Poetry Blog: "A Work Day in Hard Times"

In celebration of Black History Month and the centennial anniversary of Dudley Randall’s birth, I have been invited to share with you some of Randall’s poetry and history.

Dudley Randall is equally respected for his roles as poet and as the founder of Broadside Press.

At a time in U.S. history when few mainstream presses would publish the work of African American poets, Broadside made the poetry of seminal African American authors such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Etheridge Knight, Audre Lorde, Haki Madhubuti, and Sonia Sanchez available to readers throughout the world.

Broadside Press has continued this work for 49 years now, just as it has continued to promote Randall’s vision of the written word as a living art form intimately connected to community and to self-determination.

Below is “A Different Image,” one of Dudley Randall’s signature poems. In it he asks us to re-image and, thus, re-imagine these connections.

I look forward to sharing more of Randall’s work and legacy with you in the coming weeks.

Rosemary Weatherston
Director, Dudley Randall Center for Print Culture

“A Different Image”

The age
requires this task:
create
a different image;
re-animate
the mask.

Shatter the icons of slavery and fear.
Replace
the leer
of the minstrel’s burnt-cork face
with a proud, serene
and classic bronze of Benin.

Wednesday February 5 – Beloved Community

A week ago on Wednesday morning about the same hour (7:30)  it was +1º;  today it is + 21º but with blowing snow and chancy driving.   Let’s hope we get through another day of winter in reasonably good spirits and reasonably good working order.

john st sj

Today’s post:

The Beloved Community series comes to us from a Student-Life-led  committee who have planned events and on-campus posters for the weeks that began with Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday and will conclude when the end of February turns campus toward Spring Break.  Here’s today’s post, taken from Bell Hooks,  Killing Rage: Ending Racism.

“(Beloved) community is formed not by the eradication of difference but by its affirmation, by each of us claiming the identities and cultural legacies that shape who we are and how we live in the world.”

Also: a news note from the Muslim Student Organization

“Drop by Grounds CoffeeHaus on Wednesday, February 5th @ 6PM for a poetry slam and art show. You can write poetry about any topic and recite it or have someone recite it for you. Also, feel free to display any art. There will be refreshments!”

Tuesday February 4,

I learned early this  morning that my dissertation mentor and friend Thomas Parke Hughes died yesterday afternoon at age 91 (Altzheimer’s).  Lots of stories are coming to mind as I enter one of my life’s most sacred goodbyes.   I would never have found the history of technology  if Tom and I had not met my first day of graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania.  I didn’t even know there was such a profession and I met him by accident when I got bumped from another seminar because it was full.  I sat in on his class because it looked interesting.   During that hour I met the person who would mentor me into an intellectual commitment that has defined my life.  He and Agatha, his wife, became close friends.  They are now both gone but the friendship endures.

So I am taking liberties with today’s post in honor of this beautiful man who challenged me to look at the history of technology as my calling.  Today, remembering, I’ve sifted stories about Tom for one that could serve as today’s post, a small memorial from me to him in the company of all the people who receive this list serve.  It matters to tell him thanks here at UDM, the place where I have lived most of the professional life he helped inspire.

john st sj

Here’s a two paragraph story about Tom and me taken from John M. Staudenmaier, sj  “Welcoming in a Lovely Worlld,” Leonardo da Vinci Medal Lecture Nov 4, 2011.

Thursday  January 30   Great Lakes Ice

A friend sent me this article from MLive.  I reverses a trend that had been going on for a few years, less and less ice cover on the big lakes meant that sunshine did not bounce off the ice;  it entered the open water, warming it up, and increasing evaporation and lake effect snow.  The evaporation was a big reason the lake levels had been going down.  But apparently this monster cold weather as spiked the amount of ice cover a whole lot during January (62% of all Great Lakes surface is now ice).  More ice, more sun bounces off ice, less lake effect snow,less evaporation, more winter sunshine and more cold. I’m scratching my head about this.  Check out the article.  Here are the first few lines;  link to the whole piece is just below.

Enjoy the sun; take care about frostbite.

john sj

p.s.       UDM’s board of trustees meets this afternoon and tomorrow so I won’t be posting tomorrow.

pps.      Here’s a short poem.

Enough

Enough. These few words are enough.
If not these words, this breath.
If not this breath, this sitting here.

This opening to the life
we have refused
again and again
until now.

David Whyte, Where Many Rivers Meet

ppps.   Here’s the M-Live article:

“The Great Lakes have reached 62 percent ice coverage due to extreme cold, and in the weeks ahead that can have a triple-barreled consequence on Michigan’s weather: More cold. Less lake-effect snow. More sun.

The coverage is growing rapidly. The ice area more than doubled in just one recent week, from 22 percent coverage on Jan. 15 to 48 percent by Jan. 22. From Jan. 22 to Jan. 28 the average Great Lakes ice grew another 14 percent.

Lake Superior is 69 percent covered in ice. Lake Michigan has 46 percent ice cover, while Lake Huron is 71 percent ice covered. Lake Erie is almost totally covered with ice, at 96 percent. Lake Ontario has 26 percent ice cover.”

http://www.mlive.com/weather/index.ssf/2014/01/michigans_great_lakes_rapidly.html

Wednesday January 29 – Beloved Community

Weather.com says that it’s +1º at 7:20 am, heading up to 17º.    Sunny and windy.    Back to work.

Today’s post is a reminder that a Student-Life-led  committee has planned events and on-campus posters for the weeks that began with Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday and will conclude when the end of February & Black History Month turns campus toward Spring Break.

Here is this week’s poster-saying:     “But the end is reconciliation.”

Have a blest day

john sj

“But the end is reconciliation;
the end is redemption;
the end is the creation of the beloved community.

It is this type of spirit and this type of love
that can transform opposers into friends . . .
It is an overflowing love which seeks nothing in return.”

MLK 1957

Monday January 27

Last week Provost Zarkowski  posted an invitation for a Sexual Conduct Policy Workshop this coming Friday afternoon at 3:00 in the PDR.  It’s one of three events offered by Dr Harry Brod (the other two are Thursday and Saturday).   The attached document includes a link where you can register for Friday (plus information about the other two events on Thursday and Saturday).   To call some attention to this week’s three events I am re-posting one of my favorite poems, Denise Levertov’s “Prayer for Revolutionary Love.“  Its first post appeared on October 23, the day before UDM’s evening conversation about domestic violence.  It is encouraging that  UDM’s co-hosts have brought in a national figure to help us continue the conversation.

Colder than hell these days, wearing times.    Even so, have a blest day.

john sj

Friday, January 24, 2014

Some friends live in Stockholm, a lot closer to the Arctic Circle than we are in Motown; both cities have cold snaps today. We have 2 hours and 12 minutes more daylight than they. My friends pay attention to interior lighting — patches of sharp bright light placed to contrast with dim light elsewhere. Surprising how refreshing that can be on long winter nights.

About today’s poem: I got talking with a fellow UDM employee two days ago and the topic of angels came up. I told her/him that my niece, Terri, has occasionally written about her grandmother’s passion for guardian angels. Here’s one: flint-hard, unblinking, fierce intergenerational love: grandmother sending prayers and angels; granddaughter “without any gods”; both full of tenderness.

Have a good weekend. Bundle up in the wind gusts.

john st sj

–THE PENWOOD REVIEW
Published, Fall 1998

Prayers That Mean Something

Grandmother loans out guardian angels.
She is generous with them, always
has an extra. I suppose she’s been
collecting them, maybe inheriting them,
one every five years or so,
from loved ones gone.

If my need is truly great, she sends two or three, or
one of her best, my grandfather’s
or her own. She
grips my hand, without
fragility, tells me,
“You are good” and
it means just that.

When Grandmother says she’ll pray for something,
it is wise to have faith. For her,
even wishbone wishes come true.

Her prayers are long,
include every grandchild by name.
She prays, “Dear Lord, for what is best…”
and it is not less to be one
of so many grandchildren, for
her prayers have strength.

And she prays,
“Dear God, thank you that I still am able,” as
she hangs wet clothing between
two trees older than she, but
less gnarled.

And I, without any gods, pray too, pray, dear god dear
god, dear
thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou

that she still is able.

Terri Breeden

In The Spiritual Exercises  St. Ignatius teaches various methods of prayer.  One of the most important he calls “Repetition.” (“Attention should be paid to some more important places in which I have found understanding, consolation, or desolation.” Sp Ex # 118).   The principle: “I know more from my experiences than I think;  go back and savor and be surprised.”   For some reason this morning I went back to the workday posts from the beginning of October and found this one about longer nights and shorter days.

Here it is again, posted with no changes from its Oct 2 original form.  Good for the deep darkness of January.

Have a good day.

john sj

From: john staudenmaier sj <staudejm@udmercy.edu>
Subject: a work day as days get shorter
Date: October 2, 2013 7:07:56 AM EDT
To: “employees@listserver.udmercy.edu” <employees@listserver.udmercy.edu>

Hard times —  a Congress locked in venom and contempt for those with whom one must negotiate,  “partisan” is a common adjective for elected officials at the national level;   Detroit city caught in uncertainties about bankruptcy that stir mistrust and fear for the future;   UDM negotiating a McNichols faculty contract turned acrimonious and hurtful.

This morning reminded me that I like getting up while it is dark outside.  It helps me recognize a balance of light and dark.  The descent of the sun toward December solstice doesn’t just cheer me up because autumn colors start to replace the dreadful pollens of ragweed season (asthma).  Early dark opens awarenesses that hustling along in the light I sometimes miss.   I once got in a fight at MIT when I gave a talk about the West’s coupling the emergence of Western scientific methods with a devaluing of Europe’s mystical disciplines.  A friend, Leo Marx got upset with that talk and some other MIT-Harvard types got angry and insulting that I would  call the dark “holy” and celebrate mystery and mysticism at MIT.   But it was Leo who introduced me to this piece with which the published paper now ends.

Have a good day.

john st sj

A poem for days of diminishing light

Here come the stars to character the skies,
And they in the estimation of the wise
Are more divine than any bulb or arc,
Because their purpose is to flash and spark,
But not to take away the precious dark.
We need the interruption of the night
To ease attention off when overtight,
To break our logic in too long a flight,
And ask us if our premises are right.

Robert Frost “The Literate Farmers and the Planet Venus”

Wednesday January 22  Anastasia Baburova  poet and journalist and human rights fighter.

I’m not sure how this post took the two turns it did.  Turn # 1, looking out an east-facing window in Lansing Reilly a few minutes ago I saw sunrise on its way.   It’s almost over the horizon now.  That reminded me this sunrise is one third of the way from the shortest day one month ago, to the equinox two months from now.  Beautiful dawn as UDM Mcnichols people drive unto campus.  Then I checked the temperature.  – 1º;  but we missed a monster storm that hit Chicago and then swung under us over to DC, Baltimore, Philly, New York, Boston.

Turn # 2,  So weather stuff on my mind when I looked for a strong poem and found this short contemplation that Scott Simon broadcast in February 2009, about a beautiful young poet in Russia.  Each time I come across Anastasia’s poem and Scott Simon’s account of her murder, I touch the center of my soul and understand what’s the point.

Cold sunny morning;  one third of the way to equinox,  one sixth of the way to the beginning of summer & the longest day of the year.

john sj

 Here’s the post:

Britain’s Economist has printed a poem Anastasia wrote when she was just fifteen.

Wake up in the morning


Stretch your arms toward the sun


Say something in Chinese


And go to Paris
Every minute,

            somewhere in the world there is morning


Somewhere, people stretch their arms toward the sun

They speak new languages,

            fly from Cairo to Warsaw


They smile and drink coffee together

 Scott Simon editorial:

Even in such treacherous terrain, the recent killing of Anastasia Baburova, who worked for Novaya Gazeta, is especially outrageous. She was 25 years old. She was standing on a Moscow street on January 19 of this year with Stanislav Markelov, a human rights lawyer who had been a source on some of her investigative stories when they were both shot dead — in the back of the head.

You are not surprised to learn that the girl who wrote it grew up to be a journalist — and all the more aghast and sad that her life was cut short.

Scott Simon  February 14, 2009

Starting around 1956 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. began to call the world to create the “Beloved Community.”  He explained:  “I am not talking about some emotional bosh when I talk about love . . . you love those who don’t love you . . .  because God loves.”  King looks for the  “type of love that can transform opposers into friends.”  A love that empowered him to “Stand up for righteousness.  Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth.”   King believed such love could empower Whites and Blacks together to end poverty and militarism and racism.

To acknowledge the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. (1929) we will  post one “Beloved Community” text around campus each week and host conversations  about what  “Beloved Community” means for us at UDM as a University in Detroit.  For more information, see: http://www.udmercy.edu/news_events/news/by-year/2014/files/01-14-MLK.htm

2014 is also the 100^th birthday of  poet and publisher, Dudley Randall.  Because of his years in UDM’s library, the library is now one of the rare U.S. Literary Landmarks.  To honor his role in the creation of a culture of Black poetry, at UDM, in Detroit, and nationally through Broadside Press, Rosemary Weatherston, Director: Dudley Randall Center for Print Culture,  will guest edit one work day post each week in February.  More details follow.

******      ******      ******

Today’s post,  Tuesday January 21

Beloved Community – Jan 21-24, 2014  —  “The way of violence leads to bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers. But the way of nonviolence leads to redemption and the creation of the beloved community.”  (Martin Luther King Jr. Autobiography, Chapter 13)

Have a good day,

john st sj