The Black Clown Adapted from the poem by Langston Hughes By Davóne Tines and Michael Schachter

The Black Clown

Adapted from the poem by Langston Hughes

By Davóne Tines and Michael Schachter

Music by Michael Schachter

Directed by Zack Winokur

At the American Repertory Theater

Loeb Drama Center

Harvard University

August 31 to September 23

Review by Wendell Smith 

The first thing you should do with this review is put it down and get online to see if you can get tickets to The Black Clown at the A.R.T. before it sells out. Ironically, given its subject, it is an entertainment not to be missed.

Ironic, because this entertainment grows from a poem that says a black man must overcome his culturally imposed role to be a clown and entertain us. Published by Langston Hughes in 1931, it can be read in less than the three minutes allotted at most open mikes. At the A.R.T. it has been turned into 70 minutes of absorbing theatre. 70 minutes where we are captured by the Muses through word, music and dance and led to a prospect where we are forced to look back at truths about our collective selves (the awful truths of our history) to seek to be healed and find hope for redemption through tears and shared community.

With one agonist, The Clown, exquisitely sung by Davóne Tines, and a chorus of equally accomplished singers and dancers, The Black Clown is rooted in the 6^th century BCE Greek origins of our theater, fulfilling the Aristotelian purpose for poetry: it evokes our pity and fear to cause the purgation of those emotions.

The poem, as published in 1931 and provided in the program, has this stage direction for an epigraph, "A dramatic monologue to be spoken by pure-blooded Negro in the white suit and hat of a clown, to the music of the piano or an orchestra." A line runs down the left-hand margin of the poem to separate it from an outline for the music and the actions of the chorus called, “The Mood.” Here is a short sample from the beginning of the poem, which demonstrates that Hughes’ knew the potential for his poem, knew it would flourish, if it were ever to find the right soil, water and nurturing attention, would bloom as it has at the A.R.T.:

THE MOOD                 THE POEM

A gay and                     You laugh

low-down blues.           Because I'm poor and black and funny –

Comic entrance            Not the same as you –

like the clowns             Because my mind is dull

in the circus.                 And dice instead of books will do

Humorous                     For me to play with

defiance.                       When the day is through.

The program identifies 17 musical numbers by name but they flow into each other so that, with two exceptions they do not stand as separate songs. Those exceptions are, as Hughes calls for their use in “The Mood:” “Nobody Knows [the trouble I've seen],” and “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Chile.” In their adaptation Tine and Schachter do not use these songs in their entirety but impress them upon us by repeating their iconic phrases.

“Nobody knows the trouble I've seen, nobody knows my sorrow,” in their rendition becomes a refrain without the solace of, “Nobody knows but Jesus.” and is presented, as Hughes suggested it should be, when the performance has progressed through his poem to this section:

Three hundred years

In the cotton and the cane,

Plowing and reaping

With no gain –

Until, at last, through the staging of that repetition we come to see and feel those “troubles” and “sorrows” as the chorus turns them from an abstract lyric sung by a Gospel choir into the visual substance of dance, and, in doing so, connects them with their source, slavery; a source, which we haven’t experienced but, until now, only observed. Here we cannot avert our gaze from this foundation of our culture but must see what whiteness does.

Hughes wants the second of those traditional songs to follow these lines:

Freedom!

Abe Lincoln done set me free –

One little moment

To dance with glee.

Then said this again –

No land, no house, no job,

No place to go.

Black – in a white world

Where cold winds blow.

Here Tine and Schachter have the chorus begin a funeral procession while singing “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child;” repeating it again and again as a dirge and carrying a chair above their heads as a symbolic casket they flow off the stage through the audience and back on the stage where the procession concludes the dirge as a member of the chorus lies down on the stage and a banner printed with Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation is used for a shroud while they sings these lines by Hughes:

Not wanted here; not needed

there—

Black—you can die

nobody will care.

With that The Clown reaches his nadir, and we are halfway through the poem; now the performance pivots and begins to swing up. Initially this is through the resistance of Jim Crow illustrated with piece of magical stagecraft. The Clown sings

Yet clinging to the ladder,

Round by round.

Trying to climb up,

Forever pushed down.

as a ladder made of light comes down from the scenery loft; The Clown tries to climb it, he get one rung off the floor but can’t climb any higher because, as he pulls this endless ladder of light past him, it disappears into the floor. The production has that kind of theatrical flair from its opening through the triumph its conclusion:

Cry to the world

That all might understand:

I was once a black clown

But now –

I'm a man!

The Black Clown is the culmination of collaboration between Davóne Tines and Michael Schachter that began 2010, a year after their graduation from Harvard. The A.R.T. became involved in 2015. The result is a complete piece of absorbing theater directed by Zack Winokur with choreography by Chanel DaSilva, music direction by Jaret Landon, sets and costumes by Carlos Soto, lighting by John Torres, and sound by Kai Harada, tickets on line at https://americanrepertorytheater.org/shows-events, at the Loeb Theater through September 23.

War Zones Zvi A. Sesling

War Zones

 Zvi A. Sesling

 Nixes Mate Books, Allston Mass. 2018

 Reviewer: Ari Appel

            With its tragic accounts of war and its human toll, War Zones by Zvi A. Sesling is an outstanding addition to any bookshelf, especially that of someone interested in war. It is consistent in portraying the uselessness and waste of war, each poem building off of the effect of the last as reading the book leaves one with a progressively darker and darker image of what war means. From loss of life to loss of dignity to loss of limb, Sesling covers a lot of ground for a short book. Some of my favorite lines are “Memories flash back like / an M-16 in the dark jungle,” “Bones in pieces and minds shattered,” and “War is the future,” the last of which is an interesting proposition—the book touches on the theme of war as ongoing several times.

            A poem that really stuck with me describes the tragedy of a fallen soldier who is given a 10-second memorial on a television station but Sesling describes him as follows: “Remembered or not he is already / forgotten by the nation / his moment of glory / he will not hear the cheers / for the returned living.” The idea that a fallen soldier can be so easily forgotten is compelling as we have forgotten so many fallen soldiers. A 10-second memorial on TV does nothing more than pay lip service to an issue that goes on and on in the background of most of our daily lives. The toll of war is real, and Sesling wants his readers to know this in all of its vivid detail.

            What I like about Sesling's book above any of its individual components, which I do admire, is his ability to piece together a work that is so homogeneous in subject matter without ever leaving a feeling of repetitiousness. Every page is a new story with the same underlying theme (war) but constantly builds on rather than repeats what came before. I read poem after poem without ever feeling like I had ever read the same thing twice. Sesling's War Zones is a laudable and well-put-together poetry volume that deserves to be read by all, and should absolutely be read by anyone who has any role in the decision-making process that leads to war.

The Sunday Poet: Diane Smith

Poet Diane Smith

Diane Smith  writes about global issues that haunt us all—the diminishing middle class, the poor, refugees, healthcare; those who have little visibility or power in society.  Smith has garnered awards for her writing in Canada, England, and the United States.  She is a graduate of Harvard University with a Master of Liberal Arts in Journalism through the School of Continuing Education.

WHEN THE CARNIVAL COMES TO TOWN

The long, slow haunting whistle of the train 

Announces the arrival of the midnight special 

Midgets, bearded ladies, tigers and clowns 

Descend the conductor’s short, portable steps

Carny people sparkle with magic, 

Trinkets and trash and games of chance 

Swirling, whirling dervishes of dance 

Big Top with flying, sequined acrobats

Air thick with grease and deep-fried pronto pups,

Wispy cotton candy, peanuts, colas, 

Babies, sticky fingers, messy faces, 

Hot humid days, too swiftly passing by 

To the next town—the carny never stops

Bringing ferris wheels, tilt-a-whirls 

Thoughts of wonder, expectations rising: 

The ring toss and the endless broken ride

Days ebb as the carnival packs its bags,

Boxcars pulling up, loading animals 

Teens misting long goodbyes, as lights

Fade down the tracks, last refuge of summer

-Diane Smith

Every Day There Is Something about Elephants by Timothy Gager

Every Day There Is Something About Elephants   (Big Table Publishing)

Review by   Leah Brundige 

Timothy Gager’s engaging new collection of flash fiction, Every Day There Is Something about Elephants, shows a novelist’s interest in human interactions and vivid details coupled with a poet’s gifts for compression and figurative language. The book’s 107 stories vary in tone, scope, and length, but none is longer than four pages. Some—such as “The Lottery Winner,” a tour de force at just a page in a half—deploy and develop an extraordinary number of characters relative to their size, while others navigate the constraints on their length by more poetic means, turning on a single pun (“Chiller”) or extended metaphor (“How penguins break”). The reader is carried along by their expert pacing and, in many cases, by their sheer shock value—Gager is a master of the twist ending.

The subject matter of these short-shorts is often harrowing, and the author is unafraid to write with sympathy, if not approval, of the seedier sides of human nature and society. Abused or addicted, homicidal or lecherous, his characters command our attention as they grope through their flawed lives toward connection or transcendence. Gager is frugal with his imagery, but he knows how to illuminate a character’s plight with a painful, well-chosen detail when the story calls for it:

You burned your lips on a crack pipe, without the warning: The glass on this pipe reaches extreme temperatures. Handle with care. You didn’t care. The blisters popped and fused your lips together.

            The gritty realism of that terrible last sentence might seem at first glance to be at odds with another strain that runs through Gager’s work: a domestic surrealism that at times borders on whimsy. The elephant-haunted narrator of the collection’s title story recounts details that at first seem merely absurd (“How did I know an elephant had been in the refrigerator? He left his footprint in the cheesecake”) but become more disquieting as the narrative progresses, until we realize that the “elephants” are manifestations of the character’s mental disturbance. The conclusion brings the elephant metaphor to chilling culmination and unsettles the reader with all that it leaves unsaid. The story recalls Ernest Hemingway’s famous “Hills like White Elephants,” another piece of short fiction animated by its pachydermal symbolism, though the judicious silences in Gager’s narrative threaten to make Hemingway’s measured withholding of information look like a parlor trick.

            If the familiar concerns of Gager’s fiction—domestic violence, firearms, and drinking among them—recur frequently in these stories, they never feel repetitive; Gager’s imaginative resources are considerable, and imbue each piece with its own freshness of character or circumstance. They are stories that, however grim on the surface, rejoice in their own brevity and technique. This immensely readable book affirms the prolific Gager’s literary gifts, and showcases a kind of short story that seems, by the collection’s end, entirely his own.

The Sunday Poet: Eliot Cardinaux

Born in Dayton, Ohio in 1984 to a musical family, Eliot Cardinaux studied jazz piano at the Manhattan School of Music from 2003-2006. After sustaining a career in New York as an improvising musician, Cardinaux took an interest in the art of poetry, and moved to Western Massachusetts in 2008, where he read and wrote diligently for just over 6 years. Cardinaux then decided to return to school, and attained a bachelor's in Contemporary Improvisation as a pianist at the New England Conservatory in Boston. He is still active as both a pianist and poet along the East Coast and in parts of Europe, and has gone on to produce material in other mediums as well, including voice and film, as well as graphic design. 

In 2016, he founded The Bodily Press, a small chapbook publication and record label through which he has released the works of other poets, as well as several of his own albums and chapbooks, including, most recently, Sweet Beyond Witness, and By the Hand. 

Anima

This suffocation,
year of yesterday’s breezes
playing in my hair

the pines will answer:
I’ve seen its edges, but I
haven’t found it yet

on the walk at dusk
tomorrow will be — as dead,
as animal as

you, familiar
species, formless as the wounds
inflicted, witness.

Haiku on Leaving the City

I

To someone with hands:

pinhole, landscape; hand and strings,

while you have no land.

II

Clocks tick like always.

I gave the cat ice water.

Things are packed away.

III

Rather than writing,

the billboard needs changing, but

tonight I can’t reach.

IV

This bar is so loud;

I’d like to stop talking now,

so you can go on.

eliotcardinaux.com

eliotcardinaux.bandcamp.com

bodilypress.wordpress.com

A Lifetime of Reading: Sweet Marjoram: Notes & Essays by DeWitt Henry

A Lifetime of Reading: Sweet Marjoram: Notes & Essays by DeWitt Henry

by Michael Steffen

One of the many virtues of DeWitt Henry’s new book Sweet Marjoram (ISBN 978-1-941196-72-4, MadHat Press, 2018) is its liberally associative arrangement. It allows us, like our favorite books of lyrical poetry, once we’ve read it through and are on to this welcoming element, to open its pages where we will and just start reading. Skipping through a book is a good way to allow its individual passages to surprise us, to get by or around, in some cases, the author’s control freak editor and modesty, to get at the book’s heart, or “meat.” In the case of Sweet Marjoram, one may even on a first perusal jump to the 17th essay, “On Meat,” where our sources of fascination knock against our weaknesses and guilt.

—la carne, in Spanish and carne in Italian, echoing the Latin carn- or caro (flesh), as do carnal in English (having a relation to the body as opposed to the soul), carnival (a time of feasting and fleshly indulgence as opposed to Lent and fasting), carnivorous and carnivore…Among flora, the carnation is a flower as red as raw meat, as blood.

Meathead suggests more muscle than brains. Sexual organs are called meat… (Antony even calls Cleopatra cold leftovers on dead Ceasar’s trencher)... [page 94]

I’ve left ellipses instead of A1 sauce. The line of thought cools down in the course of the essay with sobering references to Benjamin Franklin and his pragmatic advice, “Rarely use Venery except for Health and Offspring; Never to Dullness, Weakness, or the Injury of your own or another’s Peace and Reputation,” Saint Augustine’s spiritual sense of love with allusion to another kind of “meat,” and further discussions involving Noah, Henry’s daughter, Tolstoy, a grad-student memoir of a friendly neighbor meat butcher, and more. In the wake of any one of the essays, on reflection, we marvel again and again at the variety of Henry’s sources and multiplicity of his angles of consideration on his subjects. The logo for NPR’s flagship news program, All things considered, would be a good subtitle for the book.

This is true, and so its opposite: an uneasiness at the seeming authorial absence, a lack of point of view, an omission of agenda, of logical or narrative sequence. Topics are announced in the titles: “On Weather,” “On Conscience,” “On Falling”…“On Privilege”…“On Cursing”… Henry’s meditations encompass a wide topical range, from the ordinary, “On Handshakes,” to the lofty, “On Dignity,” and the ironic, “On Folly.” A source of inspiration, it may soon dawn on the reader, lies in the 16th Century, in the French and English essayists Michel de Montaigne

(“Of sadness,” “Of friendship,” “Of cannibals”) and Francis Bacon (“Of Truth,” “Of Death,”

“Of Revenge”).

The epigraph of the book, taken from Shakespeare, citing the origin of the author’s title, is telling of this inspiration from the Renaissance, an age in its writers characterized by a spirit of the revival of classical philosophy and literature and its attitudes of open inquiry into all subjects, its copious and liberal curiosity. The title comes from a recognition scene in the beginning of the denouement of King Lear, as blinded Gloucester’s inward senses are being restored to him, and Lear is still simmering after the storm:

Lear: Ha! Give the word.

Edgar: Sweet marjoram.

Lear: Pass. (4.6.93-95)

“Sweet marjoram” (Marjoran hortensis) refers to a mint-like herb, which annotators believe was used as a medicinal cure for madness or mental illness. The title’s useful to its author also because it echoes the title of an earlier book, Sweet Dreams, a memoir of Henry’s youth and family, centered around his father who owned and operated a candy factory.

Literature and commonplace phrases and sayings serve as springboards for a good deal of the texts, offering a wide range in citations from the Bible to contemporary films, novels, essays and science, references of expressions spanning from early English, “Fair-weathered friend,” to our day’s greetings with fist bumps. Sven Birkerts praises the book’s display of “the accrued benefits of a lifetime of reading, teaching, viewing and thinking,” noting its “Shakespearian breadth of interest subjected to a steady inquiring pressure.”

While the choice of inclusion in the essays is arbitrary, though familiar, these are not “personal” essays, nor so much in academic terms thesis essays, for their lack of method and inclusion of biographical material. Announced topics are also freely digressed from, sometimes at ̊180 as in the essay “On Silence,” which more or less meditates on the impossibility of silence.

Buddhist teasers: The sound of one hand clapping. A tree falls in an empty forest. Sunyata.

There is no absence of sound, except for the deaf, who feel vibrations through the floor or other surfaces of touch.

Listen carefully, and even in scientifically designed anechoic chambers, in the absence of most sound, you’ll hear the roar and pulse of your own blood. (This, of course, is amplified in ultrasound exams of the heart, which, when I heard mine from a speaker, sounded like kicking in a bath, glug, wash, glug.

Our industrial and technological revolutions have increased ambient noise, especially in the cities… [page 15]

Again, the risk run in this manner of leaping from instance to instance is the impression it may leave the casual or unfamiliar reader that the author is writing simply to hear the ink blot from his pen, that he’s not getting to the point. Like Gertrude to Polonius, we may prove an itch to say, “More matter, with less art.” Or do we want to ask for More art, more structure…?

Maybe readers of today, used to clicking here and jumping from partially read story to partially glimpsed ad, will be very much at home in Henry’s paratactic discourse.

We are given fair warning on the title page these are not just essays, but “Notes & Essays.” Often “paragraphs” or separate units consist simply of one sentence. Or just a fragment.

Speak now, we say, or forever hold your peace.

Enfolding silence, thick silence, heavy; moments filled with silence.

Dead silence.

We mute the familiar, annoying commercial.

Philomela, the rape victim, tongue-less, hand-less.

Brier Rabbit and Tarbaby.

Hold your tongue.

Tongue-tied?…[page 16]

Passages like these can induce a sort of reader’s vertigo. What—where in…

Yet Henry stirs our curiosity in this difference from the bulk of writing which is very agenda- or purpose-driven. Harkening back to an age whose poet characterized the function of his art “to hold the mirror up to nature,” Henry’s writing attains in manner and example a wide scope and variety of our sources for thought. When these are juxtaposed, hovering, side by side, often intentionally for contrast—old/new, ordinary/exotic, common/lofty—the reward for the effort is comparative, a glimpse of objectivity and tolerance rather than a dedicated referential orthodoxy to justify some argument.

This has been one of the primary reasons for studying Michel de Montaigne in World Literature classes, often his essay “Of cannibals,” for its refutation that “other” people, the natives of what was then considered “Anarctic France” (Brazil), were inferior as humans to the seemingly infinitely more sophisticated Europeans who were at that time just discovering this new world and its inhabitants.

I am sorry that Lycurgus and Plato did not know of them; for it seems to me that what we actually see in these nations surpasses not only the pictures in which poets have idealized the golden age and all their inventions in imagining a happy state of man, but also the conceptions and the very desire of philosophy. They could not imagine a naturalness so pure and simple… [“Of cannibals”].

The essay “On Appetite” in Sweet Marjoram gives us the nutshell passage from Montaigne’s essay: “I am sorry that, seeing so clearly into their faults, we should be so blind to our own.” [page 77]

Henry, too, is aware of other lands and other people with their customs which differ sharply from our own. Not unlike Montaigne:

Islam discourages handshakes between men and women, probably to ensure chastity. In Switzerland, when an Imam’s sons recently refused to shake their teacher’s hand—a Swiss tradition—authorities imposed a $5,000 fine and provoked an international controversy… [page 11]

The discussion occurs in the essay “On Handshakes.” Ordinarily, the contrast, even conflict, between Muslim and Western customs and ethics would by far outweigh the simple gesture of a handshake. Instead of getting engulfed in all of that, Henry proceeds with his topic, to unearth a very contemporary Western oddity in the consideration of the gesture.

In addition to religious customs, there are also health and safety concerns. Handshakes spread germs. No one shook on deals with the germaphobe Howard Hughes. Supermarkets offer wipes to sanitize shopping cart handles as a precaution against epidemics of flu or AIDS. Dentists and doctors wear latex gloves… [page 11]

Here we have a case where Henry’s stylistic boldness of laying instance out after instance comes into a powerful statement, revealing virtue in the madness of his method. In a sense, it is writing as showing rather than telling. These things, the conservative manner of Muslims, Howard Hughes’s mania over germs, today’s assimilation of that mania into expected, habitual use of sanitary wipes and latex gloves, our somewhat de-humanizing (don’t touch me!) scientific awareness, all emerge from the discourse as evoked in our daily experience. The author has done little more than arrange the images and notions together under the marginal awareness of our hands and how we use them. Terrible importance is trivialized. The simple unassuming takes on poetic weight, even to the point of farcical proportions. The ant is a centaur in its dragon world, wrote Ezra Pound. Or, more recently, The feet of an ant make their own sound on the earth—Jane Hirshfield.

Sometimes, as with questions of handshakes, social attitudes shift swiftly, within one’s lifetime. Other beckoning changes can take generations.

Medieval nobles were celebrated by gisants, sculpted on their coffin lids… The knight lies at rest in full armor… On the Smith College campus, I loved Leonard Baskin’s gisant of a factory worker in this traditional pose, reclining on a slab, pot-bellied, care- and work-worn, aged, but noble also in his way… [page 21]

By disregarding temporal as well as spatial and topical parameters, the Renaissance/Henry essay assumes the power to see History, what is beyond our ordinary senses, reminding us of our society’s roots in revolution. Baskin’s gisant, elevating a common worker, may be a memorial for Democracy and its valuation of the individual, or for Communism and its proposed elevation of the working class. There are spoilers of both systems of government which are not included in Baskin’s sculpture. Further in the book, in the essay “On Privilege,” Henry will make mention of how “the redistribution of wealth under Communism privileged bureaucrats, commissars, and Stalin.” [page 28]

If America’s foundations hold up ideals for our aspirations, our history is not without its ironies.

All men are created equal, writes the slave-owning husband and father, Thomas Jefferson, philosopher, scientist, architect, statesman, politician, patrician. [page 25]

As to himself? I noted when writing about Sweet Dreams the paradoxical unselfishness—for a memoirist—of DeWitt’s manner, with a diligent regard for those around him. He bears himself with personal objectivity. It persists in Sweet Marjoram, with references to himself coming off as a sociological type:

Male and white, straight, employed and able-bodied, I should mind my manners, consider others, and reexamine my attitudes towards “difference.” [page 27, “On Privilege”]

Quietly siding with Harold Bloom’s notion, with respect to literature, of the Western Cannon, Henry entertains the opposing view:

Here is Terry Eagleton: “There is no such thing as a literary work or tradition which is valuable in itself… ‘Value’ is a transitive term: it means whatever is valued by certain people in specific situations…” [page 27]

But Henry also goes about quietly defending the values of a humanist body of writing by citing and so including Toni Morrison (“A criticism that needs to insist that literature is not only ‘universal’ but also ‘race-free’ risks lobotomizing that literature…” [page 28]) and Albert Camus (“Those who find no rest in God or in history are condemned to live for those who, like themselves, cannot live: in fact, for the humiliated. [page 28])

The tendency—altruism, evasiveness—belies Henry’s fondness for commonplace language, and his persistent eye for his nuclear others. From “On Appetite”:

Your eyes are bigger than your stomach. Biting off more than you chew. Clean your plate. I binge on wafer-thin Pringles, unable to eat just one. It’s better to eat smaller portions more often than to stuff yourself. Our oldest brother Jack, however, the only naturally thin one in our family, came home for Thanksgiving from his life 2000 miles away. He did the carving. We marveled while he out-ate all of us, three or four portions of turkey, gravy, stuffing, cranberry sauce, and even the roasted vegetables. [page 74]

It is one of the foodier-for-thought books I’ve come across recently. Henry wins our regard for settling into this tradition of essay writing, and our admiration for making the genre useful as his own to unlock a lot of needed conversation for our times.