Yictove is/was a poet, educator, and activist who lived and worked in East Orange, New Jersey, and New York City. He was/is a poet’s poet. He, not only advocated for poetry by creating spaces and places for poets to be heard, he taught and mentored future generations in classrooms, living rooms, and on the street.
Yictove was well known and loved in my poetry community. He was/is a friend and mentor for almost 10 years. He would call me up and drag me out (of myself) to readings and feature me at many events he organized in the area—he even got this introvert out in front of audiences at his periodic Knitting Factory readings. It was at one of his events that I got paid for reading my poetry for the first time.
Yictove joined the Ancestors on July 29, 2007, and I had such a great time “cutting up” at his memorial repast with his family, fellow poets, artists, rabbi, and friends that I kept looking around expecting him to come bounding around the corner and into the backyard to share our laughter at any moment.
He was/is a big poet with a big heart. And you probably never heard of him.
If you search for Yictove in most search engines you won’t find much. His Wikipedia page is down and if you’re lucky, you may find this Obituary in African Voices Magazine. However, you won’t find many of his books and you won’t find many videos or audio of his readings.
You might find this video I found of him reading one of my favorite poems, “Burning for You” from his book Blue Print (ISBN 0-916620-75-1)
You may find a few videos and essays by other poets that mention him, like this one by Patricia Smith on the Poetry Foundation website, but Yictove didn’t make the cut to be listed on that same site as a poet—although, he still haunts the Poets & Writers site as a listing that says that he’s open to travel and doing readings. Indeed.
Why is there so little on the Internet about such a big poet?
Yictove was in his prime just as the WWW was in diapers. So much of his work was on paper, on CDs (with Black Rock Coalition), and in books that were not “scanned” into the web. I’m willing to bet any reader dinner that poetry—unless written by a super famous poet—is not at the top of the priority queue for content typically scanned into Google books, and I’m becoming okay with that.
He transitioned to Ancestorhood, at a time when, although his work and events were announced online, social media was not yet a “thing.” Twitter and Facebook were just getting started. There was nothing around to record what a person did, said, or who their “friends” are—except video cameras and sound recorders.
Surveillance Capitalism was still on the drawing boards (or in the CAD system?). There was no normalized Algorithmic Cruelty of Facebook cheerfully and repeatedly displaying pictures of my mother’s grave that I made the mistake of sharing on the platform with family years ago. He came and went before there was targeted selling to and marketing of our relationships, images, and presumed weaknesses. Forgetting was still a possibility, still a choice.
The internet forgot to remember Yictove; but those of us who know/knew him haven’t.
At first, I was annoyed that I could find so little about him, but now I realize that some knowledge is best kept in our heads and hearts, and shared as stories human-to-human.
Those of us who hung out in the poetry scene with Yictove will continue sharing, in our slow, analog way, our memories of the poet and his work. We will brag about that beat-up copy of “Blue Print” or “DJ Soliloquy” that we found in the corner pile of some used book store. We will continue to tell and share our embodied knowledge of him in the old-fashioned, untracked, unmonitored, and unmetered way.
With our faces lit by the white light of monitors, we will continue to read his poems the way he did, hat on, head down, enunciating carefully, eyes nearly closed, into our headset microphones as we Zoom until we can meet each other face-to-face round the poetry “fire” again.