Black Poetics Research Articles

Black Poetics of Affect: Intimate Public Encounters with Strangers in Claudia Rankine’s Just Us (2020)

This article aims to explore how Jamaican-born writer Claudia Rankine displays the ways in which, as a black woman and a first-generation migrant settled in the United States, she ‘regularly has to negotiate conscious and unconscious dismissal, erasure, disrespect, and abuse’ (Rankine [2020] Just Us: An American Conversation, New York: Penguin, p. 23). Just Us: An American Conversation is a genre-defying work that includes poems, essays, photography, visual art, posts from social media, and academic and journalistic sources that tackle the discursive constructions of whiteness in cultural and political life in the United States. In this volume, the private and the public merge through conversations with white strangers and friends at the airport and the train station, in the classroom, in the backyard, in the street and in social distancing interactions via Zoom. Berlant ([2011] Cruel Optimism, Durham: Duke UP.) writes about public spheres as ‘affect worlds’, where emotions precede rational or deliberative thought, attaching strangers to each other and defining the terms of the state-civil society relation. I also use Sara Ahmed’s idea of ‘encounter’ (2000, 2012), defined as a meeting with others that surprises and involves conflict, because it shifts the boundaries of the familiar or assumed knowledge. In this sense, Rankine creatively looks for traces of racialized and gendered experiences in encounters that involve bodies or texts, including the devastating effects of Covid-19 on marginalized black communities. The volume completes a vital trilogy that includes the hybrid book-length poems Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (2004) and Citizen (2014). This lyrical series conform what I call ‘a black poetics of affect’, shaped by intimate public encounters with racism and sexism that disrupt the fantasy of a post-racial society. Rankine’s sustained reflections on ‘the affective dimensions of Black life’ (Palmer [2017] ‘“What Feels More Than Feeling?”: Theorizing the Unthinkability of Black Affect’, Critical Ethnic Studies 3:2, pp. 31–56.) provide new and situated insights on affect theories and feminist studies.

Frivolous Justice in a Carceral State: Black Poetics, Physical Injuries, and the Prison Litigation Reform Act

Frivolous Justice in a Carceral State: Black Poetics, Physical Injuries, and the Prison Litigation Reform Act

Travessias... ciclos transatlânticos: dramaturgia, Candomblé e ritual

ABSTRACT The present work reflects on the expanded dramaturgical conception of an acting black poetics entitled Afrocênica, immersed in the AFRO(en)CENA Collective, through the scenic experiment Travessias… ciclos transatlânticos. The concept of expression in the ritual scene is discussed, outlining the notion of a dramaturgy in cycles, inspired by the worldview of Candomblé Congo-Angola. It is intended to contribute to the expansion of epistemologies within the scope of black performance, especially in the investment in new scenic writings that take into consideration the horizontality of the black scene based on the traditional social ritual production of the Bantu.

Review of Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being

Review of Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being Erin Tatz (bio) Kevin Quashie. Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. 248 pp. $25.95 (pb). ISBN: 9781478014010. Writing from the imperative to imagine a Black world, Kevin Quashie offers readers of Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being an ethical and philosophical framework of 'being' which invests in the richness of phenomenological experience. Quashie locates manifestations of this 'being' within Black poetics, pointing readers towards an ethic of Black being that eludes the impositions of an antiblack world. Luxuriating in the works of Lucille Clifton, Gwendolyn Brooks, Reginald Shepherd, Toi Derricotte, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, and so many transcendent Black female/feminist writers, Quashie captures and theorizes upon the quality of Black being that is and is of a Black world––a world in which Blackness exists in totality. He elides the ontological jeopardy of being Black in an antiblack world by instead investing in the imaginative potentialities inherent in the inalienable fact that Black being is neither created nor encompassed by antiblackness. In other words, the paradigm of antiblackness rests on the axiomatic denial of (Black) humanity; meanwhile, as Quashie notes in his conclusion, "Black aliveness is. It is." (147).1 Thus Black being carries within itself the quiet but explosive ontological truth of Blackness as is, as if, and in totality. Quashie turns to aliveness––an ethic, a manner of being, and an orientation––as a means of accessing the rightness of the embodied knowledge of a Black 'one' within a Black world. The ethic of aliveness is of self-regard, epistemological abundance and ontological presence; in aliveness, the Black 'one' affirms her spatio-temporal and ontological immediacy and immanence––"I am here"––drawing upon this very aliveness to philosophize the terms of being, and of being human. Quashie's thinking is fluid and lyrical throughout; it extends fluently from his previous work, The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture (2017). The concepts borne in his former work flourish in Black Aliveness, along with what seems to be a luminous through-line in his thinking. Whereas his earlier work elaborated upon the idiom of 'quiet' to expand our thinking about Black subjectivity and inner life, this book does the imaginative work of expounding upon the ethical implications of what constitutes Black aliveness as it manifests in Black poems and essays. In either case, Quashie's work seeks out and cherishes the moments in which Black female/feminist thinkers have constructed what Hortense Spillers refers to as "a new semantic field/fold."2 In so doing, the texts that Quashie examines enact a praxis of becoming as surrender which defies the oversignification of Blackness.3 In this vein, Quashie expounds upon the radical potentialities of aliveness through its constitutive qualities: relationality and oneness. Quashie's first chapter opens with a note from literary theorist Barbara Christian to Audre Lorde: "Can I say again how alive your being alive makes me feel!?!" (15). [End Page 498] Christian's note exemplifies the way that the delicate complexities of aliveness belie its ordinariness; Christian's sentiment speaks to the constancy of being alive with an urgent expressiveness, relaying to its reader the peculiarity of the feeling of aliveness precisely through its universality. Aliveness is conjured, affirmed, and encountered by Christian, Lorde, and the reader in an instance of 'poiesis' for the speaker herself.4 Quashie's elegant unfurling of the relationality of aliveness offers several valuable points of intervention; foremost among them is his contribution to theories of encounter and intersubjectivity. His reading of aliveness indicates a capacity to leap past the barriers of intersubjective identification, instead operating upon an understanding of relationality as embodied totality and sociality. His aliveness is of the phenomenological current of capacious being, of surrender to the quiet volatility and potential obliteration of self. The relationality of aliveness attends to the anonymous and familiar, the personal and impersonal, through the substrate of one's material and immaterial experience of the world (as Lorde's erotic phenomenology suggests, from "within outward").5 Through this explication of relationality, Quashie centers the objectified 'other' in this formula as the...

Unfit for History: Race, Reparation and the Reconstruction of American Lyric

This article explores how contemporary US black poetics evidences the entanglement of the history of lyric with the history of race. Through readings of the work of Claudia Rankine, Evie Shockley, Tyehimba Jess and Terrance Hayes, I make the case that this poetics situates American lyric within the violence of Reconstruction to imagine how Black Reconstruction may be enacted in cultural form. My contention is that this poetics makes lyric “unfit for history” and thus exposes the racialization processes embedded in poetry's modern life forms. I show how this poetics does not simply recuperate lyric subjectivity but presents a different model of subjectivity altogether, one that is rooted in a fugitive idea of blackness. I locate this lyric from the publication of Shockley'sthe new black(2011), as a reckoning with the failures of representation that were pronounced in the colour-blind politics of the Obama era and chart it to Hayes's engagement with Trumpian politics in his sonnet sequenceAmerican Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin(2018). I argue that this contemporary poetics, which makes its argument through a destabilization of genre, unravels the racialization processes embedded in the form of reading poetry that Virginia Jackson refers to as “lyricization.”

Film's Religious Algorithm

This article explores Simone Weil's concept of ‘affliction’ and the black poetics of Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten in relation to two nonfiction films: Artur Aristakisyan's Palms (1993) and Forough Farrokhzad's The House Is Black (1962). The films’ contentiousness springs from their provocative depictions of suffering, presented not as a social ill but as a defiant mode of being outside of institutional power. Supplanting the search for a cure with the search for salvation, the films transcend the socially-conscious logic of documentary in favour of a ‘religious algorithm’ of profound but recalcitrant weakness. As alternative ‘city symphonies’, Palms and The House Is Black's municipal visions complement Hartman and Moten's vivid accounts of insurgent black life in American cities.

A "Cipher Language": Thomas W. Talley and Call-and-Response during the Harlem Renaissance

A "Cipher Language":Thomas W. Talley and Call-and-Response during the Harlem Renaissance Patrick S. Bernard (bio) The first known study of the black musical form of call-and-response and its immense significance in African American oral and literary practices is "A Study in Negro Folk Rhymes" by Thomas W. Talley (1870-1952) in his book Negro Folk Rhymes Wise and Otherwise: With A Study (1922), a collection of black secular folksongs, unquestionably the first such compilation by a black scholar. Belonging to collections on black music and poetry published during the Harlem Renaissance or New Negro Movement,1 Talley and his text do not appear in studies about the period. They are absent from The Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance (2004) and Harlem Renaissance Lives (2009), two compendiums about the era. Moreover, studies of antiphony in African American oral and literary discourses fail to credit Talley's pioneering work. Two anthologies on the subject, Call & Response (1998) and Call and Response (2011), and a study of the form in African American fiction, Call-and-Response in Twentieth-Century Black Fiction (1988, 2001), fail to acknowledge Talley's "Study." It is unmentioned in works on black poetics and prosody.2 Indeed, Talley's book has been so thoroughly ignored that it is currently listed on the Forgotten Books website.3 Although this listing does not necessarily imply scholarly neglect, it is useful to note how major scholarly bibliographies, for example the MLA Bibliography, also demonstrate the range of scholarship that fails to acknowledge or discuss Talley.4 The neglect of this central text in the black oral and literary traditions deserves examination. The son of former slaves, Talley was a chemistry professor, who also taught biology and science, at Fisk University. He chaired the chemistry department for twenty-five years (1902-1927). However, his groundbreaking work on antiphony best captures his indelible contribution to the Harlem Renaissance specifically and to African American oral and literary studies generally.5 His "Study," occupying some hundred pages (228-326), brilliantly analyzes black folklore practices with call-and-response as their basis. It is also the first original study of the praxis of prosody in black folk utterances. Although unacknowledged in black oral and literary studies today, such was not the case when Talley's book was published, as contemporary reviews of it show, beginning with the Introduction, which was written by a Vanderbilt professor of literature, Walter Clyde Curry. Unsurprisingly, Curry laces his assessment with racist condescension; he nonetheless applauds the book for "being a pioneer and practically unique in its field" (v), specifically describing Talley's "Study" as "illuminating" (x). In his review of the book in The Sewanee Review, another white writer, J. H. Nelson of Trinity College (now Duke University), muses that (after exhibiting condescension similar to Curry's) "[t]he student of folk literature should welcome the book as a distinct contribution to [Talley's] source material. Moreover, the compiler has included a valuable study of the material and, among other things, has performed a real service in explaining 'call' and ''sponse'" (369). The Harlem Renaissance writer Jessie Redmon Fauset states: "Professor Talley seems to have done for the Negro Folk Song what Mr. [James Weldon] Johnson has done for poems by Negro authors, and like Mr. Johnson's preface not the least valuable part of Professor Talley's service lies in the 'Study'" (68).6 Another Harlem Renaissance [End Page 121] writer, Walter F. White, states in his review in The Nation that an "interesting part of the book is the author's lengthy treatise [the 'Study'] on the origin and development of these rhymes, and the study of the musical scores to which these verses are sung" (694). In his review in The Southern Workman,7 Julian E. Bagley writes: "There is a second part of the book which is a painstaking and illuminating treatise on the use, origin, and evolution of the Negro rhymes. Certain it is that this hitherto unrecorded discussion will prove a valuable source of information to persons interested in this particular phase of folklore" (248). The review in the Georgia Historical Quarterly asserts that Talley's collection of African American...

Editor's Forum: Protest and/as Care

Editor's ForumProtest and/as Care Michelle D. Commander This forum cluster—in dialogue with the Editors' Forum on "Art, Process, Protest"—consists of a series of short essays on Black poetics, Black language, protest photography, and artistic practice to reflect on protest and/as care in slavery's afterlife. Christina Sharpe's In the Wake: On Blackness and Being links each meditation; here, the authors engage with an extended set of inquiries that Sharpe catalogs at the outset of In the Wake regarding Black strivings toward living otherwise: "I want to think through what this imagining calls forth, to think through what it calls on 'us' to do, think, feel in the wake of slavery. … How can we think (and rethink and rethink) care laterally, in the register of the intramural, in a different relation than that of the violence of the state?"1 The reflections that follow contemplate alongside Sharpe's stunning text, interrogating and gesturing toward additional ways of asserting and tending to Black being despite the immi/a/nence of death in the wake of slavery.2 Notes 1. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 20. 2. Ibid., 132. Copyright © 2018 Johns Hopkins University Press

Radwa Ashour, African American Criticism, and the Production of Modern Arabic Literature

In 1973, at the suggestion of her mentor Shirley Graham Du Bois, the Egyptian scholar, activist, teacher, and novelist Radwa Ashour enrolled at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, to study African American literature and culture. Ashour’s 1975 dissertation “The Search for a Black Poetics: A Study of Afro-American Critical Writings,” along with her 1983 autobiography,Al-Rihla: Ayyam taliba misriyya fi amrika[The Journey: An Egyptian Woman Student’s Memoirs in America], specifically engage with debates that emerged at the First International Congress of Negro Writers and Artists in September 1956 between African Americans and others from the African diaspora (most notably Aimé Césaire) regarding the applicability of the “colonial thesis” to the United States. This article argues that Ashour’s early engagement with African American cultural politics are formative of her fiction, particularly her 1991 novel,Siraaj: An Arab Tale,which examines overlapping questions of slavery, empire, and colonialism in the Arab world.

A Black Poetics: Against Mastery

Being black is an impossible location for selfhood. In social space, the black body has to negotiate what's being “imposed” and “recognized” in the encounter with an other, which makes for an inevitable slippage between perception and projection. It itches in this gap. But this gap is also productive of black social life, constructed in part because of the tension inside of this slippage and certainly in relation to it. “A Black Poetics: Against Mastery” proposes that creation and innovation emerge from the impossibility of knowing one's black self and that a black poetics is compelled by discomfort, by pain, and by radical self-creation. “A Black Poetics” also proposes that that fragile space on the other side of mastery—the space where we are least comfortable, least familiar—is what racializes the creative process.

Pumzi; the labyrinth of futureS

ABSTRACTFuture signifying a space-time yet to come (re)shapes the cultural specificites and, thus, is mutated into more than a sheer temporal indication and, inevitably, engages semantics, practices, objects, and objectives; equally impacting and forming meaning and matter. As such, Pumzi is a 2009 sci-fi short movie by Kenyan film director Wanrui Kahiu. Her 20-minute movie is a noteworthy literary instance, which meticulously depicts the salient complications of the future in contested and nebulous nets of futureS. This (con)text aesthetically stages the polyphonic future, thus futureS, while shedding light upon tangles and entanglements of past, present, and future which ultimately renders a labyrinth-like characteristic to the concept. In doing so, and in a dialogue with Pumzi, these questions arise: How is the plurality of the future discerned and depicted in Pumzi? To what ratio do futureS interact and negotiate with one another? And lastly, what is Black about futureS in Pumzi? In parallel fashion, I deploy Susan Arndt's account on the concept of futureS and FutureS in order to accentuate the intrinsic polyphony and multiplicity within the term and to be able to discern between future as category of practice and category of analysis respectively. Moreover, I mobilize the theoretical outlines of Wendell Bell to literary studies so as to better diagnose the ground upon which futureS in Pumzi are imagined – including the wide scope of possibility, probability, and/or preferability. The Black poetics of Pumzi and some of the Black visions of and for future are then discussed in the final section.

The Transformative Poetics of Wanda Coleman’s American Sonnets

This article examines the recurring formal traits, themes, and political concerns motivating Wanda Coleman’s 100-poem American Sonnets sequence. I argue that through her transformations of the sonnet form and her attention to current social issues, Coleman helps to define a new movement in experimental black poetics. Her work responds directly to poetic predecessors and contemporary writers while amassing a wide range of compositional strategies that both acknowledge her roots in the Black Arts Movement and mark out new creative ground.

There was a ripping sound

There was a ripping sound Quincy Scott Jones (bio) There was a ripping sound, and I thought I tore the paper from the printer too fast. But the sounded lasted beyond the printing, growing louder and closer as if the paper wasn't in my hand. Then a hand emerged, throwing words in my face. I stumbled back wiping movable type from eyes surprised to find myself in a fight with my own character. One hand tight around my throat the other violently searching for the first phallic object she could find. A penknife: not quite pen and not quite knife, conceived during a failed attempt to write poetry while gutting poultry. Men can't multitask. I can't manage a description of the horror. Chest heaving, hair falling undone. Long legs like her grip tight as a cage. Skin glazed with sweat. Eyes full of rage. Voice like a Nina Mississippi Goddamn (Don't call her Sadie). "This is for over-sexualizing my sisters and me!" "But I love women," I plead, "love the way they sit and stand and 6 a.m. snore. The way they ignore catcalls and poor jokes. They way they fix the world. That's sexy to me. They way they earn Master's degrees and pay their bills. Their superior communication skills. I wish I could talk, listen, change the subject and at the end make everything all right." I felt her grip tighten, then loosen, her eyes moving left and right seeking a resolution. I felt the penknife through my cheek. Felt fantasy blood flow as I fell to the floor. She turned back toward the fourth wall and I heard her whisper as I cradled my fictional scar. "I may be fiction, but this is all you are." [End Page 491] Quincy Scott Jones Quincy Scott Jones is an adjunct professor of creative writing at Arcadia University in Glenside, Pennsylvania, and an adjunct instructor of English at Temple University. He is the creator and host of New Directions of Black Poetics, a semiannual panel of writers and scholars discussing their relation to the African American community and literary tradition. Copyright © 2009 Quincy Scott Jones

Faithful Vision: Treatments of the Sacred, Spiritual, and the Supernatural in Twentieth Century African American Fiction, and: Singing in a Strange Land: C. L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the Transformation of America

Reviewed by: Faithful Vision: Treatments of the Sacred, Spiritual, and the Supernatural in Twentieth Century African American Fiction, and: Singing in a Strange Land: C. L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the Transformation of America Josef Sorett (bio) Coleman, James W. Faithful Vision: Treatments of the Sacred, Spiritual, and the Supernatural in Twentieth Century African American Fiction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2006. Salvatore, Nick. Singing in a Strange Land: C. L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the Transformation of America. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2005. The intersections of African-American literary and religious traditions have proven to be an extraordinary site of creative and critical energies. A first in all too many instances, W. E. B. Du Bois was one of the earliest black intellectuals to analyze the artistic and social significance of African-American religion. In his landmark 1903 text, The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois offered the following observation: The Preacher is the most unique personality developed by the Negro on American Soil. A leader, a politician, and orator, a “boss,” and intriguer, an idealist, —all these he is, and ever, too, the centre of a group of men, now twenty, now a thousand in number. The combination of a certain adroitness with deep-seated earnestness, of tact with consummate ability, gave him his preeminence, and helps him maintain it. (191) In addition to his sociological analysis of the charisma of black clergy, Du Bois’s attention to black worship practices and the theological dimensions of the Spirituals mapped a fertile terrain for future examinations of black religious aesthetics. More of a collection of improvisations based on his experience of the black folk preaching tradition, James Weldon Johnson’s 1927 volume God’s Trombones focused more specifically upon the creative powers exercised by black sacred poets on North American shores. According to Johnson, “The old-time Negro preacher was above all an orator, and in good measure an actor” (5). Recognizing the cultural authority accorded to black clerics, ten years later Richard Wright in effect called upon writers to replace preachers as the primary mythmakers in black communities in his essay, “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” (1937). For Wright, in the face of what viewed to be morally compromised bourgeois preachers, it was the responsibility of the “Negro writer [ . . . ] to do no less than create values by which his race is to struggle, live and die” (1384). While writers like Du Bois, Johnson, and Wright focused their critical eyes upon black Christianity, others have attended to what the historian of religion Charles Long has referred to as “extra-church orientations” (7). For instance, Zora Neale Hurston’s novels and folklore writings, heavily informed by her ethnographic work with black communities in the rural South, illuminated the spiritual powers of Hoodoo, a tradition initially portrayed at the turn of the century in Charles Chesnutt’s collection of short stories The Conjure Woman (1899). Indeed, many black writers and critics have taken up the task of engaging the rich diversity of black religious life as a site worthy of both celebration and critical interrogation. Moreover, a tradition of scholarly engagements in this arena can be traced back to Benjamin Elijah Mays’s seminal work, The Negro’s God as Reflected in His Literature (1938). Quite comprehensive in its scope, The Negro’s God scanned sermons, prayers, Sunday School curricula, and church music, all of which he classified under the rubric of “mass literature.” But Mays’s analysis also spanned the novels, poetry, and essays [End Page 318] of African-American authors, most notably the luminaries associated with the Harlem Renaissance—including Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes—in whose shadows he wrote. All this towards the end of his aim of presenting a book that was “wholly representative of what the Negro thinks of God” (Preface). The influence of religion on African-American literary traditions has not been lost in more recent black literary criticism. For example, in 1992, Marcellus Blount built on the arguments of Henry Louis Gates’s “trope of the talking book”—which, of course, centered around a text that was very likely the Christian Bible—to situate a performative tradition of black poetics. For Blount...

After Winter: The Art and Life of Sterling A. Brown

Reviewed by: After Winter: The Art and Life of Sterling A. Brown Gary Edward Holcomb (bio) Tidwell, John Edgar, and Steven C. Tracy, eds. After Winter: The Art and Life of Sterling A. Brown. New York: Oxford UP, 2009. Until the arrival of Alain Locke's The New Negro (1925), the defining Harlem Renaissance text was James Weldon Johnson's 1922 The Book of American Negro Poetry. With a blend of poems by both established and nascent New Negro illuminati, including Jessie Fauset, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and Claude McKay, Johnson's compilation familiarized readers with the poetry of the burgeoning literary movement, but not only the anthology's assembled verse had an impact. Correspondingly influential was Johnson's preface, which pled for a black poetics that reflected the unique condition of African American experience. The substance of Johnson's appeal might nevertheless surprise some twenty-first century readers, as the preface to The Book of American Negro Poetry called for a lyric mode that abstained from the use of dialect. Although an assiduous champion of Southern spirituals and slave songs, Johnson argued that conventional vernacular verse had more to do with minstrelsy than with the authentic poetic speech of Southern black folk. Johnson's leading light was McKay, as the Caribbean immigrant had eschewed the regional colloquial speech poetry of his Jamaican youth in favor of what he, and Johnson, deemed an elevated and therefore more suitably renaissance style for the New Negro 1920s, for McKay this customarily and appropriately being the Shakespearean sonnet. For the author of "O Black and Unknown Bards" (1908), McKay's black cris de coeur stirred the reader in ways vernacular verse could not. Ten years later, Johnson's views would undergo a dramatic shift, as now the critic was eager to further the cause of dialect poetry. His tune was changed by the publication of Sterling Brown's Southern Road (1932), a collection for which Johnson himself contributed the introduction, coining the hyphenate "Sterling-Brownian" for lyricism that "capture[d] the visionary energy and wisdom of African American culture" (Tidwell and Tracy 11). With the arrival of Southern Road Brown, the author of such touchstones as "Ma Rainey," "Odyssey of Big Boy," "Remembering Nat Turner," "Sam Smiley," "Slim Hears 'The Call,'" "Strong Men," and "After Winter," had arrived. Locke's review would celebrate Brown for initiating "new directions in African American poetry" (Tidwell and Tracy 9). The year before releasing Southern Road, Brown published his Outline for the Study of the Poetry of American Negroes, a text that would also serve as a supplemental update to the expanded 1931 reprinting of Johnson's The Book of American Negro Poetry. In effect, at the onset of the 1930s Brown was poised to assume two key positions in African American letters. He was on the way toward taking up the role first Johnson and later Locke had filled during the Harlem Renaissance, as the primary arbiter of Negro prosody. And he was in position to assume the laurel leaves, worn first by McKay, then Countee Cullen, and ultimately by Langston Hughes, during the 1920s, as leading poet of the New Negro movement. In 1935 Brown's progress as a poet hit a roadblock, however, when publishers rejected his much anticipated next volume, aptly titled No Hiding Place. The trouble publishers had with No Hiding Place was with the palpable political content of the poetry: "The folk metaphysic that so carefully defined Southern Road had shifted to a more proletarian voice. As reasons for their unwillingness to bring out this collection, publishers cited Southern antipathies toward labor causes and communist ideology . . . " (Tidwell and Tracy 9). Yet despite this setback, Brown did go on to occupy the seat of foremost literary critic of [End Page 1033] African American letters during the 1930s and on into the 1940s, doing so from his office in the English department at Howard University. He continued to publish his poetry, moreover, which he distributed fairly evenly between black cultural journals like the Crisis and Opportunity and leftist periodicals like the Nation and Partisan Review. Among his most notable achievements during the Great Depression and early war period was in the role of editor...

Crackpots on the Roof

America! HeviEW Jones continuedfrom previous page like the wind. The poem's self-reflexivity does not indulge solipsism . Instead, its iconographie focus on the "I" as alternately arrow, plunger, bird, and tree, and its marking the lyric "I" and reader's "eye" as "no sanctuary," signal an engagement in the poem's materiality as a shifting linguistic process. It also anticipates the language-based work of the contemporary African American poet Ruth Ellen Kocher. Kocher's recent poem "Issues Involving Interpretation " is replete with imaged text and imagined subtext that echoes Jordan's: The word has no life of its own despite what the writer tells you. Behind the sword is no quivering hand worn into life's hilt, no arm swaying the wind in dying movement. There is only the word, sword. Outside, the trees live without language And tip toward whatever sun manages. . . . But there is no tree in this poem, only The word, tree. There is no speaker who Entreats you to imagine the tree standing.... Delineating the apparent associations between Jordan 's and Kocher's verses highlights another strength of Every Goodbye Ain't Gone's diverse selections. As the editors assert, its promise rests as much in its "break from established disciplinary modes, a break from regnant pecking orders, a break through," as it lies in the connectivity it intimates between current African American artists' creative ventures and earlier modes of linguistic and poetic innovation. Such links to our contemporary literary moment help make the book fruitful for both the lay and academic reader, for the aficionado of African American literature and the specialist in the field. It enables the editors to reach their stated aim, to "shift our historical comprehension of African American poetry in recentdecades and our anticipations ofcritical comprehensions to come." For instance, Percy Johnston's "Lexington Avenue Express" recalls, through its transitory omnipotence and outreach, a Whitmanian past pushed through the urban and urbane present, as the speaker faces "The patriarch of every jukebox" and announces, "I / Become the Lexington Avenue Express; I walk through / Myself even as I stop at every local station from Woodlawn to 125th." Contemporary readers may appreciate the typographically stylized signatures by contributor Rusell Atkins's concretist "the L__ L L" with its "Un _______/ ouNOUN/ /" as a literary historical context for Harris's opening composition in "Drag": "/-?/-?/-?/- /--." No poet or critic has the last word on what constitutes a black aesthetic. Every Goodbye Ain't Gone contains nearly two hundred poems by thirty-eight contributors who published, according to the editors, "avant-garde, black poetics from the decades following the Second World War." The volume's heft seems lightened only by the comparatively slim ratio of women poets included , which the editors point out is double that of "the most broadly influential anthology representing the Black Arts Movement," LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal's Black Fire (1968). Some ofthe gender disproportion reflects, we learn, "the difficulty in securing poems from all of the potential contributors [they] approached." "Still," they hasten to emphasize, It is important to recognize that the proportions of male and female contributors in published collections during the time period we here survey was typified by the numbers we see in Black Fire. Surely this is not to say that many more women artists weren't actively pursuing the more adventurous avenues of poetic composition . . . . Rather, it is a sign of the barriers that still existed in a literary world dominated by men. One of the most important things we can do today is to recognize the importance ofthose such as Jayne Cortez, Elouise Loftin, Gloria Tropp, and June Jordan who broke a path for the many women who were to come after them, the remarkable next generation ofwomen artists whose work will reappear in the next installment of this [anthology] project. Judging by the quality of this meticulously researched anthology — in once popular books that have long been out of print, in journals and magazines that are now archival treasures, in library special collections catalogues and private authors's papers—Nielsen and Ramey's current offering will likely garner a diverse readership's anticipation of their future project. To paraphrase the avant...

Afro-blue: improvisations in African American poetry and culture

In Afro-Blue, Tony Bolden traces the ways innovations in black music and poetry have driven the evolution of a variety of other American vernacular artistic forms. The tradition, Bolden demonstrates, plays a key role in the relationship between poetry and vernacular expressive forms. Through an analysis of the formal qualities of black poetry and music, Afro-Blue shows that they function as a form of resistance, affirming the values and style of life that oppose bourgeois morality. Even before the term blues had cultural currency, the inscriptions of style and resistance embodied in the tradition were already a prominent feature of black poetics. Bolden delineates this interrelation, examining how poets extend and reshape a variety of other verbal folk forms in the same way as musicians play with other musical genres. He identifies three distinct bodies of poetics: some poets mimic and riff on oral forms, another group fuse their dedication to vernacular culture with a concern for literary conventions, while still others opt to embody the poetics by becoming musicians - and some combine elements of all three.