Power Lines: A Decade of Poetry from Chicago's Guild Complex [Paperback]

Luis J. Rodriguez (Editor), Michael Warr (Editor), Julie Parson-Nesbitt (Editor)

Product Details

• Paperback: 199 pages
• Publisher: Tia Chucha (October 25, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1882688228
• ISBN-13: 978-1882688227
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,403,986 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Michael Warr was born in Baton Rouge, LA and grew up in San Francisco, CA. His literary honors include the Gwendolyn Brooks Significant Illinois Poets Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, the Ragdale Foundation US - Africa Fellowship, and others. His most recent book is The Armageddon of Funk (Tia Chucha Press). We Are All The Black Boy, his first book of poems was honored by the Illinois Library Association. He is also a co-editor of Power Lines: A Decade of Poetry from Chicago's Guild Complex. A frequent collaborator with musicians, visual and performing artists, his poems have been dramatized for theater, depicted on canvas, and set to original musical composition. An award-winning arts educator, he combines poetry, performance, and storytelling with digital images, text, and music in interactive writing and mentoring workshops.

A few convoluted influences: family conversion from southern Baptists to Jehovah's Witnesses; Black Panthers agitating outside my high school; stealing "3000 Years of Black Poetry" as a teenager and discovering Anonymous, Claude McKay, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, and poets I would meet after moving from San Francisco to Chicago, namely Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka, Don Lee (later Haki Madhubuti), and Victor Hernandez Cruz; works of The Last Poets, Shelley, Adrienne Rich, Hirschman, Troupe, David Hernandez, Angela Jackson, Reginald Gibbons; learning of Neruda at a kitchen table in the Hollywood Hills; the Chicago performance poetry community; Timbuktu; room-mating with Luis Rodriguez; five years in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia where I exhausted the American Embassy Library, dined with guerillas, harbored revolutionaries, wrote everyday, and was interrogated in a cell under Haile Selassie's Jubilee Palace; the arts; Serow; Major Girma; DuBois, Fanon, Malcolm, Marx, Peery, Fine, Tesfarmariam, Tuchman, James Brown, Hendrix, Funkadelic, Gould, Wonder, Gaye, Corea, Taylor, Morrison, Laws, Montgomery, Coltrane, Davis, Santana, Sly, Solti, Public Enemy, Blondy and more; Zimbabwean guerillas; a Polisario Front diplomat; southside Chicago; merging poetry with musicians: Mitar Mitch Covic, Nefasha Ayer, Quijerema; finding the Red Poppy Art House; the streets of Paris and Cairo, the hollows of Appalachia, the Kingdom Halls of San Francisco, the warfront in Eritrea; a train in the Ogaden...

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Chicago Poetry At It's Best, January 27, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Power Lines: A Decade of Poetry from Chicago's Guild Complex (Paperback)

This one is not to be missed. If you love poetry you will love this combination of Pulitzer Prize Winners and Saloon Poets. A hundred poets are featured here, each with a distinct voice. This anthology shows why Chicago is America's poetry capital. With work by local artists such as Marvin Tate, Cincy Salach, and Quraysh Ali Lansana, jumbled in together with national names such as Wanda Coleman, Amiri Baraka and Gwendolyn Brooks, what results is a read that doesn't allow you to put the book down. This is not your mother's poetry; this is modern, 21st century, powerful, important work. These are the poems your grandchildren will be studying in the future American Poetry textbooks. This volume represents all races, creeds and colors, all social backgrounds, all variety of life spiced together with a climax by Christopher Stewart. Even if you don't like poetry you will like Power Lines. This book should become standard reading for all contemporary poetry courses. The poets in this book are our stars of today and the stars of tomorrow. There isn't a single poem in this anthology that doens't deserve a standing ovation. It speaks of Chicago and of America. It speaks of our time and the changing times. It speaks with a voice so profound it can not be ignored. I, personally, could not put it down until I reached the final poem, Larry Winfield's Any Day In June. Then I had to read it again to convince myself a poetry book could be that entertaining. I have read thousands of books and this is the freshest thing I have seen in years. My eyes are wide open to see what Tia Chucha Press is going to do next.