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  GUARD THE MYSTERIES

  THE BAGLEY WRIGHT LECTURE SERIES

  CEDAR SIGO

  GUARD THE

  MYSTERIES

  WAVE BOOKS

  SEATTLE AND NEW YORK

  Published by Wave Books

  www.wavepoetry.com

  Copyright © 2021 by Cedar Sigo

  All rights reserved

  Wave Books titles are distributed to the trade by

  Consortium Book Sales and Distribution

  Phone: 800-283-3572 / SAN 631-760X

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Sigo, Cedar, author.

  Title: Guard the mysteries / Cedar Sigo.

  Description: First edition. | Seattle : Wave Books, [2021]

  Series: Bagley Wright Lecture Series | Includes bibliographical references.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020046178 | ISBN 9781950268290 (paperback)

  Subjects: LCGFT: Essays.

  Classification: LCC PS3619.I473 G83 2021 | DDC 814/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020046178

  Ebook ISBN 9781950268504

  IMAGE CREDITS:

  Original City Lights Pocket Poets edition of Revolutionary Letters (p. 6/7), photograph by James Oliver Mitchell, cover by Ferlinghetti. Spirit Reach by Amiri Baraka (p. 14), Jihad Productions, 1972. Photograph of Audre Lorde (p. 29) by Colleen McKay. Hand-stapled pamphlet of “The Lanterns on the Wall” (p. 33) by John Wieners. 1864 portrait of Chief Seattle by E. M. Sammis. This is the only known photograph of Chief Seattle and has been reprinted in several different retouched versions. Photograph of Coast Salish village on Lummi Island dated 1895, photographer unknown (p. 39, 41), photos courtesy of the Suquamish Museum. Poster and cover (p. 45/46) by Tuli Kupferberg. Illustrations (p. 64, 69, 75) by Jack Boyce. Remaining photographs: Barbara Guest (p. 78) by Francesco Scavullo. Billie Holiday (p. 100) by Carl Van Vechten. Robert Creeley (p. 106) by Elsa Dorfman. Eileen Myles (p. 111) by Bob Berg. Joy Harjo (p. 122) by Rain Parrish at the Wheelwright Museum, 1982. Thank you to Joy Harjo and Garrett Caples for their assistance.

  FOR LYDIA SIGO

  WHO SHOWS ME THE WAY

  PAST ∞ PRESENT

  REALITY IS NO OBSTACLE

  A POETICS OF PARTICIPATION

  BECOMING VISIBLE

  NOT FREE FROM THE MEMORY OF OTHERS

  A LECTURE ON JOANNE ELIZABETH KYGER

  A NECESSARY DARKNESS

  BARBARA GUEST AND THE OPEN CHAMBER

  SHADOWS CROSSING

  TONES OF VOICE CONTINUED

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Was it ever so quiet the room began to ask you questions?

  AMIRI BARAKA

  The quest

  is to find those lost vibrating overtones

  of the poetry stone.

  JOANNE KYGER

  GUARD THE MYSTERIES

  REALITY IS NO OBSTACLE

  A POETICS OF PARTICIPATION

  Because the deepest revolution is not social.

  WILL ALEXANDER

  REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #62

  Take a good look

  at history (the American myth)

  check sell out

  of revolution by the founding fathers

  “Constitution written by a bunch of gangsters

  to exploit a continent” is what

  Charles Olson told me.

  Check Shay’s rebellion, Aaron Burr, Nathan Hale.

  Who wrote the history books where you

  went to school?

  Check Civil War: maybe industrial north

  needed cheap labor, South had it, how many

  sincere “movement” people

  writers & radicals played

  into their hands?

  Check Haymarket trial: it broke the back

  of strong Wobblie movement: how many jailed, fined,

  killed to stop that one? What’s happening to us

  has happened a few times before

  let’s change the script

  What did it take to stop the Freedom Riders

  What have we actually changed?

  month I was born

  they were killing onion pickers in Ohio

  Month that I write this, nearly 40 years later

  they’re killing UFWs in the state

  I’m trying somehow to live in. LET’S REWRITE

  the history books.

  History repeats itself

  only if we let it.

  ■ ■ ■

  I have wondered if this piece of writing could more accurately be described as a speech rather than a lecture. The recently insulting and polarized political climate has struck a chord inside of me. Is this a need to articulate my resistance or just a willingness to begin to ask new questions? When does the word itself become action? This is a question I encountered in a lecture by the poet Lorenzo Thomas titled “How to See through Poetry: Myth, Perception, and History.” It’s a question he never really answers and one that I think must be haunting all of our minds. Every day our phones or televisions call up new images and actions of dehumanization—barring whole populations of countries from entering the United States, images of makeshift concentration camps posing as immigrant detention centers (this is happening under a bridge in El Paso), yesterday’s threat of defunding the Special Olympics, the possibility of being able to deny health-care services on the grounds of some new-fangled moral objection from the religious right. These are extra classy, shockingly evil deeds, and I think somehow strategic choices. Let’s do the most heartless thing. The headlines no longer pile up, they disappear, and we are feigning shock at this point.

  This mindset has caused me to confront the parts of resistance that my poetry has left undone. My work has always placed its highest premium on delaying the meeting of edges in collage, until they fall to form the final image, or is it better to say, the unlocking of collage through the inflection of voice? This is likely due to the way I take in language before attempting to lift it up and set it back out into reality. A variant of this energy is released through the public reading of the work, lending an acoustic sensation of going elsewhere, or that, in fact, the poems are reading themselves. This is a piece from Amiri Baraka’s essay “How You Sound??”:

  I make a poetry with what I feel is useful & can be saved out of all the garbage of our lives. What I see, am touched by (CAN HEAR)…wives, gardens, jobs, cement yards where cats pee, all my interminable artifacts…ALL are a poetry, & nothing moves (with any grace) pried apart from these things. There cannot be closet poetry. Unless the closet be wide as God’s eye.

  And all that means that I must be completely free to do just what I want, in the poem. “All is permitted.”

  For the purposes of this lecture I will focus on a new kind of correspondence, another dance that my work is just now beginning to uncover, whose ultimate and desired effect is to build coalitions among people and to keep that spark active and available within poetry. Poetry is never simply a set of words living alone upon the page. It exists as a perennial light in the mind, a tool of recognition that we must press into the hands of others. Teaching poetry as I do now, most often in short stints and out-of-the-way places, I have taken to sharing American revolutionary poets like Audre Lorde, John Trudell, Diane di Prima, Amiri Baraka, Margaret Randall, Jayne Cortez, Tongo Eisen-Martin. I hesitate to immediately stamp their work as political anymore, especially when introducing their poems to students. Such naming at this point feels like imposing an immediate paralysis or unnecessary ceiling when in fact these poets hand us forms that we can carry as amulets, seemingly simple exercises that we may call upon to redefine what revolution means. Taking on reality in luminous particulars,
startling us with bound-up images unleashed. That is really the pleasure of the poet anyway: to redefine our engagement with the way language comes to guide our lives.

  REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #100

  REALITY IS NO OBSTACLE

  refuse to obey

  refuse to die

  refuse to sleep

  refuse to turn away

  refuse to close your eyes

  refuse to shut your ears

  refuse silence while you can still sing

  refuse discourse in lieu of embracement

  come to no end that is not

  a Beginning

  I was listening to a recording of Diane di Prima reading at Berkeley in 2008. At one point she speaks about the origin of her ongoing series Revolutionary Letters:

  What happened was somebody in New York hired a flatbed truck, Sam Abrams—a poet—and a generator that would run an amplifier, and we went out, some folk singers who were considered very radical, guerilla theater people who did street theater and poets, and we went all over New York, this was those years of assassinations around ’67, ’68 or so, not the first wave, but the second wave of assassinations and we would just perform places and I realized the poems I had were too intellectual for that kind of performing so I started to write things that were something you could hear on one hearing, on the street, something more like guerilla theater even though it was poetry and that became the Revolutionary Letters.

  So, there were a lot of those. They would go out to something called the Liberation News Service which would send them to 200 revolutionary newspapers. People would print what they wanted and that went on every week or so and eventually I put out a book of them in 1971 with City Lights.

  I love di Prima’s concept of writing work that we can make use of after one hearing. It is an interesting intention to place over the process. Plus the poet is almost expecting that her words will be blindly broken off at some point, so the listener may only get a shard of the poem, and writing with that in mind to begin with. She also describes what sounds like a very deliberate cross-pollination of the arts. As I begin to imagine this flatbed truck I also begin to question the difference between protest, performance, and actual battle. When di Prima makes reference to this second wave of assassinations she is not only speaking of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert F. Kennedy, but also of the deaths of seventeen-year-old Bobby Hutton, the first recruit of the Black Panther Party, as well as Fred Hampton, chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, who was gunned down in his own home in December 1969 during a raid ordered by the Chicago Police Department, who had been working in conjunction with the FBI for their COINTELPRO operation “to investigate ‘radical’ national political groups for intelligence that would lead to involvement of foreign enemies within these programs.” So essentially agents would infiltrate the organization as undercover Panthers, obtain information, begin to divide and conquer, to jail, and to assassinate.

  This is “Revolutionary Letter #36”:

  who is the we, who is

  the they in this thing, did

  we or they kill the indians, not me

  my people brought here, cheap labor to exploit

  a continent for them, did we

  or they exploit it? do you

  admit complicity, say “we

  have to get out of Vietnam, we really should

  stop poisoning the water, etc.” look closer, look again,

  secede, declare your independence, don’t accept

  a share of the guilt they want to lay on us

  MAN IS INNOCENT & BEAUTIFUL & born

  to perfect bliss they envy, heavy deeds

  make heavy hearts and to them

  life is suffering. stand clear.

  This poem is instructive for the way in which di Prima begins to interrogate the reach of pronouns, her own complicity, which leads to throwing out questions about her origins and then eventually wonders how “we” can even identify any longer with the criminal acts “they” think that they are slipping by as mere legislation. I am also so enamored with the way the pronouns first feel haphazardly talky and strewn about the poem. Though actually they are carefully lighted upon, leaned against, forming the literal crux of the music, Do you admit complicity? All explanations are finally ground down to a last dusting of liberation philosophy. “Stand Clear.” The reader is placed inside the mind of the poet as strategist, and environmental activist, espousing lists of theories on how we might survive as well as ways of continuing to force change.

  When Diane di Prima left the East Coast to move west in 1968 it was primarily to work with a group of San Francisco activists known as the Diggers. One of their founders, Peter Berg, had once teased di Prima on an earlier reading trip to the Bay Area, “Your writing helped bring all of this about, now come and enjoy the fruits.” The Diggers would initially proclaim their presence by serving free food in the long and shaded park adjacent to Golden Gate known as the Panhandle. Berg has said that they were actually more interested in getting the attention of the people in cars driving down the street, passing the food line. He hoped that they would wonder why these young people were standing around outside and eating and that eventually they would see no reason not to join them. Placing the word “free” in front of anything was another tactic of theirs; they operated a free store in the Lower Haight, an on-the-spot art experiment which ran for three years. A lot of its goods were donations from large supermarkets, crates of melons, things that would go to waste otherwise. And the Diggers would also spread the donations to a network of communes that had sprung up around San Francisco.

  The original mimeograph edition of Revolutionary Letters was published in 1968 by the Diggers’ own imprint, Communications Company. Subsequent 1968 editions were produced by the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in New York City and the Artists’ Workshop Press in Ann Arbor. The first international edition was produced in 1969 in London by Long Hair Books. I love that three separate, rabid underground printings of the book began almost immediately, a palpable sign of oncoming insurrection. Di Prima has described her outlook on publishing and distribution of the Letters as being tied to her early anarchist beliefs:

  People could hear them and would do whatever they wanted with it. I’m an anarchist, my grandfather on my mother’s side was an anarchist who wrote with Carlo Tresca for his newspaper, and I tended to have that way with my politics. I never joined anything but I wrote a lot and put it out to be used however.

  What feels most important to say is that Revolutionary Letters remains an ongoing series. Despite di Prima adding new poems with each subsequent edition (six editions in all now), people tend to confine its concerns to the late sixties or early 1970s, almost to freeze it where it began at those first nine flatbed truck poems. But in fact, the “Revolutionary Letter” is a form di Prima would take with her on the road when she began to work with Poets in the Schools, from 1971–78. This outreach would take her all over the country, including teaching in the Hopi and Navajo reservation schools, and teaching the children of farm workers in Salinas, California. I want to be sure and get a few of the later “Letters” in here. This one is dated August 2, 1984:

  REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #72

  A SPELL FOR THE CHILDREN OF THE POOR

  Here

  is a camera for Obsidian

  of Thunder Mountain, Nevada, tour guide

  who cares for her mother & all

  her brothers & sisters, whose eyes

  turn always toward the highway; & a

  lifetime supply of charcoal & pens

  & brushes for Melissa, black girl who lives

  next door to me in the Fillmore where the grocer

  refuses to give her eggs if she’s 2¢ short & she’s

  always

  2¢ short, her mom

  spent the last five dollars on codeine

  ’cause she hurts. &

  notebooks by the dozen for Erlinda

  Shakespeare, Shosho
ne, age 12 who was

  afraid to write more on her great

  long poem ’cause the notebook we gave her

  (Poetry In The Schools, 1972) was running out

  notebooks

  cost 35¢

  There is enough paper

  Erlinda, and paint, and a violin

  for your brother

  & all the leotards

  anybody wants

  on Webster St, in

  Hunters Point.

  Here’s a drum set,

  another, take the whole damn

  music store,

  what are we

  holding onto when you guys

  are the only art that’s News

  This is a poem in the form of a giveaway, a potlatch that becomes a series of portraits calling attention to poverty. What are we holding onto? This is a great question to take up in poetry and one that might actually speed up a poem. Di Prima becomes intensely critical of the ways in which we allow class structure to deny various forms of expression to children of color. Di Prima makes class distinction seem in the way of possible greatness. She manages to convey a great sense of boredom about such values. Near the ending of the poem she restores us by saying the possibilities we place in the young go beyond class and that really what we need is access, literal paper and supplies and space and time. She assures us that the instrument can offer a pathway into the arts and that the greatest gift we can offer is a discipline. When I first read Revolutionary Letters in my twenties I seemed to miss out on the grief and compassion that so inform the sequence. “A Spell for the Children of the Poor” is a political poem but so personalized and well dispersed as portraiture that it slips in to do its work almost unnoticed, and the heart is reached.