Speculative

JUNETEENTH SPECULATIVE POETRY SUNDAY online event 6/14.... freedom is here... emancipation been happened, my poetic people!

GrandMaster of Fantastic Poetry, OG Akua Lezli Hope says that “our shared foundational creations were story-poems of a mythic, fantastic, and transformational nature.” What we now call speculative poetry was first memorized, chanted, sung, and transmitted centuries ago to hold cultures together through the unknown.

I love speculative poetry as an antidote to the “Nonmagical Realism” that dominates our time and what most American consume as communication and creativity. That term was coined by my homie Melissa Johnson and myself as we navigated the literarily literal spaces of American letters together. We sought to hold culture in our voices and stay true to what we knew bone deep, even as others called it (and us) unreal. Here in Detroit, we are very familiar with living lives unknown, unseen, and even in opposition to official narratives. Often times our very survival is written out of these “non magical” and “by the books” narratives. So often, we live speculation every day.

One of the most influential books I read during this MFA education was The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh. He describes how the dominance of realism is reflective of a short-term consciousness and a demystification/ disenchantment that fills this society that has very concrete consequences for this society to constructively handle emergent crises such as climate change, making them unthinkable. When our normal human lives (and egos) become so big we can’t see anything else, then it becomes hard to pivot our lives individually much less collectively.

On the other hand, societies that Hope refers to that live with the mythical and the transformational have tools to think and feel their way into the unknown. When we swim in voluminous dreamscapes our waking lives gain an agility.

In Black American culture we talk about going to the crossroads. That’s the place where the material and the spiritual meet, where the known and the unknown gather, where deals are made and futures are conjured. As this American society trembles, blusters, and threatens to collapse into a vile end (violent) pile of injustice and wonder, we will all need this crossroads work and creative care.

We will increasingly need speculation and creativity to make it through these nights and the seasons to come. My grandma and my Granny prayed for me (us) and that speculation got me thus far. And now it’s my turn.

The end of tomorrow

We remember the end of tomorrow as birth-
place of gods, ancients that roamed

feral galaxies scattered like witches’ friends
when authority’s boot knocks and steps heavy
like contagious bad luck, packs of black curious 
roaming Detroit neighborhoods, a traveling west-

side family, seventeen light years from
one edge to the other, I opened
my flesh on the threshold like cans of food

or a portal that still pulses beneath
a country’s porch rubble arranged clumsy

by the bluster, bombs we voted for

the last American ritual before night fires

flashed, fresh flesh burns so white and flagrant they confuse

millions who tuned in, clapping and 
posing, thinking they’d become stars like us.

millions tune in, clapping and 
posing, thinking they’ll become stars like us.

~Owólabi Aboyade

Tonight, OG Akua Lezli Hope is hosting a special Juneteenth poetry reading “The Black Fantastic” to commemorate the news of Emanicpation by welcoming five poets to bring News from the awareness, the soul, and the collective imagination relevant to our people of today. I am honored to be one of the featured readers along with:

Akua Lezli Hope Linda D. Addison upfromsumdirt and Pop A Mr. E sol Sax

I first met Akua Lezli when they edited my work in NOMBONO: Speculative Poetry by BIPOC Poets (Sundress Publications) in 2021. Since then I’ve learned much about her role in Black letters and feminist movements of poetry. I’m honored that she calls me up from time to time to join in speculative jamborees such as this one.

The reading was held SUNDAY June 14 7-8pm on Zoom.

EDIT: Who knew that Juneteenth could be so enlightening? That a Black speculative reading would not just feel empowering but shimmering and multidimensional? We flowed through the cosmos, through divinity, through the incarnation of Master Artists. We flowed together. Watch this video and feel the lineage of the poet-griot speculating; that is, philosophizing and imaging (new) meanings of our collective experience. Juneteenth is already historical. These poets connected the dots and turned history into lineage. I had never felt speculative work feel so immediate, intimate and personal. This ain’t no “imaginary” or “fictional” freedom that we’re conjuring here! Watch us gather and work our words and worlds here:

As Text Editor for AWE society press, I’m proud to invite you to consider the Edgelands writing contest.

I’m talking to those who look at place, peeking below the surface, looking at how subjectivity and history mix all up together to walk, ride, or sit with us as we experience the places we be in and those we know.

The edgelands is a place where our inner and outer worlds meet. Even if you’ve never heard the term “Edgelands” you may already be rooted in what we call edgelands awareness in how you look for life and meaning in the places you touch or those that touch you.

We interpret nonfiction broadly with much speculation. We do not want to limit you to materialistic “fact.” This planet holds multiple worlds and multiple dimensions and so can this contest. Your writing may be influenced by cultural transmissions, neurodiversity, oral histories, mysticism, multidimensionality, interspecies relationality. Still, we are not looking for “made up stories” “fiction” or “inventions from your own thoughts.”

We’d love to receive and consider your true speculation, your lived edgelands experience!

For more information and entry forms: https://tinyurl.com/edgelands-non-fiction

Submissions will be judged anonymously by our guest judge Andrés González, a practitioner of curanderismo, writer, Dharma teacher, mental health clinician, and song-carrier. Andrés is the author of Blood, Bone, & Breath, his Substack exploring transmissions from the ecotone—the fertile threshold where the in-between whispers of home, portal, and worlds yet to come.

See you around in the edgelands, at the Jamboree, in the ilé, or in the dreamscape!