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A. Van Jordan

Autor von M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A : poems

8+ Werke 203 Mitglieder 9 Rezensionen Lieblingsautor von 2 Lesern

Über den Autor

A. Van Jordan is an assistant professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Beinhaltet den Namen: A. Van Jordan

Werke von A. Van Jordan

Zugehörige Werke

The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (2021) — Mitwirkender — 1,471 Exemplare
McSweeney's Issue 22: Three Books Held Within By Magnets (2007) — Mitwirkender — 335 Exemplare
African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song (2020) — Mitwirkender — 170 Exemplare
The 100 Best African American Poems (2010) — Mitwirkender — 96 Exemplare
Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (2006) — Mitwirkender — 86 Exemplare
The Best American Poetry 2013 (2013) — Mitwirkender — 81 Exemplare
This Is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets (2024) — Mitwirkender — 21 Exemplare
Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry (2019) — Mitwirkender — 14 Exemplare
It's All Love: Black Writers on Soul Mates, Family, and Friends (2009) — Mitwirkender — 11 Exemplare
Bearden's Odyssey: Poets Respond to the Art of Romare Bearden (2017) — Mitwirkender — 11 Exemplare

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The kind of poetry that pretends edgy phrases and random flashbacks are somehow deep and meaningful.
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hissingpotatoes | 2 weitere Rezensionen | Dec 28, 2021 |
This was a book that I purchased for a poetry writing class that we then never bothered to reference or read, so it's been sitting in my "to read" pile for a number of years, tucked away in a storage bin that I'm finally going through.

It certainly is an interesting piece, all the works included revolve around the life and times of MacNolia Cox, a young black girl who won her local, state-wide spelling bee, only to be sucker punched by the white judge at the National Bee, giving her a word that was not on the approved list and breaking her spirit. The entries do not follow any exact time frame, jumping around to different points in her life. In fact, most of the information regarding her spelling champ days isn't until the end of the book, though it was a much earlier part of her life.

Several poems in this collection are written in a hybrid screenplay form, making them very visually striking. There are also poems in the form of dictionary entries and those written in more long form style.

One of my favorite works in this book is "The Night Richard Pryor Met Mudbone," an amazing poem that detalis the moment Richard Pryor went from a descent comic mimicking Bill Cosby to the Pryor who would be considered a comedy trailblazer. It's such a powerful piece. I love it.
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regularguy5mb | 3 weitere Rezensionen | Feb 16, 2015 |
MACNOLIA engaged me as a hybrid piece, more a novel comprised of poems than a book of stand-alone poems (and therein lies its strength, I think). As in Lyrae Van Clief-Stephanon’s Black Swan, Van Jordan’s poems come together to form a coherent and interesting whole greater than the sum of its parts. Van Jordan takes his project up a notch by playing around to a certain extent with form (I hate to use “experimental” in relation to poetry, since I think it has become almost meaningless). His approach to putting words on the page is quite varied, moving from left justified stanzas to prose blocks to double-spaced lines to a poem, “Dust,” that incorporates gaps of white space (“exploded” form). None of this is new or radical in contemporary poetry, of course, but its hybrid nature saves MACNOLIA from getting mired in a narrative which is essentially coherent and accessible to the reader (not to say that Van Jordan “tells all”). The story told is not Van Jordan’s own (except in an historical/communal experience sense) but that of a black girl from Akron, Ohio who won the District spelling bee in 1936, then went on to the national championships in Washington D.C., where she came in fifth, having lost when the Southern judges gave her a word to spell, "nemesis," that was not on the official list (in other words, a word that she was not responsible for). Some of the poems in the book relate the story of the spelling bee and others the story (more a set of images, than an account) of MacNolia’s marriage to John Montiere. Breaking up (or through) the personal story are a series of blues poems that call upon (call forth/ recall) such historical/cultural figures as Jesse Owens, Richard Pryor, Bill Robinson, Mudbone, Josephine Baker, Asa Philip Randolph and Fats Waller. By definition, spelling is about words, about how a word looks, rather than how or what it means. In MacNolia’s case, being a champion speller also came down to how she looked, rather than what she was capable of doing or being. For the poet, words have a look, a sound, meanings and histories, as well as History about them. Van Jordan plays with all these aspects of words in the poems that comprise MACNOLIA. Among the most intriguing to me are the definition poems: “inchoate,” "from," “afterglow,” “with,” and “to.” Especially in "from," “with” and “to,” I found myself emphasizing the italicized "defined" words while reading them, which set up an hypnotic rhythm and created the feel of a percussive, fragmented syntax in an on-the-surface-of-it straightforward line. Musically and thematically, MACNOLIA brings to mind Toni Morrision’s novel Jazz, while formally, although quite different in form and content, it made me think of Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. Which brings me back to my initial inclination to read MACNOLIA as a novel rather than as a collection of poems.



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Paulagraph | 3 weitere Rezensionen | May 25, 2014 |
Unlike Van Jordan's earlier work, Macnolia, this work becomes so much wrapped up in documenting an idea and a history that the poetry ends up losing some of its power. At times, flashes of Van Jordan's best work appears, but on the whole, this project holds out all of the promise of his other work, and just doesn't deliver quite as much as might be expected. The language veers toward a more documentary tone, losing the emotion of his earlier works--so, while the story is interesting, the poetry is far less memorable. I'd recommend this to readers interested in poetry documenting history or engaging with film or art...but for readers simply interested in worthwhile poetry, I'd point them to Van Jordan's earlier works. He's one of my favorite poets, but while this work explores many of his already established themes (African American history, race relations, poverty, film, artists), it doesn't do so with nearly the grace and power I generally associate with his writing.… (mehr)
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whitewavedarling | Dec 18, 2013 |

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