Kent Foreman
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Kent Foreman is a veteran actor, performance poet, lyricist and occasional screenwriter whose poetry has been featured in two professional stage productions directed by his mentor, Oscar Brown Jr. He has toured as a jazz poet with Max Roach, and performed with Amiri Baraka, Maya Angelou, and Allen Ginsberg among others. He has won Chicago Historical Society's esteemed Carl Sandburg Award, and is an acknowledged slam champion from Chicago, having appeared on the 1998 Bellwood (Illinois) team, and the 2000 Green Mill team.
Foreman is an interesting bridge between generations, having studied with the prodigy of the Beat and Be-bop generations and endured to become a mentor and co-performer with slam and neo-slam poets of Chicago, such as Nina Corwin, Chuck Perkins, and Reggie Gibson. Being such an artist and teacher, his work has entered the ad hoc canon of Chicago's performance poets, while keeping the respect of the academy, too. It's not unusual to see or hear Foreman as a featured artist at any of a dozen different venues throughout the year.
Foreman's contemporary work unblinkingly explores negritude in his persona of "the Gravedigger," the archetypal black man hired to do what no one else will tolerate. The Gravedigger's meditations often range well beyond his immediate physical world, into the metaphysical and spiritual. In doing so, Foreman shares the fears and hopes of generations of Africans in America; the Gravedigger becomes a kind of everyman, transcendent of race and time as he expresses his placelessness throughout history, but distinctly signifying the African experience in the United States.
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It's About Time
Look man right now everything is happening
Melodrama in super Cinerama
Right now some child has just fallen from some tree
Some philandering husband has misplaced his key
To the house
Dreads the anger of his spouse
Its 4 am somewhere now
Somewhere in some clothes lined tenement yard
Some junky needs a fix
While hoe¹s bemoan the scarcity of tricks shit
Times is hard somewhere right now
Cause love somebody¹s got the blues
Is right now living in a world of deeper hues
Than grottos in Italian isles
And baby trials is going on now
At this very second on any humming highway
Any deadly drumming die way
Two speeding cars collide head on
While some cunning student of chess decides to forfeit a pawn for a night
Somewhere else a fight
In an angry hand a razor slashes
Pakistanis guard against border clashers
And blood will flow right now
Somewhere there is a Wal-Mart that¹s on fire
While it¹s thronged with shoppers
Some where else some poor sharecroppers mule
Has just gone lame
Tragedy comes in assorted sizes
Like prizes in some cosmic bingo game
Anywhere some midwife hears some newborn babes indignant crying
And somewhere in these loneliest of times someone is dying now
Somewhere right now on some stage some musician cats is cooking
While ghetto gigolos are somewhere looking for the vixens
Fixing to get into something
Or the other
Somewhere chastity is not defended bravely
Somewhere else some kindred soul is somewhere digging gravely now
Somewhere right now maybe even on Nantucket
Somebody¹s hiiiiigghh
While somewhere else someone else
Eats Aunt Jamima's sweet potato pie
Dig in a pool hall now some looser is ball racking
At some storefront church some preacher is rapping now
Right now
Somewhere some prim old virgin overhears some dirty dirty joke
and smiles
And right now somewhere somebody is listening to miles
every time,
All sorts of things are going on
At this milisec or at some ancient dawn
What
How
Oh dear dreamers
There is no other time than now
