Eric Darton and I will be helping to Occupy Wall Street with poetry at 3 p.m. on Friday, October 21. We invite you to join your voice to ours at Broadway, south of Liberty Street. (If you arrive a little late, look for us inside the park.)

This morning, for the first time, I pulled a couple of paperback anthologies off the lowest shelf of my poetry bookcase (which holds my oldest poetry books, and filled up long ago–the newer ones take up part of a bookcase in another room). There’s a sort of time capsule effect here, as many of these books are ones I’ve had since the 1970’s, and some of them have not been opened since then. After a brief examination of a Bantam edition of The Puerto Rican Poets and a Penguin Modern Poets volume with work by Corso, Ferlinghetti, and Ginsberg (and I wasn’t even aware of owning any of the Beats!), I selected Modern Poetry from Africa, edited by Gerald Moore and Ulli Beier (Penguin, revised edition, 1968), to take with me to Zuccotti Park.

After the heavy rains of yesterday and last night, the park was a bedraggled sight, with stalwart Occupiers crawling out from underneath blue tarps and surveying the quasi-wreckage when I arrived around 9:30. A stiff wind was blowing, cresting at times almost to gale force, and I had to hang on tight to my foam board sign. I was one of only a couple of sign holders at the park entrance on Broadway, another being a man somewhat my senior who asked with a smile if he could stand next to me. I smiled back and nodded in approval of his sign, which bore a vaguely socialist sentiment–only to recoil when I noticed that it was attributed to Eli Siegel, the founder of Aesthetic Realism. “Well, I’m not a fan of Aesthetic Realism,” I hastily added, “but we don’t have to talk about that.” I began reading some poems by Léopold Sédar Senghor: “In Memoriam,” “Night of Sine,” “Luxembourg 1939,” “Paris in the Snow,” and “New York (for jazz orchestra: trumpet solo).” I know almost nothing of Senghor’s poetry, and it was moving to read (in translation from the French) his vision of the relationship between Europe and West Africa before the midpoint of the 20th century: a sorrowful poetry bent on decolonization of mind and territory, even on the brink of the Second World War: “Lord, I have accepted your white cold that burns worse than salt./ And now my heat melts like snow in the sun….They felled the virgin forest to turn into railway sleepers./They felled Africa’s forest in order to save civilization that was lacking in men.” I wonder what role poetry played in Senghor’s life in later years, when he became the first president of the Republic of Senegal.

In the middle of my reading, there was a mic check and announcement of a major cleanup of the park. “We need your help! We’ll be rolling up the tarps! All personal possessions are to be moved to a specific area of the park! This area will be easy to locate! Please pick up your trash!” I felt rather as if I ought to pitch in–the Occupiers are doing all the heavy lifting required to keep the public square open for the rest of the 99% who avail themselves of dry beds at night–but since I had no personal possessions to move or trash to dispose of, I continued reading. I noticed the deficiencies of the anthology–no work that I could find by women, no work translated from African languages, and a sprinkling of words like “mulattress”–but still the volume felt refreshing, like a message in a bottle–a remnant of the thinking of another era, one in which Africa appeared, in the eyes of at least some Westerners, as not only a commercial opportunity or demographic challenge, but as an intellectual and cultural force to be reckoned with. It was not pleasant to reflect on the contrast between that seeming promise and the present era in which, according to a post by Black Agenda Report commentator Glen Ford that I read only yesterday, “Instead of the pan-Africanist dream of a United States of Africa, we are seeing an Africa under the military thumb of the United States.”
 (See http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/somalis-under-relentless-drone-attack-us-tightens-military-grip-continent )

I went on to read poems by G. Awoonor-Williams of Ghana, Wole Soyinka of Nigeria, Antonio Jacinto of Angola, and Okot p’Bitek of Uganda. Then I walked home over the Brooklyn Bridge, reveling in the light striking through the flying clouds and holding tightly to my sign lest both it and I be lifted up by the wind and flung over the railing.