The O’Zone | National Poetry Month and Jazz Appreciation Month: Part 2
The Black Arts Movement (BAM)
As prolific as the Harlem Renaissance and the Beat Generation were,
a truly amazing wave of artistic expression was yet to come. Active primarily from 1965 to 1975, the Black Arts Movement was “the aesthetic and spiritual sister to the Black Power concept,” according to Larry Neal.
Associated creatives sought to express a uniquely Black sensibility that prioritized self-determination, community engagement, and cultural pride. Music– particularly jazz and blues– was not just an inspiration but a structural foundation for many of its poets.
“Art is a weapon in the struggle of ideas, the class struggle,” said Amiri Baraka, one of the founders of the movement, the day after the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965. Baraka also established the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School (BART/S).
There are several key poets in the Black Arts Movement, and each one contributed mightily to the change that manifested from their hard work.
“The mission is how do we become a whole people, and how do we begin to essentially tell our narrative, while at the same time move toward a level of success in this country and in the world? And we can do that. I know we can do that,” noted Dr. Haki Madhubuti, poet and publisher of Third World Press.
“The Black artist is dangerous. Black art controls the Negro’s reality, negates negative influences, and creates positive images,” expressed Sonia Sanchez. A central figure in the movement, she emphasized the transformative, “dangerous” nature of art in shaping reality and fighting oppression. She also highlighted the political necessity of art to change the status quo and reclaim the “world stage” for Black people.
“Black love is Black wealth,” according to Nikki Giovanni. As a prominent voice, Giovanni viewed the movement as a proactive, “forward thrust of Blackness” rather than merely a reaction, focusing on collective objectives. She was one of the most famous and widely read poets of the era, known for her revolutionary and politically charged work.
“I don’t want to say that these poems have to be simple, but I want to clarify my language. I want these poems to be free. I want them to be direct without sacrificing the kinds of music, the picture-making I’ve always been interested in,” noted Gwendolyn Brooks, the first Black author to win a Pulitzer Prize. She experienced a profound “change of mind” after attending the Second Black Writers Conference at Fisk University in 1967.
An early mentor to Dr. Haki Madhubuti, the event marked her transition towards the Black Arts Movement.
After Fisk
The ink was already dry on the sonnet,
neatly rowed like tulips
in a garden she didn’t own.
She had mastered the white man's metrics,
the high-collared iambs,
the polite tea-party of the stanza.
Then came Fisk.
The air was thick with the sweat of the young,
with the jagged, beautiful noise of ‘67.
She looked at her hands–
the hands that won the gold medal–
and realized they were still cold.
The change wasn’t a whisper;
It was the sound of a window breaking.
She put down the silver spoon of the Academy
and picked up a brick of Black light.
No more “thee” or “thou” or borrowed lace.
She went back to the porch,
to the kitchenette,
to the boys at the pool hall,
stripping the corset from her lines
until the rhythm matched
the heartbeat of 47th Street.
She stepped out of the velvet frame
and into the sun,
Leaving the “proper” poem behind
to go find the People.
“In the sense that I also try to reflect the fullness of the Black experience, I’m very much a jazz poet,” said Jayne Cortez, furthering, “Don’t just take what is given…Claim your culture and embrace your own history…Find your own voice and use it, use your own voice and find it.”
Cortez (1934-2012) was a central figure in the Black Arts Movement, known for her firespitting poetry that fused political urgency with the improvisational rhythms of jazz. Jayne wrote and spoke with an uncompromising intensity all her own.
Acerbic, hard-hitting, unsentimental, and scathingly honest and she was a very hands on bandleader for her group of musicians known as the Firespitters…as apt a name as ever. Cortez married iconic avant garde saxophone firebrand Ornette Coleman when she was 18 years old.
Their son Denardo was born in 1956. In 1964, Cortez divorced Coleman, then founded the Watts Repertory Theater Company. Denardo has devoted his adult life in collaboration with both parents.
“The Black artist must conceive and conceptualize the collective aspirations, the collective vision of Black people,” stated Etheridge Knight.
Considered one of the most important poets of the American literary tradition, Knight was a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pulitzer Prize, and the American Book Award for Poetry.
He once shared, “I died in Korea from a shrapnel wound, and narcotics resurrected me. I died in 1960 from a prison sentence, and poetry brought me back to life.”
His work became important in what was then known as Afro-American poetry and poetics in a literary descendance from Walt Whitman’s Anglo-American poetry.
His work should be read in the context of the Black Arts Movement’s goals to inspire collective action and develop Black cultural identities distinct from dominant white power structures.
Transition to The Next Thing: Spoken Word and Hip Hop
Many of the tenets of the Black Arts Movement were translated to the next generation via Spoken Word and Hip Hop. Artists such as The Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron (and later vehicles such as Def Poetry Jam) served as bridges between the sensibilities.
“The first change that takes place is in your mind. You have to change your mind before you change the way you’re living and the way you move.”
“I am a black man dedicated to expression; expression of the joy and pride of blackness,” said Gil Scott-Heron.
“When the moment hatches in time’s womb, there will be no art talk…Therefore, we are the last poets of the world,” said Dahveed Nelson.
“People say we started rap and hip-hop, but what we really got going is poetry,” according to Abiodun Oyewole.
Transition
From the heat of the street
conga corners where the Last Poets
arised, arrived, arose,
changed Gil Scott to poetry to prose
to lyric heroic
The Black Arts Movement’s fist
clenched tight around a pen
demanding language that tasted like home,
unfiltered and loud enough to rattle the shutters
of the ivory tower power.
The beat shifted
The jazz inflected pulse of the elders
met the jagged scratch of a needle on vinyl.
The griot traded the djembe for a Technics 1200,
and the “Each One Teach One” mantra
found a home in the cypher.
Spoken word became the bridge–
Where the breath of the preacher
Met the swagger of the emcee.
No longer just a poem on a page,
But a body in motion,
A sonic boom of metaphors
that paved the way for the microphone fiends.
From the soul-fire of the seventies
to the boom-bap of the Bronx,
The lineage remains spoken unbroken:
the word is still the weapon,
and the rhythm is still the heartbeat
of a people who refuse to be silent.
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