ICYMI: The Last 2 Weeks in Black Writing and Culture (3/26-4/15)

The works of female artists are being featured in a resurgence of "women's only" or "group show" exhibitions across the country. Though the practice fell out of favor after the 1970's and 1980's, some curators are calling this reviving trend a "curatorial corrective," while female artists bristle at the thought of a "one and done" mentality that will not shift the overall landscape of the art world.

Angela Davis has spoken out about the candidates currently vying for the presidency, and she is "not impressed". In an interview with Democracy Now!, Davis discussed the need for a "new party" with a focus on labor, race, women, and other social issues she has advocated for throughout her career. She leveled critiques at each of the three frontrunners: from Donald Trump's fascism and white supremacist support, to Hillary's universalism as a  means to ignore race, to Bernie Sanders' "economic reductionism," Davis left nothing to question as to why she is remaining independent of offering endorsements to such a weak field for the nation's top executive office.

The Poetry Foundation recently offered a "Langston Hughes 101" discussion to introduce people to the work of a key figure in African American literary history. Several of his poems are summarized, and links to his own writings about poetry are also included. He is portrayed as a man of the community, and of the world. In the words of his poem "The Quick and the Dead" - "Better to be human / Than God - and lonely."

Black Panther #1, the new comic book series from Ta-Nehisi Coates and Brian Stelfreeze was released this week, and there are at least four reasons everyone (even people new to comic books) should check it out. The series promises a new storyline for T'Challa that pairs Coates' brilliant writing to a historically significant character in comic book culture.

We were saddened to learn of the passing of Kenneth Wiggins, creator of GeniusMode Inc. He was a visionary for the concept of Blacks in Tech and his absence will be greatly felt in the creative community.

And finally, if you're looking for trailblazers, check out The Root's 2016 Young Futurists who are making changes in the world around them.

Poetry and History: An Evening with U.S. Poet Laureate (2012-2014) Natasha Trethewey

[by Meredith Wiggins]

Former U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey spoke and read poems about art, family, and race as part of the Hall Center for the Humanities 2014-2015 Humanities Lecture Series on Tuesday, March 3.

All her poetry begins with a question she wants to answer, Trethewey said. In the case of 2012's Thrall, her most recent collection, the primary question was how Enlightenment thinking has shaped the current language of race, including the language that her father, a white poet, used to describe his biracial daughter.

Trethewey conceived of Thrall as a conversation with her father. They used to give readings together, she said, where her father would sometimes read a poem titled "Her Swing," which described his biracial daughter as "a crossbreed"--something, she added, "that it is not possible for a person to be."

Trethewey always felt unsettled by the poem, which she said made her feel like the Venus Hottentot, body on display for an audience's eyes. Her father loved her and encouraged her to a be a poet, she said, but he also dreaded it "because he knew I would set the story straight."

Poet Notes #1

[by Hoke Glover]

The world of poetry is like many of those integrated worlds that exist in America. There a careful balance is kept between the minority percentages and the hidden rules that govern the overall image of the enterprise. It is a neighborhood of sorts. If the amount of Blacks involved reaches 40 percent, there is a tipping point of sorts and some whites leave as they feel uncomfortable, and suddenly it becomes a Black neighborhood.

I am not sure the above scenario has ever occurred in the world of poetry.

Black Poetry after the Black Arts Movement: A Closer Look

[by Kristin Joi Coffey]

The Project on the History of Black Writing is excited to announce our 2015 Summer Institute, Black Poetry after the Black Arts Movement, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Annually, the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Division of Education funds a variety of summer institutes for educators. This year, Black Poetry continues the work undertaken by our 2013 institute, Don’t Deny My Voice: Reading and Teaching African American Poetry, and gives more focused attention to a reassessment of African American poetry from 1960 to the present.

Nathaniel Mackey, Black Poetry after the Black Arts Movement Speaker, Awarded 2015 Bollingen Prize

HBW is proud to congratulate poet Nathaniel Mackey, who will serve as a speaker at HBW's upcoming NEH Summer Institute Black Poetry after the Black Arts Movement, on winning Yale University's prestigious 2015 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry!

"I'm thrilled to learn that I've been awarded the Bollingen Prize," Mackey says. "Joining so distinguished a group of recipients makes it especially moving. I'm deeply honored by the recognition and endorsement the award represents."

Read more about Mackey's honor here, and apply to study under Mackey at HBW's BPBAM Summer Insitute here.

In Honor of Richard Wright's BLACK BOY (1945)

Today, the HBW Blog is pleased to share a haiku by Julia and Malcolm Wright, Richard Wright's daughter and grandson, in honor of the 70th anniversary of Richard Wright's Black Boy (1945). 

black boy blues birthday

seventy years of feeding

the seeds of his hope

Black Poetry after the Black Arts Movement

[by Meredith Wiggins]

Some of the biggest names in African American poetry will converge on KU this summer when the Project on the History of Black Writing hosts a two-week institute on the subject of Black Poetry after the Black Arts Movement.

And HBW hopes that you'll be a part of it.

Sponsored by a $156,000 grant from the National Endowment on the Humanities, the residential institute will be held July 19 through August 1. The NEH Summer Scholars, a group of 25 college and university teachers selected to take part, will join more than two dozen scholars to study how Black poetry both reflects and impacts social change.

For more information about the institute and about how to apply, follow the jump!

Of Nature, Nation, and the Ethnic Body

[by Jerry W. Ward, Jr.]


Editor's Note: The Project HBW Blog mostly traffics in shorter pieces, but from time to time we like to present our readers with a longer piece, as well, in a feature we call Taking the Long View.  For this installment, we feature the poetry and critical reflection of Dr. Jerry W. Ward.
 
To echo a famous twentieth-century statement, the mind should prompt the mouth to say A BODY IS A BODY IS A BODY, aware that the voiced words refer to and locate an indivisible subject and object. Or perhaps the utterance dislocates the invisible to bring into view, into perspective, a something in the world that the world is determined to impale with the idea that the “something” is ethnic and different and to be talked about. If the something that is so embodied speaks, especially in terms of accepting its ethnicity, the something that is a human being may be contemplating its relationship to nature and to its properties and privileges as a constituent of a nation. 

2014 Furious Flower Conference: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry

[by Simone Savannah]

There are no words—no poems--to adequately describe the experience of the Furious Flower conference.  To be there was an honor.  To hear poets read and scholars discuss was an immersion into the past and the future of African American poetry.

We were treated to Rita Dove two-stepping down a Soul Train line; we stood next to Nikki Giovanni and heard Sonia Sanchez sing and cry.  Frank X. Walker danced to "Skin Tight" by the Ohio Players.  Ishmael Reed read work that made us laugh, and jessica Care moore's son brought us to our feet when he read an original poem.

We felt special to be that close to poetry and to participate in what many have called Joanne Gabbin's ‘’divine vision."

#HandsUpWalkOut

On Monday, August 25, students, faculty and staff from KU took part in a #HandsUpWalkOut Demonstration in honor of Michael Brown.  Megan Kaminski, assistant professor in the English department, organized the event.  Kaminski read an excerpt from Audre Lorde's poem "For Each of You," published in Lorde's collection From a Land Where Other People Live (1973).


For Each of You

Be who you are and will be
learn to cherish
that boisterous Black Angel that drives you
up one day and down another
protecting the place where your power rises
running like hot blood
from the same source
as your pain.

When you are hungry
learn to eat
whatever sustains you
until morning
but do not be misled by details
simply because you live them.

Do not let your head deny
your hands
any memory of what passes through them
nor your eyes
nor your heart
everything can be used
except what is wasteful
(you will need
to remember this when you are accused of destruction.)
Even when they are dangerous
examine the heart of those machines you hate
before you discard them
and never mourn the lack of their power
lest you be condemned
to relive them.
If you do not learn to hate
you will never be lonely
enough
to love easily
nor will you always be brave
although it does not grow any easier

Do not pretend to convenient beliefs
even when they are righteous
you will never be able to defend your city
while shouting.

Remember our sun
is not the most noteworthy star
only the nearest.

Respect whatever pain you bring back
from your dreaming
but do not look for new gods
in the sea
nor in any part of a rainbow
Each time you love
love as deeply
as if it were
forever
only nothing is
eternal.

Speak proudly to your children
where ever you may find them
tell them
you are the offspring of slaves
and your mother was
a princess
in darkness.

The University Daily Kansan covered the #HandsUpWalkOut demonstration in the Tuesday, August 26's paper. That article can be found here.

Don't Deny My Voice: Virtual Seminars and Public Access

[By Goyland Williams]

Over the past month, the Project on The History of Black Writing and Don't Deny My Voice NEH Institute have hosted three virtual seminars on black poetry. The first webinar, moderated by Professor Opal Moore, featured award-winning poet, Nikki Giovanni. Within an hour, Giovanni covered topics ranging from black churches, music, jazz, science and technology, poetry, space, and of course, poetry.

The range and depth of knowledge that Giovanni displayed was simply impressive. Not only has she mastered the craft of creating poetry, but she displayed a critical acumen over a range of topics and narratives of black life. At one point during the interview she observed, "We have to keep telling the story, because the Black American story is a great story." To say that Giovanni is a raconteur is a understatement.

No matter how complex or simplistic, Giovanni never shyed away from difficult questions. Likewise, C. Leigh McInnis, Brenda Marie Osbey and Ishmael Reed have all answered the call of what it means to be a black writer in America: to disturb the peace. To do otherwise, is to avoid the seriousness of life and art.

Don't Deny My Voice: Reading and Teaching African American Poetry has provided public access to writers second to none. From Nikki Giovanni to Ishmael Reed, these writers engage both the creative and the critical; the profane and the prophetic; the sacred and the secular. In other words, each have deeply engaged black experiences in all of its complexities.

Lucille Clifton: The People's Poet

[By Jeff Westover]

The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 (BOA Editions, 2012), edited by Kevin Young and Michael S. Glaser, makes available "all the poems Lucille Clifton published in book form during her lifetime" as well as a significant amount of her unpublished poetry (xxvii). This 769-page volume is a welcome addition to the list of Clifton's publications, since it includes work not gathered in two earlier selections (Good Woman, 1987 and Blessing the Boats, 2000), including Clifton's last two published books of poems (Mercy, 2004, and Voice, 2008), an unpublished yet impressive 2006 set of poems titled "Book of Days," eleven "Last Poems and Drafts," and a substantial number of poems composed (but never published) before her first book, Good Times, came out in 1969. 

In Mary Carole McCauley's review of the book published in the Baltimore Sun on October 20, 2012, co-editor Michael S. Glaser explains that he rescued several of Clifton's late poems from oblivion. In an illuminating afterward to the volume, fellow editor Kevin Young elaborates: "when she cleaned out her office after retiring in 2005, she threw away a number of things, including poems, many in her hand or with her clear edits-- all of which are now part of her archive...The typescript for "Book of Days" was among these discards, complete it seems without any editorial markings or even her name" (746). 

The Revolution Will Be Live: African American Literature and Spoken Word Poetry

[By Simone Savannah]

As I continue to research various poems and poetic texts, I am continuously inspired to discuss African American poetry’s impact on the public sphere as well as within Literature and the Humanities. As an African American poet who enjoys experimenting with both the written and the spoken, my research continues to examine the ways in which “the contemporary landscape of poetry reflects a paradigmatic shift away from the prevailing model of written and/or academic poetry and more toward spoken word poetries (Why Study African American Literature)”.

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.

Ann Petry and Langston Hughes: Representations of Black Motherhood

[By Simone Savanna]

After my mother passed, I found in the pages of her journal—the story of a woman’s life I had little understood. She was consumed by self-hatred, and could not face life as an unloved overweight woman. Much of her life was spent caring for eight children she had by six men she thought loved her. The contradiction between her negative self-images and her undying commitment to her children have provided the motivation to study the lives of black women, the stories we write about them, and the practices associated with sexism and racism in our society.

While reading Ann Petry’s 1946 novel, The Street, I was constantly reminded of my mother and her journey as a Black mother. I was also reminded of several poems about Black motherhood, including Langston Hughes’ “The Negro Mother,” mainly because of the idea of motherhood and the slight differences in their endings. As the back cover states, it “tells the poignant, often heartbreaking, story of Lutie Johnson, a young black woman, and her spirited struggle to raise her son amid the violence, poverty, and racial dissonance of Harlem in the late 1940s.” It is a novel of social realism and protest (of the Richard Wright School), and features themes, such as spectatorship, the environment as a character, and gender politics. Because my research involves examining the confrontation of racism and sexism for Black women in Literature, Poetry, and society more generally, I’m choosing to focus on the gender politics, though the three aforementioned themes are very much interrelated.

Nikki Giovanni’s “When I Die:” Forgiveness and Revolution

[By Simone Savannah]

Excerpt: Nikki Giovanni’s “When I Die:”

 when i die i hope no one who ever hurt me cries
and if they cry i hope their eyes fall out
and a million maggots that had made up their brains
crawl from the empty holes and devour the flesh
that covered the evil that passed itself off as a person
that i probably tried
to love

 

I have always had a hard time with the idea of forgiveness. So, naturally, my God-mother constantly reminds me to "Let go of the past and forgive. Holding on to pain, anger, and hurt that has been inflicted by others (or that you've inflicted on yourself) prevents healing and blocks new, positive energy from your life. Embrace the present by releasing the past. Let go." But, what does forgiveness really mean when it comes to political matters and revolution?
 

Inaugural Poems: Touching Bones of Consciousness

[By Jerry Ward]

Rudolph Lewis, publisher of the online journal ChickenBones, has suggested that we welcome Richard Blanco’s use of proletarian elements in “One Today.”  I concur. With the exception of Robert Frost’s “The Gift Outright,” an old poem he substituted for “Dedication” which he had written for the 1961 inaugural, inaugural poems do refer to the proletariat or to labor. Frost could not read “Dedication” because the glare of sunlight on snow stabbed his eyes.  Maya Angelou’s “On the Pulse of Morning” and Elizabeth Alexander’s “Praise Song for the Day” refer to work.  One might argue that Frost also referred to the labor of colonizing.

Eugene B. Redmond and Cultural Documentation

[By Jerry Ward]

Eugene B. Redmond turns seventy-five on December 1, 2012.  It is obligatory to make a few notes about his legacy to world culture and the world of letters.

How many of his fellow writers has he helped to scrub a river’s back by publishing them in Drumvoices Revue?  How has his invention of the “kwansaba” enriched poetics?  How does his extensive collection of photographs, housed in the Elijah P. Lovejoy Library at Southern IllinoisUniversity Edwardsville, constitute an invaluable archive for research on writers and artists?  How do Redmond’s poems exist as works of art and as models for work to be assumed by individuals in a tradition, by people who have not committed artistic or intellectual suicide?  What impact has his neologic signature had on our use of poetic languages?  How does his now classic Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry (1976) serve as our prototype for critical, humanly engaged scholarship?

Making the Connection with Gwendolyn Brooks: Maud Martha & “Kitchenette Building”

[By Simone Savannah]

Gwendolyn Brooks Maud Martha (1953) is said to be an example of the decline of the protest novel because it offers a shift to optimism. The novella is semi-autobiographical as it does not offer a straight memoir of Brook’s lived experiences. Additionally, Maud Martha  is structured in vignettes which adds to the very poetic personal story of the protagonist. Furthermore, the novella presents a theme of domesticity that is also present in Brook’s poem “Kitchenette Building” (1963).

One could argue that vignettes fifteen and twenty-three of Maud Martha establish the background for “Kitchenette Building” and help readers come to an understanding of a kitchenette. For instance, vignette fifteen, “the kitchenette,” describes the type of apartment building. Maud Martha imagines the furniture she would like to move into her apartment before she learns that she is not permitted to add, remove, or rearrange any furniture. The apartment and apartment building then become a “gray” space occupied by the odors and sounds of Maud Martha, her husband, and other tenants. Further, “kitchenette folks” describes the tenants and each of their habits.

Breast Cancer: Black Women's Bodies and Poetry

[By Simone Savannah]

National Breast Cancer Awareness Month was established in 1985 to encourage women to take charge of their breast health by getting mammograms. Mammography is used to screen breast abnormalities for both men and women. As I did my research on breast cancer, I was drawn to the word “abnormal” as it was very much present throughout each blog and medical site. What exactly is “abnormal,” and how do medicines, treatments, and surgeries correct abnormalities?

I’ve come across various blogs and journal articles that talk about how various body types are abnormal, especially if they belong to Black women.  Of course, there are articles on Sara Baartman, a Khoi (South African) woman who became a spectacle of white male sexual desire because of her voluptuous body. Featured in a London exhibit, she was subjected to poking and ordered to parade before a white audience that was fascinated by her “abnormal” buttocks.