loading...
  • Certainty
  • Everybody Needs Improvisation
  • The Truth, Nothing But
  • After Katrina
  • Goodness and Mercy Shall Follow Me


Certainty


Without traveling to Nashville,

I still know that a boy there is falling piecemeal

into women’s clothes,

that in New Orleans

those who rose inside the water

kept rising


Jehovah smells of mint?

Allah, of gunpowder?


No.


Even I recognize love failing

in ways it must.

Everybody Needs Improvisation


Nature poet handling his plume.

Urban poet, his switchblade.


Each with wings unfolding in his hands.


One travels the boned corset of cactus,

sky lifting its hoopskirt to a meringue of stars.


The other eulogizes children fallen from loveliness, filed

into caskets.


Both behold faces turning to see

and be seen.


They scatter the broken mirror everywhere.

The Truth, Nothing But

for Elvis


Little Richard was angry for years.

He’d given up the Gospel

to somebody white and pretty

who kept begging in that sexy drawl,

heavier

than a roll of quarters,


Show me how to turn my bones

to brown sugar.

I wanna be sweet.

I wanna be sweet.


And that boy sucked the hot

right outta him.

After Katrina


There's no Sabbath in this house.

Just work.


The black of garbage bags

yellow-cinched throats opening

to gloved hands.


Black tombs along the road now,

proof she knew to cherish

the passing things


even those muted before the water came

before the mold's grotesquerie

and the wooden house choked on bones.


My aunt wades through the wreckage, failing

no matter how hard she tries

at letting go.


I look on glad at her failing,

her slow rites

fingering what she'd once been given to care for.


The waistbands of her husband's briefs

elastic as memory

the blank stare of rotted drawers


their irises of folded linen still,

smelling of soap and wood

and clean hands.


Daylight through these silent windows

and I'm sure now: Today is Sabbath,

the work we do, prayer.


I know what she releases into the garbage bags,

shiny like wet skins of seals

beached on the shore of this house.

Goodness and Mercy Shall Follow Me


I used to think about infinity for several minutes at a time, the hourglass on its side, the narrow neck exhaling into each chamber. Not having the faintest about how that would work, I always moved on to something known, like how loudly my stepfather snored when he was dog-tired, how people in my South sit on porches and stoops waiting for anything like heaven to be flung before their eyes, anything electric and mighty different. About porches and stoops in heaven, I've yet to think long. But won't all who make it be electric? At rest in the neck of the hourglass?

Kevin Simmonds was born in Chicago to a social worker and a welder. The social worker divorced the welder and returned to her hometown of New Orleans. That happened when Kevin was two years old. He grew up in New Orleans and went to Valena C. Jones Elementary, Francis Gregory Junior High and McDonogh #35 Senior High School, where the choir director, Patricia Sallier Seals, inspired him to become a musician.

Kevin studied voice at Vanderbilt University and taught middle school in Maryland for two years. Then, after stints as a teacher and part-time graduate student, he finished a masters degree in music at Middle Tennessee State University while starting Tono International Arts Association, an international arts presenter in northern Japan that sponsored the 2001 Tono American Music Festival. He returned to the States, started his fellowship with Cave Canem, and finished a Ph.D. in music education at the University of South Carolina.

During those years, he met a bunch of people who really inspired him like Valetta Brinson, Kwame Dawes, Joseph Jennings, Valerie Johnson, Georgia Stitt, Samantha Thornhill, Jan Vanstavern and Joseph Whitt.

He received a Fulbright fellowship to Singapore where he got hip to the work of Kumar, Alfian Sa'at, Cyril Wong and Su-Chen Christine Lim. Kevin has published poems, essays and reviews in journals like 42opus, American Scholar, Black Issues Book Review, FIELD, jubilat, Kyoto Journal, LA Review, Massachusetts Review, Poetry, Rhino and Salt Hill, and in the anthologies Beyond the Frontier, Gathering Ground, The Ringing Ear, To Be Left with the Body and War Diaries.

As a composer and performer, he's collaborated with poet and writer Carrie McCray on a musical adaptation of Ota Benga Under My Mother's Roof and with poet and writer Kwame Dawes on I Saw Your Face, Hope and Wisteria: Twilight Songs of the Swamp Country. Wisteria was the subject of a 2007 BBC Radio documentary and Hope received a News and Documentary Emmy in 2009. His music has been performed throughout the US, Japan, the UK and the Caribbean. sfexhale.com features his photography.

Kevin has received fellowships from the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Cave Canem, Fulbright, Jack Straw and the San Francisco Arts Commission. He creates and teaches privately in San Francisco.

"Unearthing House: The Final Songs of Gay Spree Murderer Andrew Cunanan" and "Seeing Eye" forthcoming in Fogged Clarity

Working on Making All Saints Sebastian (MASS), a mash-up of on-camera discussions of sexual explorations/exploitations, music and photography with men of all persuasions (straight, gay, questioning, hippy/liberal/free) for a performance/exhibition tour in San Francisco, New York, Seattle, Washington, DC, Atlanta and Singapore. sfexhale.com

Shaker John, Bamboo Spine, a poem cycle about Manjiro Nakahama, the first Japanese to set foot in America, will appear in the March 2010 issue of Asia Literary Review

I'm editing Ota Benga Under My Mother's Roof, the final poetry collection by Carrie McCray (University of South Carolina, 2010) NPR Story, Musical Adaptation at the Columbia Museum of Art

"Uncut" is forthcoming in jubilat

"Rosebud" and "Tracts" are forthcoming in Ganymede

feti(sh)ame at Jules de Balincourt's Brooklyn Starr Space some time in Fall 2010

Several poems forthcoming in War Diaries, an APLA anthology

Excerpts from the London's Royal Festival Hall performance of Wisteria: Twilight Songs of the Swamp Country


Music by Kevin Simmonds

Poems by Kwame Dawes

Excerpts from the London's Royal Festival Hall performance of Wisteria: Twilight Songs of the Swamp Country


Music by Kevin Simmonds

Poems by Kwame Dawes

An excerpt from the Good Vibrations performance of feti(sh)ame, a San Francisco Arts Commission-sponsored work featuring my poetry and music and based on interviews with gay men about their shame and sexual fetishes


Music and lyrics by Kevin Simmonds

Singers: Derek Lassiter and Kevin Simmonds

  • Swamp Song
  • Skin
  • I Will Sail Ashore