Innovations
Three anthologies
Coval, Kevin, Quraysh Ali Lansana, and Nate Marshall, eds. The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip Hop. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2015.
Nielsen, Aldon Lynn and Lauri Ramey, eds. Every
Goodbye Ain't Gone: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry. Tuscaloosa:
University of Alabama Press, 2006.
Nielsen, Aldon Lynn and Lauri Ramey, eds. What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black
Writers in America. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2015.
send us on a mission of tackling difficult w(hole)s by way
of revisiting the frames established by Stephen Henderson ( Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black
Speech and Black Music as Poetic References, 1972) and Eugene B. Redmond (Drumvoices:
The Mission of Afro-American Poetry: A Critical History, 1976).
Forty years ago, Henderson could assume that African
Americans shared something in common regarding how they did something in
language and listened to music, the language and the music being shaped by
profound shared experiences of life in the United States of America ; Redmond
could assume, quite legitimately, that a folk spirit hovered "over the
whole of Afro-American literary and cultural life ---sometimes calling it to
its tasks, other times providing it with just the needed lift and magic (16). Forty
years later, the frames ---mission,
speech, music ---remain valid as abstractions. It is our use of the frames that
has changed dramatically over time; our uses of these frames will always
specify our allegiances both ideological and aesthetic. How we deal with the concrete totality of
poetry, or with the slippery labels we attach to its manifest fragments, throws
violent light on what human beings do not assume in common.
If poetry matters in 2015, it matters in concert with "@#life
matters."
In the interim between 1976 and 2001, the first year of a
new century, the positioning of new black poetry was admirably represented by
Powell, Kevin and Ras Baraka, eds. In the Tradition: An Anthology of Young Black Writers. New York:
Harlem River Press, 1992.
a Sankofa book, acknowledging fidelity to mission as well as
inevitable change in speech and music. To be sure, one could find innovation in
this anthology, but innovation was not its primal feature. Historicized unity within diversity was the
major concern. A decade later, increased
attention to the experimental as a mark of diversity and personal freedom exploded. More overt attention to the individual talent and less to
tradition seasoned poetry in the
performance spaces of page and stage. New assumptions, quite unlike those of
Henderson and Redmond, came into play. Innovation assumed urgency in gestures to
promote inclusion in the making of American poetry.
The question "What is innovation?" is not trivial,
even if it is asked in our Age of Implacable Terrorisms, but the better
question under such conditions is a forking one: "How and why does innovation occur?" Considered as
parts of ongoing projects to discover what is "representative," Every Goodbye Ain't Gone and What I Say (two units of a whole) complement The
BreakBeat Poets. At the same time,
the three anthologies prompt our asking why the profound innovation of Asili Ya
Nadhiri's "tonal drawings written in poetic form" is such an
interesting absence. Literature,
especially poetry, is like light; it is at once wave and particles, artifact
(what a poet creates) and event (an
unpredictable process involving materiality and sensation for a poet's
audiences). In order to be innovative,
it is essential that a work effect
conceptual or epistemological difference rather than superficial visual or/and
auditory difference. This is how innovation occurs. Why do they occur? Innovations happen because human beings abhor
stasis, the boredom of aural or visual static.
The absence of Nadhiri's tonal drawings, and work by a few other poets
who refuse to be properly unorthodox, allows one to suspect that the
counter-establishment also has tacit rules of exclusion. Even if that is not the case, the absence does
serve to emphasize, yet once again, that
any anthology is a limited representation, a sampling that creates grounds for broader
explorations.
In the instance of What I Say, the subtitle " Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America"
places the contributors in a national matrix, whereas the subtitle "An Anthology of Innovative
Poetry by African Americans" assigned to Every Goodbye Ain't Gone
associates poets with genre, special interest groups among American poets, and technique. Thus, in 2006, Nielsen and Ramey justified
their enterprise as "a break from the established disciplinary modes, a
break from regnant pecking orders, and a breakthrough"( xxi) for the period 1945 to approximately 1977.
What is emphasized is both inter- and
intra- dynamics of ignoring and excluding. The justification for What I Say as a continuation of the original project in 2015 is of quite a different order.
"One of the crucial contributions of this volume, then," according to
Nielsen and Ramey, "will be to provide a much broader context for
understanding the poetic innovations of
the 1970s and 1980s in the United States, permitting readers to map the
independent routes by which various poets reached their particular modes of
aesthetic experimentation "(xiv).
It is most strategic that they did not write the introduction about independent
routes but gave that task to C. S. Giscombe, who fulfilled it with "Making
Book: Winners, Losers, Poetry, Anthologies, and the Color Line," his 2007
MLA presentation for a panel on "Poetry, Race, Aesthetics." I urge readers to scrutinize Giscombe's introduction to discover what is
currently the price of inclusion.
It is noteworthy that The
BreakBeat Poets anthology represents a bolder taking of risks than does What I Say, primarily because it seems to return with maximum energy to
the mapping of cultural utterances made in the Powell and Baraka anthology; one
might have discovered follow-though mappings in
Medina, Tony and Louis Reyes Rivera, eds. Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001.
Medina, Tony, Samiya A. Bashir, and Quraysh Ali Lansana,
eds. Role Call: A Generational Anthology
of Social and Political Black Literature and Art. Chicago: Third World Press, 2002.
Rivera, Louis Reyes and Bruce George, eds. The Bandana Republic: A Literary Anthology
by Gang Members and Their Affiliates. Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull Press, 2008.
Given that Douglas Kearney has work on pages 86-92 of What I Say and pages 117-126 of The BreakBeat Poets, it seems apparent that innovation as innovation simply
ignores the artificial boundaries that literary discourses have not completely
abandoned and re-valorizes William Melvin Kelley's message that Dunfords Travels Everywheres
(1970). One expects nothing more and
nothing less from a book which represents "New American Poetry in the Age
of Hip-Hop." Although neo-capitalism
has co-opted and reductively "objectified" many aspects of hip-hop, it has failed to
eradicate the ancient collective spirit Eugene B. Redmond alluded to in Drumvoices or the referential power of
speech and music Henderson evoked in Understanding
the New Black Poetry. The work
collected in this anthology is nothing
short of mind-blasting; it is an arsenal of aesthetic weaponry for the
creation of new verbal and visual orders in this world. It does not disappoint in effecting Kevin
Coval's hope that the book is "a piece of the growing discourse on how art
can be used to create a fresher world, a useful tool to further and extend and
generate conversations in classrooms and ciphers, on the corner, in living
rooms, in institutions, and in the renegade spaces young people carve out for
themselves despite state control....This is a prayer book and a shank, concrete
realism and abstracted futurism" (xxii).
Through the conduit of innovations, ashé complements amen! If poetry matters in 2015, it matters in
concert with "@#life matters."
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
September 22, 2015
