* * * * *
Mockingbirds at Jerusalem: A Poetic
Memoir
By Rudolph Lewis
This distorted place could and will never be one of permanence for a smart
black boy. He will always seek to fulfill his self in other spaces. Jerusalem generates
exiles. Beginning mid-1960s, I sought housing with indoor toilets and tap
water, and joy in America’s
urban centers, and in a neo-colonial Congo,
in New Orleans
with poets, artists, musicians, educators, and priests. I worked as porter,
teacher, journalist and librarian, studied modern art, listened to jazzmen, and
passed out words against war and injustice during the American war against the
Viet Cong.
When my exiled world became too cold and depressing to bear, I returned home
to my grandmother’s voice—her stories and songs. Most of these poems were first
written in 2006 and have been in revision for seven years. They begin with a
poem to my grandfather, William “Tinka” Lewis, who raised me as his son and
died in 1970. There are many poems that call up my grandmother, Ella Lewis,
whom I called “Mama” and from whom I learned our family history. In poor health
she was suffering loss of weight and dementia. Her daughter Annie made her
comfortable in that home that Tinka built in the late 1950s.
* * * * *
Penn State Student 1
Altoona: What
inspired you to become a poet?
R. Lewis: Inspiration
does not come all at once. It comes in stages or waves like the sea to the
shore. My writing poetry would have been
less likely if I had not completed my undergraduate English major at University of Maryland,
College Park.
And that would not have been so if not for Max Wilson, former chair of
Philosophy Department, Howard
University. He led me to
and encouraged my studies in Western fiction and philosophy. Institution and
man challenged what I thought I knew about myself or life as is. I became
convinced of the possibility there were many more choices than I imagined.
My mother’s mother raised me in the Western Tidewater—a village
named Jerusalem.
For a boy four romping around in green/grass-purple pine-leafy oak world life
was mostly idyllic. One gives the devil his due in this world and the next, as
I became more familiar with the world beyond Jerusalem. At home I felt quite safe. We had
had our monsters roar at night from drink and despair. But I was born a bit
before the Civil Rights became the topic of struggle. There were no definite
sign that Jim Crow wouldn’t boast its clannish face another 50 years from then.
In 1954, Mr. Civil Rights, Thurgood Marshall convinced the Supreme Court to
free Negroes us from Jim Crow laws began in the previous century. Before I
could get out of high school in 1965, a great deal of Freedom work had been
done. There was still much to do. When I left home both schools elementary and
high were ones of state segregation.
Much blood had been spilt in Freedom Rides, Sit-ins, and
Voter Rights Drives in the Deep South. I was
spared those cruelties and brutalities. From my little Virginia hamlet I had no idea what was going
on in the world. If there was knowledge of current Negro civil rights issues at
the high school among the Negro teachers, it was done in a whisper
intentionally that high school children in Sussex did not know what was going
on. This conspiracy of silence kept the young blind and without direction. The
contradictions are spurs for thought. Educationally, I realized how more
fortunate I than my mother and grandmother. I was the first in the family to
finish high school. I was thought to be smart, a lover of books. But I also
played hoops and a bit of boxing.
A year out of the
country I was a year at Morgan State, living with my mom in Edmondson
Village in Baltimore. Then came Fall 1967 at Morgan
State College. Stokeley Carmichael spoke. It was like the horn of Gabriel
waking the dead. I became aware of the stakes of Vietnam. It was my first protest. I
ripped up my Selective Service card and declared an unwavering resistance to
the draft. February 1968 I sealed my fate and dropped out of school. My status
changed from 2-A to 1-A. There were so many speeches and poems. These were the
BAM people, the cultural expression of the Black Power movement. There were
poems by Sonia Sachez and Richard Wright. Amiri Baraka, Marvin X, and Nikki Giovanni.
These were exhilarating times—the sayings of Mao and Papa Doc. That was my
social/political life. That was not my personal life. Writing, and writing
about the personal can change lives. Much more than a shrink.
In short, a bit of formal education, a wonderful mentor,
reading and writing about many poems Shakespearean, Having role models like the
poets Lee Meitzen Grue and Yusef Komunyakaa in 1985 really set me to write
blues infused lyrics. I began to develop a voice. My style matured as I
continued to write as I made use of my grand-mom’s stories to hold onto my home
and childhood, me grandson of a sharecropper.
Altoona: What is
your process of writing? Do you have a certain routine?
R. Lewis: Some
times I just begin to type the first thing that comes to mind or that I have
been wrestling with it. I copy notes. Add bits an pieces here and there. I keep
on tussling until I see a line of thought. Then I try to more color, more
humor, more wonder. One holds one’s breath and then look deeper. It all depends
what you want. Our ancestors are not dead: the folks hold onto them. I hold
onto the stories my grandmother told me. It’s a goldmine. But I’m rather gentle
about the tough times.
Altoona: Do you
ever suffer from writer’s block?
R. Lewis: I’m not
sure what you mean by “writer’s block.” Of course, I’ve heard people speak of
it. I know when I’m not on fire, when I have problems organizing my content, or
unable to put the notes together right so they sound right. It means I’m not
able to think matters through always easily. So one endures and reckless at
once. Or I begin fresh, start all over again. I have lots to say. I don’t think
I have time enough to say it.
Altoona: Do you
have a favorite place you like to write?
R. Lewis: It is
rare I write with a pencil or pen. I usually write at a desktop screen. When I
was at Jerusalem,
from one bedroom window I could see the church cemetery, through the other side
the white church steeple. Stretching out, I’d walk out on the screen porch, sit
a moment, walk out to the road, then on into the cemetery and look up at the
stars and moon. Come back and sit on the porch again in the dark mist or the
clear full moon night. Then go back in my bedroom with my desktop screen. The night, the birds, the tree frogs, the
deer, walking on pine straw—all were subject to my pen..
But that is not where I am. And although I’m out in the
countryside, clearly, I’m not lined up with the moon and stars. So I’m rather
erratic now. I’ve another manuscript “Devils in the Dust,.” Waiting on me. I’ve
been sitting on it for several years going over and over the poems, ever,
hopefully with fresh eyes and ears.
* * * * *
I Am New Orleans
and Other Poems
by Marcus Bruce Christian
* * * * *
Penn State Student 2
R. Lewis: I was
about 20 years old when I read the BAM poets in Black World (1968), a Johnson Publication that responded to the new
Black Consciousness Movement. My first effort at poetry writing was while an
undergraduate at University MD College Park, ca. 1978. It was an absolute
failure, mostly rhymes. And I was already 30 years old, studying literary
criticism. My real efforts began in 1985 with a New Orleans writing club led by Lee Meitzen
Grue, a local poet and editor. While teaching writing at UNO I made fast
friends with Yusef Komunyakaa. I learned about his writings before I met him. I
did not understand his poetry but I found it, moving and unique. I was forty by
the time I got used to the pen. Yusef helped me to develop and appreciate the
qualities of Marcus B. Christian, the Dean of New Orleans Letters. I spent a
lot of time with Christian and Komunyakaa. In 1999 I co-edited and published a
volume of selected Marcus Christian poems under the title “I Am New Orleans
& Other Poems by Marcus Bruce Christian.”
So it was in New
Orleans I began to write poetry. The city is cultural
rich—so many stories and so many cultural traditions. Yusef made me aware of
techniques: marking off a poem—the line breaks, deleting and rearranging words
and phrases, how to end a poem or a stanza, taking risks, choosing the right words and titles, ranking qualities
of poems, and more. An interview I did with him before his Pulitzer has found its
way into a published book of YK interviews. I really got to know him and his
poetry.
I felt I had crossed over into another world, like a beatnik
in the 1950s. Poetry has the attraction of religion—its ardor and agony. In
some instances I turned my grandmother stories into other tales and other
poems. There were Baptist sermons, spirituals, and other tales of Nathaniel
Turner. All of that was caught up in some incomplete way what I experienced
returning home while my grandmother approached 100 years old.
PSU Question: Who or what inspired you to begin writing?
R. Lewis: In
1987, I returned home to Jerusalem,
where I grew up on a small farm. It’s not so extraordinary to be inspired by a
place. Jerusalem
was built to be remembered. Three generations. My grandmother and her
grandmother were storytellers—singer. They could raise a song during August
Revival. I came back from New Orleans
where I had found a poetry journal (lasted three issues). My first poems
published in a local journal. Ihere was so much literary activity. I sponsored a poetry test. I dove into the
archive of Marcus Bruce Christian of New
Orleans. Why not Jerusalem?
So I began to write about that world and the people of my childhood. But I had
spent most of my life in the city. That was a contrast at core of my
writing—the earnest and honest country life up against the well-lit avenues of
urban life.
I was curious. And I had belief in self. The many I’ve been
and those to come. There were other influences. I found ChickenBones: A Journal
in 2001. By 2005, it was jumping, the digital center was the Flooding of New
Orleans. I was publishing all kinds of writings, not least the poets, like
Kalau ya Salaam, Patricia Wesley, Sam Greenlee and many others. I shared my
poems on line—some good, some not so good. I collected them, rewrote them,
reposted them, and revised them again. There was encouragement. But friends
were always kind. I struggled to create my own style that satisfied me.
PSU Question: Have
you struggled throughout your writing career with things such as critics or
rude comments?
R. Lewis: To be a
critic is to be a bit rude. Nuances. Subtleties. Thus the Rhetorical and poetry
of today. I like a bit of noise like the BAM poets, like Larry Neal and Amiri
Baraka. I was told I was making Baraka sounds not my on. Those kinds of
criticisms are dark and deep, and I have only a slight glimpse what it means.
My ancestors and Jerusalem
live because I hold onto them. Memory may be more beautiful than any art. They
helped me to develop a passion true of my own. The subtleties and nuances came
with years of reflective revisions.
PSU Question: Do
you have advice for someone considering a career in writing poetry?
R. Lewis: Be
practical. Get a job! Become a banker, a foreign correspondent. Become a
Buddhist. Choose poetry as you choose a fine stallion. There’s no easy way out
of this dilemma. Go on write a poem—create drama, beauty!
* * * * *
When the Wanderers Come Home (African Poetry Book)
by Patricia Jabbeh Wesley
Described by African scholar and literary critic Chielozona
Eze as “one of the most prolific African poets of the twenty-first century,”
Patricia Jabbeh Wesley composed When the Wanderers Come Home during a
four-month visit to her homeland of Liberia in 2013. She gives powerful voice
to the pain and inner turmoil of a homeland still reconciling itself
in the aftermath of multiple wars and destruction.
Wesley, a native Liberian, calls on deeply rooted African motifs and
proverbs, utilizing the poetics of both the West and Africa
to convey her grief. Autobiographical in nature, the poems highlight the
hardships of a diaspora African and the devastation of a country and continent
struggling to recover.
When the Wanderers Come Home is a woman’s story about being an exile, a
survivor, an outsider in her own country and is her cry for the Africa that is being lost in wars across the continent,
creating more wanderers and world citizens.
Penn State Student 3
Samantha: How did you know that you wanted to pursue a degree in English?
Rudy: Becoming an English major resulted
from a series of acts intentional and unintentional. As a math major, I dropped
out of Morgan State College the winter of 1968 to join “the revolution” as a
member of SNCC (pronounced “snick”). After leaving Morgan, I learned a lot
about racial history and politics by reading recommended books and getting to
know persons much more acquainted with Baltimore— the who’s who in black city
politics. For a while I was a community organizer. Then I worked later as a
union organizer (volunteer and paid) for Local 1199 in Baltimore, handling
grievances of health care workers, mostly black women, averaging $1.65 an hour
without benefits or job security.. In 1969, Local 1199 organized 5,000 of these
workers in less than six months. I was involved mostly in administrating the won
contracts.
During
this union period I met my first wife: the Local had hired her as an executive
secretary. Our marriage (1972-1976) permeated with guilt and shame, ended
disastrously. I became spiritually unmoored. For about six months, to refocus
my mind, I became active in Nichiren Shoshu, chanting “nam yoho ringe kho.” But
with a questioning mind, my solace was temporary. In life, one climbs one hill
only to spill into another valley of unease or disappointment.
I
found a mentor, a Haitian philosopher named Max Wilson, who I knew from Morgan State.
It was he who set me back on an academic path, in a Morgan State
program called University without Walls. It was a one-on-one study in which the
chosen professor and student make a curriculum with readings and other
activities, including visits to museums, musical programs, also arts activities
like ballet. To develop my inner self, he encouraged me to keep a diary, as a
means to gain some relief to some of my marital problems, and then a journal,
as a means to reflect on my readings. The whole was a shadow of a classical
liberal arts education.
I
read major fiction writers of America,
the UK, Spain, France,
and Spain—especially
those novels that dealt with the complications of sexuality, e.g., D.H.
Lawrence, Proust, and Henry Miller. After reading the country’s literature I
studied its major philosophers, in particular its existentialist philosophers
like Unamumo and Ortega y Gasset. My two-year study passed quickly as I worked
full-time as a pot washer and porter at Maryland General Hospital.
Believing I had developed greater discipline, Wilson
made a way for me to register at University
of Maryland at College Park, previously a segregated state
university. He thought it would be more of an intellectual challenge than
Morgan. The plan was that I would major in comparative literature. At College Park that major
was still in development, so I majored in English. I remained there for five
years (1976-1981), finally receiving my master’s degree in English.
Samantha: What gave you the idea to write poems
about family history?
Rudy: Ultimately, it was the influence of my
grandmother’s family and family origin stories I was told when I was a kid. It
became a rich source that partially developed my sense of identity. Although I
had written some poems in this direction in the late 1980s, I was further
encouraged by the poetry books of Patricia Jabbeh Wesley and other poets. But
my family writings are a way to provide a kind of immortality to traditions
that my grandmother began so long ago and a source for generations that come
after me. As they say, the dead live when we hold onto them.
Samantha: What was your first reaction when you
realized that the world was reacting to your poems on your website?
Rudy: Web technology was key in developing a
reading audience, as well as my skills as a journalist and a poet. That would
not have come to be if I had not learned to construct web sites while in
library school at UMCP (1993-1997). I became frustrated with print publishers.
For I had collected piles and piles of documents and other writings that I
believe would never get an audience, and that even if published in print, that
audience would be small and select with a short reading life. So the
development of ChickenBones as a
unique web-site was an answer to a literary problem. Publishing my poems was an
extra benefit. I was elated that my web friends were kind and thought well of
my poetic efforts. It encouraged me to take both my prose and poetry more
seriously. Most of these online poems have been rewritten more times than I can
recall.
Samantha: Who was your main influence when it
came to writing poetry throughout the years?
Rudy: I encouraged poets and other writers
to submit their work to ChickenBones: A
Journal. I received a wide-range of poems, some so-so, some quite
excellent. Some of these poets had books of poetry that impressed me greatly.
I’ve already spoken of Patricia Jabbeh Wesley. But there was also Louis Reyes
Rivera (1945-2012), both a poet and a teacher of poetry; and then there was
Kalamu ya Salaam. Rivera encouraged me to try my hand composing the free verse
or non-rhymed sonnet. That advice encouraged discipline as well as innovation
in choice of words as well as brevity.
Samantha: What made you to think to write the
poem “Home Is Where Relief Is.”
Rudy: In the larger sense, “Mockingbirds at Jerusalem” partially had
its source in the poems of Etheridge Knight, a poet I met while I was working
on my master’s. Knight’s poem “The Idea of Ancestry” is a great American poem,
as well as his other prison literature. His poetry helped gain him a path out
of prison. But more particularly, the poem expresses a sentiment with respect
to my birth mother.
