Wednesday, December 26

Wednesday night at 8 PM on Bibliocracy, on KPFK 90.7 FM:  JEFFREY LAMAR COLEMAN.  Documenting is often discovering, or rediscovering, and in collecting poems from the Civil Rights era, poet and editor Jeffrey Lamar Coleman both tells and retells that story.  Words of Protest, Words of Freedom:  Poetry of the American Civil Rights Movement and Era, edited by Coleman, is the first anthology of  poems written during and in response to the struggle, 1955 to 1975.  It includes familiar work by well-known poets - even defining work - but also features less celebrated writing and, for this reader, introduces key moments memorialized in poems by way of expanding, complicating, focusing those years.  Among the 100 well-known poets are Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucile Clifton, Auden and Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg, Audre Lorde, Sonia Sanchez, as well as relatively obscure or forgotten voices.  This collection is a prismatic telling, finally, with many, many ways into an appreciation of a cultural and political moment and its echoes today.  From Duke University Press, Words of Protest, Words of Freedom is organized in fourteen thematic chapters, with introductions to each, reminding the reader of what’s at stake in each section by way of events which inspired or provoked.  Jeffrey Lamar Coleman is author of Spirits Distilled: Poems, and is a much published poet and essayists.  He teaches at St. Mary’s College of Maryland and lectures throughout the United States on the history and poetry of the American Civil Rights Movement.  Thanks for listening on the radio, online, or as a free download from the station’s archives.  Happy Holidays.  Peace.