Furious Flower

By Nick Makoha

The Furious Flower Poetry Conference, held every ten years, celebrates and investigates “contemporary trends in Black literature, culture, and thought, and publishes a signature volume of poetry, poetics, and criticism to commemorate each conference.” Dr. Joanne Gabbin convened the first Furious Flower Poetry Conference in September 1994 to celebrate the poet Gwendolyn Brooks. Subsequent conferences were held in 2004 and 2014. I attended the 2014 conference with Malika Booker and Peter Kahn and first spoke about the idea of The Black Metic. On my return from the 2024 conference, I spoke with its founder Dr Joanne Gabbin and the current director Lauren K. Alleyn. 

 

Nick Makoha (NM): This is my second time as a Furious Flower attendee.

Lauren K. Alleyn (LKA): You were here in 2014. 

Nick Makoha (NM): Yeah. I try to get as many Black British poets over as possible. The first time I came in 2004 was amazing.  I knew it was gonna be good, but I didn’t expect it to be this good. And I say that humbly. There were moments when I was literally crying. And then there was the writing, and the celebration of other writers. It’s such an honour to be in their presence. I was here to witness Lorna Goodison, Kwame Dawes, and Elizabeth Alexander being celebrated. The honourees were humbled. I don’t think any one of the people you honoured could believe they were being honoured. It was important to be there to witness that. Not just by yourself but with a plethora of Black poets. Not just poets, Black poets. I was just so grateful to be there.

Dr Joanne Gabin (JG): Well, Nick, you are echoing the sentiment of a lot of different poets. I told Lauren just the other day, as I’ve gotten calls and notes from people who have attended the conference, they say ‘I’m so filled’ and it’s because of that feeling that you are not only celebrating other poets but in the course of being at that conference you are seeing your potential, you’re seeing yourself on this trajectory towards something that you really value. And then you are in that situation where you too are being celebrated because you’re celebrating the whole area of Black poetry and you’re looking at it from a global standpoint. Where people in the world who are Black understand that sometimes our poetry hasn’t been valued as it should, but here it is. 

And that was the reason I wanted to have a Furious Flower in the first place. I wanted an environment a forum where Black poets could affirm themselves. They did not need, you know, the white press, or any other press, you know, the New York Times or Washington Post to celebrate them, they didn’t need prizes to celebrate them but when they were celebrated by their own that was the ultimate. And that’s why, decade after decade, poets have come back to this. They don’t get paid to come to the conference, they have to pay to go to it. So, I am just so thrilled that that tradition goes on and that people like you understand the value of it.

NM: Lauren, this is a great mantle to take over from Dr Gabbin. And you understand about the Black writer. Because so many other institutions, for whatever reason – racism, ignorance – there’s something that Furious Flower understands about Black writers. What is that? 

LKA: Gosh, what do I understand about the Black writer? I feel like the fabric of our stories are connected in ways that aren’t always visible to each other and that when we are visible to each other something amazing happens, right? 

I think what Joanne did with starting Furious Flower – and like she just said, we celebrate us, we celebrate and see each other, that’s the foundation – but then who’s in that other? I’m from Trinidad, if I take this on I have to bring the Caribbean with me, and what I know about the Caribbean is that Africa is behind that. I have travelled to 26 countries so I know the world is large. It’s not even that I know where to find these folks but if we sound the call in the right way and use the right methodologies, ways to reach out that folks will understand that they have a place and that the table is big enough. To be part of this community that isn’t actually small but is actually mighty. One of my big moments is Canisia Lubrin reading Patricia Smith and Patricia  is behind me and is like ‘who the hell is this and why do I not know who it is?’ Oh we have so much to know about each other.

NM: I had a similar experience in the hotel and Jericho Brown was like ‘I need to hear your poem, read me a poem’ and he was like threateningly lovely and I was like ‘ok I’ll read you a poem.’ And I had to read.

JG: And did you read? 

NM: Yeah I read the poem, I read my heart out and he was very impressed and he just gave me a stare [nods] and walked off.

JG: And then we learned a few days later that he has the MacArthur Prize – so you got an acknowledgement from a genius poet. 

NM: That’s right.

JG: Which is amazing. Jericho is one of my favourites, and I always look to hear what Jericho has to say about the events that we have at Furious Flower. We were part of the Toni Morrison honouring back in 2012 and Jericho came up to me and said ‘Joanne, I see you all over this event, you know.’ And it made me feel good because you know I worked hard to do it.  Everything came together. To honour Toni Morrison and, at the same time, honour Maya Angelou was just a tremendous honour for me. So that’s important. And I thought also a wonderful part of that conference was the honour that we brought to those people who are no longer with us. All the writers nationally and internationally who have gone on to remember them, that’s part of the mission of Furious Flower, to not only educate young people about these poets and celebrate them but also to preserve their legacies and that’s something I think we do very well. 

NM: Towards the end of the conference, realizing, ‘Gosh I really miss being around Black poets,’ it’s almost like we live in deserts and then this is an oasis. Did you notice that from the first Furious Flower, this coalescing and what it does, this enrichment? 

JG: I noticed it almost immediately. In fact I wasn’t sure what I was producing but on the very first day, Eleanor W. Traylor – a wonderful critic who at that time was head of the English Department at Howard University – got up before she did her paper, and said ‘Joanne this is the coup of the century.’  She recognized from almost the beginning that this had not been done before and that no one had tried to bring all these poets together before, she foresaw that it was something monumental. And fortunately she was right there at the time the reporters were there and that’s the phrase they picked up, ‘coup of the century’. I wasn’t sure I was doing anything like that but then after I got through the third or fourth day of the conference, I realised there were always signs. 

One I like to refer to is Alvin Aubert. It was really emotional for me, but Alvin Aubert at that time was working on Obsidian (the journal) and had just given over the reins to another editor. I called him and he said, ‘Well, Joanne, I’ve had a few medical issues, I haven’t had time to reply; I had my leg amputated because of diabetes’ and I felt this small. I’m writing him about not responding to me and this man has been through that kind of surgery. 

But he said to me, without sentimentality, ‘If everything goes well, I will walk in there to do that conference’ and, sure enough, on the second day, right in the middle of a panel, he walks in with his wife on his arm a cane in the other hand and he’s walking into that auditorium. I stopped everything and I said, ‘Here is Alvin Aubert, he got to the conference.’ I didn’t even say he’s walking on a prosthetic. He came right to the front and he started reading poetry, because I asked him to do that. And midway, and you’ll see this in the video, he starts crying, it’s just the emotional weight of everything that he’s been through, everything he’s taking in and the fact that he is there reading a poem about his beloved Detroit; it was an emotional moment for everybody. And I think people understood it and didn’t know why they felt that way.

But I left that session understanding that it was the confluence of love that people felt for him and for everyone in that room that caused them to have that particular feeling Even now it makes me emotional. 

What was it, from decade to decade, from conference to conference, that people felt that they could go there and they would find, as you did, people understood their literary struggle. Because it is a struggle to be a poet in this world because not only are you taking in things that you want to talk about, things that you need to talk about, things that you are compelled to talk about, but you are also understanding that there are people there who understand that struggle and if you succeed in it and get people to communicate with you then you have achieved something mighty.