Kwansaba: Poems by Lenard Moore's Students at Mt. Olive College

Lenard Moore has done more for the vitality of poetry both here in NC and elsewhere than just about anybody I can name. Not only is he a poet himself, he also is a master haiku writer, has written poetry in over thirty forms (this he told me during a telephone call two weeks ago), is a jazz aficionado, with a manuscript of jazz-inspired poems in the works, and he is a teacher who turns his students on to forms like the Kwansaba. The kwan-what? you may be wondering. What follows will explain the what and how of this new form. Lenard's students' work will give you the best introduction--the form itself as poems on the page.(Well, the computer screen!) Following The poems is the news release that appeared in THE TROJAN TIMES, after which you may read a description of the form by Janet Riehl, along with some other examples of the form.



(Lenard Moore)

Lenard teaches at Mount Olive College in Mt. Olive, NC. He notes that the students are seniors rather than juniors as written in their bios,except for Bailey J. Harrell. Bailey graduated from Mount Olive College in December of 2008. The students' poems were originally published in the special issue of Drumvoices Revue, Volume 16, Numbers 1 & 2,Spring-Summer-Fall 2008, celebrating the Richard Wright Centennial. He is justifiably proud of his students' accomplishments.



(Old photo from Mt. Olive College Archive)


----------------
Bailey J. Harrell

In Heaven and In Darkness

Bigger choices, Bigger regrets, Bigger is branded.
Unknown names, seasons change, but blame remains
The same. Rape, theft, guilty, nothing left;
“Tell the truth boy,” death’s your destiny.
Mary, Bessie, the Bloody Brick Breaks and
Binds. The mind deters from hate. How
Can a black man survive this fate?



Bio: My name is Bailey Harrell. I am currently a senior at Mount Olive College. I plan to graduate in August of 2008 with two degrees, one in English and another in English Communications. In the fall, I hope to enroll in law school or possibly continue my studies further in Paris, France. During the four years, I have been here at MOC, I have played softball for the Lady Trojans. I have been named 2nd Team All-Conference twice; and I have also been selected as an NFCA All-American Athlete. When I am not on the ball field, I take on the role of copy-editor for the Mount Olive College Trojan Voices, which is a student-created magazine that publishes works of literature submitted by students, faculty, and members of the community.

--------------
Alisa G. Jones


Innocent Guilt
BOY! I'm no Boy, I'm a Man
You got nothin' on me, no blood
on my hand. I didn't do it,
Wit, I did. I stole and killed
Then ran and hid. Lord, forgive me
for I've sin. I guess I have
to die for my life to begin!



My name is Alisa Jones. I am currently a junior at Mount Olive College. I am double majoring in Business Management and Human Resource Management with a minor in Sports Management. I also play varsity basketball for the college. After college, I plan to attend graduate school to earn my Masters in Business.



(On the Mt. Olive College Campus)


---------------
Brittney Robich



Didn’t Do It

A strong voice echoes the empty room.

“I know you did it boy!” BOOM!

Buckley slams his heavy hand on the

Table. Mary, Bessy, Aston. A rapist was

His label. Bigger is now sweatin’ bullets.

Given this life, didn’t choose it. Now

Yellin’ the words, “I DIDN’T DO IT!”



My name is Brittney Robich. I am a junior at Mount Olive College. I am majoring in Psychology. After graduation, I plan to go on to attend graduate school, and get a Masters in counseling. I play on the Women’s basketball team here at Mount Olive.

----------------------



Carley Moore


WRITER’S HAND


Have you seen this black man-child
Who shot up from a tiny seed
To a man, with full grown hands,
Smoking paper, smoking pens, fiction and poetry?
Must say, “I’ve seen these Black hands.”
From the South arose this “Native Son,”
Of Ella and Nathan, a writer begot.



My name is Carley Moore. I am from Johnsonville, South Carolina. This is my third year at Mount Olive College and I am classified as a junior. I recently switched my major from music to sports management, but I am one class away from having my minor in music. I also plan to minor in English, exercise science, and physical education. Once done at Mount Olive, I plan to go to a school of theology to become a youth minister. Poetry is my way of removing myself from this world and going into a state of peace. Poetry relaxes my mind, body, spirit, and soul.




MOC Students Published
MOUNT OLIVE - Four Mount Olive College students have published poems in the special issue of Drumvoices Revue, Volume 16, Spring/Summer/Fall 2008 celebrating the Richard Wright Centennial. The students wrote Kwansabas, a poetry form that consists of 7 lines with 7 words each line and no more than 7 letters in each word, as part of their English 240 African American Literature Class taught by Assistant Professor of English Lenard Moore.

After reading and discussing Wright's novel, Native Son, students wrote their own poems. Bailey J. Harrell, of Kinston, a December MOC graduate, wrote "In Heaven And In Darkness; "Alisa G. Jones of Fayetteville a member of the MOC Women's Basketball Team, wrote "Innocent Guilt;” Brittany Robich of Rockingham also a member of MOC Women's Basketball Team, wrote "Didn't Do It;" and Carley Moore of Johnsonville, SC wrote “Writer's Hand." Copies of Drumvoices Revue can be ordered for $10.00 plus $2.00 for shipping and handling from http://www.siue.edu/ENGLISH/dvr/drumvoices16.pdf.

“It is important for our students to experience the publication of good writing,” Moore stated. “Hopefully, the publication of their poetry in such a well-respected literary journal will inspire them, too. If they choose to become career writers, then they will know the process from craft to publication.”

Mount Olive College is a private institution rooted in the liberal arts tradition with defining Christian values. The College, sponsored by the Convention of Original Free Will Baptists, has locations in Mount Olive, New Bern, Wilmington, Goldsboro, Research Triangle Park and Washington. For more information, visit www.moc.edu.



Kwansaba: birth of a poetry form
Posted by Janet Grace Riehl on June 18th, 2008

The Kwansaba came into being as a praise song. Drumvoices Revue has used the Kwansaba form to praise Richard Wright (2008), Maya Angelou and Quincy Troupe (2007), Jayne Cortez (2006), Amiri Baraka and Sonia Sanchez (2005), Katherine Dunham (2004), Miles Davis (2003). Outside of haiku and the blues, the Kwansaba is one of the most portable forms. It distills content economically.

In 1995 the kwansaba—a new poetry form—was invented in East St. Louis. The Eugene B. Redmond Writers Club, organized and chartered in March 1986, brought together cultural workers and creative artists searching for “new tools, concepts, vehicles, and challenges within regional and global contexts.”

In the early 1990s Kwanzaa (based on a 7-day ritual) Celebration based around the Nguzo Saba (Seven Principles) was introduced to the United States by Dr. Maulana Karenga. Eugene Redmond says in a 2004 Drumvoices Revue that “Over several months I toyed with the Swahili words Kwanzaa (first fruits) and Saba (principles) until the term kwansaba hit me like fresh–or ancestral—love.”

The Kwansaba is a poem consisting of seven lines. Each line has no more than seven words. Each word has no more than seven letters. Thus, the form, revolving around the number 7, adding up to 49 words, is based on the seven principles of the Kwanzaa celebration.

Redmond continues to explain the importance of the number 7 in “astronomy, numerology, and mythology.” In 2004 Drumvoices Revue published a special series of Kwansabas for Katherine Dunham, who arrived in East St. Louis in 1967, “at the height of the Black Arts Movement and one year after the invention of the Kwansaba.”

Since then, special contests and themes featuring the Kwansaba have been featured in Drumvoices Revue. I attended a workshop Eugene Redmond led in which he shared Kwansabas inspired by Richard Wright’s “Black Boy.” Wright wanted his life to “count for something. Drumvoices #15 (2007) featured this example of a kwansaba for Quincy Troupe.

KWANSABA FOR QUINCY TROUPE
by Reginald Lockett

Lion roaming the vast Serengeti of verse
On the Great Plains he stalks words
Dogs the scents of verbs and nouns
King of musical lines tracks poetry’s song
In the forest there stands his prize,
A sleek gazelle of a poem desired
He makes a quick study and pounces.

INAUGRATION DAY POEMS from North Carolina Poets: Lenard Moore

Lenard Moore's new book of poetry, A TEMPLE LOOMING, was featured in a December post on this blog.
http://ncpoetlaureate.blogspot.com/2008/12/templ


Sunday Reader: The Raleigh News & Observer
Published: Jan 25, 2009 06:17 AM
Modified: Jan 25, 2009 08:07 AM


Letterpoem, November 4, 2008

By Lenard D. Moore

Comment on this story

It was in boyhood that I first listened to my maternal grandfather speak wisdom while I stood attentive in my mother and father's front yard. He also spoke wisdom while working in his garden. My grandfather told me how he had worked for 50 cents a day. In short, he didn't have much opportunity in a segregated world, nor was he allowed to vote. Therefore, I thought it was only fitting for me to address this poem to my grandfather. I wanted to express my jubilation about this new era in American history, this time when we have elected Barack Obama as the first African-American president of the United States of America. On Tuesday, I watched Obama's inauguration on television, knowing my grandfather smiles from heaven, nodding.

LETTER POEM



Dear Granddaddy,

Did you see the star

eleven and a half years ago?

I know you hadn't heard about the new nova

illuminating the global landscape.

I write to tell you that I don't know what

to say at this moment when a black man

has risen like a flag into the sky.

He's just been elected the President

of this country where your grandfather slaved.

I remember you telling me

before I became a teenaged boy,

just how tough it was in Hoover days

when you plowed fields,

dug septic holes, graves, drainage lines,

carpentered houses with your hands.

All day rain didn't stop voters from voting.

I know you would be a century now.

I am a half-century old, seeing

the dream walk across the stage this fall night.

Your grandson,

Luke





Lenard D. Moore, the first African-American president of the Haiku Society of America, is the author of "A Temple Looming." Learn more about Moore at wordtechweb.com/moore.html .

© Copyright 2009, The News & Observer Publishing Company
A subsidiary of The McClatchy Company

A Temple Looming, by Lenard Moore

ISBN 978-1934999103, 80 pages, $17.00
A Temple Looming by Lenard D. Moore is a series of portraits, painstakingly rendered, that capture the nuances of the African-Americans whose lives inspired them:
(www.wordtechweb.com/moore.html}


Splendid in uniform,
the barrel-straight stare
of his pure black face
shines like a bullet.

Imagine he’d not returned
from the Great War,
leaving a void in his family,
and in this picture.

Moore’s artistry preserves what might otherwise be lost: human lives, and their world.

“A Temple Looming is a caring look into records of our African love, our will to life. Moore is ever the guardian, watching the darkening way, listening for our song.”—Afaa M. Weaver, Editor of OBSIDIAN II

“John Milton said ‘poetry should be simple, sensuous, and impassioned.’ Cousin Lenard is surely in that tradition of prosody and hope. Read on.”—Michael S. Harper



Lenard D. Moore was born in Jacksonville, North Carolina. After graduating from high school and attending two years of college at Coastal Carolina Community College, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and had basic training at Fort Jackson in South Carolina. He later earned a B.A. from Shaw University, and an M.A. in English and African American Literature from North Carolina A&T State University. Moore is a former Writer-in-Residence for the United Arts Council of Raleigh and Wake County. He is the founder and executive director of the Carolina African American Writers’ Collective and co-founder of the Washington Street Writers Group. He is President of the Haiku Society of America. He is the founding editor of The CAAWC Newsletter. He also is the executive chairman of the North Carolina Haiku Society. Moore has taught at Enloe High School, North Carolina A&T State University (Greensboro), North Carolina State University (Raleigh) and Shaw University, and now teaches at Mount Olive College, where he is an Assistant Professor of English and directs the MOC Literary Festival and advises The Trojan Voices (former known as The Olive Branch), the MOC literary journal.e. He was also the publicity He lives with his wife in Raleigh, North Carolina. (For more about Lenard Moore go to the Wordtech site listed above.)



FRAMED

The woman
in the photo
looks like Aunt Muriel:
fair-skinned, thin nose,
full lips, broad brows,
flat forehead, and hair
long on both sides
but curled at its ends.
Her poised body,
so full
of pride in a house-cleaning world,
wears a checkered cotton dress
the way Aunt Muriel did.
The scene is somber:
she is so square
to the camera,
just right
in time’s lilac deepening
for claiming kin
nearly forgotten.



---------------------

EVALENE

I like the way you sit:
sideways, legs crossed,
cotton skirt tight
below knobby knees,
left hand on
the higher knee,
and right hand on
the chair’s round back.

I like the way you pose:
twisted around
on the chair, without words;
stiff, head tilted
towards the left shoulder;
no lines, no circles
below the eyes.

I like the way you wait:
wearing a straw hat
ringed with white flowers
like it ain’t nobody’s business;
lips glossed and puckered
as if they were fixed for a kiss;
white shirt, matching jacket,
sweet baby, as if you were kin to me.

------------------
GENERATIONS

A family of four poses,
close enough to keep out light,
two girls, little, wholly thin.

Mother smiles, child in lap,
rests chin on daughter’s head
is unearthly, could praise and sing
until notes, one by one, burst plum red.

Father has his right hand on other girl’s shoulder.
She leans against her sister whose hands are clasped.
Mother leans toward her husband, could take wing.

The man tilts toward his wife,
not fully touching; yet, a gleam
in their eyes baits and burns out strife.

--------------------------
THE OLD SYCAMORE’S LIMBS

hang over the one-lane road I walk.
Leaves lie scattered,
wind stirred.
Over the rise
across the lane:
a stand of longleaf pine,
spaced just enough to hold ghosts
behind an uneven fence.

Up the road, morning light
whitewashes everything,
creates a brilliant tunnel.
I wonder if the road remains
a bed for autumn-brown leaves
on the daystar’s other side.

No animals,
no houses between the pines.
Mist settles everywhere.
Only the sycamore is old enough
to know what might have been.
How its curved arms scratch
the bright blue sheet of sky,
wait for whatever spirit comes
to enter its dark rings.












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