A Checklist of Emmett Till poems

I've been doing research on topics that inspire or capture the attention of poets. I've noted the interest among poets in Malcolm X, John Coltrane, and visual art. I was recently thinking about how poets are inspired to write about victims of violence. In that category, perhaps the most notable, longstanding individual subject is Emmett Till, a 14-year-old, who was brutally murdered by two white men in 1955. 

Several poets -- black and white -- have written about Till over the years decades. Given all the representations of Till in poetry, this list is certainly not exhaustive. 

• Elizabeth Alexander's "Narrative: Ali"
• Gwendolyn Brooks's "The Last Quatrain Of The Ballad Of Emmett Till"
• Gwendolyn Brooks's "A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi, Meanwhile a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon" (1960)
• Jericho Brown's "Riddle" (2016)
• Wanda Coleman's "Emmett Till" (1986) 
• Sam Cornish's "Emmett Till (August 1955)"
• Richard Davidson's "Requiem for a Fourteen-Year-Old" 
• Bob Dylan "The Death of Emmett Till"
• Cornelius Eady's "Emmett Till’s Glass-Top Casket" (2010)
• James Emanuel's "Emmett Till" (1963)
• Vievee Francis's "Emmett, I Said Wait" (2003)
• Mary Gilliam's "Little Boy from Chicago" (1955)
• Nikki Giovanni's "A Civil Rights Journey"    
• Langston Hughes's "Mississippi—1955"
• Langston Hughes's "The Money Mississippi Blues"
• Douglas Kearney's "Tallahatchie Lullaby, Baby" (2009)
• Philip C. Kolin's Emmett Till in Different States (2015)
• Rickey Laurentiis's "Ghazal for Emmett Till" (2015)
• Audre Lorde's "Afterimages"
• Eve Merriam's "Money, Mississippi" (1956)
• Martha Millet's "Emmett Louis Till (1941 - 1955)" (1955)
• Jeanne Miller's "Can I Write of Flowers" (2001)
• Marilyn Nelson's A Wreath for Emmett Till (2005)
• Mary Parks's "For Emmett Till" (1955)
• Sterling Plumpp's "Unremembered" (1997)
• Roger Reeves's "The Mare of Money" (2008)
• Julius E. Thompson's "Till" (1977)
• Anthony Walton's "The Lovesong of Emmett Till" (1996)
• Jerry W. Ward, Jr.'s "Don't Be Fourteen (in Mississippi)"
• Ricardo Weeks's "Song for Emmett Till's Mother" (1955)
• Ricardo Weeks's "Too Tight" (1955)
• Al Young's "The Emmett Till Blues" (2008)

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Note: For several items on this list, I'm indebted to Christopher Metress's annotated bibliography "Literary Representations of the Lynching of Emmett Till" in the collection Emmett Till in Literary Memory and Imagination (2008) edited by Harriet Pollack and Metress.


Related:
• A short checklist of African American poets on artworks & artists 
• 15 Malcolm X Poems by Poets of the Black Arts Era
• 10 John Coltrane Poems by Poets of the Black Arts Era  
• Rap Music & Slavery References: A Partial List 

Blogging about Elizabeth Alexander, Allison Joseph, Marilyn Nelson, Evie Shockley, and Patricia Smith

I've enjoyed reading, thinking, and then blogging about poetry by Elizabeth Alexander, Allison Joseph, Marilyn Nelson, Evie Shockley, and Patricia Smith.

Joseph has been really productive over the last couple of years -- really throughout her career -- so I'm hoping to update my collection of blog entries on her work over the next year.  There's also so much more to say about poetry by Alexander, Nelson, and Shockley. Smith has a volume coming out in February on Emmett Till. You know I'm here for that. And though she published a few different volumes in 2016, Joseph has at least one more than I know of coming out in 2017.

When and if you're writing blogging something of a history of African American poetry, you'd do well to track the works of these five poets, I've learned. Collectively, they connect to a wide range of other poets and major trends we've been seeing develop in the field, especially over the last 20 years or so.

Related:
• Black women poets   

An Anti-War march, Amiri and Amina Baraka, and me

During my time as a graduate student at Pennsylvania State University, I made several trips to New York City. On  one of those trips during my last year (somewhere between fall 2002 and spring 2003), I was in the city for a conference. I somehow ended up on a street, standing on the curb watching as demonstrators marched by during one of the many anti-war demonstrations taking place.

I was standing there watching large groups of protestors walking by and shouting slogans. (i.e. "No war. No peace.").

Most of the protestors were in packs of 10 or more. They were mostly white, primarily young women. Then, I saw something unexpected.

There was an elder black couple walking down the middle of the street. The woman, taller than the man, held closely to him. The man was shouting various statements.

"Bush needs to be in jail!"
"They all need to be in jail!"
"Arrest'em! Now!"

I knew that voice. I recognized the man and woman. The flow of the march had stopped. So they were now standing in one place. Without even thinking about it, I stepped off the curb and walked into the street toward them.

“Baraka!” I said, as I went up to him. It was Amiri and Amina Baraka, walking down the street in a protest march.

"Amiri Baraka. Mr. and Ms. Baraka, hello," I said, excited and nervous.

They looked at me, wondering and understandably thrown off by a random person coming up to them in the march and calling them by name.

I introduced myself and quickly thought of words that would put Baraka at ease. "I'm a student of Professor William Harris," I said.

"Ohhh, you're Billy Joe's student? He's a great guy," he said. "This is my wife, Amina."

He turned to Amina: “You know, Billy Joe Harris. This is his student. Billy Joe's a great guy.”

Baraka then reached into a bag he was holding and handed me a sheet of paper. It was a photocopy of a crude hand-drawn image ridiculing then-attorney general John Ashcroft. The words on the page read "Asscraft Landing." In the top left-hand corner was the statement "'Home Land Security' is Bush'it for Gestapo." At the top right-hand were the words "Unity & Struggle / Razor."

The flyer Baraka gave me that during the march

The march began moving again.

"Walk with us," Baraka said. So I did.

We continued together for a few blocks. Amina Baraka on one side, and me on the other, and Baraka in the middle shouting out anti-war statements.

Related:
• Amiri Baraka 

The poetics and politics of protest signs

The other day, I was talking to my friend, the literary scholar Emily VanDette, who had attended the Women's March in D.C. The demonstration in D.C., along with its sister marches taking place on every continent, combined to represent the largest effort of its kind in history. Emily and I conversed about the importance of those tremendous gatherings, and in addition to other topics, we couldn't stop talking about the signs.

While provoking anger, fear, and heartache, the rise of Donald Trump to the highest office has also prompted incredible amounts of creativity. That creativity was on display in the photographs from the many marches. Protestors organized, chanted, sang, marched, made strategic fashion statements, and they took the time to compose thoughtful, clever, militant, amusing, introspective, and rebellious messages to showcase on signs.   

Everyone has been talking, rightly, of the civility on display in the marches all over. But let's also note the wit! pic.twitter.com/fPYhxeFdfh

— Amitava Kumar (@amitavakumar) January 22, 2017

Kumar is absolutely right. In observing the marches, we'd do well, among other things, to "note the wit!" As someone who spends way too much time reading and blogging about poetry, the art of writers conveying messages in condensed, creative phrasings appeals to me. Folks who study poetry as well as those who write it, could learn a lot from the signs of protest marches. After all,

so much depends
upon

an allusive protest
sign

created with thought
displayed

among thousands of
others

A short checklist of African American poets on artworks & artists

Images by Christian Schad, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Frida Kahlo have served as inspiration for black writers.

Poets are regularly responding to artwork and artists. Robert D. Denham's Poets on Paintings: A Bibliography (2010), for instance, catalogs approximately 2,500 poems focused on paintings, a practice known as ekphrasis. Some of my recent research led me to look over other instances of African American poets (and a poet-short story writer) producing work about artists and artworks.

What follows are some examples of poetry about artworks & artists. As always, the list is not exhaustive.   

******************************

• Elizabeth Alexander's "Van Der Zee," "Bearden," and "Painting" refers to the artists Van Der Zee, Romare Bearden, and Frida Kahlo.

• Gwendolyn Brooks's "The Wall" pays tribute to the mural The Wall of Respect (1967).

• Mahogany L. Browne's "upon viewing the death of basquiat*" references signature strikethroughs of the famous painter. 

• Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon's "Migration" takes Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series as a point of reference.

• celeste doaks’s “To the Sea, From Frida” responds to Frida Kahlo's painting Memory. 

• Rita Dove's "Agosta the Winged Man and Rasha the Black Dove" takes Christian Schad's Agosta the Winged-Man & Rasha the Black Dove as the point of reference.  

• Rita Dove's "Protocol" takes Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series as a point of reference.

• Rita Dove's "Say Grace" takes Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series as a point of reference.

• Cornelius Eady's “Jacob Lawrence: Summer Street Scene” refers to the painting by Lawrence.

• Nikky Finney's "Migration Portraiture" takes Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series as a point of reference.

• Rachel Eliza Griffiths's “July 13, 1954” refers to the death date of Frida Kahlo.

• Reginald Harris's "Baltimore Uproar" finds inspiration in Romare Bearden's image of the same name.

• Terrance Hayes's "Boll Weevil" takes Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series as a point of reference.

• Terrence Hayes's "Four Premonitions" takes Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series as a point of reference.

• Tyehimba Jess's "Another Man Done" responds to panel 22 from Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series.

• Tyehimba Jess's "Negro Migration" takes Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series as a point of reference.

• Patricia Spears Jones's "Lave" takes Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series as a point of reference.

• John Keene's short story "Acrobatique" focuses on the subject of Edgar Degas's Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando.

• Yusef Komunyakaa's "The Great Migration" takes Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series as a point of reference.

• Rickey Laurentiis's "Undiscovered Genius of the Mississippi Delta" references the painting by Basquiat.

• Rickey Laurentiis's "Black Iris" responds to Georgia O'Keeffe's image of the same title.

• Rickey Laurentiis's "Vanitas with Negro Boy" responds to David Bailly's painting.

• Rickey Laurentiis's "Boy with Thorn" takes the Greco-Roman statue as a point of reference.

• Adrian Matejka's "& Later" takes inspiration from Basquiat's Trumpet.

• Robin Coste Lewis's volume Voyage of the Sable Venus takes its title from Thomas Stothard's "The Voyage of the Sable Venus from Angola to the West Indies." Lewis's title poem "is comprised solely and entirely of the titles, catalog entries, or exhibit descriptions of Western art objects in which a black female figure is present, dating from 38,000 BCE to the present."

• Roger Reeves's "Boy Removing Fleas" references Basquiat's  Ter Borch: Boy Removing Fleas from Dog.

• Natasha Trethewey's "As the Crow Flies" takes Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series as a point of reference.

• Phillis Wheatley's "To S.M. a young African Painter, On Seeing His Works" gives tribute to the 18th century artist, Scipio Moorhead.

• Crystal Williams's "Double Helix" takes Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series as a point of reference.

• Crystal Williams's "Year After Year" takes Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series as a point of reference.

• Kevin Young produced an essay and series of 10 poems to respond to collages by Romare Bearden.

• Kevin Young's "Thataway" takes Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series as a point of reference.

• Kevin Young's To Repel Ghosts focuses on the art and artwork of Basquiat. 

-------
For more poets on a single artist, there's Bearden's Odyssey Poets Respond to the Art of Romare Bearden (2017) edited by Kwame Dawes and Matthew Shenoda.

Related:
• The African American artwork adorning Elizabeth Alexander's books

Digital Humanities, Metacanon, and African American Literature

By Kenton Rambsy and Howard Rambsy II

We’re fond of the useful digital humanities project, Metacanon designed by Nathaniel Conroy. The site is an “interactive canon generator” that ranks American novels and works of fiction based on parameters that users can set. In large part, the ranking is based on the frequency of book title mentions in scholarly journals.

Updates to his site now make it possible to take a look at 181 nineteenth-century texts, the top 500 texts from 1800 through 2016, and a ranking of texts based on mentions in The New York Times.

Given our research interests, we’ve been especially intrigued with the representation of African American authors on Metacanon. Although only 69 black authored texts appear out of the 500 (when settings concentrate on the 20th century), we noticed that five of those novels appear in the top 10.

Rank #1: Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987)
Rank #2: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952)
Rank #4: Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940)
Rank #7: Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982)
Rank #9: Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

A List of African American Literature Courses at SIUE, Fall 2003 - Fall 2016

We offered the following African American literature courses at SIUE from Fall 2003 - Fall 2016. 

[Related: African American Literature @ SIUE]

Fall 2003
ENG 205: Introduction to African American Texts (A. Ramaswamy)
ENG 341: African American Women’s Writing ((A. Ramaswamy)
ENG 342: Movements in African American Literature (H. Rambsy)
ENG 345: Topics in African American Poetry & Folklore (E. Redmond)

Spring 2004
ENG 205: Introduction to African American Texts (H. Rambsy)
ENG 340: Literature of the Third World (E. Redmond)
ENG 342: Movements in African American Literature (A. Ramaswamy)
ENG 343: Topics in African American Rhetoric and Oratory (H. Rambsy)

Summer 2004
ENG 205: Introduction to African American Texts (H. Rambsy)

Fall 2004
ENG 205: Introduction to African American Texts (A. Ramaswamy)
ENG 345: Topics in African American Poetry & Folklore (E. Redmond)

Spring 2005
ENG 205: Introduction to African American Texts (H. Rambsy)
ENG 446: Cool Blk Consciousness: African American Style and Knowledge (H. Rambsy)

Summer 2005
ENG 342: Movements in African American Literature (E. Redmond)

Fall 2005
ENG 205: Introduction to African American Texts (A. Ramaswamy)
ENG 340: Literature of the Third World (E. Redmond)
ENG 341: African American Women’s Writing (A. Ramaswamy)
ENG 343: Beautiful Blk Rhetoric (H. Rambsy)
ENG 345: Furious Flowering of Poetrees since 1960s Black Arts Movement (E. Redmond)
ENG 446: Cool Black Consciousness: African American Style and Knowledge (H. Rambsy)

Spring 2006
ENG 205: Introduction to African American Texts (H. Rambsy)
ENG 341: African American Women’s Writing ((A. Ramaswamy)
ENG 342: Movements in African American Literature (H. Rambsy)

Summer 2006
ENG 205: Introduction to African American Texts (H. Rambsy)

Fall 2006
ENG 205: Introduction to African American Texts (H. Rambsy)
ENG 343: Blk Blues & Afrofuturism: African American Poetics and Speculative Fiction (H. Rambsy)
ENG 345: Topics in African American Poetry and Folklore (E. Redmond)

The shifting places of (black student) audiences for poetry

Nikki Giovanni reads at SIUE in 2012. Photograph courtesy of SIUE.

In discussions about the histories and developments in black poetry, we might also take into account the shifting places of black student audiences. College and university campuses have always been central to the rise and preservation of African American poetry over the last 5 or so decades.  And quiet as it's kept, black students as active audiences helped energize the work and sustain the visibility of many poets.

During the mid to late 1960s, colleges and universities experienced unprecedented growth in enrollment overall and among black students in particular. Not coincidentally, that growth coincided with the development of Black Studies programs and the emergence of the Black Arts Movement. When culturally active and militant-minded black students sought speakers on campus, black poets like Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, and Haki Madhubuti were among the top picks. (Even white students interested in Black Power messages would include black poets in the line-up of potential guest speakers).

Take Nikki Giovanni. As Virginia Fowler has noted in Nikki Giovanni: A Literary Biography, Giovanni "made her living as an independent artist until 1987, when she accepted a position at Virginia Tech." Before then, she most consistently supported herself by giving lectures and readings. Colleges and universities were vital audiences, where she appeared before large groups of black students, many aligned with Black Studies and African American cultural affirmations, not just creative writing programs. Giving readings wasn't just something that Giovanni occasionally did; it was how she earned her living.

University cultural centers and Black Studies programs hosted Madhubuti. They hosted Sanchez. They hosted Baraka. They hosted large numbers of other poets. Those "new" black poets of the 1960s remained in high demand for decades (Giovanni is still one of our most frequently called upon poets). Nonetheless, things with black student audiences began to shift.

Spoken word artists -- a different kind or at least new generation of black poets -- were increasingly called on to read/perform in the context of Black Studies Program and for conscious cultural gatherings. When MFA programs invited African American poets, they were more likely to host poets with MFA degrees and books from literary presses. Sizable numbers of black student audiences attend spoken word sets, and those "sets" often include rap music and various kinds of performances. By comparison, the MFA gatherings have far less participation among black students.

Faculty members run MFA programs. By contrast, students typically run the Spoken Word groups. I was the faculty advisor for One Mic, the spoken word group on my campus for several years. The tensions within the group were never about performance poetry vs. print-based; more often, the students debated about how much attention and resources they should devote to rap vs. spoken word. In retrospect, their debates reflected important shifts among black student audiences.   

Related:
• Black Arts era
• The shifting places of jazz poetry

A visual recap of blog entries on Tyehimba Jess's Olio

Tyehimba Jess's wonderful book Olio is a finalist for a National Book Critics Award and for the Kingsley Poetry Award and for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. You know I'm excited. Here's a recap of blog entries I produced on Olio some months back when it was released. Click on the links to go to the posts.   

• August 10: Coverage of Tyehimba Jess's Olio  

• April 11: Poets as Researchers: Tyehimba Jess and Robin Coste Lewis

• April 3: Amiri Baraka and Tyehimba Jess: on the Music and Musicians 

The shifting places of jazz poetry

Image source

People waste spend a lot of time talking about whether poetry is dead or jazz is dead. It might be better to talk about when genres or modes of expression rise and fall, or just shift in general. I was recently thinking about jazz poetry and considering its prominence in the histories of black poetry.

Although we could reasonably make the case that jazz poetry emerged way, way back with someone like Langston Hughes, we'd have to admit that it became most pronounced during the Black Arts era of the 1960s and 1970s. That's when we had the largest grouping of poets regularly publishing poems about the music and musicians.

Between 1968 and 1975 alone, a short list of just 20 poets who contributed to the realm of jazz poetry would include: Amiri Baraka, Jayne Cortez, Henry Dumas, Sarah Webster Fabio, Michael S. Harper, David Henderson, Bob Kaufman, Keorapetse Kgositsile, Etheridge Knight, Ted Joans, Haki Madhubuti, Larry Neal, Eugene B. Redmond, Carolyn Rodgers, Sonia Sanchez, Gil Scott-Heron, A. B. Spellman, Lorenzo Thomas, Askia Toure, and Quincy Troupe.

(Let me tell you, there are jazz poetry scholars out there who'd name many others).

For decades after the 1970s, Baraka, Cortez, Sanchez, and others continually produced work situated firmly within the domains of jazz poetry. Over the years, we've also witnessed a  range of new contributors. At the same time, we've witnessed shifts; jazz poetry doesn't hold the same prominent role in African American poetry, at least not among contemporary poets born after, say, 1960. 

In the 1970s, jazz musicians were among the most written about figures by black poets. That's no longer the case. At some point over the last over the last decade or two decades, black poets began writing about other figures like ex-slaves and many non-musician cultural and historical figures.

There are obviously some exceptions, but if you've been tracking the publishing and performance histories of African American poetry, the shifts in jazz poetry likely stand out to you.

Related:
• Black Arts era

Memorable black poetry collection: Arnold Adoff's I Am the Darker Brother

The other day, William J. Harris was mentioning Arnold Adoff's important anthology  The Poetry of Black America: Anthology of the 20th Century (1973). It was a work that was really useful for the research and writing that I did on anthologies of the Black Arts era.

Harris's mention prompted me to think on Adoff's collection I Am the Darker Brother: An Anthology of Modern Poems by Negro Americans (1968). I stumbled across the book many, many  years ago as a child. It was one of the many works that my parents had in their collection of books. (I've written about Adoff's book a few years back).

I Am the Darker Brother was more than the first anthology by Adoff that I came across; it was in fact the first anthology of black poetry I ever encountered. Back then, I had no idea clear conception of an anthology, of Black Arts poetry, and the like.  

Related:
• How Arnold Adoff helped nurture an early interest in black poetry (2013)
• I am the Darker Brother (anthology) (2012)
• 30 Anthologies featuring Black Poetry, 1968-1975 
• Black Arts era

Locating Patricia Smith in histories of contemporary poetry

In between the thises and thats, I've been returning to the poetry of Patricia Smith. She's produced a really wonderful collection of works over the years:

• Shoulda been Jimi Savannah (2012)
• Blood Dazzler (2008)
• Teahouse of the Almighty (2006)
• Close to Death (1993)
• Big Towns, Big Talk (1992)
• Life According to Motown (1991)

It's not uncommon to hear her grouped together with poets like Saul Williams, jessica care moore, and Tracie Morris, given Smith's talents as a performer of her verses. On the other hand, in the anthology, Angels of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry (2013), Charles Rowell places Patricia Smith in the "Second Wave, Post-1960s" section, which includes Elizabeth Alexander, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Terrance Hayes, Major Jackson, Carl Phillips, and Sharan Strange, among others.  

By generation, she is a contemporary of  Rita Dove, Cornelius Eady, Thylias Moss, and Harryette Mullen.
However,  during a stretch in the 1990s, Smith was establishing herself as a journalist, not necessarily a literary or print-based poet, which might explain the 13-year gap between Close to Death and Teahouse of the Almighty. Whatever the case, Smith has been really productive over the last 10 years. She has a new book -- Incendiary Art -- coming out in February.

Along with Tyehimba Jess, Smith is one of a relatively small number of poets well-known for performance who have also earned prestigious literary awards for her verse on the page. That's rare.

All of this is to say that it's both difficult and exciting trying to situate Patricia Smith's work in the histories of contemporary African American poetry.     

Related:
• Blog entries about black women poets 

The Vijay Iyer Trio, African American literature & that "free" thing

“The new music began by calling itself 'free.'" --Amiri Baraka

At the end of Vijay Iyer's opening show in St. Louis on November 30, a group of audience members approached the pianist to thank him for a wonderful show and to ask questions. One man noted that he enjoyed the music, but he was confused about aspects of what he heard.

 "I liked the show," he said to Iyer, "but, some of the songs were hard to follow."

"What do you mean?" asked Iyer, trying to get clarification.

 "There were no chord progressions and melodies to follow, you know, like in regular music," said the man, and then quickly adding, "I mean, I enjoyed it, but it...it didn't seem like the music on the radio, you know?"

Iyer patiently asked more questions, and began discussing aspects of the music. He noted that the group had in fact played a couple of more familiar or conventional tunes, such as covers of Stevie Wonder's "Big Brother" and Heatwave's "Star of a Story." 
 
"Ok, yeah, but....," the man said before cutting himself off, as he tried to articulate more about his confusion.  As he was trying to gather his thoughts, others moved forward and began conversing with Iyer.

**************

I'm no expert in jazz. Not at all. But I realized that I was far less confused than that listener about some of what the Vijay Iyer Trio was up to in part because I was familiar with the sounds and histories of what was known in some quarters as "free jazz."  And my lack of confusion wasn't born of any inherent, high listening I.Q. on my part. Instead, I was the beneficiary of an African American literature course, of all things, on free jazz many years ago when I was a graduate student at Pennsylvania State University.     

The course was co-taught by literature professors William J. Harris and Paul Youngquist. We read literary works, essays, a biography on Sun Ra, and more. We watched Space is the Place. And of course, we listened to and discussed the music. Trane, Albert Ayler, Miles. Cecil Taylor. Ornette Coleman. And more. There wasn't nearly enough time to fit in everything we needed.

Recognizing the political struggles behind black poets as award winners and finalists

The other day, I was re-reading  Greg Tate's 1989  article "Nobody Loves a Genius Child: Jean Michel Basquiat, Flyboy in the Buttermilk." The article resonates with me now as I noticed a the finalists for the 2017 Kingsley & Kate Tufts Poetry Awards.

Before getting to that, let's take a look at the relevant segment from Tate's article. Toward the end of the essay, he highlights how two white art critics misunderstand the fundamental reasons why African American artist Martin Puryear apparently came out of nowhere and won the São Paulo Bienal. Tate concludes that,

The cold fax is this: the reason that Puryear's work came before the judges in São Paulo...is because Kellie Jones, the first Black female curator with the unprecedented clout to nominate a Puryear and have it mean something to the art world's powers that be. Before we can even begin to appraise Puryear's exceptional talents we need to recognize the political struggles that positioned Jones in her exceptional historical position.

(Jones, by the way, is the daughter of the late Amiri Baraka, a figure whose words are quoted throughout Tate's essay on Basquiat).

Tate reminds us that black visual artists, among others, never lacked talent. Instead, what often eluded them was a level playing field and the connections that white artists were constantly benefiting from. He was talking that back in 1989.  

Fast forward  to this 2017 announcement. 3 of the 5 Kingsley Poetry Award finalists are black poets. Also this: 3 of the 5 Kate Tufts Poetry Award finalists are black poets. African American poets were awarded Kingsley & Kate Tufts Poetry Awards in 2016 and 2014. 

I've previously studied the remarkable works of some of the 2017 finalists--Tyehimba Jess, Vievee, Rickey Laurentiis, Phillip B. Williams, and Jamaal May. In light of Tate's 1989 article and in relation to my ongoing work on prizes and awards though, I realize that beyond celebrating the exceptional talents of poets, "we need to recognize the political struggles that positioned" the nominations and elevations of black poetry in all these competitions. 

Related:
• Prizes and awards in African American poetry

From Jack Johnson to the Stars: Charting Adrian Matejka's next moves

Adrian Matejka's newest book Map to the Stars is scheduled for release at the end of March. I really enjoyed his previous book The Big Smoke on Jack Johnson. So I'm interested in the new directions he'll go in this upcoming volume.

His publisher Penguin Books sent me an advance copy, and I've been reading the poems over the break. This volume covers a variety of moments from the poet's childhood and teenage years, many from the 1980s. Varied takes on astronomy -- from stars and solar systems to Sun Ra -- serve as the main connecting thread throughout the book.

Aah, but my quick summary here ain't doing the poems justice. His wordplay and especially his use of similes to connect reflections on the past to the stars are where the work really takes off. In one poem, a friend's front door opens "like a newly discovered planet." And then in another poem this: "The moon is still out, eyeballing the quiet street like Sun Ra did his Arkestra." References like are scattered all across the volume, you know, like stars on a clear night.

There are poems about basketball, beat boxing, Prince, Basquiat, and more. The plan, in the lead up to the book's publication, is for me to squeeze in time to write about some of the select poems or topics that I keep returning to after the initial reads.  

Related:
• Adrian Matejka  

Blogging about Poetry in December 2016

[Related content: Blogging about Poetry]

• December 30: Teaching an Af-Am lit. course with audio recordings of black women reading poetry as the basis
• December 29: Blogging about Amiri Baraka in 2016 
• December 27: A visual recap of poetry blog entries in 2016 
• December 26: The year in African American poetry, 2016
• December 16: Kevin Young's Books: A Visual History 
• December 1: Blogging about Poetry in November