Beginning in 1975 Bullins received critical ac-
claim, including an Obie Award and the New York
Drama Critics Award for The Taking of Miss Janie,
a play about the failed alliance of an interracial
group of 1960s political idealists. He has also re-
ceived a Vernon Rice Desk Drama Award, Gug-
genheim fellowships, and Rockefeller Foundation
and National Endowment for the Arts playwriting
grants. True to his Black Nationalistic aesthetic
leanings, Bullins’s naturalistic plays incorporate
elements of African-American folklore, especially
“street” lyricism, and interracial tension.
In 1995 Bullins was appointed professor of the-
ater at Northeastern University in Boston. His most
recent work, Boy X Man, is a memory play about
a man looking back on his childhood and the pro-
cess of growing up. He strains to come to grips with
not ever having understood his mother and with
having failed to say thank you to a stepfather who
has been as much of a father to him as any man
could have ever been. Bullins remains continually
concerned with getting important themes across
to his audience through his plays, and he believes
that theater must be revolutionary in order for Af-
rican-American art to be successful.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Branch, William B., ed. An Anthology of Contempo-
rary African American Drama. New York: Penguin,
1992.
Hay, Samuel. Ed Bullins: A Literary Biography. De-
troit: Wayne State University Press, 1997.
Hatch, James V., ed. Black Theater USA: Plays by Afri-
can Americans. New York: Free Press, 1996.
Neal, Larry. Visions of a Liberated Future. St. Paul,
Minn.: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1989.
Raymond E. Janifer
Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam
Tony Medina and Louis Reyes Rivera, eds.
(2001)
Bum Rush the Page introduces the United States
and the world to recent African-American history
through the fresh, sometimes youthful, voices of
black poets, artists, literary thinkers, urban trans-
lators, musicologists, and revelers. The collection
offers the emotions of a community rocked by
high crime and violence, urban expressions of hip-
hop, and an emergence of class consciousness. The
poems are about the “politics of being Black, from
civil rights to Black Power, to the new sense of self ”
and empowerment for future African-American
communities, as SONIA SANCHEZ writes in her in-
troduction to the collection (xvi).
In the introduction, Tony Medina contends
that the aggressive-progressive intrusion of the
media, its hyper-insensitivity, its ugly talk show
voyeurism, nearly lost the new African-American
poets to the slam; it nearly limited the form to the
“spoken word—that which lives in performance”
(xx). Medina’s argument is not new. RALPH ELLISON
presents it symbolically in the boxing ring scene in
the opening chapter of INVISIBLE MAN (1952). The
voices of Bum Rush belong to the page, to the sol-
ace of the written word. Through their more global
perspectives, the poets share social and political
concerns over race and gender; engage in struggles
over art, place, and self; and “celebrate life, lan-
guage, and poetry” and cultural creativity (xxi).
Whereas the poetic tones in Bum Rush are se-
ductive, prominent, and savvy, the voices form a
collective witness to artistic growth, political his-
tory, states of exile, and sexual and educational
liberation. They are, as YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA argues,
“textured by popular-culture references and mul-
tiple levels of diction—erudite and street-smart”
(xii). While steeped in colloquialisms, sometimes
to achieve poetic beat, the open and sometimes
genderless verse reveals an international youth
spawned by a global market. For example, in “New
York Seizures,” EUGENE B. REDMOND captures the
confused nature of the African American as sin-
gular amid globalization’s recipe for soup (a melt-
ing pot):A Puerto Rican speaks Voodoo with an
African accent;
A European speaks African with a Spanish
accent;
A West Indian yawns in Yiddish and curses
in Arabic;
An African speaks English in silence. (184)Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam 83