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All my life I’ve seen sneakers on wires hanging over the City but damn if I know what it means. I’ve heard a couple of theories but never anything 100% concrete. And so I think it might be time to explore this question a little further in some poems, maybe even some short fiction. Of course, all of this fits right into Anywhere Avenue but it may also fit into a new chapbook project.

Yeah, and that’s my long way around the block way of sying that I think I’m going to jump into a new project.

Now, if anyone who’s reading this would love to drop YOUR personal theories of sneaker on telephone wires/power lines I would be happy to read ’em.

At the Edge of the City

I toss my sneakers in the air
   and catch a telephone line
to broadcast my stance—
   to stay steady
to my crew,
   to stay steady
to my word and bond—

   to keep the City
fresh and fly
   with a quick step
and a glide,
   and rock steady

in the face of the
   piked air flare
of the dawn.

From Salon.com

If Obama is elected, he’ll be one of the most literary presidents in recent memory. Although his boyhood and youth in Hawaii and Indonesia were not especially bookish, Obama the reader blossomed as an undergraduate at Occidental College in California and, especially, during the two monkish years he spent finishing up his degree at Columbia University in New York. “I had tons of books,” he told his biographer, David Mendell (“Obama: From Promise to Power”), about this time in his life. “I read everything. I think that was the period when I grew as much as I have ever grown intellectually. But it was a very internal growth.” Even after he left New York to work as a community organizer in Chicago, Mendell reports, Obama lived so much like a retiring writer — spending many hours holed up in a spartan apartment with volumes of “philosophy and literature” — that some of his colleagues assumed he was gathering material for a novel.

Solitudes Crowded With Loneliness by Bob Kaufman
Rating: 4 of 5 stars

Jazz poetry at its finest and I can feel where some other Beats licked their riffs off of.

In the “Poems” section, the music is all in the lines and the language so Kaufman doesn’t have to throw his lines all over the page to affect musicality, he just lets them roll on their own beat and effect their own drones and tones.

“Second April” switches off into stanza sections set in newspaper style justified blocks of prose-imagery that chronicles the speaker’s stint in rehab. The account is chilling but never falls into self-pity (from the speaker or from the reader) thanks to its anchored speech.

“Abomunist Manfifesto” is a straight trip. Invented and re-imagined history with the just-concocted language directly aimed at the current political system is the height of poetic satire that modern experimental/performance/academic/slam poets are still aspiring to reach.

This feels like the kind of poetry collection I am going to have to revisit more than once.

View all my reviews.

Incognegro by Mat Johnson
Rating: 3 of 5 stars

Mat Johnson writes a fantastic murder mystery set in a small town, complete with the outsider trying to reach the truth despite the local powers-that-be. But add that our outsider is Zane Pinchback–a Southern Black journalist based in Harlem, light-skinned enough to pass for white, that infiltrates and reports back on lynchings–and the small town is pre-Civil Rights era Mississippi, and you have the makings of a serial that cuts to the heart of White and Black racism.

Warren Pleece’s art sharply complements Johnson’s writing with his ink rich, precise black and whites that focus on the emotion of the characters facials and body dynamics.

I hope we see this creative team and Zane Pinchback in more Vertigo offerings.

View all my reviews.

Barb hit me up with the challenge of riffing off of two poems from Lorca’s The Cricket Sings: Poems and Songs for Children. One came pretty quickly, and one took me a hard minute to get through. You can take a guess at which one was harder.

Tumbaron Tres Torres
en el estilo de Federico García Lorca’s “Cortaron Tres Arboles”

Eran tres.
(Vino el viento a tumbar las puertas.)
Eran dos. (Pájaros envueltos en llamas.)
Era uno.
Era ninguno.
(Ahora la Ciudad esta vacía.)

§
Cucaracha
en el estilo de Federico García Lorca’s “Mariposa”

Cucaracha del piso,
ay, sí eres listo,
Cucaracha del piso
eres mas que insecto.
Cucaracha del piso,
¡vete de aquí!
No te quieres ir,
pero tú tienes que ir.
Cucaracha del piso
eres mas que insecto.
Mi ultimo enemigo.
Cucaracha del piso,
vete de aquí.
¡Vete de aquí!
Cucaracha. ¿Sigues aquí?