The face of a woman so joyful, she isn’t even thinking about being cool.
It is a quiet night in Brooklyn. We are sitting in the home of Keisha Gaye Anderson for the Calypso Muse Reading Series, which has bounced for twenty years between the living rooms of New York City writers. I have been up since 6:30am and traveled from uptown to far Queens to speak at a youth event, to midtown celebrating my Brooklyn Mama’s PhD program graduation, to here, sleepy-eyed on a comfortable couch awaiting the reading. Picture it: intimate and multigenerational, young and elder writers ranging from age five to sixty. And no one is cool. Which is how I can manage to ease into this space and let it revive my tired eyes and weeping mascara and my rough new poems read off page. No one is cool. So I don’t have to be either.
Tishon @ Calypso Muse
Well, that’s a lie. Everyone was “cool” in their own distinct way, of course, but none seem cloaked in the air of cool that hangs around the shoulders of new Brooklyn in a way that gives our city a bad rap. That cynical sharpness that pushes us to prove our cool in aloofness and pretenses. The word that used to drive my mother up the wall when I overused the adjective as a teen to describe my attraction to something she found juvenile. “Cool?” She’d strain the word out, “What is cool anyway? What does it really mean?” Here, in this living room, cool is warm, is hot, is welcoming, is expansive. Years ago I walked in the woods of Golden Gate Park with my father’s cousin Rick, who has become a dear friend, and he described the word cool being so foreign to him. Back in the day when rock n’ roll and soul was steaming out the speakers, hot is what everyone wanted to be. Cookin’. Sweaty. This makes so much more sense to me artistically, heat as a metaphor for art that stirs a soul up, gets us fired and kickin’ and moving up good inside. Heat brings the molecules to a frenzy. Heat pushes things out of their hiding places.
