I binge-watched Sex and the City one day with friends in Cleveland when I was back visiting maybe 18-20 years ago. I think it's the only time I've binge-watched. I enjoyed it that day. I knew my daughters liked the show and it gave me a TV connection with them which I almost never had. I liked Cynthia Nixon's character the best. She was easily my favorite.
I didn't really keep up with the show when I got back to New York. I can be that way. But I liked seeing Cynthia Nixon go on to do great work on stage and in some movies. I found it way cool that she was interested in public school issues. Her kids go to public schools here.
So when one day a couple years ago she and her partner (arms around each other is how I knew) went into the Department of Education right where I hold my sign, I got a little excited, and kept an eye out for them. Some minutes later they came back out the door of the big building, walking near me, close enough that Cynthia Nixon looked at my sign.
You can't tell who's going to like the sign as they approach it. No more than the women in grocery store aisles handing out samples of cheese spread on a cracker can tell who's going to ask for one. I've been disappointed and pleasnatly surprised by how people react.
I was big time disappointed by Nixon's reaction. She looked mad at it. Disdain may be the word. She looked away and walked away, her arm over her shorter partner's shoulder.
It bothered me. I Googled her when I got home. Nothing I found explained it.
Maybe she was thinking about running for office then. Maybe the sign surprised her. Maybe she agreed with the sign and didn't have a quick answer to herself about the issue. Maybe that bothered her
She's running for governor. She's for and against all the right things. Progressive for sure. I hope she comes by again. I hope she stops this time. At least smiles.
Friday, April 20, 2018
The street, Chambers Street, that I hold my sign on is just two lanes. It's pretty jammed when I'm there from 8:00-9:00 weekday mornings. It's rush hour and there's usually some kind of delay up ahead. Some cars beep at me standing there with the sign. They give a thumbs-up, sometimes two thumbs. Sometimes a car in the far lane, if they're stopped for a minute, will roll the window down and make some comment that I can't always make out with the thrum of lower Manhattan filling my ears. Yesterday a good-looking car was thumpimg with rap music with the windows up. I could hear it four cars away. When it got right across from me it came to a stop. It was throbbing then and throbbing more when the driver rolled down his window and put his forearm out with a strong curved thumb catching the morning light and said, 'Raise that sign higher, brotha.'
Thursday, April 19, 2018
from the New York Times: In 2018, the writer and poet Jacqueline Woodson (on the right) was National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. The author Tracy K. Smith is in the second of her two years as the poet laureate of the United States. In the midst of National Poetry Month, the two joined up to talk about reading, poetry, black history — and how their missions overlap. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
You both have official national roles, and it’s such a big country. How do you make an impact?
JACQUELINE WOODSON I’m going to Alabama, I’m going to Mississippi, I’m going to Texas and having conversations, and then figuring out how they can continue the conversation once I’m gone. I’ve been going to prisons and detention centers in underserved communities where people haven’t met authors, so I can talk to them about the power of reading, show them that when we have these conversations about books, we’re changed by them. I have this idea that many people think books are “not for them.” Access to them has been denied in a sense to certain classes, certain races. Sadly.
TRACY K. SMITH I’m going to community centers, libraries, rehab centers. I was in New Mexico and South Carolina, and there are about six more trips. I’m trying to figure out how to have the conversation we have about poetry at book festivals or readings, but in the rural and central parts of this country. It’s been beautiful. I have this belief that we are so vulnerable when we open ourselves up to literature. We’re reminded of these real parts of ourselves.
WOODSON: When I go to a boy’s detention center I’m talking about books by Jason Reynolds and Kwame Alexander and Rita Williams-Garcia; when I go somewhere else I’m talking about graphic novels. I’m gauging the audience and helping them figure out which books make a natural entry point. It’s work though. [She laughs.]
SMITH It’s a wonderful kind of work and it asks a lot of you, too. It’s exciting but exhausting.
WOODSON And kind of heartbreaking, because the more you do, the more hunger you see. We could be on the road 365 days a year and we still wouldn’t fill the need of the people who are being denied. There’s so many underserved people, underserved institutions, there’s mass incarceration. I feel good when I’m in those spaces, and when I get out I’m like, oh, I should be going to three more places today.
SMITH What are some of the possibilities you found for sustaining the engagement once you’re gone?
WOODSON I’m showing them how to start workshops. My first way in is to praise, so people feel safer. You meet so many people writing poetry or fiction, and they have no idea what the next step is. I’m trying to get them to not feel scared about gathering and talking about their work. I do Skype sessions after my visit, so they can take off from there. We’re also creating reading guides and suggested reading lists. A lot of times I hear, “I have young black boys, what are the books for them?” People don’t know if they’re not in this world of children’s literature. They could go to their public library and their librarian may not know. You go to rural Alabama, and the library is not even there.
Photo
Jacqueline Woodson receiving her ambassadorship earlier this year from Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress, while Gene Luen Yang, the former National Ambassador of Children’s Literature, looks on.CreditShawn Miller/Library of Congress
SMITH I’m hoping to find something beyond just going and leaving, too. There are a lot of state poet laureates I’m meeting, and they talk about doing what Jackie is doing. I think there must be a way I can work together with them to foster something that won’t go away.
Has there been a children’s ambassador and a poet laureate who have worked together? Is there any possibility for that?
WOODSON Not that I know of, and Tracy and I like each other so much … [She laughs.]
SMITH Let’s do something!
I have a question about poetry. In children’s literature it’s front and center. There are books by Kwame Alexander and Elizabeth Acevedo on the best-seller list right now. Kids love them. Why isn’t it the same for adults?
SMITH I have this feeling it gets spooked out of us around the time we start feeling beholden to tests and performances. I think the way poems are taught to high school students is completely counterintuitive; it sets up this sense of being the poem’s adversary. The poem is sort of sneakily trying to outsmart you. Whereas children live in this sense of perpetual metaphor. We even use song and verse to teach kids. And then there comes a time when we somehow estrange them from that, without wanting to, perhaps.
WOODSON I completely agree. I mean it’s our first language — we put words together with all this white space and it gets figured out. And then that gets forgotten. I remember by fifth grade I was terrified of poetry. It was consumed not for joy, but to be tested on. But I don’t understand why readers aren’t buying poetry. They must still have that fear in them. Because if you can read a novel you can read a collection of poetry and have such a rich experience, if not a richer one.
SMITH Listening to music and lyrics and watching movies, I think, uses a lot of the same muscles we use in reading and experiencing poetry — and yet we somehow forget that we have those when it comes to sitting down with a book of poems.
Photo
Tracy K. Smith signs the historic guest book at the Library of Congress before beginning her tenure as the poet laureate last year.CreditShawn Miller/Library of Congress
WOODSON One of the things I love about Tracy’s work is how accessible it is, how much it invites me in and makes me feel loved, really.
SMITH I feel that when I’m reading your work, Jackie, with my kids. Like you’re doing what August Wilson did, recording decades of black life and cycles. I remember growing up and learning the history of slavery and feeling —
WOODSON: Shame.
SMITH Yes. And guilt. Feeling bad that this piece of my history was making everybody uncomfortable. Your books tell these beautiful stories of survival and triumph.
WOODSON Growing up I felt so ashamed and guilty, but no one was talking about it as triumph, right? And as our country’s negative history, not our negative history. Even the way we said “slave” instead of “enslaved.” “Enslaved” takes the onus off us. Then the older I got the more I understood our history and the grace of our survival. Thank goodness for Mildred Taylor and Virginia Hamilton and Nikki Giovanni, the writers who came along and started putting black girlhood on the page in a way that felt relevant to me. And the fact that they’d once been black girls made it even more important.
SMITH The black history we got was just this little drop in February.
WOODSON I hated every time we got to pre-Civil War history. I was like, oh no, here we go. Harriet Tubman, Phillis Wheatley, the poet who learned to write from her nice white master. Nat Turner of course, because he died. Those were the biographies we got.
My daughter had an assignment where everyone in the class had to write a journal of someone from the 18th century. Her school has lots of kids of color, but everyone wanted to write from the white point of view. So I came in and said, I’ll write that! I wrote a journal of an enslaved girl. There was joy, there was playing, there was hard work, and there was resentment that she had to be enslaved to a white girl her same age. I wrote four journals that they still use. In my final one the girl finds out that the master’s daughter who she’s been enslaved to is her half sister. And then I was like, O.K. teachers, you can take it from there. [She laughs.]
Tracy, your new book, “Wade in the Water,” also takes the slavery narrative and makes it into something that feels new.
SMITH All I really did was listen to the letters that were out there, this Civil War correspondence between black soldiers and their families, or letters by black veterans or descendants of deceased veterans. Those voices felt so current, as though they were almost whispering from yesterday. I couldn’t imagine wanting to do anything other than saying, let’s just get these voices together, and maybe somebody else will want to hear them in the same way. There’s one moment where the father of a soldier says, “I’m willing to sacrifice my son in the cause of Freedom and Humanity” — he capitalizes those nouns. I’m reading it and thinking, do we really understand: If you were enslaved, freedom and humanity are not these abstractions.
Have you ever written for children?
SMITH I haven’t.
WOODSON Please do!
SMITH I would love to, I just need to figure out how I would do it.
WOODSON Picture books are poems! I’m always so surprised that poets don’t write more picture books.
There’s also the visual aspect to picture books, the illustration, but maybe a poet has a good sense of that too.
SMITH How was the visual element for you, Jackie?
WOODSON It feels natural because when I’m writing, I see what I’m writing, it’s very visual. Line by line, from one line to the next, you’re just revealing more of what’s there to see.
SMITH You just explained something to me about line breaks.
WOODSON Do you get to wear a medal? I have one.
SMITH No, I don’t have anything like that. What’s yours like?
WOODSON It’s a coin-like medal, big and heavy, with the ambassador emblem on the front and my name on the back.
Why isn’t there one for the poet laureate?
SMITH I don’t know. Maybe I’ll get one at the end. For now I just get the satisfaction.
Tuesday, September 19, 2017
A SEPARATE PEACE
How books and reading
can save your life. I think they saved mine.
I’ve mentioned this before. In college in the late 1960s
there was an upperclassman on campus who stood outside the dining hall with a
large bright tin can. He wore, in my pretty-certain memory, a loose white T
shirt and light khakis with no crease and sandals. There was a California look
about him in his easy clothes which seemed romantic to underclassman-me then who
most days wanted to be in California or some place progressive rather than
there in South Bend, Indiana. I’d only been to California once, a few years
before, the summer Trini Lopez hit it big with ‘If I Had a Hammer’. There was
something arresting to me about the way this guy stood with his shiny can and
the small sign attached to it that asked for money for the poor people of
Bangladesh. He had no guitar or love beads. Just the can. It has stayed with
me, that picture of him there. He’s dead now I heard. And I’m 70.
There were TV shows then that we all watched. Movies you had
to see. There were record albums that you had to have. We all read newspapers
from Chicago to see what the progress of the war was in Vietnam. We couldn’t
imagine going to war. We put quarters in the juke box and lit another cigarette.
And talked about the war, and the songs, and sports.
We read Kurt Vonnegut. Professors and priests couldn’t keep
up with him or Dylan or Herman Hesse or Portnoy. It was tough to go to class
for a lot of us. There was more that mattered in the newspapers in the student
center. There was more in the little Seeburg juke box menus on the wall in each
booth. There was more in the paperback books we carried in our pockets.
It was the books that took me into other worlds, into other
ways of seeing things. There were also magazines then that were much more
radical than all the periodicals our parents got at home. They were companions
to us who didn’t want to fight in a war. Racial issues were also often
discussed in bold ways in those books and magazines. Women’s issues too. It was
really where a lot of us got our education.
I first met Neal not long after my father died…I had
just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about except
that it really had something to do with my father’s death and my awful feeling
that everything was dead. With the coming of Neal there really began for me
that part of my life that you could call my life on the road.
Today of course there aren’t the books or readers like there
were then. On the subway, you still see Kerouac books. On another train you
might see Soul on Ice. I don’t know what new books are radical like
those were. Are music and TV shows and Netflix movies the radical‘s companions
now like books and magazines were and record albums were back then? I’m not
fighting for the way it was. I just wonder.
I got this nudge from somewhere to make a sign a half a
dozen years ago that had this sentence on it: WHY NOT TEACH EVERY SCHOOL KID TO
READ WELL. I don’t know where that somewhere was. I had been thinking about
city schools and poor kids and the failure of that combination. Especially in
reading. I had put out a few copies of acityReader which talked about my frustration over the
year-after-year continuation of the reading gap. So maybe the sign was just the
natural next step. It was certainly a natural step for a guy who wanted to be
like the guy with the can, to have a passion for something like he did.
The message of the sign has indeed become my passion. Six
years is it now that I’ve held it for an
hour every weekday that it isn’t raining
or too, too cold in front of Dept of Education building in downtown Manhattan?
It could be seven. I wouldn’t change a word on the sign, which is unusual for
me. I tinker, I over-think things, I cut my own hair.
If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me,
thought Moses Herzog.
-Herzog by Saul Bellow
You watch the Ken Burns Vietnam episodes on PBS and you
remember those times when everything was intense. When you argued with your
father over the war. When you rushed to take a couple of basic education
courses so you could get a provisional teaching certificate and then get a job
to teach in an inner city grade school which would give you a deferment from
going in the army which you certainly didn’t want to do then since you had a
baby daughter who was born the week before you graduated.
That daughter is 48 now and has kids of her own, and there
are two other daughters and three other grandchildren. And their long-divorced father wanted to text
them the other night to tell them to watch the Ken Burns Vietnam series, so
that they’d know him and their mother better and maybe excuse him easier. But
they have their own shows. Everybody’s got their own shows.
Some mornings when I’m walking with my sign in its big
Kinko’s bag from the subway to where I stand with it, I catch myself just
ambling along not really thinking about what I’m there for. I run a sequence of
images quickly through my mind that seem to focus me. The images are in black
and white like an old newsreel. They are pictures I’ve seen of poor
neighborhoods were hope doesn’t spring eternal. Places where it seems to me the
surest way to give hope is to see to it that everybody in those scenes is taught
to read well. That seems like a solution to a lot of things. I’m focused then. And
I hold the sign like I believe it. Which I do. I believe it more than anything.
I believe that it could change the world.
These are all our children. We will profit by, or pay
for, whatever they become.
-James Baldwin
With Heart in Hand
A young Harvard grad,
bred to do well, goes to do good in Arkansas.
This book is so well-written. You’re impressed with Harvard
and her Taiwanese background and whatever else went onto making Michelle Kuo
write so personally and honestly. She pulls no punches about herself or the
hardscrabble environment she finds herself in. She takes things seriously.
She came to Helena, Arkansas in the Teach for America
program. There’s no other way Helena and Michelle would have met. There’s no
other way Michelle would have met Patrick, the African-American eighth grader
whose life the book comes to focus on. It’s a challenge, this relationship.
Michelle’s efforts to do right by him move you. You envy her moral compass. And
her ability to tell a story. This is quite a book.
Never on Sunday
Your neighborhood library isn’t open then. Crazy as that
seems.
I’m writing this on a Sunday and it crossed my mind as it
has many Sundays, maybe I’ll walk around the corner two blocks from here and go
to the library, just to go somewhere between—or instead of-- the NFL
games. But alas, the libraries aren’t
open here on Sundays. It shocks me every time I realize that. In New York City
the libraries aren’t open on Sunday! Let them know you think that’s nuts the
next time you go to your neighborhood branch.
Make sure you get a library card for yourself and get one
for your kids. They’re good places. Even if they aren’t open as often as they
are in almost every other place in the country. That’s weird. Isn’t it.
A Book for Now. Stimulating to read his words, feel his
urgency.
'We go to college to be given one more chance to learn to read in case we haven't learned in high school. Once we have learned to read, the rest can be trusted to add itself unto us.'
I’ve been a schoolteacher. Right after college in 1969, like a lot of guys, I taught school as an alternative to serving in Vietnam. I was married with a week-old daughter on graduation day. I taught grade school English in Cleveland, Ohio for six years. After that, I ran, eventually owned, a longstanding bookstore in downtown Cleveland. It felt something like Three Lives in the West Village. I went on to found an alternative weekly paper like the Voice, also in Cleveland. It lasted 12 years. Twenty-one years ago I moved here, armed with an idea and a prototype for a national book magazine. Like a Rolling Stone for books. I never raised the huge amount of money I needed. I then worked for a media company, editing a couple of neighborhood weeklies, more than once using my editor’s space to talk about city kids and reading. Between the editorial jobs, I taught English for a year here in Manhattan at a Catholic boys’ high school with mostly minority kids. I was terrible at discipline. But sometimes when we found a book or a story we liked, it all came together.
gunlockeb@yahoo.com
