- April is National Poetry Month, and Michigan has a new poet laureate to help promote the importance of poetry throughout our state.

Dr. Melba Joyce Boyd is an award-winning author and a retired professor of African American Studies at Wayne State University.

She will be the third person to serve as the state's poet laureate.

I'm really pleased to have Dr. Melba Joyce Boyd as our guest today.

Welcome to "American Black Journal."

- Thank you for having me, Stephen.

- Yeah, it's always wonderful to see you.

This is a great occasion to have a conversation with you as the third person to be our poet laureate.

Let's start by talking about what a poet laureate is and what that person does.

- Oh, well, let me put it like this, my job is poetry.

- Yeah.

Right.

And to get people to love poetry.

- Exactly, but the point being to obviously do poetry readings, workshop, you know, with students at all age levels, to go into libraries in the state and do readings for the communities, and to be available, I think, and excited about the opportunity to promote poetry, especially in a time where there's less reading and probably less reflecting.

They're already seeing that poetry will encourage and also develop, hopefully, in our young people.

- Yeah, I mean, you've been doing this for a long time, in addition to teaching at Wayne in the African American Studies Department.

I wonder what you make of the place that poetry has in our culture right now.

It does seem more difficult to get people engaged, I think, with poetry than maybe at other periods.

But I wonder what it looks like from your chair.

- Well, actually, I find that, well, poetry is very important to culture for sure.

It is probably the most artistic of all of the, shall we say, verbal forms of artistic expression.

But like the late Naomi Long Madgett said, "It's probably the most underappreciated of all the art forms."

- Yeah.

- But I find, at the same time, that people enjoy it, they respond to it, because it is generally pretty intense.

At least the poetry I write is pretty intense.

- Yeah.

- But I think it's important to encourage, not just necessarily that people become poets, but that they view poetry as a resource to stimulate both creative and critical thinking about the world we live in and have lived in.

- That intensity that you mentioned, talk about where that comes from and what you intend for the reader to draw from that intensity.

- Well, there's a passion, hopefully, when people are writing poetry.

I tend to be motivated by people that I know, people that I have encountered, both, you know, in real life and also in literature.

I'm very much influenced by other American poets, particularly African American poets have had a very strong impact on me.

The intensity comes from the form itself that you've got to say a lot more in fewer words- - In a very little space.

- Than if you were, you know, writing in prose.

And I do write literary history, and essays, and so forth.

But the intensity I think is also the delivery.

It's not just the imagery, it's also the sound, very much like music.

You were talking about George Clinton and the funk movement.

And the better, you know, musicians or vocalists, their lyrics are actually poetry.

- Poetry.

Sure, yeah.

I mean, I also find that quality writing and storytelling in other forms also seems to borrow from poetry in terms of structure, rhythm, sound.

I think most writers pay attention to those things when they're writing.

And they're getting it, though, from poetry, whether they might, you know, acknowledge that or not.

- Well, certainly even when you're writing prose, you want it to have a rhythmic structure so that you, in effect, capture your audience and engage them in a manner sometimes subconsciously using rhyme, slant rhyme, in order to emphasize a point.

Even when I'm writing prose, if the rhythm's not right, I'm like, "Oh, no, you know, you gotta edit this.

This is not working."

Yes, but I also feel that, as a poet, I'm very much influenced by other art forms.

Certainly music, and as well as visual arts.

I've written poems in response to artists' work, you know.

And, in particular, I did a response to a painting, an abstract painting that hangs in the DIA, which was entitled "Maple Red," by Ed Clark, and the curator there asked me if I would write something.

And I've done some other responses in terms of how an artist responds, you know, to abstraction, visual abstraction.

And also though I'm very much interested in history, and what is the connection, what's going on in the art that is related, you know, to different forms of our reality.

So it's, for me, important to be actively engaged in the broader artistic community, because it keeps you sharp, it keeps you growing.

And also when you're writing about art, you can't let it fall flat, right?

So it's, you know, it's very important, I think, to do that, and to have that as a part of your keeping, you know, your tool sharpened.

- Right.

Right, right.

- Otherwise, it can be too much of just your voice, and that's important.

- So I've got you here.

I would be remiss if I didn't ask you to read some of your work for us.

- Okay, well, let me see what I have.

I tend to write a lot about Detroit, and also, like I said, about people that I know.

And so I think what I wanna do today is to maybe read a poem that I wrote years ago for Ron Milner, who was a very important playwright- - Playwright, yeah.

- You know, here in the city.

And I wrote this poem, we had a memorial program for him.

He was a very good friend of mine, and I was a part of that cultural community that he had already, you know, developed largely.

That was Ron Milner, and Dudley Randall, who was my mentor, Naomi Long Madgett.

So Detroit was a really great place during that time to develop.

- Yeah, I'm sure, yeah.

- And this poem is entitled "Stage Black," and the opening quote is from Ron himself.

"Death is just the gateway to everlasting life.

And change is the gateway to reorder, rebirth, renewal, to re-life."

That's Ron Milner.

- Mhmm.

- "I first met you in a play peering inside the mind of the character Linda lamenting with Smokey Robinson's romantic croon, 'More love, more love,' a scene scripted to a Motown tune.

You could not stay away from this city of automobiles, of sweet, smoked barbecue jazz, of fried chicken, rhythm and blues, of tree-lined streets reaching as deep as Black Bottom, and as far away as Paradise Valley.

As a sorcerer of words, your plays reversed the language of hate, dispelled the illusions of a cursed cast in 1943 at the barricades when savage rumors were thrown off the Belle Isle Bridge.

Or in '67, on 12th Street, when we rebelled against the brutality of blind police.

Or, in 1972, when we exposed homicidal undercover cops.

You reanimate our chorus, you insert song into monologues, direct checkmates pivoting on jazz sets, salvaging joy diminished in the throes of turmoil, ciphered through the vice of the republic's manifold.

Like the deaf dance of a butterfly, your writing maps muted beauty like pain reading, grieving, flesh, defining the gray, creasing the lines, connecting our past.

But like a breeze off the Detroit River, your passing is rebirth, reliving, filling this air, this city as you reorder this script, rearrange this scene, determine this set, stage black."

- Wow.

Wow, there's so much in that.

There's so many touchstones for our city and our culture in that work.

It's always great to have you here.

Thank you so much.

- Thank you for having me.

- And congratulations on being the poet laureate.