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Condition Red: Essays, Interviews, and Commentaries
Yusef Komunyakaa; Edited by Radiclani Clytus
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Condition Red collects writing by one of America's most gifted and revered poets, Yusef Komunyakaa. While themes from his earlier prose collection, Blue Notes, run through Condition Red, this volume expresses a greater sense of urgency about the human condition and the role of the artist. Condition Red includes his powerful letter to Poetry magazine, asserting that "we writers (artists) cannot forget that we are responsible for what we conjure and embrace through language, whether in essays, novels, plays, poems, or songs." Also included are essays and interviews on: coming home to Bogalusa, Louisiana; the influence of religion on black poetry; language and eroticism; the visual artist Floyd Tunson; and the poets Robert Hayden, Walt Whitman, Clarence Major, and Etheridge Knight. The book features an extended introduction by editor Radiclani Clytus, who concludes that "Condition Red issues readers much more than a critical warning; it reminds us that our innate cultural capacity for language is, and always has been, the sum total of that which defines us."
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Cover
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Title Page
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Copyright Page
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Contents
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Language in Our Blood
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I. Essays
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Red
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Erasure
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An Ode to Raccoon
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Sorrow Songs and Flying Away: Religious Influence on Black Poetry
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A Needful Thing
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Crossroads
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A Supreme Signifier: Etheridge Knight
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The Devil’s Secretary
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The Blue Machinery of Summer
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The Blood Work of Language
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Son of Pop: Floyd D. Tunson’s Neo-blues
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Conundrum
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Clarence Major’s Cosmopolitan Vision
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Dark Waters
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The Method of Ai
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II. Interviews
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Collaboration and the Wishbone
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Three Shades of Past
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Excursions
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Getting a Shape
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The Wolf/Interview
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Celebration and Confrontation: Walt Whitman
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III. Commentaries
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Notes from a Lost Notebook
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You Made Me
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More Than a State of Mind
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Eros, Words
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A Letter to Poetry
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Small Illuminations
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How Poetry Helps People to Live Their Lives
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Picking a Lock to the Mind-Jail in the City of Asylum
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A Note from The Best American Erotic Poems
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The Mission of American Poets and Writers Visiting the 2008 Kolkata Book Fair
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Rewriting Dante
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Citable Link
Published: 2017
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
- 978-0-472-12274-5 (ebook)
- 978-0-472-07344-3 (hardcover)
- 978-0-472-05344-5 (paper)