Furious Flower I - 1994
Program
Dedication
The time
cracks into furious flower. Lifts its face
all unashamed. And sways in wicked grace.
These magnificent lines from Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem “The Second Sermon on the Warpland” provide the leitmotif for the conference, “Furious Flower: A Revolution in African American Poetry.” This conference is dedicated to Gwendolyn Brooks because of her prophetic, poetic voice that is urgent, unashamed, graceful, redeeming, and radical, a voice that tells us even amid the loneliness and the fears of contemporary life that we must live and conduct our blooming “in the noise and whip of the whirlwind.”

Dear Friends:
It is my great pleasure to welcome you to the Furious Flower Conference at James Madison University and to join with you in celebrating the furious flowering of black poetry that has taken place over the last 40 years. The distinguished poets who have joined us for this conference have not only reflected American society in their poetry, but they have also transformed it by the power and urgency of their collective voice. More than 30 major poets and critics have come together to read their poems, talk about new approaches to understanding poetry, begin the serious business of writing a literary history of this significant poetic outpouring, and make the necessary connections with the cultural and folk tradition that ever informs and enriches African American poetry.
For all of us,