#ntozake shange

[bossymarmalade]

For the past few years, a photograph has circulated on social media of a Black women’s writing group from the 1970s called the Sisterhood. Pictured are the writers Nana Maynard, Ntozake Shange, Louise Meriwether, Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, Alice Walker, Audrey Edwards, June Jordan, and Toni Morrison—all the current patron saints of literary culture, before they were anointed, when they were working artists.

“They weren’t brands, and they weren’t celebrities.”

#chromatic voice #nana maynard #ntozake shange #louise meriwether #vertamae smart-grosvenor #alice walker #audrey edwards #june jordan #toni morrison

[silkmystique]

Listen for the voices of your visions; they are nearby. Remember that you are a river; your banks are red honey where the moon wanders.

Ntozake Shange, from Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo

#ntozake shange #book quotes #black spirituality #gullah geechee

[feral-ballad]

Ntozake Shange, from For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf

[Text ID: “i found god in myself / & i loved her/ i loved her fiercely”]

#ntozake shange #writings #literature #choreopoem #excerpts #fragments #selections #words #quotes #typography

[roseillith]

FOR COLORED GIRLS WHO HAVE CONSIDERED SUICIDE / WHEN THE RAINBOW IS ENUF (1982) dir. OZ SCOTT

#f #for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf #oz scott #ntozake shange

[fluoresensitive]

"i cdnt stand bein sorry & colored at the same time/ it's so redundant in the modern world."

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf, Ntozake Shange

#🦢 #nonblack ppl don't touch #ntozake shange #for colored girls #lit #(WAILS)

[garadinervi]

Courtney Thorsson, The Sisterhood. How a Network of Black Women Writers Changed American Culture, Columbia University Press, New York, NY, 2023

Cover Art: June Jordan, on far right, with Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Nana Maynard, Ntozake Shange, Vertamae Grosvenor and others, The Sisterhood, 1977 [Inscription: Verso, front row left to right: Nana Maynard, Ntozake Shange, possibly Louise Meriwether; back row left to right: Vertamae Grosvenor, Alice Walker, possibly Louise Meriwether, Toni Morrison, June Jordan] [June Jordan Papers. Folder ‘Jordan with others, 1977-1999’, Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA]

#graphic design #book #cover #book cover #courtney thorsson #june jordan #nana maynard #ntozake shange #louise meriwether #vertamae grosvenor #alice walker #toni morrison #the sisterhood #columbia university press #schlesinger library on the history of women in america #1970s #2020s

[alliwanttodoiscollectpoetry]

a trinidadian woman

tells me a hot-blooded man

dances like slow winds

in haitian halls/

Ntozake Shange

#alliwanttodoiscollectpoetry #poem #poetry #poems #poet #poets #anthology #tumblr poetry #poem of the day #poetry blog #Ntozake Shange #wild beauty #Haiti #Haitian #Trinidad #Trinidadian #book worm #literature #poems and poetry #poetry excerpt #poetry in translation #Spanish poetry #poemblr #poetblr #poetic #daily poems

[callmesunshinee]

“& this is for colored girls who have considered suicide/ but are movin to their own rainbows”

#ntozake shange #for colored girls

[virtuouslibertines69]

"Where there is a woman there is magic. If there is a moon falling from her mouth, she is a woman who knows her magic, who can share or not share her powers. A woman with a moon falling from her mouth, roses between her legs and tiaras of Spanish moss, this woman is a consort of the spirits" - Ntozake Shange, Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo Darkness Manifesting by The Phantom Painte

#literature #quote #reading #writing #book #novel #author #writer #books #ntozake shange #sassafras #cypress and indigo #art #artist #darkness manifesting #the phantom painter #woman #magic #moon #power #mouth #rose #legs #tiara #moss #consort #spirits #darkness #manifesting

[notchainedtotrauma]

Indigo seldom spoke. There was a moon in her mouth. Having a moon in her mouth kept her laughing.

from Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo by Ntozake Shange

#Ntozake Shange #Sassafrass Cypress and Indigo #Indigo #a sense of the Black uncanny and the Black fantastic

[beyondthepineshomestead]

✨beyond the pines homestead✨

🏹🌲🏡

the American Indian way of community, harvest, & breaking bread 🍞

#homesteading #cosmic #writing community #pine trees #magic the gathering #sassafras #cypress #indigo girls #ntozake shange #beautiful women #herbalism #gardening #oracle #tarrot cards #indie games #pottery #painting #drawing #cooking #womb healing #yoni massage #yoni #steaming

[feral-ballad]

Ntozake Shange, from For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf

[Text ID: “you were always inconsistent / doin somethin & then bein sorry / beatin my heart to death”]

#ntozake shange #writings #choreopoem #excerpts #literature #fragments #selections #words #quotes #lit #typography #american literature

[unlovelyspace]

for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, Ntozake Shange

#for colored girls #for colored girls who have considered suicide #ntozake shange #poem #poetry #quote #quotes #words #writing #uploads

[roseillith]

FOR COLORED GIRLS WHO HAVE CONSIDERED SUICIDE / WHEN THE RAINBOW IS ENUF (1982) dir. OZ SCOTT

#f #for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf #oz scott #lynn whitfield #ntozake shange

[manwalksintobar]

if we’ve gotta live underground and everybody’s got cancer/ will poetry be enuf?  // Eisa Davis to Ntozake Shange

         dear ntozake,

I got sacks of mercury under the skin beneath my eyes either cried too much or i’m abt to the cool war’s burnin up my retina again does poetry start where life ends? i know i’m supposed to be cool: i wear corrective lenses that feature high definition tragedy. baby in the dumpster       ethnic cleansing assassinations       multinational mergers i’m supposed to shake my head write a poem believe in ripples. but i ain’t cool. i emit inhuman noises i imagine terrorist acts as i flick my imaginary ash onto the imaginary tray i imagine going insane with a purpose and writing it down feels sorta unnecessary does poetry end where life begins? berkeley girl       black girl        red diaper baby born of the blood of the struggle but with reaganomics and prince pickin up steam in ‘81 nothing came between me and my calvins 10 yrs old       unpressed hair       playin beethoven readin madeleine l’engle       got scared in my pants when i heard this girl testifying ‘TOUSSAINT’ in the black repertory group youth ensemble i was just sittin in a rockin chair pretendin to be 82 and talkin like I knew all bout langston’s ‘rivers’

i wasn’t as good as her and i definitely wadn’t cool so i gave up drama and decided to bake soufflés zake you wda beat me up in the playground if we’da grown up together and you did eighth grade       ‘he dropped em’ at the regional oratorical competition i saw another fly honey rip it this time it’s ‘a nite with beau willie brown’ i was bleedin on the ground i became yours no more soufflés i jacked for colored girls right off my mama’s shelf my mama fania who was sweatin with you and raymond sawyer and ed mock and halifu osumare dancin on the grass       back in the day in you i found a groove never knew i had one like that did that monologue over and over alone in my room my bunk bed the proscenium arch 13 yrs old       screamin and cryin abt my kids gettin dropped out a window didn't know a damn thing about rivers but i knew abt my heart fallin        five stories you were never abbreviated or lower case to me you just pimped that irony that global badass mackadocious funkology you not only had hígado you had ben-wa balls in yr pussy

betsey brown on my godmother's couch nappy edges in mendocino at the mouth of big river spell #7 after the earthquake in silverlake the love space demands had to be in brooklyn yr poems are invitations to live in yr body love letters yr admirers dream they coulda written themselves no one cd find a category that was yr size blackety black but never blacker than thou you teased me into sassiness when i had none to speak of made profane into sacred but never formed a church sanctified women's lives whether we were reading nietzsche or a box of kotex we were magical and regular you many-tongued st louis woman of barnard and barcelona you left us the residue of yr lust left us to wander life as freely as sassafrass cypress and indigo and even the unedumacated could get yr virtuosity cuz you always fried it up in grease you built an aqueduct from lorraine hansberry's groundwater and it bubbled straight to george c wolfe you never read what the critics said and you scrunched up the flesh between yr eyebrows like everybody else in my family

but zake is poetry enuf?

i beg the question cuz you grew me up you    and adrienne kennedy     and anna deavere smith and all my mothers you blew out the candles on my 26th so when there's mercury under the skin beneath my eyes and the world ain't so cool do you write a poem or a will?

like leroi jones said     if bessie smith had killed some white people she wouldn't have needed that music so do we all write like amiri baraka does or do we all get our nat turner on?

i beg the question cuz i wanna get my life right do some real work and i really don't want to kill any white folk i mean     can we talk abt this maybe it's just my red diaper that's itchin but i still got that will to uplift the race sans bootstraps or talented tenths or paper bag tests this time we uplift the human race and i know the rainbow might be but is poetry enuf?

it's a naive question but i'm old enuf to ask them once in a while if we do finally unload the canon clean it out stock up on some more colorful balls ain't we only gettin the ones that are available at a store near you? doesn't the market end up setting the new standards anyway? is poetry enuf if it ain't sellin? if ain't nobody readin it? can poetry keep a man     who can't read from droppin his kids out a window?

and how can i call a ceasefire to this cool war in stanzas of eights when we've declared poetry a no fly zone? we have learned to protect it and its potential politics like a mother shoot down anyone who might overdetermine a poem's meaning (while we poets divebomb everyone else's politics with impunity like we're the United States or something)

if poetry is just poetry we save it from the conservatives but doesn't that mean it's of no use to the progressives?

is poetry enuf? cuz that's all i'm doin. makin up stories    on stage     on the page keepin the beat and that's all my friends are doin and that's what a lot of folks my age are doin

but if we've gone and burnt up everything in the sky if there's nothin else to eat but landfill stroganoff if we've gotta live underground and everybody's got cancer will poetry be enuf?

my aunt angela says i can do my thang and keep swinging left hooks to oppression if i stay up stay into it stay involved just one form of praxis will do. it's just my guilt that thinks i need twenty-two what's enuf?

shouldn't i (or somebody) be our secular bodhisattva become a real power player but skip the talk show can't we stabilize, rekindle collectives and cooperatives and collaborations therapeutic communities that double as creative juggernauts a publishing house     a theatre where the plays cost less than the movies get the neighborhood coven back together take dance breaks in the cubicles sing until the flourescent lights burst into snow i ask you because you changed me zake you changed thousands of women and i know poetry can't be enuf if you drunk

i ain't tryin ta walk off wid alla yr stuff and i got nuttin but love for ya so that's why i gotta know i'm sittin on my bed encircled by every book you've ever published they're open like fans marking pages with the flint of genius all i want is for this circle to grow so tell me:

is this where poetry and life are twins? i felt so crumpled up when i started writing you poetry seemed so useless and dingy next to all the bright red bad news but now that the poem is over i feel wide open like an infant of the spring just tell me how to feed this light to my responsibilities and poetry just might be enuf           love           eisa

#poetry #Eisa Davis #Ntozake Shange #is poetry enuf? #American poetry #feminist poetry #feminism #for colored girls #Amiri Baraka #Leroi Jones #Black American poetry #Bessie Smith #Angela Davis #mothers & daughters #girls & women #politics #poems of protest #poems of rage #growing up #despair #loving the world anyway #letter #advice #letters to a young poet #radical art

[garadinervi]

Ntozake Shange, October 18, 1948 / 2023

Image: Ntozake Shange, New York City, 1976 [«Time». Photo: © AP/Shutterstock]

#photography #poetry #theatre #theater #ntozake shange #birthday anniversary #time #1940s #2020s