Why the Black Hole Sings the Blues

by Ishmael Reed

Overview

A new collection of poems from the American author, poet, and playwright Ishmael Reed.

The poems in this new collection from Ishmael Reed were written between 2007 and 2020. They range from poems based on events that occurred around Reed's house to cataclysmic space events. Some of the poems were commissioned. ”Moving Richmond” was part of a public art installation created by Mildred Howard. The poem, in huge letters forged into weathering steel billboards greets passengers who enter the new Bay Area mass transit hub in Richmond, California. Other poems were commissioned by musicians. ”Hope Is The Thing With Feathers” was performed by Gregory Porter. “Red Summer, 2015” appeared in print first and then was set to music by David Murray. Reed writes, "The longest poem in the book, “Jazz Martyrs,” was begun when Reed learned about the number of black Jazz greats who didn’t live past the age of forty. "I have been fortunate to live beyond the age of 80," says Reed. "I’ve found out who my best friends are. The ones who got me there."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781628973587
Publisher:	Dalkey Archive Press
Publication date:	07/28/2020
Series:	American Literature Series
Pages:	196
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.60(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Ishmael Reed is the award-winning author of over twenty-five books including Mumbo Jumbo, The Last Days of Louisiana Red, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down and Juice!. He is also a publisher, television producer, songwriter, radio and television commentator, lecturer, and has long been devoted to exploring an alternative black aesthetic: the trickster tradition, or Neo-Hoodooism as he calls it. Founder of the Before Columbus Foundation, he taught at the University of California, Berkeley, for over thirty years, retiring in 2005. In 2003, he received the coveted Otto Award for political theater. His most recent essay collection, Why No Confederate Statues in Mexico, was published in 2019 by Baraka Books of Montreal. He lives in Oakland, California.

Ishmael Reed is the award-winning author of over twenty-five books including Mumbo Jumbo, The Last Days of Louisiana Red, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down and Juice!. He is also a publisher, television producer, songwriter, radio and television commentator, lecturer, and has long been devoted to exploring an alternative black aesthetic: the trickster tradition, or Neo-Hoodooism as he calls it. Founder of the Before Columbus Foundation, he taught at the University of California, Berkeley, for over thirty years, retiring in 2005. In 2003, he received the coveted Otto Award for political theater. His most recent essay collection, Why No Confederate Statues in Mexico, was published in 2019 by Baraka Books of Montreal. He lives in Oakland, California.

Read an Excerpt

IF I AM A WELFARE QUEEN

If I am a Welfare Queen
Where are my jewels and furs
The baby kept me up all night
No money in the house for milk
The people who got me into this
Send their kids to school in silk
They took the four year old
Away from me
They said that I’m unfit
I work seven hours for
Five per hour
They say that I lack
Grit
If I am a Welfare Queen
Where are my jewels
And furs
My oldest tried to help
Out
They buried him last week
He entered the turf of a
Rival gang
They shot him in the streets
The undertaker sent a
Bill
I have to pay it off
Their papers mock me every day
They say I have it soft

If I am a Welfare Queen
Where are my jewels and
Furs
I travel fifty miles a day
They call it work for fare
My sister tends the youngest
Child
To sleep for her is rare
I try my best to
Make a way
But people just don’t care
If I am a Welfare Queen
Where are my jewels and
Furs

Untitled #1

Where do bad playing Jazz musicians go when they die?
The Ukraine

Untitled #2

How are some Jazz musicians like the Roosters in Sardinia?
It’s noon and they’re still crowing.

Hope Is The Thing With Feathers

“‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul”
It flies against headwinds that say No Entrance to those who want a new start
They came to Ellis Island
To Angel Island as well
To flee from tyrants and death squads who made their lives pure hell
“‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul”
It buffets the confidence of immigrants no matter their former abode
They packed them in festering slave ships and oceans infested with sharks
They packed them in the trucks of coyotes but hope gave them the spark to trek on, with blistered feet until they reached a new home
“‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul”
It flies against headwinds that say No Entrance to those who want a new start

Great Hunger sent the Irish
The Conscription sent the Jews
Armenians settled the Central Valley
The Blacks invented the Blues
The Haitians came to Miami
The Mexicans Las Cruces
“‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul”
It flies against headwinds that say No Entrance to those who want a new start to those who want a new start

Hip Hop and The Blues

I am really Sirius about music
While walking among the ducks,
geese and crows at the Emeryville
Marina
Emeryville,
an old race track town now paved over by Ikea and Banana
Republic, which are plopped down on the burial grounds of the Ohlone. However you can still play Black Jack at the Oak Club
My pods switch back and forth between
Hip Hop and the Blues
The Blues drinks Elderberry wine
Hip Hop drinks Cabernet Sauvignon
Hip Hop can be informative and enlightening, a CNN for the streets
But the corporate kind is to music what Monsanto is to Monarch butterflies
Not music but a threat
The Blues record the diary of one’s soul
Corporate Hip Hop is all about the Benjamins
In the Blues the eagle flies on Friday
The Blues wears overalls

Hip Hop wears
Vuitton, Versace and Gucci
The Blues drive Rocket 88s and beat up Cadillacs
Hip Hoppers drive Bentleys
In the Blues, a lover’s departure brings out the sweet aching sounds of despair
De Chirico would approve
On corporate Hip Hop women are bitches, hos and skanks
The men are pimps with furry smiles
Jay-Z has brunch at the 4 Seasons
Bluesmen grease at Smokey Joe’s Cafe
Bluesmen meet their women on rustic Blueberry Hill
Hip Hoppers meet up in
Player’s clubs
Hip Hoppers take out their rivals with AK-47s
Bluesmen prefer Smith & Wessons or razors as in Bessie’s
“cut him if he runs”
or poison
“nothin in the drug store will do it as quick as I will” a warning from Maggie Jones to a Four Flushin’ Papa
“you’d better play it straight with me if I find another queen in your deck there’s going to be a wreck”

Hip Hoppers are former latch key kids who grew up on “Lifestyles of the Rich and
Famous”
Blues listened to race radio and heard B.B. King embrace Lucille
Hip Hoppers dine on oysters and mussels
Biggie likes escargot
For the Blues, corn on the cob or a pigfoot and a bottle of beer will do
Hip Hop wears Jimmy Choo
Blues often goes barefoot
Hip Hop’s fantasy lovers are
Vogue models who inhabit cribs in the mountains with two mile driveways
Blues is satisfied with Fannie Mae
Hip Hoppers vacation in
Saint-Tropez
The Blues take the Greyhound to Memphis
Hip Hop lives in South Beach with a yacht docked near a mansion
Blues singers grew up in one room Delta shacks their only companions a harmonica and a 12 foot cotton sack
 

The Diabetic Dreams Of Cake

“Wall Street says that cake sales are low”
or to put it bluntly
“Cake is fizz”
So why is a diabetic dreaming of cake asked to leave a temple
Because he didn’t know that rice cakes were sacrament
(He managed to jam some into his pockets)
He dreamed that Mount Diablo was a Devil’s Food Cake
He began to munch it down until his path was interrupted by his Pancreas
The Pancreas had stick like arms and legs
It was frowning
It put up its hand and beckoned him to halt
He pushed aside the Pancreas and finished his meal
Next, he was attending the Asparagus festival in Freiberg
It was held in a great medieval hall and before each person there was a plate of asparagus
He started banging on his plate
Asparagus, Nicht, Kuchen Ja
Next he was running across Central
Park, juggling a wedding cake without losing a single flake
Safely in some Brooklyn room the news said that he had stolen the cake from a tony eastside wedding
He didn’t take it all in
He was too busy eating the cake and watching Julia Childs bake a cake
He was on a plantation doing what looked like a goose step
He was twirling a cane
He was wearing a monocle a black top hat and shiny black boots
The master said “that takes the cake”
Some of the slaves applauded
Others grumbled and called him a dandy
“You can sleep with my wife and daughter tonight”
the master said
He started running because they were as ugly or shall we say beauty challenged as well as booty challenged
Under an old southern pine tree he ate the cake
He was chillin’ with his witch
Not the one with a wart on her nose and wearing a black cone shaped hat but a centerfold witch
You’ve seen her
She was riding his broomstick while feeding him gingerbread
The walls were caked with gingerbread, the doors, the floor and the windows were gingerbread
Finicky about neatness she kept sweeping his feet from the table but something outside of the window got her attention
Two blond children were coming down the road
And here he thought that the bones in the fireplace were animal bones
She pushed him through the back door but he persuaded her to give him a piece for the road
Next he was sitting in on a congressional hearing on whether to classify pancakes as cake. A conservative senator warned of a slippery slope. “What next?” He said
“Icing on biscuits?”
His mother learned to make chocolate cake when working for a German family
Carlane, whose mother was German said that the Germans used real cocoa and so he found himself as tiny as a baby fly inside of his mother’s favorite cake bowl
He was climbing the ladle to reach the icing around the rim of the bowl
He and Sigmund Freud
He kept falling backward every time he was about to reach the top
Now they tell him that he has no free will that bacteria inside his gut have goals that don’t jibe with his
Or as the scientist says
“Microbial manipulations might fill in some of the puzzling holes in our understandings about food cravings”
In other words,
for his microbiome he is just a delivery system that brings them sugar
For them his body is a bakery
Is there no end to subservience?
He would find the conversation that his cells have about him hair raising
They crave cake even though cake spikes his sugar

And so as one grows older while the external adversaries with whom you had been feuding either die or break bread with you
The internal adversaries multiply.
They couldn’t give a Twinkie about whether you live or die

Table of Contents

Introduction: Reading Ishmael Reed Joyce Ann Joyce xi

Moving Richmond 3

Gustav 5

If I Am A Welfare Queen 8

Untitled #1 10

Untitled #2 11

Hope Is The Thing With Feathers 12

Hip Hop and The Blues 14

The Diabetic Dreams Of Cake 18

My Colon and Metamucil Get Married 22

Why I Will Never Write A Sonnet 23

Sweet Pea 24

Love is a natural feeling 29

Prayer of a Nigerian Official 31

Army Nurse 35

Honoring My Closest Friends 37

Those pesky things called genes 41

Untitled #3 42

If I Were A Hospice Worker 43

House on Belgrave Street 45

The Jazz Martyrs 47

The Banishment 71

The Return 73

Hit and Run 75

Capitalism Throws Me A Banquet 78

The Oakland Developer 81

Eulogy for Carl Tillman 85

Untitled #4 91

The Missionaries 92

Mino Woman 94

Scrub Jays 96

Myron 98

Be My Monster, love 102

Choices 104

If I Were A White Leading Man 106

Going For Seventy-Five 113

The Thing Between Us 115

It was a Sad Day In May 117

This Girl Is On Fire 120

What Ails My Apricot Tree 122

Untitled #5 124

Warriors 125

Eavesdropping on the Gods 128

Cold Paul Ryan 133

Luca and Pluto Walk into a Bar 138

Red Summer, 2015 140

The Gingko Tree 144

Dialog 145

Blu 146

Just Rollin' Along 149

Ethel at 100 152

Blues Christmas 155

Carla at 77 157

The Milky Way Is A Hot Head 158

The Ultimate Security 160

The Black Hole Sings The Blues 162

Acknowledgements 164

Editorial Reviews

"His own groundbreaking literary output over six decades, in multiple languages and every form—essays, fiction, poetry, film, even editorial cartoons—has infected a generation of artists. His work as an institution builder, anthologist, and publisher has spread the work of hundreds of writers from outside the literary mainstream—students, black folks, immigrants, working-class writers, avant-garde experimentalists, and every member of his immediate family." - Chris Jackson, Paris Review

"In his writing, Reed is a great improviser, a master of collage with an amazing ability to syncretize seemingly disparate and divergent materials into coherent 'edutainments'—forms of surprise, revelation, and frequent hilarity." - Robert Elliot Fox

From the Publisher

His own groundbreaking literary output over six decades, in multiple languages and every form—essays, fiction, poetry, film, even editorial cartoons—has infected a generation of artists. His work as an institution builder, anthologist, and publisher has spread the work of hundreds of writers from outside the literary mainstream—students, black folks, immigrants, working-class writers, avant-garde experimentalists, and every member of his immediate family.

Paris Review - Chris Jackson

In his writing, Reed is a great improviser, a master of collage with an amazing ability to syncretize seemingly disparate and divergent materials into coherent ‘edutainments’—forms of surprise, revelation, and frequent hilarity.

Robert Elliot Fox