West Coast kinfolk: in Los Angeles, Chris Abani and Kamau Daaood stand out as strong limbs on the family tree of literature

Black Issues Book Review, May-June, 2005 by Michael Datcher

Daaood has not only been plugging into that pulse for decades, but he's been the red blood cells traveling through the veins. Daaood was one of the youngest members of the legendary Watt's Writer's Workshop. The 1960s era workshop was an incubator for Jayne Cortez, Stanley Crouch, K. Curtis Lyle, Ojenke, Eric Priestly, Quincy Troupe and many others transforming Watt's Riot embers into metaphors.

"All the writers were very serious about their craft," Daaood says. "If you brought weak work, you heard about it. The first time that K. Curtis came to the workshop and read this poem someone snatched it out of his hand, and said, 'This is bullshit,' and threw it out the window. The next week he came back with a piece that was really strong,"

Daaood brought that tough love approach to Leimert Park when he cofounded the World Stage with master drummer Billy Higgins. The World Stage was a grassroots writer's workshop and jazz workshop that was designed to create and nurture artists in the Crenshaw District. From poet Ruth Forman, novelist Jenoyne Adams to jazz drummer Willie Jones III, and vibraphonist Stefon Harris, the World Stage has set fire under a new breed of artists who have their feet set firmly in the community.

In April of 2005, City Lights Publishers released The Language of Saxophone: Selected Poems of Kamau Daaood. The title is a riff on Los Angeles poets' long tradition of being intertwined with music.

"The music has always had a strong impact on the poets," he says. "We filtered the experience of the '60s through the militancy and music of the times, through Coltrane's runs and honks. But not just the music of jazz, also the music of what we called the 'Sermonic Tradition' which we got from Ojenke, who got it from his father, Rev. Saxon. We tried to find the music in how the black preacher brought the rhythmic word to the people. Then we combined that with all the image-driven surrealist poetry we were reading and 'all the Pablo Neruda, all the Bob Kaufman. We put it all together and made it our own.

"The school of poetry that came out of that period was marked by high-energy performance, rich with provocative images and steeped in musicality," he says. "The most well-known proponents of the style are probably Quincy Troupe and Jayne Cortez. And there are many very strong, younger poets who are out of that tradition but making it their own."

These young poets are the legacy of Daaood because you can always tell the quality of the tree by the fruit it bears. In a way, The Language of Saxophones is Daaood's latest casting of seeds.

"In this collection, in this book, I'm writing four decades of my life. Hopefully, there is some growth on display. Most of my work in the past was geared toward the live performance, serving the community in a specific time and place. A village artist as community artist. Like Ojenke used to say, 'I don't write poems on book pages, I write poems on hearts.'"

This is a family lesson that we can 'all learn from elder Kamau Daaood. Let's try to find home in the heart of each other. Unswayed by geography or Fahrenheit, let's have a family reunion that makes love a verb down South, on the Eastside, the Westside and the Midwestside.