My thanks to poet, photographer, arts advocate, and dear friend Justen Ahren for putting me in the hot seat, for a change, and talking about my new collection THE BLACKENED BLUES.
Aside from my role of founder and Executive Director of a non-profit organization that celebrates creativity and builds community, I’m also a writer. Much of my poetry (and musical criticism) concerns itself with a passion and obsession: jazz music, which is, alongside the blues (and bourbon), America’s signal artistic invention — yet both have very deep roots in African history and tradition. How I came to be a white man writing about obscure jazz musicians is really part and parcel to how I came to be a white man listening to jazz, and blues. Suffice it to say, it’s challenging to take brilliant careers that should be (and have been) subjects of biographies, and distill them into short poems. As a writer, I always wrestle with how artists who were treated so terribly provided us with such effulgent, inspiring music.
THE BLACKENED BLUES is part of a large and ongoing project that discusses (and celebrates) some of my personal heroes who remain far less celebrated than they deserve to be. As it happens, many of them are musicians, hampered in various ways by discrimination, ranging from old fashioned racism to institutional and cultural indifference. Though there’s an elegiac sadness suffusing these poems, there’s also acknowledgment of defiant genius: they fought their battles bravely, in their art and in their lives. This collection seeks to capture something (or, hopefully, more than a few things) essential about their lives, bearing witness while also paying homage.
I’m happy to announce that The Blackened Blues is available wherever you buy books (yes, *wherever*, so you don’t have to put more money in Rocket Man’s pocket; you can go directly to my publisher, Finishing Line Press, or support my pals (and 1455 partners) at D.C.’s The Potter’s House).
