“POETRY, POLITICS, AND PERFORMANCE”:
EUGENE B. REDMOND
At California State University Los Angeles
**Poetry Reading : TUESDAY, APRIL 27, 2010, 6:30 PM
UNIVERSITY STUDENT UNION – ALHAMBRA ROOM #305
**Writing Workshop: WEDNESDAY, APRIL 28, 2010, 3:15 pm
ENGLISH DEPARTMENT, E & T BUILDING – SEMINAR ROOM #A-631
A poet, playwright, critic, editor and educator who was an important figure in the 1960s Black Arts Movement, Eugene B. Redmond has written or edited more than 25 collections of diverse writings. These include poetry
(Songs from an Afro/Phone, The Eye in the Ceiling); critical studies (Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry); drama (Will I Still Be Here Tomorrow?); anthologies (‘Griefs of Joy’ ); multi-cultural literary journals (Literati Internazionali, Drumvoices Revue); and, with Toni Morrison, several works of the late Henry Dumas (Ark of Bones, Play Ebony Play Ivory, Echo Tree). In 1976, he was named Poet Laureate of East St. Louis, Illinois, and 10 years later--in 1986--the Eugene B. Redmond Writers Club was formed in his honor.
Among his awards: An Outstanding Faculty Research Award (from California State University-Sacramento where he was Professor of English and Poet-in-Residence in Ethnic Studies from 1970-1984); a Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses; an American Book Award; a Pan-African Movement USA Pyramid Award (for lifetime contributions to Pan-Africanism through poetry); a “Tribute to an Elder” award from the African Poetry Theater; The Sterling A. Brown Award (from ALA’s African American Literature and Culture Society Symposium); an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters Degree (from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville); inductions into the Black Writers National Hall of Fame and the Illinois Senior Hall of Fame; and a Lifetime Achievement in Education Award from the St. Louis American Foundation. A former Writer-in-Residence (or Visiting Professor) at Oberlin College, University of Wisconsin, Ibadan and Lagos universities (Nigeria), Southern University (Baton Rouge), and University of Missouri-St. Louis, Redmond is Professor Emeritus of English at SIUE where he chaired the Creative Writing Committee.
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This event is co-sponsored by the Pan African Studies Department; The Black Student Association; The English Department; The Center for Poetry and Poetics; The Chicano Studies Department; The Latin American Studies Program; and The Asian/Asian American Studies Program. A special thanks and recognition also goes to the Office of the President, which coordinated and supported this artistic program.
For further information, contact the Pan African Studies Department: (323) 343-2290
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LOVE AS NOSTALGIA; Trained hands at a keyboard By Eugene Redmond
LOVE AS REMEMBRANCE
Listening to Horace Silver's"Lonely Woman"
Carefully sprinkling shades of salt
Into the niches of an old love
Into the silk-masked wounds
Into the historical throbs -
The pain of piano nights
The pain of salty mornings
And a bass walks through the horror chambers
Of the museum of love;
The scales, the notes numb a visiting need:
Rekindle nostalgia and resurrect ghosts
Once ground into memory's junkyard -
Tried hands at the keyboard,
Plunking out acoustics of my pain:
Doubling as nostrils
That breed breath and asphixiate anxiety -
An old love
An old love
Wandering through smoke
Stumbling- through smogged ideas
Wandering through the pollution of worry
Tiptoeing through quicksands of memory:
Tried hands narrow
To a crevice of desire
That nestles night
Down to burning blackflame
Whose final finger
Plucks the keyboard of conscience
Pricks the black & white notes of nostalgia -
Crowds a clandestine vacuum
In one wall of the heart
In one ventricle of memory
In one well of tears:
An old love
An old love