Quincy Troupe has always been a step ahead of the crowd. When we were “boyz” together in Watts in the late sixties, he was the first to hip me to the possibilities of moving beyond our status as ghetto superstar poets and into the more culturally legit and politically significant role of university instructors and racial role models.
He was also an intellectual pioneer in the understanding that we should hitch our wagons to the star of world literature and music as opposed to remaining in the “just black” camp of small visions and smaller results. He saw global collaborations between peoples of color and our influential supporters as the only way to achieve the kind of recognition that has come to represent us.
If the twentieth century was the American century, the twenty-first has already been defined by the arrival of hip-hop, the ascendancy of jazz as the true American art form, the entrenchment of Nelson Mandela as the image of universal political godfather, and the re-defining of poetry as a powerful spoken medium. Troupe saw all these things early and acted accordingly.
His first important contribution to this profound cultural remix was the literary journal Confrontation: A Journal of Third World Literature. He published this groundbreaking work while teaching at Ohio University in the late sixties.
From there, he moved to New York in the early seventies, and, while professor of English at Richmond College of Staten Island, began to produce the Black Roots Festival under the auspices of the Frederick Douglass Writers Workshop and Columbia University. Black Roots n which has featured Derek Walcott, Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, Maya Angelou, Eugene Redmond, Victor Hernandez Cruz, Ishmael Reed and Jane Cortez n has been the most important continuous arts festival produced by persons of color in this country and arguably the world.
While all this cold press mind action was percolating under his guidance, Troupe was also publishing his own poetry in seven volumes, including the American Book Award-winning Snake Back Solos and culminating in his 2002 masterwork, Transcircularities: New and Selected Poems.
The Peabody Award-winning Miles Davis Radio Project and his prose work Miles: The Autobiography further attest to the range of Troupe’s accomplishments and reach of his interests. I could go on and on.
Quincy Troupe reminds me of another Quincy, who is somewhat better known but has the same kind of implacable mental energy and inveterate human curiosity. Quincy Jones, renowned record producer, musician, entrepreneur, filmmaker, cultural mentor, writer, arranger, historian and creator of his own myth and academy is who Quincy Troupe most resembles, especially in each man’s unbridled willingness to take a leap into the deep of any form and come up smelling like a giant black rose.
The latest gift from Troupe to us, which is the ultimate focus of this ranting love song, is a children’s book. He’s done everything else and succeeded spectacularly; why not a book for the kids?
What could possibly be a better subject for a children’s book than the one and only Stevie Wonder? His is an unparalleled story, an unbelievable journey from difficulty and suffering to world recognition and almost unlimited artistic success and social influence.
Troupe may have actually prepared us and the vast readership that will encounter this work with a previous piece, Take It To The Hoop, Magic Johnson. This was based on a popular poem he wrote in the seventies for the basketball legend, which had the admirable quality of being deeply felt by both poetry lovers and basketball fans.
This new book, Little Stevie Wonder, illustrated by Lisa Cohen, is a book-length poem to which both adults and kids will be drawn. It comes with an accompanying CD, featuring two of Wonder’s greatest pieces of music, “Fingertips (Part 2)” and “Uptight (Everything’s Alright).” These are not only great pieces of pop soul music, but age-appropriate, because they were written and recorded when he really was Little Stevie Wonder.
In addition to the fun poem that unfolds Wonder for children age 5-9, there is an author’s note at the end of the poem that gives Wonder’s life a factual context and an artistic chronology that I find attractive for anyone who might be interested in getting the artist’s real story n real name, place of birth, parents names, etc. n for the first time.
At 3 p.m. on Saturday, April 2, Quincy Troupe will discuss and sign Little Stevie Wonder at the Vaughn Cultural Center, 3701 Grandel Square. This special children’s event is free. Call co-sponsor Left Bank Books at 367-6731 for more info.
K. Curtis Lyle, a nationally renowned poet and performer, is culture critic for the American.