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READ INTRODUCTIONAfrican American filmmaker Ava DuVernay’s big and brilliant new film, Origin, is based on – and takes its title from – prizewinning author and journalist Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent (Random House, 2020), for weeks # 1 on a New York Times bestseller-list.
Or rather, it is the fictionalized story of Wilkerson’s life in a period of “grief and growth,” as one reviewer put it, Wilkerson (b. 1961) losing her husband (played by Jon Bernthal), her mother (Emily Yancy), and her close cousin (Niecy Nash) while doing research for and writing her big book in search of a theory that would explain not only American racism and white supremacy, but India’s treatment of Dalits, the ‘untouchables’ at the very bottom of India’s hierarchy of caste, and Nazi Germany’s extermination of some six million Jews between 1941 and 1945, during WW II.
Notes from the Field is the most recent of about twenty “multi-voiced solo dramas” written and performed by actress and playwright Anna Deavere Smith (b. 1950) over nearly four decades.
Variously described as ‘living journalism’ or ‘documentary theater’, for Notes from the Field Smith interviewed about 250 people from four different American regions: Maryland, South Carolina, Northern California, Pennsylvania, and Finland, students and parents, counselors, prisoners, preachers and politicians, finally choosing nineteen people to perform onstage, using her own body and voice and using verbatim excerpts from the interviews, the audience standing in for the interviewer (or a crowd addressed by the speaker on the stage).
Notes from the Field started as a social justice project to address what has come to be known among social scientists, educators, jurists, politicians, and activists as “the school-to-prison pipeline,” Smith writes.
And to initiate American conversations on education, race relations, inequality, and violence, hoping to improve the lives of black, Native American and poor white children who live in poverty.
“No more auction-block for me,/ No more, no more;/ No more auction-block for me,/ Many thousand gone” – from the Negro Spiritual, quoted in the epigraph to Ronald L. Fair’s ‘American Fable’
In his Introduction to Library of America’s reprint of Many Thousand Gone, praised by The New York Times as “one of the most beautifully written books” of the 1960s, W. Ralph Eubanks, currently at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, writes:
“What if Black people in an isolated corner of Mississippi were removed from the influence of three wars (the Civil War, WWI and II), migration, and modern broadcasting? What if slavery had not ended there in 1865 but persisted for another one hundred years into the 1960s? That premise stands as the basis of the nightmarish tale Ronald L. Fair weaves together in the pages of his first novel.”
“If poets can be said to operate within a social context – we, the editors, must surely think they can – then no group of poets is so conscious of context as are black Americans” – Michael S. Harper & Anthony Walton
In their Introduction to Every Shut Eye Ain’t Asleep: An Anthology of Poetry by African Americans Since 1945 (Little, Brown and Company, 1994), poets Harper and Walton write:
“Gloria Oden, who, forty years early, had exhibited some of the talents and ambitions of Rita Dove, … had been caught in a sort of no-man’s land between standard black practice at the time and the closed white literary world.” High praise, since Rita Dove (see Index), Pulitzer Prize winner and US Poet Laureate from 1993 to 1995 and included in their anthology, was already recognized as a major American poet of the twentieth century at the time Harper and Walton wrote the introduction.
“nothing but chops/ baby, yes, chops/ nothing but chops/ yes, yes, yes/ chops, nothing but/ chops, baby, yes” – Interlude, a poem from Lenard D. Moore’s The Geography of Jazz (Blair, 2020)
Three things would seem to define Lenard D. Moore as a poet: North Carolina, jazz, and haiku and other forms of traditional Japanese poetry. And in an interview with Moore, Jazz Poetry as a Message of African American Culture (Mississippi Quarterly 75.1, 2022), John Zheng, poet and professor of English since 1996 at Mississippi Valley State University, will focus on Moore’s jazz poems in The Geography of Jazz (originally published by Mountains and Rivers Press, 2018).
To Moore, jazz is part of the fabric and part of the quilt of America: “As an expressive form it is so important that it emerges in the way we talk and walk.” A celebration of African American life and culture, it is appreciated all over the world: “Jazz has a way of bringing everyone together.”
Poetry, the Chicago-based magazine founded by poet and critic Harriet Monroe in 1912, in Volume 221, Number 1, October 2022, features a 34-page special section: “What Beauty We Now Have,” on the poetry of the late Chicago poet Carolyn Marie Rodgers (1940-2010) published by her own imprint, Eden Press, on what section editor Andrew Peart calls “a largely unseen body of work.”
But why did Rodgers choose to self-publish her poetry? After all, publishing regularly from the late 1960s in John H. Johnson’s Negro Digest/Black World, edited by Hoyt W. Fuller, she quickly became a rising star in the Black Arts Movement. She was a co-founder in 1967 of Don L. Lee/Haki R. Madhubuti’s Third World Press (now in its 56th year), the publisher of her first two volumes of poetry, Paper Soul (1968) and Songs of a Black Bird (1969), a founding member of Chicago’s OBAC/Organization of Black American Culture’s Writers’ Workshop, as Andrew Peart writes, and the author of one of BAM’s most influential critical essays, Black Poetry – Where It’s At (1969).