Use Trouble

For decades, Michael S. Harper has written poetry that speaks with many voices. His work teems with poetry configured as awe, poetry as courtship, and poetry as elegy and homage. Infused with tales and riddles, sass and satire and surprise, Harper’s poetry takes the form of psalms, jazz experiments, soft serenades, and radical provocations. In Use Trouble, his first major collection since Songlines in Michaeltree, Harper renews poetry as the art of taking nothing for granted. In three groups--"The Fret Cycle," "Use Trouble," and "I Do Believe in People"--he draws on his seemingly inexhaustible resources to paint, sing, sympathize, and sorrow. Here are his tributes to his father and family, his irrepressible playfulness, and his lifelong romance between poetry and music.

Table of Contents:
Contents I. The Fret Cycle Fret (A Tune Near Composition in the Studio) A Note from Cathy at Yaddo The Lesson for Paul on Catherine Clarke?s Birthday Fret in the Woods Table Notice Fret Skips Town for a Gig in New London Fret Deep in the Woods Fret Leaves Yaddo Ghost of Fret at High Table: Mansion Fret's News from the Front: Yaddo After Martini Glasses Galore Fret Shows Up at the Metropolitan The List: Yaddo Fret Leaves Yaddo In Disguise Fret Having Survived Modernity Fret Discovers the Blues, Again Ass Fret In Studio With the Ancestors Fret Finds the Instrument of Archipelago Mt. Pleasant Local Library Fret Finds the Open Field II. Use Trouble A Photographic Guide To the City Use Trouble Portrait Esther Truimphs Homage To Jay Saunders Redding On His Natal Day: 10 13 04 Praisesong For Bb Goodbye To All That Public Letter: Visible Ink Dubonnet Archives: The Public Library I Archives: The Public Library Ii Legend of Jeannie Turner Tcat Serenade Sherley Anne Williams: 1944-1999 Chloe: Black Pastoral Luminous Handmade Book On the Theme of the Beloved Pigeon Artist On A Cellphone (Yaddo) Vote (Providence) Marilyn Tattoo Copenhagen Notes On Our Resident Humanist: Mahler B. Ryder Ostseebad Ahrenshoop Ribs Charlotte And Nathan Exchange: 50th Anniversary Charlotte To Nathan Notes On the Hopi Critical Mass Hemingway?s Iceberg Saint Dolores (Phillips Exeter Academy) ?Days Remaining?/Bloom's Day, Dublin Freud: Lessons On Boundaries George J. Makari Blues Songbirds (Habitat) ?Ponta De Areia? [Brazil] Tagore On Brodsky's Collected Three Poems: October 17, 2004 I. Archival Secrets of Mary Lincoln II. At the Square III. The Secret Lore of Will?s Presidency Zen: The Trainride Home to the Welcome Table The Flight Home Tatum Baseball (Orb) Josh Gibson Blackjack Lookbackwards: Henry Aaron?s Hammer A Centenary Ode to Eke: The Duke of Ellington Ray Charles Robinson Dead at 73 Womb of Space (Yaddo) What I Know This Very Day Along Came Betty Repeat Button Digesting Dexter Gordon at 80 Goodbye Pork Pie Hat Photo: Letter (Joel Chandler Harris) Ernesto Victor Antonucci ?Craft? Talk Elder On the Theme of Self-Knoiwledge And Education ?In Society? Though Not Defined By Falsehoods Joseph Santos Ileto The Broke And the Unbroken Jacuzzi Serenade On Arrival Christine Frey?s Resurrection The Open Studio Iowa (1961) Or ?How To Use Trouble? [Writers Workshop] Shirley of Little Falls Philip Roth ?American Masters: Pbs? (Ralph Ellison) Neighbors Leonard Brown. Musican/Teacher Richard Davis?s Trampolines Year of the Firepig In Chinese New Year Eulogy Framed As Requiem Mass On the American Frontier: Gordon Parks Modulations On A Theme?Josephus Long Eva?s Song at the End Los Angeles Coliseum Olympic Swimming Pool Frederick Armstrong Hetzel Zambia Massey?s Ministry The Tank And Its Narrators Judge & Jury The Revolutionary Garden Royce Hall (Ivie Anderson) Gwendolynian Staccato Dance Muse Spencer Trask?s Den Spoon Newk Horacescope For Horace Silver Miles Davis Shirt: Monterey Jazz Festival ?On Green Dolphin Street? The Life of Jackie Mclean Blues For A Colored Singer Interstate 80 Freeway Return Last Song Libation For Elvin Jones 1927-2004 Dexter Leaps In The Book On Trane A Coltrane Poem: 9 23 98 A Coltrane Poem: 9 23 98 (2) Coltrane Notes On the Millenium 9 23 99 Sermon on O?Mealy Larry Doby Panhandler (New Haven) Galveston: 9 8 00 Notes On the Long Poem (Tuscaloosa, Al) John Killens at Yaddo Haircut On the Solstice Ten Years of Freedom Certainties: For James Alan Macpherson Hooded Cobra Eyes Bouillabaisse Ars Poetica Bellow Berryman James Arlington Wright III. I Do Believe In People Poem On the Contents of Harper/Johnson Kin Horoscope 3 12 98 Horoscope 10 3 98 Driving Up Van Aken Blvd. My Mother Said Rome, NY My Aunt Ella Mae Ice Snapshot Sacrament Elizaville Subcode Five Gallon Water Bottles Couch Why I Don?t Do Surveys ?Sleeping Under A Wool Blanket? Patrice Among the Elders Getting My Head Shaved By My Son at Odd Hours Glass (Crystal) Bermuda Triangle Papa?s Day: Notes On Patrition? Broadside (Pch) (Omaha) Utah Beach, France 5 8 92 Josh Gibson?s Bat Portrait of Son at Rhineback Paris Mama To Son Katherine Louise Johnson Harper Headset Juneteenth Indespensable Meditation On the Family Tree The Latin American Poem Airport Altura Maroons When I Was A Boy Pull-Ups at Ps 25 Hives Iowa My Mother?s Bible I My Mother?s Bible Ii Pigeons Caretaking Supreme The Patriarch, W.Warren Harper, Circa 1938 Cathair On His Blackwatch Jacket Manhattan Beach Homage To Flight 103 Commencement Address Father: A Parable of Riches Attributes And Eccentricities of W.Warren Harper Meditations On Catskill Creek Talk Therapy On John Milton Snapshot Lovesong 1965 Watts Riot Domestic Relations The Red Dress Walking Tour 1 Walking Tour 2 Squire of Taunton Jaxon?s First Song 5 21 2000 Natal Visit on the Theme of Shoes Shoes Forty Loyalty Paul Urabe (1938-2003) Yaddo: Mrs. Amer and Black Men

About the Author :
Michael S. Harper, University Professor and professor of English at Brown University, is the author of numerous volumes of poetry, including Songlines in Michaeltree; Dear John, Dear Coltrane; Honorable Amendments; Images of Kin; and History Is Your Own Heartbeat. He is Poet Laureate Emeritus of Rhode Island and has been honored with the Frost Medal of the Poetry Society of America, the Melville Cane Award of the Poetry Society of America, the Black Academy of Arts and Letters Award, and the Robert Hayden Poetry Award, among others.

Review :
"This virtuosic, symphonic, embracive collection is a memoir, a reader's notebook, a professor's lesson plan, a family scrapbook, and a poet's book of gratitude."--Booklist "Expansive, eloquent volume in which Harper locates and contacts his artistic ancestors in verse that is as richly textured as it is troubling."--Rain Taxi