University Press of Mississippi Conversations with Sterling Plumpp (Literary Conversations Series)

Product Description Conversations with Sterling Plumpp is the first collection of interviews with the renowned poet of Home/Bass and other much-admired works. Spanning thirty years and drawn from literary and scholarly journals and other media, these interviews offer insights into his poetic innovation of blues and jazz and his mastery of black vernacular in poetry. This collection seems fundamental to an understanding of the life and work of an African American poet who has been innovative in fusing blues and jazz rhythms with poetic insight and in vivifying the vernacular landscape of African American poetry. Born in 1940 in Clinton, Mississippi, Plumpp has been living in Chicago since 1962. Home/Bass received the 2014 American Book Award. The finest blues poet of his generation, Plumpp became a model for contemporary poetry and poetics and a leading figure in the tradition of blues/jazz poetry. He continues to reinvent the language while exploring the registers of individual and communal memory, local, national, and global history. His poetry is important in attempts to define the black aesthetic from the era of the Harlem Renaissance to the seminal Black Arts Movement. It is also important for its re-articulation of the Great Migration, especially expressed by blues musicians who left Mississippi for Chicago. Review This beautiful book of interviews will be an invaluable resource when we discuss Sterling Plumpp's poetry and the blues in my 'Southern Music and Literature' course. This is the book we have all been waiting for, and I am deeply grateful to John Zheng for sharing it with Sterling's many admirers.--William Ferris, Joel R. Williamson Eminent Professor of History and Senior Associate Director of the Center for Study of the American South, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill About the Author John Zheng, Greenwood, Mississippi, USA is professor of English at Mississippi Valley State University and editor of The Other World of Richard Wright: Perspectives on His Haiku and African American Haiku: Cultural Visions (both from University Press of Mississippi). His work has also been published in numerous journals including African American Review, East-West Connections, Journal of Ethnic American Literature, Paideuma, and Southern Quarterly.