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The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South

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The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South

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Overview

The South: to render all that it means to an African American takes someone with acutely tuned senses, someone with a patience, a passion even, for the region's history and contradictions. It takes a poet. In this new anthology, the first of its kind, more than one hundred contemporary black poets laugh at and cry about, pray for and curse, flee and return to—the South.

Voices new to the scene appear in The Ringing Ear alongside some of the leading names in American literature today, including Sonia Sanchez, Yusef Komunyakaa, Harryette Mullen, Nikki Giovanni, Kevin Young, Cornelius Eady, and Al Young. The southern worlds opened up by these poets are echoed in how their poems are grouped, under headings like "Music, Food, and Work: Heeding the Lamentation and Roar of Things Made by Hand," or "Religion and Nature: The Lord Looks Out for Babies and Fools," or "Love, Flesh, and Family: The Hush and Holler Portraits."

"Not all of us on these pages have come to or from the South by the same dirt road," says anthology editor Nikky Finney. "We have not chosen our dark olive words from the same patch of earth. Some have come by way of birth and others have followed street musicians and urban corner preachers, dream and myth, to stand before its pine and iron gates."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780820329260
Publisher:	University of Georgia Press
Publication date:	03/25/2007
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	432
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.91(d)

About the Author

FRANK W WALKER is the 2013-2014 poet laureate of Kentucky. He is an associate professor of English at the University of Kentucky and the editor of Pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture. A Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry recipient, he is the author of five collections of poetry, including Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York, which won the Lillian Smith Book Award, and Isaac Murphy: I Dedicate This Ride.

HOUSTON A. BAKER JR. is a professor of English at Duke University. Among his honors and achievements in American letters, Baker is a past president of the Modern Language Association. His books include Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writing and Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy.

NATASHA TRETHEWEY was the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, 2012–14. She is the author of four collections of poetry: Thrall, Domestic Work, Bellocq’s Ophelia, and Native Guard, for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. She is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University.

SEAN HILL is currently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. He received his MFA from the University of Houston in 2003 and was awarded a Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing in 2006. Hill's poems have been published widely in journals, including Callaloo, Indiana Review, and Ploughshares.

NIKKY FINNEY is a professor of creative writing at the University of Kentucky and the author of three collections of poetry: On Wings Made of Gauze; Rice, which won a PEN America Open Book Award; and The World Is Round. She is also the author of Heartwood, a collection of short stories.

Acknowledgments     xvii
Heirlooms and Introductions     xix
Music, Food, and Work: Heeding the Lamentation and Roar of Things Made by Hand
"Dirty Rice"     3
"Rabbit"     4
"Time with Stevie Wonder in It"     6
"Night Shift/Day Shift"     9
"Don't Know What Love Is"     11
"Joe Chappel's Foot Log Bottom Blues, 1952"     12
"Glutton"     14
"Back in blues"     16
"Fish"     17
"Red onion hoodoo"     19
"Night Work"     21
"Doing Hair"     23
"Simmie Knox Paints Bill Clinton for the White House"     25
"The Boucherie"     27
"Catfish"     28
"Miss Look's Dream (Miss Look)"     32
"The Migrants"     34
"The Whistle"     35
"Red Blessings"     38
"At the Owl Club, North Gulfport, Mississippi, 1950"     41
"Pea Song"     43
"Intermittent Requiems for Bud"     44
"Witness"     46
"The Spice of Life"     47
"The Quilter"     48
"Sound and Semblance"     49
"Cookout"     52
"WatermelonRepast"     54
"Pot Meals"     55
"I know the grandmother one had hands"     57
"Smoke"     59
"Middle Ear"     61
Swimming, Childhood, and Other Thunders: Don't Get Your Hot Hair Wet or Your Good Shoes Dirty
"How to Teach Them"     65
"Immolatus"     68
"Nikki-Rosa"     70
"Lessons in Trailer Living"     72
"Hair Raising"     73
"1957"     74
"Manhood"     76
"What she will remember"     78
"Splinter of the Path"     79
"Fusion"     81
"On the first drive-by"     83
"Mama Gertie Bell Speaks to Her Granddaughter"     84
"My Best Day"     85
"Nicknames"     86
"Journeyman"     90
"Buckwheat's Lament"     91
"Bull"     92
"How to Make It"     94
"Key west"     97
"Eads Bridge Boogie Across the Mississippi"     99
"History Makes Concessions for White Boys"     100
"Black Hymnal"     102
"The Dry Spell"     104
"Spectaculations"     106
"Ghazai for My Mother"     108
Religion and Nature: The Lord Looks Out for Babies and Fools; The Anvil of Heaven Murmuring
"Sunday"     111
"How to Make Rain"     112
"The Tire Plant Is Struck by Lightning"     114
"Baptism"     115
"St. Philip Blues"     117
"Quarter Moon Rise"     119
"Israelites"     120
"Picnic"     121
"Lightning bug reflects"     123
"The Reason I Know the Devil Is Mean"     124
"Nat Turner in the Clearing"     125
"Prelude to a new plague"     126
"Speaking in Tongues"     127
"My Mother's Tornado"     129
"Goodness and Mercy Shall Follow Me"     130
"Goldsboro Narrative #20"     131
"Storm Named Earl"     133
His and Her Story: The Myth and Rumble of Memory under the Hammer of Jeopardy
"Harriet Tubman's Email 2 Master"     139
"Seven crown man"     140
"Reward"     142
"The Politics of Breathing"     144
"We Are Not Responsible"     145
"The Good Funeral"     146
"My Heart"     148
"Hands, 1921"     149
"Drapery Factory, Gulfport, Mississippi, 1956"     152
"Barking"     278
"In a place where"     279
"Garden"     281
"O'Connor's South"     284
"Bliss: geophagy"     286
"Bowing in the Church of Beauty"     287
"Awake"     288
"In my neighborhood just north of atlanta"     289
"Milledgeville Haibun"     290
"Fifth Street Exit, Richmond"     291
"Summer Night, McNasby's Pier, 1968"     295
"Duke"     297
"Of Course the Brochure Doesn't Mention Mrs. Abbott"     300
"Knoxville, Tennessee"     303
"Between Angels & Monsters"     304
"On Passing thru Morgantown"     306
"Song of the South"     307
"Our Natures Rise"     309
"Home (Running Man)"     310
"Landscape Mode"     313
"True Autumn"     314
"Driving South"     316
"I Love It When You Call Me Big Country"     317
The Twenty-first-Century Southern Riff and Shout: Modern Lullabies for Planet Octavia
"Ectopia"     321
"Graphs: Photos from a Traveler"     322
"Residual"     325
"I Have Walked a Long Time"     326
"Saturday & a glimpse of sunday"     328
"Haiku 142005"     330
"Community day"     331
"Afronauts"     334
"We Real Crunk"     336
"Diovan HCT 160MG"     337
"Three the Hard Way"     338
"Lawn Jockey"     344
"Poem For Amadou Diallo"     345
"Big Thicket: Pastoral"     346
"Dressing Down"     349
"Elegy for the Mad Brother @ Borders"     350
"Poem for June Jordan"     352
"Apathy no more"     354
"Gentleman"     356
"Eartha Takes the Old Woman Shopping for Red Shoes"     357
"One for Strom"     359
"Now"     360
Nikky Finney Interviews Lucille Clifton     363
Credits     379
Contributors     385

From the B&N Reads Blog

Page 1 of

Editorial Reviews

Offers a consistently strong showcase of Black voices and a compelling and accessible organization, and should persist as an important articulation of the Black experience of the American South . . . wondrous diversity of form subject, of perspective . . . the genius of the book and of Cave Canem's importance is obvious . . . The Ringing Ear is such an heirloom—Cave Canem's gift from the chorus of voices pushing the boundaries and barriers to the diverse and expanding tradition of American poetry.

Rain Taxi

The Ringing Ear is an intergenerational sampling that is arranged thematically. The effect is that of eavesdropping on a thoughtful, candid, provocative conversation among the poets in each section.

San Antonio Current

The Ringing Ear reminds us that sometimes regionalism does not mean provincialism or myopia, but instead offers an opportunity for people to find their true songs and sing them with the assurance and power of knowing. There is something strikingly expansive about the range and complexity of the poems collected in this anthology. This is a distinctly southern book, a distinctly black book, a distinctly American book—it is all these things and more.

author of Wisteria: Twilight Poems from the Swamp Country - Kwame Dawes

The Ringing Ear brings together a wonderfully diverse group of African American poets under the aegis of the now widely known Cave Canem workshops, which have enabled dialogue and opened doors for hundreds of Black poets in the last decade. In this anthology, extraordinary emerging poets join honored ones like Yusef Komunyakaa, Sonia Sanchez, Harryette Mullen, Cornelius Eady, and those whose names—Thomas Sayers Ellis, Natasha Trethewey, Kevin Young—are becoming indelible. Their focus is the "magnetic South," vexed and compelling as it is in the Black American imagination. Narrative, lyric, surreal, or hyper-real, using meter, multiple voices, verbal deconstruction, informed by jazz, blues, cutting-edge pop, string quartets, and schoolyard rhymes, by history learned in books and told in kitchens, this book pieces a mosaic of American life and of the poem's possibilities.

author of Desesperanto: Poems 1999&ndash2002 - Marilyn Hacker

There is little question Cave Canem is transforming contemporary American poetry . . . Finney's care and sophistication give shape to this wonderful showcase of new talent . . . The Ringing Ear negotiates traditional southern themes such as food, religion, land, labor, and family, and challenges the reader to question how issues of love and sexuality complicate assumptions about race and the South . . . What is most striking about The Ringing Ear is the degree of intimacy in each poem . . . This is a wonderful resource for teaching the craft of poetry and an exciting example of contemporary Southern literature. With The Ringing Ear, Nikky Finney introduces herself as a talented editor, and Cave Canem solidifies its position as a powerhouse in American poetry.

American Book Review

By writing about a region with its rich history and racial contradictions, these poets advance the impact of their poetry beyond historical and cultural boundaries. This is a timely, vital collection that insists the uses of poetry must be redefined and examined through the work of some of our best poets.

Bloomsbury Review

This poetry anthology is riveting, perfectly imagined for classroom use as well as for readers who want to stay in touch with the work of young writers. Even better than individual poems—and they are very good indeed—are the ingenious, even brilliant conversations among them that editor Nikky Finney arranges. Everywhere the poems reinforce, argue with, amplify, challenge, and deepen each other. This kind of subtext editing is a gift. We need this book.

Prairie Schooner - Hilda Raz

There are tons of literary anthologies inspired in one way or another by the Southern states. But to say that an anthology of poems about the South by African American writers is overdue would be an understatement. . . . The Ringing Ear . . . redresses the imbalance, collecting poems by Sonia Sanchez, Cornelius Eady, Nikki Giovanni, Nathaniel Mackey, and more.

Guardian

The Ringing Ear brings together a wonderfully diverse group of African American poets under the aegis of the now widely known Cave Canem workshops, which have enabled dialogue and opened doors for hundreds of Black poets in the last decade. In this anthology, extraordinary emerging poets join honored ones like Yusef Komunyakaa, Sonia Sanchez, Harryette Mullen, Cornelius Eady, and those whose names—Thomas Sayers Ellis, Natasha Trethewey, Kevin Young—are becoming indelible. Their focus is the "magnetic South," vexed and compelling as it is in the Black American imagination. Narrative, lyric, surreal, or hyper-real, using meter, multiple voices, verbal deconstruction, informed by jazz, blues, cutting-edge pop, string quartets, and schoolyard rhymes, by history learned in books and told in kitchens, this book pieces a mosaic of American life and of the poem's possibilities.

author of Desesperanto: Poems 1999&ndash2002 - Marilyn Hacker

The Ringing Ear reminds us that sometimes regionalism does not mean provincialism or myopia, but instead offers an opportunity for people to find their true songs and sing them with the assurance and power of knowing. There is something strikingly expansive about the range and complexity of the poems collected in this anthology. This is a distinctly southern book, a distinctly black book, a distinctly American book—it is all these things and more.

author of Wisteria: Twilight Poems from the Swamp Country - Kwame Dawes

"The Ringing Ear reminds us that sometimes regionalism does not mean provincialism or myopia, but instead offers an opportunity for people to find their true songs and sing them with the assurance and power of knowing. There is something strikingly expansive about the range and complexity of the poems collected in this anthology. This is a distinctly southern book, a distinctly black book, a distinctly American book—it is all these things and more."--Kwame Dawes, author of Wisteria: Twilight Poems from the Swamp Country
"The Ringing Ear brings together a wonderfully diverse group of African American poets under the aegis of the now widely known Cave Canem workshops, which have enabled dialogue and opened doors for hundreds of Black poets in the last decade. In this anthology, extraordinary emerging poets join honored ones like Yusef Komunyakaa, Sonia Sanchez, Harryette Mullen, Cornelius Eady, and those whose names—Thomas Sayers Ellis, Natasha Trethewey, Kevin Young—are becoming indelible. Their focus is the "magnetic South," vexed and compelling as it is in the Black American imagination. Narrative, lyric, surreal, or hyper-real, using meter, multiple voices, verbal deconstruction, informed by jazz, blues, cutting-edge pop, string quartets, and schoolyard rhymes, by history learned in books and told in kitchens, this book pieces a mosaic of American life and of the poem's possibilities."--Marilyn Hacker, author of Desesperanto: Poems 1999-2002
"There is little question Cave Canem is transforming contemporary American poetry . . . Finney's care and sophistication give shape to this wonderful showcase of new talent . . . The Ringing Ear negotiates traditional southern themes such as food, religion, land, labor, and family, and challenges the reader to question how issues of love and sexuality complicate assumptions about race and the South . . . What is most striking about The Ringing Ear is the degree of intimacy in each poem . . . This is a wonderful resource for teaching the craft of poetry and an exciting example of contemporary Southern literature. With The Ringing Ear, Nikky Finney introduces herself as a talented editor, and Cave Canem solidifies its position as a powerhouse in American poetry."--American Book Review
"By writing about a region with its rich history and racial contradictions, these poets advance the impact of their poetry beyond historical and cultural boundaries. This is a timely, vital collection that insists the uses of poetry must be redefined and examined through the work of some of our best poets."--Bloomsbury Review
"This poetry anthology is riveting, perfectly imagined for classroom use as well as for readers who want to stay in touch with the work of young writers. Even better than individual poems—and they are very good indeed—are the ingenious, even brilliant conversations among them that editor Nikky Finney arranges. Everywhere the poems reinforce, argue with, amplify, challenge, and deepen each other. This kind of subtext editing is a gift. We need this book."--Hilda Raz, Prairie Schooner
"Offers a consistently strong showcase of Black voices and a compelling and accessible organization, and should persist as an important articulation of the Black experience of the American South . . . wondrous diversity of form subject, of perspective . . . the genius of the book and of Cave Canem's importance is obvious . . . The Ringing Ear is such an heirloom—Cave Canem's gift from the chorus of voices pushing the boundaries and barriers to the diverse and expanding tradition of American poetry."--Rain Taxi
"The Ringing Ear is an intergenerational sampling that is arranged thematically. The effect is that of eavesdropping on a thoughtful, candid, provocative conversation among the poets in each section."--San Antonio Current
"There are tons of literary anthologies inspired in one way or another by the Southern states. But to say that an anthology of poems about the South by African American writers is overdue would be an understatement. . . . The Ringing Ear . . . redresses the imbalance, collecting poems by Sonia Sanchez, Cornelius Eady, Nikki Giovanni, Nathaniel Mackey, and more."--Guardian

From the Publisher

The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South

The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South

Paperback(New Edition)

Paperback(New Edition)

Related collections and offers

Overview

Product Details

About the Author

Table of Contents

Customer Reviews

Related collections and offers

Overview

Product Details

About the Author

Table of Contents

Related Subjects

Customer Reviews