The Furious Flowering of African American Poetry.

Joanne V. Gabbin, ed. The Furious Flowering of African American Poetry. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1999. 330 pp. $59.50 cloth/$19.50 paper.

On several beautiful days in September 1994, James Madison University in rural Virginia convened what organizer Joanne V. Gabbin describes as "the largest gathering of poets, critics, and scholars in more than two decades" to discuss and celebrate the state of African American poetry. Drawing on an image from Gwendolyn Brooks's "Second Sermon on the Warpland" (1968), the conference was called "Furious Flower: A Revolution in African American Poetry." In some respects the gathering recalled the historic (but controversial) 1966 Black Writers' Conference held at Fisk University. All of the major figures in contemporary African American poetry attended--including Rita Dove, then Poet Laureate of the United States--and they were joined by hundreds of poetry devotees and students. The first product of this conference was, of course, the intimate interaction of these participants in an atmosphere that was carefully organized yet congenial. Kente cloth and embraces, laughter and warm expressions of brotherhood and sisterhood set the tone. The second product is an extraordinary four-volume videotape documentary distributed by California Newsreel (149 Ninth Street, Suite 420, San Francisco, CA 94103) that is particularly suitable for classroom use.

While the documentary includes brilliant poetry readings interspersed with informative but casual interviews with the poets, it does not give viewers a full awareness of the important academic milestone that the conference represented. This task has been performed by the publication of The Furious Flowering of African American Poetry. This volume includes a selection of papers presented at the conference as well as transcripts of some of the interviews. These interviews--described quite properly as "conversations"--are exchanges between poets and critics who share similar ideas and who seem to know each other well. The tone is candid and relaxed; the effect is like listening to old friends discussing topics of great importance. Though the critical essays were presented in more formal circumstances, they also seem to be touched by the comity evident in the conversations.

The papers included here are of uniformly high quality and, quite surprisingly, accomplish complex discussions of important literary issues without resorting to the clogged jargon that is found at most academic conferences. This may be a result of the fact that these scholars were aware that all of the conference's critical sessions were attended mostly by undergraduates and members of the general public. The profession might do well to consider staging similar events more often. In any case, most of these essays are models of clarity that should be widely emulated if we really want to reconnect serious African American poetry and literature to the huge audience it enjoyed twenty-five years ago. While it is accessible to the general reader, this volume also raises issues that will concern conscientious specialists in American literature.

Especially useful is the fact that several of the essays here focus on writers who are canonical figures in the anthologies assigned to high school and college students. Reading these discussions will deepen and expand such a student's appreciation of work that may already be familiar. There are also, of course, discussions of some overlooked or forgotten authors who these critics feel deserve more attention.

Marianne Russell's "Langston Hughes and Melvin Tolson: Blues People" offers an interesting study of poetic influence. "These two Lincoln University graduates," she says, "both began their writing careers by producing poetry based on the vernacular, the language, form, and spirit of blues/jazz." Tolson believed that folk forms were important, that "our native symbols must be lifted into the universal." As a result, Russell says, "Tolson applauds Hughes's manipulation of the blues as a racially authentic artwork." In "Langston Hughes: A Poet Supreme," Kalamu ya Salaam discovers a political statement implicit in Hughes's poetic technique as demonstrated in Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951). He offers a neo-Bakhtinian view of this book-length suite of short poems. "The work's modernity," he claims, "is the sell-reflexive nature of all of the voices speaking, and in speaking, coming to consciousness of themselves and their environment."

Both Russell and Salaam make one anxious to re-read Hughes and Tolson, but it is curious that neither critic compares what these poets were doing and William Carlos Williams's contemporaneous epic Paterson. Some aspects of the epic voice and vision as it appears in the work of African American poets are explored in Edward A. Scott's "Bardic Memory and Witness in the Poetry of Samuel Allen" and Raymond R. Patterson's informative "African American Epic Poetry: The Long Foreshadowing." Patterson declares that epic poetry defines the "connection between poet, community and cultural traditions." His study contrasts works such as the long-forgotten Francis A. Boyd's Columbiana, or The North Star (1870), Alberry A. Whitman's Not a Man and Yet a Man (1877), and more recent efforts such as poems by Tolson, Robert Hayden, and Jay Wright's The Double Invention of Komo (1980).

Very useful interpretations of a poet whose short works have nevertheless achieved a cumulative epic impact can be found in Eugenia Collier's "Message to the Generations: The Mythic Hero in Sterling Brown's Poetry," which is complemented by "The Ballad, the Hero, and the Ride: A Reading of Sterling A. Brown's The Last Ride of Wild Bill" by Mark A Sanders. In "Consciousness, Myth, and Transcendence: Symbolic Action in Three Poems on the Slave Trade," Jon Woodson discusses Hayden's "Middle Passage," Tolson's Libretto for the Republic of Liberia, and Clarence Major's "The Slave Trade: View from the Middle Passage" (1994). As with Marianne Russell's essay on Hughes and Tolson, Woodson focuses on poetic influence but insists on drawing attention to the "problematic" relationship between black and white American poets. Indeed, Woodson sees the writing of poetry as a conversation among poets--unhindered by space or time--with individual poems serving as specific critical pronouncements and intertextual revisions. Woodson's excellent essay is the book's literal centerpiece as well as a highlight; his ideas are intriguing and his erudition impressive, yet his writing is clear and marvelously accessible. That is precisely the standard of criticism that Jerry W. Ward, Jr., calls for and demonstrates in his essay "Illocutionary Dimensions of Poetry: Lee's 'A Poem to Complement Other Poems.' "Reading a 1969 poem by Haki R. Madhubuti--then known as Don L. Lee--Ward logically proposes a critical focus well suited to analyzing works created during the Black Arts Movement when oral recitation was highly prized and both poets and audiences assumed that poems were--first and foremost--"ac ts of speech" and bold performances of political resistance as well.

Eric A. Well's "Personal and Public: Three First-Person Voices in African American Poetry" also explores rhetorical positioning (or, some might say, posturing) in works dating from the Harlem Renaissance to Amiri Baraka and Nikki Giovanni. Joyce A. Joyce and Aldon Lynn Neilsen also examine Black Arts and avant-garde writers. There are fine essays here too on Lucille Clifton and Alice Walker, Yusef Komunyakaa and Rita Dove; and editor Gabbin contributes an excellent study in "Blooming in the Whirlwind: The Early Poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks."

What is evident throughout The Furious Flowering of African American Poetry is that this is a volume documenting the unapologetically militant branch of the African American literary tradition. These critics are attempting to do what Mark A. Sanders claims Sterling Brown's poems do; i.e., create "a diversified or multidimensional face for the heroic impulse, one perpetually agitating against social conventions and white authority." It is also clear that these writers do not take the term heroism lightly. For them, heroism is found in any civilized and literate act that, as Jon Woodson phrases it, "resonates authentically against the confused context of postmodern nihilism and iconoclasm."

The essays and conversations in The Furious Flowering of African American Poetry not only propose the possibility of such heroism, they demonstrate that it is a mode of behavior already being practiced.