In "Afro-Blue", Tony Bolden traces the ways innovations in black music and poetry have driven the evolution of a variety of other American vernacular artistic forms. The blues tradition, Bolden demonstrates, plays a key role in the relationship between poetry and vernacular expressive forms. Through an analysis of the formal qualities of black poetry and music, "Afro-Blue" shows that they function as a form of resistance, affirming the values and style of life that oppose bourgeois morality. Even before the term "blues" had cultural currency, the inscriptions of style and resistance embodied in the blues tradition were already a prominent feature of black poetics. Bolden delineates this interrelation, examining how poets extend and reshape a variety of other verbal folk forms in the same way as blues musicians play with other musical genres. He identifies three distinct bodies of blues poetics: some poets mimic and riff on oral forms, another group fuse their dedication to vernacular culture with a concern for literary conventions, while still others opt to embody the blues poetics by becoming blues musicians - and some combine elements of all three.
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Advance Praise: "From Buddy Bolden to Tony Bolden and Mongo Santamaria to Jayne Cortez stretches a territory seldom traversed with such fluency. This book brings us the cultural poetics so long promised but seldom achieved. It is a book to which many will turn with gratitude." -- Aldon Nielsen, author of Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism
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Front Cover | Front Flap | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Flap | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Inside This Book
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First Sentence:
WHEN WILLIAM WEAN HOWELLS wrote that Paul Laurence Dunbar's dialect poems are "'delightful personal attempts and failures for the written and spoken,'" he was blissfully unaware that his statement would haunt African American poets and their critics like a specter for a century. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
rill chorus, black speaking voice, riff chorus, blues poets, subsequent references appear, black vernacular culture, new black poetry, tonal semantics, blues poetics, black oral tradition, blues idiom, black cultural forms, secular priesthood, cutting sessions, blues culture, blues music, black poets, vernacular forms Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
African American, Black Arts, Big Boy, John Henry, Sterling Brown, Southern Road, New Orleans, Bessie Smith, Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka, Easy Boogie, Jayne Cortez, Margaret Walker, Ballad of the Landlord, Dream Boogie, Larry Neal, Sonia Sanchez, Thelonius Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Haki Madhubuti, James Weldon Johnson, John Coltrane, Louis Armstrong, Standard English, Angela Davis New!
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Front Cover | Front Flap | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Flap | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
WHEN WILLIAM WEAN HOWELLS wrote that Paul Laurence Dunbar's dialect poems are "'delightful personal attempts and failures for the written and spoken,'" he was blissfully unaware that his statement would haunt African American poets and their critics like a specter for a century. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
rill chorus, black speaking voice, riff chorus, blues poets, subsequent references appear, black vernacular culture, new black poetry, tonal semantics, blues poetics, black oral tradition, blues idiom, black cultural forms, secular priesthood, cutting sessions, blues culture, blues music, black poets, vernacular forms Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
African American, Black Arts, Big Boy, John Henry, Sterling Brown, Southern Road, New Orleans, Bessie Smith, Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka, Easy Boogie, Jayne Cortez, Margaret Walker, Ballad of the Landlord, Dream Boogie, Larry Neal, Sonia Sanchez, Thelonius Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Haki Madhubuti, James Weldon Johnson, John Coltrane, Louis Armstrong, Standard English, Angela Davis New!
Books on Related Topics | Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Front Flap | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Flap | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 100
books:
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- Understanding the New Black Poetry by Stephen Henderson on 6 pages
- Amiri Baraka (Twayne's United States Authors Series ; Tusas 383) by Lloyd W. Brown on 5 pages
- Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison on 5 pages
- For My People by Margaret Walker on 4 pages
- Collected Poems by Ted Hughes on 4 pages
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