Tag: dark room collective

John Keene: “Murmurs Linger After the Blue Frost”

Photographers Unknown, Murmurs Linger After the Blue Frost

when night hovers in the square
moon sheets the avenues and glare
from headlights glaze the lone chestnut
murmurs linger after the blue
frost and subdivisions arriving
in crates like tangerines from the ghost
orchards of Chile
beauty is especially dangerous under pressure
to feel your lips on my throat like a wire
or a Beretta slowing firing under water

remember what I cannot bear the leaving
lost hours the embarrassed fragrance of surrender
like a midnight novena on November first
still standing on the naked slopes after dynamite
shears away bedrock and rangers sweep over
brush searching for missed embers and clues
whatever you find there pocket for yourself
keep the lock of my hair sulphur tang of my skin

still burning on your tongue a signal fire
black as your fingers on a compass I turn
on and on never ceasing to ponder the strange
economy of ladders or breakdancers
men’s eyes when they lie writhing
like dolphins through a narrow strait
out into the broad way of a bay the sound
of phosphorous as it catches fire
which is the soul rising into the air without
fear; you, your eyes or dawn, opening

John Keene, The Soul is Always Beautiful, Punks: New and Selected Poems, 2021, The Song Cave Press

Born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1965, John R. Keene Jr. is an American poet, writer, translator, educator and artist. Born into a Catholic family, he attended parochial schools and graduated from the Saint Louis Priory School, ministered by the Benedictine monks of Saint Louis Abbey. 

John Keene earned his Bachelor of Arts from Harvard College where he was a staff member of the art and literary magazine, the “Harvard Advocate”, and member of Harvard’s Black Community and Student Theater. Elected a New York Times Foundation Fellow, Keene received his Master of Fine Arts from New York University. He is both a lifelong member of the Dark Room Collective, an influential African-American poetry collective that promotes greater visibility to emerging writers of color, as well as a Graduate Fellow of Cave Canem, a Brooklyn, New York-based organization that supports MFA programs and writing workshops for African-American poets across the United States.

Keene’s fictional debut was his novel “Annotations” published through New Directions Press in 1995. A fiction work of experimental poetic text, the novel explored those questions that revolve around identity in its forms of race, social class and sexuality, both gay and straight. These issues were examined through a re-creation of Keene’s life as a black youth in St. Louis with references to the historical and cultural events of the 1940s and 1960s. 

In May of 2015, John Keene published “Counternarratives”, a collection of thirteen short fiction stories and novellas. This collection, which ranges over five centuries of history, examined lives marked by the pressures of their time. Its stories, drawn from memoirs, detective stories, newspaper accounts and interrogation transcripts, created new perspectives of our past and present. In one story, Huckleberry Finn meets his former raft-mate Jim after an absence of several decades; in another story, Mexican poet Xavier Villaurrutia meets American poet Langston Hughes in New York during the Depression. In 2016, “Counternarratives” received the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction and the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, an organization dedicated to the promotion of multicultural literature.

Keene published his first collection of poems “Seismosis” in 2006. Featuring line drawings by Christopher Stackhouse, this sophisticated conversation between writing and visual art is a cohesive study of abstraction in both mediums. In 2016, Keene published a second art-poetry book “Grind” in a collaboration with photographer Nicholas Muellner, best known for his two photo art books “In Most Tides an Island” and “The Amnesia Pavilions”. In the same year Keene published “Playland”, a collection of old and new poems. 

In December of 2021, John Keene published “Punks: New & Selected Poems”, a seven-section collection containing historic narratives of loss, lust and love. Keene’s poems, whose cast of characters include historic Black personalities as well as friends and lovers, addressed the issues of grief, AIDS, desire and oppression. All the stories are told through a wide range of poetic forms, all of which Keene has mastered. “Punks” was the winner in 2022 of the National Book Award for Poetry, the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, and the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. 

Keene was formerly associate professor of English and African-American studies at Illinois’s Northwestern University and has taught at Rhode Island’s Brown University, New York University and at Indiana University’s Writer’s Conference. He is currently Distinguished Professor of English and Chair of the African-American and African Studies Department at Rutgers University-Newark, as well as a teacher in its Masters Creative Writing Program. In addition to all his educational positions, Keene served for several years as an editorial board member of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s African Poetry Book Fund which promotes and publishes African poetry. 

Among John Keene’s translation work is the 2014 “Letters from a Seducer”, a translation of Brazilian magic-realist author Hilda Hilst’s novel “Cartas de um Sedutor”, one volume of a tetralogy that tells the story of an amoral, wealthy man who seeks an answer to his incomprehension of life through sex. This translation by Keene was selected for the 2015 Best Translated Book Award Fiction long list. He has also translated French, Portuguese and Spanish works by such writers as Jean Wyllys, Alain Mabanckou and Mateo Morrison, among others. 

Among Keene’s many awards are the 2000 AGNI John Cheever Short Fiction Prize, the 2005 Whiting Award for Fiction/Poetry, the 2016 Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, the 2018 Windham-Campbell Literature Prise for Fiction, and the 2019 Harold D. Vursell Award for Distinguished Prose from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Notes: An extensive interview with John Keene by American poet Jeffery Renard Allen on Keene’s “Annotations” and “Counternarratives” can be found at the online literary site Big Other located at : https://bigother.com/2022/06/18/from-the-archives-an-interview-with-john-keene-by-jeffery-renard-allen/

The Brooklyn Rail has a conversation between John Keene and his fellow professor from Rutgers University, novelist Akil Kumarasamy, in which they discuss each other’s work. This discussion can be found at:  https://brooklynrail.org/2023/02/books/John-Keene-in-conversation-with-Akil-Kumarasamy

Photograph Eight of the Header Collection: Romy Maxime, “Brothers James and John, Cape Town”., Brothers and Sisters Series, Gelatin Silver Print, OATH Magazine, South Africa

Romy Maxime is a Swiss South African photographer and videographer known for her enigmatic portraits, fine art prints, lifestyle, advertising and fashion work. She is based between Cape Town, South Africa and Zurich, Switzerland. Maxime’s photo “Brothers James and John” was the winner in 2023’s annual Lensculture Portrait Awards. Her website is located at: https://www.romymaxime.com

Carl Phillips: “How They Woke, Finally, in a Bed of Ferns”

Photographers Unknown, Twelve Men Seated

How they woke, finally, in a bed of ferns — horsetail ferns.
How they died singing. All night, meanwhile, as if somehow
the fox’s mouth that so much of this life has amounted to had
briefly unshut itself — and the moth that’s trapped there,
unharmed, gone free — a snow fell; the snow-filled street
seemed a toppled column, like the one in the mind called
doubt, or that other one,
                                              persuasion, the broken one, in three
clean pieces …Well, it’s morning, now. Out back, the bamboo
bows and stiffens. Thoughts in a wind. Thoughts like (but
nobody saying it): Nobody, I think, knows me better by
now than you do. Or like: The bamboo, bowing, stiffening,
seems like nothing so much as, in this light, competing forms
of betrayal that, given time, must surely cancel each other
out, close your eyes; patience; wait. Maybe less the foliage
than the promise of it. Less that shame exists, maybe, than that
the world keeps saying it does, know it, hold on tight to it, as if
the world were rumor, how every rumor
                                                                           rings true, lately.
When I’m ashamed, I make a point of reminding myself what
is shame but to have shown — to have let it show — that variety
of love that goes hand in hand with having wished to please
and, in pleasing, for a while belong. So shame can, like love, be
an eventual way through? There’s a minor chord sparrows make
with doves that’s not the usual business — it’s not sad at all, any of it:
this always waiting for what I’ve always waited for; this not being
able to assign to what’s missing some shape, a name; this body
neither antlered nor hooved — brave too, this body, unapologetic…

Carl Phillips, Blow It Back

Born in Everett, Washington in 1959, Carl Phillips is an American writer and poet. As a child of a military family, he moved frequently around the United States in his formative years until his family settled in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Phillips earned his Bachelor of Arts from Harvard University and Master of Arts in Teaching from the University of Massachusetts. He continued his education at Boston University, where he earned a Master of Arts in Creative Writing.

Along with other black poets such as John Keene, Natasha Trethewey, and Major Jackson, Carl Phillips was a member of the Dark Room Collective. Founded after the funeral of James Baldwin in 1987, this collective began as an intergenerational reading series which hosted and cultivated the work of black poets of various aesthetic movements. Many of the current leading figures in the poetic movement had their beginnings with the Dark Room Collective.

Beginning as a teenager, Phillips wrote poetry until his entry into Harvard University on a scholarship, where he began to study Latin and Greek. It was not until 1990, while coming to terms with his gay identity, that he resumed his poetic writing. A classicist by training, Phillips often uses classical forms in his work and often references classical art, music, and literature. He received critical acclaim early in his career with the publication of his debut collection, “In the Blood”, which won the Samuel Morse Poetry Prize in 1992.

Carl Phillips’s second collection, “Cortège”, was nominated in 1995 for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Six years later, his collections, “Pastoral” in 2000 and “The Tether” in 2001, were both well received, with “Pastoral” winning the 2001 Lambda Literary Award for Best Poetry. Two of Phillips’s works, the 2009 “Speak Low” and the 2011 “Double Shadow”, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, were finalists for the National Book Award.

In addition to over a dozen volumes of poetry, Carl Phillips has published works of criticism and translation. Two collections of essays, “Coin of the Realm: Essays on Life and the Art of Poetry” and “The Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness, Imagination”, were published by Graywolf Press in 2004 and 2014, respectively. Phillips’s translation of Sophocles’s “Philoctetes” was published in 2003 by the Oxford University Press.

Before teaching English at the university level, Phillips taught Latin at several high schools in Massachusetts. He is currently a Professor of English at Saint Louis’s Washington University, where he also teaches Creative Writing. Phillips was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2006 and, since 2011, has served as a judge for the Yale Series of Younger Poets.

Carl Phillips’s honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Library of Congress. He is the recipient of the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Academy of American Poets Prize, and a Pushcart Prize, and he has been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.