Book contents
- The Cambridge History of African American Poetry
- The Cambridge History of African American Poetry
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Beginnings
- Part II Black Modernity
- Part III The New Black Poetries
- Part IV Building Our Own
- 22 Anthologizing Black Poetry, 1922–2022
- 23 The Sisterhood and Its Legacies
- 24 “An Avant-Garde Thing”
- 25 What Cave Canem Means
- 26 Furious Flowering
- Part V Histories of The Future
- Index
- References
26 - Furious Flowering
Black Poetry and Institutional Durability
from Part IV - Building Our Own
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 May 2026
Edited by
Book contents
- The Cambridge History of African American Poetry
- The Cambridge History of African American Poetry
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Beginnings
- Part II Black Modernity
- Part III The New Black Poetries
- Part IV Building Our Own
- 22 Anthologizing Black Poetry, 1922–2022
- 23 The Sisterhood and Its Legacies
- 24 “An Avant-Garde Thing”
- 25 What Cave Canem Means
- 26 Furious Flowering
- Part V Histories of The Future
- Index
- References
Summary
This chapter traces the history and legacy of Furious Flower, conceived as a conference on Black poetry and poetics in 1994 and continuing to this day as an academic and cultural center housed at James Madison University. While such institutionality may find itself, at times, at odds with the most radical parts of the African American poetic tradition, it is nevertheless a fundamental way to establish historically marginalized writing in the literary consciousness of a nation. This chapter examines the shape and the substance of Furious Flower’s dedication to archival recording while also looking at the organization’s attempt to chart a poetic landscape for African American poetry after the Black Arts Movement, in an era that has seen explosive growth in the production of poetic work but, precisely due to that growth, is increasingly hard to describe as a unified “tradition.” The chapter identifies how, through its dedication to audiovisual material, Furious Flower has turned scores of deeply ephemeral events into something that can be experienced across time and space, repeatedly, for the sake of research, teaching, community-building, and history-telling.
Keywords
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- Type
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- Information
- The Cambridge History of African American Poetry , pp. 478 - 494Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2026
References
Selected Bibliography
Andrews, Kimberly Quiogue. The Academic Avant-Garde: Poetry and the American University. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023.Google Scholar
Gabbin, Joanne V. (ed.). The Furious Flowering of African American Poetry. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1999.Google Scholar
Gabbin, Joanne V. (ed.). Furious Flower: African American Poetry from the Black Arts Movement to the Present. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Gabbin, Joanne V. and Alleyne, Lauren K (eds.). Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry. Evanston, IL: Triquarterly Books, Northwestern University Press, 2020.Google Scholar
Judy, Ronald A. T. (Dis)Forming the American Canon: African–Arabic Slave Narratives and the Vernacular. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Murphy, Dana. “Praisesong for Margaret Walker’s Jubilee and the Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival,” in African American Review 53(4) (2020): 299–313.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Porter, Lavelle. The Blackademic Life: Academic Fiction, Higher Education, and the Black Intellectual. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2019.Google Scholar
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