The injury led to Troupe’s discovery and love of
writing. Troupe is married to Margaret Porter, has
four children—Antoinette, Tymme, Quincy, and
Porter—and lives in La Jolla, California.
Troupe got his poetic start in the late 1960s
during the height of the BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT,
a period when black artists began to focus on the
spiritual and cultural needs of black America. In
Los Angeles Troupe was active as a member of the
Watts Writers’ Workshop, whose members touted
the slogan “arm yourself or harm yourself ” to
respond to America’s racial injustice. Troupe ed-
ited Shrewd magazine in 1968; in 1972 he pub-
lished his first collection of poems, Embryo Poems
1967–71 (New York: Barlenmir, 1972), in which
he revealed his concern with the division between
black America and white America. This concern
reverberates throughout “White Weekend: April
5th to the 9th, 1968,” in which the author laments
the death of Martin Luther King—“& the bearer
of peace / lying still in Atlanta”—while indicting
white America for its blindness, represented by
Wall Street, where the significance of King’s death
was registered by an increasing stock market: “but
in new york, on wall street / the stock market went
up 18 points.”
In his second publication, Snake-Back Solos:
Selected Poems 1969–1977 (1978), which won
the American Book Award in 1979, as well as in
Weather Reports: New and Selected Poems (1991)
and Avalanche (1996), Troupe clearly demonstrates
the talent that made him one of the master poets
of the late 20th century. Through his singular abil-
ity to integrate jazz, poetry, and gospel, Troupe
develops a transcendental form of communica-
tion that engages the reader at multiple levels of
consciousness.
Troupe’s “New York City Beggar,” in which the
narrator conjures up an image of the urban pan-
handler as an addict enslaved by his addiction
and the cycle of begging, is most representative.
After the narrator refuses to give the panhandler
a dime,
he put a Halloween leer on me & said:
“thank you boss”gave the V for victory/peace sign, cursed
under his breath
& left, like an apparition
flapping his raggedy black coat
like giant crow wings in the wind.By refusing to contribute to the panhandler’s wel-
fare, the narrator, whom the beggar first addresses
as brother, “brother can you spare a dime,” seems
to establish a master/slave relationship in which he
(the narrator) represents freedom, while the beg-
gar represents the enslaved. The narrator’s refusal
to “spare a dime” serves as a potential avenue for
unlocking the beggar’s shackles—to eliminate the
beggar’s potential dependency. However, the beg-
gar “gave the V for victory/peace sign, [and] cursed
under his breath.” By transforming the beggar into
a crowlike apparition, Troupe’s narrator makes
him an easily recognizable trickster figure, whose
strength comes by disrupting the status quo. Con-
sequently, the reader is forced to recognize that it
is the master, not the slave, who is responsible for
unsettling the institution of slavery.
Throughout his oeuvre, Troupe rigs the Black
Arts Movement’s themes, making them acces-
sible to white America while still keeping them
real—as evidenced by his appearance on Bill
Moyer’s Emmy Award–winning series, The Power
of the Word (1989). Troupe’s ability to talk in two
tongues, to communicate simultaneously to both
black and white America, is aided by his knack for
freezing moments of humankind caught being
human—as is the case in the authentic and some-
times narcissistic Miles Davis that emerges in the
musician’s autobiography, Miles: The Autobiog-
raphy of Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe (1990),
which Troupe coauthored. This authenticity al-
lows Troupe’s subjects to remain real to the black
experience and at the same time approachable
to a broader reading audience. His subjects are
often the strong who, though caught in the ava-
lanche of life, become heroic role models for bet-
terment rather than victimized role models for
embitterment.
This message is driven home in “A Poem For
‘Magic’ ” (Avalanche, 1996), in which the narrator508 Troupe, Quincy Thomas, Jr.