What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America (Modern and Contemporary Poetics)

What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America (Modern and Contemporary Poetics)

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. " What I Say makes a crucial contribution to contemporary poetry and poetics by emphasizing the wide range of forms and content present in innovative black poetries. The timing of this collection could be described as urgent, its function essential."--Joshua Lam, Journal of Modern Literature 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. What I Say Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America By Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Lauri Ramey The University of Alabama Press Copyright © 2015 The University of Alabama Press All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8173-5800-6 CHAPTER 1     WILL ALEXANDER     Apprenticeship     ... between impulse and resistances,     between advances and retreats.     –Octavio Paz, Eagle or Sun?     Here I am     posing in a mirror of scratch paper sonnets     sonnets as rare     as a live Aegean rhino     absorbing the cracklings of my craft     its riverine volcanoes     its spectacular lightning peninsulas     emitting plentiful creosote phantoms     from an ironic blizzard of unsettled pleromas     scouring through years of unrecognized pablums     of constant arch-rivalry with extinction     bringing up skulls of intensive discourse     by the claws in one's mind     which seem to burn with systemic reduction     one then suffers poetic scorching by debris     by inaugural timber which flashes     by friction which flares up & harries     by unrecognized moltens collapsing in glass     of initial intuitive neglect     as if one's fangs     were fatally stifled by incipience     by verbal range war didactics     by territorial driftwood     by sudden undemonstrative detractions     awed     by the diverse infernos of Trakl & Dante     one's youngish body stands     devoured by reverential print trails     momentarily cancelled     by the loss of blasphemous nerves & upheaval     stung     by demeaning neutralities     ravaged     by a blank Sumatran solar psychosis     by a tasteless collision of rums in transition     by a conspiracy of obscured fertility by hubris     as one sucks in doubt from a wave of tumbling blister trees     there exist irradiations flecked with a gambled synecdoche     with indeterminate earthenware splinters     taking up     from aboriginal density     a forge of Sumerian verbal signs     cooked with a tendency     towards starfish hypnosis     towards psychic confrontational drainage     conducting one's frictions in a torrential furnace of osmosis & ire     yes     apprenticeship     means poetry scrawled in unremitting leper's mosaic     cringed in smoky interior cubicles     releasing variou