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“The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.”

James Baldwin.

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This revolution reverberates throughout the land touching every city, every town, every village where black men are segregated, oppressed and exploited. But this Civil Rights Revolution is not confined to the Negro nor is it confined to civil rights, for our white allies know that they cannot be free while we are not, and we know that we have no future in a society in which six million black and white people are unemployed and millions more live in poverty. Nor is the goal of our Civil Rights Revolution merely the passage of civil rights legislation. Yes, we want all public accommodations open to all citizens, but these accommodations will mean little to those who cannot afford to use them. Yes, we want a Fair Employment Practices Act, but what good will it do if profit-geared automation destroys the jobs of millions of workers, black and white? We want integrated public schools, but that means we also want federal aid to education - all forms of education. We want a free democratic society dedicated to the political, economic and social advancement of man along moral lines Now, we know that real freedom will require many changes in the nation’s political and social philosophies and institutions. For one thing we must destroy the notion that Mrs. Murphy’s property rights include the right to humiliate me because of the color of my skin. The sanctity of private property takes second place to the sanctity of the human personality. […] Those who deplore our militancy, who exhort patience in the name of a false peace, are in fact supporting segregation and exploitation. They would have social peace at the expense of social and racial justice. They are more concerned with easing racial tensions than enforcing racial democracy. The months and years ahead will bring new evidence of masses in motion for freedom. The March on Washington is not the climax of our struggle, but a new beginning not only for the Negro but for all Americans who thirst for freedom and a better life. Look for the enemies of Medicare, of higher minimum wages, of social security, of federal aid to education and there you will find the enemy of the Negro - the coalition of Dixiecrats and reactionary Republicans that seeks to dominate the Congress. […] In the struggle against these forces all of us should be prepared to take to the streets. The spirit and technique that built the labor movement, founded churches, and now guide the Civil Rights Revolution must be a massive crusade, must be launched against the unholy coalition of Dixiecrats and the racists that seek to strangle Congress.

A. Philip Randolph, Address at the March on Washington For Jobs and Freedom (1963)

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What Work Is

We stand in the rain in a long line waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work. You know what work is—if you’re old enough to read this you know what work is, although you may not do it. Forget you. This is about waiting, shifting from one foot to another. Feeling the light rain falling like mist into your hair, blurring your vision until you think you see your own brother ahead of you, maybe ten places. You rub your glasses with your fingers, and of course it’s someone else’s brother, narrower across the shoulders than yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin that does not hide the stubbornness, the sad refusal to give in to rain, to the hours of wasted waiting, to the knowledge that somewhere ahead a man is waiting who will say, “No, we’re not hiring today,” for any reason he wants. You love your brother, now suddenly you can hardly stand the love flooding you for your brother, who’s not beside you or behind or ahead because he’s home trying to   sleep off a miserable night shift at Cadillac so he can get up before noon to study his German. Works eight hours a night so he can sing Wagner, the opera you hate most, the worst music ever invented. How long has it been since you told him you loved him, held his wide shoulders, opened your eyes wide and said those words, and maybe kissed his cheek? You’ve never done something so simple, so obvious, not because you’re too young or too dumb, not because you’re jealous or even mean or incapable of crying in the presence of another man, no,   just because you don’t know what work is.

- Philip Levine

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burn burn burn burn burn burn Masculinity 

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I think I’ll start a farm in Australia take walks just sit around blocking moonbeams on a desert or on a beach

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I will try to know you though you defy my grasp

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Late Spring

Coming into the high room again after years after oceans and shadows of hills and the sounds of lies after losses and feet on stairs

after looking and mistakes and forgetting turning there thinking to find no one except those I knew finally I saw you sitting in white already waiting

you of whom I had heard with my own ears since the beginning for whom more than once I had opened the door believing you were not far

- W.S. Merwin

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FRENCH HORN

For a few days only, the plum tree outside the window shoulders perfection. No matter the plums will be small, eaten only by squirrels and jays. I feast on the one thing, they on another, the shoaling bees on a third. What in this unpleated world isn’t someone’s seduction? The boy playing his intricate horn in Mahler’s Fifth, in the gaps between playing, turns it and turns it, dismantles a section, shakes from it the condensation of human passage. He is perhaps twenty. Later he takes his four bows, his face deepening red, while a girl holds a viola’s spruce wood and maple in one half-opened hand and looks at him hard. Let others clap. These two, their ears still ringing, hear nothing. Not the shouts of bravo, bravo, not the timpanic clamor inside their bodies. As the plum’s blossoms do not hear the bee nor taste themselves turned into storable honey by that sumptuous disturbance.

- Jane Hirshfield

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Interview with artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby.

“Once people really begin to pull the space apart and what’s happening, there is this feeling of being unable to put either the character or the space in a clearly defined box--because it doesn’t exist.”

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Interview with poet Edward Hirsch. 

“The only way you can write a good formal poem is if you can control the form...so that the form becomes the way in which you can express what you need to say.”

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Interview with painter/filmmaker/photographer Wim Wenders

“The frame is the main act.”

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do not be an art critic, but paint, therein lies salvation.

Paul Cézanne