The Poetry Foundation and the Poetry Society of America are pleased to bring to Chicago a national celebration of black iconic poets. Quraysh Ali Lansana, Rosellen Brown, Kwame Dawes, Haki Madhubuti, Dipika Mukherjee, and Ed Roberson will read and discuss the work of such illustrious poets as Lucille Clifton, June Jordan, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Kamau Brathwaite, among others. When: Thursday, June 6, 7 p.m. Where: Poetry Foundation, 61 West Superior Street Admission: Free admission on a first come, first served basis
* Bonus video curated by The Beachwood Value Added Affairs Desk.
Quraysh Ali Lansana with a basketball poem.
The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine, is pleased to announce the publication of the June 2013 issue, Landays. The issue is dedicated entirely to poetry composed by and circulated among Afghan women.
After learning the story of a teenage girl who was forbidden to write poems and burned herself in protest, poet and journalist Eliza Griswold and photographer and filmmaker Seamus Murphy journeyed to Afghanistan to investigate the impact of the girl’s death, as well as the role that poetry plays in the lives of contemporary Pashtuns.
A year later, Griswold and Murphy returned to Afghanistan to study the effects of more than a decade of U.S. military involvement on the culture and lives of Afghan women. In the course of this work, Griswold collected a selection of landays, or two-line poems. These poems are accompanied by Murphy’s stunning photographs from the same period and are presented in the June 2013 issue of Poetry.
The Guild Literary Complex, Third World Press and The American Writers’ Museum have joined together in organizing the first annual Brooksday at the Chicago Cultural Center.
A marathon reading of the works of Gwendolyn Brooks, Brooksday is a daylong celebration of the life and work of one of Chicago’s legendary literary figures.
We’ve invited more than 100 notable literary, civic, cultural and political leaders, along with students and teachers, to take the stage on June 7 from 9 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.
Readers will be reading a diverse selection of poems, along with selections from the novel Maud Martha.
1. DuSable Museum Now Has A Book Club.
“Introducing the DuSable Museum Book Club, which provides a unique forum to discuss exciting and emotive literature related to African American history and culture. Be among the first to take part in these dynamic learning experiences, starting with our first selection The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, presented in collaboration with One Book One Chicago.
“The Warmth of Other Suns is Isabel Wilkerson’s historical study about the The Great Migration and the Second Great Migration, the movement of blacks out of the Southern United States to the Midwest, Northeast and West between 1915 and 1970.
“The book intertwines a general history and statistical analysis of the entire period, and the biographies of three persons: a sharecropper’s wife who left Mississippi in the 1930s for Chicago named Ida Mae Brandon Gladney; an agricultural worker, George Swanson Starling, who left Florida for New York City in the 1940s; and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, a doctor who left Louisiana in the early 1950s, for Los Angeles.
This was co-published with the Washington Post.
President Obama signed the Dodd-Frank financial reform law in July 2010, hailing it as an overhaul to prevent the kind of crisis that hit the world economy in 2008 and one of the signature achievements of his first term.
Almost three years later, much of the big stuff the law calls for is on hold, under legal and legislative assault, or still working its way through the regulatory intestines. According to a law firm that tracks the legislation, only 38 percent of the 398 Dodd-Frank rules have been imposed, while regulators haven’t yet publicly put forward versions of almost a third of them.
Is this the face of success? A new book, Act of Congress, by Robert Kaiser, an associate editor and senior correspondent for the Washington Post, gives that question a qualified yes.
“The story of Dodd-Frank does demonstrate that Congress still can work,” he writes, “and it shows how, but only in extreme circumstances.”
To a Beltway expert such as Kaiser, that a dysfunctional and hyperpartisan Congress passed such a sweeping bill constitutes a small miracle. He concludes that “the big banks and Wall Street institutions never gave up trying to shape the bill to serve their interests, but that they had little success.”
As former Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank, whose name is on the bill, says: “Money is influential [in Congress], but votes will kick money’s ass any time they come up against each other . . . Public opinion drove that bill.”
At another point, Frank declares, “The big banks got nothing.”
Kaiser’s account reminds you of those fairy tales that end with the wedding and don’t follow up to see how the prince and princess’s married life turns out.
1.Chicago Skyscrapers, 1871-1934, by Thomas Leslie.
“For more than a century, Chicago’s skyline has included some of the world’s most distinctive and inspiring buildings. This history of the Windy City’s skyscrapers begins in the key period of reconstruction after the Great Fire of 1871 and concludes in 1934 with the onset of the Great Depression, which brought architectural progress to a standstill. During this time, such iconic landmarks as the Chicago Tribune Tower, the Wrigley Building, the Marshall Field and Company Building, the Chicago Stock Exchange, the Palmolive Building, and many others rose to impressive new heights, thanks to innovations in building methods and materials. Solid, earthbound edifices of iron, brick, and stone made way for towers of steel and plate glass, imparting a striking new look to Chicago’s growing urban landscape.
“Thomas Leslie reveals the daily struggles, technical breakthroughs, and negotiations that produced these magnificent buildings. The book includes detailed analyses of how foundation materials, framing structures, and electric lighting developed throughout the years, showing how the skeletal frames of the Rookery, Ludington, and Leiter Buildings led to the braced frames of the Masonic Temple and Schiller Building and eventually to the concealed frames of the City Opera, Merchandise Mart, and other Chicago landmarks. Leslie also considers how the city’s infamous political climate contributed to its architecture, as building and zoning codes were often disputed by shifting networks of rivals, labor unions, professional organizations, and municipal bodies.
“Featuring more than a hundred photographs and illustrations of the city’s physically impressive and beautifully diverse architecture, Chicago Skyscrapers, 1871-1934 shows how during these decades, Chicago’s architects, engineers, and builders learned from one another’s successes and failures to create an exceptionally dynamic, energetic period of architectural progress.”
From Steve Coll’s “Drone Delusion” in the New Yorker:
“The Way of the Knife (the title comes from a national-security adviser’s remark that the United States needed to fight terrorism with ‘a scalpel not a hammer’) offers the brisk pace, inside-the-White House scenes, and opaque sourcing of a Bob Woodward procedural.
“In one Situation Room meeting early in Obama’s first term, General James Cartwright, the vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is said to have asked why the United States was ‘building a second Air Force’ in the form of the C.I.A.’s swelling armed-drone fleet. [Author Mark] Mazzetti quotes Obama’s reply: ‘The C.I.A. gets what it wants.’
Over the transom and through the woods. A Souljah, Not a Soldier
“Sister Souljah once rapped with the trailblazing hip-hop group Public Enemy and was denounced by then presidential candidate Bill Clinton for what he called extremist comments on racial violence,” Rashard Zanders writes for DNAinfo Chicago.
“To the more than 200 fans that came to see her speak at a South Side library over the weekend, she is better known as a beloved best-selling author who has written eloquent coming-of-age novels such as 1999’s The Coldest Winter Ever, which sold more than 1 million copies.
“Appearing Sunday at the Carter G. Woodson Regional Library at 9525 S. Halsted St., Souljah – who was born in the Bronx as Lisa Williamson – openly spoke about her career as an activist, musician, public speaker and literary powerhouse. Her resume now includes another book, A Deeper Love Inside: The Portia Santiago Story, a sequel to The Coldest Winter Ever, which was released earlier this year.”
Over the transom. 1. Chicago Malaise.
“The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream” has an elegant, unflinching, non-nostalgic clarity about Chicago that you rarely see in books about Chicago,” the Tribune’s Christopher Borelli writes.
We haven’t read, so can’t say.
