No. 23 - They just did the work...

Thank you to all showing the love here, on social media, via text….please continue to do all the things!

Here are two notes, connected but still random, that I wanted to hold on to nevertheless.

Lauri Schayer, editor of work by African American poet A.B. Spelllman, shared, at Furious Flower this past September, anecdotally on the poet Calvin Hernton. Hernton was a member of the Umbra Collective, a group of black writers and poets writing in the early 60s in downtown Manhattan, prior and precursor to the Black Arts Movement. Hernton, Schayer mentions, was not a self promoter, that he just did the work.

Holding on to that notion today, as I post this online, for the reminder that it is the practice, and the process that matter, the everydayness of the work. I do see the value in bringing one's work to whatever audience that might be, but remember to return to the making of it all, to the page, the word, or as Anne Lamott might say, to the very bird.

Another outtake from Furious Flower Black Poetry Conference 2024. In a panel on Editing African-American books, with panelists Joanne Braxton, Alvin Lynn Nielsen, Lauri Schayer, A.B. Spellman, and Laura Vrana, we learned of the necessity of trust, between editors and writers, of daily, sometimes multi-daily contact between the pair.

Schayer offers as well, her admiration for researcher David Grundy, who is a co-editor on an anthology on the Umbra Poets, sharing that Grundy, was not just a good digger, a good historian and researcher, but also an amazing intellectual. In my words here, [he] was able to dig up the dead, and to lay the body down. This, to me, made me recall the delicate, elucidating way in which we might handle the work of each other.

::in orbit together::

Thanks for getting here. Don’t forget to comment, heart, like below.

With best wishes,

n