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Blues Poems (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets)
by
Kevin Young
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 blu...more
The blu...more
Hardcover, 256 pages
Published
September 2nd 2003
by Everyman's Library
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I picked up this book in a bookstore in New Orleans a couple of years ago - I had finished the paperback I had brought with me, and I wanted a little book I could put in my pocket and read while I ate red beans and rice or gumbo in a restaurant, or had a beer in a French Quarter bar. I enjoyed it then, but had never read it through until today. It's kind of a mixed bag, but my impressions are positive, for the most part. It has poems by older African-American poets (Langston Hughes, Countee C...more
Nothing I can say puts it more eloquently than the quote from Ralph Ellison in the introduction: "The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and then transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically." Pulling both from...more
Titus Hjelm
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Inspirational.
This is an excellent anthology. It gathers blues lyrics as well as modern and contemporary poems inspired by the blues.
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Kevin Young is an American poet heavily influenced by the poet Langston Hughes and the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Young graduated from Harvard College in 1992, was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University (1992-1994), and received his MFA from Brown University. While in Boston and Providence, he was part of the African-American poetry group, The Dark Room Collective.
Born in Lincoln, N...more
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