East Baltimore Muse

Save the Children In thinking about the tragic murder of Heaven Sutton, the 7 year old girl in Chicago who was hit by a gangbanger's stray bullet, I come back to the intersection of personal and social trauma of the 1960s'.  At that time several forces intersected in the lives of black people, such as the loss of old social institutions created during segregation, the violence of urban rebellions, the Vietnam War, the shift in the American economy toward global economics, and the personal trauma of child abuse.  A vortex of violence was created in the 60's, and Heaven was caught unaware in what that vortex of violence has bequeathed to us, a tragedy that should have us looking more critically at what happened in the late 60's when black communities became battlegrounds and then were emptied of economic opportunity. There is plenty of data and research available, but what I am suggesting is that we have not looked closely enough at this period as a begin...

Men, Work, Violence, Men, Work Guns I pulled over into a rest stop in Connecticut a couple of weeks ago because I was getting a little sleepy.  At 2 o'clock in the afternoon I'm settling too much into the Satellite radio, and things are getting a little droopy, so I pull over to sit for a few seconds and then get out to walk into the McDonald's for a coffee.   It's before Zimmerman has turned himself in, and I have already had a warm greeting from a black man I don't know, a stranger.  It was just a warm exchange of smiles and a nod of the head, the kind of moment that reminds me of what I've read about the signs used during the time of the Underground Railroad, tilts of the hat from a certain kind of hat at a certain corner, etc.   At this second stop the black man I saw must have been in Islam at some point.  He is especially excited to see me wearing a hat that looks like it might be on the head of a Muslim, but it was actually made by o...

That Summer in New Hampshire Water Song Part II                       When my ship comes in  is a phrase we all know, or a certain generation knows, and it's about the thing hoped for but not quite seen.  The poet's success is some ship out in the bay for many of us, and maybe it's when we realize it's better for the ship to stay out on the water that we come to understand the real prize of this thing called being a poet. I left Baltimore and drove up to Indian Pond, New Hampshire, without a clue as to how long it would take.  I had been on the road for eight hours and realized it would be a few more before I got to the turn I was supposed to take to get to Catrina's house.  There was supposedly a mailbox there at the road just past the junction where New Hampshire met Vermont, but it was dark.  There were no lights on the road, just the road itself and the way it revealed it's curves and...

Water Song               It was heartbreaking.  I had hoped to win the Walt Whitman Award in 1983, but my manuscript, something entitled "City Folk," had only  been selected as one of forty finalists out of a field of twelve hundred manuscripts.  I have only rarely submitted manuscripts to contests and have not done even that in many years, but at this point in my life I can say that was not a bad showing.  I was still in factory, working as a janitor in the warehouse at Baltimore's Procter & Gamble plant, and I wanted to escape.  I had a plan, but the best laid plans are only plans.  The imponderable civic of human activity and the intelligence that governs it have other plans.            In 1975 I wrote the first version of what became "City Folk," and that became "Water Song" in 1985, a sojourn of ten years between first draft of a manuscript and a published book. ...

Meet Me at the Old Chuckwagon Milton Avenue I was raised on westerns, and my first sight of real horses was when the "Arabbers" came through the alleys selling topsoil and fresh produce. They sang out street vendor songs and walked beside horses that were either ponies or slightly larger. Often they would be pintos or piebalds. Once in awhile I saw a palomino, but chestnut came to be my favorite color in horses, so when I watched the westerns I learned to distinguish the colors somewhat. With a black and white television in the early sixties, it was not so easy to see anything other than the limited chiaroscuro of our 19 inch RCA. My uncle Ronnie was a self-made film expert, and he helped bolster my early accumulation of westerns watched, if I can take the time to name a category. My father's favorite was "Shane," and I have it on DVD in my collection. Every now and then I pull it from the shelf to try to figure why my father called it his favorite. I hav...

MARYLAND PENITENTIARY "Central Booking" East Baltimore February 11, 2011 Central Booking is what the Maryland Penitentiary has come to be known, and it is the oldest prison in the western hemisphere still in daily operation. You can reach it by driving west on Madison Street from Johns Hopkins hospital, which sits in the middle of an old black neighborhood and up the street, so to speak, from Dunbar High School, named for Paul Laurence Dunbar, the great African American poet who wrote the line "I know why the caged bird sings..." which inspired the title of Maya Angelou's incredible autobiography. Jail, as we call Central Booking or any of the other "correctional" institutions in Baltimore, is full of black men, and in my sixtieth birthday year I am given to looking back over my life from this point to the black men I have known. I am not alone among black men from poor and working class urban backgrounds who can say they are survivors. In Bal...

photo by Bill Larson taken at Austin Peay University Clarksville, Tennessee 2010 To the Heart of Things When I listen to people with terminal illnesses talk about the time they have left, it often takes me awhile to remember that I have had to deal with that, too. Maybe it's because I am fifteen years away from the diagnosis. I was forty-three years old, too young to expire according to many, not the least of whom was myself. However, people have died soon after they were born. People die at all ages, but I was busy doing stuff, as they say, when the diagnosis came and along with it the only solution, according to the doctors. They wanted to give me a new heart. I refused to be put on the waiting list. I wanted to try exercise, change of lifestyle, the geographic cure, and most of all, a return to my Taiji and all the related aspects of what we call Chinese medicine. But all that seems like chit chat. I think now of the place where I lived, an apartment on Philly's West...