13 July 2014
To Greg Pond
Dear Mr. Pond…Greg…
I thanked you for the poems you read at The Sacred
Grounds Café on Wednesday, 2 July 2014, all of them good, but, because I love
her, I was especially taken with the poems about Billie Holiday. I have been reading the rest of your poems too
in the 2014 edition of The Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, and I like them all
very much. I was glad to hear someone
read a poem about Billie, especially someone who admires her deeply. It probably sounds too glib to people who ask
me who influenced my writing that I always say, “Shakespeare and Billie
Holiday.” When we spoke and I said,
“”Billie’s singing is poetry, I could see that you immediately understood what I meant.
The next day, walking around Lake Merritt in
Oakland, I passed a tall, lean Black man who had laid out framed photos that
were particularly good of many great 20th century African-American
leaders and musicians. We talked and
realized we had been around long enough to marvel at our memories that almost
become fantasies of the decades of changes in ever-changing San Francisco Bay
Area, my memories beginning in 1959, while his knowledge were more extensive as
he was born in San Francisco. I
purchased the photo shown here of a beautiful, happy, and healthy young Billie
Holiday.
Around 1961, invited by a fellow soldier to his
hometown, Hollywood/Los Angeles, while we were both on leave from Fort Ord
(Monterey). My friend introduced me to a
Black judge whose first name was Benjamin.
His courtroom was televised daily.
As I expressed only a vague knowledge of Billie Holiday, he invited me
to his apartment and, as if part of a necessary ritual before listening properly
to Billie for the first time, we drank a bottle of whiskey
Being gay and black was by far the more difficult
challenge at that time, but I had my own troubled history, besides gay life
being a secret underground at the time. I
had my share of abuse and empathy for harms others had experienced too so I had
no difficulty feeling close to the pain in Billie’s voice, and it was a perfect
introduction by a sensitive and discerning man in the same minority as Billie, a
group whose history in the U.S. for hundreds of years was the path of the cruel
lash of a whip. Ben was a man who still,
in torment, witnessed the ongoing racism in the laws he had to enforce where he
could not exercise proper justice for other Black man; at times he felt the law
gave him the terrible choice of releasing someone pathological or giving him a
death sentence. The effect of that
ethical dilemma led, a year or two after we met, to his committing suicide, a
memory that lingers as information as Billie’s own biography.
Anyone who has suffered abuse, estrangement,
exclusion – you name it – may find companionship in Billie’s singing. She can dig into us and converse with our sorrow
and fear and, beyond the wealth and range of feelings she expresses, there is
also something saving in her vocal technique of twists and pauses (her caesuras are the best!) helps exorcize
us through the strength of her singing as it, undoubtedly kept her going too.
I have a graphic elsewhere, perhaps on my blog, that
presents a graphic yin and yang of two verses that seems complementary: Billie Holiday’s “Good Morning, Heartache”
and Emily Dickinson’s “Good Night – Midnight.”
And your reading made me recall something I had
forgotten and I dug it out of some old box – a rant I wrote before I had heard
of rants. And I remember that I delivered it at the time with passion to a
close friend.
Billie’s
Blues
(Written in the 1960s, and
first recited to Victor Gonzalez)
When
it was all over, when the Chief White Fat Ass
Capitalist
in America was found sitting midair,
his
trousers dropped to his ankles, his hand reaching
for
a roll of toilet paper, and toilet paper, stool, and all,
were
blown away, he cried, but no nanny came to comfort him.
This
time he heard it for himself: Billie’s
Blues,
Bessie’s
Blues. Wail out your rage, stolen
Africa!
Sing
him how his highest skyscraper almost
touches
the bottom of your despair since it was
his
skyscraper that dug it deep. You want to
be
my
lover, and I hate you so, Big White Hunter!
You
need only stop killing to see it. If you
see,
you
have already stopped killing. Oh,
please,
dear
Night. All will sing Billie’s Blues soon
‘Cause
when your own stomps on you
in
the name of someone else, that’s Billie’s Blues.
Other,
they said, is your enemy, the big strange Other.
He
holds you in a long blue look, and your asshole
dances
like cymbals. When he flutters
mascara’ed lashes
fingers
run down your spine as if you were a clarinet,
and
you blow if you can blow. Other, brother, is The Human.
The
Human means well, pushing us forever on
into
some brighter and brighter vision, each time
tawdry
in no time, each time everybody in one
vision
hating and hurting everyone in another vision.
Enjoy
the large feeling of striding through this world
freely
under breeze and sun, but not always free to do
whatever
you like. Why would you ever bother to
wake up?
Why
not go on dreaming? If in this dream of
a
large feeling of the world as a place where a human
has
a right to stride freely under breeze and sun –
you
are in the place where the snake of time turns
against
us – or Kindness begins; where our great
mother
Justice is just the most precise cutter of cake
wedges
you ever saw. There’s a screwed-up
system,
you see, and you happen to be mixed up in it.
Stand
aside and let the thing fall. Let fall
whatever
it
is that “just has to happen.” Can
you let go of
the
Time machine and just be? Wail, Billie!
with
your white gardenia of black in-sight, wail!
-
James McColley Eilers
I see that you are
available on the Internet, Greg, and look forward to reading and hearing you there. Good luck!