Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books, and Questions that Grew Me Up

by Remica Bingham-Risher

Overview

Examines firsthand the lives of legendary Black writers who made a way out of no way to illuminate a road map for budding creators desiring to follow in their footsteps

Acclaimed Cave Canem poet and essayist Remica Bingham-Risher interweaves personal essays and interviews she conducted over a decade with 10 distinguished Black poets, such as Lucille Clifton, Sonia Sanchez, and Patricia Smith, to explore the impact of identity, joy, love, and history on the artistic process. Each essay is thematically inspired, centered on one of her interviews, and uses quotes drawn from her talks to showcase their philosophies. Each essay also delves into how her own life and work are influenced by these elders. Essays included are these:

· “blk/wooomen revolution”
· “Girls Loving Beyoncé and Their Names”
· “The Terror of Being Destroyed”
· “Standing in the Shadows of Love”
· “Revision as Labyrinth”

Noting the frustrating tendency for Black artists to be pigeonholed into the confines of various frameworks and ideologies—Black studies, women’s studies, LGBTQIA+ studies, and so on—Bingham-Risher reveals the multitudes contained within Black poets, both past and present. By capturing the radical love ethic of Blackness amid incessant fear, she has amassed not only a wealth of knowledge about contemporary Black poetry and poetry movements but also brings to life the historical record of Black poetry from the latter half of the 20th century to the early decades of the 21st.

Examining cultural traditions, myths, and music from the Four Tops to Beyoncé, Bingham-Risher reflects on the enduring gifts of art and community. If you’ve ever felt alone on your journey into the writing world, the words of these poets are for you.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807015926
Publisher:	Beacon Press
Publication date:	09/06/2022
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	1,089,202
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Remica Bingham-Risher is a Cave Canem fellow and Affrilachian poet. Her work has been published in the New York Times, the Writer’s Chronicle, New Letters, Callaloo, and Essence, among other journals. She is the author of three volumes of her own poetry: Conversion, winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award; What We Ask of Flesh, shortlisted for the Hurston/Wright Award; and Starlight & Error, winner of the Diode Editions Book Award. She lives in Norfolk, Virginia, with her husband and children.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Imagining Home

On Faith

Intimate Tending

Courting Paradise

blk/wooomen revolution

Girls Loving Beyoncé and Their Names

Who Raised You?

The Terror of Being Destroyed

Standing in the Shadows of Love

Revision as Labyrinth

Come Through

Acknowledgments
Sources
Credits
Index

Editorial Reviews

04/11/2022

Poet Bingham-Risher (Starlight & Error) mines the experiences of Black writers in this jovial mix of memoir, essay, and homage to her literary “guiding voices.” Lyrical essays elucidate the themes that emerged from interviews she conducted over almost two decades with 10 Black poets. In “Imagining Home,” she explains how she found poetry “outside of song” as a fifth grader when a teacher read her class Langston Hughes’s “Mother to Son.” Soon thereafter, Bingham-Risher wrote her first poem, which won a prize. In “Standing in the Shadows of Love,” she bonds with Patricia Smith over a shared “lifelong obsession with music” both for its own sake and as poetry. Lucille Clifton, she notes in “Intimate Tending,” highlights that, for Black artists, “living is political whether we want it to be or not” and writes that that’s what she is “disappointed not to find in the writing of those without the birth-burden of double consciousness as part of their living and, hence, breath, breadth, and work.” The author’s own poems appear throughout, including one for her daughter that honors Black women’s names. It adds up to a powerful celebration of poets who “paint life with all its many spirals and errors.” Lit lovers will be dazzled. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

2022-08-03
Essays for poets and poetry lovers framed by personal narratives and interviews with Black poets who have influenced the author in her life and career.

In her latest book, Bingham-Risher champions literacy, writing, and teaching as acts of love and social responsibility. The author emphasizes the work that spoke to her early on and led her to mentors like E. Ethelbert Miller, Sonia Sanchez, Lucille Clifton, Natasha Trethewey, and a host of other significant writers who fueled her burgeoning career. She recounts her life through the lens of poetry, asking vital questions: What is the Black poet’s responsibility as a writer? To the community? To the self? Each interview offers something to ponder. Bingham-Risher recounts how poetry softened the blow of personal and political hardships, enriched her education, and “grew her up.” Some essays, like the ones linked with the author’s interviews with Patricia Smith and Tim Seibles, are cohesive and sharply rendered, while others are meandering. The author doesn’t deeply explore each topic she addresses; the narrative operates at a loosely associative level, the voice and persona of the narrator remaining somewhat elusive. Nearly every experience—e.g., marrying the love of her life, a chance meeting with children’s book author Eloise Greenfield, coping with personal losses—is expressed in the same register. This sometimes creates a static reading experience, and some chapters get bogged down or brush too lightly over important territory, including Black Lives Matter, the death of Sandra Bland, and the massacre at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. The book is strongest when the personal narrative is sharper, as when Bingham-Risher writes about her daughter’s unique name, the tragic tale of a good friend who was killed by police in Phoenix, or her family’s biannual The Color Purple breakfast, a festive, all-day affair of cooking, mentoring, and honoring elders. Still, Bingham-Risher asks questions of poetry, community, and responsibility that will inspire both seasoned and aspiring poets and educators.

A love letter to Black literary art that leaves you wanting more.

Kirkus Reviews

A powerful celebration of poets who ‘paint life with all its many spirals and errors.’ Lit lovers will be dazzled.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Cover-to-cover, Soul Culture will start a discourse about Black poets and writers and Black books, and it is highly recommended for those who love poetry and Black literature, especially readers striving to become creative writers and hone their poetry-writing skills.”
—Booklist

“Cohesive and sharply rendered . . . Bingham-Risher asks questions of poetry, community, and responsibility that will inspire both seasoned and aspiring poets and educators.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Bingham-Risher’s essays are a vibrant fusion of cultural analysis, interviews with Black poets, and personal essays. A poet herself, she surveys the impact of identity, cultural traditions, and history on how communities create and consume writing.”
—Book Riot

“This collection of essays is a remarkable ode to Black poets and poetry unlike any other. Bingham-Risher examines the writing process through some of her favorites, from Lucille Clifton to Beyonce, through a lens of joy, power, love and legacy.”
—Karla J. Strand, Ms.

“Never heavy-handed, the thematic connections highlighted in each chapter are imbued with grace and gratitude as the author reflects on lessons learned, bringing her whole, authentic self to the effort—as a Black poet, a mother, an educator and mentor, a daughter, and a wife.”
—C-Ville Weekly

“This book is miraculous! Remica Bingham-Risher weaves together a book of knowledge, illumination, and song unlike any I have known but that I might have dreamed.”
—Elizabeth Alexander

“This is a praise song for Remica Bingham-Risher. This is a gratitude moment for her devotion to Black poetry and Black poets. . . . How I love this woman, her genius, her immense spirit! How grateful I am to be part of this remarkable gathering!”
—Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

“With a genius all her own, and in the blackest ink, Remica Bingham-Risher has woven us a gorgeous, intergenerational, and polyvocal history of kinship, perseverance, Black poetry, and love. This book is a devotion. I want to share it with everyone I love.”
—Aracelis Girmay

“With this book [Bingham-Risher] has produced another important documentation of how African American poets have become a realized force in American literature.”
—Afaa M. Weaver

“She builds a bridge between the past and the future, gently nudging today’s poet to consider their place. Remica invites you in.”
—Aline Mello

“Soul Culture is a necessary guide to transcendence in the twenty-first century, a nexus of ancestors, elders, and the wise among us.”
—Tracy K. Smith

“Remica Bingham-Risher’s Soul Culture is more map than book. Reading, you ask, as an early Roots album once did, Do you want more?!”
—Reginald Dwayne Betts

“We do not arrive, Soul Culture reminds us, without the labor and love of who comes before us. We do not arrive without who dreamt us into being. Soul Culture honors that labor and love and dreaming. Soul Culture sings it. How necessary, how gorgeous, how true.”
—Ross Gay

“Love made this book. . . . Bingham invites you into her life as a Black woman in the US—shows you the things that have wrecked her and the things that have saved her—and opens up, in the process, new definitions of faith, Blackness, and the word.”
—Evie Shockley

From the Publisher