ISBN: 9780252028748

In Afro-Blue Tony Bolden traces the ways innovations in black music and poetry have driven the evolution of a variety of other American vernacular artistic forms. The blues tradition, Bol… Mehr…

In Afro-Blue Tony Bolden traces the ways innovations in black music and poetry have driven the evolution of a variety of other American vernacular artistic forms. The blues tradition, Bolden demonstrates, plays a key role in the relationship between poetry and vernacular expressive forms. Through an analysis of the formal qualities of blues music, Afro-Blue shows that it functions as a form of resistance, affirming the values and style of life that oppose bourgeois morality. Even before the term blues had cultural currency, the inscriptions of style and resistance embodied in the blues tradition were already a prominent feature of black poetics. Bolden delineates this interrelation, examining how poets extend and reshape a variety of other verbal folk forms in the same way that blues musicians play with other musical genres. Bolden identifies three distinct bodies of blues poetics: some poets mimic and riff on oral forms, others fuse their dedication to vernacular culture with a concern for literary conventions, while still others opt to embody the blues poetics by becoming blues performers. Tony Bolden, Books, Fiction and Literature, Afro-blue: Improvisations in African American Poetry and Culture Books>Fiction and Literature In Afro-Blue Tony Bolden traces the ways innovations in black music and poetry have driven the evolution of a variety of other American vernacular artistic forms. The blues tradition, Bolden demonstrates, plays a key role in the relationship between poetry and vernacular expressive forms. Through an analysis of the formal qualities of blues music, Afro-Blue shows that it functions as a form of resistance, affirming the values and style of life that oppose bourgeois morality. Even before the term "blues" had cultural currency, the inscriptions of style and resistance embodied in the blues tradition were already a prominent feature of black poetics. Bolden delineates this interrelation, examining how poets extend and reshape a variety of other verbal folk forms in the same way that blues musicians play with other musical genres. Bolden identifies three distinct bodies of blues poetics: some poets mimic and riff on oral forms, others fuse their dedication to vernacular culture with a concern for literary conventions, while still others opt to embody the blues poetics by becoming blues performers.<