Nothing But the Music


Book Description

Thulani Davis' synesthetic documentary poems breathe impressionistic life into the sonic-social history of East Coast avant-garde jazz, soul and punk Written between 1974 and 1985, these are Davis' most anthologized works. Featured musicians and dancers include Cecil Taylor, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Bad Brains, Henry Threadgill, Thelonious Monk, the Revolutionary Ensemble, the Commodores, Ishmael Houston-Jones and many more, in performances at historic venues such as the Five Spot, the Village Vanguard and the Apollo. Nothing but the Musicis further proof of Davis' place as a crucial figure, alongside poets Jayne Cortez, Sonia Sanchez and Ntozake Shange, in the cultural landscape surrounding the Black Arts Movement. Thulani Davis(born 1949) is the author of the novels 1959and Maker of Saints, several works of poetry and the forthcoming book The Emancipation Circuit: Black Activism Forging a Culture of Freedom(Duke University Press). She is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin.




The Second Set, Vol. 2


Book Description

Embracing a wide variety of poems informed by jazz, The Second Set includes statements of poetics by many of the poets anthologized.




African American Literature


Book Description

This essential volume provides an overview of and introduction to African American writers and literary periods from their beginnings through the 21st century. This compact encyclopedia, aimed at students, selects the most important authors, literary movements, and key topics for them to know. Entries cover the most influential and highly regarded African American writers, including novelists, playwrights, poets, and nonfiction writers. The book covers key periods of African American literature—such as the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and the Civil Rights Era—and touches on the influence of the vernacular, including blues and hip hop. The volume provides historical context for critical viewpoints including feminism, social class, and racial politics. Entries are organized A to Z and provide biographies that focus on the contributions of key literary figures as well as overviews, background information, and definitions for key subjects.




Lyric and Liberalism in the Age of American Empire


Book Description

What is the difference between the 'I' of a poem--the lyric subject-- and the liberal subject of rights? Lyric and Liberalism in the Age of American Empire uses this question to re-examine the work of five major American poets, changing our understanding of their writing and the field of post-war American poetry. Through extended readings of the work of Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Amiri Baraka, John Ashbery, and Jorie Graham, Hugh Foley shows how poets have imagined liberalism as a problem for poetry. Foley's book offers a new approach to ongoing debates about the nature of lyric by demonstrating the entanglement of ideas about the lyric poem with the development of twentieth-century liberal discussions of individuality. Arguing that the nature of American empire in this period--underpinned by the discourse of individual rights--forced poets to reckon with this entanglement, it demonstrates how this reckoning helped to shape poetry in the post-war period. By tracing the ways a lyric poem performs personhood, and the ways that this person can be distinguished from the individual envisioned by post-war liberalism, Foley shows how each poet stages a critique of liberalism from inside the standpoint of 'lyric'>. This book demonstrates the capacities of poetry for rethinking its own relation to history and politics, providing a new perspective on a vital era of American poetry.




Something Else Again: Poetry and Prose, 1975-2019


Book Description

Associated with the New Narrative movement and published in the ground-breaking anthology This Bridge Called My Back, Gabrielle Daniels’ work spans essays, fiction, poetry and novels. This book, Daniels’ first full-length collection, collects poems and prose from the 1970s to the present, including the complete text of Daniels’ now-impossibly rare chapbook A Movement in Eleven Days, a retrospective essay on New Narrative, and excerpts from her in-progress novel Sugar Wars. From poems inspired by films, music, revolutionary figures, and recent political disasters, to prose pieces on neglected African-American women writers, and urban and wilderness environments, Daniels’ subject matter and media are vast. As Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian write in the anthology Writers Who Love Too Much: “Daniels’ talents spin in every conceivable direction. Her writing continues to investigate and illumine corners of the world often neglected by the white capitalistic structures of patriarchy that shapes our lives from birth to death. Daniels’ work reveals a history, a legacy, a plan of action for the future. These are stories and poems with the punch of a novel in miniature.” Something Else Again reveals a major voice in American literature. GABRIELLE DANIELS was born in New Orleans in 1954 and moved to California at the age of seven. Her grandmother, the late Rev. Ruth Matthews Taylor, was a Spiritualist Minister. Daniels’ essays, stories and poems have appeared in the print and online magazines Big Scream, Equinox: Writing for a New Culture, Kenyon Review, Love You Madly, Mango, Open Space, Poets Reading the News, Rigorous, San Jose Studies, Silver Birch Press, Sinister Wisdom, and Soup, and the anthologies This Bridge Called my Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cheríe Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Sister Fire: Black Womanist Fiction and Poetry, edited by Charlotte Watson Sherman, Another Wilderness: New Outdoor Writing by Women, edited by Susan Fox Rogers, and Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative Writing 1977-1997, edited by Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian. Her reviews have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, American Book Review, Off Our Backs and Women’s Book Review.




The Jazz Republic


Book Description

Reveals the wide-ranging influence of American jazz on German discussions of music, race, and culture in the early twentieth century







Pleasure Dome


Book Description

Yusef Komunyakaa is best known for "Neon Vernacular", which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1994, and for Dien Cai Dau, poems chronicling his experiences as a journalist in Vietnam. "Pleasure Dome" gathers over two and a half decades of Komunyakaa'swork, 25 early uncollected poems and 18 new poems.