What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America (Modern and Contemporary Poetics) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0817358005 ISBN 13: 9780817358006

Verlag: UNIV OF ALABAMA PR, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

What I Say is an anthology of formally experimental and innovative poetry by black writers in America from 1977 to the present that allows readers to map the independent routes by which various poets reached their particular modes of aesthetic experimentation.

What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America is the second book in a landmark two-volume anthology that explodes narrow definitions of African American poetry by examining experimental poems often excluded from previous scholarship. The first volume, Every Goodbye Ain't Gone, covers the period from the end of World War II to the mid-1970s. In What I Say, editors Aldon Lynn Nielsen and Lauri Ramey have assembled a comprehensive and dynamic collection that brings this pivotal work up to the present day.

The elder poets in this collection, such as Nathaniel Mackey, C. S. Giscombe, Will Alexander, and Ron Allen, came of age during and were powerfully influenced by the Black Arts Movement, and What I Say grounds the collection in its black modernist roots. In tracing the fascinating and unexpected paths of experimentation these poets explored, however, Nielsen and Ramey reveal the tight delineations of African American poetry that omitted non-canonical forms. This invigorating panoply of work, when restored, brings into focus the creatively elastic frontiers and multifaceted expressions of contemporary black poetry.

Several of the poets discussed in What I Say forged relationships with members of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry movement and participated in the broader community of innovative poetry that emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s and continues to exert a powerful influence today.

Each volume can stand on its own, and reading them in tandem will provide a clear vision of how innovative African American poetries have evolved across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. What I Say is infinitely teachable, compelling, and rewarding. It will appeal to a broad readership of poets, poetics teachers, poetics scholars, students of African American literature in non-narrative forms, Afro-futurism, and what lies between the modern and the contemporary in global and localized writing practices.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Aldon Lynn Nielsen is the author of Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism and Integral Music: Languages of African-American Innovation. Lauri Ramey is the author of Slave Songs and the Birth of African American Poetry and The Heritage Series of Black Poetry, 1962–1975. Nielsen and Ramey also coedited Every Goodbye Ain't Gone: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry by African Americans.

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What I Say

Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America

By Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Lauri Ramey

The University of Alabama Press

Copyright © 2015 The University of Alabama Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8173-5800-6

CHAPTER 1

    WILL ALEXANDER

    Apprenticeship

    ... between impulse and resistances,
    between advances and retreats.
    –Octavio Paz, Eagle or Sun?


    Here I am
    posing in a mirror of scratch paper sonnets
    sonnets as rare
    as a live Aegean rhino

    absorbing the cracklings of my craft
    its riverine volcanoes
    its spectacular lightning peninsulas
    emitting plentiful creosote phantoms
    from an ironic blizzard of unsettled pleromas

    scouring through years of unrecognized pablums
    of constant arch-rivalry with extinction
    bringing up skulls of intensive discourse
    by the claws in one's mind
    which seem to burn with systemic reduction

    one then suffers poetic scorching by debris
    by inaugural timber which flashes
    by friction which flares up & harries
    by unrecognized moltens collapsing in glass
    of initial intuitive neglect

    as if one's fangs
    were fatally stifled by incipience
    by verbal range war didactics
    by territorial driftwood
    by sudden undemonstrative detractions
    awed

    by the diverse infernos of Trakl & Dante
    one's youngish body stands
    devoured by reverential print trails
    momentarily cancelled
    by the loss of blasphemous nerves & upheaval
    stung
    by demeaning neutralities
    ravaged
    by a blank Sumatran solar psychosis
    by a tasteless collision of rums in transition
    by a conspiracy of obscured fertility by hubris

    as one sucks in doubt from a wave of tumbling blister trees
    there exist irradiations flecked with a gambled synecdoche
    with indeterminate earthenware splinters
    taking up
    from aboriginal density
    a forge of Sumerian verbal signs
    cooked with a tendency
    towards starfish hypnosis
    towards psychic confrontational drainage
    conducting one's frictions in a torrential furnace of osmosis & ire

    yes
    apprenticeship
    means poetry scrawled in unremitting leper's mosaic
    cringed in smoky interior cubicles
    releasing various deliriums
    as if pointed under a blackened Oedipal star
    with its dark incapable tints
    with its musical ruse of unspoken belladonna

    poetics
    an imaginal flash of Russian chamber lilies
    stretching under a blue marsupial sun
    like kaleidoscopic tumbleweed
    fugaciously transfixed
    upon an anomalous totem of glints
    upon rainy Buenos Aires transfusions
    above the urinal coppers of a flaming polar star rise

    of course
    kinetic
    like magical malachite rivers
    flowing from moons
    blowing through the 3/4 summits of motionless anginas

    I've looked
    for only the tonalities that scorch
    which bring to my lips wave after wave
    of sensitivity by virulence

    yes
    a merciless bitterness
    brewed by a blue-back tornado of verbs
    in a surge of a flashing scorpion chatter
    in a dessicated storm of inferential parallels & voltage
    like a scattered igneous wind
    co-terminus with the bleeding hiatus & the resumption of breath

    resolved by flash point edicts
    by consumptive stellar limes
    by curvature in tense proto-Bretonian fatigue

    mixing magnets
    juggling centripetal anti-podes & infinities
    cracking the smoke of pure rupestral magentas

    yes
    hatcheries
    floating through acetylene corruption of practiced mental restraint
    to splendiferous vistas mingled with inspirational roulette
    its mysteriums
    always leaping like a grainy rash of scorching tarantellas
    or leaking moon spun alloestophas
    as if speaking
    in irregular glossological green Dutch

    a frenetic seminar on febricity
    a reiteration of hendacasyllabic agitation & stinging
    a ferocious vacillation
    explosive as random "aggregational" nodes
    mimed by a black consonantal dissection
    its maximal priority
    forked at "hypotactic inclusion"
    with isochronous internal procedure
    with ratios
    with phonic penetralia by distortion
    primed by anomalous "nuclear accent"
    by a cadence of composing syllables & compounds

    yes
    poetics
    its force
    jettisoned by "hypotaxis"
    by ... paratactic co-ordination
    & fire

The Neutralized Sore of the Unshackled Bear

He had limping blue forelegs. He was a balding Don Juan. Around his hut were shackled secretary birds carving footnotes on the light of his eardrums. He was trapped inside his forehead going over the fire of his backsliding memory. There were harpies with green earlobes hopping over horses. There were meadowlarks in chains eating blood from a dagger. He began to reel....

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: UNIV OF ALABAMA PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0817358005
• ISBN 13: 9780817358006
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 344
• Herausgeber: Nielsen Aldon Lynn, Ramey Lauri
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande