Lorenzo Thomas
Biographic Data
| ID | 3584150 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lorenzo Thomas |
| GIVEN NAMES | Lorenzo |
| FAMILY NAME | Thomas |
| SIGNATURE | THOMAS L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Houston - Downtown |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 39 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 10 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 39 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1972 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Umbra Poets, 1980
370 African American Review 50.4 (Winter 2017): 370-374© 2018 Johns Hopkins University Press and Saint Louis University Umbra Poets_Umbra Poets 2/13/2018 2:11 PM Page 370 UMBRA POETS 371 Umbra Poets_Umbra Poets 2/13/2018 2:11 PM Page 371 372 AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW Umbra Poets_Umbra Poets 2/13/2018 2:11 PM Page 372 UMBRA POETS 373 Umbra Poets_Umbra Poets 2/13/2018 2:11 PM Page 373 374 AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW Umbra Poets_Umbra Poets 2/13/2018 2:11…
Ailerons & Elevators
Ailerons & Elevators Lorenzo Thomas (bio) Autumnal Equinox The backward see The wise don’t say a word Three dreams, one foolish And two meaningless Are haunting me, disturbing me One says A golden road was plotted out for you In dreams, of course But that’s not where you are When you awaken The danger is seeing the world as two extremes The afternoons of rushing home to see her Balanced against turning the corner Hoping that her car will not be t…
The Character of Consciousness
Over years, Amiri Baraka has repeatedly demonstrated his generosity to other poets. Some established poets think of themselves as gatekeepers or godfathers--I'm thinking of someone who perhaps is a chancellor at the Academy of American Poets--and such people like to dole out opportunities to students or proteges. Then there are poets who are genuinely helpful and generous. first kind of folks are usually bad poets. They may be famous and well-con…
Sleeping with the Dictionary
Extraordinary Measures: Afrocentric Modernism and Twentieth-Century American Poetry
This broad overview by an established poet and cultural critic reveals the rich tapestry of African American poetry as it has emerged over the past century. From early 20th-century writings to present-day poetry slams, African American poetry exhibits an impressive range of style and substance. Lorenzo Thomas has written an important new history of the genre that offers a critical reassessment of its development in the 20th century within the con…
The Furious Flowering of African American Poetry
AFRICAN-AMERICAN POETRY, with its wellsprings in jazz and vernacular culture and its inescapable political dimension, stands among the most important bodies of literary work of the twentieth century. This collection of essays and six lively interviews with practicing poets, arising from the now-famous Furious Flower Conference of 1994, provides a mosaic of the major critical and aesthetic issues emerging from the poetry and its literary milieu.Af…
Performing the Word: African American Poetry as Vernacular Culture
Brown (English, Austin Peay State Univ.) organizes her study around the concept of American vernacular culture, which she defines as customs and mores that appear to be most specifically manifested by persons in the United States who trace their ancestry to Africans enslaved there. One feature of this culture is an oral quality that she maintains appears in both the spoken and the written word. Aspects of this tradition manifest themselves, for e…
Goodbye to the Stars & Bars
Who would want to--who would dare--inventory the hatreds in America? Not just those cultivated by harmless stupidity or easily erased jealousies, not just kids tussling over a light or dark My Real BabyTM or any other celebrated sock puppet that could be simply cut in half and put an end to that squabble, but the deep, festering pus-filled hatreds that have already paralyzed various parts of the body politic and now--seemingly resistant to all tr…
Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism
already negligible levels, I more than ever wish to thank those who have assisted me as I have worked on this book
Conversations with Derek Walcott
Lustre
Lustre Lorenzo Thomas (bio) Lorenzo Thomas, Poet: A Special Section What does the warmth Of your hand mean That accompanies The mute slide into sleep When she feels like a shoemaker’s children All your endearments spent On lavish wit Or lyrics mailed away Trading compliments feels Like having dinner with strangers Conversation predicted The weather, a sadness shared About the world today (Art) (land) (livestock) auction prices The polished surfac…
Diplomacy
Diplomacy Lorenzo Thomas (bio) Lorenzo Thomas, Poet: A Special Section Tonight, I count my sins An exercise The kind of thing The most unwinnable of games A solitary state of mind Devises. Nothing to do With conscience or contrite Renunciation Simply to fill up time And block ideas That might just generate Additional complaints Nothing is gained, perhaps Except to understand The eye-piercing cologne men wear To transact filthy business Lorenzo Th…
An Interview with Lorenzo Thomas
Callaloo - Volume 22, Number 2, Spring 1999
Go to Bed Anyway
Go To Bed Anyway Lorenzo Thomas (bio) Lorenzo Thomas, Poet: A Special Section Knowing I will not sleep tonight, Counting my blessings and the day’s Obscenities, Measure what our champions Have achieved— A politics of filth and innuendo, Public discourse degraded into smut Samson’s blind triumph Pulls down the fortress of the enemy On our own heads Knowing I will not sleep tonight, Tomorrow is a fiction For those who need a dream Lorenzo Thomas Lo…
Nowhere Near Albequerque
Callaloo - Volume 22, Number 2, Spring 1999
Songs Without Shadows
Callaloo - Volume 22, Number 2, Spring 1999
Portraits of Community: African American Photography in Texas
Re-Searching Black Music
In Search of Color Everywhere: A Collection of African-American Poetry
Freedom the celebration of blackness love poems holidays and other gatherings healing poems heroes and heroines rituals - music, dance and sport the American journal
Authenticity and Elevation: Sterling Brown's Theory of the Blues
Every poet must confront a serious problem: how reconcile one's private preoccupations with the need make poetry that is both accessible and useful others. A failure this area does not, of course, prevent the production of poems. Indeed, some poems - like many of T. S. Eliot's - may be records of this struggle, while others have the disturbingly eloquent beauty of Church testifying or 12-step program witness. One manner of reconciliation is embra…
Ascension: Music and the Black Arts Movement
The Negro Traditions
"Classical Jazz" and the Black Arts Movement
period between 1960 and 1970 represents an era of important and extraordinary cultural change in United States. Longstanding issues of relationship of ethnic vernacular to mainstream, and that of American mainstream to European high art, came into focus in these years in a particularly contentious yet artistically fruitful manner. If one recalls artists such as John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, and Eric Dolphy, it is clear that jazz musicians were n…
The Time: Portrait of a Journey Home
Alea's Children: The Avant-Garde on the Lower East Side, 1960-1970
A century ago area known as New York's Lower Aside was among most depressed neighborhoods in city. As Milton Meltzer has noted, it distinction of being the most crowded slum district in city, and probably in world, with an 1890 population density of 37 persons per dwelling (73-75)-half a million people in a tight comer of Manhattan. Strangely enough, Lower Side is also a central location of a great deal of American popular culture. A steady flow …
Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism
already negligible levels, I more than ever wish to thank those who have assisted me as I have worked on this book
Communicating by Horns: Jazz and Redemption in the Poetry of the Beats and the Black Arts Movement
Lorenzo Thomas, "Communicating by Horns": Jazz and Redemption in the Poetry of the Beats and the Black Arts Movement, African American Review, Vol. 26, No. 2, Poetry and Theatre Issue (Summer, 1992), pp. 291-298
A sense of community: Blues music as primer for urbanization
(1990). A sense of community: Blues music as primer for urbanization. Popular Music and Society: Vol. 14, No. 2, pp. 77-86
Poèmes
Life in El Barrio
Review of Puerto Rican Obituary by Pedro Pietri.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website
Five Empty Reams
Magnetism
The Shadow World: New York's Umbra Workshop & Origins of the Black Arts Movement
For the oldtime fancy-talking sporting man, was the city so nice they had to name twice. York York. To many others it's not quite so nice. Cold blooded, really. Still, in spite of or because of its congestion of horrors, there is a special dynamic magic to York. Dynamic and decadent. Shyless and maddening. Fancy airs polluted with sighs of desperation. One writer spoke of looking up under Miss Liberty's gown ... only to discover that she don't we…
Black Art/Handbills
By the Numbers: Response to Questionnarie From Jerry W. Ward in Callaloo 4
They Never Lose
We Can See the Craft
A sense of community: Blues music as primer for urbanization
(1990). A sense of community: Blues music as primer for urbanization. Popular Music and Society: Vol. 14, No. 2, pp. 77-86
A Mingus Memory
Millenarian Joys
Poetry
Communicating by Horns: Jazz and Redemption in the Poetry of the Beats and the Black Arts Movement
Lorenzo Thomas, "Communicating by Horns": Jazz and Redemption in the Poetry of the Beats and the Black Arts Movement, African American Review, Vol. 26, No. 2, Poetry and Theatre Issue (Summer, 1992), pp. 291-298
Alea's Children: The Avant-Garde on the Lower East Side, 1960-1970
A century ago area known as New York's Lower Aside was among most depressed neighborhoods in city. As Milton Meltzer has noted, it distinction of being the most crowded slum district in city, and probably in world, with an 1890 population density of 37 persons per dwelling (73-75)-half a million people in a tight comer of Manhattan. Strangely enough, Lower Side is also a central location of a great deal of American popular culture. A steady flow …
Ascension: Music and the Black Arts Movement
The Negro Traditions
"Classical Jazz" and the Black Arts Movement
period between 1960 and 1970 represents an era of important and extraordinary cultural change in United States. Longstanding issues of relationship of ethnic vernacular to mainstream, and that of American mainstream to European high art, came into focus in these years in a particularly contentious yet artistically fruitful manner. If one recalls artists such as John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, and Eric Dolphy, it is clear that jazz musicians were n…
The Time: Portrait of a Journey Home
In Search of Color Everywhere: A Collection of African-American Poetry
Freedom the celebration of blackness love poems holidays and other gatherings healing poems heroes and heroines rituals - music, dance and sport the American journal
Authenticity and Elevation: Sterling Brown's Theory of the Blues
Every poet must confront a serious problem: how reconcile one's private preoccupations with the need make poetry that is both accessible and useful others. A failure this area does not, of course, prevent the production of poems. Indeed, some poems - like many of T. S. Eliot's - may be records of this struggle, while others have the disturbingly eloquent beauty of Church testifying or 12-step program witness. One manner of reconciliation is embra…
Portraits of Community: African American Photography in Texas
Re-Searching Black Music
Conversations with Derek Walcott
Lustre
Lustre Lorenzo Thomas (bio) Lorenzo Thomas, Poet: A Special Section What does the warmth Of your hand mean That accompanies The mute slide into sleep When she feels like a shoemaker’s children All your endearments spent On lavish wit Or lyrics mailed away Trading compliments feels Like having dinner with strangers Conversation predicted The weather, a sadness shared About the world today (Art) (land) (livestock) auction prices The polished surfac…
Art (28 works) · History (23 works) · Literature (16 works) · History (15 works) · Art history (13 works) · Poetry (11 works) · Latin American and Latino Studies (9 works) · Visual arts (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Music History and Culture (7 works)