Books by Marvin X

Love and War: Poems  / In the Crazy House Called America / Woman: Man's Best Friend /  Beyond Religion Toward Spirituality

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Notes on the Journal of Black Poetry Festival

Marvin X, Chief Planner

Tentative date for the Journal of Black Poetry Festival: Late September, 2007.

Purpose: To give honor and respect to Brother Dingane Joe Goncalves, publisher and editor of the Journal of Black Poetry JBP.

The invited poets and planners include Amiri Baraka, Askia Toure, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Last Poets, Haki Madhubuti, Kalamu ya Salaam, Amina Baraka, Eugene Redman, Rudolph Lewis, Tureeda, Ayodele Nzinga, Naru, Ptah, Marcel Diallo, Tureeda, Ishmael Reed, Devorah Major, Al Young, Jose Angel Figerora, Nefertiti El Muhajir, Muhammida El Muhajir, Larry Ukali Johnson, Reginald Lockett, Devorah Major, Marvin X.

As per funding, we should consider that the JBP was published independently without corporate or government funding. Shall we continue this tradition of do for self with respect to funding this festival, since this project is a continuation of the cultural revolution that will impact the consciousness of participants, especially the hip hop generation.  And why should we beg corporations and foundations to do for us what we should do for ourselves?

If every interested poet would donate a hundred or thousand dollars, we could pull this off independently. If poets would be willing to pay their own airfare and lodging, that would be a nice chunk out of the budget. We have a tentative facility at Oakland's Eastside Arts Center. Laney College is nearby and we expect the students at Laney's Club Knowledge to be a part of the planning to insure the hip hop generation is represented in this intergenerational gathering.

Anyway, tell me your thoughts on funding, agenda and expected outcome. Please respond to me by email (mrvnx@yahoo.com ) and/or snail mail: Marvin X, P.O. Box 1317, Paradise CA 95967. Happy New Year,  Marvin X

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Journal of Black Poetry Festival

Marvin X, Chief Planner

Marvin X is the chief planner of The Journal of Black Poetry Festival being organized for sometime next year. He is calling on all Pan African poets to participate. The JBP festival has the backing of founding publisher/editor Dingane Joe Goncalves. All poets who were published in the JBP are being drafted to participate. Nikki Giovanni has informed Marvin X she will contribute since her first published poem appeared in the Journal. Some of the editors included Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Askia Toure, Larry Neal, Marvin X. Contributors included Kalamu ya Salaam, Haki Madhubuti, Last Poets, Ed Bullins, and so many others it would be impossible to list.

In fact, the Journal was the chief organ of the Black Arts Movement, along with magazines Black World, Black Theatre, Black Dialogue, SoulBook, Liberator, Umbra, and a few others. See James Smethurst's The Black Arts Movement, University of North California Press. Almost anyone who was a budding poet or poet of substance appeared in the Journal, including poets from Africa and the Caribbean. Additionally, it was a communication organ of the black arts revolution, containing regional and national news on the cultural revolution.

The Journal of Black Poetry probably published more poets than any other journal in the history of American literature. Thus, we want to honor the man who single-handedly edited this critical publication of Pan African and North American African literature:Digane (Joe Goncalves). Shy and reclusive, Digane agreed to participate after Marvin X told him he would be kidnapped and brought to the festival.

Other key organizers include Eugene Redmond, Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Rudolph Lewis. If you and/or your organization would like to participate and be a listed as a supporter, please leave a note on my blog: http://marvinxspeaks.blogspot.com 

The festival will probably take place in Oakland at the Eastside Arts Cultural Center, which recently hosted the 40th anniversary of the Black Panther Party, and produces the annual Malcolm X Jazz Festival.

If you have ideas on the agenda or papers, send them to the above blog. Dingane is preparing to publish an anthology of the Journal that was edited by the late poet/critic Sherley A. Williams. We know contributions are needed to publish this important anthology. Certainly, any poet who appeared in the JBP should consider making a generous donation to the anthology. A topic of discussion should be how to publish radical literary organs to continue the cultural revolution.

Don't be caught in the new year without a copy of Marvin X's Beyond Religion, Toward Spirituality , essays on consciousness, Black Bird Press, 281 pages, $19.95. Order from Black Black Bird Press, P.O. Box 1317, Paradise CA 95967. Add $5.00 for priority mailing.

ISBN: 0-9649672-9-4

For interviews, bookings, contact Suninleo PR

muhammida el muhajir, creative director
sun in leo, inc.
718.574.6331
718.496.2305
www.suninleo.com

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Larry Neal, Guest Editor

The Journal of Black Poetry is published for all black people everywhere. It will appear quarterly. Copyright 1968 by Joe Goncalves. Journal of Black Poetry / 1308 Masonic Avenue #4 / San Francisco, California 94117

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[Although] its circulation was not as large [as Negro Digest/Black World . . . a circulation . . . over 100,000 . . . the largest literary magazine in American history] , The Journal of Black Poetry which published 19 issues between the mid sixties and the mid seventies, is one of the most vibrant examples of an independently published, non-academic poetry journal in the history of American publishing.

—Kalamu ya Salaam, "What Is Black Poetry"

Dingane Joe Goncalves became Black Dialogue's poetry editor and, as more and more poetry poured in, he conceived of starting the Journal of Black Poetry. Founded in San Francisco, the first issue was a small magazine with mimeographed pages and a lithographed cover. Up through the summer of 1975, the Journal published nineteen issues and grew to over one hundred pages. Publishing a broad range of more than five hundred poets, its editorial policy was eclectic. Special issues were given to guest editors who included Ahmed Alhamisi, Don L. Lee (Haki R. Madhubuti), Clarence Major, Larry Neal, Dudley Randall, Ed Spriggs, and Askia Touré. In addition to African Americans, African, Caribbean, Asian, and other international revolutionary poets were presented.

—Kalamu ya Salaam, “Historical Overviews of The Black Arts Movement”

Goncalves (Dingane), an occasional poet, is unique in his intellectual-typographical approach to ideas (see Black Fire), but his service to black poetry has been more obvious in his work as founder-editor of the Journal of Black Poetry. He also served as poetry editor of Black Dialogue. A quiet but steady influence on the new black poetry, he has written some of the most informed criticism to come out of the period.—Eugene B. Redmond, DrumVoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry, A Critical History (1976)

One of the most important important results of the creation of Black Dialogue in terms of the Black Arts movement was that it led to the creation of the third important Bay Area journal, the Journal of Black Poetry, in 1966. the editor of JBP, Dingane Joe Goncalves, raised in Boston, was a leader of CORE in the Bay Area. In fact, it was in san Francisco CORE office that the visual artist and poet Edward Spriggs and Goncalves first met. the relationship between Goncalves and Spriggs no doubt strengthened, if not actually forged, Goncalves's ties to the various black political and cultural circles centered on San Francisco States. Goncalves and Spriggs (who was soon relocated to New York) joined the staff of Black Dialogue on which Spriggs served as the East Coast correspondent and Goncalves as the poetry editor.

When Black Dialogue received far more worthwhile poetry than it could possibly print, Goncalves saw the need for a new journal devoted to black poetry. The result was JBP—on which Spriggs worked, too, as a regional corresponding editor from Harlem. In many ways the project of JBP  was much like that of Black Dialogue: to allow young black writers with or without wider reputations to speak to each other, to try out their voices. Again, much like the new avant-garde outside the Black Arts movement as well as within it, JBP emphasized process over finished product.

However JBP became far more than a journal of poetry. it published critical reviews, and news about black cultural and political movements sent in from all over the United States (and beyond). Regular corresponding editors such as Spriggs and Clarence major in new York, provided some of this news. But reader correspondents sent in much more, reporting on theaters, workshops, readings, presses, and so on from Savannah to Seattle. Also despite his political and cultural commitments, Goncalves was in many respects a very reclusive person, staying out of the conflicts that became endemic in the Bay Area after the split between the BPP and many of the Black Arts activists in the Bay Area in 1967, allowing JBP to weather political storms that destroyed, hamstrung, or forced the relocation of many key Bay Area Black Arts activists and institutions.

In short, JBP was incredibly important in facilitating grassroots communication and a sense of community among black artists across the country. If one truly wishes to gain a sense of the scope of the Black Arts movement and how the movement worked on the ground in the second half of the 1960s and the early 1970s, especially outside New York, Chicago, and the Bay Area, the news section of JBP is indispensable.—James Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement (2005)

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UCLA PN6109.7 .J82 -- Journal of black poetry. v. 1, no. 1-17; summer 1966-summer 1973 San Francisco, California

Continued by Kitabu cha jua. v. 1, no. 18-, Summer 1974 Library has v.14-19(1970-75)

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The Journal of Black Poetry, Volume One (Fall-Winter), Number Three, 1966, 20 pages, Black and White photo of Malcolm X

Titles Include: Without Tenderness, The Genesis, White Power, Massa in De Cold, Cold Ground, Your Presence, A Sower Went Out to Sow His Seed, Death of a Nigger, In This Underground of Blackness, Poem for Members, her, Every Time I Feel the Spirit, What Goes Around Comes Around, The Singer, My Brother, Time to Die, Song of the Dry Season, The Golden Ode

Authors: David Diop, Alexander Pushkin, Clarence Major, Jon Eckels, Fred Bradford, Dwight Newby, Ed Bullins, Le Graham, Clarence Major, Carl Boissiere, James Danner, Raymond Dandridge, Antara

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The Journal of Black Poetry, Summer 1967, No. 5, 44 pages Authors: Sam Cornish, Dudley Randall, Cy Leslie, Hillary Broadous, Richard Allen, Larry Neal, L.G. Damas, Jacque Roumain, Aime Cesaire, Nicolas Guillen, Jorge de Lima, Marvin X, JMM, George Jacobs, Don L. Lee, Roland Young

Titles: The Policeman Always, With Nothing Else, Sooner or Later, Ballads of the Numbers Game, The Beautiful, Towards a Ballade of the Girl Next Door, For the Life of an Uncle Tom, Yeah! I knew You didn’t, Look Not for Spirituals, Garvey’s Ghost,  The Night they Came, When the Drum Beats, Listen to the White World, A Little Rock, The Song of Hope and 9 more!

Includes Black and White photo and drawings

Titles & Authors: The Policeman Always, Sooner or Later, With Nothing Else  by Sam Cornish; Ballad of the Numbers Game, by Dudley Randall; The Beautiful by, Cy Leslie; Towards a Ballad of the Girl Next Door, by Hillery Broadous; The Primitive Man, by Marvin X; Garvey’s Ghost  by Larry Neal.

More Authors names: Essays by Roland Young; Report from Detroit by Le Graham.

Special 7-page supplement: Black Poets from Brazil, Cuba, Guyana, Martinque, Haiti.

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Journal of Black Poetry, Vol. 1 No. 11. Spring 1969. Spriggs, Ed, Guest Editor. Oversized (8-1/2x11) Poetry, essays, criticism. Many of the major BAM poets represented, including Carolyn Rodgers, Ethridge Knight, Marvin X, Nikki Giovanni, Don L. Lee, Sonia Sanchez, Stanley Crouch, Ted Joans, etc. . To back of cover. 80 pp.

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Journal of Black Poetry, Number 16, Summer 1972. Oversized. Goncalves, Joe, Ed.Many BAM poets represented, including John Clark, Sterling Plumpp, Jay Wright, Pearl C. Lomax, Kalamu ya Salaam , Elma Stuckey. many others. Essay by Walter Rodney. Contributing editors: Amiri Baraka, Marvin X, Larry Neal. To cover.100 pp.

posted 19 December 2006

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Panel on Literary Criticism 26 March 2010  National Black Writers Conference Patrick Oliver, Kalamu ya Salaam, Dorothea Smartt, Frank Wilderson discuss the use of literature to promote political causes and instigate change and transformation.  The event is at the Medgar Evers College at the City University of New York. C-Span Archives Panel on Politics and Satire 26 March 2010  National Black Writers Conference Herb Boyd, Thomas Bradshaw, Charles Edison and Major Owens discuss how current events are reflected in the writings of African Americans.  The event is at the Medgar Evers College at the City University of New York. C-Span Archives

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BLACK CLASSIC BOOKS   BCP Digital Printing

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updated 17 October 2007