Book Trailer: The Black Arts Enterprise by Howard Rambsy II

The outpouring of creative expression known as the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s spawned a burgeoning number of black-owned cultural outlets, including publishing houses, performance spaces, and galleries. Central to the movement were its poets, who in concert with editors, visual artists, critics, and fellow writers published a wide range of black verse and advanced new theories and critical approaches for understanding African American literary art.  

The Black Arts Enterprise and the Production of African American Poetry offers a close examination of the literary culture in which BAM's poets (including Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Larry Neal, Haki Madhubuti, Carolyn Rodgers, and others) operated and of the small presses and literary anthologies that first published the movement's authors. The book also describes the role of the Black Arts Movement in reintroducing readers to poets such as Langston Hughes, Robert Hayden, Margaret Walker, and Phillis Wheatley. 

Focusing on the material production of Black Arts poetry, the book combines genetic criticism with cultural history to shed new light on the period, its publishing culture, and the writing and editing practices of its participants. Howard Rambsy II demonstrates how significant circulation and format of black poetic texts—not simply their content—were to the formation of an artistic movement. The book goes on to examine other significant influences on the formation of Black Arts discourse, including such factors as an emerging nationalist ideology and figures such as John Coltrane and Malcolm X. 

"Rambsy's book takes up in closer detail the central issues of the Black Arts Movement, and its approach will be a model for subsequent scholarship. Reverberations from the Black Arts era are still demonstrably at work in the literature of this moment, and this rereading of the BAM era brings with it a reconfiguration of our understandings of previous eras."
—Aldon Nielsen, Penn State University

"Rambsy's sharp analysis of the material production of Black Arts poetry, supported by an extraordinarily sensitive attention to significant historical and textual detail, greatly advances our knowledge of the Black Arts Movement."
—James Smethurst, University of Massachusetts Amherst

"The Black Arts Enterprise and the Production of African American Poetry is the first serious study to concentrate on the creative and critical role of Black poets, their poetry, their publishers, and the cultural, economic, and political activity their work generated in the nation . . . essential reading for students of the Black Arts Movement and African American studies."
—Haki R. Madhubuti, Founder and Publisher of Third World Press

"As a hip, deeply versed young scholar, Rambsy applies verve to a model-building examination of BAM versifiers. Fellow scholars, librarians, poetry lovers, 'transmitters' of culture, spoken word-music collaborators, and BAM comrades, in particular, will find welcoming embraces in The Black Arts Enterprise and the Production of African American Poetry."
—Eugene B. Redmond, author of Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry (A Critical History)

Howard Rambsy II is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville.

The Digital Crate: "In the Full Moon of Sonia"

courtesy Jill Brazel

From the Digital Crate: The Full Moon of Sonia

by Mark Anthony Neal | NewBlackMan

“Black people’s reality is controlled by alien forces. This is why Sonia Sanchez is so beautiful & needed; this is also why she is so dangerous.”

—Haki Madhubuti (Don L. Lee)

For those who’ve heard ever Sonia Sanchez perform, you know that she possesses a spirit that seemingly gains energy with each word that she offers to the world. Indeed, I can still hear her poly-syllabic chants in my head as if I was 19 year-old again watching her weave her poetic magic the first time I saw her perform in 1985.

Sonia Sanchez was born more than seventy-years ago in Birmingham (Bombingham), Alabama. Dr. Sanchez is more likely though, to claim herself as a native of New York, the city that she moved to as a nine-year old and the place where she began to cultivate her poetic skills after graduating from Hunter College in 1955. Sanchez’s poetry workshops in the 1960s at places like the Downtown Community School proved politically challenging to her employers. According to Sanchez, she was “white-balled” in New York and eventually left New York taking teaching positions as various schools until she landed at Temple University in 1977. She retired from Temple in 1999.

Sanchez’s first collection of poetry, Homecoming, was published by Dudley Randall’s Broadside Press in 1969, followed by We a BaddDDD People in 1970. Both collections featured poetry that literally screamed off the page as if Sanchez was struggling to find language to fully convey the emotions that informed her poetry, whether it was the plight of African-Americans in the United States or her failing marriage with the late “prison” poet Etheridge Knight. As Sanchez told MELUS, “you must remember, when we were reading poetry at that time, there was not an interest in poetry. People had their ears tuned to radios…something with a beat.” Sanchez and many of her peers such as Haki Madhubuti (Don L. Lee) and Nikki Giovanni found success in the late 1960s and early 1970s by gearing their poetry to the dance-floor and the street.

Not surprisingly, Sanchez’s legacy is being recovered by the hip-hop generation, particularly among spoken word poets. Danny Simmons, executive producer of Def Poetry, refers to Sanchez as the “spiritual mother” of spoken word. And indeed Ms. Sanchez gives love back citing the late Tupac Shakur (who she pays tribute to on Full Moon of Sonia), Rakim, and Ursula Rucker (who bears a striking resemblance to Sanchez) as exemplars of hip-hop generation wordsmiths. More than anything Full Moon of Sonia is an attempt to speak more directly to the hip-hop generation.

Recorded during the National Black Arts Festival in 2003, where Ms. Sanchez was celebrated as a “living legend,” Full Moon of Sonia is Sanchez’s first solo recording after more than thirty-five years as a published poet. Backed by a stream of R&B, Funk, Jazz, Soul, Blues and Gospel, Sanchez brings to musical life a range of poetry that captures the demons and passions of African-American life. Poems such as “Bubba” (which first appeared in Home Girls and Hand Grenades), “Tupac” and “For Langston/I’ve Known Rivers” (for the legendary poet) recalls figures from Sanchez’s past, allowing her memories of them to speak to the humanity of black men in the midst of on-going demonization.

Earlier in her career, Sanchez was often lock-step with the most fiery expressions of 1960s styled black nationalism. Though Sanchez remains fiery, Sanchez’s black nationalist politics are muted some what  these days, in part because of her embrace of feminist politics. So a piece like “Poem for Some Women” performed to the gospel track “There’s a Leak in this Old Building” gives light to a women who leaves her baby in a crack-house, indicting the men who take advantage of both the woman and her child, as well as a society that offers little support for poor single mothers. Even more powerful is a track like “He/She” which examines the utter tragedy of domestic abuse. And still Sanchez takes time to have fun as she does with “Good Morning Sex.”

Full Moon of Sonia, represents Sonia Sanchez as a poet women at her peak. At once she embodies the power and promise of African-American expression and a clarion example of longevity and vitality for a hip-hop generation in dire need of artistic role models. 

###

 

Mark Anthony Neal is the author of five books including the forthcoming Looking For Leroy: (Il)Legible Black Masculinities (New York University Press). He is professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African & African-American Studies at Duke University and the host of the weekly video webcast Leftof Black. Follow him on Twitter @NewBlackMan.