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Summary
Poems of celebration and endurance.
From “I Am a Black Man”
I am a Black man my history written with blood some sweet songs of sorrow are composed for my soul and I can be seen plowing in the fields Can be heard humming in the night
In these poems of celebration and endurance, Leonard A. Slade Jr. addresses the human need to be connected not only to the physical “now,” but also to the other lives and other music we pass through during our lives. Slade’s unique voice exposes the sweetness, the sorrow, and the humor of life’s celebrations and struggles, but above all is the importance of love and the reliance on God and in faith for transcendence. These are poems to help us to endure, to grow, and to triumph.
“I have read [Slade’s] poetry, and I am the better for it, the wiser for it, and the happier for it.” — Dr. Maya Angelou, Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University
“Jazz After Dinner is a significant volume of poetry. Slade’s poems reek of life, jazz, and the bebop rhythms of a Langston Hughes—celebration and endurance, yes, but with a little toe-dancing as well. What more do we ask of our poets? Slade is a bit of a British Romantic, but the American kind, one who also says, ‘Yassir. Look at me and be healed.’” — Ginny MacKenzie, author of Skipstone
“Purity of sound, sense, and emotion are the hallmarks of Jazz After Dinner, distillations of Slade’s decades in the lonely groves of poetry. And in the same collection of melodious love poems come powerful poems of social protest calling on us to remember captives on slave ships, slave mothers, Montgomery and Memphis, and the dream of Dr. King. In the tradition of Thoreau, the exuberant Slade recreates his world as surely as if he were living at Walden Pond.” — George Hendrick, coauthor of Why Not Every Man? African Americans and Civil Disobedience in the Quest for the Dream
“Leonard A. Slade Jr.’s Jazz After Dinner raises our consciousness of American history and of our traditions, legacies, and progress. Paying tribute to inspirational figures, including his parents, Martin Luther King Jr., and Zora Neale Hurston, these poems call for reflection, gratitude, and knowledge. Slade’s style flows easily from the freewheeling rhythm and call-and-response feel of ‘The Country Preacher’s Folk Prayer’ to the spare, aloof lines of ‘Cat.’ With clarity and grace, his poems evoke familial pride, faith, and appreciation for those small moments that recollect beauty and kindness.” — Nadine M. Knight, Harvard University
Leonard A. Slade Jr. is Professor and Chair of the Department of Africana Studies, Director of the Doctor of Arts in Humanistic Studies Program, and Director of the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies Program at the University at Albany, State University of New York. He has published in many journals and magazines and is the author of fifteen books, including eleven books of poetry: Another Black Voice: A Different Drummer, The Beauty of Blackness, I Fly Like a Bird, The Whipping Song, Vintage, Fire Burning, Pure Light, Neglecting the Flowers, Lilacs in Spring, Elisabeth and Other Poems, and For the Love of Freedom.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Jazz after Dinner
Jazz After Dinner
For Our Mothers
Drinking
We Must Remember
His Professor
My Friend, My Survivor
Overcharged
Thanksgiving Celebration
In Praise of Summer
Sounds
This My Father
Queen for Patrons
Freedom
He
Citizens in Heaven
How Beautiful, O God
And When I Die
I Am a Black Man
Be Grateful
New Year
Advice I Wish I Had Taken Earlier in Life
Never Forget
The Sad Adult
Be Like the Flower
Conversation
Black Philosophy
Reasons for Celebration
Classic Shed
Brown Portrait
Reasons for Celebration
The Great Mother
As a Friend
New York City
Life and Death
Golden Years
Family-Glorious
How Great You Are
When I Heard from the Tax Man
Lilacs in Spring
Rapping My Way Home from an English Conference at Hunter College On March 22, 1997
