Ntozake Shange and Patricia Spears Jones photo by Coreen Simpson
UP DATE: Earlier this year, I recorded my favorite Gwendolyn Brooks sonnet for the Library of Congress. It was supposed to have been posed in April, but there were some issues with approval from Ms Brooks’ Estate. Finally, that happened and the poem is posted. Like Pauli Murray, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Margaret Walker, Alice Walker, Ms. Brooks’ work looms large in my psyche. And it is great to see the generation that I am part led by the now late Ntozake Shange, Thulani Davis, Akua Lezli Hope, Marilyn Nelson, the late Monica Hand, Elizabeth Alexander, Claudine Rankine, Erica Hunt have continued to explore the power and poignancy of Black women’s lives and examine Black women’s thought. In my post, I include my elegy, meditation on Akilah Oliver, who was an extraordinary poet. Where straight or queer, we are poets of imagination, innovation, and cultural constancy. I thank Gwendolyn Brooks for her fierce foundation for us and Akilah Oliver for her experimentation and her joy–both are truly misssed.
http://www.loc.gov/poetry/poetry-of-america/american-identity/patriciaspearsjones-gwendolynbrooks.html
Gwendolyn Brooks-The Whisky of Our Discontent
Early October I gave a keynote at LIT TAP and and it allowed me to think about culture, privilege, power and how we as Black women poets often provide import ways to think in words. The link is at the end of this post.
Now two powerful women writers and thinkers and innovators in this culture: Ntozake Shange and Maria Irena Fornes have passed. Shange was an extraordinary writer and performer. She perfected the use of choreopoem, a performance trope that was in full sway at the start of the 70s esp. by women poets and dancers. As a member of the audience at the premiere of For Colored Girls at the Public Theater with my best friend Debbie Wood, who knew the composer, I can always claim being at what was truly a new and powerful moment in the theater and for Black women. And we needed something new. We needed that play. We still do. Not everything Shange wrote is as distilled and life altering, but her work in total is now part of world literature and she gave every Black woman poet an idea of what it means to be so terribly successful and how difficult it is to maintain artistic vision, integrity and health. Maria Irena Fornes was a queer Latina who created her own version of theater. She also taught two-three generations of theater artists including my good friend Lenora Champagne. She was 88 and had had Alzheimer’s for several years. At least the downtown theater world has continued to produce her work and watched over her. Zake was only 70 and she had been ill for several years. Even so, she recently published a new bilingual collection to much acclaim.
Women writers, artists, poets, thinkers are often overlooked, neglected, misrepresented or dismissed. And yet, we persist because we have voices and we just gonna sing.
https://electricliterature.com/the-poetry-of-queer-black-women-shows-us-how-to-move-forward-9a01ef66f32c