Ghetto Koans: A Personal Archive – Book Reveal

Congratulations! It’s a book!!

Ghetto Koans: A Personal Archive is now available from Black Lawrence Press.

The bulk of poems in Ghetto Koans: A Personal Archive represent attempts to finding myself as a poet, by training my eye to focus on and validate things I found beautiful or curious or odd or all of the above. Its bringing what I learned in studying high school journalism and what I was beginning to learn as a twentysomething street poet into conversation with one another. The ‘truth’ of journalism, the ‘beauty’ of poetry.

Many of the poems were written from about 2007 with 2 or 3 poems composed couple of years ago. The poems lived together in my binder for all that time and have always nudged and encouraged me, letting me know they’re still around and, just maybe, needed to be seen and read. I once submitted an early version in competition and got quickly dismissed. During the pandemic, I got an offer to publish them which surprised me because I also expected them to reject it. But instead, I got cold feet and withdrew it, discomforted by my own doubt and uncertainty. However, in recent years, a couple of new poems emerged that I thought would fit well with those previously developed, so I remixed the entire manuscript again and here we are.

In the early years of me finding my poetic voice, I moved about the world watching, listening. All in hopes of writing about and addressing the world, or rather my narrow experience of it, in a beautiful way. And what I began learning from poetry was the idea of validating life’s overlooked details. Poetry wasn’t about a field of flowers, but the single flower, trampled underfoot or twirling at the edge of a cow’s mouth. It was about the details, once accumulated, that make up an entire life.

I was born in North Oakland, then lived in San Francisco a couple of years before returning to West Oakland where I shared a Victorian with friends. I was too quiet as a roommate and few could prove I lived there. I was quiet, but paid a lot of attention to things and people. At the time, gentrification was just beginning to change the streets of Oakland. So, for me, these poems represent the ending of community, an era, a kind of family. Within this volume are memories the new neighbors on the block don’t care about.

A ‘koan’ is a paradoxical story or riddle Zen Buddhists use to abandon logic and reason to provoke enlightenment. Think: ‘What is the sound of one hand clapping?’ There is no logic or reason to any of the poems here. Is there a point to any poem? Is there enlightenment within every poem, whether you like, understand it or not?

The book is dedicated to Reginald Lockett who, like myself, lived in Oakland his entire life. He considered himself poet laureate of West Oakland and until Ayodele Nzinga was chosen at Oakland’s first poet laureate in 2021, he was. Uncontested. Reginald was great poet and amazingly generous and loving man. After the death of my mother when I was homeless and broke, he very generously paid me to read for his class then treated me to lunch. He was the only non-family member whose funeral I ever attended. After his services, I returned to the neighborhood where I’d grown up to at least look at the house where I was born and raised, to walk back to its corner store one final time. It was strange returning to a neighborhood I’d been priced out of, a once resident made a stranger. My house stands Right There, yet I’m a stranger, and that house no longer a home.

This collection is dedicated to him and could be dedicated to no one else. I hope you enjoy it!!