National Book Award Finalist Quincy Troupe will read in a rare live appearance at Aretha’s Jazz Cafe inside the Music Hall, 350 Madison Ave. Detroit, on Wednesaday, November 2, at 7:00 pm. Joining Mr. Troupe will be Detroit poet Melba Joyce Boyd with Jazz artist Marion Hayden, and Native Detroiter and California poet Geoffrey Jacques. This event is sponsored by Wayne State University’s African Americam Studies, English Dept., Poets & Writers, and The Detroit Writers’ Guild. Book Beat will be on hand selling books for the authors.
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Melba Joyce Boyd
Melba Joyce Boyd is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of African American Studies at Wayne State University, and an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan. She is an award-winning author and/or editor of thirteen books, nine of which are her own poetry collections. Roses and Revolutions: The Selected Writings of Dudley Randall* received the 2010 Independent Publishers Gold Award, the 2010 Library of Michigan Notable Books Award for Poetry, and was a Finalist for the 2010 NAACP Image Award for Poetry and the 2010 ForeWord Award for Poetry. She composed the official poem for the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit, which is inscribed in the dedication wall, and she is the poet laureate of the Wright Museum. In 2015, she was honored with several awards for academic, cultural and community service, including, but not limited to the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Achievement Award, and the International Institute of Detroit for Community Service.
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Marion Hayden
Around Detroit, Marion Hayden is well known as an educator, Kresge Arts Fellow and university lecturer on jazz, but in the city’s jazz scene itself, she is the co-founder of the popular all-female band Straight Ahead and a talented jazz bassist. Born in Detroit, MI, in 1952, she is the daughter of Marion and Herbert Hayden, her father an avid record collector and jazz pianist himself. Growing up on the industrial west side of the Motor City, she took up piano at the age of nine, followed by the upright acoustic bass at 12. In the summer Metro Arts program she met Wendell Harrison and Marcus Belgrave, who would become teachers, and in time lifelong collaborators.
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Geoffrey Jacques is a poet, critic, and teacher who writes about literature, the visual arts, and culture. His research interests include modernist poetry and poetics, African American literature and culture, and the postmodern city. He is the author of Just for a Thrill (WSU Press, 2005) served as a correspondent for the Daily World, a People’s World predecessor publication, in Detroit and New York from 1978-1984. He is currently a culture moderator at Portside and lives in Southern California.
Quincy Troupe’s newest collection of poetry Duende was recently long-listed for 2022 National Book Awards.
Duende honors the memory of those lost to the transatlantic slave trade and pays tribute to the Black Lives Matter movement.
Winners for the National Book Awards will be announced live on November 16.
About Duende
The selected poems from over fifty years by the great poet and biographer and friend of Miles Davis.
Quincy Troupe writes poetry in great waves. The words are just notes. It’s the music you make with them that matters. He’s not a wordsmith, he’s a shaman conjuring long repetitive lines, cadences of looking across the sea towards Africa and haunted by the legacy of slavery and racism, or of remembering fellow conjurers, poets and musical artists, celebrating, always celebrating, but never only that.
In the fifty-page, incantatory poem, “Ghost Voices,” there is a longing to be reconnected to the past, and a longing too to be free of it. In the short title poem, “Duende: For García Lorca and Miles Davis,” there lies, nakedly, Troupe’s credo: “…secrets, mystery infused in black magic / that enters bodies in forms of music, art/ poetry imbuing language with sovereignty / in blood spooling back through violent centuries…” The version of the great poem “Avalanche (number 3)” that appears here is different from the version of the same poem he published nearly 25 years ago–in exactly the same way that a jazz artist picks up his horn to play the same song a little differently every time.
Troupe is a generous and gregarious poet in this giant offering that includes many new poems, as well as a selection chosen from across his eleven previously published volumes. What’s remarkable is the constancy, the energy, and how he’s always looking right at you in the here and now, and at the same time sees something over your shoulder that others don’t see yet, maybe a distant storm gathering over the waters, something we’re going to need to rise up and face soon enough.
PRAISE
“Quincy Troupe is a hoodoo soothsayer of poetry whose iconic riffs peal across each page as they peel back layers of America’s history. Reader—open this hefty Duende potion of Jazz and sweat with caution, ’cause the swagger of each line might just drown you to save your life.”
—Tyehimba Jess, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Olio
“In this career-spanning collection, you don’t just read Quincy Troupe’s poetry: You are lifted by his word. You ride syllables and sound and glory. You grasp articulated root-working, know that you are traveling with mastery, the ‘tongue’s edge, high-strung, at edge of the cliff.’ That’s right. You understand there is no end to this man’s brilliance.”
—Honoree Fanonne Jeffers, author of The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois
“Hallelujah! There’s a hot new book from the peerless Quincy Troupe. Beyond his masterwork, Pursuit of Happyness, and his classic memoir on Miles Davis, Troupe has been celebrated for decades as a poet whose range enlarges the heart. Duende is this year’s comprehensive, must-read collection. Don’t miss the party.”
—Mary Karr, author of The Liar’s Club and Tropic of Squalor
“Quincy Troupe’s Duende is a ‘must have’ collection of this poetry icon’s lifetime’s output of poetic truth telling, spell casting, melodic improvising, record keeping, tonal shape shifting, and spirit reckoning. And much more.”
—Michael Lally, author of Another Way to Play: Poems 1960-2017
“Back when Quincy and I taught poetry writing in prisons on Riker’s Island, he was already not ‘first person I’ but ’eye’ as he appears here in Duende, in these blazing, unshackled, resounding poems. In other words, ego is checked by all that is beheld, all that the eye sees, condemns and celebrates in nonstop enumeration. This is pure imaginative freedom, this is poetry that can never be locked up or denied — it is music made by the eye and heart.”
—Carol Muske-Dukes, author of Blue Rose
“Duende is an exuberant, full scale, magical tour through a life well-lived! Quincy’s mesmerizing rhythms and dazzling images nourish heart, mind and soul! I love this book!”
—Marilyn Chin, author of A Portrait of the Self as Nation: New and Selected Poems
Born July 22, 1939, in St. Louis, Missouri, Quincy Troupe is an awarding-winning author of 12 volumes of poetry, three children’s books, and six non-fiction works. In 2010 Troupe received the American Book Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement.
Among Troupe’s best-selling works are Miles: The Autobiography of Miles Davis and his memoir, Miles & Me, soon to become a major motion picture. Other notable works are: The Pursuit of Happyness, an autobiography with written with Chris Gardner that was a New York Times bestseller for over 40 weeks and a major motion picture starring Will Smith; The Architecture of Language (poems), that won the 2007 Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement; and Transcircularities: New and Selected Poems, selected by Publishers Weekly as one of the ten best books of poetry in 2002 and winner of the 2003 Milt Kessler Poetry Award.
Quincy Troupe is professor emeritus of the University of California, San Diego, formerly editor Code magazine and Black Renaissance Noire, a literary journal of the Institute of Africana Studies at New York University, and poetry editor of A Gathering of the Tribes online magazine.