#or slips up and uses 'ye olde' jargon in everyday speech

[anticidic]

Fyodor would be the epitome of a back in my day... kind of guy.

He lived through the transformation from horse carriages to manual cars to automatic. Back in his day, they had to watch out for horses so people didn't get trampled on the streets.

All the different food transformations he lived through. Everything's processed and packaged now. Sodas used to be 100% pure, cavity-causing sugar. You still have that today, but now it's a lot of artificial flavoring without all the real sugar. Sodas just don't taste like how they used to.

So. Many. Fashion Trends. that came and went over the centuries. From flowy gowns and corsets and suits to...pants, skirts, shorts, t-shirts. Sneakers. Sunglasses? Whatever happened to the monocles?

Phones. He had a wild time adapting from sending carrier pigeons to rotary phones to phone booths to landlines to personal cell phones. And it just keeps going. Now we've got smartphones!

[larrydrosalez]

I like relaxed language and I like blackness. This anthology is a celebration of both.

tawk  

Sometimes we’re afraid to talk. Yes, WE. This might be about black talkin, but this here is for you too Sandy-Sue and Jin-Woo.  I know you’ve had those days when somethin forces you to speak or preach or teach something you’d be much better off talkin about. You scour your brain in search of synonyms you learned in an English class (some time ago) or for some phrase you picked up from your favorite politically active musician – all for nada – because, in your scavenger-hunt for eloquence, you end up with 1000 syllables that don’t say anything.  Trust me, I know the feeling. (Deleting those Gs and forgoing those apostrophes a few lines up still has me wary of some impending doom.  O_o)  [imagine the courage it took to include an emoticon.]

    It is this fear of writing the way I feel most comfortable expressing myself that convinced me that this anthology needed to be compiled. It needed to be compiled and needs to be delivered to every writer that thinks their words aren’t good enough and to every reader that thinks some writer’s metaphors are too big and meaning too small. I want this anthology to combat any notion that in poetry white high-language is right language and that slang is to be reserved for Langston Hughes and Maya Angelou. This anthology, black-tawk, is intended to act as an examination of Black-American identity in contemporary poets through their specific use of colloquial vernacular, to be referred to as black-talk. These poems are compiled in order to reject “high language” (white-talk) as the only suitable means of intelligent and normative expression and that slave-talk is the only example of recognizable black expression. I seek to find a contemporary river of black voices that flow somewhere between a Mattie and a Michael Eric Dyson (and certainly above a Tyler Perry.)

     So what does black-talk between a Mattie and a Dyson sound like? It sounds like black people you hear talking every day. There are no meanings lost in abstract metaphor, no need to keep a library assistant on call and there’s the occasional glimpse of slang. Nah, I ain’t only talkin ‘bout that talk you hurd on the corner’a 3rd and Main, because while that’s beautiful, this anthology hopes to reveal subtle currents of vernacular that black poets use to express blackness. Of course there’s more than a heap of uses of slang’s shining star - “ain’t,” but he’s joined by “nuff” and “betcha” and even “cd” (could.) And these are sometimes decorated by the absence of punctuation that lends itself to an exploration of space and caesura to create natural and lulling speech patterns that mimic the way black people talk. You won’t find Queen’s English here. Nothing like what Jamil (Robert Sims) in his poem “pre-sentence Report” (page____) refers to as “…nouns that // old Sigmund couldn’t EVEN spell.” Though in his poem Sims speaks of medical jargon, there are certainly poets that employ a sort of poetic jargon requires too much energy to decipher.

    Not that deciphering is all bad, we wouldn’t want lazy readers, but when simplicity is forgone merely to sound poetic, the authenticity that makes poetry beautiful is lost. Stephanie Pruitt, a young poet from Nashville, could write novels about the process and love involved in getting her hair hot combed in the kitchen – but she doesn’t need to. Her haiku “Hair raising” (page _____) is beautiful in its ability to, concisely, resonate with black girls everywhere. “Hair burning in the kitchen” could easily become “kinky fibers laid straight by heated comb permeates the air in the place meals are made,” but it doesn’t need to. Now the form of haiku is innately simple but this same current of simplicity can be found throughout the anthology in various forms.

 black

Sometimes we’re afraid to be black. Yes WE. This might be about black talkin but if you change black to “chino” or “country” this here is for you too Jose and Billy-Rae. It’s about black talkin because black talkin is what I know best. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been made to feel afraid to express my blackness (or asian-ness or mexican-ness.) If a university environment is any representation of the real world, and I fear it may be more forgiving of race, people don’t want black people to be black. Every scorned sagging pant, every kinky twist pressed to oblivion, every set of braids chopped off for a job where suits and ties are need can serve as a testament that black people aren’t allowed to be black.

Oh, but that’s not true, we have a black president! – right, having one black president negates the pressure every white professor ceo quarterback vice-president student government official city official member of congress  employed contributing member of society member of congress places on black people to act white right.

…

…

I needed space to let that sit. The minority will always be made inferior when evaluated against the majority. Being black isn’t wrong, it’s just not being white. There are thousands of conversations to be had about blackness and black identity and defining what “black” is, but this is not a research paper and I am not an anthropological expert on the matter. So you ask, what does blackness have to do with this poetry anthology, and what does that contribute to life? Well, blackness is in the everyday things that black people do. There is no singular blackness. If you’re a black girl that gets a perm and a silky-smooth 32” Remy, you’re exuding blackness just as much as the sister pickin her afro every morning. If you’re a black boy with clean locks sitting proudly on the shoulder pads of your new Armani suit, you’re exuding blackness just as much as the scruffy brother in the newest Js and a tall-tee (although I personally detest tall-tees, that doesn’t negate the blackness found wearing it.)

Since poetry is a manifestation of expression based on personal experiences, black poets should be allowed to be black poets, right? No. An Essay by Evie Shockley entitled “All of the above: Multiple choice and African American Poetry” included in the introduction to the anthology “Rainbow Darkness,” edited by Keith Tuma, examines the reasons black authors are not allowed to be black authors. In short, he states (and I agree) that black authors (I would say all black artists) are subjected to “the poetics litmus test.” They must be judged based on political allegiances and racial “authenticity” rather than ability or talent. If a poet talks like Langston Hughes, they are authentically black, which is good, but they are a “black” poet not an “American” poet. According to Shockley, in order to receive the privileges “American” poets are afforded:

“An African American poet has had to avoid writing in styles or about subjects that are recognizably “black” in favor of “universal themes” and conventional aesthetics. Or  she could slip in the back door by appearing willing to narrate ‘the black experience’ for white consumption in ways that do not fundamentally deconstruct white (liberal) understandings of race or directly advocate revolutionary social change.”

This provides a perfect explanation concerning why black poets are pressured away from talking black. Even I question whether or not I want to be “that black poet” every time my mind wants to pen a thought about kinky hair, “unique” names, or encounters with racism. Just as the fear of talking convinced me of the necessity of this anthology, the fear of being black doubly convinces me that there are people that need this.

 black-tawk

I like relaxed language and I like blackness and this anthology is a celebration of both. These poets aren’t afraid to be black even when they’re not talking about black things. This collection includes poets just talkin and poets just being black and poets talkin about being black – none afraid to share their identity and the language they speak. Ntozake Shange isn’t afraid to write poems in a manner that is supposed to be talked. Sapphire sees the significance of what Claireece P. Jones has to say, and how she says it. Celes Tisdale saw the need for people to hear what inmates from Attica think. All of these voices have been gathered to fight the fear of being Black regular Mexican Asian poor Jamaican poorly-educated well-educated strange normal smart dumb black-tawking.

black-tawk is right. Don’t be shamed of it. These are your peers.

  my tawk

    And now that I’ve splattered you with my thoughts/rants about blackness and language and wooed you with my semi-intellectual prowess, I’d like to free myself of the black burden – a burden that has weighed heavy on my mind since I started compiling these poems. What is the black burden you ask? For me, it is the false interpretation that any black voice is THE black voice. To those reading in hopes of better understanding the black race based solely on the compilation of a 22-year-old-half-black-half-mexican-and-japanese-middle-class-college-guy I say:  I am not THE black voice. I am not THE black voice. I am not THE black voice.  I, like the poems selected for this anthology, do not represent the entire black race or encompass all Black-American identity. There is no anthology or single person that does. I, and these poems, do however represent a current of thought, a movement, towards talking. Towards tawking. Towards tawking black. black-tawk. Enjoy.