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Overview
Black Dues! Black Blues! Black News! , Ted Joans trumpets in his tribute to Langston Hughes. What Library Journal wrote in 1969 holds true today: "This collection of his work clearly reveals the influence of Langston Hughes, his mentor and friend. Joans, however, has the harsher and more strident tone necessary to accurately reflect today's society. As he says in one poem: 'We must fall in love and glorify our beautiful black nation / We must create black images / give the world / a black education.'"
One of the first black poets to become involved in surrealism and a first generation Beat, Joans is an expatriate poet whose work is enjoying renewed interest. This major collection of poems written during the past forty years is a significant contribution to American letters. Teducation is the first single-volume collection representing the life's work of Joans, a once roommate of Charlie Parker and a contemporary of Allen Ginsberg and Bob Kaufman.
Energetic African American Beat poet, surrealist painter, longtime Paris-based expatriate, African traveler, jazz expert and jazz musician, the versatile 71-year old Joans (Black Pow Wow Jazz Poems) has published 35 books, but never, till now, a selected. Joans's rakish, unsatisfiable sensibility can make his work in Beat modes as technically innovative as Burroughs, as polemically exhuberant as Ginsberg and as comic as Corso. His early work, like theirs, depends heavily on surrealist modes; "The rhino roam in the bedroom/ where the lovely virgin wait/ the owl eats a Baptist bat/ adn God almighty is too late." The masterful longer "Timbuktu Tit Tat Toe" packs a few hundred years of Black America's relationship to aftica into four pages of giddy declamation. Likke Amiri Baraka (who lauds Joans's verse), Joans came to enbrace an aesthetic of people's poetry, creating exhuberant forms to meet his needs, stirring the pot with neologism and slogan, and calling on an arsenal of heroes from Malcom X to Jean-Michael Basquiat. "And Then There Were None" locates political rage in Louis Armstrong's famous grin: "you tried to turn him into your 'musical golliwog doll'/ you wanted his trumpet to blow what you said so/ you misinterpreted his wide smile." Repudiatin
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781566890915 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Coffee House Press |
| Publication date: | 10/01/1999 |
| Pages: | 240 |
| Sales rank: | 812,208 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
A Few Blue Words to the Wise
to SHOUT / RAVE / RANT / and RAGE is being militant as
hell but not very brave
(Especially when you're before an all-Black audience)
to SCREAM / SNEER / BELLOW / and even fart is being
excited / worked-up but
all that won't stop a Honky heart
to curse / and call him names (all true) is not really bad Yet it
makes our black
poetry look sad (You know, like we ain't got nothing better to
poet about)
Then: or thus:
We must write poems black brothers about our own black relations
We must fall in love and glorify our beautiful black nation
We must create black images give the world
a black education
Africa
Africa I guard your memory
Africa you are in me
My future is your future
Your wounds are my wounds
The funky blues I cook
are black like you—Africa
Africa my motherland
America is my fatherland
Although I did not choose it to be
Africa you alone can make me free
Africa where the rhinos roam
Where I learned to swing
Before America became my home
Not like a monkey but in my soul
Africa you are the rich with natural gold
Africa Ilive and study for thee
And through you I shall be free
Someday I'll come back and see
Land of my mothers, where a black god made me
My Africa, your Africa, a free continent to be
An Affair
MONEY MADE
LOVE
TO AMERICA
AMERICA
MARRIED MONEY
AT FIRST BITE
And Then There Were None
the death of Louis Armstrong
AGAIN you have killed another one of us
AGAIN
you have finally overworked the old man to death
you would not allow him to outlive your Picasso
you were always very "fond" of this black man
you never cared whether he was too tired to perform
you and your father and even your grandfather bled him
your musical sons and daughters rode his sounds like parasites
you made a fortune from writing about what you thought he was
you tried to turn him into your "musical golliwog doll"
you wanted his trumpet to blow what you said so
you misinterpreted his wide smile revealing his teeth
you never thought that: Better and Bigger to greet and then EAT you!
you mistook his manners as uncle sam's Tom
you never realized that: Deception was a black style from way back
you never saw him as a powerful black human being
you never heard his trumpet angrier than the Bird, Malcolm, or Trane
you can't quite recall his notes going beyond your "high C"
you forgot that he started very young with a gun
you didn't want to remember why he was born so poor
you never respected him or his artistry like you did You-ropean's
you wished the hell that white lips were so hip and so strong
again you have killed another black brother
this time the world musical giant Louis Armstrong
Animal? No! Cracker? No! Groucho? Yes!
I sing to you
as I bebopped along a song in a perfect late summer August Saturday
noon digging the Soho women's rear ends wagging to and from here and there
I sing to you
as I am lured into an African art gallery filled with Ngeure masks with
protruding forehead (as though asking a deep question) and seeing the
most beautiful Dan mask in the world suggesting the eternal attraction
of adult/child girls
I sing to you
as the New Morning Bookstore's newspaper screams a headline in a big black
bold type, "GROUCHO IS DEAD," I now sad step and murmur,
Groucho gone?
I sing to you
for all the Days at Operas / Nights at Races / Yes I mean just that and filled
with Horse Soups / Duck Bizness / and crazy slapstuck Monkey Feathers
I sing to you
your loudmouth brother Harpo wearing the very first Jewfro hairdo to
halo his tightlipped tophat head hoodoo
I sing to you
for all the unlit cigars you held onto, thus sparing your audiences the
wretched cigar stench; your cigar was symbol long before jive Churchill
fatigued Castro and you made demeaning fun at Capitalists cigar mad men
I sing to you
when I need to out talk an indecent dude who is wrong as Margaret
Dumont
would have been if she be in Harlem I968 playing her
haughty-taughty straight
I sing to you
who blew long chain reactions of words as though you'd heard John Coltrane
before he was to be born and Chico did some Monk plunks too
I sing to you
as a true Marxist, but not that dude Karl, but you Groucho, Harpo, Chico,
Marx Brothers who were so social-minded and communal that you took in
empty Zeppo
I sing to you
for did I not as an infant black tot learn that "new booms sweep clean"
from your 1929 first film Coconuts? / and too "why a duck" at the viaduct
I sing to you
in spite of Captain Spaulding copping-out of paying my African brethren who
bore his carcass by colonial hammock chair by land from Africa to Hollywood
I sing to you
as the desk clerk thrice / as the private detective twice / and as the dubious
President of Freedonia whose motorcycle sidecar went nowhere, and too,
sing to you as the dunce At The Races and another dunce in Go West Young Man
I sing to you
your oceanliner tiny cabin room with its overcrowded trunk that spewed out
your brothers and then all those other people who filled the cabin until
there was no place for you to do what you had planned to do with
Margaret Dumont
I sing to you
Singing at the university to the weird bearded professors, "What Ever It
Is I'm Against It" and your endless wisecracks, sharp wit that caused the
wealthy bourgeoisie to almost shit / or at least they had a fit causing faint
I sing to you
Mr Firefly / Mr Miller / Mr Kornblow / Mr Driftwood / Mr Hammer /
Mr Flywheel / Prof Wagstaff / Loophole Grunion / Dr Hackenbush /
Quentin Quale / and who else, oh yes,
he is coming, Here Comes Captain Spaulding, Hooray for Cap'n
I sing to you
your bouncing eyebrows / your grease paint moustache / your lensless glasses /
your droopy clothing / your center-parted hair / your leering eyeballs / your
pretentious thumb-in-vest come-on confronting all the imperialists that be
I sing to you
Lydia the tattooed Lady, Lydia, oh yes, I've met Lydia
I sing to you
for the very first, a great classic 1929 Coconuts / to the worst 1949
Love Happy
I sing to you
Groucho Marx who attacked it all before the others came
I sing to you Groucho, my eternal movie star
Another Dream Deferred?
a take-off on Langston's famous poem
What happens to a dream deferred?
Langston Hughes poetical said then I read:
Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun ... etc.
The warm sun the warm winter Mexican sun
Where Aztec executioner priests used to
Make sacrificial blood run
Victims died and all that spilled
Blood dried and dried into obsidian black
In those ancient Aztec times way way back
Did they leave those corpses to fester like sores
To stink like rotten meat
Or did those Aztec sanitation departments
Allow the corpse to just lay there and bloat
In the winter warm sun
Or did they cart hygenically away
Those heavy putrid cadaver loads
Or perhaps they just simply ignored
As many contemporary people by being hard and cold
Who when asked for human help
They just let those living "corpses"' Explode
Mexico City
January 1988
A Powerful Black Starmichael
in memory of Kwame Turé
Senufo mask face ...... You
Torso of kanaga ...... You
Ogun worded mouth ...... You
Kilimanjaro atmosphere ...... You
Elegance similar to an Ellington .... You
Lover of the Marvelous ...... You
Yoruba ritual hipster ........ You
Congo & Chicago chauffeur man ...... You
Afroid acrobat flipster ........ You
Roaming the world wisely ...... You
Merry Malcolm x-mas every day ...... You
International higher than ladder level ...... You
Cool competent coordinator ....... You
Ebony Egypt way-a-head Arabs .... You
World liberation was what you, yes You were about
You who
Youniversalized power of Blackness
Dakar, Senegal
November 1998
Bang Baby Bang
Hey policeman! Why do you carry a gun? to shoot me in the
back if I start to run ... or is it because you are a frightened man?
Do you go to bed with your woman
with your gun in your hand?
Hey policeman why do you carry a gun? to kill us off if we
don't obey? to mass murder us the legal way ... or is it
'cause you're a uniformed criminal
and for you crime does pay?
Tell us policeman why do you all carry guns?
can't you enforce the law without a gun?
are you afraid of the public, thus need one?
does a gun give you power of life and death?
Okay policeman I'll carry a gun myself
I'll carry a gun to protect me from you
so when we dispute / we both will know / exactly what to do
Bang baby bang!
Beauty
BEAUTY IS NOT FOUND IN ONE'S FACE / NOR IN THE
NATIONALITY OF THE RACE
NO NO WORLD BEAUTY IS THE SOUL
BEAUTY IS NOT THE DORIS DAY GLITTER / NOR IS IT SAMMY
DAVIS THAT MAKES YOU TWITTER
NO NO WORLD BEAUTY IS THE SOUL
BEAUTY IS NOT THE BLOODY CRY IN BATTLE / NOR IS IT THE
SLAUGHTER OF BULL FIGHTER'S CATTLE
NO NO WORLD BEAUTY IS THE SOUL
BEAUTY IS NOT THE WEIGHT OF MONEY / NOR IS IT A SEX ACT
WITH A PLAYBOY BUNNY
NO NO WORLD BEAUTY IS THE SOUL
BEAUTY IS NOT OWNED BY JUST ONE PERSON / NOR IS IT
CONFINED TO RELIGIOUS WORDS OR CURSING
NO NO WORLD BEAUTY IS THE SOUL
BEAUTY IS NOT THE PAINTING THAT LOOKS SO "for real" / NOR IS
IT A CORNY RHYMING POETIC DEAL
(so I shall SHUT UP world) 'CAUSE
BEAUTY IS THE SOUL
Black February Blood Letting
LUMUMBA WAS MURDERED AND MADE A MARTYR
IN THE MONTH
OF FEBRUARY BUT NO DISH BROKE IN THE SINK OF THE UN-UNITED
NATIONS
MALCOLM X WAS MURDERED AND MADE A HERO IN
FEBRUARY AND STILL
YET NO ELECTRIC COUCH HAS GAVE BIRTH TO A HIGH
VOLTAGE HUM
ABUBAKA TAFAWA BALIWELA WAS FOUND
DEAD IN HIS OWN
FEBRUARY NIGERIA ALTHOUGH NO WITCH DOCTOR RAISED A BONE
TOWARD MECCA
KWAME NKRUMAH WAS DETHRONED IN HIS ABSENCE
IN THE
GHANA FEBRUARY AND STILL YET I CAN NOT FORGET
THAT NOT ONE:
CHINESE RED RUSSIAN RED OR ANY OTHER
KINDA RED
DID ANYTHING MILITANTLY TO HONOR THESE BLACK
FEBRUARY DEAD
Black Light
It is crystal clear
It is crystal clear to me
It is crystal clear to you
It is crystal clear to them
It is crystal clear to some
It is crystal clear to those
It is crystal clear to these
that we blacks, no longer, want to please
Bread
Money is the world! Dollars / Francs / Marks / Kronor / Pesetas /
Guilder / Rupees / Pounds / Pounds / Escudos / Drachmas /
etc etc Money is your mother / money is your father / money
is your entire family / all your living and dead relatives
mean money / money is your god / money is your god / money is your
god / money is your god / money is your god / your goal is money /
your interest is money / you will cheat to get money / you
will steal to get money / you have always killed to get money /
you have always killed to get money / you have always killed to
get money / you have always killed to get money / you will sell
your soul (if you had one!) for money / you are always looking
for new ways to make more money / you can not have your power
without money / your minutes and years are lived for money / in
the beginning of your life the word was .....................
Table of Contents
| Introduction | i- vii |
| I | Hand Grenade |
| A Few Blue Words to the Wise | 1 |
| Africa | 2 |
| An Affair | 3 |
| And Then There Were None | 4 |
| Animal? No! Cracker? No! Groucho? Yes! | 5 |
| Another Dream Deferred? | 7 |
| A Powerful Black Starmichael | 8 |
| Bang Baby Bang | 9 |
| Beauty | 10 |
| Black February Blood Letting | 11 |
| Black Light | 12 |
| Bread | 13 |
| Cold | 14 |
| Colored Choruses | 15 |
| Dead Serious | 17 |
| Demystify | 21 |
| Domestic Faxophone | 22 |
| Ego-Sippi | 24 |
| Empty Inside Outside | 25 |
| Faces | 26 |
| Flutterbye | 27 |
| Happy 78 HughesBlues | 28 |
| Happy Headgear to They | 29 |
| Harlem to Picasso | 31 |
| Have Gone, Am in Chicago | 32 |
| How Do You Want Yours? | 35 |
| Ice Freezes Red | 39 |
| I the Graduate | 42 |
| I Told On It | 44 |
| Jazz Is | 48 |
| Jazz Is My Religion | 49 |
| J.F.K.* Blues | 50 |
| Le Fou de Bamba | 52 |
| Let's Play Something | 53 |
| Like Me | 56 |
| Long Gone Lover Blues | 57 |
| Lumumba Lives Lumumba Lives!! | 58 |
| My Ace of Spades | 59 |
| My Bag | 60 |
| Natural | 61 |
| Nitty Gritty | 62 |
| No Mad Talk | 63 |
| O Great Black Masque | 64 |
| Passed on Blues: Homage to a Poet | 65 |
| Poet Key | 68 |
| Promised Land | 69 |
| Repression | 70 |
| Salute to the Sahara | 71 |
| Sanctified Rhino | 72 |
| Santa Claws | 74 |
| Scenery | 75 |
| Skip the Byuppie | 76 |
| Soul on the Lam | 78 |
| Spare the Flies but Kill the Lies | 79 |
| The .38 | 80 |
| The Black Jazz Smile | 82 |
| The Ladder of Basquiat | 83 |
| The Nice Colored Man | 89 |
| There Are Those | 91 |
| The Sax Bit | 92 |
| The Sermon | 93 |
| The Wild Spirit of Kicks | 97 |
| They Forget Too Fast | 98 |
| Timbuktu Tit Tat Toe | 100 |
| True Blues for Dues Payer | 104 |
| Two Words | 105 |
| Uh Huh | 106 |
| Watermelon | 108 |
| We Invent Us | 109 |
| Why I Shall Sell Paris | 112 |
| Why Try | 115 |
| II | Fertileyes & Fertilears |
| Aardvark Paw | 119 |
| Ain't Mis-behaving like Raven | 122 |
| All Too Soon | 124 |
| Alphabetical Love You | 125 |
| And None Other | 127 |
| Béchar River | 132 |
| Bed | 133 |
| Calexico & Mexicali | 134 |
| Cauliflower Suspenders | 136 |
| C'est Vrai? | 138 |
| Collected & Selective Groupings | 139 |
| Commonplace Bulues | 142 |
| Cordialité | 144 |
| Cuntinent | 146 |
| Do Not Walk Outside This Area | 152 |
| Eternal Lamp of Lam | 156 |
| For Me Again | 158 |
| From Rhino to Riches | 159 |
| He Is Turning | 162 |
| Hiccups that You Hear Down the Hall | 166 |
| Him the Bird | 167 |
| I Am the Lover | 168 |
| If | 169 |
| Jazz Anatomy | 170 |
| Jazzemblage | 171 |
| Jazz Me Surreally Do | 173 |
| Je Prendrai | 174 |
| Journey | 177 |
| Laughter You've Gone And | 178 |
| Mes Février Fathers | 180 |
| Miss-Meat-Me | 181 |
| No Mo Space for Toms | 183 |
| Of Our Rainbow | 184 |
| Okapi Passion | 188 |
| On Rue Jaques Callot | 192 |
| Ouagadougou Ouagadougou | 193 |
| Pills | 194 |
| Pre-Birth Memories | 195 |
| Pygmy Stay Away from My Door | 197 |
| Rain & Rain | 199 |
| Ready or Not | 202 |
| Sans Subway | 204 |
| Sécurité | 205 |
| Shun Not This Rider | 208 |
| Smoke Sleep | 210 |
| So Fortunately Unfortunately | 212 |
| Spent Penny | 213 |
| Tant Pis! | 214 |
| The Enigma of Francis Parrish of Paris France | 216 |
| The Hat | 218 |
| The Overloaded Horse | 219 |
| The Statue of 1713 | 220 |
| The Sun My Son | 224 |
| They Rode Hyenas during the Night | 225 |
| To Be What / Is Not To Be | 226 |
| Untitled | 227 |
| The Truth | 228 |
What People are Saying About This
Amiri Baraka
T.J.'s poetry is one paradigm of an era, soundings from one of the more" color-full' (sic) individuals who lit it up, whose voice still brightens and enlightens the curious world he ceaselessly observes. The work is oral, meant to be read aloud, which was one of the most salvageable aspects of the Beat period, Live Readings. So the poems read as if Ted were speaking directly to us, Live, and his global audience . . . Walking and talking, looking and squawking, laughing and rapping, Ted is still the world's most Bohemian Beat "Outside" Brother.
From the B&N Reads Blog
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