| Summary: | Furious Flower III: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry (2015) offers the unprecedented opportunity to watch thirty-two of today's leading African American poets reading from their work and discussing the critical issues shaping this vibrant poetic tradition. Its four video volumes compile close to five hours of highlights from the landmark national poetry summit sponsored once a decade by the Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University, the country's only academic venue devoted to the study of African American poetry. Together with Furious Flower I (1998) and II (2005) - now newly available - this third title constitutes a video anthology of some of the most exciting poetry and perceptive critical insights of the past decade. Any teacher, poet, student or reader who has followed the current flowering of African American verse would want to have attended this seminal event - and now on video they can. The conference's final thematic focus was the role of formal innovation in defining and developing a Black aesthetics for the future. These seven poets explore directions which are "pushing the envelope" of African American poetic expression:Tyehimba Jess, Major Jackson, Evie Shockley, Jericho Brown, Mendi Lewis Obadike, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Yusef Komunyakaa.
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