In this final episode of Season 1 of the Word.Life podcast, Donney unpacks his personal journey as a performance poet, the evolution of the politics in his writing, and how writing about race and culture proved to be the true mission statement of his artistry.

With poems that preach, pray, and teach, Donney Rose speaks to America in the moment and in tradition of protest writers who understood the power of political art. Rose listens before he speaks, and lives what he writes. His words matter and they ring loud after we read them.

In 2019 Louisiana Poet Laureate, Jon Warner Smith wrote those words as the prologue to a poem I had published in 64 Parishes, a digital publication that highlights the arts and humanities in Louisiana. Jon was tasked with getting a few select poets whose work he revered to contribute to the publication, and when he asked me I was more than honored to oblige his request. Before sending him my piece titled “A Request for Removal” which dived into the cultural conversation around Confederate monuments being removed from the public sphere, I briefly paused to reflect on the trajectory of my writing that resulted in Louisiana’s first Black male poet laureate to request a piece from me to be included in a noteworthy anthology.

And after Jon confirmed what poem of the few I sent him that he thought we be the best fit, his words in the prologue further affirmed a path I had been on as a writer for roughly the past decade: which was to tell uncompromising truths about the country I lived in, the impact of growing up Black in the American South, and all the nuances my identity held, and the personal and cultural history that informed the writer I was becoming.

My writer/performance poet life, however, did not start from a place of such substance.

I entered the world of spoken word poetry as a college student at Southern University, a historically Black college in Baton Rouge. But before I ever got on a distorted microphone in the student union to read my extra rhymey poems, I was writing lyrical raps in a composition book as a high school student in the mid-to-late 90s and was easily influenced by themes and aesthetics in popular hip hop. My writing came of age in the early era of Biggie, Wu-Tang, Nas, Jay-Z, Snoop, 2Pac, Redman, No Limit and Cash Money Records. I was a southern-born kid with a penchant for East Coast lyricism. I passed around my composition book to homies who would also pen rhymes in hopes to write something as ill as our favorite emcees. We were working middle-class Black boys deeply enamored by the violence, misogyny, sexual objectification, and drug culture referenced in mainstream hip hop. And that admiration was often reflected in the raps we scribbled into our notepads, even though it was not a true depiction of our actual lifestyles.

Back then, we were all focused on who could write the illest lines. We strived to impress each other with how much wordplay and shock value we could squeeze into our bars. This often produced raps that were disparaging to young women, exaggerations about our toughness, or outright embellishments about how fast we were living. Our favorite rappers had a gift of painting sex, murder and mayhem vividly, and we wanted our little notebook verses to be as ill as theirs.

This was my literary foundation.

By the time I got to college, hardly anything had evolved in regards to my approach to writing. I was not writing violently or materialistically as I did in high school, but my earliest poems were peppered with blatant misogyny and sexism, and an overall whimsical outlook on life. I didn’t write this way due to a lack of peer examples as I met a number of friends on the poetry scene that wrote from a place of elevated consciousness and self-awareness. I just wasn’t personally as evolved and was still deeply steeped in a hip hop aesthetic that prioritized being ill on the mic, by any means, over being substantive.

I spent the beginning of the early 2000s as a young poet, trying to resist the label of poet, and the stereotypical tropes that came with being identified as a Black poet. I didn’t want my work to be too pro-Black, or to come off too bohemian, or too revolutionary. I wanted to be the lyrical poetry cat that participated in the genre but didn’t wanna be confused as the ‘peace & blessings’ or ‘power to the people’ archetype.

By the time I start participating in local poetry slam competitions, I thought the best approach to success was to write pieces that would have a universal appeal to all audiences. When I first started slamming in Baton Rouge, the slam scene was predominantly white and the open mic poetry events were predominantly Black. Whatever revolutionary ideas I had for my writing were tempered to try to meet judges in a slam where they were, but moreover, I just did not have a critical enough of lens to properly articulate whatever angst I was feeling. As someone who grew up in a Black neighborhood, attended a Black church, had damn near all Black friends in a deeply segregated environment, my earliest writings did not reflect a need to rail against systemic racism. I understood the surface level oppression and inequity in the city I grew up in, but my world up until my early adulthood was definitively Black, and my art at the time reflected the musings of someone who could not clearly see all the ways white supremacy culture impacted even the blackest aspects of my life.

As the 2010s came around, I began to broaden my worldview in my writing, but still was not heavily focused on issues relating to race and race relations. I wrote poems speaking out against the homophobia and misogyny that plagued my ideology and language growing up, but did not place too much emphasis on race and culture. My writings at the top of the 2010s, specifically as it related to slam poetry, was also a reflection of the local and national scene I was immersed in. At the time, there was a huge movement led by white feminists and queer poets to denounce poems and poets that trafficked in patriarchy, sexism, and homophobia. My politics were undoubtedly evolving, so it’s not like I was writing material that was in opposition to where I was in life, but I was not paying attention to how much matters of race were being minimized to amplify voices that were marginalized on account of gender and orientation.

Or to put it another way, when it came to slam competitions, the feminist voice or work that sought to dismantle the patriarchy had a better chance at success, whereas pieces that spoke against systemic racism or the dehumanization of Black folks was looked at as a relic of the past that had its time in the era of the Last Poets and the Black Arts movement.

Then in 2012, everything changed.

Trayvon Martin was killed by George Zimmerman in the winter of 2012, and by that summer many Black poets that were participating in regional and national poetry slam tournaments were raising their voices at the dawn of the movement we now know as Black Lives Matter. Over the course of the next few years as the hashtags and news headlines of state-sanctioned and vigilante violence against Black Americans grew, Black slam poets spoke in boldness and truth about what was happening around them. Black page poets or Black poets that mostly created in academia began crafting work reminiscent of poetic elders like Sonia Sanchez and Amiri Baraka, writing fiercely about the continued legacy of racial subjugation Black folks faced in America, with little to no concern about appealing to the sensibilities of white readers.

Anti-Black violence was a mainstream topic of conversation, and Black poets were at the forefront of speaking truth to power. It was in this moment I also found myself experiencing a paradigm shift creatively.

I remember all the poems that served as transitional points in my writing and performance career. The breakthrough pieces that began moving my aesthetic in a different direction. In 2013 I wrote a poem called “Black Boy Soul Music” that used sound imagery as a means to illustrate the angst of growing up as a Black male in America. I remember performing Black Boy Soul Music in a preliminary bout at the National Poetry Slam in 2013, a move that I would not have thought to make years prior to that, even if I had written it. But at the time, the social climate seemed right for me to put it out there, not just in the hope of getting a good score in the competition, but because it felt like I was living in a moment when the context of it would actually be heard.

By 2015 I released a chapbook of poetry called The Crying Buck, a collection of work that explored the idea of Black male vulnerability. I sought to unpack the idea of the buck, a strong and virile enslaved male as an archetype that was never allowed to exist in the fullness of his humanity, and examines how much of that dehumanization flowed through generations of Black men and boys that were conditioned to hide their tears. The last piece I wrote for The Crying Buck was titled “Last Words,” which told a persona-based narrative of a funeral of a Black boy murdered by police. The Crying Buck chapbook ended up being the most successful poetic merchandise I ever produced, and “Last Words” became one of my most signature pieces of all time.

I was then nearly two decades into my writing and performance career, and for the first time, it felt like I had found my authentic voice.

The following year was a pivotal one for me as a poet and community organizer, as it was the summer of 2016 when state-sanctioned violence came into my community with the police shooting of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge. Every poem I wrote and event I organized in the years prior to that incident would serve as the blueprint for advocacy I would engage in on the ground level. That summer I watched police violence go from being an abstract thing I saw on the news, to an actual occurrence that shook the core of my hometown. I wrote a lot through tear-filled eyes while watching many of my beloved community members be met with additional brutality from a police force that was unapologetic about the actions of their comrades, or their methods of attempting to squash our protests.

A couple of years later I would be named a Kennedy Center Citizen Artist Fellow, a recognition that celebrates artists from around the nation who use their art form to advocate change. The fellowship lasted two years and put in community with some of the most beautiful souls I ever met. In 2020, I completed and debut my most ambitious poetry project ever called The American Audit, a poetry and mapping project that used an extended metaphor of America as a business being audited by Black people 400 years after the arrival of the first Africans in Jamestown, Virginia. I performed The American Audit three times for schools on a field trip, and one time as a sold-out general audience show. Three weeks after it debuted, the world shut down for the pandemic. It has not seen a live stage in two years.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, I have relocated from Baton Rouge to PG County, Maryland, and started mostly writing editorials for The North Star. I still consider myself a spoken word poet and was even able to do a feature set at the legendary Busboys & Poets this past November. I believe my work to still be ever-evolving, but I’m pretty sure that it will keep a focus on the vastness of the Black experience. There are so many ways to tell our American story and so many angles to approach the storytelling from. I am grateful that my artistic journey started from where it did, as it allowed me infinite room to grow artistically and as a human.

That’s my story. And I’m sticking to it.

In this week’s episode of Word.Life Donney is in conversation with poet Sasha Banks about her debut collection “america, MINE”, writing honestly about what America has been to Black people and the injustices that impacted the collection’s writing.

I have a confession: I have a bunch of talented friends. I say so not to brag about the circles I keep, but to state a matter of fact. Over the years, I’ve had the great fortune to meet and be in community with some of the dopest poets, emcees, musicians, and visual artists anywhere on the planet. My artist friends are not famous, but they are highly respected in their craft, revered amongst their peers, decorated, and quality humans. The overwhelming majority of them are from the South or have ties to the South as that is where my creative career blossomed, therefore it is where I met most of my creative friends.

It is also a reason that many of my super talented and independent artist friends are not household names.

Many times when I’m in need of creative inspiration I turned to the music or writings of my homies. It is a blessing to be able to know geniuses on a personal level and to have direct access to the artists behind the art that moves me. One such friend is an extraordinary poet by the name of Sasha Banks who I met nearly a decade ago when she first visited my hometown of Baton Rouge. Sasha’s poetry has been published all over the place in outlets such PBS Newshour, Apogee, and Fanzine, and she has been the recipient of numerous recognitions including a 2019 Rhode Island Writers Colony fellowship.

When I first heard Sasha’s work almost ten years back, I knew I was engaging with a rare talent. She, like many poets I’ve met over the years, began her public life as a poet in the world of spoken word, and specifically slam poetry. In the slam world, there’s a popular saying that the best poem doesn’t usually win the competition and that is because slam poetry is often a matter of theatrics and verse that’s easily palatable for an audience to digest in a short amount of time. Sasha’s poetry was rich and textured and nuanced when she was slamming. It gained her the respect of her peers but did not garner her trophies in the competitive world because it was basically too damn good for short-form consumption. And after a couple of years participating in the competitive circuit, Sasha would go on to Pratt Institute to receive her MFA, allowing her work the opportunity to exist in the density and experimentation it deserved.

But Sasha was not simply writing poems for the sake of being credentialed in academia or in efforts to scale the Ivory Tower of creative writing. She was finding the protest in her poetic voice at a time when this country needed an army of fearless Black wordsmiths to articulate the agony our people were enduring. In 2014, in the wake of Michael Brown being shot and killed by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, Sasha organized an online poetry campaign and fundraiser called ‘Poets for Ferguson’ that called upon the friends and colleagues she met in the world of slam and academia to raise their voices in advocacy for Mike Brown and to draw attention to specific adversity that activists and organizers in the Ferguson and St. Louis era were encountering.

Poets for Ferguson spread like wildfire over social platforms for a few days, as Sasha sat behind the scenes, largely uncredited with sparking a literary movement that has been replicated in various forms since her 2014 initiative. But what she was gaining was something far more valuable than social media clout, or a trending name. Through the work of Poets for Ferguson and her time studying at Pratt, Sasha was engaging in a deeper interrogation of this country’s relationship with Black people and exploring the impact of citizenship deprived of the most basic levels of belonging and membership.

Those years of critical exploration culminated in the 2020 release of her debut collection of poetry, titled america, MINE, a stellar body of work that challenges notions of cultural autonomy, ancestral memory, and belonging, all while daring its readers to imagine how this nation would function if it was stripped of the supremacy that shaped it.

I recently had the opportunity to talk with Sasha about the creation of america, MINE, and the inspiration behind two of my favorite poems in the collection, “Recollect” and “God Bless America.” And as much as I knew I was chatting with a friend, I also was reminded that I was in conversation with an incredibly important writer that the world needs to be leaning into.

I began our conservation by asking Sasha about a blurb on the back of america, MINE that referred to it as a collection that was taking on the hard work of refracturing an already fractured landscape and rebuilding it in a more honest image, and asked her how difficult it was to build out that honesty while sitting with the reality of what America is, and what it should be

I next asked Sasha about the timeline of america, MINE which straddled between the Obama and Trump administrations amid a period of high-profile cases of racial injustice and police violence against Black Americans. I was curious about how much adjusting she had to do over the course of the six years it was working, and the social patterns she was witnessing as the writing was unfolding

Of the two poems I wanted Sasha to read for this episode, the one I wanted her to start with was “Recollect,” the first piece in america, MINE that is written as a somewhat post-apocalyptic ode to the America we currently know. In “Recollect,” Sasha challenges readers to draw out certain images of a lost country as they remembered it. I wanted to know what inspired that unique concept and what she hoped that readers would take away from it.

I was especially intrigued by a line in “Recollect” where Sasha asks what shade of white is the White House? and asked if she could describe the symbolism of the line and what it means for America to run on white nationalism/white supremacy

My favorite poem from america, MINE is “God Bless America,” where Sasha brilliantly writes using a poetic form called contrapuntal. I wanted to know why she chose to use the contrapuntal, which is basically a poem that braids separate texts into one, and what was she aiming to say specifically about America’s treatment of Black women

In “God Bless America” Sasha takes the lyric “land that I love” from the song God Bless America and bookends it with the phrase “that I fear will kill or lynch me as I stand beside her.” I asked Sasha if she could elaborate on what it means for Black folks to often stand in solidarity with a country that has looked to dehumanize us the whole time we’ve been here

I lastly wanted to know what key lessons did Sasha want the readers of america, MINE to take away from its poems, with respect to what side of the American experience they landed on, be it privileged or marginalized

Singer/songwriter H.E.R. is one of the most accomplished artists of her generation. “Fight For You” is a revolutionary masterpiece that added to her growing legacy.

I have this thing about me where I don’t always get into Black musicians that are overhyped by the mainstream media. If I don’t discover their art before white publications or musical outlets shower them with praises, I am often reluctant to give their music a chance as I am generally skeptical about what the mainstream considers high-quality Black music. 

Because of this bias, I occasionally miss out on the work of Black artists that I later come to enjoy. One of the best examples in recent history of that bias working against me was when I found myself sleeping on the talent of H.E.R., the multi-talented singer, songwriter, and musician who is arguably one of the greatest artists of her generation. I had seen white music outlets fawn over the artist-born Gabriella Wilson for quite a while, but it wasn’t until I decided to tune into her 2018 Tiny Desk Concert that I recognized what all the buzz was about. I was especially hooked after seeing her perform the hit song ‘Hard Place’ and developed a deep appreciation for her song ‘Focus on Me’ which I had heard before in passing.

After that Tiny Desk, I officially became a fan. 

I will also admit that in addition to initially ignoring H.E.R.’s work on account of how white media lavished it with praise, I also did not initially pay attention because I was practicing ageism and was not being honest with myself about it. H.E.R. is 17 years younger than me, and at the point I discovered her work, I was kinda of the mindset that there was not much a Gen Z or late millennial artist could offer me, creatively. I found myself lamenting about how some of the best music had already been made, using the same logic as my parents’ generation, and was not as open to giving artists who were born around the same time I was getting out of high school enough of my attention to recognize how dope they might have been.

Thankfully, I wised up when it came to H.E.R. 

And as I dived deeper into her catalog of music, saw her do a number of televised performances, and caught her a couple of times live, it struck me that I was witnessing a once-in-a-generation talent. A young woman, with an old soul, that possessed a great deal of vocal maturity, skillful instrumentation, stellar songwriting, and a mysterious star persona that I had not really seen since the music icons of my childhood. Whether she was doing a tribute for a musical legend or rocking out one of her songs at an award show, I quickly came to the realization that there was nothing that H.E.R. could not do when given a microphone, a guitar, and a piano. The last time I saw her perform live she jumped behind a drum set and blew my mind even further.

The other thing that intrigued me about H.E.R. as a musician and rising icon was her public commitment to social justice and how she was using her extremely large platform to raise awareness about pressing issues of the day including police brutality and racial injustice. H.E.R. was born and raised in Vallejo, California, a modest-sized town in the Bay Area located just over half an hour from Oakland, the birthplace of the Black Panther Party. As a child prodigy and biracial daughter of a Black musician, H.E.R. began her musical ambitions as a 10-year-old singing on the Today Show and would sign her first record deal with MCA Records at the age of 14. 

And after several years, and a slew of industry accolades including multiple Grammys and mounds of critical acclaim, H.E.R. would co-author a song that captured the revolutionary energy of Bay Area blackness, while paying tribute to the life and activism of one of the greatest leaders Black America would ever know.

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Released in 2021, the song “Fight for You” was the first single off the soundtrack for the film, Judas and the Black Messiah, a biographical movie based on the life and activism of Chairman Fred Hampton Sr. of the Chicago chapter of the Black Panther Party, and the betrayal he endured by an FBI informant named William O’Neal which led to his assassination. Fred Hampton, a militant-minded organizer and founder of the multicultural Rainbow Coalition, was a fearless and charismatic leader who became one of the most prominent figures in the Black Panther Party. His fiery rhetoric and tactical approach to liberation also made him a prime target of local and federal law enforcement. 

As the 21st-century movement for Black lives grew in momentum, interest in the folklore surrounding the death of Fred Hampton also grew within a new generation of advocates and allies that not only wanted to learn more about his untimely death,  but also about the teachings and organizing and advocacy of a 21-year-old proletariat revolutionary that was so radical that the powers-that-be had to murder him at the dawn of his adulthood. 

Judas and the Black Messiah was the first film to take a deep dive into the circumstances leading to Hampton’s death. The film’s soundtrack enlisted an A-List of musical luminaries to lend their talents, leading off with Fight For You as a 70s-
soul-inspired war cry that found H.E.R. pledging allegiance to the struggle backed by producer D. Mile’s infectious bass lines and triumphant horns.

H.E.R. starts the song by crooning lyrics that could be interpreted as an omen for freedom fighters that regularly battle oppressive systems hell-bent on their destruction. When she sings all the smoke in the air/feel the hate when they stare/all the pain that we bear/oh, you better beware, she is painting a picture of a movement under siege and warning both leaders and followers alike about the importance of keeping their heads on a swivel.

In the pre-chorus, she establishes who she is standing solidarity with and for what reason while crescendoing to the dynamic hook. H.E.R. sings

Freedom for my brothers
Freedom 'cause they judge us
Freedom from the others
Freedom from the leaders, they’re keeping us

and you believe that it is possible that she left the recording booth and headed straight to a Black Panther planning meeting or began working on carving out the path to a new Underground Railroad.

And by the time she gets to the full-on chorus and declares that as long as she’s standing that we can never lose and that she will always fight for you, it is easy to buy into the idea that her sultry alto voice layered over a funky, yet urgent rhythm is the sound of resistance in the face of systemic opposition.

In the second verse of Fight For You, H.E.R. ups the ante when she affirms that the only solution is a new revolution, and asks freedom fighters of today if they will be ready for war when the opposition knocks at their door, an obvious nod to the ambush that claimed Chairman Fred’s life in the wee hours of the morning on December 4, 1969. 

And as she soars into the final pre-chorus, H.E.R. is crying out for freedom from injustice, freedom from corruption and warning those who have been battle-tested that the enemy is aiming for their destruction. Fight For You is as much of a groove as it is an anthem that challenges listeners to be bold in their convictions, and reaffirms that those who fight on the side of righteousness and justice can have faith that a community of advocates, accomplices and witnesses will always be there, standing in the gap to fight alongside them.

As with much of H.E.R.’s previous work, Fight For You has been critically acclaimed, winning an Academy Award and Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song. But the impact of this record that dropped at the top of Black History Month in 2021, on the eve of the release of Judas and the Black Messiah, and as the nation was still wreaked from the embers of the uprisings during the summer of 2020, cannot be merely defined by how many trophies it brought its creators.

Fight For You is a modern-day protest masterpiece, performed by an artist who is creating at a frequency unparallel to the majority of her peers. It is a courageous song. It is a song of witness. A song that the revolution should be proud to have included in its playlist.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Donney Rose is a Writer, Educator, Organizer and Chief Content Editor at The North Star

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Donney talks about how the work of the late poet, Etheridge Knight inspired Black boys in Baton Rouge public schools to embrace poetry in a manner they never did before.

The first time I stepped into a classroom as a teaching artist was right at 15 years ago. After a half-decade as a performance poet and a few years as a substitute teacher, I was afforded the opportunity to teach the art of spoken word poetry to middle and high school students via the nonprofit I was working for at the time. The majority of my first year as a teaching artist was spent conducting writing workshops in Baton Rouge public schools. The pedagogical approach of the organization I worked for was to work in partnership with classroom teachers and guide their students in writing original poems in response to literary devices and forms they discovered in model texts we brought to the classroom. Oftentimes when the classroom teacher would inform the students that there was a ‘special guest’ that day to lead them in a poetry lesson, a collection of sighs and groans would fill the room.

The students’ disinterest was less about me, and more about how they had been conditioned to view poetry as a genre that primarily celebrated the canon of dead white men whose work did not resonate at all with millennium teenagers.

But the context of their apprehension went a little deeper than just not caring about Shakespeare or Robert Frost.

The Baton Rouge public school system is an overwhelmingly majority Black school system in a state that consistently either hovers toward the bottom or bottoms out in national education rankings. Its students by and large come from impoverished households. The East Baton Rouge Parish School System, which is the governing body of public schools in the city, held the nation’s longest-running school desegregation case which went on for 51 years and did not resolve itself until 2007.

2007 was also the year I began working as a teaching artist.

For Black students in the northern part of the parish, and certain zip codes in the southern part of the parish, the decades-long desegregation case placed them in underfunded schools where their quality of education suffered on multiple fronts. From the infrastructure to the quality of educators schools were able to retain to the merry-go-round of superintendents and their patchwork solutions to a deeply systemic problem, generations of Black students in Baton Rouge’s public school system endured gross inequities in how they were educated in comparison to private and parochial schooled students in Baton Rouge that were mostly white.

I know this educational inequity firsthand, as I was a student in the EBR public school system before I eventually returned as an arts educator.

The first thing I noticed when I began teaching workshops was an unsurprising resistance from Black male high school students. Many of the Black boys I initially came in contact with regarded poetry as a feminine art form that required too much vulnerability to participate in. Their position was all too familiar for me, as I was once a high school Black boy sitting in English classes, gripping tight to whatever semblance of masculine bravado my environment taught me. When I was in high school, I wrote rhymes, and when I became a teaching artist I used my performance experience as a part-time lyricist and emcee to aid me in reeling in boys in my workshops that were reluctant to participate, often gaining favor with them by showcasing my freestyling ability.

But after their initial impression of me wore off and it was time to engage with the model poems I was there to teach them, the Black boys in class would often check out throughout the duration of the lesson. And even though most of our curriculum consisted of contemporary poets whose work reflected very modern themes and was written in accessible language, there was still a large degree of disconnect with a lot of my Black male students who could not identify with the plight of certain poets’ identities that were being used in our workshops.

This was until I introduced those boys to the work of Etheridge Knight.

Etheridge Knight was not a contemporary poet. He was born an entire generation before the students I taught and died several years before they were alive. But his story and poetic voice struck a tone that resonated with those boys who sat in my workshop and previously felt unseen. Knight was a high school dropout from Mississippi that eventually joined the army and fought in the Korean war. During his time in the military, Knight developed a severe drug addiction that ultimately led to him committing a robbery in 1960 that would land him in the Indiana State Prison for eight years. It was during his incarceration that Knight began writing poetry and corresponding with influential Black writers such as Gwendolyn Brooks.

He released his first collection of poetry, Poems from Prison in 1968, and on the back cover, wrote the following text:

“I died in Korea from a shrapnel wound, and narcotics resurrected me. I died in 1960 from a prison sentence and poetry brought me back to life.”

Knight would go on to win various awards and fellowships for his poetry and became a central figure in the Black Arts movement. He was married to legendary poet, Sonia Sanchez, wrote a myriad of critically-acclaimed poetry collections, and ultimately gained a Bachelor’s degree in American poetry and criminal justice in 1990, one year before he died. His writing told gritty truths about mass incarceration, addiction, and criminality, but also leaned into tales of family and dispossession, written with the authenticity of someone who had been to hell and back and found redemption in poetry.

The first poem of Knight’s I taught in a classroom was “The Idea of Ancestry,” a narrative poem told out of sequence about Knight looking at photos of family members he tacked on the wall inside of his prison cell. In the poem, Knight reflected on family members he shared similar features and mannerisms with and told the story of the robbery he committed that separated him from his loved ones. What I remember most about the first few times I taught that poem was the responses from Black boys in my workshops who spoke about their fathers, brothers, uncles, and cousins that had been trapped by the prison industrial complex. The objective was to have students write narrative poems about a time they faced danger, but the context of Knight’s piece cut to a core that I had not previously experienced in the response from my Black male students.

They had read and heard a poem that spoke directly to so many of their lived experiences. In Knight’s words, they found literary kinship that explained the material conditions that shaped their educational outcomes and the societal dynamics that criminalized poverty and addiction and caused a separation between themselves and their loved ones. The rugged truth-telling and cadence of Knight’s work gave those boys a different permission to be vulnerable than other poems I shared with them. For the first time, they were engaging with poetry that was not canonized in the traditional sense they were accustomed to. They were intrigued to learn of a poet who lived under dire conditions who was able to brilliantly articulate tales of survival and redemption for public consumption. They were in awe that those poems found their way into their English classes, delivered by a Black male teaching artist who affirmed that this too was the American canon of poetry.

One of Knight’s most powerful pieces we used in our curriculum was called “Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane,” a poem about a prisoner known as ‘Hard Rock’ who was known “to not take no shit” but had his brain rewired after spending time in an asylum.

Knight writes:

The testing came, to see if Hard Rock was really tame.

A hillbilly called him a black son of a bitch

And didn’t lose his teeth, a screw who knew Hard Rock

From before shook him down and barked in his face.

And Hard Rock did nothing. Just grinned and looked silly,

His eyes empty like knotholes in a fence.

Hard Rock Returns is a gut-wrenching piece about the long-term dehumanizing effect of being institutionalized. Knight draws from his own experience watching Black men be reduced to a shell of their former selves while incarcerated. The boys in my workshops would often share heartbreaking stories of institutionalized family members who went into prison one way and returned as strangers. The raw language of the piece authenticated it for the Black boys in class who were often disenchanted by flowery poetics. And despite the heartache of seeing many of their family members’ stories in the piece, what connected with them, and prevented them from disengaging was reading text that humanized their family members’ experience.

The poem affirmed their suspicions about just how cruel and inhumane the carceral system was, allowing them to not only recognize where they never wanted to be but also empathize more with their loved ones whose crimes could never be equal to their punishment.

Another of Knight’s poems that resonated with my students was the piece titled “The Warden Said to Me”. Knight begins the poem with the following lines:

The warden said to me the other day

(innocently, I think), "Say, Etheridge,

why come the black boys don't run off

like the white boys do?"

I lowered my jaw and scratched my head

and said (innocently, I think), "Well, suh,

I ain't for sure, but I reckon it's cause

we ain't got no wheres to run to."

And within those first few lines, Knight speaks a reality about how inequity plagues the formerly incarcerated and often leads to recidivism. Much like reading the text of Hard Rock Returns connected to personal experiences my students had with incarcerated family members, the text of The Warden Said to Me sparked painful dialogues about their family members who were incapable of functioning outside the confines of the prison system. To see my students light up in the dimmest way imaginable when sharing stories about repeat offenders in their families made me think of my own relatives that were ensnared in a cycle of incarceration. Knight’s words bonded us in a manner that was less about shame and more about collective grief.

His rich imagery turned up the volume on voices that had been cast to the margins, reminded us of what our loved ones were enduring on the inside, but most importantly reminded us that they were still human and capable of feeling fear and hatred and being forgotten.

But through his writing…his exquisite way of humanizing those who had been relegated as less than human, he taught us about the nuance and beauty of the human condition, even at its most destitute.

His words got those Black boys in those neglected public high schools in Baton Rouge to write in a way that no other examples I showed them were able to. Which, I suppose what part of his legacy he was intending to leave behind.

In this week's episode of Word.Life, Donney pays homage to Lauryn Hill's Unplugged album, the  revolutionary lyrics of the track "I Find It Hard to Say (Rebel)," her meteoric rise to stardom in the late 90s and the controversy that followed her after her breakout album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill

Donney sits down with independent hip hop artist and his good friend, Marcel P. Black to discuss Marcel’s song (and album) “Cry Freedom”, the 2016 summer of unrest in Baton Rouge, and what it means to put your politics on the line beyond the rhyme.

In this episode of Word.Life, Donney is in conversation with revolutionary poet, essayist, activist and scholar, Amoja ‘MoMan’ Sumler. They discuss his poem “The Key to Hitting”, systemic abuse and the literal violence that has plagued Black Americans for generations.

I became involved in the game of slam poetry at the top of the 21st-century after a couple of years of performing poems at open mics in my hometown of Baton Rouge. I intentionally used the word ‘game’ instead of genre when referring to slam poetry, because that is what it is, a literary game. Since 1986 poets of varying backgrounds, identities and walks of life have competed in this performance sport in every setting imaginable from bars to coffee houses to galleries to university student centers to wherever an audience would come willing to gather and hear wordsmiths spill their soul and have their art be judged by everyday folks. In the nearly four decades since the inception of this game, the persistent motto has always been that the points are not the point, the poetry is the point, and in no place has that idea ever rang more true than at national and regional slam tournaments.

Attending, and especially competing in a national or regional poetry slam tournament is like stepping into a counter-cultural society. For anywhere from 3 days to a full week depending on the tournament, poets of every ethnicity, gender, orientation and socioeconomic background imaginable have the opportunity to have their voices centered among their peers and poetry enthusiasts. It is almost as if all of the silencing and marginalizing that many of its participants receive in the outside world is temporarily suspended and the voices of the disenfranchised are the MOST valuable ones in existence. This is not to suggest that the world of poetry slam is completely void of societal ills that are common to everyday life. A large part of the culture is the idea that it considers itself to be a truly democratic space and that does not always allow for its participants to be vetted along the lines of morality. Slam, as an open platform, has been both a lighthouse for its participants to express themselves in a world that has often attempted to mute their cries, as well as an unfortunate hiding place for souls that were as tortured as they were talented.

Over the past few decades, some of this generation’s most prolific writers have emerged from the world of poetry slam. Some of the country’s best-selling authors, revered essayists, dynamic musicians, and decorated educators were at one time or another, strategizing in the back of a slam venue at a tournament, hoping to put poems on stage that would gain the respect of their peers, and allow them the opportunity to hoist up a trophy. At its essence, slam gives its participants real-time responses to their work from randomly selected judges that score pieces based on the merit of the writing and performance. But beyond the judges, and the points, and the strategizing, is the community that is formed between members of marginalized populations who find camaraderie in the art of sharing and listening.

I competed in poetry slams at the national level for over a decade and met some of the most interesting personalities I’ve ever known. And that’s an understatement. What I mean is, I’ve met poets who became extended family. Poets who have shared positive affirmations with me, said prayers on my behalf, cheered on my accomplishments outside of dimly lit performance spaces, and stood heel-to-heel with me in fighting for justice in the real world when there was no applause to be gained.

One such poet is my guest on this episode of Word.Life, a veteran by the name of Amoja ‘MoMan’ Sumler whose radical leftist poetry and activism has been a staple in slam circles for over two decades. Amoja Sumler is a poet, essayist, chef, podcast host and author of the poetry collection, Fables, Foibles and Other ‘Merican Sins which is described as a gothic noir that gives readers “an unflinching look at a world of white menace.” MoMan is a legend in the southern poetry community and someone who absolutely abides by the politics he writes about in his work.

We talk about a piece from Fables, Foibles and Other ‘Merican Sins titled “The Key to Hitting” which speaks uses the symbolism of Thomas Jefferson’s abuse of those he enslaved as a metaphor for abuse Black Americans endure at the hands of the system, the abuse we extol on each other, and the lineage of violence in the South that haunts Black life to this very day.

In this week's episode of Word. Life, Donney unpacks Stevie Wonder's "Living for the City" and the longstanding complexities of Black migration

It can be hard to decide which songs or albums of Stevie Wonder’s are his greatest offerings. There are very few musicians in the history of the recording industry who has had a career close to Stevie’s. For the past six decades, the man born Steveland Hardaway Morris has been one of the most revered creatives in American music and has the accolades and the adoration of fans around the globe to prove his invaluable worth.

Many music critics and fans consider 1976’s Songs in the Key of Life to be Stevie’s quintessential stand-out album, and it would be hard to argue that Stevie [or anyone else for that matter] could have composed a better body of work. But among the albums in his stellar discography that gives Songs in the Key of Life a run for its money is 1973’s Innervisions.

At the time of its release, Innervisions was Stevie’s 16th album and peaked at #4 on Billboard within a month of its release. The New York Times described his musical prowess on Innervisions as “as a gang and a genius, producing, composing, arranging, singing, and, on several tracks, playing all the accompanying instruments,” but what signified Innervisions from other previous releases was the range in topics it covered during a pivotal moment in Black/American history.

With songs that tackled issues like drug abuse (“Too High”) and critiques of American leadership (“He’s Misstra Know-It-All”), Stevie took on many of the most critical issues of the day in a post-Vietnam, post-Civil Rights leaders’ assassinations era. One of the most powerful songs on Innervisions for me is “Living for the City” which tells the story of a Mississippi-born young Black man seeking to escape the overt racism of the Deep South for what he assumed would be “greener pastures” in the bright light megatropolis of New York City, only to discover that systemic racism against Black folks also followed its own migration pattern.

Welcome to Word Life, the newest podcast of The North Star Media Group. I came up with this idea to highlight the intersections of literary art, music, politics and revolution from an organic place. I have spent just over the last two decades of my life as a performance poet, a teaching artist, an event organizer, an advocate and most recently as an editor.

Throughout that time I have witnessed the impact of revolutionary art both as an observer and a creator. I have been able to bear witness to the power of words and messages that on the surface may have been meant to entertain, but beneath the surface functioned as a blueprint for change and encouraged its audiences to use radical imagination to shape the world into what they wanted it to be. Each week on Word Life I will be looking at radical works of literary art and revolutionary music, unpacking the context and intent of the messaging.

Sometimes, I will be joined in conversation by the creators of the work. Sometimes, I will be giving my best interpretation of what a certain piece of art was intended to get across or accomplish. Either way, I hope that you’ll join me in threading the intersection of art imitating life, and in discovering the lessons the creators meant for us to take from their offerings.

This is Word.Life, a newsletter about Podcast hosted by The North Star's Chief Content Editor and poet, Donney Rose. .

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