[View Titles on Goodreads.com: pavlic -- douglas]
Reviewed by Keith Mitchell
Douglas, Mitchell. Cooling Board: A Long Playing Poem. Granada Hills, CA: Red Hen, 2009. 112 pp. ISBN 1597091405. $19.95 (paper).
Pavlic, Ed. Winners Have Yet to Be Announced: A Song for Donny Hathaway. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2008. 208 pp. ISBN 0820330973. $19.95 (paper).
The importance of African-American music to literature is pretty much a given; The number of novels, short stories, plays and poems in which African-American music is essential is staggering. Poetry has been particularly ripe for the exploration of connections between music and the genre. Usually individual poems in a collection are devoted to black musical artists. Sometimes, on rare occasions, whole collections are devoted to a particular black musical artist, especially jazz and blues artists. Who can forget Michael S. Harper’s furiously experimental Dear John, Dear Coltrane (1985) or Alexis De Veaux’s heart-rending Don’t Explain: A Song of Billie Holiday (1980)? Rarely, however, has an entire poetry collection been devoted to a black musical artist who’s work many might consider certainly slight in light of musical icons John Coltrane and Billie Holiday. Yet, Ed Pavlic’s Winners Have Yet to Be Announced: A Song for Donny Hathaway and Mitchell H. Douglas’ Cooling Board: A Long Playing Poem are two very fine praisesongs for the ’70s and ’80s R&B singer and musical genius, Donny Hathaway. Continue reading this post…
As is currently the case in many sectors, broadcast journalism is scrambling to figure out how to tap into and employ (and exploit . . . hey, it’s capitalism) new media and the public’s relationship to the developing formats. NBC News seems to have found a clue, if not an answer, in their new Digital Reporter Mara Schiavocampo. A Silver Spring, Maryland native, Schiavocampo took some time from her busy “have camera, will travel” schedule to answer a few questions from the road. 
