By Dr. Jamar "Marmi" Turner Introduction (Opening Reflection) I was recently approached by a more senior poet who offered advice on how I might live up to his expectations of a “professional poet.” His suggestion was simple: perform the poems—don’t read them. Now, to be fair, performance has its place in a tradition that stretches back thousands of years. But what followed felt less like guidance and more like a narrowing—as if poetry, and the communities that hold it, were a

Black art was never meant to decorate institutions. It was meant to transform the conditions that made those institutions necessary. Within the Black Arts Movement, Larry Neal argued that Black art is inseparable from Black liberation. Art, in this framework, is not aesthetic expression alone—it is cultural, political, and spiritual labor.