Blues Poems

Author : Kevin Young
Publisher : Everyman's Library
Page : 258 pages
File Size : 46,5 Mb
Release : 2003-09-02
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 9780375414589

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Blues Poems by Kevin Young Pdf

Born in African American work songs, field hollers, and the powerful legacy of the spirituals, the blues traveled the country from the Mississippi delta to “Sweet Home Chicago,” forming the backbone of American music. In this anthology–the first devoted exclusively to blues poems–a wide array of poets pay tribute to the form and offer testimony to its lasting power. The blues have left an indelible mark on the work of a diverse range of poets: from “The Weary Blues” by Langston Hughes and “Funeral Blues” by W. H. Auden, to “Blues on Yellow” by Marilyn Chin and “Reservation Blues” by Sherman Alexie. Here are blues-influenced and blues-inflected poems from, among others, Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, June Jordan, Richard Wright, Nikki Giovanni, Charles Wright, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Cornelius Eady. And here, too, are classic song lyrics–poems in their own right–from Bessie Smith, Robert Johnson, Ma Rainey, and Muddy Waters. The rich emotional palette of the blues is fully represented here in verse that pays tribute to the heart and humor of the music, and in poems that swing with its history and hard-bitten hope.

Author : John O'Donohue
Publisher : Harper Collins
Page : 95 pages
File Size : 49,6 Mb
Release : 2009-05-21
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780061935763

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Conamara Blues by John O'Donohue Pdf

Translating the beauty and splendor of his native Conamara into a language exquisitely attuned to the wonder of the everyday, John O'Donohue takes us on a moving journey through real and imagined worlds. Divided into three parts -- Approachings, Encounters, and Distances -- Conamara Blues at once reawakens a sense of intimacy with the natural world and a feeling of wonder at the mystery of our relationship to this world. Whether exploring the silent, eternal memory of Conamara or focusing on the power of language and the vagaries of human need and passion, O'Donohue tenderly reveals the fragile vulnerability of love and friendship. The result is a musical, transcendent, and deeply moving series of poems that exemplifies O'Donohue at his finest. Written with penetrating insight and distilled transparence, Conamara Blues offers a singular and lasting imaginative vision of a landscape of hope and possibility -- powerfully exhibiting the mastery of a poet at the height of his lyric powers.

Author : John Lane
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 62 pages
File Size : 46,7 Mb
Release : 2017-09
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 0881466255

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Anthropocene Blues by John Lane Pdf

In the story of the earth, geologists tell us that around 12,000 years ago the planet shifted from the Pleistocene to the Holocene. There probably were poets to sing about that change, but of what they sang, we have no records. Even earlier, paintings on cave walls point toward an artistic response from our upstart species. These early artists painted the Pleistocene's last great ice age herds thundering past. Now John Lane's traveling geologist sings a dawning epoch's blues. The Anthropocene is upon us, and his poems show how humans believe they have become "the planet's boss, the big chief, the emperor of air, diesel fuel,/bow thrusters, and tax shelters..." And if you don't believe the times are changing, consider these poems-full of dead-on-the-road groundhogs and radial tires, carbon-spewing adventure travel, masturbating parrots, and mounds and mounds of garbage-as twenty-first-century objective correlatives John Keats might recognize. But all is not collapse out there. The puny human voice William Faulkner praised in his Nobel acceptance speech sings amidst the 6th Great Extinction. These lyrics and narratives deposit the pleasures of contemporary poetry in the carbon record.

Author : Jack Kerouac
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 208 pages
File Size : 49,7 Mb
Release : 1995-09-01
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 9781101548806

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Book of Blues by Jack Kerouac Pdf

Best known for his "Legend of Duluoz" novels, including On the Road and The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac is also an important poet. In these eight extended poems, Kerouac writes from the heart of experience in the music of language, employing the same instrumental blues form that he used to fullest effect in Mexico City Blues, his largely unheralded classic of postmodern literature. Edited by Kerouac himself, Book of Blues is an exuberant foray into language and consciousness, rich with imagery, propelled by rythm, and based in a reverent attentiveness to the moment. "In my system, the form of blues choruses is limited by the small page of the breastpocket notebook in which they are written, like the form of a set number of bars in a jazz blues chorus, and so sometimes the word-meaning can carry from one chorus into another, or not, just like the phrase-meaning can carry harmonically from one chorus to the other, or not, in jazz, so that, in these blues as in jazz, the form is determined by time, and by the musicians spontaneous phrasing & harmonizing with the beat of time as it waves & waves on by in measured choruses." —Jack Kerouac

Author : Barbara Ras
Publisher : University of Pittsburgh Press
Page : 91 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2021-03-09
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 9780822988212

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The Blues of Heaven by Barbara Ras Pdf

In The Blues of Heaven, Barbara Ras delivers her characteristic subjects with new daring that both rattles and beguiles. Here are poems of grief over her brother’s death; doors to an idiosyncratic working-class childhood among Polish immigrants; laments for nature and politics out of kilter. Ras portrays the climate crisis, guns out of control, the reckless injustice and ignorance of the United States government. At the same time, her poems nimbly focus on particulars—these facts, these consequences—bringing the wreckage of unfathomable harm home with immediacy and integrity. Though her subjects may be dire, Ras also weaves her wise humor throughout, moving deftly from sardonic to whimsical to create an expansive, ardent, and memorable book.

Author : Langston Hughes
Publisher : Courier Dover Publications
Page : 99 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 2022-01-31
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 9780486850566

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The Weary Blues by Langston Hughes Pdf

Immediately celebrated as a tour de force upon its release, Langston Hughes's first published collection of poems still offers a powerful reflection of the Black experience. From "The Weary Blues" to "Dream Variation," Hughes writes clearly and colorfully, and his words remain prophetic.

Author : Langston Hughes
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 311 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 1990-09-12
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 9780679728184

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Selected Poems of Langston Hughes by Langston Hughes Pdf

Langston Hughes electrified readers and launched a renaissance in Black writing in America—the poems in this collection were chosen by Hughes himself shortly before his death and represent stunning work from his entire career. The poems Hughes wrote celebrated the experience of invisible men and women: of slaves who "rushed the boots of Washington"; of musicians on Lenox Avenue; of the poor and the lovesick; of losers in "the raffle of night." They conveyed that experience in a voice that blended the spoken with the sung, that turned poetic lines into the phrases of jazz and blues, and that ripped through the curtain separating high from popular culture. They spanned the range from the lyric to the polemic, ringing out "wonder and pain and terror—and the marrow of the bone of life." The collection includes "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," "The Weary Blues," "Still Here," "Song for a Dark Girl," "Montage of a Dream Deferred," and "Refugee in America." It gives us a poet of extraordinary range, directness, and stylistic virtuosity.

Author : Ali Jimale Ahmed
Publisher : Red Sea Press(NJ)
Page : 85 pages
File Size : 50,9 Mb
Release : 2005-01-01
Category : Somalia
ISBN : 1569022399

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Diaspora Blues by Ali Jimale Ahmed Pdf

'Timeless and timely, there is verse and music in Diaspora Blues tuned by acute intelligence. Ali Jimale Ahmed's pithy and elegant lines span the range from the classical Arab jewels of an al-Ma'ari to the kind of ironies that grace the discursive English Restoration wit of Pope and Swift.' - Ammiel Alcalay. 'Somali poet Ali Jimale Ahmed recounts a lyrical odyssey, confronting the world's monsters, storms and temptations with the glittering safe harbour of his visionary poetic strength.' - Charles Cantalupo.

Author : Jaki Shelton Green
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 110 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 1996
Category : Poetry
ISBN : UOM:39015041008601

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Conjure Blues by Jaki Shelton Green Pdf

Author : Al Young
Publisher : Sourcebooks, Inc.
Page : 226 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 2008
Category : Blues (Music)
ISBN : 9781402249389

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Something About the Blues by Al Young Pdf

Author : Wanda Coleman
Publisher : David R. Godine Publisher
Page : 220 pages
File Size : 43,5 Mb
Release : 1987
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 0876857012

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Heavy Daughter Blues by Wanda Coleman Pdf

Deals with city life, marriage, work, parents, baby sitters, racism, poverty, death, thieves, language, chance, lesbianism, childhood, and the past

Author : Earnest N. Bracey
Publisher : iUniverse
Page : 149 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 2019-05-28
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 9781532073458

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Dark Labyrinth by Earnest N. Bracey Pdf

Earnest Bracey is a man who loves music. He played his jazz trumpet at several venues in Japan, as well as at the One Step Down jazz club in Washington, D.C. He was a jazz trumpet soloist in the acclaimed Jazz Big Band at Jackson State University in the late 1970s, and his love for music has poured into his love of prose. Dark Labyrinth is a collection of poems about music and so much more. Many of Bracey’s poems reference the power of the blues. Perhaps his most significant “blues poems” are “The Language of our Demise,” “Ebola Blues,” and “The Tall Black Man with One White Shoe.” As a musician and African American history professor, Bracey’s poems give poetic justice to the black experience in the United States. His collection provides snapshots of African American feelings in an imaginative way. His words celebrate the horror and beauty of America without sugarcoating anything. Some poems are derived from strict facts and harsh truths, but all carry a bluesy, musical sense of play.

Author : James Baldwin
Publisher : St Martins Press
Page : 75 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 1985
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 0312051042

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Jimmy's Blues by James Baldwin Pdf

A collection of poetry echoes many of the themes and lyricism of Baldwin's essays and novels

Author : Shauna Barbosa
Publisher : University of Pittsburgh Press
Page : 96 pages
File Size : 49,5 Mb
Release : 2018-04-20
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 9780822983293

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Cape Verdean Blues by Shauna Barbosa Pdf

“These words feel like experiences. Some are personal, most are enlightening, but all connect. Connect on a higher Level. A spiritual level.” —Kendrick Lamar, Grammy Award-winning artist, and winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Music -- A Lit Hub Favorite Book of 2018 The speaker in Cape Verdean Blues is an oracle walking down the street. Shauna Barbosa interrogates encounters and the weight of their space. Grounded in bodily experience and the phenomenology of femininity, this collection provides a sense of Cape Verdean identity. It uniquely captures the essence of “Sodade,” as it refers to the Cape Verdean American experience, and also the nostalgia and self-reflection one navigates through relationships lived, lost, and imagined. And its layers of unusual imagery and sound hold the reader in their grip.

Author : Douglas Mark Ponton,Uwe Zagratzki
Publisher : Vernon Press
Page : 226 pages
File Size : 51,7 Mb
Release : 2020-10-06
Category : Music
ISBN : 9781622739561

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Blues in the 21st Century: Myth, Self-Expression and Trans-Culturalism by Douglas Mark Ponton,Uwe Zagratzki Pdf

The book is the fruit of Douglas Mark Ponton’s and co-editor Uwe Zagratzki’s enduring interest in the Blues as a musical and cultural phenomenon and source of personal inspiration. Continuing in the tradition of Blues studies established by the likes of Samuel Charters and Paul Oliver, the authors hope to contribute to the revitalisation of the field through a multi-disciplinary approach designed to explore this constantly evolving social phenomenon in all its heterogeneity. Focusing either on particular artists (Lightnin’ Hopkins, Robert Johnson), or specific texts (Langston Hughes’ Weary Blues and Backlash Blues, Jimi Hendrix’s Machine Gun), the book tackles issues ranging from authenticity and musicology in Blues performance to the Blues in diaspora, while also applying techniques of linguistic analysis to the corpora of Blues texts. While some chapters focus on the Blues as a quintessentially American phenomenon, linked to a specific social context, others see it in its current evolutions, as the bearer of vital cultural attitudes into the digital age. This multidisciplinary volume will appeal to a broad range of scholars operating in a number of different academic disciplines, including Musicology, Linguistics, Sociology, History, Ethnomusicology, Literature, Economics and Cultural Studies. It will also interest educators across the Humanities, and could be used to exemplify the application to data of specific analytical methodologies, and as a general introduction to the field of Blues studies.