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What I Say

What I Say

Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America

Modern and Contemporary Poetics

Edited by Aldon Lynn Nielsen and Lauri Ramey

Preface by Aldon Lynn Nielsen and Lauri Ramey

Introduction by C. S. Giscombe

Contributions by Willliam L. Alexander, Ron Allen, T. J. Anderson, Tisa Bryant, Pia Deas, C. S. Giscombe, Renee Gladman, Duriel Harris, Harmony Holiday, Erica Hunt, Kim Hunter, Geoffrey Jacques, Douglas Kearney, John Keene, Nathaniel Mackey, Dawn Lundy Martin, Mark McMorris, Tracie Morris, Fred Moten, Harryette Mullen, Mendi Lewis Obadike, G. E. Patterson, Julie Patton, Claudia Rankine, Deborah Richards, Evie Shockley, giovanni singleton, Tyrone Williams and Ronaldo V. Wilson

344 Pages, 6.00 x 9.00 x 0.70 in

  • Paperback
  • 9780817358006
  • Published: June 2015

$39.95

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  • eBook
  • 9780817388003
  • Published: June 2015

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  • Description
  • Contents
  • Authors
What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America is the second book in a landmark two-volume anthology that explodes narrow definitions of African American poetry by examining experimental poems often excluded from previous scholarship. The first volume, Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone, covers the period from the end of World War II to the mid-1970s. In What I Say, editors Aldon Lynn Nielsen and Lauri Ramey have assembled a comprehensive and dynamic collection that brings this pivotal work up to the present day.
 
The elder poets in this collection, such as Nathaniel Mackey, C. S. Giscombe, Will Alexander, and Ron Allen, came of age during and were powerfully influenced by the Black Arts Movement, and What I Say grounds the collection in its black modernist roots. In tracing the fascinating and unexpected paths of experimentation these poets explored, however, Nielsen and Ramey reveal the tight delineations of African American poetry that omitted noncanonical forms. This invigorating panoply of work, when restored, brings into focus the creatively elastic frontiers and multifaceted expressions of contemporary black poetry.
 
Several of the poets discussed in What I Say forged relationships with members of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry movement and participated in the broader community of innovative poetry that emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s and continues to exert a powerful influence today.
 
Each volume can stand on its own, and reading them in tandem will provide a clear vision of how innovative African American poetries have evolved across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. What I Say is infinitely teachable, compelling, and rewarding. It will appeal to a broad readership of poets, poetics teachers, poetics scholars, students of African American literature in nonnarrative forms, Afro-futurism, and what lies between the modern and the contemporary in global and localized writing practices.
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction. Making Book: Winners, Losers, Poetry, Anthologies, and the Color Line - C. S. Giscombe
Apprenticeship
The Neutralized Sore of the Unshackled Bear
Concerning Forms which Hold Heidegger in Judgment
(Untitled)
Merchant of the Open Grid
boss napalm
Pimp Chain Radiator
Better Git It in Yo’ Soul
Al-Hadiqa Street Mirage
At a Column of Crutches, Basilique de Ste-Anne-de-Beaupre
from Tzimmes
from Cargo
Where I Lost It
(very recent past)
(The 70s–UltraSuede)
(The distant past–B.W.I.)
from Blue Hole, Flood Waters, Little Miami River
from At Large (1981)
from The Northernmost Road
from Five Dreams
Mnemonic Geography
Afro-Prairie
Three Dreams
from Not Right Now
from No Through Street
from Tour
from Radicals Plan
Lazarus Minor
Phaneric Display No. 2: The Meta
Phaneric Display No. 3: Slumber Party Cabaret in E minor
Monday
Gone by Then
Spectacular Brooding
After All
Verse
Afterword
The Voice of No
Personal
Starting with A
Object Authority
crazy for your tongues
jo mama at de crossroads
didn’t yo mama invent the pay toilet
we don’t need hell
Saturday Night Fish Fry
Well You Needn’t
The Wonderful Fantasies of the Colonized
The Culture of the Copy
One Year Later
Night Language: listening to Jayne Cortez
Notice
Atomic Buckdance
Swimchant for Nigger Mer-Folk (An Aquaboogie Set in Lapis)
The Chitlin Circuit
Ionisation
Color
Self
Survey
Dogon Eclipse
Black Snake Visitation
Ghede Poem
Song of the Andoumboulou: 6
Song of the Andoumboulou: 4
Song of the Andoumboulou: 12
Irritable Mystic
Alphabet of Ahtt
Song of the Andoumboulou: 23
Song of the Andoumboulou: 24
Song of the Andoumboulou: 31
Lag Anthem
Song of the Andoumboulou: 40
Dread Lakes Aperture
A Bleeding: An Autobiographical Tale
Telling Tales
Diode
Seven Days
from Of Baths and Systems
Inscriptions on the Whale Flank
Dialegomai (Suite)
from Black Pieces III (The Horses of Plato & Achilles)
Reef: Shadow of Green
SuReal
Why I Won’t Wear a Tattoo
Apology to Pangea
Bessie Smith
Henry Dumas
Murray Jackson
William Parker
Modern Language Day
We Live After a River
Bête Noir
from Trimmings
from S*PeRM**K*T
from Muse and Drudge
Denigration
Free Radicals
The Lunar Lutheran
Ted Joans at the Café Bizarre
Zen Acorn
Determined Invisibility
What I Had to Have
Gassed
Open
Hesitation Step
As If That Alone
Julie Ezelle Patton
When the Saints Go
Revelation
Notes for Some (Nominally) Awake
from Residual in the Hour
from Hunger to the Table
from Hunger to the Table
from Toward Biography
Liv’s View of Landscape I
Interpretive Commentary
from Don’t Let Me Be Lonely
Parable
art of dakar (or, tourist trap)
atlantis made easy
henry bibb considers love and livery
you must walk this lonesome
a thousand words
poem for when his arms open so wide you fall through
aftermath
a course in canvas
not in the causal chain
from melanin suite
AMERICAN LETTERS
from Atias: The Green Book
mesostic for Ree Dragonette
mesostic for the Sun Ra Arkestra
mesostic: Golden Sardine (after Bob Kaufman)
the odds
Constellation
Card
“Dispell’d”
El Negro
Study of a Negro Head
If Mime Then Music. . .
Cold Calls
from Bar Code
On the C Train the Black Object Ponders Amuzati’s Family Eaten in the Congo
51. Lucy, Her River and Sky
The Black Object’s Elasticity
Notes on Contributors

Aldon Lynn Nielsen is the author of Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism and Integral Music: Languages of African-American Innovation. Lauri Ramey is the author of Slave Songs and the Birth of African American Poetry and The Heritage Series of Black Poetry, 1962–1975. Nielsen and Ramey also coedited Every Goodbye Ain't Gone: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry by African Americans.

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