As members of a visionary, organized literary posse that often included Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones), Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez and Haki Madhubuti, these African American poets gave voice to the Black nationalist movement of the 1960s and 70s by using their words to rail against the status quo, rattle the cages of racists and advance a political revolution.
    But despite their well-documented contributions to social change, scholarship on their poetry and the literary milieu that it represents is difficult to find, says Dr. Joanne V. Gabbin, an English professor at James Madison University and organizer of an upcoming national meeting of poets and critics, "The Furious Flower Conference: A Revolution in African-American Poetry."
    "Many of the poets who will gather here, like Amiri Baraka and Sonia Sanchez, were so busy fighting for justice, fighting for liberation and equality, that there wasn't the emphasis on trying to document the movement.  And only now are historians going back and trying to assess the movement beyond seeing these poets as agents of social change," says Gabbin, who wrote Sterling A. Brown: Building the Black Aesthetic Tradition, the first full-length biography of the late African American poet.
    The conference, dedicated to Pultizer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks, will take place Sept. 29-Oct. 1 at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, VA.  The literary event, considered the first of its kind, will bring African American poets and critics together to discuss the status of African American poetry from 1960 to the present, as well as to provide resources to help educators - high school techers and college professors - include this literature in their curricula.
    "There hasn't been, to my knowledge, another poetry conference like this in years, if there has ever been one," says Gabbin, who borrowed the conference title from a line in Brooks' poem, "The Second Sermon on Warplan."
    Conference participants, a hearty blend of literary legends and emerging new voices, will include Gwendolyn Brooks herself as well as Rita Dove, Eugene Redmond, Lucille Clifton, Toi Derricote, Michael Harper, E. Ethelbert Miller, Pinkie Gordon Lane, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Elizabeth Alexander, Arnold Rampersand and Eleanor Traylor.
    "Many of these poets have lent their voices to the civil rights struggle and social change in this country, and that has to be a part of it - that's the furious part," says Gabbin, who also heads James Madison's honors program.
    "There has been a lot of militancy and anger directed at change, but there has been a development of beauty of poetry - as poets have done for centuries.  They want to see what is human, universal, beautiful and true about our experience.  That's the flower part of it."

Taking A Closer Look

    Unless the critics and scholars start to "write and popularize the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, those works and those writers will become obscure," asserts E. Ethelbert Miller, a poet and director of the African American Resource Center at Howard University.
    It has just been in the past decade, says Gabbin, that "critics and scholars are starting to look at the work of African American poets as literature - experimental literature, literature that is lyrical, literature that is explosive and has roots in the folk tradition, and that can be assessed by all of the forces that we have come to accept and use to evaluate great literature."
    Gwendolyn Brooks provides an immediate example.  Despite a literary career that spans five decades, the first two critical works examining her poetry were published only during the past five years.  And in the case of Nikki Giovanni, a Virginia Tech English professor and one of the most widely read African American poets in the nation, the first biography written about her came out only a year ago.
    "We are finally beginning to catch up with these writers who should have been assessed a long time ago," says Gabbin.  "Until educator and literary critic Trudier Harris wrote the Dictionary of Literary Biography, we didn't have a solid reference source that talked about these poets.  We seem to be almost 50 years behind the times when it comes to serious literary criticism of these poets."
    Bringing together "literary giants and the new poets" in one place is an historic event, Miller says.  "This conference is extremely critical to our work as writers.  Its represents a time for us to assess what Gwendolyn Brooks means, what new literature will be, what will it sound like, to explore what the work of these poets is all about.  So many times you go into schools and the work of Afro American poets is not even being taught, or their books are out of print."

New Voices

    As Miller sees it, those who will be leading African American poetry into the next century are young, gifted, Black, middle class and degree holders.
    "When I look at Dark Room Collective members Sharan Strange and Thomas Ellis, for example, I see literary forces to be reckoned with," says Miller who has long served as a mentor for many up-and-coming writers.
    According to the collective's official history, the death of writer James Baldwin in 1988 gave birth to a shared vision and a commitment to keep alive their living literary legacies.
    Ellis and other members of the Boston-based collective, a forum and network for new and established poets and writers, will be "featured prominently at the conference," among a cadre of Black literature's most celebrated writers, says Gabbin.
    While rap and hip-hop have been credited in recent years for poetry's reemergence and for giving voices to everyday people, "We can't overlook a new world of emerging Black poets," says Greg Tate of the Village Voice.
    "Groups like Greencard out of New York and the Dark Room Collective are on the move," Tate adds.  "Most are pursuing degrees and have one foot planted in academe and one planted in the street."
    In a recent article in American Visions magazine, Thomas Ellis asserts that there is room for many voices - "...in the [1920s], you had to write a certain way to get published; in the [1960s], you had to talk a certain way to get published...My theory is, everywhere I go, I carry 10 people with me...if there are enough voices being published, you won't have the debate about what you should be writing about."
    Poet John Keene agrees: "The poets, especially those from the Black Arts Movement, saw their poetry as part of the revolution, not simply an aesthetic revolution, but a political revolution.  Many saw their poetry almost completely in the service of liberating Black people.
    "Now, what is going on is an emergence of Black poets from a variety of communities - there are black gay poets [and] poets from the academic community.  The sense of what poetry can do is much more diffuse today, and the poets are speaking in different voices," says Keene, a member of the collective and managing editor of Callaloo, a journal of African American and African arts and letters based at the University of Virginia.
    While many of the new emerging voices in African American poetry have chosen to pursue degrees and anchor themselves in the academy, there is no substitute for being "a part of the Black community," says writer and poet Haki Madhubuti.
    "You can't read a couple of books and say that you know the Black community," Madhubuti says.  "That's what white people have been doing all their lives.  You have to be a part of the culture - the fabric of the community that you are trying to chronicle."
--reprinted from Black Issues in Higher Education, August 25, 1994, vol. 11, no. 13, pp. 40-2.