Good evening.
There is that. The place is.
Yeah, there's a there's a spot up
here. I've got a hit.
Sorry we're late getting underway.
You kept coming in.
But it's. It's hard, you know?
I mean, you got to park underneath
the you got to walk around the
building is it's like New York
out there.
So thank
you for waiting.
I'm to tell you that
there will be refreshments
and they're said to be a good
refreshment
afterwards.
Outside, they're going to pull this
curtain back, I think.
And then, voila, there are
there the refreshments.
And so hang around.
Talk to each other
in iambic pentameter
and we'll
have fun.
Okay.
I have a feeling there was another
O.
Oh, we're going to do
this again.
But it won't be anything like this.
Of course.
I'm so glad to have Harry here.
Oh, yeah.
Angie Malenko is going
to read here in the middle of
November.
I think it's the 18th, the
20th, the 11th, sometime
in the middle of November.
So keep on keep an eye out
for that.
Okay.
I'm Stephen Yenser
and I want to welcome you
to the first Hammer Poetry
Reading of the year.
The readings are sponsored
by the UCLA English
Department, from which
I've retired, but still have this
tenuous link.
And the and
the university's cultural
affairs commission, as I
think it is now called,
which originated
the series actually way back in the
late 1960s.
It's been a continuous series
since about 1968,
which makes it, I think, the oldest
series on the West Coast.
Oh, how come?
Excuse me.
And of course, the the Hammer's
public programs
which is the whole big
cruise ship.
Of entertainment
and edification
captained by Claudia
Bestor through
all kinds of weather
Harryette Mullen
the breadth of her prolific
production exceeds
my my scope
this evening. She has published
historical research on her ancestors
and thereby shed much needed
light on the participation
of African-Americans
in the Civil War.
She has given us vivid,
short stories.
She has created a series
of incisive
collages entitled
Shrines for the American
Dream,
among other undertakings.
But I'm here only to introduce
her poetry.
Poetry is her her chief venture,
of course.
But my charge is is
an easy one, partly
because she has
composed
her own best introductions.
Let me read one,
which is a short poem
from her very first book.
And the poem is called Tree.
Yes, I'm grounded
like all the little bushes
attached to the earth at
the ankles.
What saves me?
Hmm? What saves me is
my madness.
The racket of birds
singing loud in my tangled
hair.
From from that point
forward, she has been firmly
grounded in her past,
personal and historic
and rooted in
the material world,
yet inhabited
to cop a verb from
Sylvia Plath, inhabited
by a by a music touched
with a transcendent madness.
To take that forward from her poem,
a racket that is
itself earthy
drawing as it does on American
slang and vulgar ism,
a Spanish vernacular
that she grew up with,
American African-American
folktales, slave
narratives and other
heterogeneous sources.
But it's all shot through
all that earthy language with
flighty elements and thinking
of the birds.
Inspired by rush
hour, she etymological
play.
She's indebted also to the good
dictionaries.
And one of her books is called, of
course, Sleeping with the
Dictionary.
And no nonsense verse,
I think is back there someplace in
her wide reading
and in general what Baraka
has called the jazz
equally bluesy
strain in American
literature.
So in short, she's
she's deeply traditional,
but also wildly
experimental.
So she's
she's simply complex.
So it's no surprise,
surely, that she combines the
lyrical with the satirical
and the playful with the painful.
They are inextricable,
even in a mere fragment here
and there and going one say almost
everywhere.
Take her her phrase about
her instrument, a
stark strangled banjo.
We hear the
patriarchal echo,
the Star Spangled Banner
twisted up with
tortuous experience of slavery.
Stark Strangled.
Stark strangled.
BANJO You never know whether to
laugh or cry.
Or there's the title of a collection
of prose poems,
which is a word on a sign
above a grocery,
probably in a poverty stricken
neighborhood from which
several letters have
been lost
or altered or stolen.
So you have only a partial
word, which in the beginning must
have been supermarket.
But given the missing letters,
it now says
s p e
r m k
t with
little asterisks
or the missing letters stars.
And if you're going to pronounce it,
it has to be sperm kept
for lawn as it is.
It's a it's a rich pun,
the epitome
and the very pith
of a capitalist economy.
The small thing, just a single
word.
Sperm kill.
But it's huge.
It's like the atom, you know, it has
to be large because there's so much
inside.
It contains so much supermarket
sperm kit.
Sperm count.
Abundance.
Untold abundance in the supermarket.
Superficial appeal.
Sexual desire,
commodification.
It's all so
smash together, you know,
in a kind of like
a slice
of fruit cake,
nuts and fruits every
place.
It's a simple complexity that
one is tempted to identify
as eminently American.
So as the poet who
is, as she puts it, in one
double edged epithet,
a freed slave.
Fraid f f r a YTD
slave.
Unafraid, but afraid.
Slave.
And in another passage.
I guess the rope would be the
connector here.
And another passage.
A self-made woman
who gets the hang.
Being a genuine
American Patrick Stewart,
Stephen Miller and and
his ilk.
She welcomes the other.
Her book called Muse
and Drudge Interfaces
Ancient Greek Motifs, Voodoo
Chanty History
Scenes from Birth of a Nation,
among other things.
Elsewhere, she adopts poetic
forms from the so-called East.
The Tonga sequence, for
example, in Urban Tumbleweed
and the Haiku Series
in a volume that she
might still be working on, though
it's to be published next
year. So she'd better hurry up
in the in the UK.
I haven't seen it of course,
so I can't guarantee that
it will be as Lexi Ludic
and as Lacerating Leigh
Critical,
as comic and
as caustic about
racism and misogyny
and consumerism
as some of her earlier
work has been.
But let's see.
Harriet.
Thank you, everyone, for
starting your weekend early with a
poetry break.
It is wonderful to see friends,
colleagues, poets.
I know maybe some poets
and friends and colleagues.
I don't know.
I it's always an honor,
you know, to do something as Hammer
Museum.
And, you know,
we all look forward to
the mini seminar on the poet's work
that we get from Stephen, who
just has such comprehensive,
thorough and
in-depth knowledge
of the poet's work.
And and I want to thank also
Claudia Bestor, the
director of public programs here at
The Hammer, who's brings
us all kinds of
delights.
So I'm going to read
from this this manuscript that
is going
to be a book, we hope.
I mean, you know, they
said so
next year.
And the title
of it is Open
Leaves Poems from Earth,
and it is Haiku Series
Broken up with some prose
passages. I think I can
manage to read all or most
of it, so I'll say
So this is open leaves poems from
Earth.
Succulents flake
their thirst in
intermittent rainfalls
between dry spells.
Organic garden,
a border of marigolds
to repel insects.
Redheaded rooster
cocks.
Crown.
Bold.
Solo. Sia's.
Lush Regalia.
Maize
that natively dresses
delightfully not
ever uniform,
unencumbered vines,
green submarines
and rambling carefree
curlicues.
Cotton buds, two
clear deer's ears
alerted to hear
willows.
Soft whispers.
Looking up at an endlessly
attentive sky.
Yards of blue eyed
grass.
Golden rods.
Wild blooms.
Invasive weeds.
Prolific blonds.
Butterflies.
Bees.
The leaves of certain plants
are more ostentatious
than many flowers.
Asparagus aims.
Shoots vertically.
Quiver of slender
arrows.
Glowing lanterns.
Hang on.
Flowering branches.
Lemon illumination.
Rose is before
a poet composes
or knows yet what
a rose is.
Ink drenched orchid.
Your pink heart
swaddled in a black
cloak of mystery.
Borrow a cup
of utterly yellow
luster from Sunshine
Meadow.
Tender flock
of lambs, ears
intently listening
for Wolf's baneful
moan.
Cultivate essence
to press or hang
in sun to dry
your bluish name.
So here we are at one of the little
short prose passages that's
called Chasing D,
Chasing Dirt
and.
I actually have two different little
epigraphs and I'm trying to pick
which one. So one of them is.
Nothing will last but
trouble and dirt.
That's a traditional folk song
I learned in elementary school.
And the other one is
I learned this in elementary school,
too. It bounces off
me and sticks to you.
So here it goes.
Whatever is the matter
has lost its place.
It can't belong here.
But where some other
place disordered.
That's somewhere elsewhere, undone.
Wherever the matter comes from.
Some place full of space
that isn't empty in
tropic creation, coughing
up dust of burnt out stars
Too much infinity
for vacuum or duster
Too late to filter impure
particles impossible
to remove indelible
stains.
What would it take to make a
space be clean
and free?
What implements?
What elements?
What solutions?
What if we scrub our launch
and never find the protoplasm?
Make slime that rhymes
with grime.
What is the matter?
Breaking down constantly.
Dust balls, rolling downhill
gathering stray hairs, nail
snippets, flakes of sloughed skin,
bits of flying fur with feathers
unfurled to sweep,
to be swept, to be moved
from place to place, stirred
up only to settle again.
No way to stay clean
when we go chasing dirt.
Whatever comes next
can eat our dust.
Back to haiku,
evergreen scent of rosemary
infuses the air
with hints of pine.
Find Royal garment
fashion for a butterfly's
fragile dominion.
A regular.
Adds peppery zest
to salad of mix.
Leafy greens,
lettuce. Tomato tempt
you.
Be ready to swoon
when ripeness woos
you.
Mint spreads eagerly.
New roots sprout
wherever stems bow
down to touch ground.
Find frogs and toads
in every yard.
No garden is complete
without them.
Future Monarch
in Caterpillar Nursery
Nestles Milkweed Leaf.
Bright hummingbird
sips hibiscus flower.
Bright Hummingbird
sips.
Hibiscus liquor
fuel.
A Faithful flower.
Zipped tight
in their sleeping bags.
Who could imagine their deep,
black eyed dreams?
Tableaux of long stemmed
dancers, a symbol
on point in supple
tutus.
Every flower.
A reminder of all
that we miss when not
looking.
Open leaves fold
as if in prayer,
offering a silent
blessing.
A big bucket
of ladybugs.
No bargain when all are
free to go.
Not to be confused with
cilantro.
As the garnish isn't
paltry.
Pick.
Nick quick
finish. And Brazil.
Papa's flesh.
Don't bite.
Skin or seeds.
Exploring.
Dark earth tap
roots. Reaching for sweetness.
Discover.
Pay dirt.
So here's another bump in the road.
Piece of prose here.
It's called Flung from
Dust.
And the epigraph
is from Franklin D Roosevelt.
Last year, the nation suffered
a drought of
unparalleled intensity.
History may repeat itself.
Lung from dust, they believed.
The land where they settled
was theirs for the taking.
So they took it,
cleared it, plowed and planted
it early.
Every spring they ordered seeds.
They turned the soil and prayed
for the right combination of sun
and rain.
Each year they trusted that
their fields would flourish,
that they would harvest food
to survive another winter,
that they might live another year
to sow a new crop in the
land they had taken a land
that gave and gave year
after year, after
only a few generations
of taking, with no thought
of giving back, they
saw what had been living soil
used up, worn out,
turned to barren ground.
Still they plowed furrows
into famished earth, hoping
that rain would follow the plow.
There had been rainfall.
Then came years of deadly drought.
No seed would take root in their
exhausted fields.
Nothing could grow in lifeless
topsoil, no
more than a thin layer of dust
particles of inner matter
with nothing to stop the wind from
picking it up and blowing
it from here to yonder across
the plains.
Reckless winds, scattered dust
work. Reckless wind carry
dust for miles, covering everything.
Hunched bodies leaning
against it.
Lost in chafing.
Blizzards.
Cars and tractors buried
under suffocating drifts.
The wind swept up the stifling
dust and shoved it down their
parched throats.
They wrapped their faces with shawls
and bandanas to keep from swallowing
grit that stung their
eyes, scratched the sky
and darkened midday sun.
Disastrous as a plague
of locusts.
A cloud of approaching doom,
at last to escape the devouring
wind.
They abandoned their vacant
fields, dreaming
the abundance of green pastures.
They left their homesteads
shrouded in worthless dirt,
like the dust flung by wind,
like swarming grasshoppers.
They picked up and set down
in another place,
thinking only of their
hunger and the chance
to begin again.
After performing
athletic feats.
Grasshopper resting
on a leaf.
Lovers of clover
plant green stuff all
over as forage
and cover.
Of all edible ovaries.
What could taste as luscious
as sweet figs?
Oprah's baby fuzz
stiffens, too.
Bristles loaded
missiles point to sky.
Technically a berry
eggplant.
Flowers, fruits.
Pale white, too purple.
A castle turret.
Defending the Treasury.
Protecting the crown.
Though heartless.
Nevertheless, Stern
Onion weeps for
poor human creature.
Praise the gardener
who considers and
cares for the lives
of lilies.
Specializing in digestion
and earthworm is almost
only gut.
Wind licks a
finger.
Peeling off flimsy corners,
skimming, leafing trees,
opulent music.
Swelling before fading.
Bright notes of blown
blossoms.
Pinks plentiful
when coastal hills and
mountains sing their
farewell to spring.
Hedera helix
climbing tower walls.
In no time.
She grasps it all.
Western pygmy blue butterflies
range expands
as Russian thistle rolls.
Canyon sparkles with water
saving domestic manzanita
scrub.
Copa de Oro
brilliant trophy
on display in Pronghorn
Valley.
This is the California native
section. You'll.
Broadsword crosscut
saw serrated knife
shark's toothy jaw
spiked agave.
Flourishing natives.
Purple Chinese houses
bloom along the highway.
Frequent fliers help
pollinate desert
flowers, bees,
bats, white winged doves.
So we are at another
point. This is called exiting
earth.
And I've rounded up the cast
of characters for the epigraphs
here.
So we have
if people were super optimistic
about technology,
there would be
no reason to be pessimistic
about the future.
That is Peter Thiel.
We need to secure the future
of consciousness by being a
multi-planet species.
I think you all know that's Elon
Musk.
Life's too short to
hang out with people who aren't
resourceful.
That is Jeff Bezos.
Money is for making things
happen. That is Richard Branson.
Okay, so this is called exiting
earth.
We need a spare planet.
When our sun implodes,
this big ball of energy can't go
on forever.
No such thing as eternal sunshine.
It might take billions of years,
but the sun will self-destruct,
obliterating earth
as that event approaches
or sooner.
At this rate, if we go on trashing
the planet, we'll need
an exit strategy.
We better plan ahead if we wait too
late, our window closes.
To be ready, we must prepare
for the inevitable end of life,
as we've known it, to
necessarily ultimate extinction.
It's up to us to alter destiny
and salvage the future.
The sun collapses,
but we carry our unique brilliance
to far frontiers of the
vaster universe, expanding
the electromagnetic field of
consciousness into infinity.
Predicting the future clarifies
the present as crisis
opens opportunities
to upgrade the human prototype,
exploiting unrealized potential,
envisioning chaos
determined to survive and profit
in unexplored realms
of possibility.
We wisely invest
in technological solutions
to existential catastrophe
for the sake of prospective
humanity.
We dedicate ample resources
to conquer the unknown
and devise an escape
before Earth becomes unviable.
Now that we control
evolution, the
forward path of progress
leads to the convergence of organic
and inorganic circuits
in our reconfigured humanity,
as we engineer entities
fit for survival
in a colonized space of beyond.
We choose to evolve,
to exist in unfamiliar worlds,
a challenge we accept
to thrust ourselves off of Earth
and shoot into the void.
Flashing comets,
trailing cosmic dust.
We sacrifice now.
We sacrifice you now
to win that distant future.
So much of value exists
beyond the horizon.
If we think long term human
suffering at
this moment may be
a prudent down payment
for eventual returns.
From the point of view of the
universe, all of history
is a blip.
But we set sail intending
to be winners.
We choose to outsource
ourselves to a far off galaxy.
No matter. Never mind that.
Already the dark edge
of infinity, beyond the blue sky
is littered with disposable
machines that eventually
fall out of orbit hurled
back to earth.
More Haiku.
Gaster pods, snails
and slugs will drown
themselves in beer
poured out to entrap.
Loose lettuce leaves a head
of springs in.
Keep it cool or lettuce will
bolt. Yeah. I heard about Liz
Trot. She didn't last longer
than a head of lettuce.
Okay. That's because the lettuce
ain't lettuce anymore anyway.
Okay. It's plastic.
Grow verdant rainbows,
harvest hearty garden greens
like colorful chard,
piquant peppers, please.
Taunt tease with
tongue piercing taste,
igniting desire
to buttery fruit.
Historic prehistoric
survivor.
We offer a toast.
Watermelon crossed Atlantic's
perilous waves with black
seed cargo.
Injuries sustained while picking
berries.
Snagged skin.
Bruised fruit.
Hurt feelings.
As if a sunburned sunflower
would turn away from the blazing
sun.
Firmly planted.
Here we go.
Digging turnip greens, uncovering
roots.
Zucchini blossom,
nestling under tangled shade,
summing up summer.
With her leaves burning
sacred smoke, swirls,
sages, wisps of
pungent wisdom.
Purple clouds gathered in
a brainstorm.
Artist dreams of cauliflower.
Harvest Moon's fullness.
Gravity's Captive Balloon
Tethered Earthbound fruit.
Indelible juice,
no color seeps darker.
No color seeps
deeper.
Then beats bleeding.
Red stain.
Walking into it.
Full breadth of eucalyptus
this rainy morning.
No one could miss your strong
design to your
sleek form as seen no longer
pedals, so haunting.
I'll always remember
your moody Blue Beauty
and I'm going to end with
the last of the prose pieces.
This one is a bit longer than the
other.
It's called From the Soil.
I don't know if I can sing this.
This is a lyric
from Guy Clark.
What would life be without home
grown tomatoes?
When I die, don't bury
me in a box in a cold,
dark cemetery.
Out in the garden would be
much better because I could be
pushing up home grown tomatoes.
So.
Let's see.
A wild patch of mint
surrounding a heap of black
soil is all that
remains of fitful attempts
to cultivate her urban garden.
She has given up the effort
content to buy fresh produce
at a weekly farmer's market.
Her habit of composting kitchen
scraps has left her
with this mound of rich soil
no longer devoted to growing
her own cucumbers, heirloom
tomatoes, lettuce and
herbs. Too busy,
too distracted, too
tired to continue.
She has broken a family tradition,
moved a further step away
from working the soil.
She sees her mother kneeling
in her abundant garden, head
bowed as when she
plans her planting, consulting
the annual Farmer's Almanac
and leafing through her stack of
organic gardening magazines.
That is my mom, for real.
Her mother wears faded jeans,
a red plaid shirt with a blue
paisley bandana around
her neck, her face protected
from the sun's rays by a wide
brimmed hat of woven sweetgrass.
Her knees sink into
black soil as her
hands in green gloves
pluck tender okra pods
from their stems and place them in
a basket with ripe red tomatoes
just off the vine.
She can taste the gumbo,
feel on her teeth and tongue, the
texture of okra.
Her grandfather had a garden.
She recalls a picture of him taken
with her grandmother's brownie
camera.
He's gripping a pitchfork, turning
soil in the yard behind their
vernacular bungalow.
Shirtless in denim overalls,
flashing a smile
under his sweat stained straw
cowboy hat.
At 16, he and his mother
had a bitter falling out
when he told her he was leaving home
to go to college.
Everyone needed to pitch in, she
insisted, to hold on to
the family farm and
work a living out of it.
All the children had to do their
part.
He was the only one of all the
siblings to go so far in school.
Somehow, after he'd left
and his father had died, his
mother held on to their acres,
even during the Great Depression
and beyond.
She was a pale looking woman.
She was excuse me?
She was a plain
looking woman.
Someone who'd look like she'd work
hard all her life.
My mother remembers visiting, eating
double yolk eggs from
free range hens
and nearly falling off the back of
a skittish horse.
Great grandmother owned that land
until her death when
remaining relatives sold the farm
and moved to the city.
The property they sold is now
part of a wealthy suburb.
But in the years before
her grandfather was born,
it was unincorporated land
that children of sharecroppers could
buy investing,
sweat and hope along with
their savings.
Her grandmother was a city girl from
back east whose thrifty
parents bought what had been a
boarding house.
The narrow two story home where
their children were born.
But her grandfather grew up on his
family's farm.
His grandparents had been slaves
and then sharecroppers.
Their children worked for city
people as cooks and
washer women as blacksmith
porters and day laborers.
Striving and saving to
buy a piece of land and escape
from the city.
No need to sweat in
Ms.. Anne's kitchen or
Mr. Charlie's blacksmith shop.
Lord knows I don't want
my child to be a white man's
yard dog.
Soon as they'd earned enough, they
bought their own land and built the
house on the family farm where
her grandfather was born.
By the time he was 16, he knew
he didn't want to be a farmer.
He wanted to study for the ministry.
The grandfather of her childhood
was the pastor of a church
who wore a black suit with
a starch, white shirt and dark
tie.
When he stood in the pulpit on
Sundays, nodding at her grandmother,
who sat at the piano.
Other days he sat at a roll
top wooden desk to write
his weekly sermons, mixing
Bible stories with quotations
from his books of history
and philosophy.
He listened to country western
music on the radio.
He liked to go fishing.
He enjoyed working
in the household garden, growing
leafy greens, tomatoes, okra,
watermelon and black eyed peas.
He took pleasure in eating fresh
food, home grown.
It wasn't the same as being a
farmer, pulling a living
from the soil.
Her mother remembers family meals
with cousins, aunts and uncles
occasions for telling jokes and
stories.
When Pop got together with his
relatives, they could make
a meal, laugh out loud,
garden sprout it under their hands
as they moved two houses in the
city, starting new plots.
You won't starve if you can grow
your own food.
If you take care of your green pet,
it will take care of you.
Growing up, she helped her mother
in the family garden.
She fed and watered the earthworms
they raised in a worm farm,
a bin filled with dark soil,
tunneled by pinkish worms,
kept in a shady spot and sprinkled
daily.
Expert cum posters.
Worms thrive with scraps
and peels of fruits and vegetables,
eggshells, coffee grounds and moist
soil.
Their castings, worm
poop, fertilize
the garden, turning earth into
black gold.
Her grandfather would pay her to dig
her fingers into their bed and
extract worms from the soil,
a nickel each.
He used them as
bait. When he went fishing,
the worms don't bite, but
they get the fish to bite.
She overcame her squeamishness
enough to handle the cool
wet wiggers, but could not
bring herself to bait a fishhook
with a live worm.
Yet she never objected
to the catch of the day
that landed on her dinner plate
with a garden salad.
When she scoops a handful
of black earth, she thinks
of living things that keep
the soil alive.
Thank you very much.
Boy haiku
has come a long way.
Right back to Basho with that
tradition a hundred
years ago. That's wonderful.
What a wonderful
way to begin
the new academic
poetic year.
Thank you very much, Harriet.