Wrestling with the Muse

Melba Joyce Boyd is professor of Africana studies at Wayne State University and adjunct professor at the Center for Afro-American and African Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author of six books of poetry, including The Province of Literary Cats, co-editor of Abandoned Automobile: Detroit City Poetry 2001, author of Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Frances E. W. Harper, 1825-1911, and the producer and director of the documentary film, The Black Unicorn: Dudley Randall and Broadside Press.

WhileWrestling with the Muse is clearly an homage [to Dudley Randall], it doesn't slip into sentimentality or fluff. Detroit Free Press As his one-time assistant editor and literary executor, poet and professor Melba Joyce Boyd is uniquely qualified to tell the story of Detroit's late poet laureate. Detroit Metro Times This is an imaginative work illuminating the life and influence of African American poet and publisher Dudley Randall. -- Anne Martino The Ann Arbor News Boyd has penned this definitive biography and celebration of [Randall's] poetry. College and Research Libraries News Boyd celebrates the life and times of African-American poet Dudley Randall in Wrestling with the Muse: Dudley Randall and the Broadside Press... Boyd's sensitive portrait introduces us to a colleague many of us never had the opportunity to know. American Libraries [Wrestling with the Muse]... is a memoir within a memoir capturing not only the life of Randall, one of the greatest success stories in American small press history, but also the history of a turbulent century rife with racial injustice and discrimination. Ebony Magazine Boyd provides an intimate and critical examination...along with a valuable study of many of the personal, politcal, and institutional bases of mid-20th-century African American Poetry...Highly recommended. Choice her book is an engaging and important contribution. taking its place alongside the autobiographies of Nikki Giovanni and Amiri Baraka and too few others -- W. Kim Heron Metro Times Detroit Muse integrates aesthetics and politics with the vividness of an eyewitness and the conscience of a good journalist. -- Kim D. Hunter Against the Current This is an indispensable book for anyone interested in American intellectual and cultural history during the second half of the twentieth century, as it recalls the work of an accomplished poet largely missing from contemporary anthologies and convincingly recounts the development and impact of a crucial cultural institution of the black arts-black power era. -- James Edward Smethurst, University of Massachusetts Journal of American History A serious, delightful and unpredictable exursion into the vibrant and volatile social life of Detroit. -- Jonathan Scott Race and Class

• List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction. Wrestling with the Muse 1. Beginnings and Endings 2. The Fertile Black Bottom of Paradise Valley 3. Poets of Black Bottom: Dudley Randall Meets Robert Hayden 4. War at Home and Abroad 5. The Return: Poetry and Prophecy 6. Sojourn and Return 7. The Emergence of the Second Renaissance in Detroit 8. "Ballad of Birmingham": The Founding of Broadside Press and the Black Arts Movement 9. "Ya Vas Lyubil": Alexander Pushkin, Dudley Randall, and the Black Russian Connection 10. Cultural Wars and Civil Wars 11. "Prophets for a New Day": Diversity and Heritage 12. The New Black Poets 13. Dudley Randall's Poetic Dialectics and the Black Arts Movement 14. "After the Killing": Dudley Randall's Black Arts Poetry 15. Poetry as Industry 16. "Shape of the Invisible": The Rise and Fall of Broadside Press 17. "In the Mourning Time": The Return 18. A Poet Is Not A Jukebox 19. At Peace with the Muse 20. "The Ascent" Epilogue Appendix I. Translating Poetry Into Film Appendix II. Worksheets for "Frederick Douglass and the Slave Breaker" Notes Bibliography Index