Poetry in 1988: A Research Note

[By Jerry W. Ward]

Twenty-five years ago, Naomi Long Madgett edited and published A Milestone Sampler: 15th Anniversary Anthology (Detroit: Lotus Press, 1988).  The book is a collector’s item. Pictured on the front cover are Lotus Press poets who participated in the fifteenth anniversary celebration in Detroit, June 25-27, 1987.The back cover informs us that

The press has held, as a major part of its philosophy,  respect for the independence of its black poets in their choice of style and subject matter.  As a result, its products demonstrate remarkable variety, determined not by editorial biases but by technical competence.

Follow Up: 7 Links That Demonstrate RapGenius's Connection To Digital African American Literary Scholarship

[By Kenton Rambsy]

On yesterday, I posted a list of “7 Ways that RapGenius Assists Digital African American Literary Scholarship.” Today, I decided to do a follow up post to illustrate exactly what I meant by providing actual examples on the RapGenius website. RapGenius’s crowd-sourced, multimedia platform helps users to fuse social networking and online databases to create digital resources to study black writing.

7 Ways that RapGenius Assists Digital African American Literary Scholarship

[By Kenton Rambsy]

I said it once and I’ll say it again: Rap Genius is not just for Rap fans. In my post, Rap Genius and Black Literature, I wrote about how the website “helps clarify the importance of language usage, historical context, and thematic content in poems, speeches, essays, and novels.”

Rap Genius's growing online collection of black writers ranging from Langston Hughes to Nikki Giovanni aids in sparking conversations concerning black literature and serves as a valuable digital resource. In some respects, the site could be considered Cliffsnotes of the 21st Century by providing an interactive platform for engaging, summarizing, reading texts.

I have come up with a list of 7 reasons that explain the significance of crowd-sourced annotations to the study of Black Literature and digital humanities to encourage literature enthusiasts to become more interested in using Rap Genius:

Poetry in First World: An April Meditation

[By Jerry W. Ward]

After Johnson Publications abruptly discontinued Black World in 1976, Hoyt W. Fuller and others founded First World Foundation in Atlanta and began to publish First World: An International Journal of Black Thought.  In The Black Arts Movement (2005), James Smethurst does not associate the demise of Black World and the birth of First World with Watergate (1974), but future studies of African American poetry will have to account for how the covert activities of Richard Nixon’s administration intensified divisions and decline within the evolving of Black cultural nationalism.

Post-Civil Rights assumptions about the aesthetic function of poetry beg to be explained within the total context of dwindling American faith in the credibility of democracy. The “formal turn” in black poetry after 1974, even if it is considered as a pure act of language (a specialized speech act), must be associated with a paradoxical resuscitation of faith in American exceptionalism. I want to sell signifying  tickets with the claim that young black poets born after 1965 consciously and unconsciously were determined in the late 1980s and early 1990s to prove they were more quintessentially “American” in craft than other poets in the United States, much in the fashion Ralph Ellison “proved” he was more American than Saul Bellow.