Don't Deny My Name: Words and Music and the Black Intellectual Tradition

Black musical forms profoundly influenced the work of American poet and leading literary figure Lorenzo Thomas, and he wrote about them with keen insight---and obvious pleasure. This book, begun by Thomas before his death in 2005, collects more than a dozen of his savvy yet engagingly personal essays that probe the links between African American music, literature, and popular culture, from the Harlem Renaissance to the present.
Don't Deny My Name (which takes its title from a blues song by Jelly Roll Morton) begins by laying out the case that the blues is a body of literature that captured the experience of African American migrants to the urban North and newer territories to the West. The essays that follow collectively provide a tour of the movement through classic jazz, bop, and the explosions of the free jazz era, followed by a section on R&amp;B and soul. The penultimate essay is a meditation on rap music that attempts to bring together the extremes of emotion that hip hop elicits, and the collection ends with an unfinished preface to the volume.

Arts & Photography

Thomas, Lorenzo

Music

University of Michigan Press

Black musical forms profoundly influenced the work of American poet and leading literary figure Lorenzo Thomas, and he wrote about them with keen insight---and obvious pleasure. This book, begun by Thomas before his death in 2005, collects more than a dozen of his savvy yet engagingly personal essays that probe the links between African American music, literature, and popular culture, from the Harlem Renaissance to the present.Don't Deny My Name (which takes its title from a blues song by Jelly Roll Morton) begins by laying out the case that the blues is a body of literature that captured the experience of African American migrants to the urban North and newer territories to the West. The essays that follow collectively provide a tour of the movement through classic jazz, bop, and the explosions of the free jazz era, followed by a section on R&B and soul. The penultimate essay is a meditation on rap music that attempts to bring together the extremes of emotion that hip hop elicits, and the collection ends with an unfinished preface to the volume.

The Collected Poems of Lorenzo Thomas (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Wesleyan University Press

Song You asked me to sing Then you seemed not To hear; to have gone out From the edge of my voice And I was singing There I was singing In a heathen voice You could not hear Though you requested The song―it was for them. Although they refuse you And the song I made for you Tangled in their tongue They wd mire themselves in the spring Rains, as I sit here folding and Unfolding my nose in your gardens I wouldn't mind it so bad Each word is cheapened In the air, sounding like Language that riots and Screams in the dark city Thoughts they requested Concepts that rule them Since I can't have you I will steal what you have Lorenzo Thomas (1944-2005) was the youngest member of the Society of Umbra, predecessor of the Black Arts Movement. The Collected Poems of Lorenzo Thomas is the first volume to encompass his entire writing life. His poetry synthesizes New York School and Black Arts aesthetics, heavily influenced by blues and jazz. In a career that spanned decades, Thomas constantly experimented with form and subject, while still writing poetry deeply rooted in the traditions of African American aesthetics. Whether drawing from his experiences during the war in Vietnam, exploring his life in the urban north and the southwest, or parodying his beloved Negritude ancestors, Thomas was a lyric innovator.

The first comprehensive book of Lorenzo Thomas's work. Chances Are Few included prose works, poetry, and Thomas's English versions of work by Roberto McKay, Dukardo Hinestrosa, and Leon Damas. Gwendolyn Brooks says of this book: "This is a striking collection, notable for wit, technical skill, and steady energy." Stephen Stepanchev, author of American Poetry Since 1945 says: "Fresh, individual, and alive. It coheres in its theme, in its concern with the counterpoint between desperate American lives and the fantasy world of TV and the movies. It is an excellent book."

Chances Are Few

Blue Wind Pr

A major figure in the Black Arts Movement and a founding member of the Umbra workshop, Lorenzo Thomas is one of the most heralded authors of his generation. Dancing on Main Street, Thomas’s long-awaited collection spanning many decades of his career, blends traditional lyricism with a surrealist’s touch and a realist’s eye. Together, these poems form a cinematic look at the obsessions, -pleasures, trials, and tribulations of life on Main Street.
Lorenzo Thomas, who was born in Panama and grew up in New York City, is a poet, critic and professor of English at the University of Houston. His books of poetry include Chances Are Few, The Bathers and Sound Science. He is the recipient of two Poets Foundation awards and the Lucille Medwick Prize.

Dancing on Main Street

Coffee House Press

This anthology presents material selected from the collection of Angel Hair magazine and books edited by Anne Waldman and Lewis Warsh between 1966 and 1978. Included are substantial sections of writing--in some cases entire books--from an impressive range of poets including Clark Coolidge, Alice Notley, Hannah Weiner, Robert Creeley, Bernadette Mayer, Kenward Elmslie, Tom Clark, Joanne Kyger, Bill Berkson, Ted Greenwald, Lorenzo Thomas, John Wieners, Joe Brainard, Ron Padgett, as well as Waldman and Warsh, among many others. From the nascent St. Mark's Poetry Project on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to Bolinas and Boulder, Angel Hair published an idiosyncratic cross-section of innovative writing in distinctive format, becoming one of the longest-lived and most influential publishers on the small press scene. The anthology of literary writings is supplemented with brief memoirs by more than twenty writers, and the book also includes an annotated checklist by Aaron Fischer and Steven Clay that comprises a citation and photograph of each of the approximately eighty books, magazines, broadsides and catalogues issued by the Press.

Angel Hair Sleeps with a Boy in My Head: The Angel Hair Anthology

COOLIDGE, Clark

CLARK, Tom

Notley, Alice

Elmslie, Kenward

Mayer, Bernadette

Warsh, Lewis

Weiner, Hannah

Kyger, Joanne

WIENERS, John

Brainard, Joe

CREELEY, Robert

Greenwald, Tom

United States

Granary Books

Edited by Anne Waldman, Lewis Warsh, Contributors include Bill Berkson, Joe Brainard, Tom Clark, Clark Coolidge, Robert Creeley, Kenward Elmslie, Tom Greenwald, Joanne Kyger, Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, Ron Padgett, Amber Phillips, Lorenzo Thomas, Ann

Hejinian, Lyn

Clark, Emilie

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