Drumjournals Full disclosure: I love Eugene B. Redmond as a human being and value him as a friend. But, like many people on both sides of the river and all over the world, I came to know and love the man through his work as poet, scholar, organizer, editor and educator. It is his continuing and powerful work in these roles -- especially organizing and editing -- which concern us here. "We have a whole constellation of publications associated with East St. Louis now," Redmond says, with great pride. Since 1976, the year of publication of Drumvoices, his path-breaking study of African-American poetry, Redmond has stood as poet laureate of his hometown, East St. Louis. In a time when city people have been fleeing for the suburbs, and many scholars disappeared into theory, Redmond returned to his home community and deepened his commitment to the people there. "I have been Tattooed for life," Redmond writes: "A thought called EAST SAINT LOUIS/ Is etched into each island of my Brain." With a full professorship at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, he has been in a position to open himself up locally as a mentor, which he has done by forming the Eugene B. Redmond Writer's Club and making the east side the center of a great deal of new literary energy. It is also old, even ancestral energy. Redmond comes from the generation which established multiculturalism in University humanities, and his new Drumvoices journal includes established greats and worthy veterans like Maya Angelou, Derek Walcott, Toni Morrison, Henry Dumas, Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Quincy Troupe, K. Curtis Lyle and Michael Castro. One should pause for a moment and consider: Any literary journal in the world would pay dear for some of these by-lines. Redmond's tireless support and organizing, matched with his own deeply soulful written and spoken work, has put him into some deep company. One nice moment in the Drumvoices journal comes when Maya Angelou, one of the world's most widely inspiring writers, lays low to Redmond what a brother he has been to her. Old friendship is one of Drumvoices most deep and satisfying vibes. One old friend Redmond keeps turning to as editor is the late Henry Dumas, whose great works Redmond has kept in print. Drumvoices 1 includes a Dumas piece about Sun Ra. It tells about a singer of ancient bonesongs in the context of a hellish, sublime, hallucinatory parable of Africans in "the Kingdom of the Ice King." Africa is all over the journal, and not always through hallucination. Ama Ata Aidoo, born in Ghana now residing in Zimbabwe, details one of the basic motives in history, which relates clearly to her home continent: "A way to get land, land, more land." Lindiwe Mabuza, chief representative of the African National Congress in the U.S., writes about the African city, these "branchless reserves of cheap labour/ These fertile gardens/ Of dead labour." Tess Onwueme excerpts a play about development work among rural women in Nigeria. Drumvoices follows the African tradition to places in the Americas other than the U.S. Carmencita Romero, formerly a dancer with Katherine Dunham, delivers a fascinating portrait of Havana in 1939. Nancy Morejon reports on her literacy work in Cuba, and publishes a poem by one of Grenada's patriots, a construction worker friend, who writes, with moving simplicity: "I lived on the banks of a river,/ there I met my beloved,/ there I fought back,/ there I defended Grenada." (Romero and Morejon are two of many powerful women writers who appear in Drumvoices 3, guest edited by Jayne Cortez.) Quincy Troupe writes with his wicked wit about "the dictators of Haiti & anywhere else," declaring them "deadly as a fart at a republican party." Part of Redmond's message has always been that the distant and other is also local. "From Ethiopia to East St. Louis," as he says on the cover of the first Drumvoices journal. He has helped mentor a slew of local writers, encouraging their talent and their interest in African cultural patterns at the same time. Andrea Wren, Jabari Asim, Sherman Fowler, Evon Udoh and Darlene Roy appear frequently when Redmond is editing, right next to Maya Angelou, which must be a rush for writers just beginning their careers. Redmond's own praise poems may reach across the Atlantic, or just down the railroad tracks to Lovejoy, Ill., hometown of Hammett Bluiett and his horn full of "soular connectives: sonic blooms." He may look no further than his local high school, Lincoln High, for the subject of his praise: "Our own dreamgirls of the reliable lungs," Redmond writes of Lincoln's girls' track team. Of course it helps his project that East St. Louis keeps producing marvelously talented and diligent people; Redmond draws upon a deep pool. Miles Davis, Katherine Dunham, Jackie Joyner Kersey the list goes on longer than anyone would expect. One of the most searching pieces in any of the Drumvoices comes from Lincoln grad Barbara Ann Teer, who works out a sober and searching essay about blackness in these confusing times. It ends with hope, and compromise with the changing times: "The drum sent a committed language across the air waves and the computer can do that too." Speaking of committed language: Redmond has had a major hand in the Break Word With the World series, which does what it says it will do. It partakes of our times and speaks many minds about them. "I Will Drink From the Bowl of My Sisters!" Maria Guadalupe Massey declares in the title of a poem, which comes to the bitter conclusion that "hunger and poverty taste the same everywhere." They do one whole pamphlet in solidarity with PEN Oakland's protest over media mishandling of race. "We are handing the Media the Hangman's Rope," Redmond writes of their struggle. Cheryl D. Smith takes us to the street where people eat "gunfire for breakfast, blood for lunch and/ death for dinner." Micheal Castro relives the pain of conquest and the ironies of Catholic iconography. Pamela Escarcega hits so hard it hurts, even when you already know what she is saying. The present to her looks like "atrocity on the rise/ or just business as usual"; the past is "the iron fist shaking hands with a broken revolutionary." Redmond likes to spice his editorial efforts with snapshots and memorials, and he gathers advertisers, sometimes from among his contributers. His style has a coziness that strikes some as smarmy. Thesame is true -- truer -- for The Original Chicago Blues Annual, which Redmond serves as associate editor. His partner in the Blues Annual is given to taking out full-page ads promoting himself as "poet/ performer/ lecturer/ writer/ producer/ publisher." That is a bit much, and it is a shame, because the material itself is so strong. The Blues Annual is strongest in the interviews. Here jazz and blues greats sum up the past, tell priceless truths about the human comedy and pass on survival strategies. Pinetop Perkins remembers why he and so many bluesmen left the South: "I got tired of plowin them mules down there." Eddie Boyd expertly dissects the psychology of jamming drunk: "You know, you think when you drunk you pitchin' a bitch and raising hell, you know. Well, you are pitchin' a bitch, but not the kind you think you pitchin'." Junior Wells speaks out against egotism: "I smell some shit; it's my own shit. It ain't nobody else's, you know." Deitra Farr ridicules blues contests which lack a single black judge: "Does anybody think Benson & Hedges can have a polka contest and have not one Polish person as a judge?" The Blues Annual's third issue has an interview with St. Louis native Lester Bowie which is worth its weight in gold. It is an amazing self-portrait of a brilliant and outspoken man. He remembers the first time he walked in on the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. His response -- not uncommon for subsequent observers -- was, "Man, I had never seen so many weird motherfuckers in my life!" We learn that one ingredient of Bowie's success with bands is he works with fellow veterans of the armed services: "If we hadn't been able to know how to bivouac," he says, "we never would have survived." Which underlies a great truth, more African than military: "There are so many things you can do collectively." It is a family truth too, told by a guy who is proud to be both an outlaw and a daddy. "You can manage all these things," he says, "and still be a responsible citizen. The biggest and best thing I got going is my family." Bowie scorns people who lack the ingrained family survival strategy of taking care of your own -- and those whom you owe. In musical terms, this makes him resent the outside artists who have plundered black traditions without putting anything back. Bowie makes his point very clearly: "I think the motherfucking Rolling Stones ought to build a six block recreational, cultural facility for Black folks on the Westside of Chicago where they made their money from." There is still hordes of money, and plenty of curiosity, in black art of all forms, African, Caribbean and American. Sometimes we fail to recognize it when it is sitting right here at our doorsteps in buckets. Knowing this, Redmond has to counsel his protges in patience. He says, "I tell people, 'Hold still, don't go anywhere, wait for them to come to you.' And they do. Any time someone is working on a Dunham or a Davis documentary, they come to us." Henry Dumas predicted this, in his own strange way, in his Sun Ra story. "They did not follow any outward road or way," Dumas wrote, "but did the things according to where they were located. They all began to march toward the direction of the drum." Chris King St. Louis Riverfront Times as a human being and value him sides of the river and all over e man through his work as poet, editor and educator. 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