EthicalDative

‘Spoken word allowed me to bypass literary gatekeepers’ … Joelle Taylor.

… I was, in part, asking a question of myself: whether poetry that arose out of social media could hold up under intensive close reading. The answer, in short, was yes… As time passes, and the new poets grow older, a critical discourse will develop, and we’ll begin to see a canon emerge… “Spoken word,” Joelle Taylor says, “is proper poetry. But poetry for the mouth has a different instinct than that for the pen; of equal value, but different. We must be judged on the terms of the chosen expression. Those who undermine the form often reveal an elitist, classist bias – as seen in their need to define and own poetry. You cannot own an art”.

(Sarah Crown, “Generation next: the rise — and rise — of the new poets,” The Guardian, 2-16-19)

(c) 2019 JMN.

A studio portrait of Dudley Randall, whose Broadside Press helped amplify the voices of prominent black poets. Credit Yancy Hughes/Job Trotter Foto, via Bentley Historical Library/University of Michigan.

Randall started the publishing house, which was based in Detroit, with his librarian’s paycheck, and it swiftly became a success, producing dozens of broadsides — a printing style in which just one side of the paper is used — as part of the Black Arts Movement, a flowering of African-American literature, theater, music and other arts.

“Black authors could not be published by white publications, white magazines or by white publishers,” Randall said in a 1973 interview with Speakeasy Culture, a literary publication out of Central Michigan University. “We had to do it ourselves.”

(Morgan Jerkins, “Overlooked No More: Dudley Randall, Whose Broadside Press Gave a Voice to Black Poets,” NYTimes, 2-13-19)

(c) 2019 JMN.