Cataloging Black Poetry Before the Data

These days, I organize organized collections of information, also known as datasets, about Black writers and literary history. Back in the day, I simply organized lists on Word. 

At that time, I was not guided by concepts like “data” or “quantitative approaches.” Instead, I was influenced by works such as Eugene B. Redmond’s Drumvoices, the articles of Greg Tate, and poems by Amiri Baraka. Like them, I wanted to reference or catalog a wide range of Black ideas, works, and artists within a single composition.

My article " Catching Holy Ghosts: The Diverse Manifestations of Black Persona Poetry" (2008) was  perhaps one of my earliest and most ambitious attempts to produce what I would eventually call cultural cataloging. The spreadsheets, literary data work, and other technology-based processes came later.