8/9/1995
Dear Nikki,
I wanted to write you and thank you for some time and perhaps it is the difficulty in the context of simply beginning that has prevented me from doing so, I don’t know. At last I am able to fathom what I wanted to say to you. When we last met I was attending (Virginia Tech 1989) Summer school and I was enrolled in your Black Poetry Senior seminar class. I was the naive college senior who wrote marginal, self involved poetry and I had a lot to learn and I still do. I wrote a poem titled 1775 Delivered which contrasted the life of the slave with modern day prison politics, ambitious to say the least. You noted in your evaluation that the poem lacked closure. Yet I think that the deliberate ambiguity of the poem was rooted in fear and denial. My inability to foster compassion at the time lead to the depiction of human atrocity as an immanent facet of existence. Atrocity is never immanent, but it is allowed. Since I continue to regard you as one of my greatest Teachers I wanted to discuss several concepts with you. I am amazed by your courage. The dogma that you continue to confront in your writing has become even more culturally engendered today. I feel the unbearable misery of the human problem everywhere today but I think that you know that the solution has always been to give people an individual hope and dignity. I think about what you said in Gemini about beginning to consider yourself as beautiful or as a beautiful person. I am reminded of the danger of honesty without love that you mentioned in Gemini as well. Yet the white devil is the human devil, the atrocity continues unbounded and fostered by pathetic denial and an unreasonable selfism. Joy Harjo notices the coninuing adolesence of our society, this culture which refuses to accept and love all of it’s people-an immanent suicide. I think about that Summer classroom often and I realized that you were asking us to challenge our own private constructs, to reexamine our cultural truisms and begin to confront our own denial regarding human pain. These things you asked of us and these difficult issues remain at the center of my task as a poet and an artist. I have continued to write poetry and am a performance artist, during my shows I integrate the medium of painting, poetry and music simultaneously. I have recently performed at the Asheville Poetry festival and I will continue to do exhibits and performances of my work both locally and abroad. Thank you Nikki, your writings and thoughts continue to remain with me. I wish you all the best.
Good Luck,
-Byron Kelly
