Literary News2023

Some Best-of-the-Best Videos (continued)
Spoken-Word Poems

The Great Realisation Tomos Roberts
In a narrative poem on the 21st-century pandemic, the speaker, an older sibling, relays the saga of the world crisis to a younger sibling, leaving him (and us) on a note of hope.

Lost Voices Darius Simpson & Scout Bostley
In a strategically rendered performance, the duo objects to social norms attached to gender and to race.

Poem to Father Brandon Leake
Son of an absentee father, the speaker leads us from his infancy to his marriage, focused on his emotions toward his father and their ties.

A Love Poem for Lonely Prime Numbers Harry Baker
Both a math and a poetry aficionado, the world-poetry-slam champion (2012) fuses the two into a single, metaphor-rich love story.

Rifle Rudy Francisco
About how society conditions Black men today, the poem progresses from the speaker's gun-centered past to the option of transforming it. The option is conveyed via a symbol at the start and end of the poem that, in effect, frames it.

Gun into Musical Instrument

For more of these poems, go to Video Library.

 


The cannon controversy (continued)

Part of our changing times is pushback against the traditional literary canon, which has long been dominated by white, Western, male writers. Yes, agree some troubled professors: Let's modify the canon, but not at the expense of traditionally taught titles that are well worth preserving. The personal and social benefits derived from these works are too precious to lose. They, as well as previously ignored titles, advance individual and collective growth, enabling us to better assess a current social practice or popular belief. And exposure to traditional titles promotes our capacity for self-expression—in content and style.

All these considerations leave us with the issue of how best to update the literary canon. Let's dispense, say the champions of preservation as well as progress, with the rigidity of the past and fuse together fine works by ethnic and female writers with those by some long-taught luminaries. Present-day technology allows for more pliability in updating the canon than before. And we can merge into the mix an old-new genre that's taken hold of late: spoken-word poems responsive to social issues today. The poem below is a telling example.


 

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