The poems that I wrote in NYC in this book were “I Had a Dream”, “Spider, Spider”, “The Follies of a False Façade” “When Men Look Into My Eyes”, “The Plantation”, “Street Corner Blues, subtitled Motherless Chile’”, “You Say You Fed Up, I Say Shut Up!”, “Black Power”, “I Had A Dream”, and “The Plantation”. The rest of the poems in this book were written by me after I relocated to Buffalo, NY. CD and DVD in works in progress so you can listen to these poems on CD with a backdrop of negro spirituals being sung so sweetly and in 3 part harmony in the background. Or watch it on DVD, My youtube channel is sblack3001 you can message me there.
Irresistible in its color and momentum, Greg Alan Brownderville's debut collection explores the competing mysticisms of his boyhood: the Voudou of his native Arkansas Delta and the Pentecostalism embodied by his devil-hunting pastor, Brother Langston. On the one hand, "gust" sonically suggests "ghost," and wind is a metaphor for inspiration and the Holy Spirit. On the other hand, "gust" suggests urge and pleasure, especially of the gastronomic variety, thus evoking the body. Brownderville commands the complex eloquence of Southerners who love not only local color but also high-flown rhetoric. Instead of reinforcing stereotypes about rural folks' thought and speech, he challenges our assumptions by presenting real life as a festival of mixed diction. Church, as Brownderville enacts it, both quickens and forbids the erotic, whose lightning flashes and crashes everywhere in these poems. Highlights include a press conference with a bizarrely poetic rural sheriff, a Zimbabwean meter never before employed in English, a rock and roll song interrupted by a Walmart intercom, and poems about the exploitation of Italians in Arkansas cotton fields. At once evoking Yeats and Whitman, Gust recovers the dramatic mode often neglected in contemporary American poetry. Brownderville's uncanny lyricism storms through stories that are both moving and humorous.
Love poems like ONE LONELY DAY, and WHENEVER YOU FEEL LONELY, You’re on My Mind. and erotic love poems like Sweet Cherry Kisses, “SUGAR AND SPICE”., FREAKY NASTY BOY (which is a R&B hip hop rap song, I NEEDS ME A HANDYMAN which is a blues love song also, I AM YOUR HANDYMAN?. Just Give Me The Dick is a blues song also, and other love poems like IF I CAN’T SELL IT I’MO SIT ON IT ‘CAUSE I AIN’T GIVIN’ IT AWAY., or THE WOMAN WITH 8 ASSES. I had a lot of fun writing these poems and I hope it will bring just as much excitement into your love life as it has in mine.
In Afro-Blue, Tony Bolden traces the ways innovations in black music and poetry have driven the evolution of a variety of other American vernacular artistic forms. The blues tradition, Bolden demonstrates, plays a key role in the relationship between poetry and vernacular expressive forms. Through an analysis of the formal qualities of black poetry and music, Afro-Blue shows that they function as a form of resistance, affirming the values and style of life that oppose bourgeois morality. Even before the term blues had cultural currency, the inscriptions of style and resistance embodied in the blues tradition were already a prominent feature of black poetics. Bolden delineates this interrelation, examining how poets extend and reshape a variety of other verbal folk forms in the same way as blues musicians play with other musical genres. He identifies three distinct bodies of blues poetics: some poets mimic and riff on oral forms, another group fuse their dedication to vernacular culture with a concern for literary conventions, while still others opt to embody the blues poetics by becoming blues musicians - and some combine elements of all three.
During the 1960s and 1970s, a cadre of poets, playwrights, visual artists, musicians, and other visionaries came together to create a renaissance in African American literature and art. This charged chapter in the history of African American culture—which came to be known as the Black Arts Movement—has remained largely neglected by subsequent generations of critics. New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement includes essays that reexamine well-known figures such as Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sonia Sanchez, Betye Saar, Jeff Donaldson, and Haki Madhubuti. In addition, the anthology expands the scope of the movement by offering essays that explore the racial and sexual politics of the era, links with other period cultural movements, the arts in prison, the role of Black colleges and universities, gender politics and the rise of feminism, color fetishism, photography, music, and more. An invigorating look at a movement that has long begged for reexamination, this collection lucidly interprets the complex debates that surround this tumultuous era and demonstrates that the celebration of this movement need not be separated from its critique.
In this first musicological history of rap music, Cheryl L. Keyes traces the genre's history from its roots in West African bardic traditions, the Jamaican dancehall tradition, and African American vernacular expressions to its permeation of the cultural mainstream as a major tenet of hip-hop lifestyle and culture. Rap music, according to Keyes, is a forum that addresses the political and economic disfranchisement of black youths and other groups, fosters ethnic pride, and displays culture values and aesthetics. Blending popular culture with folklore and ethnomusicology, Keyes offers a nuanced portrait of the artists, themes, and varying styles reflective of urban life and street consciousness. Drawing on the music, lives, politics, and interests of figures including Afrika Bambaataa, the "godfather of hip-hop," and his Zulu Nation, George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic, Grandmaster Flash, Kool "DJ" Herc, MC Lyte, LL Cool J, De La Soul, Public Enemy, Ice-T, DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, and The Last Poets, Rap Music and Street Consciousness challenges outsider views of the genre. The book also draws on ethnographic research done in New York, Los Angeles, Detroit and London, as well as interviews with performers, producers, directors, fans, and managers. Keyes's vivid and wide-ranging analysis covers the emergence and personas of female rappers and white rappers, the legal repercussions of technological advancements such as electronic mixing and digital sampling, the advent of rap music videos, and the existence of gangsta rap, Southern rap, acid rap, and dance-centered rap subgenres. Also considered are the crossover careers of rap artists in movies and television; rapper-turned-mogul phenomenons such as Queen Latifah; the multimedia empire of Sean "P. Diddy" Combs; the cataclysmic rise of Death Row Records; East Coast versus West Coast tensions; the deaths of Tupac Shakur and Christopher "The Notorious B.I.G." Wallace; and the unification efforts of the Nation of Islam and the Hip-Hop Nation.
Writing poems from an early age, Brian Chace Boswell has been searching for truth and meaning in a world short of both.In his first collection of poetry, he explores those matters that touch our hearts, while trying to open our minds. Brian Chace Boswell takes us on a journey through the human soul, where love, pain and truth are all travelers on the same road.More than just a collection of poetry, FORWARDS, BACKWARDS, AND EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN is an intimate look into the human soul on a journey of self-discovery.
During his years as Poet Laureate, Robert Hass revived a popular 19th–century tradition: including poetry in our daily newspapers. "Poet's Choice" went on to appear as a nationally syndicated column across the country from 1997 to 2000. The column, which featured poems relevant to current headlines, serves as a symbol of the continuing importance of poetry in our daily lives. This collection contains well–known poets such as Wallace Stevens, Rita Dove, John Ashbery, and Robert Frost, as well as emerging and translated poets such as Jaime Sabines and Czeslaw Milosz. Also included are Hass's essays that accompanied the poems. Encapsulating a world before 9/11, this collection serves as both remembrance and reminder of a period in our history, and as a celebration of the poets whose works transcend time.
Offering a comprehensive view of the South's literary landscape, past and present, this volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture celebrates the region's ever-flourishing literary culture and recognizes the ongoing evolution of the southern literary canon. As new writers draw upon and reshape previous traditions, southern literature has broadened and deepened its connections not just to the American literary mainstream but also to world literatures--a development thoughtfully explored in the essays here. Greatly expanding the content of the literature section in the original Encyclopedia, this volume includes 31 thematic essays addressing major genres of literature; theoretical categories, such as regionalism, the southern gothic, and agrarianism; and themes in southern writing, such as food, religion, and sexuality. Most striking is the fivefold increase in the number of biographical entries, which introduce southern novelists, playwrights, poets, and critics. Special attention is given to contemporary writers and other individuals who have not been widely covered in previous scholarship.
