A big smile this morning rouses me from writing hermitry:  Philip Levine is the new U.S. poet laureate.

A big smile because Levine is a mensch, a real mensch.  His poems are “gritty, hard-nosed evocations of the lives of working people,” says NYT critic Charles McGrath, somehow missing the point that in Levine’s hands, grit becomes haunting, soulful music.  And totally missing the point that here is a poet who resonates with the millions of “working people” not working right now.

Why do I love Levine?  Here’s the beginning of one of his best-known poems, What Work Is:

We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is — if you’re
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it’s someone else’s brother,
narrower across the shoulders than
yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin
that does not hide the stubbornness,
the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, “No,
we’re not hiring today,” for any
reason he wants…

And here’s a video of him reading another poem, Belle Isle.

See what I mean?

Occasionally – okay, rarely – the first time you meet someone is indelibly etched on your mind.  Meeting Tamam Kahn was like that.  It was a few years ago at the Ghost Ranch in northern New Mexico (once the haunt of Georgia O’Keeffe and D.H. Lawrence) at the all-women AROHO – A Room of Her Own – writers conference, where I was teaching, taking a break from working on After the Prophet, and generally high on being in high desert.

That morning I was stretched out on a table, doing some Pilates exercises between sessions (on the table, because nobody was going to stumble over me that way, I guess;  stretching, because I’d hiked further than I’d intended before breakfast) when Tamam appeared, long blond Rasta locks and all.

She didn’t say hello.  She didn’t say her name.  She just stood there and began to chant, and I sat upright immediately.  This chant commanded attention.  It took me a moment to realize whose voice this had to be:   that of Khadija, Muhammad’s first wife, the woman to whom he fled in terror after his first encounter with the angel Gabriel, who held him and assured him that he was not crazy and that this really was a divine revelation, and to whom he stayed married in a monogamous and extraordinarily close relationship until her death.

“You wrote that poem?” I asked when Tamam fell silent.  And I mean silent:  all the buzz and chatter around us seemed to have fallen away.  She didn’t answer — just kind of half-smiled and began chanting another, this one in the voice of Aisha, the youngest and most controversial of the nine women Muhammad married after Khadija’s death.

It wasn’t just the rhythm.  These poems had a fierce, elegant energy, an urgency and passion that seemed to bring these women alive.  When I’d written my ‘flesh-and-blood biography‘ of Mary, many people had asked me if I’d felt like I was channeling her.  I’d said no way — I’m not into channeling or any of that New Agey kind of stuff.  But that morning at Ghost Ranch, it honestly felt as though Tamam was channeling these seventh-century women.  By the time Tamam/Aisha had finished, I was officially blown away.

Those poems have now been published in Untold: a History of the Wives of Prophet Muhammad – just two of seventy poems in all, embedded in a prose narrative.  Here’s me on the back cover:

In a sustained act of spirited research and imagination, Tamam Kahn brings Muhammad’s wives out of the shadows and into the light.  The women of ‘Untold’ have at last found their perfect teller, in voices so gemlike and clear that one wants to chant them aloud, dance to them, celebrate with them.

And yippee, publication brings Tamam to Seattle for the next few days, doing readings and a Sufi retreat weekend.  So if you’re anywhere near, check her schedule here (I’ll be at the Thursday reading in the chapel of the U District’s United Methodist Church on 43rd between 15th and University), and prepare to be blown away.

I could be cute and say that accidental theology went hip-hop last night, but what happened goes a lot deeper than that.

It was a fundraiser for 826 Seattle, with several musicians and writers paired up together.   The most provocative pairing, at least on the surface of things:  me and the Sportn’ Life crew — D. Black,  Fatal Lucciauno, and Spac3man.  (Go here for video and audio, especially of D. Black’s extraordinary album Ali’Yah — Hebrew for ‘ascent’ — and Spac3man’s new mix tape.)

D. (Damion) Black is Seattle’s most admired hip-hop star, co-owner of its one black-owned recording company, and for anyone who likes religion neatly defined, a nightmare:   a Muslim as a boy,  a Christian convert in his teens, and now, in his 20s, fascinated with the Jewish roots of Christianity and a practicing orthodox Jew.   And a straight-up mensch.  “You’re an agnostic Jew?” he said just before we took the stage.  “That makes you all the more Jewish.”   Which happens to be the most Jewish of all possible answers.

The idea was for us to talk about our respective “crafts,” but instead we ranged wide and deep.  On Obama, for instance:   If many people were in tears and overjoyed the night Obama was elected, Damion said, he wasn’t.  The rent was still overdue, the car still broken, the debts still mounting, and  none of that was going to change simply because a black man had become president.   In Seattle’s Central District as in New York’s Harlem, nobody needed to be reminded that Obama did not walk on water.

This kind of talk wasn’t what the audience was there for, though.  They wanted rap.    “Only if Lesley does it with us,” said Damion.

“No way,” said tone-deaf and rhythm-impaired me.

“Say one of your poems,”  said Fatal.

“I have no poems.”

“You want one of mine?”  said Spac3man, taking out his phone.  He thumbed through a few screens, then handed it over to me.  “Here,” he said, “‘Protect and Serve.'”And this is what I read, straight off the screen, leaning in low and close to the mike:

On the beat like Bean, hop out my hood like J-kwon/
I don’t like one Jake accept Jake One/
Damn! here dey go over da loud speaker/
Follow procegger, while you kneelin on ya knees bruh/
intertwine ya fingas and don’t be quick to speak up/
Cause they’ll beat ya like rocky in a meat freeza/
Please, bruh treat snitches the same/
G ur not I don’t like 5-0 like Game/
Animal, They sense fear so calm down/
Fuck calling them pigs they corrupt like dog pound/
doughberman pinchers, squeezing us in our compound/
Try reach for ID, you might be gunned down/
Rights only go so far dont be dumb, ock/
Court dey hide behind the shield like 300 when the sun blocked/
My advice if you pulled in da slums wit’em/
Be Osama slash Obama, run nigga!/”

(Copyright:  SPAC3MAN of Sportn’ Life Records.  Posted here by permission of the author.)

Weird spelling?  As those doughberman pinchers should tell you, it’s deliberate.   In fact even as I read it, nothing about this poem seemed weird.  If I didn’t get some of the references in the first half, stumbling here and there, no matter;  the subject was all too familiar — a scene told again and again on the news pages, but now from the inside.  And if the mainly white audience was shocked by the last line – that word, in a white woman’s mouth!  the conflation of those two names! — I was not.  By then I was Spac3man, a gracefully gangly walking magnet for the suspicion of those who protect and serve some, but not all.

What it felt like for Spac3man (far left, below) to have his work recited from the outside, as it were — and with a British accent, no less — I don’t know.   But I do know that to allow a newly-met stranger to publicly read a poem not yet recorded or published was an act of extraordinary generosity.  I could have mangled it, and he trusted me not to.

That, I think, is called amazing grace.