Neighborhood Writing Alliance workshop participants took the stage at Printer’s Row Lit Fest this last Sunday. Celebrating another year of the 15-year-old Journal of Ordinary Thought, they read published pieces to an intimate, attentive crowd. Audience members and writers alike gathered underneath the Arts & Poetry stage’s tent for partial shelter from summer’s sudden, blistering arrival.
Sharon Warner opened the event by remarking that we were blessed with “a good crowd on a good day”. Her manner was both elegant and familiar, the tone one might imagine a pastor using at a neighborhood church. She read “Gardener of Dreams”, a poem inspired by a friend (“an historian who is Black, and a Black man who is an historian”) who had enjoined her to “be the gardener of young people’s dreams”. “Dreams” follows the uneven trajectory of African American history, including a reference to “the great migration” that led many blacks to northern, industrial cities like Chicago. Warner’s message was one of resilience, of a people who have repeatedly “made ways from no way”.
Warner’s concerns were echoed by others for whom resilience and growth were central themes. Often these concerns were manifest in a preoccupation with the natural world, and the spiritual/material nourishment provided by food. Donna Pecore read of attempting to loosen the yolk of the past in “Tossed Salad for Cathleen and Peter”:
My experience of wedded bliss is tinged
with sour grapes, but my friends have worked
to turn the vinegar into something sweet.
all mix a salad fresh; covered with a tasty vinaigrette
I sort my grapes, toss crisp iceberg into the dark romaine,
I leave my past, enjoy the present, and envision hope.
David Nekimken celebrated “…diversity in organic forms / the essential oneness of the web of life” in his poem, “Open Spaces”. Barbara Simms reminisced of the joy of going “from watermelon to watermelon…until we couldn’t stomach another bite or chug even another teaspoonful of juice” during summers on her grandparent’s farm in Texas. And Ron Yokley joyfully announced that “spring has finally come!”, in a performance that successfully animated a weaker (at least on the page) poem.The flipside to this lushness and gratitude was an insistent concern with violence, environmental degradation and the fragility of life. Mary Gray Kaye’s “Destruction” likened trees to the vulnerable human body, asking:
Who feels more pain?
Who deserves still to stand?
A band-aid where the blood is
Yet the sap seeps unattended
Trees will not grow here again
A second poem by Donna Pecore questioned human interventions into food, wondering if “we will survive this science of good intentions”. “There are so many things I’d like to tell you,” Helena Marie Carnes Jeffries read, on the shock of losing a young friend too soon. Mayi Ojisua read a hauntingly disjointed poem in which he assumed the position of a killer, listing what his victims “never had”: “a mother”, “a cross”, “a taste”. Ojisua’s poem seems to struggle against the fear that “The scale of justice / Is always unequal after all”.
Hopefully NWA (and the JOT) will continue to support justice by enabling accessible spaces of articulation. This is by no means an easy task; and NWA, like all non-profits, obviously struggles to uphold its mission in the face of bureaucratic pressures and funding needs. I would have liked to see some wilder stylistic and aesthetic choices at the reading – a rather formal approach to poetry predominated, and only two nonfiction pieces were read. In addition, the “cleanliness” (a certain uniformity of tone and form) of the journals gives me the impression that the editorial process could be much more collaborative. But, in a city as notoriously segregated as Chicago, it’s no small feat that NWA’s writers made up the most diverse group that I saw in attendance at Printer’s Row. Most of the writer’s seemed at ease, both with reading in public and with each other. Such facilitation of both community and individual power carries deeply radical potential.
