Celebrate, Educate, Preserve: A Conversation with Furious Flower Poetry Center's Founder and Inaugural Director, Dr. Joanne V. Gabbin

Abstract

Celebrate, Educate, Preserve:A Conversation with Furious Flower Poetry Center's Founder and Inaugural Director, Dr. Joanne V. Gabbin Dr. Sheryl C. Gifford (bio) Dedicated to the memory of Dr. George E. Sparks, whose friendship and support of Drs. Gabbin and Gifford made this interview possible. Click for larger view View full resolution Joanne V. Gabbin with poets at the 2014 Furious Flower Conference: (left to right) Joanne V. Gabbin, Rita Dove, Mariahdessa Tallie, Frank X Walker, Ishmael Reed, Elizabeth Alexander, Yusef Komunyakaa, Cornelius Eady, and Toi Derricotte. Photo by C. B. Claiborne. Introduction At one point in our 2017 conversation, Dr. Joanne Gabbin describes Sterling Brown as a literary parent. Similarly, she has fostered the development of Black poetry by founding the Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. Since 1994, the Center's programming and decennial conference have produced a substantial archive of Black poetry. The archive attests to the wealth of opportunities the Center provides for emerging Black poets to work firsthand with established poets such as Kwame Dawes, Rita Dove, Nikki Giovanni, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Sonia Sanchez. [End Page 36] The archive reflects Dr. Gabbin's commitment to ensuring the continuity of Black poetry by validating emerging poets' relationships to previous generations of Black poets and their contributions to a singular literary tradition. A sense of belonging characterizes the Center and its decennial conference, which has honored the Elders, Warriors, and Seers in the Black poetic tradition and generated a familial dynamic that celebrates artistic and scholarly distinctions. The kinships forged at the conferences have deepened over the last thirty years, a testament to the strength of their roots in Furious Flower. The deaths of luminaries in Black poetry such as Kamau Brathwaite (2020), Mari Evans (2017), bell hooks (2021), Dolores Kendrick (2017), Naomi Long Madgett (2020), Toni Morrison (2019), Ntozake Shange (2018), and Derek Walcott (2017) highlight the significance of Dr. Gabbin's work as the Center's founder and inaugural executive director. Her efforts have ensured contemporary Black poets' inheritance of Elder, Warrior, and Seer traditions, inspired Black poetry readers' and writers' creative and scholarly growth, and motivated the development of similar organizations across the country. Yet the experience that awaits lovers of Black poetry when they enter Cardinal House, the red brick house at the edge of JMU's campus that is the Center's home, is unique. They will leave as members of a storied family, inheritors of its inexhaustible heritage, and bearers of its precious charge to seed the future of Black poetry. Part I: Celebrate SG: Joanne, you've dedicated over twenty years to supporting Black poetry through the Furious Flower Poetry Center. What inspired you to create this distinctive enterprise and its conference? JG: Furious Flower started with the modest idea of a reading for Gwendolyn Brooks. I'd planned to have her do a second reading when she came back to the [Shenandoah] Valley in 1994. One thing I always did, when I went to a new school, was to invite Gwendolyn Brooks—there's a story to that—so I invited her to read in 1986, a year after I first got here [to JMU]. In 1993 she was invited back to the Valley by Piedmont [now Virginia] Community College. When I heard she was going to be in the area, I took my students to Charlottesville to see her. They heard her read, and then, in her gracious way, she signed autographs for an hour after the reading, for every student. She'd ask for each student's name, sign her autograph to that name, and then spend thirty to forty seconds saying something to the student. It was wonderful. On the second day of her visit, I called her and thanked her for being so kind to my students, and I asked her if she would come back to JMU in that same semester. She declined but promised to come the next year, so I had a whole year to plan her reading. Once I started telling people I was planning a reading for Gwendolyn Brooks, many of the poets who were friends of mine wanted to be there when she...