A “rich hybrid of memoir and history” (The New Yorker) of the literary art form that has transformed the cultural landscape, by one of its influential practitioners, an award-winning poet, professor, and slam champion “Bennett…transport[s] us back to the city blocks, bars, cafes and stages these artists traversed and inhabited…an instructive text for young poets, artists or creative entrepreneurs trying to find a way to carve out a space for themselves…Shines with a refreshing dynamism.” —The New York Times In 2009, when he was twenty years old, Joshua Bennett was invited to perform a spoken word poem for the Obamas, at the same White House "Poetry Jam" where Lin-Manuel Miranda declaimed the opening bars of a work-in-progress that would soon revolutionize American theater. That meeting is but one among many in the trajectory of Bennett's young life, as he rode the cresting wave of spoken word through the 2010s. But in this book, he is not a memoirist so much as a participant historian, who goes back to the roots of the spoken word form, considering the Black Arts movement and the prominence of poetry and song in Black education; the origins of the famed Nuyorican Poets Cafe in the Lower East Side living room of the visionary Miguel Algarín, who hosted verse gatherings with legendary figures like Ntozake Shange and Miguel Piñero; the rapid growth of the "slam" format that was pioneered at the Get Me High Lounge in Chicago; the perfect storm of spoken word's rise during the explosion of social media; the stories and perspectives of many others on this journey, as they helped shape spaces dedicated to literature as practiced with urgency by people of color and to the pursuit of human freedom. A celebration of voices outside the dominant cultural narrative, who boldly embraced an array of styles and forms and redefined what—and whom—the mainstream would include, Bennett's book illuminates the profound influence spoken word has had everywhere melodious words are heard, from Broadway to academia, from the podiums of political protest to cafés, schools, and rooms full of strangers all across the world.
From a 2021 Whiting Award and Guggenheim Fellow recipient, a “rhapsodic, rigorous poetry collection, which pays homage to everyday Black experience in the U.S.” (The New Yorker) Gregory Pardlo described Joshua Bennett's first collection of poetry, The Sobbing School, as an "arresting debut" that was "abounding in tenderness and rich with character," with a "virtuosic kind of code switching." Bennett's new collection, Owed, is a book with celebration at its center. Its primary concern is how we might mend the relationship between ourselves and the people, spaces, and objects we have been taught to think of as insignificant, as fundamentally unworthy of study, reflection, attention, or care. Spanning the spectrum of genre and form--from elegy and ode to origin myth--these poems elaborate an aesthetics of repair. What's more, they ask that we turn to the songs and sites of the historically denigrated so that we might uncover a new way of being in the world together, one wherein we can truthfully reckon with the brutality of the past and thus imagine the possibilities of our shared, unpredictable present, anew.
An acclaimed poet further extends his range into the realm of speculative fiction, while addressing issues as varied as abolition, Black ecological consciousness, and the boundless promise of parenthood Featuring the novella “The Book of Mycah,” soon to be adapted by Lena Waithe’s Hillman Grad Productions & Warner Bros. TV Across three sequences, Joshua Bennett’s new book recalls and reimagines social worlds almost but not entirely lost, all while gesturing toward the ones we are building even now, in the midst of a state of emergency, together. Bennett opens with a set of autobiographical poems that deal with themes of family, life, death, vulnerability, and the joys and dreams of youth. The central section, “The Book of Mycah,” features an alternate history where Malcolm X is resurrected from the dead, as is a young black man shot by the police some fifty years later in Brooklyn. The final section of The Study of Human Life are poems that Bennett has written about fatherhood, on the heels of his own first child being born last fall.
A prize-winning poet argues that blackness acts as the caesura between human and nonhuman, man and animal. Throughout US history, black people have been configured as sociolegal nonpersons, a subgenre of the human. Being Property Once Myself delves into the literary imagination and ethical concerns that have emerged from this experience. Each chapter tracks a specific animal figure—the rat, the cock, the mule, the dog, and the shark—in the works of black authors such as Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Jesmyn Ward, and Robert Hayden. The plantation, the wilderness, the kitchenette overrun with pests, the simultaneous valuation and sale of animals and enslaved people—all are sites made unforgettable by literature in which we find black and animal life in fraught proximity. Joshua Bennett argues that animal figures are deployed in these texts to assert a theory of black sociality and to combat dominant claims about the limits of personhood. Bennett also turns to the black radical tradition to challenge the pervasiveness of antiblackness in discourses surrounding the environment and animals. Being Property Once Myself is an incisive work of literary criticism and a close reading of undertheorized notions of dehumanization and the Anthropocene.
The debut collection from a 2021 Whiting Award and Guggenheim Fellow recipient whose “astounding, dolorous, rejoicing voice is indispensable” (Tracy K. Smith) The Sobbing School, Joshua Bennett’s mesmerizing debut collection of poetry, presents songs for the living and the dead that destabilize and de-familiarize representations of black history and contemporary black experience. What animates these poems is a desire to assert life, and interiority, where there is said to be none. Figures as widely divergent as Bobby Brown, Martin Heidegger, and the 19th-century performance artist Henry Box Brown, as well as Bennett’s own family and childhood best friends, appear and are placed in conversation in order to show that there is always a world beyond what we are socialized to see value in, always alternative ways of thinking about relation that explode easy binaries.
The powerful story of an art form that has transformed the cultural landscape, by an award-winning poet, professor, and slam champion. 'AN ENGAGING HISTORY' New York Times | 'A RICH HYBRID OF MEMOIR AND HISTORY' The New Yorker | 'A MUST-READ' Roger Robinson | 'GALVANISING' Luke Kennard | 'CAPTURES LIGHTNING IN A BOTTLE' Therí A. Pickens | 'MAGNIFICENT' Cornel West In 2009, at only twenty years old, Joshua Bennett was invited to recite a poem for President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama at the White House's Evening of Poetry, Music, and the Spoken Word. Spike Lee and Saul Williams were in the audience, and it turned out to be the very same event where Lin-Manuel Miranda first performed a work-in-progress that revolutionised musical theatre - Hamilton. Blending memoir and literary analysis, Bennett shows how a handful of visionaries altered modern culture. With passion, wit and erudition, he charts the history of spoken-word poetry, as well as his coming-of-age journey as a writer. From the early influence of Miguel Algarín and the Nuyorican Poets Café to Amanda Gorman's inauguration poem for President Joe Biden, he celebrates the contributions of legendary figures such as Ntozake Shange, Nikki Giovanni and Miguel Piñero, as well as how artists like MF DOOM, Jill Scott and Mos Def were inspired to develop their craft within their shared tradition. Spoken Word illuminates the profound influence that poetry has had everywhere melodious words are heard, from the West End to academia, from the podiums of political protest to cafés, from schools to rooms full of strangers all across the world.
Exploring the rich relationship between historical thought and religious debate in Victorian culture, God and Progress offers a unique and authoritative account of intellectual change in nineteenth-century Britain. The volume recovers a twofold process in which the growth of progressive ideas of history transformed British Protestant traditions, as religious debate, in turn, profoundly shaped Victorian ideas of history. It adopts a remarkably wide contextual perspective, embracing believers and unbelievers, Anglicans and nonconformists, and writers from different parts of the British Isles, fully situating British debates in relation to their European and especially German Idealist surroundings. The Victorian intellectual mainstream came to terms with religious diversity, changing ethical sensibilities, and new kinds of knowledge by encouraging providential, spiritualized, and developmental understandings of human time. A secular counter-culture simultaneously disturbed this complex consensus, grounding progress in appeals to scientific advances and the retreat of metaphysics. God and Progress thus explores the ways in which divisions within British liberalism were fundamentally related to differences over the past, present, and future of religion. It also demonstrates that religious debate powered the process by which historicism acquired cultural authority in Victorian national life, and later began to lose it. The study reconstructs the ways in which theological dynamics, often relegated to the margins of nineteenth-century British intellectual history, effectively forged its leading patterns.
Stirring collection of Indian Legends that have endured from generations ago to enlighten many tomorrows. The true oral history of a real people. Retold from diaries, manuscripts, letters. Who rehearst the story tellings--Viz.: U. S. leaders, missionaries & Rabbi who lived amongst the Indians.
If your memories aren’t your own, then whose are they? One man is about to find out, as he accidentally ingests a mysterious drug that throws him into a hallucination so vivid that it seems real. Now Dr. Taylor Briggs will embark on a journey to unlock the mysteries of his own mind—and to find the killer of the innocent victims whose last moments are being played out in his head, in a stunning psychological thriller that explores memory, its crucial role in our consciousness—and its power to deceive. Also a major motion picture starring Billy Zane, Dennis Hopper, and Ann-Margaret.
The purpose of Communicating in the Anthropocene: Intimate Relations is to tell a different story about the world. Humans, especially those raised in Western traditions, have long told stories about themselves as individual protagonists who act with varying degrees of free will against a background of mute supporting characters and inert landscapes. Humans can be either saviors or destroyers, but our actions are explained and judged again and again as emanating from the individual. And yet, as the coronavirus pandemic has made clear, humans are unavoidably interconnected not only with other humans, but with nonhuman and more-than-human others with whom we share space and time. Why do so many of us humans avoid, deny, or resist a view of the world where our lives are made possible, maybe even made richer, through connection? In this volume, we suggest a view of communication as intimacy. We use this concept as a provocation for thinking about how we humans are in an always-already state of being-in-relation with other humans, nonhumans, and the land.
This book is a myth for our time. It is a story, not in that it has a plot, but rather that it grows as it goes on. It consists of 72 interwoven chapters, which can be read independently, but together name the collective experience of life in the present age. Each chapter addresses a current personal, cultural, or spiritual topic, and each word participates meaningfully in the development of these ideas. At the beginning of October 2019, I had an urge to sit down and begin speaking. This book is a record of all that I said over the course of the following 40 days. I offer here the result of that work. Anyone who wishes to contact me may do so at heller.joshua.98@gmail.com. I warmly welcome any curiosity or conversation.
Affirmations and declarations are powerful tools for personal change. They quite literally rewire the brain, allowing you to move toward that new you. Do you want to be more successful? Do you want to wake up every morning feeling happy and excited? Do you want to lose weight? In this book, Bennett, Bennett, and Wagner explain how to use affirmations and declarations to create a better life. Recent brain science sheds light on the brain's neuroplasticity. This means that the physical brain can be rewired over time, literally changing who you are. But, how do you rewire the brain? Affirmations and declarations are two powerful tools to help your brain make this exciting change for the better. This also book explains common reasons why traditional advice about affirmations is ineffective, and why they are not really changing your brain. It also outlines the most effective ways to write and say your affirmations based on recent brain science. Also included is information on how to record your affirmations to create your very own self-hypnosis script. Bonus sections include the morning blitz, common questions and answers, and some effective sample weight loss declarations.
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