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Books by Louis Reyes Rivera
Who Pays The Cost (1978) /
This One For You (1983) /
Scattered
Scripture
Bum Rush the Page
(co-editor) /
The Bandana Republic (co-editor)
Sancocho: A Book of Nuyorican Poetry by Shaggy Flores
(edited by Louis Reyes Rivera)
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Inside
the River of Poetry
By Louis Reyes Rivera
New York, New York
Always there is need for song. And every
human has a poem to write, a compulsion to contemplate out loud,
an urge to dig out that ore of confusion locked up inside. But
with the contradictions of privilege and caste, of class and
gender distinctions regulating access, of those ever present
distortions in textbooks with their one-sided measure of human
worth, and with the culture of white man still serving as
ultimate yardstick to what is acceptable as matter, not everyone
is permitted to learn to read, much less to study poetry or hone
the art and take the risk of putting one's self on paper.
While wanting to be naturally soothed by self-definition, too
many among us learn to rely on commercial lyricists to reflect
our joy and pain. At best, we latch onto committed activists who
take on as social vocation the work of bridging the human spirit
with word made flesh. At worst, we fall prey to professional
wordsmiths (politicians and preachers alike) who conjure up
another religion that dissuades us from social contention.
Somewhere in between these two extremes, we sometimes meet and
break a moment's bread with poets.
Today, what was once called poetry is referred to now as Spoken
Word Art. Unlike the Rappers who have Hip Hopped twenty-syllable
couplets into a steadfast beat, Spoken Word Artists have
returned to free verse oration exhilarated by internal rhyme
schemes and unfettered metaphors that speak directly to inner
city blues. The news of the day, testament and affirmation,
current and advanced, informs this form of poetry that outlines
the immediate and understudied aspirations of African and Latino
Americans caught in the crossfire between skin game caste and an
ever shrinking planet of high tech advances.
Desk top publishing, internet websites, tea parties and Open Mic
readings, marathon jams and poetry slams have combined to form
the latest battlesites between truth and decadence. Inside the
range of this contention are the new poets being pulled by and
pushing against a state of confusion in search of clarity.
Their names are many and they come from everywhere, like
Jamaican Dub Poets in Germany and England, or Nuyorican Poets in
Texas and the Bronx. To single out the more notoriously known
here in New York as comprising the new heat (like Tony Medina,
Asha Bandele, Jessica Care Moore, Nzinga Chavis, Saul Williams,
UniVerses, 2nd To Last, Ras Baraka), without qualification, is
to commit the same crime as today's textbooks: taking a single
droplet or two out of a river and making out like two droplets
are the actual river itself. For just as each drop of water
helps to form a river, each name dropped is but a metaphor for
the many others who came before or right alongside those whose
work forms our current popular canon.
Poetry, you see, is as old as breath itself. For when human
beings across the planet simultaneously uttered that first
initial sound, they gave rise to the same echo heard in the wail
of every newborn child. The sound of that cry might be
onomatopoeic, but its meaning is quite literal. "I am here,
now!" This is the essential affidavit that serves as
testament inside every person's compulsion to give voice to the
voice, as condition urges vision, vision provokes thought, and
thought pronounces the name of God: "I matter, too!"
Thus the birth of the word, the root of every language. Poetry.
The strength of the people. The finest manifestation of craft,
content and intent in every written and oral expression. The
basis upon which all other literary genres have evolved. From
poetry, not only the lyric, but as well drama and narrative, the
expository and the thematic, the didactic and the ideological as
root to all our scripture, sacred and profane.
It began as a blending of sound (the rhythm), sense (the
experience), and color (the given image). A voice raised in
celebration of itself. Chant and dance, music and tone, mystery
and miracle forged into the embodied literature of people
passing it on, by speech and sight, to each subsequent
generation, asking and answering the fundamental question: How
do we live? And is that the same as how we want to live or what
we mean when we say there's something we're supposed to do?
The Chinese call it The Way; the Buddhist, Enlightenment; the
Hindu, Nirvana; the Muslim, Complete Submission to the Will of
Allah; the Egyptian-Judeo-Christian, Seeking the Light; and
among many Africans and Amerindians it was once referred to as
Being At One With Life. And from the poets among them, it is
that inner compulsion to Follow the Muse. They speak to the same
cause, challenging the inner voice to maintain balance between
flesh, thought, action. Thus, Poet as author of scripture and
Griot as Keeper of a Narrative. Each generation, regenerated by
its own voices has, since the first word heard, added to that
tapestry of affirmation. In Egypt and throughout the Americas,
they called it Song; in Israel, Psalms; in West Africa, Nommo;
and in Greece, Poetry.
It knows no borders. Unrestricted by or to genre, gender,
nation, race, time or class. For in the need to contemplate,
inside the compulsion to sing, and as Gylan Kain says, "to
give voice to the deeper meaning of ourselves," poets learn
to look upon love, life, struggle both as interchangeable terms
and as the only limitations self-imposed. This is why poets are
never invited to participate in televised forums, roundtable
discussions and panels with other writers and speakers,
journalists, politicians, social activists, academics, religious
leaders. You never know what the poet will say.
This is also why poetry is considered the most dangerous art
form, why it is not honestly taught and thoroughly nurtured into
our youth in the schools, among our adults in the factories and
fields, inside our homes, churches, offices. It cannot be
diluted, bought, sold, compromised or traded without treason to
its beauty, its necessity, its meaning. The poet learns to care
about every word.
What we often view as a national literature is but one of many
rivers coursing its way into the ocean of all our knowledge. In
the general sense of world literature, we're supposed to bear in
mind the ocean into which every river flows; with the particular
local canon, however, we are actually cheated from studying all
those droplets comprising both rivers and streams (the ethnic
and the national), despite the fact that without them, there'd
be no water to feed into that ocean.
Sad to say that too many of today's Spoken Word Artists lack an
understanding of their own context. So focused on the immediacy
of their own moment of breath, they are not as well studied into
the history and evolution of this artform for the vocation that
it is. In short, they have not really read or been taught to
engage the works of those who came before them. And so, this
contributive note regarding the river of our poetry.
African American poetry is not restricted to the United States.
It is an hemispheric phenomenon as old as the dirge and the moan
heard inside those first slave ships bound for the
slave-breaking islands of the Caribbean, to Hispaniola and
Mexico, long before they landed in Virginia. In the U.S., where
drums were outlawed, it manifested as folklore, Spirituals and
the Blues; in the Caribbean as Plena (Barbados), Bomba (Puerto
Rico), Ska (Jamaica), with conga and steel drums, as with
Merengue (Haiti) Mambo (Cuba) Calypso (Trinidad), like Samba
(Brazil).
With European influences setting up the parameters over form and
acceptability, here or there the poem was separated from music.
Thus, slave narratives grew into novels and African poetry in
the Americas often took on the semblance of European meter, pace
and nuance (a la Phyllis Wheatley).
Today's reading rooms, soirees and poetry jams are hardly a new
tradition, as they can be consistently traced back to 1888, the
year that marked the end of American chattel slavery and the
beginning of Negritude (both in Brazil) --during which period
the children and grandchildren of slaves and runaways begin
their careers as writers searching for new definition (like
Charles Chestnut in fiction, Paul Lawrence Dunbar in poetry, and
W.E.B. DuBois as researcher and social critic).
Of course, freedmen were writing long before then. North
American (John Russworm, David Walker, Frederick Douglass,
Martin Delaney, William Wells Brown) and Caribbean writers (Placido,
Eugenio Maria de Hostos, Ramon Emeterio Betances, Lola Rodriguez
de Tio, Jose Marti) had been laying out a foundation for a
literary African/American thought. But it is after 1888 that a
genuine and continuing renaissance begins, as it now included
all of the descendants of former slaves learning to define
themselves on paper. Thus, Rag and the Blues as immediate
metaphor for the thousands of artists in places like Memphis,
New Orleans, Chicago, Santiago de Cuba, Le Cap and Harlem, who
helped initiate a composite rebirth of African art spreading
across the face of America, sometimes rolling like a teardrop,
other times in denial of itself, but always from the spirit of
intellect shaping its own voice.
By the 1920s and early '30s, social struggle and a budding
aesthetic had converged throughout the colonial world. Political
movements (unionism, socialism, communism, anarchism, Pan-Africanism,
nationalism, independence) often intersected with a cultural
counterpart (Creolism, Diepalism, Negritude, the Harlem
Renaissance). Cross-fertilizing. Like the largest number of UNIA
chapters during the Garvey years were in Louisiana and Cuba,
corresponding to the growth of a U.S. National Negro Renaissance
and a Cuban Negrismo movement also taking place. Each in their
own way stood against European imperialism while uncovering the
parameters of self-definition.
As with the many African and Latino American poets practicing
the art today, the list of folks involved back then is endless.
In addition to critics, researchers and activists, like Ida B.
Wells, William Monroe Trotter, Carter G. Woodson, Richard B.
Moore, Alain Locke, J.A. Rogers, Zora Neale Hurston, W.E.B.
DuBois, and with people like Arturo Alfonso Schomburg serving as
natural bridge between the English, Spanish, French diasporic
communities, the poets themselves comprised a river of
personnel: Pablo Neruda, Luis Pales Matos, Jose de Diego,
Nicolas Guillen, Juan Antonio Corretjer, Julia de Burgos,
Clemente Soto Velez, Alfredo Miranda Archilla, Aime Cesaire,
Leopold Sedor Senghor, Leon Damas, Countee Cullen, James Weldon
Johnson, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Sterling
Brown, and so many others who've not been as extensively
published or read as these few. But their collective impact
ushered in new forms and a continuum of literary stalwarts like
Richard Wright, Margaret Walker Alexander, Gwendolyn Brooks,
James Baldwin, and John Oliver Killens. Killens, by the way,
along with historian John Henrik Clarke, co-founded the Harlem
Writers Guild, the one group that definitively bridged the
Harlem Renaissance of the '20s/'30s with the 1960s Black Arts
Movement and the 1970s Nuyorican Poetry Phenomenon.
Those who workshopped alongside Killens, in or out of the Guild,
include at least two generations of dramatists (Lonnie Elder
III, Loften Mitchell, Charles Russell, Douglas Turner Ward,
Ossie Davis), fiction writers (Alice Childress, Rosa Guy, Piri
Thomas, Maya Angelou, Louise Merriwhether, Sarah E. Wright,
Richard Perry, Doris Jean Austin, Brenda Connor-Bey, Elizabeth
Nunez Harrell, Nicholasa Mohr, Brenda Wilkerson, Arthur
Flowers), poets and lyricists (Mari Evans, BJ Ashanti, Askia
Muhammad Toure, Mervyn Taylor, Thulani Davis, Ntozake Shange,
Fatisha, and Irving Burgie --the one who wrote most of the
British Caribbean songs that first made Harry Belafonte famous).
With the Black Arts Movement, the proverbial Pushkin spark
turned into flame as the 1966 National Black Writers Conference
at Fisk University (organized by Killens) gave cognizance to
what had already been taking place; thus we have the new
poet-theoreticians, like Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal, Askia
Toure, Ishmael Reed, Audre Lorde, Henry Dumas, alongside new
critics, like Addison Gayle and Hoyt Fuller, new venues, like
Umbra, Cannon Reed & Johnson, or the Watts Writers Workshop,
through which Jayne Cortez and Quincy Troupe had developed their
skills, or like Detroit-based Dudley Randall, through whose
publishing efforts began the careers of Haki Madhubuti, Carolyn
Rodgers, Sonia Sanchez. Like The Last Poets, many of them were
as influenced by Malcolm X as by Martin Luther King, Langston
Hughes, Margaret Walker, Paul Robeson and DuBois.
By the late 1960s, Victor Hernandez Cruz, Jesus Papoleto
Melendez and Felipe Luciano became the latest spanning between
African American and Puerto Rican literature that had been
previously bridged by the likes of Schomburg, Guillen and Jesus
Colon. As the 1970s took off, a Nuyorican mix began its own
sidestream fruition to both African American and Puerto Rican
orthodoxy. Spanglish took its place beside AfroAmericanese as a
new idiom, with poets Miguel Algarin, Lorraine Sutton, Americo
Casiano, Miguel Pinero, Sandra Maria Esteves, Julio Marzan,
Lucky Cienfuegos, Roberto Marquez, Jose Angel Figueroa, Tato
Laviera, Noel Rico, Magdalena Gomez, Susana Cabanas and Pedro
Pietri serving as initial progenitors to another poetic
sensibility. Its availability and earned place has often been
hindered by Anglo arrogance and Hispanophilia, caught, as these
poets were, between an evolving aesthetic-in-exile influenced by
Ebonics on the mainland and an active insular and extremely
cultural nationalism in Puerto Rico that at first refused to
even recognize this hybrid created out of U.S. colonialism.
During this same period, from the late 1960s straight into the
1980s, the tradition of small press and self-publishing
(traceable to the 1730s, when Europe began allowing colonies to
own printing presses) had expanded into roughly 1,000
independent magazines and publishing outlets under the influence
or control of African and Latino Americans: Freedomways, Journal
of Black Poetry, Hambone, Callaloo, Literati
Chicago, The Rican Journal, Third World Press, Third
Press, Quinto del Sol, Black Classics Press, Yardbird Reader,
Mango Publications, Arte Publico Press, Black World/First World,
Poettential Unlimited, Shamal Books, Bola Press, Kitchen Table
Press, Single Action Productions, Blind Beggar Press, Drum
Voices Revue, Harlem River Press, just to name a few.
Thus, sandwiched between the Black Arts Movement and the rise of
Hip Hop is a linking generation of African and Latino American
poets, producers and publishers who had come into their own (and
many of them by the mid-1970s) to serve as the latest bridge
connecting the continuum of an hemispheric African American
literary canon. These were the students of Malcolm and Martin
and H. Rap Brown, entering the new decade with their own
resolve, reading, performing and organizing everywhere: in
prisons, community centers, cafes, in homes and on the streets,
at Kwanzaa festivals and Malcolm X commemoration programs, at
political rallies and in the schools. These sidestream
stalwarts, most abundant in places like New York, were the
immediate parents of those who would later become Rap and Spoken
Word (Chuck D., Reg E. Gaines, Bruce George) Artists.
They had entered the '70s knowing that the major publishing
outlets had already slammed its doors on Black Literature. Thus,
they became the generation that had proliferated the publishing
world with their own gumption, giving rise to, if not
solidifying the careers of an Alice Walker, a Toni Morrison and
an Ntozake Shange. Poets-publishers-organizers who did the
basework while working a 9-to-5, raising a family, studying and
performing their craft. In New York City alone, these included
Yusef Waliyaya from The East's African Street festivals, John
Branch from the Afrikan Poetry Theatre, Rich Bartee of
Poettential Unlmtd., Lois Elaine Griffith of the Nuyorican Poets
Cafe, George Edward Tait of the Afrikan Functional Theatre, Gary
Johnston and C.D. Grant of Blind Beggar Press, Layding Kaliba
now with African Voices, Barbara Smith of Kitchen Table Press,
Abu Muhammad of Nubian Blues magazine, Glen Thompson of Harlem
River Press. From them and through them, such poets as Safiya
Henderson-Holmes, Akua Lezli Hope, Zizwe Ngafua, Dawad Philip,
B.J. Ashanti, Ted Wilson, Malkia M'buzi Moore, A. Wanjiku J.
Reynolds, and many others previously mentioned either began or
continued finding outlets for their works to appear in print.
Meanwhile, music and poetry never did finalize the divorce
Euro-Americans insisted upon. Not only were Hughes and Hurston
experimenting with the "jazz poem" and the intonations
of northern and southern folklore back in the 1930s, but from
the BeBop and Afro-Cuban Jazz era straight through to the
present Rap/Spoken Word epoch, musicians and poets have
consistently uncovered the African tradition of incorporating
sound and sense into a wholistic art form. Literature, music and
dance. Louis Armstrong, Sun Ra, Charlie Mingus, King Pleasure,
Slim (Gailliard) & Slam (Stewart), Alvin Ailey had all
eloquently continued that course. Singers Eddie Jefferson, Jon
Hendricks, Oscar Brown, Jr., and, of course, Nina Simone, had
long ago fused poetry into the jazz voice (Billie Holiday's
Strange Fruit was actually a poem someone had given her).
Of equal significance is the immediate link to Rap and Spoken
Word. Musicians Weldon Irvine, Ahmed Abdullah and Oliver Lake,
like their literary counterparts, Gil Scott-Heron, The Last
Poets, Jayne Cortez, Sekou Sundiata, Tom Mitchelson, Yusef
Waliyaya, Cheryl Byron, Atiba Kwabena Wilson, Ngoma Hill, each
in their turn, have preceded Sharif Simmons, UniVerses, 2nd To
Last, etc., in fusing the poem with the idioms of music and
dance.
And so the insistence that music and word are inseparable
elements to the voice raising up and rising up comes full circle
inside the currents of modern poetics. It's part of an ongoing
continuum in constant evolution, an unfinished renaissance
establishing its own parameters on its own terms. Like Sterling
Brown once posed, "If it took Europe 300 years to unfold
its renaissance, what makes you think that we can do it in
six?"
And while it is homegrown North American, it
is also cross-rooted in an African and Caribbean experience.
Published in In Motion Magazine (May 19,
2002)
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Bill Moyers and James Cone (Interview) /
A Conversation with James Cone
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John
Coltrane, "Alabama" /
Kalamu ya Salaam, "Alabama"
/
A Love Supreme
A Blues for the Birmingham Four
/ Eulogy for the Young Victims
/ Six Dead After Church
Bombing
Audio:
My Story, My Song (Featuring blues guitarist Walter Wolfman Washington)
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. This
collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
1950
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
____ 2005
Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update 28 November 2011
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