Blue Black Poetry Collective

Peace
Blue Black Poetry Collective was a poetry crew I ran with in the early 90's. It was in my 'I don't know if I want to go back to college phase'. So I was around alot of people who were in college who were juggling the same idea. It was at first just a workshop group. We got together 1/week. We would share some poetry and offer concise comments for revisions. From that point it started to grow though into something else. We were hungry so we started to bring food. Visitors started wanting to come by to hear us. Individuals in the group started to specialize in certain areas. We had black feminism, proto-afrofuturistic poetry, black psychedelica, post-colonial commentary, etc. It was truly an interesting time.

In the end what we transformed into a poetry performance group and KILLED it around the New Haven county for a couple of summers. It was funny cause we definitely didn't plan it to be that way. We brought poetry and theatre together. We wanted to have an engaging way to perform poetry that kept the audience involved. So we had poems as conversations, poems coming from the back of the room, from the audience itself, etc. This was during the time that slam poetry was coming into its own yet we were doing something different that hearkened back to more like the Black Arts Movement.

We are each in a different spot nowadays. I would hazard to say that I am the only one who is still actively pursuing the craft even though I was away from it for a while. I will say this though. I am sure that moment in time transformed all of our lives in some way. Shout out to the BBPC.