Ahmos ZuBolton : Early LSU Dayz

Ahmos ZuBolton:

Early LSU Dayz
___________________________

“except for the
terrible puzzle
of books, he
was free”
—Ahmos ZuBolton
”The Basketball Star,”
The Last Cookie

I met him at LSU—
when he was Amos Bolton
before he started writing
with his new (old) name
“Ahmos ZuBolton”

“Zu” came from back—
when his grandfather ran
away from being a slave
ending up getting caught
& branded with the “Zu”
______________________

“I entered college
believing one learned
by osmosis”
—Audre Lorde, Zami

And so I read intently—
writhing my way thru
Faulkner’s Absalom even
tho his syntax drove me
absolutely crazy

Talk about a closet case—
Mississippi meanderings
about the Sutpen curse,
incestuous miscegenation,
Bon and Henry at Ole Miss
___________________

Later morbidly recaptured—
by Quentin Compson there
at Harvard with gay soirees
in the midnight dorm like
the other two lovers

Deep South survival—
with its long history of
decadent SM bondage &
delta deliverance which
I was in the middle of
_______________________

The same professor—
Who taught Faulkner also
Taught Creative Writing
And it was in that class
I met the poet ZuBolton

Right away Ahmos said—
Let’s do poetry instead of
writing prose and the way
he said it there in that
Allen Hall classroom…
___________________

It gave me goosebumps—
Ahmos back then in 1966
one of the first young
Black Americans to go to
LSU newly desegregated

There on a scholarship—
already Delta Journal editor
it was like being with a
writer who already knew
the direction of things
______________________

He picked a poem of mine—
Published it in the Delta
And we became friends
Before he got drafted &
Ended up in Viet Nam

The last thing he said—
To me in front of the LSU
Student Union was this:
“C’mon, man, like submit
those Poems now!!!”