Second Post on Ridin' the Moon in Texas

Two things for this post:
 
1. The goat
 
2. "No one has ever said a bomba was counter-revolutionary or that break-dancing was an anarchist distraction."
 
 
1. The goat  appears in Shange's response to Arturo Lindsay's collage "Indigo's Emergency Care for Wounds That Cannot Be Seen": "ancestral messengers/composition 13." My grandmother's in my cell phone would be the title of the poem I write in response because there are now three events on my phone that signal her presence--the second being her intervening in the conversation between my mum and I when she writes "Yes. I am waiting," and I call mum because that's not the type of thing she would say--I am on my way home to Brooklyn on Christmas Eve--and my mum thought I had written "Yes. I am waiting" meaning, that I was waiting for her text and being smart about it. "Yes. I am waiting" is something my Gran would say, and she knew my phone is how I communicate through written word to people who are not there--I found the third and fourth page of a letter she had written about the cost of fixing cars and a quite small wedding...probably a quarter century ago--as I was constantly checking it, my phone, this past spring when I was visiting her in Bonnie Leslie Court--it would make sense that would be the object through which she would choose contact. Shange's poem though is about a goat, and how its "fresh milk is best for the baby" and a critique on the difficulty of keeping a goat in new york city:
 
no, senora rodriguez, i don't know where
your goat can rest/just not in this building
no, it is not all right to go up the stairs
out of the way of the tenants/oh, please, senora
don't try to take the goat to your sister's
house in queens on the e or the f train
 

 

A Poem Book a Week #1 Ridin' the Moon in Texas--Ntozake Shange

A new project to celebrate a year after finishing the dissertation and to go back and learn how to read deliciously again, like I used to, before.

First up is Ntozake Shange's Riding the Moon in Texas: Word Paintings (St. Martin's Press, 1987). It's a first edition. A Christmas gift from either my mum or my sister, probably my sister because it was bought at Unamable Books, the bookmark is still in there. I never even looked at the book... consider this also confessions of a former dissertator... so I had no idea that it was even related to my dissertation, which is about collaborations between writers and artists. Shange was living in Texas...also a locale of the dissertation (see Penz: It's Pronounced Pants on blogspot)...and how to survive but to get in contact with artists and have conversations with their work. The book is beautiful with the images of the art and the words of the poet-writer. So far, my favorite is "Conversation With the Ancestors" ir response to Arturo Lindsay's collage "Indigo's Emergency Care for Wound That Cannot Be Seen." It is a poem about New York and how the city forces us to be in certain ways, like how we can't move around easily with a goat. And then one poem about popular music romance and violence: "cowry shells/ sequin jackets / protect us momentarily / just before we beat the hell out of each other" (16). The lines remind me of a conversation I had with a friend-poet about healing after being hurt by a lover--and how that leaves the heart... I wish had the line from the poem...something about ripped out and smashed under boot.