This introduction is called "We Try to Create
Spaces Within Spaces."
Douglas Kearney and Val Jeanty fought.
Val Jeanty a.k.a.
Val-Inc was born in Port Au Prince, Haiti, emigrated
to New York in 1986.
She's a drummer, sound engineer, composer,
and creator of Afro electronica or voto electronica.
And she's a teacher.
As Val-Inc she says, Val is incorporating
her ancestors' past.
She says, I make music that goes a little beyond listening.
Sound is frequency and vibration.
Sound is alive.
It keeps us alive and we actually feel or hear music.
She talks about what it is to work
with electronic devices, instruments that are synthetic
almost unreal, and to reconcile these 21st century
machines with the sacred Afro-Asian traditions of sound
and spirit.
I study sound, she says, I always seek the sound,
the spaces in between sounds.
What does that sound?
The sound I haven't heard yet.
I want to make that sound.
I'm going to be the first one to taste this formula.
I try to create spaces within spaces.
These citations are from a talk you
can find on YouTube in a music demonstration from 2010.
There it's called Val-Inc on Afro Electronic Music
Composition.
Val Jeanty as sound engineer has worked with Anthony Braxton,
Wadada Leo Smith , Henry Threadgill.
She's collaborated on original works of Tracey Morris, Douglas
Kearney, Cuban musician Yosvany Terry, and others.
Her solo digital album, and I say solo
in quotes I think there's always more than one going on here.
Solo digital album, On, O-N, is available at Bandcamp.
That's from 2007.
And I first encountered her--
I teach a class on Zora Neale Hurston
and I've taken to showing this film.
I think it was Darius James's film.
He made it with the guy named Oliver Hardt.
But Darius writes, narrates the film really, it's his film.
And it's called the United States of Hoodoo.
And Darius is searching around the United States.
He had come back from Berlin thinking,
he had left the country thinking there's nothing here for him.
When his father died, he came back to their house
in Connecticut and encountered these masks on the wall.
And his question to himself was, what's
the significance of these for my father?
Were they art?
Was there something sacred involved?
Was it some attachment that he wouldn't
have been able to explain?
But Darius takes it upon himself to take a voyage
across the country.
And the first place he goes in the film at least,
is to visit Val Jeanty.
And so I highly recommend that film.
It's on Vimeo, the United States Hoodoo.
Douglas Kearney's graphically, sonically,
performative first book of poetry "Fear, Some"
came out in 2006.
In 2007, the Poetry Center at San Francisco State, of which
I'm the director, we together with Giovanni Singleton,
the poet, and editor of "Nocturnes Review"
at that time, we received a small grant
from the city of San Francisco to invite
some poet musicians to perform their works in San Francisco.
We focused on inviting Black artists who otherwise
hadn't had much opportunity to perform
their work in San Francisco.
This is a city where today Black folks living there
are calling themselves the Three Percenters.
We invited Jayne Cortez and the Fire Spitters.
We brought Bern Nix along with Jayne to join her son,
the drummer Denardo Coleman, and the bassist Al MacDowell,
who would be performing with Ornette Coleman in his band
the night before for the SF Jazz Festival.
When I talked to the director of SF Jazz saying
you know we're doing this thing with Jayne Cortez,
and can we get some co-publicity and so forth,
his remark was, oh, I've always wanted to invite her.
Well, invite her.
We did it.
We managed to do it.
I think it was the only time the Fire Spitters ever
performed in New York.
And we lost Ornette.
We lost Jayne Cortez.
We lost Bern this summer.
There was a San Francisco Chronicle headline
for that event, which I can't pass up mentioning.
It said, poet Jayne Cortez, Ornette Coleman's ex-wife,
makes heady music.
After I called and complained to the journalist,
the headline got repaired.
I looked it up just now.
It says, poet Jayne Cortez makes heady music
with Ornette Coleman sidemen.
Opening for the Fire Spitters that night, and this
was at the Victoria Theater.
And I still am kind of stunned.
How did we do all this?
LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs was a student in the MFA program
at California College of the Arts.
She had done no performances in San Francisco.
She'd done all her work in New York.
And so this was her, as far as I know,
the only performance she did in San Francisco.
And she said, well, why don't we invite Matana Roberts?
And so Matana was it really at the beginning of her New York
days after coming from Chicago.
And if you have not heard her works, "Coin Coin"
this is an ongoing epic.
It's going to be 10 volumes of vinyl LPs and CDs and downloads
and so forth.
But an amazing narrative work of music and writing,
incredible, tune into Matana Roberts.
So Douglas Kearney comes into the picture.
We invited him to open for Amiri Baraka and Roscoe Mitchell.
That was the first ever collaboration
of those two folks.
Roscoe had just moved to the Bay Area to teach at Mills College
and I kind of had the brainstorm to put them together.
And when I called them up, both of them
said something like, gee, I don't know.
Does he want to work with me?
Douglas said, yes, and we invited him.
The day before he sat down for a public conversation,
in quotes, with Amiri Baraka at San Francisco State that was
moderated by Matthew Shinoda.
This was right after Baraka sat down
in the Department of Africana Studies
with a roomful of students and veterans of what
would be called the Third World Liberation Front
Strike at SF State.
Amiri Baraka had been an instrumental participant
in the agitation that would effectively
shut down the State University from November, 1968
to March, 1969.
And I say the students at SF State.
You know, like, can you imagine this happening today?
But those students had jobs like you did.
They wanted to be in school the way you did.
And they did that.
They shut that thing down for months.
They came back when they said you're
going to have the First Department of Black Studies
at a public university.
You're going to have a Department
of Native American Studies, a Department of Asian-American
Studies, and Raza Studies.
And it's all going to be under the first College of Ethnic
Studies at a public university.
This became a model agitation for radical change
that got followed across the US.
So if you're in any of the schools across the country,
especially public schools, you owe it
to those folks for doing that work for you.
Yeah.
[INAUDIBLE]
With
That [INAUDIBLE]
Yeah, it's amazing.
We took over the president's office.
At that moment we also brought to town Baraka's college friend
shortly after and co-editor of the magazine
The Cricket AB Spellman came with this little grant.
And 2/3 of the Black Took Collective
were also there Duriel Harris and Ronaldo Wilson.
And Dawn Lundy Martin was not along that time.
I don't know how we did this.
We spent a lot more money than that grant.
That evening at the Victoria Theater was 10 years ago.
Douglas now teaches writing poetics and performance studies
at CalArts, the California Institute
of the Arts in Valencia, California and lives
with his family near there after living
in Altadena, which I associate with Octavia Butler
and with Dana Franklin.
That's where she lives in Kindred in 1976.
His books now include The Black Automaton from 2009.
And then a wild rash of books that
have happened in the past three years, Patter from 2014,
Buck Studies in 2016, both books of poetry.
And Someone Took They Tongues, which
is the book of opera libretti from 2016.
And from 2015, Mess and Mess and, essays and poetics.
It opens with this tiny nugget, called Snake Handling.
And please indulge me, it's brief.
Snake Handling.
I gave a talk at day house some April back.
Among other questions, someone asked
that I unpack the phrase, the poem's argument.
What is the difference between poetry and rhetoric?
One holds an argument as snake handlers might a diamondback.
The rhetorician grips securely the scaly collar
ensuring the serpent doesn't bite.
Poet however may find perches further down the spine,
leaving the viper free to writhe or strike.
So fodder is food.
If you cite, like I did, the online etymological dictionary.
It comes from the old English fodor, especially hay straw
or rather bulk food for cattle, from the proto Germanic,
fodram, which is also old Norse foor,
middle Dutch, voeder, old high German, fuotar, German, futter,
from the proto Indo-European, pa-trom, suffix form of root,
pa, to feed.
I think we're going to be fed by this piece tonight.
Earlier this afternoon, Duriel Harris
had us remembering the great Black studies
Black studies scholar Hortense J.
Spillers that incredible essay, Mama's Baby Papa's
Maybe: An American Grammar Book.
And I think we need to remember that notion of it
being an American grammar book.
She questions the particular American grammar
that can put together the human slave with livestock
and have them imposed in the same kind
of linguistic structures and the laws.
And she says to that extent, the project of liberation
for African-Americans has found urgency
in two passionate motivations that are twinned.
One, to break apart, to rupture violently
the laws of American behavior that make such syntax possible.
Two, to introduce a new semantic field /
fold more appropriate to his her own historic movement.
And just for the past two days, I've
been feeling that thinking its presence
is performing also this essential double action,
these two passionate motivations.
We try to create spaces within spaces.
Val Jeanty, Douglas Kearney.