This clip of an incoherent, rambling politician ran on South African TV a few weeks ago.
After a few days, a second clip in the sequence was flighted. It emerged that it was a clever campaign for a South African brand of Parmalat milk.
Here’s the second clip or the actual commercial:
It works?
===========
mikepearson85—March 29, 2010 — Parmalat EverFresh is a premium long life milk, that delicious for longer or "Good as ever, whenever." To hype this commercial up, we released a viral of the politician's whole speech...
Ad by Net#work BBDO Cape Town. Shot by Danny Boyle of Sweet Spot Content.
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was founded at Shaw University in April of 1960. Hoping to harness the enthusiasm and willpower of young people to end segregation, founders Ella Baker, James Lawson and Julian Bond organized protests and actions across the south. SNCC was vital to the impact of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. This Wednesday through Sunday, SNCC celebrates its 50th anniversary with a conference at Shaw. "The State of Things" will broadcast live from the campus in Raleigh on Friday, April 16 with a panel of SNCC activists. But first, historians Seth Kotch, of the Southern Oral History Program at UNC-Chapel Hill, and Duke Distinguished Professor of History Bill Chafe join host Frank Stasio to listen to archival tape of Ella Baker and Julian Bond discussing SNCC's founding and its legacy.
(April 13) -- Without the video, this might have been a classic case of "he said, she said."
But there is a video. And so the case against two University of Maryland students accused of attacking police after a basketball game last month was dropped after the footage showed county police beating one of those students repeatedly with a baton. Now a new kind of accusation is being leveled, this one against the officers: police brutality.
"The video shows the charging documents were nothing more than a cover, a fairy tale they made up to cover for the officers' misconduct," Christopher Griffiths, one of the students' lawyers, told The Washington Post. "The video shows gratuitous violence against a defenseless individual."
On April 9, a Prince George's County prosecutor dropped charges against 21-year-old John McKenna and 19-year-old Ben Donat. But for the Maryland police, the story doesn't end there. Prosecutors are launching a criminal investigation into the officers' actions, and the county police said it would conduct an internal review. Three officers have been suspended.
"I'm outraged and disappointed after viewing the video," Prince George's County Police Chief Roberto Hylton told the Post. "That's not the type of professional conduct we promote. Any employee who uses excessive force will be held accountable."
On Monday, lawyers for the students made sure the video, which was filmed by another student, went public.
Officers in black riot gear can be seen swarming in the streets, and one of them clearly strikes one of the students with a baton, seemingly without cause. He hits the ground almost immediately but is struck at least five more times before the police move on.
University of Maryland basketball games can be rowdy affairs. In 2001, a disappointing loss compelled a mob of angry students to maraud through the streets, causing more than $500,000 in damage.
And on March 3 this year, after Maryland beat archrival Duke, the big win sent hundreds of celebrating students into the streets near the College Park campus. Police made 28 arrests as they tried to clear the streets of nearly 1,000 students.
Last month, Hylton said the March 3 riot was "large, unruly and destructive" and noted that students were setting things on fire and removing street signs. In a sworn statement, county police officer Sean McAleavey said McKenna and Donat "struck" other officers and their horses, "causing minor injuries."
In a statement last month, university spokesman Millree Williams said "the post-game behavior of some students is inconsistent with the high standards -- in academics, attitudes and in behaviors -- that we have set at the University of Maryland College Park."
But students painted a different picture.
"It was like a war zone or something," said Kerry Kramer, a freshman. "You just would hear like the shots going off, and you would just like start running because you didn't want to get hit," she told the Post last month.
A local news station captured video of students with their hands above their heads as though they were surrendering, and blood was splattered on the ground, although it cannot be confirmed that police caused those injuries.
And the tape seems to corroborate assertions by University of Maryland students that the police response to the mob, which included using pepper spray and rubber bullets, may have been excessive. It doesn't help that Prince George's County police are already battling a certain kind of reputation. In 2004, the department was under review by the U.S. Department of Justice for concerns over excessive force.
In 2001, The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a story about the suburban force's penchant for brutality. "The cops in Maryland's second most populous county had a reputation for turning routine traffic stops into Rodney King incidents sans video camera," Coates wrote.
Last month, the University of Maryland's student newspaper, The Diamondback, described the reputation the force had earned over the years among students, fairly or not: "For many years, the Prince George's County Police Department had a hard-nosed image: Act first, ask questions later."
“They Killed the Wounded and Drove Over Their Bodies”: Iraqis Speak About WikiLeaks Video, But Who Is Listening?
By now we’ve heard plenty of people’s opinions on the now famous WikiLeaks video showing the U.S. military killing 12 Iraqi civilians — from Defense Secretary Robert Gates to Stephen Colbert to Josh Stieber, a former soldier turned conscientious objector who would have been on the mission over Baghdad that day. But missing from the discussion have been the voices of Iraqis themselves, those who witnessed the slaughter, and especially those whose loved ones were killed.
Fortunately, this week and last, Democracy Now! broadcast some of these voices loudly and clearly, providing a much needed dose of reality amid so much talk of “rules of engagement” or WikiLeaks’s political “bias.” On Monday, Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez played clips from an interview with Ahlam Abdelhussain, whose husband, Saleh Mutashar, died trying to rescue one of the two Reuters newsman hit by the blasts while his two children were injured. “My husband did nothing wrong,” she says, now a widow.
“How do I feel? What can I say? Why was he shot with his children in the car? They did nothing wrong. He was helping a journalist. What was his crime? What was the crime of our children who are left with no father and no support.”
Saleh’s nephew, Anwar, said:
He was carrying wounded people during the American attacks. He was trying to help. They believe that someone who was carrying a gun will take his children along with him? Unbelievable. What can we do? God take revenge from the Americans. They destroyed us and destroyed our nations. What is the future of those children? They are orphans.
Today, Robert Gates continued to defend the actions depicted in the WikiLeaks video, telling reporters on a military aircraft, “You’re looking at a situation through a soda straw and you have no context or perspective.”
Perspective? How’s this for “perspective”:
“We used to live in a rented house,” says Ahlam Abdelhussain. Her husband “worked as a construction worker.”
We didn’t have any other income. After his death, I was left with nothing. My children were wounded. We were devastated. My father-in-law took us to live with him. Life became very difficult. My children are still suffering from their wounds. My daughter still suffers from pain in her head and her stomach. My son is still in pain after his surgery. We don’t have a pension or any other income to rely on, so my father-in-law took us to live with him.
And if it’s more “context” you need, consider this report by independent journalists Rick Rowley and David Enders, who were on the scene the day after the massacre:
RICK ROWLEY: We came to the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad one day after a U.S. attack helicopter strike that killed twelve Iraqis, including a journalist and a driver working with Reuters. The U.S. military claimed that they were under attack from rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire and that all of the dead, except for the two Reuters employees, were insurgents. But local residents showed us the remains of a burnt-out van spattered with blood and told us a different story.
WITNESS 1: [translated] The helicopter came yesterday from there and hovered around. Then it came right here where a group of people were standing. They didn’t have any weapons or arms of any sort. This area doesn’t have armed insurgents. They destroyed the place and shot at people, and they didn’t let anyone help the wounded.
WITNESS 2: [translated] I swear to God it was helicopters that attacked us. These people are all witnesses. They attacked us twice, not once.
RICK ROWLEY: Another resident went on to describe what happened to the man who tried to help the wounded.
WITNESS 3: [translated] The driver went to carry the injured, who had been shot in front of his eyes. While he was going to pick them up, the pilot of the helicopter kept flying above, watching the scene. They started firing at the wounded and the dead. The driver and the two children were also there. The helicopter continued shooting until none of the bodies were moving.
RICK ROWLEY: We asked the crowd of people what might have prompted the attack, and they said that when the journalist arrived, residents quickly gathered around him.
WITNESS 2: [translated] The group of civilians had gathered here because people need cooking oil and gas. They wanted to demonstrate in front of the media and show that they need things like oil, gas, water and electricity. The situation here is dramatically deteriorating. The journalists were walking around, and then the Americans started shooting. They started shooting randomly and targeted peaceful civilians from the neighborhood.
WITNESS 3: [translated] There were children in the car. Were they carrying weapons? There were two children.
WITNESS 2: [translated] Do we help the wounded or kill them? They killed all the wounded and drove over their bodies. Everyone witnessed it. And the journalist was among those who was injured, and the armored vehicle drove over his body.
WITNESS 3: [translated] The U.S. forces, who call themselves “friendly” forces, were telling us on speakers that they were here to protect and help us. We heard those words very clearly. But what we saw was the opposite of that. We demand the American Congress and President Bush supervise their soldiers’ actions in Iraq.
Secretary Gates — and anyone else who defends the videotaped aerial murder of Iraqi civilians as somehow justified — should listen to these voices before they open their mouths again.
The Mothership was an awe-inspiring stage piece, as seen in 1976 concert footage. (Shout! Factory Photo)
By Chris Richards
Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, April 12, 2010; A01
This is a story about a UFO.
Not just any UFO. The Mothership.
It might be the most awe-inspiring stage prop in the history of American music and it belonged to funk legends Parliament-Funkadelic. Since the Mothership vanished in Prince George's County in 1982, rumors of its whereabouts have mutated into local lore: It burned in a fire. It was disassembled. It was stolen. Scrapped. Kidnapped. Thrown in the woods. Chained to a truck by a drug dealer and dragged to funk-knows-where. The band's most devoted followers say it flew off into space.
This is a story about trying to find it.
In concert, the Mothership was last spotted in Detroit in 1981, belching dry ice fumes and flashing kaleidoscopic light. An aluminum flying saucer, it was about 20 feet in diameter and decked out with dazzling lights. Below it stood a band of otherworldly eccentrics celebrating the hard-won freedoms of the civil rights movement in a freaky, fantastical display.
Darryll Brooks remembers the last time he saw the Mothership. It wasn't in Detroit. It was in a junkyard in Seat Pleasant. Brooks last saw it there because Brooks is the guy who threw the Mothership away.
It was the spring of 1982 and Parliament-Funkadelic frontman George Clinton and his bandmates were battling debt, drug addiction and each other. Brooks, who ran the group's Washington-based tour production company, says the only way he could pay the band's debts was to pawn its gear. With no place to store a spacecraft, he dumped the Mothership in a junkyard behind a Shell station on Martin Luther King Jr. Highway. But 28 years later, its final resting place remains a mystery.
Here's where it isn't: In that Seat Pleasant junkyard.
Here's where it might be: Sleeping peacefully beneath a quilt of P.G. County kudzu.
Ask Seat Pleasant residents about a missing UFO and you'll get puzzled looks and a few laughs. Tromp through the neighboring woods and you'll cut your hands on the thorny bramble. You'll also find abandoned tires, mattresses, vacuum cleaners -- but no spaceships.
Parliament-Funkadelic guitarist Garry Shider resides in Upper Marlboro, not too far from where the ship disappeared. Maybe he knows where to find it.
"Aw man," Shider says. "You ain't gonna find the Mothership."
Endlessly imitated
Throughout the '70s, Clinton and his bandmates blurred the line between escapism and empowerment with a glut of albums that have been endlessly sampled, imitated and analyzed. Look at the decades of funk, rock, techno, go-go, Prince hits and jam bands that came in P-Funk's imaginative wake -- "influential" doesn't quite cut it. Without Parliament-Funkadelic, Lady Gaga would not wear ridiculous outfits and hip-hop might not exist.
Onstage, the band was a living, breathing, panting comic book -- Clinton in his stringy blond wigs, bassist Bootsy Collins in his star-shaped shades, Shider in nothing but angel wings, combat boots and Pampers. It was expressive, subversive, brilliant.
"They were celebrating the intellectual breadth of the black experience and giving people a grand space to celebrate all that they had become," says California author and funk historian Rickey Vincent. "Sly Stone said, 'I Want to Take You Higher.' George Clinton said, 'Yeah, and I got the Mothership to take you there.' In a sense, he was doing what black folks had wanted to do for generations: Take themselves up."
Clinton, his 68-year-old voice rasping over the phone from Los Angeles, agrees: "We were higher than anyone else!" (He and the current iteration of the band are scheduled to play the 9:30 club on Monday.)
Before the Mothership was built, it was a concept. Parliament released "Mothership Connection" in 1975, an album with a title track about hitchhiking to cosmic transcendence: "Swing down, sweet chariot. Stop and let me ride." Clinton started dreaming up a tour to match. After watching the Who's 1969 rock opera "Tommy," he asked himself: "How do you do a funk opera? What about [black people] in space?"
He called upon David Bowie's tour producer, Jules Fisher, to help bring the Mothership to life. "This was theater. This was drama," says Fisher, a renowned Broadway lighting designer. "Current shows like U2 and the Stones -- they don't provide this narrative arc."
The Mothership was assembled in Manhattan and made its first descent in New Orleans from the rafters of Municipal Auditorium on Oct. 27, 1976.
Minds were blown.
"That first night was really huge for us," Clinton says. "But we made one mistake." The band unveiled the Mothership at the beginning of the show -- an impossible stunt to follow. The next night, in Baton Rouge, the ship didn't land until much later in the set.
Keyboardist Bernie Worrell remembers being unable to look away. "It was phenomenal, man. You couldn't describe it," he says. "I can play and not look at the keys. I watched it every time it would come down."
'Whole different love'
Washingtonians greeted the Mothership with unparalleled fervor. The nation's capital had long been a stronghold for the band and in 1975, Parliament released the "Chocolate City" album, a supremely funky mash note that popularized the nickname Washington had earned for its majority-black population.
When radio personality Donnie Simpson first moved to the area, he saw P-Funk stoking a unique dialogue with the community. "As hot as I thought they were in Detroit, when I came here, it was a whole different love," he says. "A whole different appreciation for the funk."
Washington is also where Clinton first hired promoters Brooks and Carol Kirkendall for a 1977 gig at Landover's Capital Centre. "Once we started playing there, it was all over," Clinton says.
Brooks had never seen anything like it. "Here's a guy coming out of a Mothership with a mink coat and platform shoes," he says. "And a cane? And a fur hat? C'mon, man. Black folks been down so long. . . . It was jubilation."
Soon, Brooks and Kirkendall's company, Tiger Flower, was producing and promoting nearly all of the band's domestic tour dates. Some of the wildest shows transpired close to home. At a Capital Centre gig on April 25, 1981, Clinton stepped out of the Mothership, tossed his gold-lamé cape over his shoulder and strutted across the stage. Naked. (You won't find it on YouTube, but there's a VHS tape out there to prove it.)
"The audience went crazy," Brooks says. "Carol and I looked at each other like, 'We're in so much trouble. Our career is over.' But nobody said a word. I guess the officials didn't see it. The unions didn't see it. But the audience saw it."
It was also the last time a Chocolate City audience would see the Mothership in all its glory.
'Ran out of juice'
Going down with the ship? In the case of Parliament-Funkadelic, the ship went down with the band.
"The volatility of the record industry at that time -- the disco crash, they called it -- made it really hard to subsidize that big touring group," says funk historian Vincent of the band's early-'80s collapse. "They ran out of juice and they ran out of money."
The band would later reform as the P-Funk All-Stars, and a second, less impressive Mothership would be built in the '90s, but the group never eclipsed the highs of the late '70s. Worrell rattles off the factors that dragged Parliament-Funkadelic down: "Discontent. Tired of all the unfairness. Being owed money. Lack of respect within the group. The management. Learning that money was stolen."
After the Detroit show in '81, Brooks and Kirkendall had the band's equipment trucked back to Washington for storage. Months passed. The group remained dormant and cash evaporated. Unable to pay the rent on his storage spaces, Brooks began peddling the unused gear to local go-go bands. Some of Worrell's keyboards were sold to a young Trouble Funk, cementing P-Funk's role in go-go's creation myth.
Worrell, meantime, had no idea that his fantastic machines were being snatched up by Washington's then-fledgling go-go players. "But I know that a lot of stuff I was looking for, I didn't have," he says.
Too bad go-go didn't need a spaceship.
"We had to find places to put stuff, including the Mothership," Brooks says. So he stashed it in his mom's two-car garage in Clinton, Md., for about six months -- "long enough to make my mother [ticked off]."
On a cold, clear spring afternoon in 1982, she finally demanded that her son remove this piece of junk. Brooks and Bernie Walden, a young Tiger Flower employee, dragged the Mothership out of the garage, crammed it into a U-Haul truck and drove it to a tree-lined junkyard in Seat Pleasant. "We backed the truck as far as we could out into the woods and kicked it off the truck," Brooks says. "We had a bottle of something and gave it a toast."
"It was heavy," Walden says. "And I didn't want to do it."
Brooks says he regrets the decision, too, but was unable to reach Clinton or the band at that time. "Nobody was keeping phone numbers," Brooks says. "Some of them were living with their mamas."
Today, the group's feelings are mixed. "I thought that was pretty stupid," Clinton says of the decision to dump it. Shider disagrees, citing the massive expenses that racked up from touring with an extensive entourage, elaborate costumes and a gigantic metal spacecraft.
"I was glad it was gone," he says. "With the Mothership came no money."
Hunting a UFO
Today, the Shell in Seat Pleasant is a Lowest Price gas station. On a sunny weekday afternoon, the junkyard out back is busy with middle-age men poking around for old engine parts. Three guys are trying to revive a Ford sedan that wants to stay dead. Two others are searching for scrap metal they can sell in Baltimore. No one has seen any UFOs.
But they do recommend speaking with Charlie Walker, the gas station's former owner. Walker practically shouts into his telephone when he says he's never heard of Parliament-Funkadelic. But he vaguely remembers "something big and aluminum" catching on fire in the junkyard in the mid-'80s.
So the Mothership went up in flames?
"No, no, no, no, no," says Thomas Stanley, an assistant professor at George Mason University. "It didn't burn. It exists. It exists to this day. "
Stanley is a true funk scholar. Along with his friends Larry Alexander and the late television writer and former Washington Post reporter David Mills, he wrote the book "George Clinton and P-Funk: An Oral History." He also penned articles for Uncut Funk, Mills's Parliament-Funkadelic fanzine.
Stanley claims that he's recently seen the wreckage of the Mothership -- touched it. But he doesn't want to give up the location. His reverence for this music borders on religion, but he has no interest in sending a salvaged Mothership to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame -- or even the Air and Space Museum.
After a cryptic conversation about how the Mothership escaped its fate in the junkyard, Stanley e-mails some clues about its alleged location. He also includes a plea to let it rest.
"I find it much more satisfying to imagine this sacred artifact bound firmly in the bosom of the strong black communities that straddle the D.C. line between Suitland and Seat Pleasant. This was always the heart of P-Funk's base of support in Chocolate City," he writes. "It is very important, I think, that we not seek truth at expense of myth. Music and Myth are, after all, P-Funk's most enduring legacy."
So is it really out there? Does it really matter? Perhaps there's no grand cosmic truth to be found in the wilds of Prince George's County. Just myth.
On a chilly Friday at dawn, the only thing that seems real in these woods are the vines that strangle your ankles with every step. Swiffer broomstick in hand, you can thwack away at the bushes for hours without hearing a . . .
CLANG!!
The Mothership?
No. Chrome toilet bowl. Another false alarm. Definitely the funkiest. Culverts, rusted air-conditioning units and forsaken grocery carts make similar sounds.
But Stanley swears the Mothership is still out here with the trees and the trash. Beneath an impenetrable blanket of weeds and dirt it sleeps, undisturbed for nearly three decades and miraculously undestroyed -- rusted, rotted out and funkier than ever.
B-Sides: George Clinton, Bernie Worrell, Garry Shider and others on the search for the Mothership
George Clinton continues to bring the funk, but without the original Mothership. (Ade Johnson-AFP/Getty Images)
By Chris Richards
For today's Washington Post story about the search for Parliament-Funkadelic's lost Mothership, I called on members of the band to see if they knew where I might locate the crash site. They didn't have the answers I was looking for, but they still had plenty to say. Here are some interview excerpts that were left on the cutting room floor.
George Clinton, Parliament-Funkadelic leader
Do you know where the Mothership is today?
It's still all over D.C. We had to store it there and the people that were taking care of it were doing a good job but they started stripping it down. It was parked in a garage or a gas station or something... We wanted to do a contest for the fans. Anyone that could bring in a piece of the Mothership would get a free copy of the new album.
What was the inspiration to do such an over-the-top live show in 1976?
We wanted the biggest production that a black group [could have]. It was the biggest production in anything.
You lived in Washington D.C. for a short time when you were very young. What do you remember the most from your time here?
I lived in Northeast... I was four or five years old, maybe. I can remember the blackouts. We had just dropped the bomb on Japan and you'd look outside and you couldn't see the sky from the planes. Rows and rows and rows of planes.
(Read more interview excerpts, after the jump)
Bernie Worrell, former Parliament-Funkadelic keyboardist
Do you know where the original Mothership is today?
I heard it was stored in the Greek Theater in L.A. There's a Greek Theater there, right? Whatever road that is, there's a studio out there... Next thing I heard was that George had it back and it was somewhere in Tallahassee. Final thing was that it was sold -- or taken for money owed.
What was it like when the Mothership came down in concert?
There were screams, yelling, a big rush of energy coming from the audience. We had the energy from the ship, from the band and the audience energy -- three sources of energy.
--
Garry Shider, Parliament-Funkedlic guitarist
What was it like when the Mothership came down?
Pandemonium. That's what I remember. It was a new era. You could see a new era starting up... Nobody ever landed no spaceship on stage.
What do you remember about the troubled years Parliament-Funkadelic faced in the early '80s?
It was business as usual to me. That's how rock-and-roll goes. You go up and you come down. It was just time to revamp.
You told me you moved to the Washington area in the early-'90s. Do people here recognize you on the street?
Oh, yeah. It's all, "Hey, Diaper Man!"
--
Darryll Brooks, the band's tour producer and promoter
What made the Mothership such a powerful visual image?
They never thought about us in space. They didn't put us in cowboy pictures. Walt Disney didn't give us that. Hell, they didn't give us a black princess until 2009. But back in '77 a brother could get out of a spaceship? What a great day for a brother!
Did you feel bad about junking the Mothership?
You don't understand. When you're in a corner, if it's gotta go, it's gotta go. I feel bad, but what are you gonna do about it?
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame museum didn't exist yet, but did you ever think about trying to donate the Mothership to some sort of organization?
That was not the frame of mind of anyone in my vicinity. I'm sorry.
Are fans angry with you?
I don't walk around with a shirt that says "I'm the one!"
--
Carol Kirkendall, the band's tour producer and promoter
(On tour in Houston, Kirkendall had a major problem on her hands: her tech crew had disappeared and she needed someone to land the Mothership. So she called on her then 17-year-old son Poncho, who was handy with machines, to come save the day...)
So what happened?
The tech crew that been with George since the beginning were the only ones who knew how to land the Mothership. And there was some kind of discord. George ran a pretty tight budget and there was some disagreement about money and the guys got mad and walked off. I got panicked... So I called home and arranged to get Poncho a ticket into Houston... He figured it out!... It landed a little crooked. Not badly, but there was a little tilt to it... His father just loved this. [Poncho is in school] and I'm flying him off to fix the Mothership.
I first became aware of Parliament through the album 'Mothership Connection'.All things Funkadelic, George Clinton, and P Funk naturally would follow.To be honest at that time in the 1970's my personal music taste was dominated by rock and punk and the whole new wave thing here in the UK.However Parliament were one of those 'cross over' bands, that I expect registered with more than just me, a stereotypical rock music fan of the era.Trying to separate George Clinton, Parliament and Funkadelic in the late seventies is a tricky business, so I will take the convenient way out, along with many others and treat them as one act.Music purists can find out more about the Mothership Connection album HERE, Parliament HERE, or visit George Clinton's My Space site HERE.George Clinton and Parliament / Funkadelic continue to tour and astound as I type this post.This is Parliament - Funkadelic live in Detroit, MI, USA, on new years day January 1st 1978.The set list recorded is:
Funkentelechy
Cosmic Slop
Maggot Brain
Mothership Connection
Swing Down Sweet Chariot
Flashlight
The sound quality is very good and is likely FM stereo (or possibly from the soundboard).
Of the videos described in this eNewsletter, this is one of
my favorites. Sanchez, a great story teller in her
own right, really brings Bambara's work to life in this
reading.
asha bandele describes what makes a writer great.
The video was recorded during a reading at
the Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers College,
Brooklyn NY. asha is such a powerful speaker.
Brew-Hammond read with such expression and emotion that the
characters came alive in this touching excerpt from her novel.
The video was recorded during at
UpSouth event in Harlem.
Here is a portion of Mary "HoneyB" Morrison's keynote address
which was
given at Aspicomm Media's Self-Publishing Symposium 2010. There
is more than one side to this serious business woman.
Gilda Squire, founder of Gilda Squire Media Relations, talks
about marketing your book with a limited budget during at
Aspicomm Media's Self-Publishing Symposium.
E. Ethelbert Miller reads from his memoir The Fifth
Inning and talks at the Center for Black Literature at
Medgar Evers College, Brooklyn NY.
Peggy Dodson, CEO Urban Broadcasting Company
Peggy interviewed a
few of us after a panel discussion.
Afterwards we chatted. Her story was so compelling; I said to myself YOU should be the
one being interviewed; here is one minute of her story.
". . .there are some of us for whom
there is no honor that the oppressor can
give us that would entice us out of the
hills." Watch the video to
understand why this quote applied to
Toni Cade Bambara.
Malaika reads the short story
"Luther on Auburn,"
Deep
Sightings & Rescue Missions a posthumous collection
of short stories, essays, and interviews of Toni Cade
Bambara.
Monda put on a SHOW at the Hue-man book
store in Harlem. She has live
music, read poetry and performed a scene
from her novel with fellow author Renee
Flagler!
Here Renee described her popular
Self-Publishing Symposium.
AALBC.com has been a supporter and
participant in this event since it's
inception.
Web 2.0 Expo NY 09: Baratunde Thurston, "There's a #Hashtag
for That" http://aalbc.com/fun/
Ok, AALBC.com did not create this video, but I stumbled
across it a few minutes ago and had to add it. If you
"tweet" you gotta check it out: It is hilarious and
Baratunde provides some valuable information
Show Your Video to AALBC.com's Large and Targeted Audience
We have just introduced a special where you can have your
video (YouTube or other embeddable format) shown throughout
the AALBC.com website -- including the homepage! for only
$249 (normally $399).
You created a great video, book trailer or commercial -- now
place it somewhere it will be seen -- AALBC.com!
Order an AALBC.com coffee
mug and then email us a photo with you holding it. Of
course you can be holding your book too. Or don a tee shirt
with your book's title on it the way author
Monda Webb
is doing here.
The Journal, the literary magazine of The Ohio State University, would like to announce the sixth annual Journal Short Story Contest.
This year's judge is Lee K. Abbott, author of the short story collections Dreams of Distant Lives, Strangers in Paradise, Love is the Crooked Thing, The Heart Never Fits Its Wanting, and Living After Midnight. His latest collection of stories, All Things, All at Once, was published by Norton in Spring 2006.
The Journal Short Story Contest offers $1000 and publication of the winning story in The Journal's Autumn/Winter issue. All styles, subject matter, and forms are welcome. Simultaneous submissions are accepted provided immediate notice is given if work is accepted elsewhere. Please submit only previously unpublished fiction up to 7500 words. All manuscripts will be considered for publication.
Deadline for postmark of manuscripts is May 1st.
A reading fee of $10 must accompany each manuscript (please make checks payable to The Journal).
Manuscripts should be submitted anonymously with the title of the work and all contact information listed on a separate cover letter. Please be sure to also list your title on the manuscript itself. Manuscripts will not be returned. Please number pages and double-space all entries.
Notification will be in late October.
Send previously unpublished story along with reading fee to:
Short Story Contest
The Journal
Department of English
The Ohio State University
164 West 17th Avenue
Columbus, OH 43210
First place winners receive $1000 and publication. Second and Third place winners receive publication. Check back August 4, 2010 for announcement of the winners.
Judges:
Junot Díaz (fiction) and Ilya Kaminsky (poetry)
To enter:
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Submissions must be e-mailed by May 1, 2010.
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First Book Award for Poetry
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AND PUBLICATION IN AN EDITION OF 1,000 COPIES
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Two hardcopies of your manuscripts of 48-80 pages.
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$20.00 reading fee made payable to Zone 3 Press. Reading fee includes a one-year subscription to Zone 3 Magazine. Deadline: May 1, 2010.
Eligibility and Additional Considerations:
Anyone who has not published a full-length collection of poems (48 pages or more) is eligible; those with chapbooks may participate.
The final judge is Rigoberto Gonzáles.
In order to ensure the integrity of this award, current and former students and faculty of APSU are not eligible to enter. In addition, Zone 3 Press will not accept manuscripts from contestants who have previously studied with, or have a personal relationship with the announced judge. Zone 3 Press is committed to providing an ethically responsible competition; as such, the editors reserve the right to reject manuscripts that display any form of ethical impropriety.
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Zone 3 Press
First Book Award for Poetry
Austin Peay State University
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Zone 3 Fiction Award
Zone 3 is now accepting submissions for its annual fiction award. Entry should be typed, double-spaced, and should include a cover page with your name, address, and the title of your story.
The entry fee is $10 and includes a one-year subscription to Zone 3.
No deadline. Send us your best story. Please mail to Zone 3, APSU,
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Fall 2010 issue of Zone 3.
Zone 3 is pleased to announce Vanessa
Hemingway as the winner of our ninth annual Zone 3 Fiction Award
for her story “Revelations,” which was published in our Spring 2009 issue.
Zone 3 Poetry Awards
ZONE 3 is now accepting submissions for its 21st
annual poetry awards. Your entry should include a cover page with your name,
address, and the title of your poems as well as a $10 entry fee (includes a
one-year subscription to Zone 3).
You may submit up to three poems (with SASE) to
Zone 3, APSU, Box 4565,
Clarksville, TN 37044. Postmarked deadline is November 15, 2009. The winners
will be announced in the spring 2010 issue of
Zone 3.Prizes: $500/$300/$100 and publication.
ZONE 3 is pleased to announce Ruth Moon Kempher as first place winner of our annual Zone 3 Poetry Awards for her poem “Of Azaleas,” which was published in our Spring 2009 issue. Second place goes to Matthew J. Spireng for “Migrating Swallows, Assateague” and third place to Robert Guard for “The Facts About Hunting Birds.”
Carolyn Marie Rodgers, poet, playwright and author of ten collections of poetry and short fiction, died April 2, 2010. She will be missed by her family and many friends. A memorial service is being planned for May 4, 2010 in Chicago, IL.
Carolyn Rodgers, a Chicago poet who first learned her trade in the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC) Writer's Workshop meetings and Gwendolyn Brooks's Writers Workshops, was distinctive as a new black woman poet in the late 1960s, when she published her first two books, for her vehement adherence to the Black Arts program. Noted for her vulgarity and other excesses, Rodgers was quickly criticized by other Black Aesthetic practitioners for her unladylike uses of the very rhetorical excesses they had promoted. In his introduction (7-8) to Rodgers' second volume of poetry,Songs of a BlackBird (1969), David Llorens hinted at the tensions caused by her appropriation of the masculinist style: "Some 'revolutionary' brothers had put the 'bad mouth' on her, and had run down something as old as ... and far more insidious than 'nigger bitches ain't shit.' And they had me check the sister out, looking for a badge that ain't never been there as far as I know or think" (8). Llorens wrote the introduction because he found no evidence of such treachery (the "badge" of bitchiness that he says never existed), viewing her rhetorical vigor as "new energy" (8) that would aid rather than undermine the revolution.
Still, near the end of that same volume, Rodgers responds to critics who dictate a more conventionally feminine role for black women. In "The Last M.F.", she promises to stop employing vulgar language in her poems; like Dickinson's excessive compliance when her brother asks her to write more simply ("As simple as you please, the simplest sort of simple"), Rodgers vows never again to use obscenities like "mother fucker," but she does so in lines that obviously savor this last opportunity for such expressiveness:
they say, that i should not use the word muthafucka anymo in my poetry or in any speech i give. they say, that i must and can only say it to myself as the new Black Womanhood suggests a softer self a more reserved speaking self. they say, that respect is hard won by a woman who throws a word like muthafucka around and so they say because we love you throw that word away, Black Woman ... i say, that i only call muthafuckas, muthafuckas so no one should be insulted.
Once again, the charge against the revolutionary female speaker is that she is a contradiction: if revolutionary aesthetics are aggressive and menacing, then simply by speaking, she is unwomanly. Her role in the revolution is to be soft and feminine. In fact, as the poem indicates, black women are admonished to cultivate a "reserved speaking self"--a demand that risks discouraging them from speaking at all.
Typically, then, the woman who chooses to speak must prove her femininity. The speaker of the poem parodies this necessity:
i say, that i am soft, and you can subpoena my man, put him on trial, and he will testify that i am soft in the right places at the right times and often we are so reserved, i have nothing to say.
The speaker recognizes exactly the equation required to vindicate herself. she's demonstrably feminine because she's sexy. She is physically feminine ("soft in the right places") and so focused on lovemaking ("reserved") that she is sometimes speechless. Yet the hush of sexual intimacy is not the same as enforced silence, and the poem records the debate between what "they say" and what "i say" in the structure of alternating arguments about women speaking. Finally, she accedes to being a listener rather than a talker--"but they say that this new day / creates a new dawn woman, / one who will listen to Black Men"--yet still hates to give up her point. As she complies with their demands, she registers her scorn for black men who censor women, her delight in deploying obscenities against them, and the futility of censoring the truth that obscenities can convey:
and so i say this is the last poem i will write calling all manner of wites, card-carrying muthafuckas and all manner of Blacks (negroes too) sweet muthafuckas, crazy muthafuckas, lowdown muthafuckas cool muthafuckas, mad and revolutionary muthafuckas, But anyhow you all know just like I do (whether I say it or not), there's plenty of MEAN muthafuckas out here trying to do the struggle in.
The parenthetical remark, "(whether I say / it or not)," uses punctuation like hands cupped over ears--the parentheses simultaneously muffle the sound of her utterance and channel it toward our attention. The eloquent line break after "I say" and the solitary instance of the capital "I" lend authority to the speaker's voice even as the parentheses appear to take it away. The words of those we ignore continue to nag us: they say that censorship hides the truths that ought to be revealed, silences the people we need to hear from, and ultimately undermines the revolution.
Songs of a Black Bird represents Rodgers's Black Arts period; however, amid the expected paeans to black men and the revolution, "Black Woman! / let yr man (ev'ry Black Man) / be yr Hero," are hints of dissatisfaction with the Black Arts program ("Now Let's Be Real" 18). In "Breakthrough" (31-33), for example, the speaker admits that "my mouth has been open / most of the time, but / I ain't been saying nuthin." Yet, the two poems that open Black Bird say a great deal about the direction Rodgers will eventually take. "Jesus Was Crucified, or, It Must Be Deep" (9-11) and "It Is Deep" (12-13) relate the tensions between the speaker, a black liberation radical, and her mother, a middle-class Christian. Over the telephone, the speaker disagrees with her mother's worldview: that there is a God, that some white people are good, that all revolutionaries are Communists, and that her daughter shouldn't curse in public. To her mother's insistence that "deep deep down" in her heart the daughter knows that the Bible is true, the speaker sarcastically responds "it must be d / eeeep," meaning that any faith she has is buried so deep-in the past--that it's no longer accessible. Her response also resonates with the sixties' sense of "deep" as something complicated and ponderous: the speaker can't fathom religious belief.
In the next poem, however, the edge of sarcasm is gone as the speaker restates the phrase but this time to assert its accuracy. "It Is Deep" rehearses a similar conversation; this time, though, the mother has arrived unexpectedly at her sick daughter's apartment to give her some money and make certain she's all right. Though her mother doesn't "recognize the poster of the / grand le roi" or her own daughter's "book of / Black poems," she most certainly acknowledges her relationship to her daughter: she
pressed fifty bills in my hand saying "pay the [telephone] bill and buy some food; you got people who care about you."
The speaker is moved by her mother's demonstration of love and solidarity and realizes her mother is "a sturdy Black bridge that I crossed over on."
The idea of crossing over to a new way of life provides the substance that Rodgers explicitly longed for in several poems of self-doubt about her writing. Her third book takes its title from this concern: How I Got Ovah (1975) collects new and selected poemsin a volume that marks a turning point in Rodgers's career. Like Giovanni and Sanchez, Rodgers rejects the official hatred of the liberation movement and embraces love. "Some of Me Beauty" (53) recalls and dismisses her revolutionary persona:
the fact is that i don't hate any body any more i went through my mean period.
Now, however, she awakes to find herself
carolyn not imani man jua or soul sister poetess of the moment i saw more than a "sister". . . i saw a Woman. human. and black. i felt a spiritual transformation a root revival of love.
The correlation between a spiritual transformation and the revival of love is critical. Two of the new poems, "how i got ovah" (5) and "how i got ovah II/ It Is Deep II" (77-78), record the poet's conversion to her mother's Christianity. As the titles suggest (in their allusions to the titles and last line of the poems about her mother's love and faith in Black Bird) Rodgers "got over" hatred and self-doubt by getting over the militant movement and the Black Aesthetic--and by getting over to Christianity and a new style.
The "Author's Note" (xi) that introduces the volume hints at the changes in the book proper by hinting at the change in the author:
When a book is finally published, an author is very likely to have changed his style and his mind. About many things.... Still, a person does not wish to offer apologies for where she or he was. For certainly where one has been makes where one is more meaningful. Many of you will recognize some of these poems. You will not recognize quite a few others.... I want my work to interest as many people as possible; therefore, some words have been either altered or eliminated completely.
As that last statement suggests, there will be no "MF"s here. These new poems suggest "a softer self," "a more reserved speaking self" Now, however, the softness and reserve are consistent with the Christian notion of femininity rather than the black militant one, though, in practice, the two models of proper female behavior are indistinguishable.
The crudeness, recklessness, and ineffectiveness of the revolutionaries are explicitly contrasted with the civility, patience, and effectiveness of the "church folk" in "and when the revolutionaries came" (65-67) just as her former poetry is explicitly repudiated in "Living Water" (79-81):
i keep feeling my mouth with my tongue afraid that something has slipped loose dropped out all the time i was opening and closing saying nothing nothing nothing.
Here "nothing nothing nothing" dismisses those former poems (by saying they amounted to nothing) at the same time it recalls them (by mimicking the characteristic repetitions of Black Arts verbal aggression). If she's going to write now, she'll have to write a new kind of poetry. Yet the speaker in "Living Water" feels an inward spiritual fullness that she isn't sure she can tap for her writing. The final section of the poem resolves this worry by relinquishing verbal authority to God:
I think sometimes when i write God has his hand on me i am his little black slim ink pen.
This obviously female pen is slight, diminutive, merely an instrument of masculine authority: she embodies exactly the sort of femininity that Carolyn Rodgers had once aggressively rejected.
In Christianity, Rodgers found an alternative to the Black Power movement that, like the Nation of Islam, did not provide an alternative to conventional femininity. "For Women" (Ovah 72-75), for example, celebrates the long-suffering, silent woman, who endures her abusive marriage because she is strengthened by God's "amazing grace":
she is mostly silent taking his abuses when she can. as he cuts her with words that wisely know her human weaknesses.
In the face of his ridicule, name calling, physical aggression, drinking, gambling, and faithlessness, she
goes on singing singing singing amazing grace.
Indeed, unbeknownst to him,
he is alive somewhat saved somehow sanctified
because of her faith and prayer. She receives grace from God, and her husband, in turn, "saps a strength from her."
The poem is clearly not just about this one woman; she represents the poem's conception of womankind, as the epigraph suggests: "(women are the fruit of the earth)." Yet in what sense can "For Women" be considered for women when it glorifies silent suffering and deferred spiritual rewards? The amazing grace that sustains the woman in the poem, or even the poet herself, might provide solace to any particular woman, but it did not offer a more generally efficacious response to the misogyny of the liberation movement.
However well their thematic and formal developments suited the individual careers of Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, and Carolyn Rodgers, the retreat from Black Arts excesses to a more moderate style associated with a more feminine project rendered their poetry less "useful," to borrow Karenga's term, for other women poets. This is not to fault the poetry; indeed, Sanchez's and Rodgers's work grows more beautiful and compelling as it finds its uniqueness. But if excess can be described as a writing strategy peculiarly suited to the expression of marginalized voices, then their poetry became less revolutionary as it became less excessive, shifting the weight of its political work from style to subject. While Black Arts movement excesses had established a public aesthetic program that enabled a community of voices to express themselves, its fundamental misogyny ultimately disabled most black women writers within that community. Though they recovered their individual women's voices in developing their own poetry, they no longer participated in or promoted a public artistic program. Yet the sexism of the black liberation movement would eventually have to be resisted, like that movement had resisted the dominant culture's racism, in a more public utterance. And, not surprisingly, the later black feminists who succeeded in challenging the misogyny in their culture turned to excess once again in their struggle to be heard.
The expression "how I got ovah" slips fluently from black colloquialism into a black gospel song and on into the black slang vernacular with unobstructed ease. Presently it is the title of Carolyn Rodgers' latest volume of poetry, How IGot Ovah.
The meaning of the recurring expression is generally defined by its contextual usage and can be appropriately connotative of how one has triumphed spiritually; how one has overcome worldly hardships; how one has outwitted his adversary; or merely how one has swindled his loved ones. In Carolyn Rodgers' book, many of these connotations emerge; however, another unique connotation is given shape by the thematic structuring of the book. The poet writes on the seemingly disjointed and ostensibly contradictory aspects of black life. She is not afraid of the contradictions; she consciously seeks them out, then reconciles their differences by poetically presenting their interrelatedness. The poet 'gets ovah' the waters of confusion that flow between the contradictions by crossing certain metaphorically symbolic bridges. These bridges she comes to recognize are her own inner voice, her ancestral rootedness, her Christian faith, and her parental support. Other supportive structures in the bridges are her church community and her extended black community. So the unique connotation of ‘getting ovah’ in Carolyn Rodgers’ book would be bridging the separating waters, reconciling the contradictions or piecing together the seemingly dichotomous entities of black life.
The major dichotomies that are patterned throughout the book are (1) black revolutionary tactics as opposed to Christian ethics, (2) the black past as opposed to the present, (3) the black younger generation as opposed to the older generation, (4) idealistic dreams as opposed to dead-end awakenings. and (5) the individual poetic voice as opposed to the conscious, collective poetic voice. Often, more than one dichotomous pattern is being dealt with simultaneously in the same poem. (. . .)
In her untitled poem (p. 6), the poetic statement is consummated. The persona realizes, after being caught up in a whirlwind of voices, that she is confused and "cannot remember /where to listen. " Once away from the screaming voices, silence reflows and the poet returns "cradling creation in the silences." The poet has listened to the (ideological) voices till deafened by them and only after that point does she realize that through creative silence, or listening to her own inner voice, she is able to create. Listening to her own inner voice is her poetic bridge of "getting ovah."
Estella M. Sales, "Contradictions in Black Life: Recognized and Reconciled in How I Got Ovah," CLAJournal 25, No.1 (September 1981): 74-75, 81
Hilda Njoki McElroy
It is interesting to note that most of the poems in How I GotOvah are written in the lyric mode from a first, person perspective. The persona in each poem is so well established and developed that one feels well acquainted and involved with this speaker in a very personal manner. Though some poems are deeply personal at times, the reader/audience is never excluded from these experiences. Probably because Carolyn Rodgers' works cover such a wide range of human experiences her sermons/songs/tales seem to often be addressed to us though we know the poet is female and the poems reveal a female persona. I have noticed that male students in my Interpretation of Black Poetry class frequently find Rodgers' works to be equally valid for male or female.
Skillfully utilizing rhythmic devices from our Afrikan oral tradition in the title poem, "how i got ovah," the persona seems to be speaking directly to those of us in the Black diaspora who share the sufferings of a displaced people: . . .
In "The Children of Their Sin," Rodgers is like the old Afrikan folkteller—entertaining and instructing us about our weakness, contradictions and inner conflicts. Combining many devices from the African folk tale, Rodgers deals basically with self-hatred. In order to reinforce this theme, Rodgers, in a fantastic display of craftpersonship, utilizes present/mythic time, cosmic sounds/rhythms, and vivid imagery. In the present time in part one, the personaestablishes the irony and contradictions by explaining how she left her job one evening of poet-teaching Black people how to love one another and on the way home she refused to sit next to a Black brother because he looked "mean and hungry, poor and damply cold." Rather, she chose to sit next to a white man because he "was neatly new yorkish antiseptically executive."
Hilda Njoki McElroy, [Review of how Igot ovah], Black World 25, No.4 (February 1976): 51-52
Bettye J. Parker-Smith
It can be fairly accurately claimed that Carolyn Rodgers' artistic achievements have undergone two distinct and clear baptisms. The first can be viewed as being rough-hewn, folk-spirited, and held 'down at the river' amid water moccasins in the face of a glaring midday sun; the climax of 'swing-lo-sweet-chariot' revival. These were her OBAC (Organization of Black African Culture) years. This organization, a Petri dish for young Black writers of the sixties, was guided principally by the late Hoyt W. Fuller, Jr., then editor of Black World, and served, if only temporarily, to arrest the psychological frailty of Carolyn Rodgers, who was "slim and straight, and as subtly feminine as a virgin's blush." Fuller recalled that when he first met her at an OBAC social function, she was "skinny and scared," verbalized an interest in writing, and telegraphed a need to be stroked. Being the unhealthy flower she was, Carolyn Rodgers responded naturally to his quiet mood and healing voice. (. . .) The format of the OBAC workshops helped cushion Rodgers' insecurities; its members provided a strong support system for each other. It was as a member of this literary coterie, this small in-group of novice writers and intellectuals, that she made her initial impact. In introducing her first volume of poetry, Paper Soul,Fuller prepared us for what was to come: "Carolyn Rodgers will be heard. She has the artist's gift and the artist's beautiful country." This first period of her writing includes her first three volumes, Paper Soul, 2 Love Raps, and Song of a Black Bird. It is characterized by a potpourri of themes and demonstrates her impudence, through the use of her wit, obscenities, the argumentation in her love and revolution poems, and the pain and presence of her mother. She questions the relevance of the Vietnam War, declares war on the cities, laments Malcolm X, and criticizes the contradictory life-style of Blacks. And she glances at God. These are the years that she whipped with the lean switch, often bringing down her wrath with stinging, sharp, and sometimes excruciating pain. She is very exact about her focus:
I will write about things that are universal So that hundreds, maybe even thousands of years from now, White critics and readers will say of me, Here is a good Black writer, who wrote about truth and universal topics. . . . I will write about Black people repossessing this earth, a-men.
To be sure, she was clairvoyant and uncompromising. Her poetry was colored by a young woman's contempt for injustice and a young rebel's sensitivity to the cost of freedom in a corrupt world where race takes precedence over everything else.
On the other hand, the second baptism takes place just before Carolyn Rodgers is able to shake herself dry from the first river. This one can perhaps be classified as a sprinkling and is protected by the blessings of a very fine headcloth. It is more sophisticated. It is cooler; lacks the fire and brimstone of the first period. But it is nonetheless penetrating. The two volumes that characterize this phase are How I GotOvah and The Heart as Ever Green. At this point, Rodgers moved away from Third World Press, the publisher that accommodated most of the OBAC writers and which published her first three volumes, to a larger commercial publishing house. She also broke, it seems, abrasively with OBAC. She moved back inside her once lone and timid world. With OBAC she had demonstrated signs of strength and assertiveness. These characteristics are not visible in this stage and she returned to her old form of insecurity. In fact, her frailty seemed to have returned doublefold, wrapped itself around her physical and psychological self. This was the moment when she received recognition from a larger and more diverse reading audience. However, her celebrity was short-lived. The poetry that represents this period is rather specific. She cross-examines the revolution, its contradictions, and her relationship to it. She listens to her mother’s whispers. And she embraces God.
Bettye J. Parker-Smith, "Running Wild in Her Soul: The Poetry of Carolyn Rodgers," Black Women Writers(1950-1980): A CriticalEvaluation, ed. Mari Evans (New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984), pp. 395-97
Walter Sublette
Carolyn Rodgers' poetry has received more than mild critical interest for some time. It was considered special well before 1976, when her collection,How IGot Ovah, was a National Book Award nominee. Yet since that time, Rodgers' reputation has spread considerably. Her poetry is tightly crafted free verse that unpretentiously combines the black American vernacular and the straightforward American style. It is absent of fashionably extreme attitudes, and achieves a distinct presence by cementing private poetic vision with grim but poignant understanding. In The Heart as Ever Green, this fusion of poetic vision and spiritual compassion is extremely pronounced, producing a kind of contemporary black American poetry that is warmly honest, immediately direct, and clearly accessible.
Rodgers makes strong use of the word "heart" in the title. As supported in the poems, the heart is meant to be a reservoir of containment. In it the patiently waiting expectations of all black people are protectively housed. It is a place of necessity from which the black race observes life, the observation itself made tolerable through the realization of inevitable social change. That change will one day bring freedom as well as personal and collective growth. It seems important to realize that the image of the heart is not used to express pessimistic hope, but realized certainty. It is a place of warm solidity, of relative security, whose sustaining power is the awareness of past and present suffering. It is a place of pride and dignity, of indestructible strength and enormous love. And since the heart is suspended in time as an impregnable constant, it is appropriately affixed with the color green in anticipation of the time it may realize its full fruition.
The Heart as Ever Green is a poetic statement on the condition, attitude, and determination of black people. Carolyn Rodgers has given us a strong, dignified, and beautiful book of poems. At the core of this work is a sensibility that is framed in the notion that black suffering will be alleviated in time. That may be an accurate, perceptive, and honorable belief, but is nonetheless one that not all black contemporary poets would agree with.
Walter Sublette, "Poetic Voices of Hope and Rage," Chicago Tribune BookWorld, 19 November 1978, p. 10
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Carolyn Marie Rodgers, poet, playwright and author of ten collections of poetry and short fiction, died April 2, 2010. She will be missed by her family and many friends. A memorial service is being planned for May 4, 2010 in Chicago, IL.
The speaker is moved by her mother's demonstration of love and solidarity and realizes her mother is "a sturdy Black bridge that I crossed over on."