An Excerpt from the Current Issue : American poet David B. Austell's tribute to Harlem Renaissance Hero, James Weldon Johnson

 

DAVID B. AUSTELL

Marshaling the Milliards

Religious and Political Entanglement in the Poetry of James Weldon Johnson

 INTRODUCTION

If a traveler from an antique land¹ were to walk down West 4th Street in Greenwich Village just past Washington Square East and down a bit to the Office of Undergraduate Admissions at New York University, skirting the security guard and down to the building’s lower level, there he would find a modest space with a small plaque identifying it as the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Classroom. This is a tribute to the first African American professor at NYU and the first such at any predominately white university in the United States. As a teacher, lawyer, diplomat, political leader, public intellectual, and author of poetry and prose, James Weldon Johnson was a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Although he was born a southerner, he was a participant in the Great Migration, and much of his professional life took place in Manhattan during the early years of the 20th century at the mid-point of the negro nadir,²  an era of fierce oppression and degradation of African Americans in the United States. For such a time as this, Johnson would leave an indelible mark on the early civil rights movement as he helped marshal the milliards of African Americans into the early ranks of activists and protesters. He was well-suited for the task.  For ten years (1920 to 1930) Johnson was the first executive secretary of the NAACP.  Prior to this, he served as U.S. Consul General to both Venezuela and to Nicaragua during the Roosevelt and Taft presidential administrations (1906 to 1913). His literary life was both provocative and comforting, inciting and insightful, and his literary opus is always considered in terms of the great works of the Harlem Renaissance.  Moreover, Johnson compiled, anthologized, and published key volumes of African American arts and letters: The Book of American Negro Poetry (1921), and The Book of American Negro Spirituals (1925). More recently perhaps, Johnson has been to a degree overshadowed by other luminaries of the Renaissance: W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Duke Ellington, Josephine Baker.  The unassuming classroom at NYU somehow exemplifies this.  Nonetheless, Johnson’s legacy is undeniable in African-American political life and the literary avant-garde of the Harlem Renaissance.³

BRIEF BIOGRAPHY

James Weldon Johnson was born in Jacksonville, Florida in 1871 to James Johnson, a successful head-waiter at St. James Hotel in Jacksonville during Florida’s early expansion as a tourist destination, and Helen Dillet Johnson of the Bahamas. Johnson’s younger brother, Rosamond Johnson, became a musician and composer (his most famous composition, often referred to as the “Negro National Anthem,” is the immortal Lift Every Voice and Sing with lyrics by James Weldon Johnson).  Both studied at the segregated Stanton School in Jacksonville where their mother was a teacher.  At an early age, James Weldon Johnson and his brother were introduced to the intense spiritual life of Jacksonville through the family’s membership in Ebenezer Methodist Episcopal Church with its liturgy steeped in the rich language of the King James Bible and its spiritual practices rooted in Africa (Johnson’s venerable Aunt Venie was a religious enthusiast and the “champion of the ring shouters…the music an African chant, and the shout an African dance, the whole pagan rite transplanted and adapted to Christian worship”⁴  W.E.B. Du Bois would refer to this as the frenzy⁵).  At age sixteen, James matriculated at Atlanta University from which he graduated in 1894. Rosamond would receive his undergraduate musical training at the New England Conservatory.  It was in Atlanta that Johnson had his first deepened sense of the “ramifications of race prejudice and an understanding of the American race problem”; at Atlanta University, he experienced the awakening awareness of the “peculiar responsibilities due to [his] own racial group” which his education at Atlanta University was preparing

him to meet.⁶ After graduating from AU, Johnson returned to the Stanton School in Jacksonville. He became its Principal in 1906.  During this period, Johnson also “read the law,” taking the Bar Exam in Florida in 1897 and subsequently becoming the first African-American to be admitted to the Florida State Bar.  James and Rosamond moved to New York City at the fin de siècle, and Johnson remained politically active even while he and Rosamond briefly formed a musical duo.  By 1906, Johnson had entered the United States Foreign Service traveling to Nicaragua as U.S. Consul General.  His life during this period was not unmitigated labor. The brilliant and refined New Yorker, Grace Nail, had captured Johnson’s attention during the time he and his brother were performing in the city, and in 1910 (the middle of his deployment abroad, during which his most famous work of prose was written, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man) James and Grace were married. Upon their return from diplomatic life and re-entry into the life of New York City, Johnson became involved with the newly formed NAACP (as a field organizer and later as the organization’s first Executive Secretary beginning in 1920).  Protesting the race riots in St. Louis in 1917, Johnson organized a “silent parade” of over ten thousand black New Yorkers of all ages; W.E.B. Du Bois led the drum corps of muffled and silent drums.⁷  From its inception, W.E.B. Du Bois had envisioned the NAACP as an “interracial organization, [and given his education and background] James Weldon Johnson was hired because he could mix with all kinds of people.”⁸ This skill was critical since both black and white members would be necessary to tackle the huge political challenges associated with the increasing lawlessness of southern states towards their African Americans residents, and the increasing frequency of race riots in northern states. Johnson’s leadership activities included opening new chapters of the NAACP, expanding its influence, and directly lobbying for key legislation, the most important of which at the time was the 1921 Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill which had passed the House only to become derailed in the bitter race politics of the Senate.⁹  Johnson would lead the NAACP until his retirement from the organization in 1930. 

Intertwined with his myriad talents was Johnson’s dedication to the Muse. He was a poet, a key member of the Harlem literati, and to use David Howard-Pitney’s construct, a writer of verse jeremiads, deep public lamentations of the horrid racism against which Johnson organized his political life. His poetry, one of the great outpourings of the Harlem Renaissance, cut at the notion of American exceptionalism, for no country could continue as a “promised land” where unalienable rights were violently withheld from its most vulnerable inhabitants.¹⁰ The poems were also warnings for white Americans that race-hatred was morally degrading and spiritually corrupting. Johnson’s poetry, as all good poetry must, exists on several planes. In his early writings, he experimented with the use of dialect, which he later turned away from, only to return again to dialect as the authentic echoes of a past which was rapidly slipping away.¹¹ This is the context of God’s Trombones, Johnson’s masterwork of 1927.  Johnson’s poems were at times framed in poetic forms common to the day (i.e., quatrains, tightly organized rhyme-schemes, iambic pentameter). However, in his preface, Johnson states that African American poets must “find a form that will express the racial spirit by symbols from within rather than by symbols from without.¹² Johnson chose not to write God’s Trombones in dialect in order to capture the KJV-laced language used by the old-time preacher, to move away from stereotypes of black preachers of the South, and to demonstrate that black folk-life could be the substantive basis for a new poetics. What emerged was a hybrid, a new exposition of folk-preaching in which secular themes were encased in the full metal jacket of African American religiosity. 

POETRY AND TROPE

In God’s Trombones, as well as many other examples of his verse, James Weldon Johnson’s literary work exemplifies what Dr. Josef Sorett has identified as the “trope of black sacred/secular fluidity” where trope is identified as more than a repeating figure of speech (a riff in jazz terms). In Dr. Sorett’s framework, trope refers to a recurring tendency in studies of black religion in the United States demonstrating that African American religiosity and polity, the sacred and the secular, are intertwined, entangled in an interactive, fluid manner.13 Moreover, Sorett’s trope can be seen as adhering to Schlegel’s concept of historicism: that social and cultural behavior (here, intertwined/entangled, sacred/secular activities) are historically determined.¹⁴ 

 (To read the rest of the essay, please get a copy of the current Issue of Pratik Magazine)

David B. Austell, Ph.D., is Associate Provost and Director of the International Students and Scholars Office at Columbia University in New York City where he is also an Associate Professor of International Education in Teachers College-Columbia University.  In 1992, he was a Fulbright Fellow in Japan and Korea.   David’s third book of poetry, The Tin Man, regarding the life of Saint Joseph of Arimathea, has been published by Nirala.   

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Virtual Readings : Poetry in Tumultuous Times -- Cultivating Voices' Pratik Special Reading Review by Rhony Bhopla

Poetry in Tumultuous Times

Cultivating Voices featuring Pratik Magazine. November 22, 2020

Literary communities around the world continue to widen their circles in spite of the global pandemic. Seasoned writers are taking on innovative roles in the digital sphere to introduce their fresh works to newer audiences. They are emerging in the online world with the most unexpected collaborations.

The latest issue of Pratik Magazine led to one such collaboration involving celebrated poets from Ireland, United States, Canada, Italy, and more.The reading was hosted by Cultivating Voices Live Poetry and the gracious host, Sandra Yannone, with Technician-in-Charge, Don Krieger.

The quarterly magazine Pratik, founded by Nepalese poet Hari Adhikary in 1979, began as a Nepali language publication. Several distinguished Nepalese poets like Mohan Koirala and others were involved with the publication until it was later revamped as an English language literary magazine in 1990. At that time, Yuyutsu Sharma became the Editor and continued to  publish the magazine until 2003. During the online reading, Yuyutsu described how he would go to the Kathmandu Durbar Square every day after teaching Shakespeare at the Tri-Chandra College of Tribhuvan University, and sit in a one-room letter press run by two young Newar brothers. "It was in the heart of the city near Kashtamandap, literarily meaning house of wood, another name for Kathmandu," he added.

Yuyutsu continued to publish the magazine for a decade, but his mother's death in 2002, and the grief that ensued, prevented his work on the publication. He traveled throughout Europe and North America and met many writers along the way. He then decided that it was time to bring back the magazine. He thought it would be an enjoyable opportunity to introduce the illustrious poets he had met during his travels in the West to his audiences in the Indian Subcontinent where there was limited exposure to contemporary Western literature. More importantly, he wanted to translate and introduce Nepalese poets to the world at large. “Very little is known about contemporary Western poetry or available in English or translation with the exception of a few figures like TS Eliot and Allen Ginsberg,” he discerned.

I was excited about the reading, but little did I know that I would have the opportunity to hear such an accomplished set of writers such as Charles Bernstein, Tony Barnstone, Chard DeNiord, Grant Hier, Seymore Mayne, Jill Hoffman, Gloria Mindock, Kerrin McCadden, Faminia Cruciani, Bill Wolak, Judith Mok, Gerard Beirne, Sydney Lea, Ute Margaret Saine, Cleopatra Mathis, Suzanne Lummis, Patricia Carragon, Chuck Joy, Jack Grady, and Howard Pflanzer.

The event began with Charles Bernstein, an American literary scholar known as a member of the Language Poets. As with all of the poets, Bernstein has multiple literary achievements, prizes, and acknowledgements to his name. Every poet read precisely and with heart, showcasing their life-long dedication to the literary arts. Social justice themes were woven into their poems. We heard from Tony Barnstone, who read a vivid narrative poem on bullying. His final piece was a solemn reflection on domestic violence. The poem relayed acompelling account of guilt felt by the speaker having known something wrong was happening next door, a battering of a helpless woman.Yet, the speaker himself expressed helplessness.

Vermont Poets were grandly represented in the reading, and with no exception, Chard DeNiord, Vermont’s Poet Laureate Emeritus, read a lulling short lyrical poem, and another with remarkable metaphors such as “bone in heart” likened to a tuning fork.

Jill Hoffman, the Editor of Mudfish, delivered her poems with a voice charged with certainty.Her first poem “Aubade” began with lines:

Say I was in the Camps

and my friends were all gone

and walking around me as memories

in their gray striped pajamas

not lying in the bay of skeletons anymore

naked

and my dog was licking my cunt

And Felix Nussbaum was painting barbed wire

like a necklace of lace

with a few prisoners penned in

one shitting on a tall can

and I was in love with him

but couldn’t show it

because he was dead…

Hoffman, also a painter, included ekphrastic elements in her work with a reference to Felix Nussbaum a German-Jewish surrealist painter.

Kerrin McCadden read moving elegies for her brother who lost his life to the U.S. Opioid Crisis. Her writing process included mining words from a President Nixon speech which was to be read in case the moon landing failed. The extracted words formed poems with a solemn tone and meaning in the context of McCadden’s brother. Her powerful set ended with the starkness of numbers: “I add him to 72,000/and subtract him from me.”

Then to Rome. Flaminia Cruciana read her work in Italian, while Yuyutsu Sharma, in Kathmandu, read the English translation. It was a remarkable demonstration of how the limits of the pandemic brought together two people across thousands of miles. Cruciana is an archaeologist and Near East scholar who has worked in pre-historic Ebla, Syria. Her compassion for the Syrian villagers has influenced her writing, and was evident in her passionate elocution.

Every poet read with zeal much like in an in-person live reading.We were all together in the energy of the present moment and with each poem.The reading closed with American poet, playwright, and fiction writer Howard Pflanzer whose poems were infused with a call to action on behalf of those silenced. He began in the voice of a migrant at the Tijuana-San Diego border. For his final poem, Pflanzer shared that 15 years ago, he had been pulled over by the police for walking alone at 2 a.m. It was not until recently that he had written about the experience:“Where are you going?...Identify yourself!...to them I was a White drug dealer/not the usual dark-skinned prey…"

And when the cops left:

            I stood there alone for a moment

            caught my breath

            and continued walking towards 14th Street

            understanding clearly who the cops were that night

            and the deadly threat to those with dark skin.

Cultivating Voices Live Poetry is a virtual reading series which started in March 2020 to help writers “summon their strength and promote social unity through the literary arts.” This reading was one such occasion where contributors to Pratik Magazine brought with their works humor, melancholy, wisdom, encouragement, social commentary, and literary craft. Both Sandra and Yuyutsu talked about the challenges of isolation and how they missed seeing their poetry colleagues in the customary ways that poets meet. Yet, this event brought poets and audiences together in a space of unity and appreciation. 

⏤⏤⏤⏤⏤

Rhony Bhopla is a British Indo-American poet and visual artist residing in Sacramento, California. Her poems have appeared in Cosumnes River Journal, Convergence, Medusa’s Kitchen, and Brevities.Her recent visual art piece, The Indian Accent, is showing in the Crocker Art Museum’s Studio Selections 2020 Exhibit. Rhonyis in her second year in the MFA in Writing program at Pacific University.

 

 

Rhony Bhopla

 

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From Pratik's Current Issue: "Temples of Stone" by Indian poet HK Kaul (1941-2020)

 

H.K. KAUL

1941-2020

 

Temples of Stone

 

Gods in the valley are alone now.

No watchmen around

No worshippers either.

 

Where have the worshippers gone

Who flocked every morning

Circling gods with charters of demands?

 

They left for safer havens

With family, gold, lost glitter.

Left gods alone in the chambers.

 

In the stones, in the temples

In the temples of stone

Knowing well gods will rise

When stones around will begin to melt

Seeing strewn arms, heads and torsos

Rising from battlefields to life

Taking new forms for the new worshippers.

Founder Director, DELNET-Developing Library Network and Founder Secretary-General and President, The Poetry Society (India), H. K. Kaul was born in Kashmir, India. He edited Journal of the Poetry Society (India) and authored more than a dozen poetry collections including Firdaus in Flames and In the Islands of Grace. 

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Cultivating Voices hosts a reading to celebrate the Fall 2020 issue with current and past contributors.

Join Cultivating Voices host Sandy Yannone as we welcome Himalayan Poet Yuyutsu RD Sharma, editor of Pratik: A Magazine of Contemporary Writing, for a reading to celebrate the Fall 2020 issue with current and past contributors. 

https://www.facebook.com/events/663288314371227

SELECT PRATIK POETS TO READ AT THE EVENT ARE

Charles Bernstein

Tony Barnstone

Chard DeNiord

Grant Hier

Yuyutsu Sharma

Jill Hoffman

Kerrin McCadden,

Bill Wolak

Judith Mok

Gerard Bernie

Suzanne Lummis

Flaminia Cruciani

Patricia Carragon

Seymour Mayne

Sydney Lea

Cleopatra Mathis

Gloria Mindock

Chuck Joy

Jack Grady

Margaret Saine

Howard Pflanzer

Highlights of the Current Issue:

Art, Poetry and Music collaboration;

Dreams of a Sleeping World;

Art of Oscar Oiwa;

Plus an interview with Hollywood Musician Chad Cannon

EIGHT POETS FROM VERMONT:

Chard deNiord  David Huddle Tony Whedon  Major Jackson Cleopatra Mathis  Joan Aleshire  Kerrin McCadden  Karin Gottshall   Sydney Lea

DAVID B. AUSTELL

Marshaling the Milliards

A tribute to Harlem Renaissance Hero, James Weldon Johnson

Four Poets from Nicaragua

Ernesto Cardenal, Rubén Darío,  Salomón de la Selva, Joaquín Pasos

A SHEAF OF OTTAWA POEMS

Shai Ben-Shalom, Seymour Mayne  Nicola Vulpe, Betty Warrington-Kearsley, Erwin Wiens

ELEVEN  ITALIAN POETS

Claudia Russo,  Flaminia Cruciani,   

Rita Stanzione, Zairo Ferrante, 

Paolo Staglianò, Antonello Airò, 

Cinzia Marulli, Gabriella Becherelli,  Vittorio Fioravanti Grasso,          

Antonio Blund, Adriana Scanferla

Featuring

DAVID AXELROD

CHARLES BERNSTEIN

JILL HOFFMAN

BILL WOLAK

MIKE GRAVES 

PATRICIA CARRAGON

Plus New Work by GLORIA MINDOCK 

& HOWARD PFLANZER

Afterlife: Two Poems by H.K. KAUL (1941-2020)

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American poet Jill Hoffman's new poem, "Prose" from Pratik's Current Issue

 

JILL HOFFMAN

Prose

 

To write it is to give it up

like vomiting

which I did one night

arms around the base of the toilet bowl.

 

You know you are going to pay the price.

It’s just a question of how much

and maybe when.

Echoes adhere to everything and make us humble,

 

the dagger upheld against the breast,

remembering

who said what when.

This prose commitment to daily life, to describing

 

what he was like in bed

and moving over and turning

over over and over

till he is gone, and it is you.

 

There is even a little dog

and a bench and a garden,

I am playing a mandolin, he proffers flowers,

the whole Meissen arbor

guarded by chicken wire

and razor-ribboned around,

with a tiny gold

padlock

 

that only a change of

attitude can open,

like a can of worms

that turns to gold.

Founding Editor of Mudfish, American poet, Jill Hoffman has taught in major universities (Bard, Barnard, Brooklyn, Columbia) and published in major magazines, such as The New Yorker and Paris Review. She has led the Mudfish writing workshop in Tribeca since 1990. She is also a painter.

 

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Submissions Date Extended for Pratik's Special Issue focused on New Writing from South Asia Issue

 Submissions Date Extended for New Writing from South Asia

Due to several requests from authors getting their work translated into English, the submission date for Pratik's Special Issue focused on  New Writing from South Asia has been extended. The new deadline for submission is 15 December, 2020. 

The Special Issue will appear in 2021, more details follow in the coming weeks.

The submissions are free, please send your poems (Not more than five poems) or a short story written in English or translated into English only.

No simultaneous submissions, also we prefer unpublished work.

Please send  your work as one Word Document to:

pratikmagsubmissions@gmail.com, Also pls cc the same file to whitelotusbookshop@gmail.com

The new deadline for submission is 15 December, 2020.

Pratik: A Magazine of Contemporary Writing

Edited by Yuyutsu Sharma

White Lotus Book Shop,

Hanumansthan, Kupondole,

Kathmandu Nepal

Phone:5520248, 9803171925

whitelotusbookshop@gmail.com

 

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PRATIK INTERVIEW EXCERPT: Hollywood composer Chad Cannon on "Dreams of a Sleeping World "

 

CHAD CANNON

Dreams of a Sleeping World

Art, Poetry and Music Collaboration

 

 

Chad Cannon is an American composer interested in the intersection of cultures, history, and human stories. His score to the Academy Award-winning Netflix documentary, American Factory, has been called “stirring” (NY Times) and “graceful” (Washington Post) and was nominated for a Cinema Eye Honors Award. Other film scores include the Minneapolis police documentary Women in Blue (“lush and powerful” - IndieWire), the Hiroshima film Paper Lanterns (“haunting and mystical” - The Japan Times), and the upcoming PBS special Harbor from the Holocaust (with special guest artist Yo-Yo Ma).

 

As orchestrator, additional composer, and/or cultural consultant, Chad has collaborated with some of the world’s best-known film composers, starting with Japanese composers Joe Hisaishi (known for his work with Hayao Miyazaki) and Shigeru Umebayashi, in addition to Harry Gregson-Williams, Alexandre Desplat & Howard Shore (under Conrad Pope) and Tyler Bates (under Tim Williams). Titles include Disney’s 2020 Mulan, Sony PlayStation’s Ghost of Tsushima, Illumination’s The Secret Life of Pets.

 

Praised by The New York Times as “subtle, agile,” and with “vividness of emotion”, Chad’s concert works tend to explore human emotion through the lens of cultural history, and often include visual or literary elements. The Dreams of a Sleeping World, an hour-long symphony with woodwind soloist and choir, is based on 10 paintings by Japanese-Brazilian painter Oscar Oiwa, and features poems from around the world by individuals who have experienced large-scale calamities firsthand. The symphony was premiered in 2017 by Mate Bekavac with the Slovenia Philharmonic and Choir, and recorded by Vladimir Kulenovic and the Hollywood Studio Symphony in 2018.

 

Chad is the founder of the Asia / America New Music Institute (AANMI), which promotes cultural diplomacy through contemporary concert music. AANMI has done work in Japan, China, Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore, South Korea, and the U.S. He holds degrees from Harvard & Juilliard.

 

 

Pratik: What’s the nucleus of your collaboration, Dreams of a Sleeping World?

 

Chad Cannon: The Dreams of a Sleeping World is, at its core, a piece about human suffering. Inspired by ten paintings from Japanese-Brazilian visual artist Oscar Oiwa, the piece explores an array of human and natural catastrophes through the linguistic lens of poets who have experienced these events firsthand. I specifically chose Oscar’s work because it represents a contemporary artist’s reaction to the sometimes-terrifying effects of a globally connected society, and I chose these particular poets because I felt that the words needed to come from the people who know what it’s like to have their world, their community, their lives, shattered by events that were completely beyond their control.

 

My own life experience has been a lovely, peaceful one, full of joy and happiness, but I have had the opportunity to visit places in the world where great suffering has occurred. Throughout my 20s, I spent a great deal of time (cumulatively about 3 years) working on humanitarian or charitable projects in Asia. These experiences included participating in projects in Tohoku, Japan, following the 2011 triple disaster (earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown), 8 music tours with Midori Goto (including visits to Myanmar, Bangladesh, and Nepal, each of which involved visiting refugee camps, special needs schools, hospitals, schools for the blind and for the deaf, etc.), and a 2-year church mission in Japan for the Latter-day Saint Christian church. All of these experiences left me a changed person, and The Dreams of a Sleeping World is the reaction of my inner soul to all of the things I saw, heard, and felt.

 

As far as the “nucleus” of the actual work itself, I would say that in addition to being “about” human suffering, the work also deals with the great cycle of life and death. When we are born into this world, fate seems to be the guiding principle – we have no say whether we are born into a slum in Dhaka or into a penthouse suite in Manhattan. We don’t get to choose if we are male or female, or which language our parents will speak. We don’t get to choose if our children will drown in a tsunami, or if our grandmother will die underneath a falling beam during an earthquake. However, we can indeed control how we treat those around us, and we can choose to have hope in an otherwise bleak universe. I am talking about the hope I saw in faces of humanitarian aid workers such as Seng Rah Lahpai in Myanmar, or firefighters from Yamagata who would spend their weekends volunteering in Miyagi Prefecture after the tsunami. It’s the kind of hope that lets us celebrate our common humanity in the face of huge adversity.

 

Pratik: Do you see any role your American upbringing has played in the making of this symphony?

 

Chad Cannon: That is an interesting question, and I’ve actually never considered in relation to this particular piece! I would say the number one “American” factor in this work is, ironically, the idea of presenting a more “universal” worldview. The United States is a place where people from basically every cultural tradition on earth mingle freely. My high school in Salt Lake City was quite diverse, even though Utah as a whole is mostly Caucasian and Christian. From a young age I started meeting people who had come from war-torn parts of the world. For example, one of my first dates in high school was with a lovely person who happened to be a refugee from the war in Bosnia in the 1990s. Meeting somebody who had seen firsthand the devastating effects of such a catastrophe made me realize that not everybody on earth gets to grow up in such peaceful circumstances. I suppose that could happen anywhere, but for me the pluralism of American society is the thing that makes it most American!

 

As far as the musical language, there are some moments that are meant to be understood as “American”, such as the lonely jazz trumpet solos in the third movement, Ghosts, where the American poet Brian Turner is giving his perspective as an American soldier in Iraq. Likewise, the incredibly beautiful words of American poet William Stafford provide the closing “curtains” to the whole symphony, and the music at that point I would say becomes a bit American overall in its brightness of color, even though the context of the painting and the poem is the city of Hiroshima in the aftermath of the atomic bomb.

 

Pratik: Can you please describe briefly your journey as a Music composer?

 

Chad Cannon: From a young age I was surrounded by music. I’m the youngest of 6 children and my mother’s two battles in life were to get her children to play music seriously, and to attend church seriously. Of course at church there is a lot of music as well! Eventually I realized that I was able to imitate other composers’ writing, and pretty soon I was off writing my own music. When I became an adult I studied music at Harvard University and later at Juilliard. Finally my road led me to Los Angeles, where I first worked for a famous orchestrator named Conrad Pope on big-budget Hollywood films such as Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit Trilogy. Nowadays I spend most of my time composing my own music for a variety of media projects, most recently for the Oscar-winning documentary film, American Factory.

 

Pratik: Who were your major mentors/Inspirations in this journey?

 

Chad Cannon: I already mentioned Conrad Pope, he was essential to my post-schooling years! When I was a student, I was hugely inspired by the American composer John Adams. At Harvard I took a course about his operas, and he and his long-time collaborator Pete Sellars came and spent a few days workshopping with our class. I also had a chance to see their production of Adams’ opera, Nixon in China at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. That was a transformative experience for me to hear the power of lyrics, visual spectacle, and live orchestral music all coming together in a meaningful, politically, and culturally “relevant” manner.

 

More recently I have had the wonderful privilege of working as an arranger for Studio Ghibli composer Joe Hisaishi, whose work on Hayao Miyazaki’s animated films have received worldwide acclaim. Hisaishi is a true master of orchestral and character-based compositions, and I can honestly say The Dreams of a Sleeping World would not exist without Hisaishi’s influence. I’d say you can clearly hear this in the 6th movement, where I tried to include much color and childlike wonder, a la Hayao Miyazaki / Joe Hisaishi.

 

Pratik: Who are your favorite poets/music composers? What  art forms -- Poetry/Music/Art -- can play in today’s society?

 

Chad Cannon: Oh, there are so many! I think my all-time favorite poet is Langston Hughes. For me, he captured the essence of what it was like to be an African-American in this country prior to the Civil Rights Movement. I’m not a scholar of his life or his works, but I think it’s fairly clear that his poetry played a major role in helping the wider world understand the suffering of his own community. Poetry, music, and art can all play a role in helping people build empathy for those whose life experiences differ from themselves, and empathy is something the world needs a LOT more of.

 

Pratik: When did you first meet Oscar? Can you please share your experiences of working with him.

 

Chad Cannon: I first met Oscar when I was an intern at the Asian Cultural Council (ACC) in New York City in 2012. ACC is an organization founded by John D Rockefeller III, who loved Asian art. Its main purpose is to support artist exchange programs between the U.S. and Asia, and also between countries within Asia. Oscar was an ACC grant recipient, and had donated one of his paintings to an ACC fundraiser. In an attempt to help the ACC get interest, I took a family friend to his studio to observe his work. It was so inspiring for me to see an artist who just gets up every day, comes into his studio, and creates works of art all day long. It made me want to become a full-time artist myself, and I still think of Oscar’s dedication every time I find myself struggling in my own composing studio.

 

Later on, as my career started to develop following my years in NYC, Oscar had reached out to me to see if I could create some music for a video of his for an exhibition he was going to have in Beijing. He sent me a book of his paintings as a thank-you, and when I opened that book and started looking at his incredible oeuvre, I was stunned! I decided right then and there that I would love to create a large piece of music inspired by his paintings. So, The Dreams of a Sleeping World (the title of which was taken from one of his other paintings), began to take shape.

 

Oscar was extremely generous in letting me browse through all of his works, and very supportive when I ended up choosing to divide the 10 paintings into Part I - The Sea, and Part II - The Land. The first five paintings are water-themed, and the second five are earth/land themed. Oscar was also very kind to let me pair poetry with each of the paintings, which in a way ascribed whole new meanings. For example, the second movement, Invisible Sea, is paired with a poem by Rabindranath Tagore. The poem seemed to me to be all about death, and the symbolism of dying to the bottom of the ocean seemed perfect for the imagery I was seeing in Oscar’s painting. The original intent behind Oscar’s piece, however, had to do with the B.P. Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico. So in other words, the painting itself was super specific, whereas my reaction to it was much more broad. And there are examples where the opposite happened. Swirl, for example, is a painting Oscar intended to reflect a sort of inner chaos, or a psychological unfolding, but I chose a poem that was specifically about the 2005 Hurricane Katrina and the Superdome disaster that happened in Louisiana. So there, we had a painting that was more broad in intent, and my selection of a poem draws the audience into a very specific mindset. In each instance, though, Oscar was incredibly flexible and really gave me creative freedom to craft the narrative of the symphony.

 

One other thing about Oscar is that he is incredibly warm-hearted and fun to spend time with. We have had meals together in many different cities now. In 2019 I had the wonderful opportunity to be present for the grand opening of his summer-long solo exhibition at the Kanazawa 21st Century Art Museum, which is one of Japan’s most prestigious and well-visited contemporary art museums. Oscar is so humble, and has a great sense of humor, and I think both of these qualities come across in his artwork, even though the art I chose for the symphony was mostly quite serious.

 

Pratik: How did you pick up the poets included in the Collaboration?

 

Chad Cannon: I spent about 3 months reading poetry online until I found the poets and poems that felt right for this project. I was just immersed in reading, and thinking, and searching again. Thank goodness for online poetry forums! I actually should have spent more time in a physical library but alas, ever since my Harvard library card expired, I have been mostly an online reader. In some cases I discovered poems accidentally, but mostly I actually searched for poetry specific to events I had in mind, such as the 2011 Great Eastern Japan Earthquake & Tsunami, or the Vietnam War.

 

Pratik: Where did you first meet Yuyutsu and how did his poetry come part of the symphony?

 

Chad Cannon: Yuyutsu came into my life because I had searched specifically for “Nepal Earthquake Poems,” which of course led me directly to his anthology, Quaking Cantos: Nepal Earthquake Poems, which is full of heartbreaking and also loving poetry. The very first poem, “Twisted Galaxies,” was just the perfect, pithy set of words that conveyed exactly the kind of naturalistic beauty and tragedy that I was searching for. I was really trying to find the right voice for those many people I had seen in Nepal who were struggling to rebuild their communities after the 2015 earthquakes. When I visited Nepal in November and December 2016, I got to visit with the Kathmandu University Music Department, which at the time was holding classes in a house in Kathmandu, because their campus in Bhaktapur had been completely destroyed and then flooded by all the rain. At first I felt terrible for these poor music students and professors for their loss, but then I felt so inspired by their resilience and their dedication to their art. My main takeaway from that experience is that the human spirit is unbreakable, particularly when paired with something as human as creating works of art. Yuyutsu’s poetry for me became the embodiment of that unbreakable human spirit, so I ended up choosing that as the “voice of Nepal” in the symphony. I’m so grateful Yuyutsu was kind enough to drop by Los Angeles and stay in our landlord’s guesthouse when we had the L.A. premiere of the Dreams of a Sleeping World film (which is now available for anyone to see on YouTube).

 

Pratik: We know your associations with Japan and Nepal? Please share some of the highlights of your stays in these nations as a music composer.

 

For Full Interview Read the Fall 2020 issue of Pratik

 

 

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Highlight from Pratik's Current Issue: American Poet Gloria Mindock's new poem, "Baked"

 

GLORIA MINDOCK

Baked

With a rolling pin in my hand,

I roll your heart out flat…

stop it from beating.

The redness of blood turns to wax,

sticky while wet.

 

I mix it with flour for consistency,

mind you, you never had this.

Skin is added for extra flavor.

 

After cutting up a few veins,

my creation is ready to bake.

Once out of the oven, all crisp,

all beautiful…

The door is opened, and I throw it out

for the birds.

Peck away my friends.

Eventually, all men get flown.

 

 

Former poet laureate of Somerville, MA, Gloria Mindock has published several books, most recently, I wish Francisco Franco Would Love Me. She is the founding editor of Cervena Barva Press and one of the USA editors for Levure Litteraire (France).

 

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Artist of the Current Issue : Oscar Oiwa

 OSCAR OIWA; DREAMS OF A SLEEPING WORLD

Recipient of fellowships and grants from Asian Cultural Council and John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship and  the “Medal of Honor” from His Imperial Majesty, the Emperor of Japan, Oscar Oiwa was born in São Paulo, Brazil. He was educated in Brazil and Japan and has held 60 solo exhibitions worldwide.

His  selected public collections include The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (Tokyo), Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (Tokyo), Mori Art Museum (Tokyo), Yokohama Museum of Art (Kanagawa), Toyota Municipal Museum (Aichi), Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art (Hiroshima), Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art (Hyogo), 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa (Ishikawa), Utsunomiya Museum of Art (Tochigi), Phoenix Museum of Art(Arizona), Arizona State University Art Museum (Arizona) and  Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation, University of São Paulo Museum of Contemporary Art (USP).

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