Blk Sonshine is a duo out of South Africa. Enjoy.

$4,500 in awards for writers

THE NEW LETTERS LITERARY AWARDS
Now open for 2010.  Deadline:  May 18, 2010.
Submit your writing online or by mail.  Details below.

See winners of the 2009 Literary Awards
Find out more about our preliminary and final judges.

 

The $1,500 New Letters Prize for Poetry

for the best 2010 group of three to six poems

The $1,500 Dorothy Churchill Cappon Prize for the Essay

for the 2010 best essay

 

The $1,500 Alexander Patterson Cappon Prize for Fiction

for the best 2010 short story

 

Click here to read a interview with Robert Stewart, editor of New Letters (conducted by Jendi Reiter for Poetry Contest Insider).
 

GUIDELINES 

For a printable version of the 2010 guidelines, click here.

Submit by regular post or electronically.  Simultaneous submissions of unpublished entries are accepted with proper notification upon acceptance elsewhere.

UPLOAD YOUR WRITING ONLINE HERE.  Please read guidelines carefully to insure best service.

Enclose with each entry:

• $15 for first entry; $10 for every entry after. Entry fee includes the cost of a one-year subscription, renewal, or gift subscription to New Letters, shipped to any address within the United States.  (Subscriptions mailed outside the U.S. require a $12 postal surcharge.)  Make checks payable to New Letters.
• Two cover sheetsthe first with complete name, address, e-mail address, phone number, category, and title(s); and the second with category and title only.  Your personal information should not appear anywhere else on the entry.  For sample cover sheets, click here.
• A stamped, self-addressed postcard for notification of receipt and entry number.
• A stamped, self-addressed envelope for a list of winners.  This is optional.  Please send only one envelope if submitting more than one entry.

RULES AND NOTES

• All entries will be considered for publication in New Letters.
• Fiction and essay entries are not to exceed 8,000 words.  A single poetry entry may contain up to six poems, and those poems need not be related.
• Multiple entries are accepted with appropriate fees.  Please make cover sheets for each entry of fiction, essay, or group of poems.
• Manuscripts will not be returned.
• No substitutions after submissions.  No refunds will be offered for withdrawn material.

• Current students and employees of the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and current volunteer members of the New Letters and BkMk Press staffs, are not eligible.

• Postmark by May 18, 2010.

 

MAIL ENTRIES TO: New Letters Awards for Writers UMKC, University House 5101 Rockhill Road Kansas City, MO  64110-2499
 

HISTORY OF THE AWARDS COMPETITION

New Letters established its Awards for Writers in 1986 to discover and reward new writers and to encourage more established writers to try new genres or new work in competition.  The contest is open to any writer.  In order to assure fairness throughout the judging process, all judging is done anonymously and by writers outside the New Letters staff, with two rounds of judges making finalist and winner decisions. 

For final judges from previous years, please see the list below.

Finalists are notified in mid August.  Final judges select one winner and one runner-up in each category, which are announced the third week of September.  First runners-up receive a courtesy copy of a recent book of poetry or fiction from our affiliate BkMk Press, a New Letters affiliate.  Judges have the option to select work for second runner-up and honorable mentions.  All finalists are listed in the New Letters issue in which the winners are published.  These and all other entries will be considered for publication by the New Letters editor. 

AWARDS

Alexander Patterson Cappon Fiction Prize:  $1,500 for the best short story

New Letters Poetry Prize:  $1,500 for the best group of three to six poems

Dorothy Churchill Cappon Essay Prize:  $1,500 for the best essay

SLAPERING HOL PRESS Annual Chapbook Competition Download a PDF copy of 2010 guidelines here The prize for the 2010 competition is a $1000 cash award, publication, ten books, and a reading at The Hudson Valley Writers' Center. At the discretion of the judges, a second chapbook may be selected for publication with an award of $250. SHP uses a blind judging system and subscribes to the CLMP contest code of ethics. - 2010 GUIDELINES - This competition is open to writers who have not published a collection of poems in book or chapbook form. Entrants should submit a collection of poems, or one long poem, limited to 16-20 pages. Manuscripts should include a title page (title only), and a separate cover sheet with the title of the work, the author's name, address, phone number, e-mail address, a bio, and acknowledgments. Manuscripts will not be returned. Enclose a self-addressed, stamped (44 cents) envelope for results only. If you would like a notification of receipt of manuscript, include a self-addressed and stamped postcard. Enclose a $15 reading fee. Poets may submit more than one collection, but a $15 reading fee must accompany each entry. Make checks payable to The Hudson Valley Writers' Center. If you would like a copy of one of our previous winners, which we will select for you, enclose an 8 x 10 or larger envelope with $1.90 in postage affixed. Entries must be postmarked by May 15, 2010. The winner will be announced in September 2010. Send entries to: Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition The Hudson Valley Writers' Center 300 Riverside Drive Sleepy Hollow, NY 10591

The Nigerians - interesting project (forwarded message)

Dear friend

Sorry for the mass mail, but I am hoping to reach out to as many Nigerians with a literary flair as possible, so please read the email and pass it on to your network if they fit the bill.

Are you tired of the bad press that Nigerians seem to get wherever we go? Do you want to change, influence or dispel the negative perceptions outsiders have about us? And do you want to share some of the passion you have for your country and explain its irresistible draw? And perhaps most importantly – can you write?

We are looking for just 20 brilliant Nigerian writers to take part in a ground-breaking, collaborative publishing project that will entertain, educate and influence readers globally while throwing a positive light on the country of our birth.

The Nigerians is a collection of compelling and wittily written pieces that provide insights to help unravel the complex conundrum that is Nigeria.

There is no doubt that the gods of literature have blessed Nigeria with some of the best writers in Africa and the world. From Chinua Achebe , Ngozi Chimanda Adichie, Ben Okri, Wole Soyinka to Helen Oyeyemi, Sefi Atta, Segun Afolabi, Biyi Bandele, Kole Omotose, Chris Abani . . . . . this project is waiting to happen.

We are looking for unpublished writing between 2000 and 5000 words. The pieces must be upbeat, witty, fictional accounts of a place, an event, a character or a situation that sheds light on Nigeria or its people. We are looking for a range of pieces that are uplifting, real and human, and that give a respectful picture of Nigeria from an insider’s perspective.

Are you a writer who would like to be a part of this world-first, literary legacy project for Nigeria?

There will be no contributor fees, only the chance to collaborate on this influential initiative, but the selected writers will share equally in the royalties, the copyright and the limelight.

The Nigerians will be launched in Lagos, South Africa, London and New York and will be available for sale worldwide through the internet.

I’m excited about this project and I hope you are too. Please contact me (moky@mmemedia.co.za) if you would like to participate or pass the mail on to someone who you think will be interested.

Moky Makura

The U.S. in Haiti: Neoliberalism at the Barrel of a Gun

By Arun Gupta
From the February 19, 2010 issue | Posted in Arun Gupta , International | Email this article

Illustrations by Lisa Lin

Official denials aside, the United States has embarked on a new military occupation of Haiti thinly cloaked as disaster relief. While both the Pentagon and the United Nations claimed more troops were needed to provide “security and stability” to bring in aid, violence was never an issue, according to nearly all independent observers in the field.

The military response appears to be more opportunistic. With Haiti’s government “all but invisible” and its repressive police forces “devastated,” popular organizations were starting to fill the void. But the Western powers rushing in want to rebuild Haiti on a foundation of sweatshops, agro-exports and tourism. This is opposed by the popular organizations, which draw from Haiti’s overwhelmingly poor majority. Thus, if a neoliberal plan is going to be imposed it will be done at gunpoint.

The rapid mobilization of thousands of U.S. troops crowded out much of the aid being sent to the Port-au-Prince airport following the Jan. 12 earthquake. Doctors Without Borders said five of its cargo flights were turned away, while flights from the World Food Program were delayed up to two days. By the end of January, three quarters of Haitians still lacked clean water, the government had received only 2 percent of the tents it had requested and hospitals in the capital reported they were running “dangerously low” on basic medical supplies like antibiotics and painkillers. Nearly a month into the crisis, the Washington Post reported, “Every day, tens of thousands of Haitians face a grueling quest to find food, any food. A nutritious diet is out of the question.”

At the same time, the United States had assumed control of Haiti’s airspace, landed 6,500 soldiers on the ground with 15,000 more troops off shore at one point and dispatched an armada of naval vessels and nine coast guard cutters to patrol the waters, and the U.S. Embassy was issuing orders on behalf of the Haitian government. In a telling account, The New York Times described a press conference in Haiti at which “the American ambassador and the American general in charge of the United States troops deployed here” were “seated at center stage,” while Haitian President René Préval stood in the back “half-listening” and eventually “wandered away without a word.”

The real powers in Haiti now are the U.S. commander, Lt. Gen. Ken Keen; U.S. ambassador Louis Lucke; Bill Clinton (who has been tapped by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to lead recovery efforts); and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. When asked at the press conference how long U.S. forces were planning to stay, Keen said, “I’m not going to put a time frame on it,” while Lucke added, “We’re not really planning in terms of weeks or months or years. We’re planning basically to see this job through to the end.”

While much of the corporate media fixated on “looters,” virtually every independent observer in Haiti after the earthquake noted the lack of violence. Even Lt. Gen. Keen described the security situation as “relatively calm.” Veteran Haiti reporter Kim Ives told Democracy Now! on January 20: “Security is not the issue. We see throughout Haiti the population … organizing themselves into popular committees to clean up, to pull out the bodies from the rubble, to build refugee camps, to set up their security for the refugee camps.” In one instance, Ives continued, a truckload of food showed up in a neighborhood in the middle of the night unannounced. “It could have been a melee. The local popular organization … was contacted. They immediately mobilized their members. They came out. They set up a perimeter. They set up a cordon. They lined up about 600 people who were staying on the soccer field behind the house, which is also a hospital, and they distributed the food in an orderly, equitable fashion. … They didn’t need Marines. They didn’t need the U.N.”

A NEW INVASION

But that’s what Haiti is getting, including 3,500 more soldiers and police for the 9,200-strong U.N. force already there. These U.N. forces have played a leading role in repressing Haiti’s poor, who twice propelled Jean-Bertrand Aristide to the presidency on a platform of social and economic justice. And the poor know that the detailed U.S. and U.N. plans in the works for “recovery” — sweatshops, land grabs and privatization — are part of the same system of economic slavery they’ve been fighting against for more than 200 years. Neoliberal reconstruction, then, will happen at the barrel of the gun. In this light, the impetus of a new occupation may be to reconstitute the Haitian Army (or similar entity) as a force “to fight the people.”

This is the crux of the situation. Despite all the terror inflicted on Haiti by the United States, particularly the slaughter of thousands by U.S.-armed death squads after each coup, the strongest social and political force in Haiti today is probably the organisations populaires (OPs) that are the backbone of Aristide’s party, Fanmi Lavalas. Twice last year, after legislative elections that banned Fanmi Lavalas were scheduled, boycotts were organized by the party. In the April and June polls the abstention rate was reported to be at least 89 percent.

A new occupation of Haiti — the third in the last 16 years — also fits within the U.S. doctrine of rollback in Latin America: support for the coup in Honduras, seven new military bases in Colombia, hostility toward Bolivia and Venezuela. Related to that, the United States wants to ensure that Haiti will not pose the “threat of a good example” by pursuing an independent path, as it tried to do under President Jean-Bertrand Aristide — which is why he was toppled twice, in 1991 and 2004, in U.S.-backed coups.

SWEATSHOP SOLUTION

In a March 2009 New York Times op-ed, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon outlined his development plan for Haiti, involving lower port fees, “dramatically expanding the country’s export zones,” and emphasizing “the garment industry and agriculture.” Ban’s neoliberal plan was drawn up by Oxford University economist Paul Collier.

Collier is blunt, writing, “Due to its poverty and relatively unregulated labor market, Haiti has labor costs that are fully competitive with China.” He calls for agricultural exports such as mangoes that involve pushing farmers off the land so they can be employed in garment manufacturing in export-processing zones. To facilitate these zones Collier says, Haiti and donors need to provide them with private ports and electricity, “clear and rapid rights to land;” outsourced customs; “roads, water and sewage;” and the involvement of the Clinton Global Initiative to bring in garment manufacturers.

Revealing the connection between neoliberalism and military occupation in Haiti, Collier credits the Brazilian-led United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH ) with establishing “credible security,” but laments that its remaining mandate is “too short for investor confidence.” In fact, MINUSTAH has been involved in numerous massacres in Port-au-Prince slums that are strongholds for Lavalas. Collier also notes MINUSTAH will cost some $5 billion overall; compare that to the $379 million the U.S. government has designated for post-earthquake relief.

Speaking at an October 2009 investors’ conference in Port-au-Prince that attracted dogooders like Gap, Levi Strauss and Citibank, Bill Clinton claimed a revitalized garment industry could create 100,000 jobs. Some 200 companies, half of them garment manufacturers, attended the conference, drawn by “Haiti’s extremely low labor costs, comparable to those in Bangladesh,” The New York Times reported. Those costs are often less than the official daily minimum wage of $1.75. (The Haitian Parliament approved an increase last May 4 to about $5 an hour, but it was opposed by the business elite, and President René Préval refused to sign the bill, effectively killing it. This episode sparked student protests starting in June of last year, which were repressed by Haitian police and MINUSTAH .)

ROOTS OF REPRESSION

In his work Haiti State Against Nation: The Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism, Michel-Rolph Trouillot writes, “Haiti’s first army saw itself as the offspring of the struggle against slavery and colonialism.” That changed during the U.S. occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934. Under the tutelage of the U.S. Marines, “the Haitian Garde was specifically created to fight against other Haitians. It received its baptism of fire in combat against its countrymen.” This brutal legacy led Aristide to disband the army in 1995.

Yet prior to the army’s disbandment, in the wake of the U.S. invasion that returned a politically handcuffed Aristide to the presidency in 1994, “CIA agents accompanying U.S. troops began a new recruitment drive” that included leaders of the death squad known as FRAPH, according to Peter Hallward, author of Damning the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment.

It’s worth recalling how the Clinton administration played a double game under the cover of humanitarian intervention. Investigative reporter Allan Nairn revealed that in 1993 “five to ten thousand” small arms were shipped from Florida, past the U.S. naval blockade, to the coup leaders. These weapons enabled FRAPH to grow and to terrorize the popular movements. Then, pointing to intensifying FRAPH violence in 1994, the Clinton administration pressured Aristide into acquiescing to a U.S. invasion because FRAPH was becoming “the only game in town.” After 20,000 U.S. troops landed in Haiti, they set about protecting FRAPH members, freeing them from jail and refusing to disarm them or seize their weapons caches. FRAPH leader Emmanual Constant told Nairn that after the invasion the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) was using FRAPH to counter “subversive activities.” Meanwhile, the State Department and CIA went about stacking the Haitian National Police with former army soldiers, many of whom were on the U.S. payroll. By 1996, according to one report, Haitian Army and “FRAPH forces remain armed and present in virtually every community across the country,” and paramilitaries were “inciting street violence in an effort to undermine social order.”

During the early 1990s, a separate group of Haitian soldiers, including Guy Philippe, who led the 2004 coup against Aristide, were spirited away to Ecuador where they allegedly trained at a “U.S. military facility.” Hallward describes the second coup as beginning in 2001 as a “Contra war” in the Dominican Republic with Philippe and former FRAPH commander Jodel Chamblain as leaders. A Democracy Now! report from April 7, 2004, claimed that the U.S. government-funded International Republican Institute provided arms and technical training to the anti-Aristide force in the Dominican Republic, while “200 members of the special forces of the United States were there in the area training these so-called rebels.”

A key component of the campaign against Aristide after he was inaugurated in 2001 was economic destabilization that cut off funding for “road construction, AIDS programs, water works and health care.” Likely factors in the 2004 coup included Aristide’s public campaign demanding that France repay the money it extorted from Haiti in 1825 for the former slave colony to buy its freedom, estimated in 2003 at $21 billion, and his working with Venezuela, Bolivia and Cuba to create alternatives to U.S. economic domination of the region.

When Aristide was finally ousted in February 2004, another round of slaughter ensued, with 800 bodies dumped in just one week in March. A 2006 study by the British medical journal Lancet determined that 8,000 people were murdered in the capital region during the first 22 months of the U.S.-backed coup government and 35,000 women and girls were raped or sexually assaulted. The OPs and Lavalas militants were decimated, in part by a U.N. war against the main Lavalas strongholds in Port-au-Prince’s neighborhoods of Bel Air and Cité Soleil, the latter a densely packed slum of some 300,000. (Hallward claims U.S. Marines were involved in a number of massacres in areas such as Bel Air in 2004.)

‘MORE FREE TRADE’

Less than four months after the 2004 coup, reporter Jane Regan described a draft economic plan, the “Interim Cooperation Framework,” which “calls for more free trade zones (FTZs), stresses tourism and export agriculture and hints at the eventual privatization of the country’s state enterprises.” Regan wrote that the plan was “drawn up by people nobody elected,” mainly “foreign technicians” and “institutions like the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the World Bank.”

Much of this plan was implemented under Préval, who announced in 2007 plans to privatize the public telephone company, Téléco. This plan is now being promoted by Bill Clinton and Ban Ki-moon as Haiti’s path out of poverty. The Wall Street Journal touted such achievements as “10,000 new garment industry jobs” in 2009, a “luxury hotel complex” in the upper-crust neighborhood of Pétionville and a $55 million investment by Royal Caribbean International at its “private Haitian beach paradise.”

Haiti, of course, has been here before, when the USAID spoke of turning it into the “Taiwan of the Caribbean.” In the 1980s, under Jean- Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, it shifted onethird of cultivated land to export crops while “there were some 240 multinational corporations, employing between 40,000 and 60,000 predominantly female workers,” sewing garments, baseballs for Major League Baseball, and Disney merchandise, according to scholar Yasmine Shamsie. Those jobs, paying as little as 11 cents an hour, coincided with a decline in per capita income and living standards. (Ban Ki-moon wants Haiti to emulate Bangladesh, where sweatshops pay as little as 6 cents an hour.) At such low pay, workers had little left after purchasing food and transportation to and from the factories. These self-contained export-processing zones, often funded by USAID and the World Bank, also add little to the national economy, importing tax free virtually all the materials used.

U.S.-promoted agricultural policies, such as forcing Haitian rice farmers to compete against U.S.-subsidized agribusiness, cost an estimated 830,000 rural jobs according to Oxfam, while exacerbating malnutrition. This and the decimation of the invaluable Creole pig (because of fears of an outbreak of African swine fever), led to displacement of the peasantry into urban areas, and along with the promise of urban jobs, fueled rural migration into flimsy shantytowns. It’s hard not to conclude that these development schemes played a major role in the horrific death toll in Port-au-Prince.

The latest scheme, on hold for now, is a $50 million “industrial park that would house roughly 40 manufacturing facilities and warehouses,” bankrolled by the Soros Economic Development Fund (yes, that Soros). The planned location is Cité Soleil. James Dobbins, former special envoy to Haiti under President Bill Clinton, outlined other measures in a New York Times op-ed: “This disaster is an opportunity to accelerate oft-delayed reforms” including “breaking up or at least reorganizing the government- controlled telephone monopoly. The same goes with the Education Ministry, the electric company, the Health Ministry and the courts.”

It’s clear that the Shock Doctrine is alive and well in Haiti. But given the strength of the organisations populaires and weakness of the government, it will have to be imposed violently.

For those who wonder why the United States is so obsessed with controlling a country so impoverished, devastated, and seemingly inconsequential as Haiti, Noam Chomsky sums it up best: “Why was the U.S. so intent on destroying northern Laos, so poor that peasants hardly even knew they were in Laos? Or Indochina? Or Guatemala? Or Maurice Bishop in Grenada, the nutmeg capital of the world? The reasons are about the same, and are explained in the internal record. These are ‘viruses’ that might ‘infect others’ with the dangerous idea of pursuing similar paths to independent development. The smaller and weaker they are, the more dangerous they tend to be. If they can do it, why can’t we? Does the Godfather allow a small storekeeper to get away with not paying protection money?”

For more of the Indypendent’s coverage of Haiti from the current issue:

“Beyond Port-au-Prince: Grassroots Women’s Group Brings Aid to Remote, Hard-Hit Areas of Haiti,” By Judith De Los Santos, Feb. 19, 2010

“Legal Floodgates Open: Undocumented Haitians Now Have Chance to Live, Work Legally in U.S.,” By Renee Feltz, Feb. 19, 2010

“Compassion of the Church: Springing Faith into Action for Haiti,” By Jaisal Noor, Feb. 19, 2010

Working Class and Gay in South Africa

February 27, 2010 · 1 Comment

CNN has a story on why despite South Africa’s progressive laws, lesbians and gays are still under attack there. The basic moral of the piece is that if you’re middle class, you can form your own safe, comfortable communities even if other middle class people want to discriminate against you. If you’re working class–and South Africa is a very social conservative country, with the working classes holding some objectionable views too–and gay, then you condemned to a more precarious life.

Willie Mays, the Say Hey Kid

By PETE HAMILL

Published: February 25, 2010

 

Illustration by Rodrigo Corral; photograph from Bettmann/Corbis

 

WILLIE MAYS

The Life, the Legend

By James S. Hirsch

Illustrated. 628 pp. Scribner. $30

Related

Excerpt: ‘Willie Mays’ (February 10, 2010)

Up Front: Pete Hamill (February 28, 2010)

Willie Mays, at 78, Decides to Tell His Story (January 31, 2010)

Dwight Garner’s Review of ‘Willie Mays’ (February 10, 2010)

 

Audio

Enlarge This Image

Associated Press

Willie Mays in 1973.

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A long time ago in America, there was a beautiful game called baseball. This was before 30 major-league teams were scattered in a blurry variety of divisions; before 162-game seasons and extended playoffs and fans who watched World Series games in thick down jackets; before the D.H. came to the American League; before AstroTurf on baseball fields and aluminum bats on sandlots; before complete games by pitchers were a rarity; before ballparks were named for corporations instead of individuals; and long, long before the innocence of the game was permanently stained by the filthy deception of steroids.

In that vanished time, there was a ballplayer named Willie Mays.

He came to a Manhattan ballpark named the Polo Grounds in 1951, when he was 20, to play for the New York Giants. Within a few months, he showed that he had the potential to become one of the greatest players ever to walk on the green grass of the major leagues. He could hit, he could run, he could catch, he could throw. And he brought to the playing of baseball a mysterious, almost magical quality that has disappeared from the professional game. Willie Mays brought us joy. All of us.

Even those of us who from birth were fanatical acolytes of the secular church of the Brooklyn Dodgers. The ­Dodgers were in my DNA. My father was an immigrant from Belfast and didn’t become truly American until he got baseball. I’m sure that passionate embrace was true of millions of other immigrants, and was swiftly passed to their American children. My father took me to my first ballgame at Ebbets Field in 1946. I went with my own friends one June day in 1947, just before my 12th birthday, and saw Jackie Robinson in his first brave season, saw him get hit by a pitch, then steal second, then drive the pitcher nuts with his jittery feints, and then score on a single. And heard the gigantic roar from all the Brooklyn tribes. Bed-Stuy was joined at last with Bensonhurst and Park Slope, Flatbush and Bay Ridge. For Robinson and the team president, Branch Rickey, had done more than simply integrate baseball. They had integrated the stands. From the box seats to the bleachers, we were consumed by love of the Dodgers. The phrase “Dem Bums” was uttered with deep affection.

All those old passions rose in me again when reading James S. Hirsch’s fine new book, “Willie Mays: The Life, the Legend.” Above all, I remembered Mays getting a thunderous round of applause when he first came to bat in games at Ebbets Field (the only other visiting player to hear such cheers was Stan Musial of the St. Louis Cardinals). Even the most fanatical Dodger fans wanted Mays to go 3 for 4, steal two bases and make one astounding catch in center field, as long as the Dodgers won, 6-4. Here I must plead guilty to nostalgia, but not to sentimentality, which is always a lie about the past. Like millions of others, I was there. And I remember the joy of watching a young man named Mays play the game for everything it was worth. To all of us then, it was worth a lot.

“By the time he retired,” Hirsch writes, “he was an American icon whose athletic brilliance and stylistic bravado contributed to the assimilation of blacks during the turbulent civil rights era, a distinctive figure of ambition, sacrifice and triumph who became a lasting cultural touchstone for a nation in search of heroes.”

In his long, fascinating account, Hirsch tells the full story of Mays’s baseball life. He was born in 1931 in a mainly black mill town outside Birmingham, Ala., where he was raised by his father, Willie Mays Sr. (known as Cat), and his mother’s two younger sisters. His mother, Annie Satterwhite, never married his father, but the strapped Depression household was full of feminine warmth. Beyond that small community, the world could be ominous with danger. In Alabama, there were still living Americans who had been born into slavery. The Ku Klux Klan, the most enduring of American terrorist organizations, remained the ultimate enforcer of the iron rules of segregation. When Willie was 7, the family moved to Fairfield, a nearby town that was biracial. By then, the boy had discovered baseball, and he was tutored by Cat, who played semipro ball. Young Willie learned to hit and run and slide and catch and throw. The full curriculum. Most important, he learned the rules of the game. They were at once a challenge and a comfort.

“Willie Mays,” Hirsch writes, “always recalled his childhood as a joyous, sunlit time surrounded by loving friends and family who encouraged his dreams and sheltered him from hardship.”

In great detail, Hirsch — the author of “Hurricane: The Miraculous Journey of Rubin Carter” — tells the story of the rise of the teenage Mays, who first starred in high school sports (including basketball and football) and then, even before graduation, joined the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro leagues. Older players guided him in baseball and in life. In 1950, he was signed by the New York Giants for $4,000 and assigned to a minor-league team in Trenton; in 1951, he moved to the triple-A Minneapolis Millers. He was hitting .477 in the first 35 games when the Giants called him up.

The Giants’ owner, Horace Stoneham, assigned a boxing promoter named Frank Forbes as the kid’s personal guardian, charged with warding off all temptation and finding him a place to live in Harlem. But his baseball guardian was the Giants’ manager, Leo Durocher. Hirsch gives us a delightfully raffish portrait of the man Mays would call Mr. Leo for all the years to come. Mr. Leo’s desire to win, at all costs. His baseball intelligence. And his marvelous gift for obscenity (the one Durocher characteristic Mays did not adopt). With his nerves pulsing steadily, Mays started off poorly, going 1 for 26 (the one hit was a home run off the great Warren Spahn). Then he started to hit, and the career had begun. That rookie year, he was in the on-deck circle during the playoff game with the Dodgers, trembling with stress, when Bobby Thomson hit “the shot heard round the world.” Before he was done, Mays would hit 660 home runs of his own.

Most of the book concentrates on baseball. It’s full of recalled moments, including the amazing catch of Vic Wertz’s drive in the 1954 World Series (and the even more amazing throw that followed). The baseball brilliance is here, along with the slumps and the sporadic collapses from exhaustion. The career of Willie Mays, Hirsch reminds us, underlines the fact that even the best hitters fail seven times out of 10. We are also told about the various strategies Mays adopted to retain some privacy in the face of immense public celebrity. We are reminded of the failure of Mays’s first marriage and the success of his second. We learn about his money problems, in those years before free agency created baseball millionaires, and about his generosity, especially to kids. We learn again how Mays and other black players had to endure racism in those early years. We get a better sense of his reluctance to plunge publicly into the civil rights movement, owing to a combination of modesty and caution (he was attacked for that caution by Jackie Robinson). In his own fashion, Mays seemed to be saying that he challenged virulent racism in the way he lived and by the way he played the game.

For me, starting on Page 269, Hirsch reveals a story I never knew: what happened after the Giants and the Dodgers left New York at the end of the 1957 season. Like many others, including my father, I erased baseball from my life that year. I wouldn’t read about it. I didn’t watch a single game on television. I was embarrassed and embittered by the childish naïveté that had fueled my passion. Like most Giant and Dodger fans, I could never root for the Yankees. So I never saw Mays play for San Francisco. Not an inning.

Hirsch fills in those blanks, causing me even more regret. I missed the great years of Sandy Koufax and Bob Gibson and Henry Aaron. I missed seeing Mays battle the winds that made Candlestick Park the worst stadium in baseball (probably costing him a hundred career home runs). I didn’t see another baseball game until the Mets arrived in the tottering shell of the Polo Grounds in 1962, before Shea Stadium was ready. I went to the park to see them play the Pittsburgh Pirates, but all I could see was Willie Mays. I waited for Shea.

In this book, Hirsch evokes a time now gone, one he himself didn’t experience. He was born in 1962, and never saw Mays play. But he has studied the films and videos. He has drawn on newspaper and magazine articles from that era, and previous books about Mays (most notably Charles Einstein’s “Willie’s Time,” published in 1979). He has interviewed many people, including Mays, who has “authorized” this biography. The result: Hirsch has given us a book as valuable for the young as it is for the old. The young should know that there was once a time when Willie Mays lived among the people who came to the ballpark. That on Harlem summer days he would join the kids playing stickball on St. Nicholas Place in Sugar Hill and hold a broom-handle bat in his large hands, wait for the pink rubber spaldeen to be pitched, and routinely hit it four sewers. The book explains what that sentence means. Above all, the story of Willie Mays reminds us of a time when the only performance-enhancing drug was joy.

 

Pete Hamill, the author of more than 20 books, is a distinguished writer in residence at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University.

A People's History of American Empire by Howard Zinn

Poetry Editor Amber Mosure interviewed Wanda Coleman.

A recent contributor to HARRIET, Wanda Coleman occasionally contributes to drgodine.blogspot.com, and is featured in Writing Los Angeles (Library of America, 2002), in Poet's Market (2003), and Quercus Review VI (2006). She has been an Emmy-winning scriptwriter, and a former columnist for Los Angeles Times magazine; a nominee for poet laureate, California 2005 and for the USA artists fellowship 2007. Coleman's works from Black Sparrow include the novel Mambo Hips and Make Believe, Bathwater Wine, winner of the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize—the first African- American woman to receive the award.

AM: I read that your father was an ex-boxer turned advertising agent and your mother cleaned houses and worked as a seamstress. Did your parents approve or disapprove of you writing poetry? How did they encourage your talent?

WC: In the late 40s-early 50s, my father was a sparring partner for Archie Moore, light heavyweight champion 1952-1959. He had a few bouts of his own, but basically his career in the ring was over by 1953 and, between selling insurance policies for Golden State (the only Black-owned insurance company in Los Angeles), and working nights for RCA as a janitor, he opened up a series of print shops then sign shops in South Central. They sustained him until he retired in the mid-80s. He met my mother through an aunt, who did the laundry for wealthy white families in Hollywood and Beverly Hills. At that time (1940-43) my mother was a cook and maid for actors Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman. My parents had mixed feelings about my writing. They were proud that I was intelligent enough to be a writer, but my content (and my moodiness) gave them conniptions. (Before she died two years ago, my mother would finally remind me how much my strong language had once upset her, but that when compared to today's hiphop and its rappers my work seemed tame.) My parents had always encouraged me to read, as a child, but had fits when I got in trouble at school for the kinds of material I was reading: Henry Miller, Jim Thompson, Sartre, Malraux, stuff like dat.

AM: You married young and had children. How has this experience shaped your writing and your poetic themes?

WC: I married right out of high school at 18 in 1964 and was a single mom on my own by the age of 22—in and out of college and writing workshops. The experience forced me into a working-class poverty I've never recovered from, which has ironically provided me with endless material for poems and stories. But I was never able to complete my formal education, to my everlasting regret. I wouldn't advise any young woman to follow that path.

AM: You've held down a number of different jobs over the years: medical secretary, waitress, magazine editor, and journalist just to name a few. How have these various jobs influenced the way you write?

WC: I was also an endowed chair—once. Jobs in “the real world” caused me to devise methods of writing well under pressure—which is good discipline when one has to write against a deadline. I've also learned to make the most of the time I have for vacations, coffee breaks, and lunch. For years, I rose at 4 a.m. in order to get an hour of writing in before getting the kids off to school or a babysitter's and going to work. On most jobs I was able to trade weekdays off in exchange for vacation time. That allowed me to travel whenever I was invited to share my poems or stories overseas or across the country. These jobs were also rich sources of writing material.

AM: What authors and what books have influenced your poetry? Who were the authors that compelled you to keep writing, and what about their work inspired you?

WC: I have tried listing these in the past, but it sounds outrageous. So I'll name the biggies: Ann Petry (I completely identified with the circumstances and world view presented in her book The Street), Richard Wright (his The Man Who Lived Underground is simply the finest piece of prose ever written by an African American), Poe (the poems and the short stories), Guy De Maupassant (I read his complete works), Melville (Moby Dick at 14 was a terrific read), Nathanael West (his novels blew me away), Jeffers (a landsman), Charles Olson and E.E. Cummings (both stylistically), and Charles Bukowski (by chance, he was someone living I actually had the opportunity to observe—and the content of his work gave me the nerve to approach Black Sparrow Press with my first manuscript, which was rejected).

AM: I read that you got a lot of backlash for writing a bad review of Maya Angelou's book, A Song Flung Up to Heaven, why do you think that happened?

WC: Well, actually, I wrote a great and accurate rip of Maya Angelou's fake book. The editorial staff of the Los Angeles Times did not support me after giving me the assignment. I was told by an assistant editor that they received hundreds of letters and subscription cancellations. They did not allow the unexpected controversy to “blow off” by publishing some of those letters, pro and con, thereby engaging in a discussion as they had done with other writers. They made me an exception. By not allowing readers to voice their responses, or allow a dialogue to take place, they set me up as a target. I was left to sink or swim on my own. I got busy and wrote 3-4 essays in response. Ishmael Reed's online magazine Konch, L.A. Weekly, The Nation, and The Sentinel were the only publications approaching “mainstream” in which I was allowed to respond to the backlash.

My rip of Song seems to have since liberated literary critics worldwide. I've never seen so many sacred cows given the ax. However, the controversy over my review was water off Angelou's back. She has a “magic mack”—she is a charming, well-spoken one-book author who was able to parlay her success with I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings and a brief friendship with James Baldwin into a monster literary career. She has had the blessings of such notables as Oprah Winfrey (who shed tears on the air, she was so moved by Maya's pap) and President Clinton (who added to her celebrity by anointing her Poet Laureate of the nation). Even President and First Lady Obama have dropped her name. Thus, Maya is imbued with heavy-duty literary influence—much akin to the holy powers of the Pope— which usually inspires fear among academics and tends to mute criticism from all quarters.

My original review plus all the essays I wrote on the controversy appear in "The Maya Situation" section of The Riot Inside Me. I also preface and end the section by telling the reader what kinds of reactions I received personally, along with some anecdotes summarizing the fallout.

AM: You started out as a poet. How easy or hard was it to make the transition to fiction writer?

WC: I did not start out as a poet. I started out as a musician, discussed in part in one of the essays in The Riot Inside Me: Trials and Tremors (Black Sparrow Books). I wanted to be a concert violinist, played the piano, tried the cello and viola. I represented my elementary school at one of Leonard Bernstein's Youth Concerts (1958), and once had the pleasure of meeting Pablo Casals (at a music festival). I spent many afternoons and a few "field trip" evenings at the Philharmonic Auditorium. I studied violin privately with a noted virtuoso who had immigrated to the U.S. from Italy. But in "the ghetto," the price of my love for classical music was ego-blistering. I was ostracized by my "colored" peers and called such names as bulldagger, freak and sissy—which, in those days, were not as hurtful as being called black and I was called that as well.

My pursuit was ended by a debilitating bout of encephalitis that eventually weakened my fingering (I still can't finger pop on my left hand). I also had voice training and thought I might become a singer. But after I heard Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, and Kitty White, I decided that originality was important to me. By their standards, I could only be mediocre as a singer. However, I was so well-read that I knew the world as I was witnessing it did not exist in Western Literature. By putting that world into writing, I knew I could be an original; therefore, I decided that writing was the best place for my creative expressions.

As a fledgling writer I went from poetry to fiction and back with relative ease. It was the lack of sufficient writing/contemplative time that brought my poetic aspect to the fore (I often worked 2-3 jobs at a time). Once I had my artistic breakthrough (1976), I was able to write five or six poems in an hour and still meet my aesthetic criteria. I've had over 1100 poems published. Fiction, as I wanted to write it, demanded more time and greater focus, therefore my production (100 short stories and 2 novels, one unpublished) has been small relative to fiction writers in general.

AM: A lot of writers start out with one goal in mind and throughout their career that idea changes. How have your writerly goals changed over the years?

WC: My original goal was to be one of the world's great writers. That has not changed. I am still reaching for it. My more mundane goals, largely focused around getting published, have changed only to the extent that the publishing business has changed and is still going through post-internet and computer-era throes, not to mention the ramifications of the current economic crash. Funny, the phrase “paperless world” really rankles. If anything, the digital world demands “more paper faster.” There was a paperless world before the Egyptians invented papyrus, and books were the purview of the social elites of priests and rulers until Gutenberg. Otherwise, I wish I had more quality writing time, were less of a dreamer by nature and more pragmatic. I often get that “born too late/born too soon” feeling, when reconsidering writers from the past, then encountering new writers. Recently, when invited to France, my young host asked me who, among France's famous writers would I like to meet? It was quite a strange shock to me when he pointed out that everyone I named was deceased.

AM: I've read that you are the “L.A. Blues Woman.” How did that name come about?

WC: Irish-American poet Tim Joyce gave me that moniker back in the early 80s. I've tried to honor it. I had written a few blues poems, and have written more since ("Morning Widow Blues," "Blues Off Key", etc.) Three years ago I was invited to the annual blues festival in Oxford, Mississippi where I had a great time performing in that genre and visiting Faulkner's home.

AM: What advice would you give to emerging poets and writers about how to go about getting their work published?

WC: The little or small press magazines that exploded into existence after Ed Sanders birthed Fuck You magazine in 1962, seem to have largely vanished or gone online. Those in which I flexed my writing muscles fifteen years later included Ab Intra, Bachy, First World, Art Kunkin's Free Press and Momentum. These kinds of publications keep the literary ego encouraged, are good places to grow, test one's skills, and sometimes make one's reputation. I always advise my students to not fear rejection, to submit their work to the magazines they admire, and to compete for the prizes they covet.

AM: Another woman who tends to attract attention and has a reputation as confrontational and outspoken is Exene Cervenka. In 1985, you and Exene Cervenka collaborated on a spoken word LP entitled, “Twin Sisters.” What was that experience like?

WC: No one's ever asked me about that! In 1981, an ambitious fellow named Harvey Kubernik (who once recorded Charles Bukowski) was traversing our sub-Hollywood scenes, tapping poets, rock musicians and performance artists for a number of spoken word compilations (Voices of the Angels, Neighborhood Rhythms, English as a Second Language). His tastes were eclectic and nondiscriminatory. He reached for anyone he thought excellent, and who represented a neglected aspect of life in Southern California. He put together shows as well, working with the likes of Linda Albertano (ex-backup singer for Alice Cooper), Ray Manzarek and John Densmore (surviving members of The Doors), singer-songwriter Jack Nitzsche, and counterculture icon Timothy Leary, booking us at local venues and poetry festivals.
This man worked like the Devil to revive and promote the post-Beat west coast spoken word phenomenon only to be overshadowed when the slams broke in New York and Chicago, and with the emergence of the Nuyorican Cafe. Harvey was the first, but the media virtually shunned him; nevertheless, he toughed it out. Not only did he put me on stage with X personnel, including Dave Alvin, but teamed me with performance vamp Lydia Lunch (Vortex, 1983), Henry Rollins (Black Flag), and Jello Biafra (Dead Kennedys). In 1985 he paired me with Exene for Twin Sisters (re-released in 1991). We were not strangers. I first met John Doe and Exene in their early days before they formed their rock band X, while they were aspiring young poets hanging out at Beyond Baroque Literary Center in Venice Beach, so we were already on friendly terms if not friends. We had a great time putting the album together, and every reading we did was hothothot and packed to the rafters.

Los Angeles artist George Evans (currently exhibiting his work with William “Bill” Pajaud—one of my father's former protégés at Golden State) did the cover art and design. But we could not get Twin Sisters taken seriously or reviewed anywhere of value…and our exciting project fizzled despite our hard work. I thought it failed because of the obvious racial statement inherent in what we were doing. Harvey maintained that my fans didn't like Exene and that Exene's fans didn't like me, regardless of color. They didn't see the fun or the irony in what we were doing as L.A. women, each important, in her own way, to the cultural life and mystique of the city! In that respect we were identical, if different in every other way. This seemingly unlikely experience with the New Wave/punk rock scenes was good for me in that it broadened my audience in some unexpected ways. I genuinely liked X and still treasure my LPs. They're right in there with the Bobby Blue Bland, John Coltrane and Franz Liszt. It was bad for me in that it alienated some of those who took me seriously as a literary figure. By the time we all called it quits, I had recorded with Berkeley poet Michelle Clinton (Black Angeles) and had three solo albums: High Priestess of Word, Berserk on Hollywood Boulevard and Black and Blue News (short stories).

The last time Exene and I were on stage together was at a memorial service for Allen Ginsberg in 1997.

AM: To me it seems that women writers and artists have come a long way in the last 30 years of establishing a platform with which to voice their pain, their experiences, and their power. This has happened especially because of women like you, Lydia Lunch, Diamanda Galas, Exene Cervenka, and Karen Finley. In what ways do women still have to prove themselves, and in what ways do they have more freedom?

WC: There are more women doctors! In AIDS-ridden and cancer-prolific America, women have more freedom when it comes to medical care and disease prevention, if there remains vast room for improvement. Healthcare professionals have undergone serious consciousness raising and are more sensitive to the needs of women and their physiological differences from men.

Women have greater roles in nearly every aspect of American life except the entertainment industry! Show business has become a bit more liberal when it comes to women over 25, but not by much. I am sick of movies where all the men, from 10 to 100 are in love with the same woman who's barely voting age. Women as sex objects, and exploited as such, has infested everything; too many women's roles border on soft or hard core pornography; even female newscasters are pressured to dress in a tits-and-ass manner, depending on the demographics.

When shopping for clothes, I've noticed that styles that were once considered the domain of prostitution have become everyday wear. At the same time, female body-types that don't conform to Playboy magazine standards largely remain censored unless they are comediennes and therefore fodder for laughs and pimp-simple satire—emphasis on sistuhs. That's about to change, I hope, with the much-anticipated release of a film based on the novel Push by Sapphire.
At the same time, more actresses have become godzillionaires, there are more women behind the cameras, more women free to assume positions of power outside the traditional arenas, and within their communities. Too—American women are freer to become athletes. When I played basketball there were no opportunities for me to even think about turning professional, or to pursue a sports scholarship.
On the negative side: 1) White women comprise the largest number of homeless females in our country. 2) Women—especially poor Blacks and Latinas—are being criminalized and imprisoned in rapidly increasing numbers. 3) Taboos against women being angry, even when justified, and against expressions of non-exploitive eroticism from women are still at work in our society.

However, the most horrific aspect of being a woman is if one grows old and has limited resources. Aging in America and what it does to its largely female geriatric population is a travesty. There is nothing worse than the assisted living/post-operative/nursing home systems of this nation. They not only exploit helpless and ailing senior citizens, largely women, they endanger and rob them if their families do not protect their valuables or keep track of their finances! This is also true of home-care situations, if to a lesser extent. Women who are suffering from the effects of aging are often forced into close quarters with the maladjusted or the criminally insane. These institutions and their employees are largely unmonitored, and, when regulated, insufficiently regulated. The elderly and the ill—male and female alike—are literal prey for these organizations when they become substandard.

AM: Tell us about any projects you're working on at the moment.

WC: Before starting to make my reputation as a poet, I engaged in playwriting. One of my first plays, The Product was produced at a late 60s arts space called Studio Watts (poet-actor Jayne Cortez was one of the founders). I'm “studying” to go back to that.

Among my favorite plays/small films are the dramatization of Carson McCullers'novel Member of the Wedding and LeRoi Jones' stunning Dutchman. Among the playwrights I admired as a teenager were Eugene O'Neill, Luigi Pirandello, Harold Pinter (especially his surreal Birthday Party) and Arthur Miller (who I finally met at the 2001 National Book Awards tete-a-tete, yikes!). Oddly enough, Miller was very unassuming (the opposite of most people who have his kind of reputation). His life as a young playwright had been very difficult, he said. He implied that playwrights were lesser than poets and novelists. I gushed at him that Death of a Salesman, was “absolutely a work of art—a masterpiece” as was The Crucible. He blushed then got a faraway look in his eyes.

Other than that, I continue on as usual, writing poems and stories. I hope to publish that second novel and a third collection of short stories. I'm also contemplating “selecteds” of my work, poetry and fiction. Nowadays, I get up at 5:30 in the mornings, freshen up, get a cup of coffee, cocoa or tea, and then attack the stack of unwritten work, unread books and journals begging my attention. My husband, Austin Straus, is a former English professor, a painter and a poet (Drunk with Light, Red Hen Press). When I have a good couple of days of writing, I will usually have something for him to read by lunchtime on the third day. He'll take a look, give valuable feedback, and help me edit my first draft. I do the same for him.

Sunday, June 21, 2009

BEYOND WORDS

Bobby McFerrin smashed it at the Royal Festival Hall last week. A man who has a voacl vocabulary beyond words and the ability to create a community in a auditorium of over 6 hundred people. All with a a wordless melody that seems to have words scattered all the way through it. Don't ask me what I mean, just try and see him next time he's in your area. Richard Bona, bass extra ordinaire.