Summer Updates :: Winter Garden Healing Arts
In this newsletter:
Summer greetings & travel notice
Poems by Henry Dumas
Happy Summer to you all. This season's update is a bit brief. I hope you are finding ways of thriving despite the multiple crises swirling around us. Summertime in Oakland manages to be lovely as always. I've been enjoying the farmer's markets, blooming trees, cool breezes on a hot day, and grey mornings, like today.
Some other things keeping me grounded right now: weekly Chi Gong classes, and training to be a community crisis responder with Mental Health First.
I'm rushing to get this newsletter out because I am preparing to leave town for a few weeks, and I want to give you all an opportunity to schedule before I go. I have openings through the rest of this week and next, and then I'll be away til mid August.
Part of my travels will be spent in my old home of Los Angeles, where I'll be taking appointments in Silverlake & Atwater Village, as well as on-site. If you know someone who might appreciate my work down there, feel free to share this email. If you were on my Los Angeles mailing list before I moved, you will be getting a separate email with info about my availability in the coming days.
The rest of my trip will be up the coast to Seattle and back, where I'll be playing a series of shows in my alter-ego as a musician. It's been a while since I did anything resembling a tour, so I'm excited for the challenge, and looking forward to connecting with old friends and new.
This photo is from the WWII-era Manzanar internment camp along the eastern Sierra Nevada. My partner and I stopped there on our way to Death Valley a few months ago. I highly recommend the trip, and I also recommend learning about this aspect of American history. I worry about the direction our country is headed, and the casual forgetting of our country's darker tendencies does not bode well for the future.
Photo taken with Pentax LX shooting Ilford HP5 Plus, for the photo nerds.
Poems by Henry Dumas
This season's literary offering is from Henry Dumas. Dumas was a young poet active in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. His writing strikes me as a particularly intimate and rooted example of Black Arts era poetry. Dumas was interested in folk traditions and mythologies of the Black diaspora, but devoted equal attention to phenomenological themes relating to embodied experience and relationships with the people around him. In contrast to Black Arts movement figurehead Amiri Baraka, whose work frequently sought universality in the particular, to the point of obscuring the poem's personal and specific origins, Dumas's aesthetic feels more present in the complexities and interpersonal commitments of everyday life, even when he reaches outside his own experience. There is a quality of untranslatability in the intimate work of Henry Dumas, a window onto the experience and outlook of one individual navigating a complex web of relationships.
Dumas was not well published in his lifetime, but through the efforts in particular of Eugene Redmond and Toni Morrison, his writing has gained somewhat wider recognition. Henry Dumas was shot and killed by New York City Transit Police in 1968, at age 33.
The following are selections from a cycle of poems entitled Saba, published in the collection Knees of a Natural Man.
Saba: Shadow and Act
a black shadow limped behind the blond king
making an invisible rope from shreds of blood
a shadow grows blacker and taller as the sun sets
(this aint no big thing but its all we got)
with a flip of his whip the king permits the moon
growing out of the darkness the black man counts
the stars, tightens his rope, and pulls it down
Saba: Black Paladins
we shall be riding dragons in those days
black unicorns challenging the eagle
we shall shoot words
with hooves that kick clouds
fire eaters from the sun
we shall lay the high white dome to siege
cover screams with holy wings, in those days
we shall be terrible
Saba
The word shall descend
upon us
before we learn to speak
and it shall
stop us before we break
Saba
all the letters i have written you
(an empty hall of echoes)
swirl where the wind has left them
i am learning / the alphabet / of the wind
footsteps...
Saba
I am taking pictures over this bridge
between us
first picture: iris of August bowing
second picture: i make a rainbow
third picture: i can actually see you
fourth picture: hooped in my wheel
fifth picture: rolling towards March
sixth picture: ice snowing the ridge
seventh picture: i waited for you
eight picture: this boy believed
ninth picture: his shadow would answer
tenth: can i see when i close my eye?
eleventh: i caught you forgetting me
twelfth: negative: between us, a shutter
With care,
Wilson