Poets' Corner

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Comment by Edwin Boone on May 14, 2012 at 10:19pm

Comment by Edwin Boone on April 6, 2012 at 11:05am

In Honor of Elizabeth Catlett: a queen whose dream is our self esteem
April 15, 1915 - April 2, 2012
 
Elizabeth Catlett conceived and created her art through her love of truth and her love for Black people.
 
She drew and sculped the mountains and valleys of our cultural realities.
 
She raised our spirits in celebration,
                     as she guided us to find comfort in finding ourselves.
 
In her work, and in her person, she expressed and encouraged
                     a focused sense of honor and purpose in portraying Black people.
 
With her pasting, we feel her spirit as a cool Black breeze in a white hot world;
                     a world that is endurable - because she lived and worked and loved us.
 
Let us honor Elizabeth Catlett by following the example she set;
                      living and creating with a passion for our African heritage.
 
 Let us follow her dream of achieving a progressive world vision and a freedom loving reality.
 
 
May you rest in peace Elizabeth Catlett,
                       as we find peace through your artwork and the life you have lived.
 
Akili Ron Anderson
Thursday, April 6, 2012

Comment by Edwin Boone on April 3, 2012 at 7:29am

In the western world most people agree that the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci is considered the most recognizable painting by a european artist. My question is, what is the most famous or recognizable painting by a Black Artist? Is it Sugar Shack by Ernie Barnes, an untitled skull  by Jean Michel Basquiat, or The Banjo Lesson by Henry Ossawa Tanner. 

Would Bill Clinton's Presidential Portrait by Simmie Knox be considered well known, and if so, is it a contender. Could a piece by some other living contemporary artist who has a unique style, and has created a painting that is very well known in the Black community be the most famous painting by a Black artist. What's your opinion?  Is there such a painting?
http://blackartinamerica.com/forum/topics/most-famous-painting-by-a...

Comment by Edwin Boone on March 30, 2012 at 10:52pm

CornelWest
30 Mar
A legal system that can’t disclose the truth & lacks any moral substance calls into question the system's legitimacy. ow.ly/9ZnHp

CornelWest
27 Mar
To be great in our times too often means to have great prosperity and no moral magnanimity at all.


CornelWest
26 Mar
RT @FWDnation: #AmpItUp! FWDnation.com RT @CornelWest: Message to student activists: You are in school to FIND YOUR VOICE.

CornelWest
26 Mar
Go to the studio, library, laboratory, church and even the club...in between, I work for the economic justice of those living in poverty.

CornelWest
26 Mar
If activism is in your heart, embrace it. Everybody can't be a full time activist, but find time in your vocation for your activism.

CornelWest
26 Mar
Don't tell me about your job, I want to know about your life's task.

CornelWest
26 Mar
What is your vocation, not just your profession; what is your calling, not just your career...

CornelWest
26 Mar
Don't ask for anyone's permission about what you want to work for. Consultation is important, but the choice is yours.

CornelWest
26 Mar
Message to student activists: You are in school to FIND YOUR VOICE.

CornelWest
25 Mar
I finally get deep inside Finland’s world-renowned education sys w/ the Dir. General of Finnish Edu, Pasi Sahlberg: ow.ly/9RJny

CornelWest
24 Mar
A listener from #Occupy Seattle takes me to task about my openness to voting for Barack Obama in this year’s election: ow.ly/9RnIm

CornelWest
24 Mar
Here is the letter sister Sinead O’Connor forwarded #SmileyAndWest in light of the #Trayvon Martin tragedy: ow.ly/9R71L


CornelWest
23 Mar
We all are sick of tired of innocent people being shot down, especially innocent Black children. ow.ly/9QzQY

CornelWest
23 Mar
We want to be part of the fightback to ensure that some sense of #justice is procured. ow.ly/9QzDn #Trayvon Martin


CornelWest
22 Mar
I cannot be an optimist but I am a prisoner of #hope. ow.ly/9P9Fn

Comment by Eartha Watts-Hicks on March 27, 2012 at 12:35pm

Attention all poets:

Submit now for the 2012 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Deadline is April 30th. Visit http://www.cavecanempoets.org/cave-canem-prize. Good luck!

Comment by Edwin Boone on March 10, 2012 at 10:50pm

Homeless Poet, I saw your last post a few days ago, but didn't pay much attention to it.
Religion is under valued in our society, it serves a genuine need, glad we have it, thank you for sharing. What would we do without it.

Comment by The Homeless Poet on March 8, 2012 at 2:41pm

Comment by Edwin Boone on February 23, 2012 at 8:37pm

http://www.ecclesia-ministries.org/index.html

A Ministry with a mission.




To a justice worker the master said,
"You stress only one of the two imperatives of justice."
"Namely?"
"The poor have a right to bread."
"What's the other one?"
"The poor have a right to beauty."

Comment by Edwin Boone on February 20, 2012 at 11:25pm

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone. (James Baldwin)
 
Life is more important than art; that's what makes art important. (James Baldwin)
 
No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it. (James Baldwin)
 
All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up. (James Baldwin)
 
The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity and one's knowledge of human life. (Ralph Ellison)
 
I am an invisible man. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. (Ralph Ellison)
 
There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.
(Maya Angelou)
 
You can't use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have. (Maya Angelou)
 
In today's climate in our country, which is sickened with the pollution of pollution, threatened with the prominence of AIDS, riddled with burgeoning racism, rife with growing huddles of the homeless, we need art and we need art in all forms. We need all methods of art to be present, everywhere present, and all the time present. (Maya Angelou)
　
We are all creative, but by the time we are three of four years old, someone has knocked the creativity out of us. Some people shut up the kids who start to tell stories. Kids dance in their cribs, but someone will insist they sit still. By the time the creative people are ten or twelve, they want to be like everyone else. (Maya Angelou)
　
An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose. (Langston Hughes)

Art is not escape, but a way of finding order in chaos, a way of confronting life."
(Robert Hayden)
 
The sincere, sensitive artist, willing to go beneath the clichés of popular belief to get at an underlying reality, will be wary of confining a race's entire characters to a half-dozen narrow grooves. (Sterling Brown)
 
Without imagination we can go nowhere. And imagination is not restricted to the arts. Every scientist I have met who has been a success has had to imagine. (Rita Dove)
 
Acceptance of prevailing standards often means we have no standards of our own.
(Jean Toomer)
　
Most novices picture themselves as masters - and are content with the picture. This is why there are so few masters. (Jean Toomer)
 
Art is not for the cultivated taste. It is to cultivate taste. (Nikki Giovanni)
　
We eat up artists like there's going to be a famine at the end. (Nikki Giovanni)
 
Art hurts. Art urges voyages - and it is easier to stay at home. (Gwendolyn Brooks)
 
And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see - or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read. (Alice Walker)

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.
(Alice Walker)

Helped are those who create anything at all, for they shall relive the thrill of their own conception and realize a partnership in the creation of the Universe that keeps them responsible and cheerful. (Alice Walker)

Thought is more important than art. To revere art and have no understanding of the process that forces it into existence, is finally not even to understand what art is (Amiri Baraka)
 
Art is not living. It is the use of living. (Audre Lorde)
 
A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots. (Marcus Garvey)

You are young, gifted, and Black. We must begin to tell our young, There's a world waiting for you, Yours is the quest that's just begun. (James Weldon Johnson)
 
Every mother should be a true artist, who knows how to weave into her child's life images of grace and beauty, the true poet capable of writing on the soul of childhood the harmony of love and truth, and teaching it how to produce the grandest of all poems - the poetry of a true and noble life. (Frances Ellen Watkins Harper)
 
Art is History's nostalgia, it prefers a thatched roof to a concrete factory, and the huge church above a bleached village. ( Derek Walcott)
 
“Violence is central in our lives, a constant and unavoidable reality. Experience is not a linear construct moving from one point to another - childhood to maturity, "bad" to "good," beginning to end - but a wheel turning around a point that shifts between hope and despair.
"At the still point of the turning world," the job of the artist is not to resolve or beautify, but to hold complexities, to see and make clear." (Tori Derricotte)
 
My horizon on humanity is enlarged by reading the writers of poems, seeing a painting, listening to some music, some opera, which has nothing at all to do with a volatile human condition or struggle or whatever. It enriches me as a human being. (Wole Soyinka)
 
Free enterprise is not a bad idea and has produced art. (Ishmael Reed)

Comment by Edwin Boone on February 20, 2012 at 8:14am

Without Santuary; a pictorial documentary about lynching.
http://withoutsanctuary.org/main.html

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