A Black Arts Poetry Machine: Amiri Baraka and the Umbra Poets

by David Grundy, Daniel Katz

Overview

A vital hub of poetry readings, performance, publications and radical politics in 1960s New York, the Umbra Workshop was a cornerstone of the African American avant-garde.

Bringing together new archival research and detailed close readings of poetry, A Black Arts Poetry Machine is a groundbreaking study of this important but neglected group of poets. David Grundy explores the work of such poets as Amiri Baraka, Lorenzo Thomas and Calvin Hernton and how their innovative poetic forms engaged with radical political responses to state violence and urban insurrection. Through this examination, the book highlights the continuing relevance of the work of the Umbra Workshop today and is essential reading for anyone interested in 20th-century American poetry.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350178380
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	08/20/2020
Series:	Bloomsbury Studies in Critical Poetics
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.58(d)

About the Author

David Grundy teaches at Robinson College, University of Cambridge, UK.

Table of Contents

Abbreviations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Baraka, Umbra, and the Writing of Literary History
1. "A Tale of Two Cities": Umbra, Internationalism and the Death of Lumumba
2. "Poems That Kill": Amiri Baraka's Magic Words
3. "Space of a Nation": David Henderson Writes the City
4. Language, Violence and "the Collective Mind" in Calvin C. Hernton
5. "Home is Nowhere Where You Were Born": Calvin C. Hernton's "Medicine Man"
6. "Return to English Turn": Tom Dent
7. Memory and Myth in Lorenzo Thomas' "The Bathers"
Conclusion: "If Our Heads are Harder"

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

Grundy (Univ. of Cambridge, UK) chronicles the Umbra poets, historical moments (for instance the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965), and the rise of black nationalism, investigating them-and the literature that came out of this period of awakening-with equal thoroughness ... Grundy is also an excellent close reader of poetry. Though Grundy is an academic, there is no academic jargon in this well-researched, clearly presented study. He does an excellent job of dealing with the complexities of this history and how it informed the period.
CHOICE

From the Publisher