Lew Rosenbaum—Chicago Revolutionary Poet

Lew Rosenbaum reading at a recent Chicago event.

Note--My original version of this post included the poem Dead Letter Office which I mistakenly attributed to Lew Rosenbaum.  I deeply apologize for the mistake. I have substituted his powerful poem about police executions Don't Shoot.

I sort of stumbled on Lew Rosenbaum on the Facebook group Chicago Revolutionary Poets Brigade.  I knew nothing about him, but we have better than a dozen mutual FB friends, mostly radicals and activists I have known and some poets.  Judging from his picture, we are about the same age and have similar preference for goatees.  It seems likely that one way or another our paths probably crossed some decades ago however fleetingly.

I could not sniff out a lot of biographical detail in my usual Google search.  He has apparently been an activist for most of his adult life and been a radical bookseller including time at Chicago’s Guild Bookstore—an old haunt—as well as a poet.  It turns out he is the administrator Revolutionary Poets Brigade page and is the manager of People’s Tribune Chicago community which is associated with Peoples Tribune, newspaper and now website  which was formerly published by the League of Revolutionaries for a New America, is now independent with an editorial board based in Chicago.

Don’t Shoot

1999

Amadou Diallo

23 years old

Guinean immigrant in the Bronx,

New York.

His name rolls off the tongue

Like waves rising from the port of Conakry

To crash at the foot of the Statue of Liberty.

Shot 41 times

By four white police officers.

2011

Kelly Thomas

Thirty-seven years old

Homeless, Anglo, schizophrenic man.

Citrus-scented hallucinations

Taunt his fevered

Fullerton, California, street dreams.

Beaten to death by the police.

2014

Michael Brown

19 years old

African American bound for college,

Hope gripped tight,

A future denied.

Shot 6 times

In Ferguson, Missouri.

Come: See the blood

Running in the streets of my country.

Does it matter

If it’s 41 shots

Or only 6 –

Or (merely) beaten to death?

Amadou Diallo’s killers

Were judged not guilty.

Kelly Thomas: verdict not guilty.

How will Michael Brown’s killers be judged?

Come see the blood,

Blood that torrents down the streets

Of my poor country.

Michael Brown, his student life opening before him;

Kelly Thomas, living in the trap of his delusions;

They achieved the equality of the bullet and night-stick,

Both shed blood to wash the streets of their cities.

Amadou’s mother cried out, sobbing:

She had “the talk” with her son.

Surely Michael’s mother had

“the talk.”

Even before Trayvon Martin

I had “the talk” with my grandson.

Today I shiver as his

Brown-skinned hands brandish his toy rifle.

Come see, how the blood

Floods the streets of my rich country.

These, our words, are

Our weapons.

Our weapons draw all the poor together

In what is a tapestry of common purpose,

That join us in a vision of a country

Where no one wants for a place to stay

For food to eat

For songs to sing

Where the conjoined blood

That today separately runs rivulets in the streets

Will bind us together

To return laughter to our throats

Peace to our hearts

Justice to our hands.

—Lew Rosenbaum

Rosenbaum's chap book.

The second poem I found on the Chicago Labor and Arts Blog where it was posted last April.  I’ll let Rosenbaum describe it in his own words:

My mother, Anna, died at 87 in 1983.  She spent the last few years declining in a nursing home; the last weeks hardly cognizant of her surroundings.  That image haunted me, still haunts me, trying to imagine what was in her mind when we thought she was not comprehending. This poem took a couple of decades to write, reaching this version in my chapbook To Pay The Piper. She loved to tell young people about the time the soldiers came, like cossacks; it was so central to her growing up, to her fear of the Russian oligarchy and her willingness to embrace the radical.  Of course one of the things that I think about now at this time of my own life is that others will have to fight and to remember; and in remembering and fighting, do something the world of her comrades was unable to do. They will build a whole new world which will not know cossacks of any kind and which will treat the elders with compassion.  

Rosenbaum's mother Anna circa 1920.

This is My Last Shuttered House

Grandma shuttered all the windows

Anna Rosenbaum in about 1920

She took us up the stairs

She hid us under beds

While the soldiers thundered by.

But this is my last shuttered house.

This withered body contains the last of my suffering.

What hurts me most?

I would tell you,

The look you give me

When you can’t see within.

Oh yes, you see a crazy woman.

Flailing about, her tongue.

Wraps itself around each gurgling

Sound I cannot make you understand.

You sit here now

Son and daughter; you

Have each other to talk to

And, thinking you know how

Senseless I am,

Exchange glances

Sharing your distress and pity.

Now I can lie here

Pretend to sleep.

Although your pity repulses me;

Still, glad you are here.

I know you are upset.

I’ll give you less grief

If I lie here

In my last shuttered house.

Peering from the outside

You can’t see

Ghost or web or

Whatever is alive within.

I remember the first time.

I’ve told you many times.

I was only seven

Oshmyany was our town

And the soldiers came like cossacks

They rode horses with clattering hooves

Down the narrow cobbled streets

And they banged on all the doors

They demanded young men for the army

They demanded young women to serve them.

And we shuttered all the windows

Grandmother shuttered all the windows

She took us up the stairs

We hid under the beds

We hid in the closets

Grandmother pulled the shutters

And the house was dark for days.

* * * * *

Now I hurt most from those

Your uncomprehending stares

Even more than sores that eat through to the bone

Even more than feeding tubes they thrust down my nose

And more:

Because my stare cannot always comprehend you.

(Moments clear like this one

May never come again).

One July evening you laid your hands on my

Sweat-drenched brow and murmured permission.

“Don’t stay in this pain for me” you said.

“Not on my behalf. The toll’s too great.”

I grip this too fragile thread

Only to recognize your faces

When I can . . .

I will let go when meaning

Slips away completely.

There is nothing after this.

When this house, my last house,

Is shuttered tight

Others will have to fight

Others will have to remember

Even about that first time

When I was only seven

And the soldiers came like cossacks

Riding horses with clattering hooves.

Now I hurt most from those

Your uncomprehending stares

Even more than sores that eat through to the bone

Even more than feeding tubes they thrust down my nose

And more:

Because my stare cannot always comprehend you.

(Moments clear like this one

May never come again).

One July evening you laid your hands on my

Sweat-drenched brow and murmured permission.

“Don’t stay in this pain for me” you said.

“Not on my behalf. The toll’s too great.”

I grip this too fragile thread

Only to recognize your faces

When I can . . .

I will let go when meaning

Slips away completely.

There is nothing after this.

When this house, my last house,

Is shuttered tight

Others will have to fight

Others will have to remember

Even about that first time

When I was only seven

And the soldiers came like cossacks

Riding horses with clattering hooves.

—Lew Rosenbaum

Michael Warr—Poet Without Credentials

Michael Warr in his natural habitat.

I love it when poets previously profiled in National Poetry Month posts here take the time to clue ye olde proprietor of voice I have not heard—probably because I was not paying attention in the right places.  In this case it was Jeff Epton, author of Wild Once and Captured who clued me in last year to Michael Warr.  Warr is not exactly a new poet—he has been writing for decades.  A Chicago writer, his first collection, We Are All the Black Boy came out back in 1990.  He has also edited important collections and had a successful career as an arts and not profit administrator. 

Warr was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 1955 but moved to his family to San Francisco at the age of 4.  His was a deeply committed Jehovah’s Witness family. As a child he was drawn to the arts he wanted to be a painter but he was also struck by poetry.  He recalls going room to room while still in elementary school with another boy reciting verse.

But Warr found his parent’s religion stiffening and left it and his family at the age of 16.  Yet he acknowledged how much he got from his Witness background.  “I attended a high school with the lowest reading rate in the entire state of California,” he told a 1994 interviewer. “The reason I could read was because I was a Jehovah’s Witness and that’s all we did.”  While attending that high school he and friends cut classes to cross the Bay and hang out at the University of California at Berkley where there were poetry readings, African students, and an exciting radical scene.

After graduation he made a beeline for Chicago which he saw as a Mecca of Black arts and culture—the home of Gwendolyn Brooks’ Bronzeville and successful Black publishing—the legendary Daily Defender and Ebony and Jet magazines.  He came to the right place.  Focused, driven, and committed he seemed to will himself into a career as a freelance writer and journalist despite lacking the punched ticket of a college education that everyone said he needed to succeed.

In 1978 at the age of 23 he declared himself a war correspondent and headed to Ethiopia to cover a brutal civil war and famine that most of the world was trying its damnedest to ignore.  He wrangled assignments from the BBC, The Manchester Guardian, The Economist and other publications.  He returned to Chicago in 1982 with an Ethiopian wife and spent much of the next two years touring the country and lecturing about what he had learned in Africa.  He also returned to freelance writing and edited trade publications.  Although he was making a decent income, producing telecommunications magazines.

Warr found a literary home and stumbled on a new career at Chicago's legendary Guild Bookstore on Lincoln Ave.  Studs Terkel was just one of the city's literary and leftist community luminaries who gravitated there.

It was during that period that he restlessly began revisiting poetry and found a congenial home at the old Guild Bookstore.  A North Lincoln Avenue fixture, crowded, rundown at the heels, and a little seedy the Guild was a radical bookstore and de facto leftist cultural center run by Richard Bray, a classic old labor leftist and the city’s favorite book nerd.  Bray used his bookstore to stage poetry nights, readings, and other occasional literary events along with a parade of radical educational and organizing meetings sponsored by otherwise warring leftist sects.

Warr began hanging around and sharing his poems at the readings. Gwendolyn Brooks would stop by as well poets famous and scruffy including my old friend and Fellow Worker Carlos Cortez.  By the end of the ‘80’s he was organizing many of the events for Bray and plotting to develop a formal Guild affiliate arts organization.  In 1989 that became the Guild Annex and Warr was it executive director.  He had stumbled into a new career as an arts administrator.  And, boy, was he good at it.  He even had a knack for that most elusive skill among artsy-fartsy types and can’t-be-bothered-with-bourgeois-money lefties—fundraising.

At first he worked as a volunteer while continuing his editing job at Telephony magazine, but was able to obtain a $100,000 grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, enough to pay a modest salary and hire an assistant to oversee the 40 volunteers at the Annex and its busy schedule.  He could finally quit the day job.

The Guild Annex opened as a physical space in an empty storefront next to the bookstore.  It was soon a bustling place full of classes, art shows, meetings, performance art, and of course those poetry readings.  It can be said that the readings there and the poetry slam movement fostered at the Green Mill were the catalyst for Chicago’s edgy poetry resurgence.  Besides running the place and expanding programs to service the arts, Warr was a performer.  He honed enough material for his first collection, We Are All The Black Boy was published in 1991 by Tia Chucha Press, an independent publisher he founded with Luis Rodriguez which became a Guild Annex project.  It was greeted with ecstatic reviews. Better yet, Warr’s childhood idol Gwendolyn Brooks wrote a cover blurb.

The strong title poem still has enormous power.  In fact, it could have been written yesterday in the brutal Chicago streets.

We Are All The Black Boy

In his mouth

An icy steel,

Notched barrel in his mouth.

Fingered by a sadist

With an omnipotent badge,

Disgusted by the boy's blackness,

'fraud of the rebelliousness

In his predator walk,

In his street corner

Disposition,

In his Niggers With An Attitude

"fuck the police" lyrics.

For this audacity

Hands behind the back

And bullet in the head.

His former breathing valuable

Only to the ghetto undertaker

With the one permanent job.

They are wise to fear

Our blood

Cannot be retracted

Without redemption.

—Michael Warr

Chicago

February 1990

During those years the busy Warr seemed everywhere on the Chicago poetry and arts scene.  He directed The Writers Voice, a literary arts program for writers ages 12 to 17 at the Duncan YMCA, was President of Neutral Turf Chicago Poetry Festival, which he helped found in 1988, and frequently consulted with both arts organizations and philanthropists.

Warr’s first marriage ended in divorce but he wed Patricia Zamora, a youth coordinator in Pilsen.

The Guild Annex thrived as an arts organization even after the Bookstore closed in the ’80s.

Even after eventually re-locating to his old Bay Area stomping grounds, Warr remained connected to his Guild roots and Tia Chucha Press where he and Luis Rodriguez edited Power Lines: A Decade of Poetry from Chicago’s Guild Complex 1999 and which issued his second collection, The Armageddon of Funk in 2011.

In the meantime Warr collected honors—the Gwendolyn Brooks Significant Illinois Poets Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, the Ragdale Foundation US-Africa Fellowship, the 2012 Black Caucus of the American Library Association Award and 2012 PEN Josephine Miles Excellence in Literature Award. 

He received a $40,000 Creative Work Fund grant to produce his multimedia project Tracing Poetic Memory in Bayview Hunters Point, a result of his long interest in mating poetry with the other creative arts including music, painting and photography, dance and other performance art.

After work in California including consulting to San Francisco Pride, the Marcus Shelby Jazz Orchestra, and the MacArthur Foundation. Warr was appointed in 2015 as Deputy Director of the Museum of the African Diaspora, a Smithsonian museum, in San Francisco.

And as if all of that were not enough last year Warr co-edited with Phil Cushway the important Of Poetry and Protest: From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin published by W. W. Norton.

Whew! I’m exhausted just reading about the guy.  Not bad for a slum kid with no credentials.

Malcolm Is ’bout More Than Wearing a Cap

The problem is not the letter X
or the myriad of emblazoned caps
even worn backward by white boys.
When Arsenio sports a rhinestone-
studded X to match his Armani suit,
I see Malcolm emasculated by fashion.
As if X symbolized a new NBA team
challenging the Pistons, Cavs, and Bulls,
their jerseys blinking “Buy American”
with every slam dunk sponsorship.
Then a sandwich is named Sandwich X,
and a four-wheeler is named Bronco X,
until the substance of X is x’ed out.
A dollar for every X on a cap
can either make a multi-millionaire,
or hopefully help pay for a revolution,
a cry we hear these days almost
as much as we see X’s — in America
where all is commodified.

Will X stand for change or
changing what America wears?
As ruling designers alienate
the Malcolm from the X. Separate
the meaning of Malcolm from the
punctuated power of X.
To Malcolm is to do. Your cap
is clean, but Malcolm is ’bout more
than wearing a cap. Your horn rims
impress, but Malcolm is ’bout vision.
Your T-shirt is down, but Malcolm
is ’bout taking over.
Your enemies will also wear the X,
sell the X, sex the X, film the X,
praise the X, record the X, raise the X,
fraternize and buy the X.
Your enemies will never Malcolm the X.
Only we can Malcolm the X.

—Michael Warr

An Open Poem To Clarence Thomas

“…it’s high-tech lynching for uppity blacks
          who in any way deign to think for themselves.”
                              – Clarence Thomas

To be lynched is not to be castigated by peers, but castrated
by mobs for raping white women that you’ve never seen.

There are trees in Mississippi watered by the midnight murder
of black men. Trees with barbarism carved into them. Witnesses
of animalistic, primal lynching. Lynching for which there were
no hearings. Lynching that committed instead of hiding crimes.

Lynching is not a cloak to wrap oneself in for the magical return
of blackness after wiping its significance away. To be lynched
is more than a memory.

You know the pigment-controlled psyche. America’s sword
of blackness and sexuality. You sit in the seat of a Justice
empowered, unchallenged, enriched, until the break of senility.
If this is being lynched then lynch me. Lynch all of us.

Written in response to the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas Hearings and
for the theater performance What’s This In My Coke?

—Michael Warr