Conversations With Lenard D Moore

A fundamental collection of sixteen interviews with the esteemed writer and former president of the Haiku Society of America

Lenard D. Moore and African American Haiku: Merging Traditions identifies Moore as a primary figure in the American Haiku Movement as well as a significant contributor to the field of African American haiku. Ce Rosenow analyzes the ways in which Moore combines haiku with a variety of other traditions: African American storytelling, jazz poetry, ekphrasis, and elegies. An examination of Moore’s haibun, a Japanese form combining prose and haiku, reveals the further development of the African American aesthetic created in his individual poems. Ultimately, the author argues that Moore’s decades-long engagement with haiku and his prolific publication history solidify haiku as an established form in African American poetry.

Conversations with Sterling Plumpp is the first collection of interviews with the renowned poet of Home/Bass and other much-admired works. Spanning thirty years and drawn from literary and scholarly journals and other media, these interviews offer insights into his poetic innovation of blues and jazz and his mastery of black vernacular in poetry. This collection seems fundamental to an understanding of the life and work of an African American poet who has been innovative in fusing blues and jazz rhythms with poetic insight and in vivifying the vernacular landscape of African American poetry. Born in 1940 in Clinton, Mississippi, Plumpp has been living in Chicago since 1962. Home/Bass received the 2014 American Book Award. The finest blues poet of his generation, Plumpp became a model for contemporary poetry and poetics and a leading figure in the tradition of blues/jazz poetry. He continues to reinvent the language while exploring the registers of individual and communal memory, local, national, and global history. His poetry is important in attempts to define the black aesthetic from the era of the Harlem Renaissance to the seminal Black Arts Movement. It is also important for its re-articulation of the Great Migration, especially expressed by blues musicians who left Mississippi for Chicago.

A WALL STREET JOURNAL FAVORITE FOOD BOOK OF THE EAR From the author of Queen Sugar—now a critically acclaimed series on OWN directed by Ava Duvernay—comes a beautiful exploration and celebration of black farming in America. In this impressive anthology, Natalie Baszile brings together essays, poems, photographs, quotes, conversations, and first-person stories to examine black people’s connection to the American land from Emancipation to today. In the 1920s, there were over one million black farmers; today there are just 45,000. Baszile explores this crisis, through the farmers’ personal experiences. In their own words, middle aged and elderly black farmers explain why they continue to farm despite systemic discrimination and land loss. The "Returning Generation"—young farmers, who are building upon the legacy of their ancestors, talk about the challenges they face as they seek to redress issues of food justice, food sovereignty, and reparations. These farmers are joined by other influential voices, including noted historians Analena Hope Hassberg and Pete Daniel, and award-winning author Clyde W. Ford, who considers the arrival of Africans to American shores; and James Beard Award-winning writers and Michael Twitty, reflects on black culinary tradition and its African roots. Poetry and inspirational quotes are woven into these diverse narratives, adding richness and texture, as well as stunning four-color photographs from photographers Alison Gootee and Malcom Williams, and Baszile’s personal collection. As Baszile reveals, black farming informs crucial aspects of American culture—the family, the way our national identity is bound up with the land, the pull of memory, the healing power of food, and race relations. She reminds us that the land, well-earned and fiercely protected, transcends history and signifies a home that can be tended, tilled, and passed to succeeding generations with pride. We Are Each Other’s Harvest elevates the voices and stories of black farmers and people of color, celebrating their perseverance and resilience, while spotlighting the challenges they continue to face. Luminous and eye-opening, this eclectic collection helps people and communities of color today reimagine what it means to be dedicated to the soil.

Uncovering how poetry refigures Black history to imagine a more just present and future “Poets are lyric historians,” proclaimed Langston Hughes. Today, historical poetry offers a lyric history necessary to our current moment—poetry with the power to correct the past, realign the present, and create a more hopeful, or even hoped-for, future. The Necessary Past: Revising History in Contemporary African American Poetry focuses on six of today’s most celebrated poets: Elizabeth Alexander, Natasha Trethewey, A. Van Jordan, Kevin Young, Frank X Walker, and Camille T. Dungy. Their works reimagine the interiority of Black historical figures like the so-called Venus Hottentot Sara Baartman and the would-be spelling champion MacNolia Cox, the African American Native Guard who fought in the Civil War and the unknown victims of domestic violence, Jack Johnson and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Medgar Evers and those freed and enslaved in the early nineteenth century. These poets shift the power dynamic in revising our shared history, reconfiguring who speaks and whose stories are told, and writing a past that frees readers to change the present and envision a more just future.

A poetry collection by internationally acclaimed poet Lenard D. Moore focusing on jazz music as an experience and an inspiration. In The Geography of Jazz, Moore celebrates jazz music and jazz musicians. Some of the poems address specific events. Others honor individual artists. Many do both. While the poems may not initially signal the rhythms of jazz in their presentation on the page, they convey jazz rhythms through Moore's deft handling of the poetic line and his use of formal techniques including but not limited to assonance, onomatopoeia, and repetition. This collection also includes a new poetic form, jazzku, an innovation that recalls Japanese haiku and tanka.

The whole value of Lenard Moore's verse in this book is his attention to family, land, and seasons.

The Routledge Global Haiku Reader provides a historical overview and comprehensive examination of haiku across the world in numerous languages, poetic movements, and cultural contexts. Offering an extensive critical perspective, this volume provides leading essays by poets and scholars who explore haiku’s various global developments, demonstrating the form’s complex and sometimes contradictory manifestations from the twentieth century to the present. The sixteen chapters are carefully organized into categories that reflect the salient areas of practice and study: Haiku in Transit, Haiku and Social Consciousness, Haiku and Experimentation, and The Future of Global Haiku. An insightful introduction surveys haiku’s influence beyond Japan and frames the collection historically and culturally, questioning commonly held assumptions about haiku and laying the groundwork for new ways of seeing the form. Haiku’s elusiveness, its resistance to definition, is partly what keeps it so relevant today, and this book traces the many ways in which this global verse form has evolved. The Routledge Global Haiku Reader ushers haiku into the twenty-first century in a critically minded and historically informed manner for a new generation of readers and writers and will appeal to students and researchers in Asian studies, literary studies, comparative literature, creative writing, and cultural studies