Discovery and Discipline in East St. Louis
To obtain an informed view of what is happening in American poetry
and poetics, you have to do a lot of work.
One task is to attend to matters of discovery and discipline in East St.
Louis and the directions traced in
Roy, Darlene. Afrosynthesis:
A Feast of Poetry & Folklore.
East St. Louis: Kuumba Scribes Press, 2015.
Roy, a co-founder of the Eugene B. Redmond Writers Club, has compiled a guidebook to the kind of
African American experimentation and lore which is seldom mentioned in such critical discourses on the status of our
literature as the anthology What I Say:
Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America
(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2015), edited by Aldon Lynn Nielsen
and Lauri Ramey. Roy's book is evidence
that our literary culture is vast , always contributing the American historical narrative which is myopic and
unfinished. The yearly
"Da-Dum-Dun" gatherings that pay homage to Miles Dewey Davis, Henry
Dumas, and Katherine Dunham enliven triple consciousness regarding sound,
words, and motion, but that consciousness can only be transmitted by such a
creative document as Afrosynthesis,
which allows us to discover the rewarding discipline of the kwansaba, a fixed poetic form that originated in East
St. Louis.
"The kwansaba," Roy explains , "is a form
composed of seven lines of poetry,
each of which has seven words, with
each word containing no more than seven
letters. It was developed by Eugene
B. Redmond and refined in an EBRWC summer workshop in 1995" (60). The forty-three kwansabas
in Afrosynthesis, which are
prefaced by free flowing poems, blues, toasts, haikus and tankas ---preparatory works for dealing with the
challenges of the kwansaba, illuminate how to both conform to and depart from
the strict rules. In "Appendix:
Guidelines to Writing Effective Kwansabas" (60-61), Roy enumerates
permissible exceptions to the rule of seven and suggests using alliteration,
assonance, neologisms, and onomatopoeia to maximize variety.
It is pleasant to
discover from careful readings of Roy's kwansabas how discipline within a
tradition inspires remarkable innovations
---re-w(rapping), for example, of consciousness
into conch-us-nests. Through the dedicated play with language and
form, Roy teaches us how shape historical clues about the April 1, 1865
founding of East St. Louis or the July 2, 1917 race riot (a prism for Ferguson,
August 9, 2014); craft praise poems for
Mrs. Ezora Gertrude Woodard Duncan, Josephine Baker, Barack Hussein Obama, Sonia Sanchez, Quincy Troupe; remix Paul Laurence Dunbar's phonetics with
the humor of Langston Hughes.
Ultimately, Roy teaches us that the discipline demanded by fixed poetic
forms begets stronger authenticity and encourages sustained meditation on the
conditions of now. Ah, yes. Afrosynthesis gives us proof that
innovation in a nest of complex African American imperatives is a beautiful thing in need-plagued time.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr. May
11, 2016
