Image Credit: Gopal Dagnogo, Nymph without Satyr. (2014). Courtesy of the artist
For those who can’t get with or interpret certain codes, in general or specifically, black folk/culture under segregation didn’t always contain or restrain in the manner/matters classified. I would, in fact, argue that the place inside the inside considered outside, was not, in many communities and places, as binary as the cliched “sacred/profane” split has come to represent, for the third or middle way (gender nonconforming) under the hoop-and-holler tent of everyday life, from streets to sheets, occupied a place in “black” culture that may not be THAT dissimilar from what the term “Two-Spirit” has come to signify in Native America (which is further complicated when one understands the true NATURE of a rainbow people crammed into a designation that feels like a curse to/for )… If one is familiar with some of the codes of the black church. If there is any where to understand the black sissy-fit dynamic of sound and sensuality, it is IN the black church. From the quick snap of a cape flung flamboyantly over the shoulders of a black minister (presumed “straight” for some and not-so by others which is in itself a delightful game of “dress-up,” underscoring “those who know don’t say and those who know don’t”), loaded meanings behind “queens” and “kings”; and even rod and staff, playing it straight as a play… on and on (outside time) ritual dance from Fela Kuti & Ghana gold Africa to the Americas… Color, color, color for a deeply colored peoples. Ya’ll need to quit… Relying on those who have a vested interest in downplaying these details to serve up a straighter black America or the orthodoxy hitting that same dull note of “homophobia” (a Christian import) is a sign of a shoo-fly-don’t-bother-me chord… dressed to impress…. But for those who were around long enough to get the story of the shoe from the other foot, let it all hang out… double-talk and double-walk… even “bad” meant “good”… Now drag those a’s. . . and get a b-a-a-d… Ya feel me?
Julie Ezelle Patton is a permaculturist, poet, performer, artist, and sculptor. Her poetics take the form of scrolls, extended texts, limited edition work, performances, and site-specific installations. Patton’s performance work emphasizes improvisation, collaboration, and otherworldly chora-graphs, and bridges literary and musical composition. She has performed at many international venues and festivals including the Stone, Jazz Standard, Festival Internacional de Poesía in Medellín, Colombia; The Kitchen, La Bâtie-Festival de Genève. Patton is also a frequent collaborator with choreographers, poets, filmmakers, and composers including Uri Caine, Henry Hills, Don Byron, Henri Grimes, Sally Silvers, and Anne Waldman. With the support of her 2015 FCA grant, Patton participated in readings at the Page Poetry Salon, Poets House, and the New School. Her writing was also featured in the anthologies What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America (University of Alabama Press, 2015), Please Add to This List: A Teaching Guide to Bernadette Mayer Sonnets (Tender Buttons Press, 2015), and Best American Experimental Writing 2016 (Wesleyan University Press, 2015). Patton is the author of Teething on Type (1996), A Garden Per Verse (or What Else do You Expect from Dirt?) (1999), Notes for Some (Nominally) Awake (2007), and Using Blue To Get Black (2008), B (Tender Buttons Press, 2015), and Writing With Crooked Ink (Belladonna, 2015). Her work has appeared in ((eco (lang)(uage(reader)) (2010), Critiphoria, I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women (2005), and other publications. The Building by the Side of the Road (2012), chronicles Patton’s adventures creating Let It Bee Ark Hives on the Glenville edge of Cleveland, Ohio’s University Circle cultural district. This living, breathing, D-I-Y home-ec[o]arts INNstallation houses visiting and resident creatives and scholars, a number of Patton’s own projects in visual and performance art, as well as permaculture. As a Green Horizons Fellow at Bates College, Patton created a sculpted library called “Room for Opal,” an eccentric take off of 19th century naturalist laboratories. Prior to receiving her 2015 Grants to Artists award, Patton received the 1993 New York City Arts-in-Education Roundtable Award for Sustained Achievement in Poetry. She was also the recipient of a 2006 Mellon Learning Fellowship and a 2007 New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellowship. She was a 2007 National Poetry Series Finalist, and received a 2008 Acadia Arts Foundation Grant and the Doan Brook Association’s 2012 Watershed Hero Award.She has taught at Teachers & Writers Collaborative, Learning Thru Art at the Guggenheim Museum, the Studio In a School Program at New York University, Case Western University, Naropa University, and Schule fur Dichtung in Vienna, Austria. Patton received her B.F.A. from Antioch College in 1979.
