“font-family: Verdana; line-height: 13px;”>Quincy Troupe is a man of the world – he lives in “font-family: Verdana; line-height: 13px;”>, has a home on Guadalupe, and travels the country and globe as a performing poet. Yet in his lively new book of poetry, “font-family: Verdana; line-height: 13px;”>Erancities
(Coffee
House Press), more than ever he is a black man from St.
Louis
“font-family: Verdana; line-height: 13px;”>.
“font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Verdana;”>In a lengthy dedication, he name-checks no fewer than eight African-American men from the St. Louis region: the musicians Miles Davis, Hamiet Bluiett and Kelvyn Bell; the poets K. Curtis Lyle and Eugene B. Redmond; the artist Oliver Jackson; his cousin Donald Troupe; and his friend Donald M. Suggs, publisher of The St. Louis American.
“font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Verdana;”>“In this particular book, I really wanted to thank the people who really have supported me over the years,” Troupe said.
“font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Verdana;”>“These are people who always were there for me with criticism, positive criticism and negative criticism when they didn’t like something. They always helped me.”
“font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Verdana;”>Troupe also dedicates a poem to K. Curtis Lyle and two other soulmates from the Watts Writers Workshop that was so formative for him. In perhaps the most exciting poem in the volume, Troupe praises “those exuberant edgy misfits,/ those glorious madcap poets of precise inexactitude.”
“font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Verdana;”>Troupe said he and Curtis are “fellow travelers of the road” who found their poetic voices from other places. “We read Cesar Vallejo, Pablo Neruda, Gabriel Garcia Lorca, Aime Cesaire,” Troupe said. “Nobody had heard of these people then.”
“font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Verdana;”>The two young poets co-created one another; and then after Troupe had moved to Curtis’ hometown of Los Angeles, Curtis moved here. “He got my sensibility, and I got his,” Troupe said. “He’s from L.A., and I’m from St. Louis. We changed places!”
“font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Verdana;”>Of the list of dedicatees from St. Louis, Miles Davis is in a different category. Troupe was a boyhood fan of Miles’ music and only evolved a friendship with the great composer and bandleader while working together on Miles’ autobiography, the prose work that cemented the poet’s reputation as a literary figure of global importance.
“font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Verdana;”>In addition to the dedication, Troupe dedicates two of these 58 poems to Miles, writes one poem about the last tune Miles performed live and remembers him in other pieces.
“font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Verdana;”>“I love that he was a risk taker,” Troupe said. “Miles always pushed forward, tried something new, even though people always tried to pigeonhole him into playing like that old quintet with Coltrane or whatever it was they liked.”
“font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Verdana;”>Taking risks and trying new things come together in a new poetic form that Troupe innovated and introduces in this collection: the Seven/Eleven. It, too, has St. Louis roots.
“font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Verdana;”>“I grew up in the inner city of St. Louis, Missouri, and I watched older and younger people – mostly men – gambling when they played the game of dice,” Troupe writes in a note explaining the form.
“font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Verdana;”>The form incorporates the numbers seven and 11 in the numbers of syllables per line and lines per stanza, but it also calls for risk and chance – not only the chance inherent in any throw of the dice, but the risk inherent in a street game where the player could lose his life.
“font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Verdana;”>“I’ve watched people get killed over cheating at dice,” Troupe said.
“font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Verdana;”>That is another element to his hometown – it is a source of artistic greatness, but also can be a dangerous place. And a frustrating one. The new book includes a homecoming poem, “Going Back to Voices Lost in the Past,” where the poet expresses fear that someone from the old neighborhood will pop a cap in him when the visitor fails to recognize the former friend in the “ruined” face before him.
“font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Verdana;”>As much as Troupe depends upon that long list of old friends from here, he has mixed feelings about his hometown.
“font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Verdana;”>“St. Louis for me did not move forward politically,” he said. “It’s like a large plantation (I hate to say that) where people pull strings from the suburbs. We don’t honor a lot of people who come from here who have been influential. I hate to sound negative like that, but that’s just the way it is.”
“font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Verdana;”>Troupe, who was in St. Louis this week to see his mother, will keep moving. He and Kelvyn Bell are bound soon for the University of Hawaii – Hilo, where the St. Louis-born artist Michael Marshall will host them for a residency, along with Taj Mahal. Then he has gigs at Penn State, in New York, Minneapolis, L.A., San Francisco, Oakland, San Diego, Morocco, Bordeaux – and that only gets him up to the month of May.
“font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Verdana;”>Everywhere he goes, he will remember where he came from.
“font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Verdana;”>“When people move on from the place they come from, they tend to forget about that place and the people who influenced and supported them,” Troupe said. “I’m always trying to acknowledge that I didn’t grow up just alone in the world. I had a lot of support. I was born and raised here, and I learned lot here.”
