house and took everything. We were literally stripped clean.
Speaking of people I had to exclude: Hank Williams. which is to say, songs are part of lyric poetry in my book, my thinking. In fact they are the urgent element of poetry in our time, they carry the most emotion for the most people in our culture. everyone LOVES poetry, because we all love (one form or another) of rock and roll (be it folk to emo to rap). It's all rock and roll and all lyric poetry.
I have just been to a city in the West, a city full of poets, a city they have made safe for poets. The whole city is so lovely that you do not have to write it up to make it poetry; it is ready-made for you. But, I don't know - the poetry written in that city might not seem like poetry if read outside of the city. It would be like the jokes made when you were drunk; you have to get drunk again to appreciate them.
I believe in books. And when our people [coughing] - our people of Jerusalem, let's say after the Romans destroyed the temple and the city, all we took is a little book, that's all. Not treasures, we had no treasures. They were ransacked, taken away. But the book - the little book - and this book produced more books, thousands, hundreds of thousands of books, and in the book we found our memory, and our attachment to that memory is what kept us alive.
As children, we looked up to our maids and our nannies, who were playing in some ways the role of our mothers. They were paid to be nice to us, to look after us, teach us things and take time out of their day to be with us. As a child you think of these people as an extension of your mother.
Patricia Smith is one of the best poets around and has been for a long time. Her Blood Dazzler is full of capacious soul and formal inventiveness: the compassion and artfulness necessary to capture the tragedies and Tragedy of Katrina. Smith is herself a storm of beautiful, frightening talent. Her words will wash you or wash you away. I consider this new book a major literary event.
I was influenced by the political environment of our country that has just gained freedom from British colonialism. And the seminal figures in that environment were Mahatma Gandhi, who had been assassinated shortly after I was born, but nevertheless dominated the collective psyche of the country. And of course there were other statesmen who were very much part of the culture we knew as well as looked upon by society as leaders, and mentors, and people that inspires us to have a vision for idealism.
Venice is ever the fragile labyrinth at the edge of the sea and it reminds us how brief and perilous the journeys of our lives are; perhaps that is why we love it so. City of plagues and brief liaisons, city of lingering deaths and incendiary loves, city of chimeras, nightmares, pigeons, bells. You are the only city in the world whose dialect has a word for the shimmer of canal water reflected on the ceiling of a room.
To Toronto City Council:
The Sam The Record Man store and sign were important fixtures in Toronto's musical landscape as well as its Civic history. Sadly, all that remains now are our memories of the store and this magnificant neon sign. Ryerson and they City of Toronto should absolutely preserve what myself and many of its citizens consider to be an important symbol of our past and of that store's contributions to our culture.
But in a way you can say that after leaving the sea, after all those millions of years of living inside of the sea, we took the ocean with us. When a woman makes a baby, she gives it water, inside her body, to grow in. That water inside her body is almost exactly the same as the water of the sea. It is salty, by just the same amount. She makes a little ocean, in her body. And not only this. Our blood and our sweating, they are both salty, almost exactly like the water from the sea is salty. We carry oceans inside of us, in our blood and our sweat. And we are crying the oceans, in our tears.
If I could, I'd go city by city, county by county, town by town, and talk to people to explain to them what immigration is really about - that this is not about me, this is not about us, this is not about us taking something from you. This is not about us being a threat to you. This is not about Democrat or Republican, and this is not really about border security. But in some ways our politics, and in many ways our politicians, have gotten in the way.
We've come full circle but the best remains the heart of the city, the greatest center of the greatest city, our Acropolis, where our Christmas tree is lighted.
Everything we knew condemned us, and our questioning condemned us most of all. Knowledge was the way of our people, and knowledge was dangerous. It was the first thing that freed you and the thing that put you in peril. It was the key to the ten gates. I saw them clearly now, each and every one, the gates that were there for me. Ashes, Bones, Grass, Heart, Stone, Love, Sorrow, Blood, Earth, Sky.
United always had that flag which counted the years City were without a title, making fun of our fans. After the 6-1, they were quiet!
No one of Lincoln's old acquaintances in this city ever heard of his conversion to Christianity by Dr. Smith or anyone else. It was never suggested nor thought of here until after his death.... I never saw him read a second of time in Dr. Smith's book on Infidelity. He threw at down upon our table - spit upon it as it were - and never opened it to my knowledge.
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