Congratulations to Malaika King Albrecht, Furious Flower Poetry Center Advisory Board member, on the publication of her latest book of poems What The Trapeze Artist Trusts.  For more information about Ms. King Albrecht and her work, please click here.   

Professor and poet, Rita Dove, received the 2011 National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama in a ceremony held at the White House on February 13, 2012.  Before awarding Ms. Dove her medal, it was said that "... Ms Dove creates works that are equal parts beauty, lyricism, critique, and politics."  In addition to being the only American to receive all three of the nation's highest arts and humanities distinctions, Ms. Dove received a Pulitzer Prize for her literary work in 1987 and served as the U.S. Poet Laureate from 1993-1995. 

Click here to view the ceremony.

Flabbergasted!

That's the word poet Naomi Long Madgett used to describe how she felt when she got the call last month telling her that she had been chosen to receive the Kresge Foundation's prestigious Eminent Artist Award -- the first woman in the award's four-year history to receive it. 

"It took me completely by surprise," said Madgett, Detroit's poet laureate.  

The award comes with a $50,000 prize.  But it's not the money that most pleases Madgett, 88.  She is most pleased that the award recognizes her poetry, but especially that it honors her work as a teacher, mentor, and publisher.

  "The main thing I have wanted to do in my life is make a positive difference in the lives of others," she said.  "If I had enough money to live without getting a salary, I would have taught for nothing." 

Sonia Sanchez, poet, teacher, and activist, was named Philadelphia's first poet laureate on December 29, 2011.  Mayor Michael Nutter said during the ceremony, "Poetry is an extraordinary and powerful art form.  Ms. Sanchez exemplifies the role a poet can play in helping to define a city and helping its citizens discover beauty."  To read more, click here.

Nikky Finney is the winner of the 2011 National Book Award for Head Off & Split.  In her inimitable style and spirit of humility, she recognizes the history of those who made such sacrifices, even to the point of life and limb, to read and write.  Here is the link to Nikky Finney's acceptance which John Lithgow, the host of the awards ceremony, called "the best acceptance speech he had ever heard." 

Click here to view the ceremony. 

Drinking Gourd chapbook poetry prize

Northwestern University’s Poetry and Poetics Colloquium (PPC) proudly announces a partnership with Northwestern University Press for the inaugural Drinking Gourd chapbook poetry prize, a first-book award for poets of color.

This will be an annual award combining the efforts of Northwestern’s Poetry and Poetics Colloquium and Northwestern University Press in celebrating and publishing works of lasting cultural value and literary excellence. Seeking to showcase the work of emerging poets of color, volumes in the Drinking Gourd series will be selected by a panel of distinguished minority poets and scholars and will feature a short introduction by a senior writer of color.

The first prize Drinking Gourd chapbook will be introduced by the renowned poet, Ed Roberson, who will also publish an accompanying chapbook of new work to launch the series.

The submission deadline is January 15th, 2012, and the winner will be notified by March 15th.  The two chapbooks will be published in Fall 2012 by Northwestern University Press.

Yusef Komunyakaa was been named as a finalist for the 2011 National Book Award.  Komunyakaa's book of poetry, The Chameleon Couch, was published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

“This 14th collection from Komunyakaa does not wear its ostensible subject—how to continually reinvent life when the past constantly wells up within   the present—on its sleeve. But over the course of these poems, Komunyakaa revisits his shared love of jazz with the poet William Matthews, an earlier ease with multiple lovers ("back when it was easy to be/ at least two places at once"), an impossible-to-forget era where "a black boy or girl sent to the grocery store... / could disappear between a laugh &/ a cry," and, in a poem of the same title, "A Voice on an Answering Machine" that belongs to someone dead (who "lives between the Vale of Kashmir & nirvana, beneath a bipolar sky"). The ease and lack of defensive ornament allow a new kind of autobiographical poem to emerge, a daybook-like chronicle of what it is to have the freedom in later life to remake oneself moment by moment, while accommodating all that one has done, and those one has loved, before. The last poem, "Ontology and Guinness" is at once a joyous celebration of Obama's election and an effortlessly self-elegizing cenotaph. That the poem, which also sings the praises of a certain stout, holds together at all is a testament to its maker's will and invisible skill.” –Publishers Weekly  

To read more about this year's National Book Award, visit www.opb.org/nationalbookawards.

With Good Reason Interview of Award-Winning Poet Sonia Sanchez 

Recently, Furious Flower Poetry Center hosted “Continuous Fire: A Seminar on the Poetry of Sonia Sanchez.”  During the seminar, Sonia Sanchez sat down with Sarah McConnell of With Good Reason.  McConnell also interviewed Dr. Brenda M. Greene of the Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers College about Sanchez’s work.  Listen to their discussion here.

  
NEA Funds New Attie & Goldwater Doc: BaddDDD Sonia Sanchez 

The June 8, 2011 The National Endowment for the Arts recently announced support for Barbara Attie, Janet Goldwater and Sabrina Schmidt Gordon's new documentary, BaddDDD Sonia Sanchez.  The media arts grant will go to Women Make Movies, the nonprofit fiscal sponsor for BaddDDDD Sonia Sanchez. 

BaddDDD Sonia Sanchez looks at the life and work of the world-renowned African-American poet/playwright/ educator/activist. At the age of 76, she continues to flourish personally and politically, inspiring and mentoring a new generation of poets and hip-hop artists. 

Barbara Attie and Janet Goldwater, Producers/Directors of BaddDDD Sonia Sanchez, have worked together making documentaries on women’s issues and women artists since 1990. Their collaborative work was recognized in 2005 with a Pew Fellowship in the Arts and in 2008 with a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship in Media. Their most recent documentary, Mrs. Goundo’s Daughter, is an ITVS co-production and was broadcast on PBS in February 2011 as part of the AfroPoP: The Ultimate Cultural Exchange series. 

Other funders for BaddDDD Sonia Sanchez include the Leeway Foundation and the Lomax Family Foundation. 

To learn more about the project, go to the website at www.attiegoldwater.com.

Dr. Joanne Gabbin was profiled in the Summer 2011 edition of Bloom, a Harrisonburg publication celebrating Valley women.  The article speaks to the early influences in Dr. Gabbin's life that inspired her life-long love of poetry.  Also, it chronicles the evolution of the Furious Flower Poetry Center, which began as a gathering of 35 poets in 1994.  "I wanted to do something that would help the students at JMU learn about African American poetry," she said.  Seventeen years later, the Furious Flower Poetry Center is a treasured fixture of the University.

Blog 

May 29, 2011 

Death and Life of Gil Scott-Heron (1949-2011) 

Death takes you to an unfamiliar place, to narrative knowing and the science of the human. 

A man’s death is an algorithm for inquiry.  Is it an accident that James Cherry sent you his most recent book, Still A Man and Other Stories, from Jackson, TN?  Gil Scott-Heron sang “I need to go home and slow down in Jackson, Tennessee” on the cut “New York Is Killing Me (I’m New Here: Gil Scott-Herron).  Howard Rambsy, who is from Jackson, TN, wrote a blurb for Cherry’s second collection of poems, Honoring the Ancestors (2008) which includes “Homecoming (for Gil Scott-Heron)  and a history-informed blog “Gil Scott’s Role in Untelevised Revolution”at 

http://siueblkstudies.blogspot.com/2011/05/gil-scotts-role-in-untelevised.html 

Scott-Heron honored his musical ancestor Robert Johnson with a dark remake of Johnson’s “Me and the Devil” just as Esther Phillip, out of the authority of her own tragedies, paid tribute to Scott-Heron with her cover of “Home is where the hatred is.”  With the exception of Johnson, any of these people might have been influenced by Langston Hughes’s Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz (1961). Nanoseconds of death and life are not exactly accidents. 

If it were the case that the only poem Scott-Heron could be known for was “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” (1970), I would still claim he is one of the bridges the Black Arts Movement crossed over on as it went to hiphopland.  There is great honor in being a bridge over troubled water. But Scott-Heron was most assuredly more than a bridge. He flowed to somewhere with the 1990 poetry collection So Far, So Good.  He was a brilliant artist much attuned to layers of culture and emotion as he testified in the 2009 Reelblack interview “Definition of a Poet (R.I.P.)” as the deepest core of his humanity broke through the tragic record of his face.  A man’s face is an enigma; his spirit, a truth. The power of “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” overshadows Arrested Development’s “Revolution” as it was used in Spike Lee’s Malcolm X (1992), especially when one compares such cuts as “Tennessee” and “Mama’s Always on Stage” from the group’s album 3 Years, 5 months and 2 days in the Life of (1992) with Scott-Heron’s “Johannesburg” (1975).  Film can murder the effectiveness of sounding by changing the context for reception.  And one must note that Spike Lee virtually deconstructed how misused a word “revolution” is by cinematizing the televising of a revolting revolutionary act in the “Dance of Death” scene in Bamboozled (2000).  We must weigh carefully the difference between Scott-Heron’s affirmative, tradition-rooted utterance of “revolution” for an audience in revolt in the 1970s and Lee’s effective and satiric  unmasking of minstrelsy thirty years later for a post-soul audience romanced by the “gangsta” music industry.  History matters. It also matters that we hear Arrested Development’s “Tennessee” as an ecological gloss on Scott-Heron’s life and Scott-Heron’s debut album Small Talk at 125^th and Lenox (Flying Dutchman Records 1970).  He was a man of his times when he included both “Who’ll Pay Reparations on My Soul” and “The Subject Was Faggots” on the record. 

An algorithm for cultural inquiry led you to post on Rodger Kamenetz’s Facebook wall ---“Rodger, I never met Scott-Heron, but his art and ethos have influenced my creative efforts.”  And Kamenetz replied: “Hi Jerry.  Good to know.  Can you or will you write an appreciation here or elsewhere?  I only knew him as a ‘classmate’ and sometimes hung out a little when he was young and beautiful, tall and pretty aloof.  It was 72=73.  He was at Hopkins doing the MA at the Writing Seminars but pretty quickly he stopped coming to class.  He was just getting on to the music thing then.”  And you post back ---“I may write a short piece soon.”  Kamenetz has jogged your memory.  Gil Scott-Heron published novels –The Vulture (1970) and The Nigger Factory (1972).  They seem to have escaped literary historical commentary. 

Facebook has displaced face-to-face inspiration for writing appreciations or criticisms or anything else.  Dread stabs you.  You worry that old rituals of humanity, old ways of communicating the respect of condolence, have vanished.  Your options for making peace with acknowledging Gil Scott-Heron’s transition have dwindled. 

You can’t swim against the tide.  On your own Facebook wall you have posted the New York Times obituary with the remark: “Another winter/summer in America moment.”  You posted “Winter in America” (1990 version) with the obscure political comment “And no one shall be happy ‘til we witness a flaming spring/fall in Saudi Arabia.”  You listened to “Angel Dust” and posted it with the comment “Dreadful dust corked American in a bottle/threw it under the cosmic bus.”  And you had to post “The Message” (1982) by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, just as you had to check your library shelves to be sure the lyrics for “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” are followed by the lyrics for “The Message” (pages 61-65) in the first edition of The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (1997). 

Your hunger for old-fashioned respect, necessitated by your admiration for Gil Scott-Heron’s sacrifice for civil and human rights in Jackson, TN in 1962, is satisfied only by reading Tony Bolden’s excellent essay “Blue/Funk as Political Philosophy: The Poetry of Gil Scott-Heron” in The Funk Era and Beyond: New Perspectives on Black Popular Culture (Palgrave 2008) and Bolden’s Chapter 22 “Cultural Resistance and Avant-Garde Aesthetics: African American Poetry from 1970 to the Present” in The Cambridge History of African American Literature (2011). For dessert, you consume a sentence from Aldon Lynn Nielsen’s Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism (Cambridge University Press 1997): “For all his virtues as an eloquent, and even elegant communicator, however, Scott-Heron was not a proponent of revolutionary formal experimentation in verse…” (190).  Well, if you could play Bob Kaufman’s cranial guitar as well as Gil Scott-Heron did, not promoting page-bound innovation is a cardinal virtue.  Music and Scott-Heron’s mastery of sound was a far better way of awakening sleepers in the public space of the American mind. Amen. Jerry W. Ward, Jr. 

"Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." John Donne (English poet, 1572-1631).

Two Trains Running: Black Poetry 1965-2000 

(notes towards a discussion & dialogue) 

By Kalamu ya Salaam 

“Most literary criticism gives…very little critical understanding of.. black speech/black music as a source of black poetry. My argument is that the best use of our language is in fact song. And this song essence, this musical emphasis informs what we know as poetry.” 

Read the rest of this insightful essay about African American poetry by clicking here.