In the past month, two articles of mine on two quite different poets
appeared in The Poetry Foundation and the newly founded Hythe Review.
This post goes into a bit more detail on the background to those pieces and
serves as an additional tribute to the late Nellie Wong, who passed away
earlier this year.
It’ll be followed in the next while by material relating relating to two further recent publications, on jazz poetics and on the relation between jazz and hip hop. More on those in due course.
Nellie Wong: Typing Back
Based in San Francisco for many years, Nellie Wong features in a chapter of my 2024 book on Boston and Bay Area queer poetry, Never By Itself Alone, focused on her comradeship with fellow poets and activists Merle Woo and Karen Brodine. Wong wrote of labour, of class struggle, of family history. Her first book appeared in the late 1970s, when Kelsey Street Press published Dreams in Harrison Railroad Park; her final book will appear posthumously in this new century, now moving beyond its first quarter.
Employed as a secretary, typing others’ words, Wong used her own poetry and prose to write back, to write over the words of bosses. To write, Wong reminds is, is also to be involved in labour—physical labour, or labour that removes traditional, hierarchical distinctions between intellectual and manual labour, that attempts to deny the workings of the mind within the workings of the body and of the body within the mind. Poetry, activism, and education were a way out of those frames and into herself, into the fullness of her own life, but using precisely the means of that gendered labour—the typewriter, reproducing the words of others as a way of reproducing oneself for a wage, become now a weapon, a way into words and language and struggle.
To type back, Wong discovered, is to fight back, to discover and invent, to transmit. There is a friction here, and it is this friction that poetry operates like a lever. To type back is not the current invisibilising process of automation, of Large Language Models which anticipate and erase waged labour without any alternative recompense. Rather than the erasure of bodies, such writing attests to their presence within the system, insisting on their agency, their potential for sabotage, and their own inherent worth.
An early draft of Nellie Wong’s ‘Stolen Moments’, published in the Freedom Socialist newspaper in Spring 1980. A revised version forms the title poem to Wong’s 1997 pamphlet.
Last year I was privileged to attend an online discussion with the socialist feminist organisation Radical Women. Wong was involved with both RW and the affiliated Freedom Socialist Party until her passing, and was there herself on the Zoom call. I was deeply honoured by her presence, and struck by her modesty. Here’s the conclusion to the Poetry Foundation piece:
An individual writer’s work makes a contribution toward something whose contours will exceed those of their own life. “You will not survive the work that still needs to be done,” Wong wrote back in 1981. “You will be gone when the questions of the future arise like wildflowers on the plains of this earth.” To write is to live, but also to accept death. Wong’s late poems reconcile themselves to transience in the belief that human struggle might build a better world. As she wrote in “Under Our Own Wings” in 1979:
If you begin I begin If you sing I sing . . . In death our bodies regress to the innocence of bones. In love we work to live in America under our own wings.
Beyond the introductory work of that article, readers should head straight to the source. There are multiple rare recordings of Wong available at the invaluable Archive.org, among them:
—Allie Light’s 1981 film Mitsuye and Nellie: American Poets, featuring Wong and Mistuye Yamada, who is at the time of writing an astonishing 103 years old;
—reading her comrade Karen Brodine’s poems in Washington for Radical Women in 1991, as well as delivering a lecture on ‘Racism, Sexism, and War’;
—interviewed on the KMVT15 Community Media TV channel, in a programme entitled ‘A Banquet of Poems’;
—and speaking on family and creativity with her siblings Flo and William at the Headlands Center for the Arts in 1996.
Wong’s illuminating 2017 reading and conversation with Genny Lim at the San Francisco Poetry Center can also be accessed via the Poetry Center website. In July 20025, she read with the Laborfest Writers Group at Bird and Beckett Books: the full reading can be viewed on Youtube, as can the memorial reading held in January 2026. A lovingly-maintained website can also be found here. And the organisations with which Wong was involved—a part of her life just as important to her as her writing, and inseparable from it—can be found at their respective websites: Radical Women here and the Freedom Socialist Party here.
In these traces, in her work, in her impact on many lives, Nellie Wong lives on.
Harmony Holiday’s broken epic
Also just published, a review of the expanded UK edition of Harmony Holiday’s epic poem Maafa, on The 87 Press’s new open-access journal The Hythe Review. For those who don’t know, Holiday’s Substack, Black Music and Black Muses has been running for several years and documents her ongoing writing on music. But music suffuses almost everything Holiday writes: her essays, her ongoing biography of Abbey Lincoln, her collections of poetry.
Maafa’s soundtrack would be Prince; it would be Pharoah Sanders; it would be the music of Holiday’s father, Jimmy Holiday, of Billie Holiday, to name some of Holiday’s touchstones, those named within its pages and the pages of her other books.
The rest of the post can be read by subscribers on Substack here.
I was at a party on Saturday night when someone came in and said that a van had driven into the Berlin Christopher Street Day parade, killed one person, injuring more. I’ve never been to CSD; go, instead, to the Internationalist Queer Pride demo that, since 2021, has been organised in contradistinction to the corporatisation and pinkwashing of the main CSD demo, whose organisers had called the police to remove pro-Palestinian marchers. Since 2023, this has meant outspoken support for the victims of the genocide in Gaza, and all the attendant policing that involves. So to me Berlin Pride also means cops pepper-spraying and pain-gripping people on the street. Well, it’s in the tradition. In the sun, the heatwave having finally come back after the week’s rain and thunderstorms, finally setting off after several hours, marching past the newly-converted Rheinmetall weapons factory, formerly a builder of car parts, the first time arms manufacture has taken place in Berlin since the Second World War; Rheinmetall, sender of weapons to Israel, to Turkey, to Saudi Arabia, for use in Syria, in Gaza, in Yemen, part of the government’s shift towards increased weapons production since Olaf Scholz’s 2022 Zeitenwende speech and its 100 billion euro fund for war, the willed and ever-expanding horizon of war. The march monitored, not for our own safety, but for the safety of the city’s “white” citizens, by vanloads of armed cops with their machine guns pointing down to the ground; the same cops who let another van drive through or past the protective barriers in the Tiergarten to plough into a path of queers that evening. Not protecting us from the world, but protecting the world from us.
After the parade, in the evening, people start heading off to the parties. The killing happened around ten p.m. and I didn’t find out till around midnight. People had been arguing in the kitchen about the World Cup. Guatemalan funeral music by the San Lucas Band was playing, out of tune, slow. Then Ornette Coleman. The music soared. I felt the world drop out. I don’t quite know how to describe that simultaneity—of hearing that music, which I love and which to me is the sound of possibility and joy and collective potentiality, of what Coleman means by harmolodics, infinitely transposable in whatever register, whatever instrument, whatever key—you could call it queer if you wanted to do that—of hearing that music at the same time as that news. I don’t know what it means, I’m not writing to turn this into a metaphor or an allegory or to makes sense of it, I’m writing it because I have to, I’m writing it to register the loss. Mourning is about revision and return, repeating that initial moment of knowledge, replaying it. It’s a loop, yet it develops; it moves forward, yet it stays in the same place. I’m writing this two days later but I’m still in that kitchen, the world is still dropping out, Ornette is still playing, the San Lucas Band are still playing, and I’m still in that kitchen. I don’t know who they were, the person who was killed, I don’t know their name, and I mourn their absence, that gap. The driver of the van attacked people with a knife or a machete after ramming the van into people on the path and fled. And I don’t know who they were either. And I’m still in that kitchen and already I’m thinking, if it’s an Islamist attack, queers will be used as convenient propaganda—never more convenient than when dead—against whoever it is the state wants to kill, deport. Whoever it was who drove that van could equally well have been one of the white supremacist AfD supporters at the counter-protest staged earlier that day. And if it’s not an Islamist attack, we’re just dispensable: they’ll gloat, those other AfD supporters, CDU supporters, and all their unaffiliated supporters, privately, in their homes, or publicly, online: they’ll cheer the death; they’ll smirk at our loss.
So say what. Stay alert. Some platitude of the sort. Mourn, but don’t let them use us, use you.
I wrote those last lines the same night. The next day, the news comes out in more detail. Wanted posters on digital screens. Perpetrator, Islam, terror attack, plastered everywhere, all over the newspapers, all over the city, and the victim still not even named. The year before, the Chancellor had described raising a queer flag over the Bundestag as akin to treating it as a “circus tent”. Today, the national flag is lowered to half-mast in a gesture that passes as “solidarity”. But I don’t really know what’s worse. This half-mast show, as if there were some sort of unity between the national flag and a flag that should negate the idea of the nation, of this nation, entire. Already the videos coming out, this instrumentalised commentary that is the opposite of mourning, that is like spitting in the faces of the dead. Already the voices of the AfD and its cheerleaders in the right or the so-called “centre” raising themselves. A white blonde Woman on Welt says “Political Islam kills” and talks about Hamas and “irregular migration”, as if that had anything other than precisely fuck all to do with any of this. “Deport all dangerous individuals”, says someone else. (The attacker was born in Germany.)
So mourning is once again becoming a weapon against those it’s supposed to protect. But you still have to mourn. Where does that feeling go. Who becomes a part of the “we” imposed like an unwanted national flag, vampirically, over the bodies of the dead. The flag doesn’t absorb the blood that flows from the body, it doesn’t stanch the wound. Rather, it is the very thing that sucks the blood out: blood spread into its colours, blood the basis of its being.
It’s not my nation and it’s not my flag. But these are, I feel, my dead, not the dead of those nation and flag who opportunistically claim them; not directly, but still, my dead, and I mean that internationally— these dead, not dead to be recuperated by nations and borders but dead who belong beyond those borders; my dead, in whatever way one might take that to mean, without taking any ownership. The person who was murdered was visiting from Poland with her daughter; the killer was German. No nation owns that death.
These dead my dead, because, yes, whatever it was Donne said about diminishment and involvement and nothing in itself entire, yes, that, perhaps, but more specifically: this person is dead because they were queer or they were seen as queer or they were in a queer space, a space that was, for that moment, queered, and because those have been or are my spaces, too. And because of that, because when I heard the news the world dropped out, because this next day and the day after I still can’t get it out of my head—because of all this, I still have to mourn.
I tried to do that by writing a poem. This is hardly a poem. On the afternoon of the next day I pace around inside and it starts to rain and I stay inside and eventually I cycle over to the vigil by the Brandenburger Tor. It starts to rain again, then it stops, then it starts again. This is hardly a poem. Soon after I arrive they finish clearing away the barriers by the gate. A tourist takes a series of selfies in the vacated space, oblivious, smiling away. On the ground on the raised bit of pavement there are rainbow and trans flags, placards, candles. By now, early evening, some hours after the vigil began, swelling to ten thousand people, the crowd is small, but still present. People stand here, they linger, they don’t just pass by, the group becoming in its silence rather than its noise a crowd. “And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour” and the opening of the seal signalled the end of whatever world and you know all the noise that will follow. Here, it’s quiet, respectful. I realise I haven’t brought any flowers with me to lay so I leave nothing but my temporary presence. People look dazed. Some quietly crying. Older gays and younger queers, mainly but not exclusively white. Some Zionists holding up a sign saying “this is what happens when you globalise the intifada” are eventually persuaded to leave. Then I notice after a while that the rainbow flag carried by the woman sitting quietly near the centre has a Star of David in the middle. Next to me are some people with a keffiyeh and a keychain with Palestinian flags. Who do you think I felt safer standing next to.
And it’s not, not really, my safety that’s the issue. Or not the me, not the we, the state might take me to be.
I don’t think I’ll ever be able to think of Tiergarten now without thinking about the attack. About its political uses by the predictable barrage of right-wingers calling for “re-migration” and denouncing Islamist terror as proxy for their racist nationalism. About the Zionist flags I saw at the vigil. About the feeling of the ground opening up, the world dropping out, and at the party, when I heard the news, I didn’t know what to say or what to do so said my goodbyes without comment and I left, quietly, as if ashamed.
The driver of the van attacked people with a knife or a machete after ramming the van into people on the path and fled. Later, when he ran at them with the same weapon in an allotment in Spandau, the cops shot him. As if this was some sort of satisfactory conclusion. But likely, it’s only the beginning. They will talk about “protecting” us and there will more cops on the parade to police us and to police real or imagined threats, and white blonde women and straight men on Welt will say things like “political Islam kills” and talk about Hamas and “irregular migration”, and the head of the Alternativ für Deutschland will condemn the killing knowing full well that many of their supporters are delighted by it on all counts, the cops killing the Muslims killing the queers, two birds with one stone.
“And many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.”
Recorded by ethnomusicologists, the music of the San Lucas Band was nominated for a Grammy Award and the musicians were displaced and probably killed in the Guatemalan Civil War, with its genocide of indigenous populations and activists. The Kaqchchikel musicians, survivors of the Mayan populations decimated by the conquistadors and their massacres and the diseases they brought, tried to bend the western instruments they’d been left and the funeral march melodies and dirges they were playing into the microtonal inflections their own traditions encompassed. It’s as if you can hear the music break under the strain, and yet it stays together.
The evening of the Monday after, the sirens seem to have not stopped sounding. Cops on my road. As if their music were any less sickening or inappropriate than whatever threat it is they are supposed to protect whatever “we” it is they think they are protecting us against.
I refuse it, I refute it, I am not that we.
The vigil was silent but after it I needed to hear something, and so, over these past days, I listened to ‘Atomic Peace’ and ‘Altruvista’ and ‘I Want to See You’ by Alice Coltrane, recorded after John Coltrane’s death, and to ‘Vigil’ by John Coltrane, recorded in watchfulness before his own, and I listened to John Corigliono’s AIDS Sympony, its first movement, titled Of Rage and Remembrance, and I listened again to the San Lucas Band, and they all finish playing. For now, Coltrane’s Meditations is the only purgation that will do, for each sound that comes out on the record sounds like it’s about to break in two. There is no mourning here that is not screaming. No screaming that is not mourning. Multiphonic. Flame. Flowers by a monument in the rain. Flowers by a grave.
And then again silence.
Not to let such a death be used, and not to let it be in vain.
Abdullah Ibrahim, pianist, now follows James Blood Ulmer, guitarist, who died a few weeks ago; Sonny Rollins, saxophonist, who passed a few weeks before Ulmer; Gunter Hampel, multi-instrumentalist, former husband of Jeanne Lee, who passed a few weeks before Rollins; David Henderson, poet, who wrote so much of the music, and who passed a few days before Hampel; Éliane Radigue, composer, who passed a few months prior to Henderson. From the music and back into it, the song they have all become.
I sometimes wonder, speculatively, if the reasons these artists are dying now, the way that they are, falling like dominoes, it seems, is not just because of the gradual loss of generation, the inevitable factor of ageing—that “natural” fact that is also never not socially experienced, socially produced—but because the world they spoke into and of has not come to pass, because we are letting the world as it exists now continue, because that world continues in “our” name. For those who create another world in their art still have to survive this one, even when they ride the relatively safe zones of shelter atop the rising waters around.
I wonder, that there is no space for their spirit in this new paradigm, even as a source for extraction, as the trillionaires openly talk what the economist William Nordhaus called the “euthanasia of the laboring classes”, the sacrifice of whole swathes of the global proletariat; as sanctioned genocides and ceasefires that are not ceasefires pummel themselves through misinformation and state enforcement and corporate profiteering; and yet vast swathes continue to believe, against their own interests, that it’s the weakest who are the greatest threat and who should be shouted down and cast out, repelled with ocean mines or border fences or burned out of their houses in the pogroms in all but name flaring across every continent on the planet.
I think of these litanies for artists I always seem to be writing, turning passage into a factor of continuance, the pathos they’re sold on, the retrospective backwards glance always preferred to the moment of live lithe late work, contradiction and difficulty: late work, even where that entails the repetition of a set repertoire, a set of stuttered stammered stumbling looping paths back to the source, like the story I was told about the bandleader who, fluid as ever in their playing, would nonetheless keep calling the same tune, over and tune, until reminded (by ear) to move on. I think of mourning, melancholia, nostalgia, the logic of defeat and loss: turning ever backward toward the city on the hill or the burning city or the city overwhelmed by flood, refusing to move on. Making garlands out of the wreckage, spreading magic carpets there. Dwelling excessively on the pathos of ending, addicted to cadence, to the closing chord, replayed. A heritage industry of embalmed corpses, a Lenin’s tomb of art.
I think of those litanies of artists and then I think of other lives, other names. Yves Sakila killed by security guards in Ireland. The four migrant workers burned alive in an attack on their car by gangmasters in Italy—not named. Those killed in Israeli airstrikes on Beirut, “ceasefire” or no ceasefire—not named. How, in writing, to do anything but juxtapose those lists; how to do anything but turn them into lists.
But music, it’s been said, is the last of the senses to leave: after language, on the edge of consciousness, life/death, waking/dream. Is limbo, the gate to pass through. So to remark on that moment at its ending is part of the work that music does, in trance erasing beginnings, endings, in cadence prolonging or truncating them.
Reproducing here liner notes to a new CD released by Edition Wandelweiser Records containing realisations of Emmanuelle Waeckerlé’s score what is left if we aren’t the world: recordings from 2022—an early home recording, the premiere performance in Amsterdam—with one of the 2023 Klangraum performances, from earlier in the week, and a later performance in Thessaloniki, all with different ensembles.
Emmanuelle and I met around Eddie Prévost’s weekly workshops a few years ago and we discussed this score soon after it had been written. The following summer, I witnessed and took part in the closing realisation of this piece at the Wandelweiser gathering, Klangraum, in Düsseldorf, the weather humid, changeable and breaking outside. (I wrote a brief report on the festival for The Wire, but its impact on me goes beyond critical summary.) The format of the gathering involves pieces being performed—one might say ‘workshopped’—every day for an entire week. It takes quite something for a piece, however open the score, to sutain that amount of attention, but what is left if we aren’t the world more than does this.
Over the past few years, I’ve found the piece a way to think and feel about what it feels like now—it makes a cameo in a book of poems I’ve been working on for the past few years called On Musical Objects—and I was honoured to write the liner notes to this CD release (for which Ryan Dohoney also provides a typically astute take). As upcoming performances in the context, not of music, but of performance art, activism, and discursive practices, suggest, what is left continues to evolve, and I’m looking forward to seeing and hearing about future iterations.
Until we are done, until we feel or sound indistinguishable from what is there…
what is left if we aren’t the world?
Emmanuelle Waeckerlé’s piece is a placeholder, a holding place, holding space. A way to respond to the alarming and sudden cessation of social life during the pandemic—whether that was experienced as ending, as interlude, or as a kind of new beginning. The piece has its origin in a recording of Emmanuelle’s voice and the wind on a stormy night in lockdown: the voice alone, but not alone, the wind its own kind of breath, one that doesn’t need a body to breathe through, to keep going or to preserve. what is Left, the ensemble piece that emerged from this, is a way of collectivizing that aloneness. From I to We, always asking who “we” are; who is allowed to be “we”.
A year after the premiere in Amsterdam, the piece was performed five times at the Jazz-Schmiede, Düsseldorf, as part of the long-running Wandelweiser gathering, Klangraum. Lines were blurred between rehearsal, performance, and composition. Whatever their role in a particular piece, everyone is a listener, with listening a shared activity orienting us to each other and towards the world. The piece was workshopped: not as a precursor to something finished, but as part of an ongoing process, in which the discussions that surrounded the piece—how to perform it, what it means—are just as much a part of the piece as its score or a performance of that score.
what is left if begins with “pandemonium”, an explosion of sound which can be alternately joyous, explosive, or wracked, gradually fading out into a silence in which musicians and environment merge. Composed during Covid, it indexes that desolate time, but also the ways in which chaos continues to form the underlying, unstable ground of our equally uncertain present. This kind of collective catharsis is a space for grief as well as rage, and for the networked, swarm intelligence of collective sound-making occurring within the framework of a social relation of mutual attention and care. To go beyond ourselves whilst also digging deep into those parts of ourselves that we’ve forced ourselves to suppress, in order to go on: those huge griefs that, during the pandemic, we lived with and then had to force ourselves to forget; the ongoing griefs of the catastrophes we’re living through now, five years on.
I’m struck by the instruction in the score: “pandemonium [...], but not an apocalypse”. Because the idea that everything has ended is perhaps too easy, even as the possibility of planetary extinction becomes more and more palpable. How do we cope with an end that is not an end? How do we go on? The score opens at the moment when one doesn’t quite believe what’s happened, and continues into the moment where we try to hold onto the beliefs that sustained us up to this point, and to integrate—or to refuse to integrate—the new knowledge that trauma brings. “finding ourselves inside of something.”Finding something inside of ourselves. Keeping moving.
Within these sounds we hear the reflection of the horrors of where we are, all the things that block us truly being together—the anxieties, the cruelties, the hierarchies, the pettiness, the violence, the mistrust, the fear. But we also hear the possibility of what it would mean to be together, truly, glimpsed, briefly: a fraction of a second, a sliver of a sound.
Both the self and the tutti fall apart. And this is where we have to start. For after we figure out what’s left, the question is, as Emmanuelle says, “what to do?”
There’s a radio recording from the Half Note in 1966 (or perhaps 1963,
depending which discography you use): Rollins with McCoy Tyner, Walter
Booker, and Mickey Roker, moving in and out of tunes at will; melody
stacked free associatively on melody—rhapsody, in the sense of rhapsōidos,
“stitcher of songs”, as if Rollins might play every song he knew, that
act of association and recall a kind of survival force. Rollins was
always walking around the club while he was playing, walking off stage
while he was playing, playing within the form: having already begun as
he stepped out of the taxi and walked into the venue, or deciding to take a trip up the stairs and out of the club
to serenade Alice and John Coltrane in their home, followed by the
remnants of the faithful. Sound bouncing off buildings, the walls, sound
that would not be contained.
Walking while playing evokes
the barwalkers, the entertainers of R&B, movement that refuses
fixity; it’s a way of thinking, an exercise of freedom, a desite to get
away, an impatience with the limitations of the form or the stage. This
movement doesn’t translate to recordings; registers, instead, as a kind
of sudden absence. In his unaccompanied cadenza on the Half Note
recording, there are huge pauses as he moves around the room, testing
the space: interruption, tension, void. All the more so given that these
performances were broadcast on the radio, where they become dead air.
But, rising again, resurrecting across the silence, Rollins comes back,
the melody comes back, the force of remembrance, re-membered: a body put
back together, gathering the limbs of Osiris. One tune becomes another,
‘Oleo’ to ‘Poinciana’ to ‘Happy Birthday’ to a newly abstract or
abstruse motif: all those moments where what’s quoted and what is the
thicket in which quotation occurs constantly blur and stretch, the
earworm always within reach.
A subscriber post on Substack, on the great bassoonist Karen Borca.
Outside the by-now better-known names of free jazz, Borca’s work
offers few external hooks or ways into the music: no Sun Ra
theatricality, no Cecil Taylor ritual, no Archie Shepp radical
traditionalism. It is a music that speaks for itself, and that demands a
commitment of understanding on the part of the listener that moves
beyond the merely illustrative. The music does not illustrate something:
it is that thing itself. It asks the listener to dig as deep as the
musicians dig, to stay with it, to sharpen their faculties on its
sharpening invention. But to do so, to stick with it, is one of the
richest rewards this music offers.
Borca’s music is work,
in all its sense: playing as labor and as invention, the work of
intense involvement with the material of sound and its transformation,
dancing on the edge, dancing in your head;
the work required by the listener to join the dance and be spun up too
in it; work as in a product, a body of work, meaningful evidence offered
up to the world as to the impact and beauty and grace and power of a
person’s art, their contribution to the world. And as work, it seems to
sing of the negation of work as exploitation and the emergence of some
other form of situation, of invention, the rearrangement of the self in
the multiple networks of the social, following the line, worrying it,
seeing where it might lead. Work. Good news. And yes, the blues.
We can study this, we can listen to it, we can thrill to it, we can learn from it.
A relatively spontaneous announcement of a relatively spontaneous gig: this for a new quartet combining poetry and music, with myself (poetry), Andrea Burelli (voice, poetry, perhaps violin), Lucio Capece (bass clarinet), and Stellan Veloce (cello). It will happen at the Casino for Social Medicine at Sonnenallee 100, Berlin, on this coming Saturday, 16th May, at 19h.
As a trio, Stellan, Lucio and I worked together twice last year, and
that was beautiful. (Their duo at a performance a few months before the
first of those occasions, after which I approached them to work
together, was even more beautiful). As a quartet with Andrea, we’ve done
one rehearsal so far, and I think it’s entering a whole new dimension,
which I’m very excited about.
Also reading will be Tracy Fuad. And I’m excited about that, too.
