20th Anniversary Reflections
Joel Dias-Porter was first featured in Beltway Poetry Quarterly early in the journal’s history, in the Summer 2002 Portfolio Issue (Volume 3:3), and his work has also appeared in five special themed issues: the Split This Rock Issue (Winter 2008, Volume 9:1, guest edited by Regie Cabico with Kim Roberts); the Audio Issue (Fall 2008, Volume 9:4, guest edited by Katie Davis); the It’s Your Mug 15th Anniversary Issue (Summer 2009, Volume 10:3, guest edited by Toni Asante Lightfoot); the Poets Respond to Shakespeare Issue (Summer 2016, Volume 17:3, guest edited by Teri Ellen Cross Davis); and the Slam Issue (Fall 2016, Volume 17:4, guest edited by Elizabeth Acevedo and Gowri Koneswaran). The editors have long admired his strong poetic voice, and his balance of experimentation with formal traditions. He guest edited the Cave Canem 20th Anniversary Issue with Holly Bass (Spring 2017, Volume 18:2).
He writes, “I greatly appreciated the opportunity to edit the Cave Canem 20th Anniversary Issue and enjoyed my time doing so.”
Two Poems
The Idea of Improvisation in Dupont Circle
(a DJ Renegade remix)
The whir of a “Blackbird”
flies from a battered sax
at the center of the circle.
Its marbled hues ring
like a fountain’s waves,
rippling flag-like
in the April wind,
blowing in dark Blues,
a rhythm not solely ours,
though maybe only we
can C what’s sigil
in its rites.
Suppose the white fountain
isn’t merely a metaphor,
the soaring “Blackbird”
not simply a symbol.
Could this blue wail
and that widening water
(raving evermore)
be tied by flattened chords
if what spouts from
this gray-locked man
was only what he’d heard,
since these chords
were also voiced by Bird
whose tarnished horn
wasn’t spurred
by splashing water
or rippling wind,
but a
C#° within.
If simply a blue sound
of the fountain
stirred or stilled
the green bills in his case,
or merely a deep silence
of overhead clouds
darkly floating,
no matter how light,
wouldn’t it still be
the yang of dark water
ringing deep?
Why then did he seem
to reed something
darker even than the yen
of a black bird’s
undulating wings on the wind?
Might this sculpture ringed
with listening pigeons
B more than just
a spouting place where he
(God with a minor G)
came to create?
What chords are these?
Which Key?
We ask to unravel
its ontological roots,
(though finding mostly
a few strings
we cannot).
As he blows,
what he quills
with this epistle of Paul’s
augments, yet diminishes
our quandary.
Am7
“singing” said darkness
lifts to frame
the admiral light,
so how could
“these broken wings”
be the sole controls
of our sapphire souls?
Meaning listen,
who could see
what the “sunken eyes”
of our enslaved ancestors
might’ve dreamed
thinking overboard
of some minor C?
O play black Bird,
hint why
Si’l vous plait,
these riddle passages
are the changes you chose,
and by choosing, changed.
Hum why we yearned
(as the conductor
of dusk donned
his onyx tuxedo)
to bop our heads
to the traffic’s
rumbling motors,
or gyre like civil serpents
to police sirens around this circle,
but perhaps heard “learn to fly”
above that alabaster basin
while the Lyric framed the arc
& spume of its spray
or dovetailed in accord
with a bird-black eye’s
charcoal fire &
we turned then to sing-
Sky dark,
have you anything
to say?
Whitman’s Sampler (+1)
(a DJ Renegade remix)
To begin with, take warning, I am surely far different from what you suppose;
I do not ask any more delight, I swim in it as in a sea.
Then the eyes close, calmly close, and I speed forth to the darkness,
Mind not the old man beseeching the young man,
Entering but for a minute I see a sight beyond all the pictures and poems ever made,
Ebb stung by the flow and flow stung by the ebb, love-flesh swelling and deliciously aching,
Have you ever loved the body of a woman?
Have you ever loved the body of a man?
And who has made hymns fit for the earth?
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Here, take this gift,
Which too long I was offering to feed my soul,
O I think it is not for life I am chanting here my chant of lovers,
I think it must be for death
Indeed O death, I think now these leaves mean precisely the same
as you mean,
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore, and dark-color’d sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn;
And what I assume you shall assume;
Stop this day and night with me, and you shall
possess the origin of all poems;
To elaborate is no avail—
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.
Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical,
I and this mystery, here we stand.
Joel Dias-Porter (aka DJ Renegade) was born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA. He represented Washington, DC as a team member or individual competitor at the National Poetry Slam for six consecutive years (1994-1999). He made the Individual Finals five years in a row (94-98) and was also Heads Up Haiku Slam Champion two years in a row (98-99). His poems have been published in Time Magazine, POETRY, Mead, The Offending Adam, Callalloo, Ploughshares, Antioch Review, Red Brick Review, Asheville Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and the anthologies The Best American Poetry 2014, Resisting Arrest, Gathering Ground, Love Poetry Out Loud, Meow: Spoken Word from the Black Cat, Short Fuse, Role Call, Def Poetry Jam, 360 Degrees of Black Poetry, Slam (The Book), Revival: Spoken Word from Lollapallooza, Poetry Nation, Beyond the Frontier, Spoken Word Revolution, and Catch a Fire. Performances have included The Today Show, SlamNation, and the film Slam. A Cave Canem fellow, he lives in Atlantic City, NJ. To read more by this author: Eight Poems (Summer 2002); Two Poems (Split This Rock Issue, Winter, 2008); "Saturday Poem" (Audio Issue, Fall 2008); Four Poems (It's Your Mug Anniversary Issue, Spring 2009)