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READ INTRODUCTIONNotes 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 you are familiar with the following publishers: Carlton Press, North Carolina Haiku Society, St. Andrew College Press, Les Hombres Press, Red Moon Press, WorldTech Press, Mountains and Rivers Press (and Blair), Wet Cement Press, and Cuttlefish Books –, then you are likely to be the owner of all nine books and chapbooks of poetry published between 1982 and 2023 by North Carolinian Lenard D. Moore.
Writing and experimenting with many literary genres, Moore (b. 1958) is probably best known for his work with (African) American versions of traditional Japanese forms, like haiku and tanka. And this year’s publication of A Million Shadows at Noon (Cuttlefish Books, 2023) – a haiku sequence commemorating the historic, if somewhat controversial, Million Man March of African American men on October 16, 1995, on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. – marks 41 years of effort.
“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 Carolyn M. 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, 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).
In the essay Remembering Ronald Fair, published in Common Reader, 29 September 2020, author Cecil Brown (the bestselling novel The Life and Loves of a Jiveass Nigger (1969) and Stagolee Shot Billy (2003), about the legendary ‘badman’) remembers encounters with Ronald L. Fair and argues that "the Black expatriate’s novels, Hog Butcher and We Can’t Breathe, are more timely than ever.”
He quotes Chicago critic and editor Richard Guzman’s reaction on his website to the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on 25 May 2020: “Another ‘I-Can’t-Breathe’ incident.” A phrase Richard Guzman borrows from the title of Ronald L. Fair’s 1972 novel We Can’t Breathe, Fair’s most autobiographical, rich with details about the lives of transplanted Black southerners (like Fair’s parents) and that of their children who grew up in Chicago during WW II and after.