In case you're not familiar with these two poets, here are their bios as published on the Observable Readings site:

Quincy Troupe

Quincy Troupe is the author of eight volumes of poetry and six non-fiction works. The Pursuit of Happyness, a biography, was a New York Times best-seller; The Architecture of Language, a book of poems, won the 2007 Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement. He is editor of Black Renaissance Noire, a literary journal of the Institute of Africana Studies at New York University.

Patrick Rosal

Patrick Rosal is the author of two poetry collections; Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive, which won the Members' Choice Award from the Asian American Writers' Workshop, and most recently My American Kundiman, which won the Association of Asian American Studies 2006 Book Award. His poems and essays have been published widely. He taught creative writing for many years at Bloomfield College and twice served on the faculty of Kundiman's Summer Retreat for Asian American Poets.

Though I've often wanted to attend Observable Readings, this is the first time I've been able to make it all the way there. My time was well spent. The poets were excellent read in a welcoming ambiance of the Schlafly Bottleworks taproom and several of my friends among the assembled company.

Both Patrick and Quincy are empassioned poets encompassing the political and the personal in their work. Their reading matches their skill as poets. I need to say upfront that I'm normally not a big fan of Spoken Word performances of the type one tends to find at poetry slams and such. I find them overwhelming, often strident and insistent. These poets whose reading certainly leans in that direction (I'd guess) are not like that a'tall! Their embrace is so wide that the feeling the listener is left with is a sense of compassion for the tenderness and fragility of human life and the world we find ourselves in.

Both, to quote a Quincy Troupe line used in his introduction "come from the truth wid it." Their poetry is visceral, kinesthetic, and almost too hard to contain without making utterances and physical gestures. How I longed to be in an audience making this kind of expression of receiving the poetry, in concert. But, I didn't want to be the lone white woman at the back table, uulating or jumping up and down. I didn't want to misbehave. "Oh, misbehave!" Patrick Rosal urged when I brought this up in conversation after the reading.

So, instead, we had the polite applause in between poems and poets...the kind that I feel interrupts the flow of the reading. How I wished that an announcement had been made, saying, "Please hold your applause until the end, but feel free to hoot and holler, laugh, sigh, and cry, as much as you wish in response to these empassioned artists. You are riding in a Catillac, driven by a master."

In 1995 the kwansaba---a new poetry form---was invented in East St. Louis. The Eugene B. Redmond Writers Club, organized and chartered in March 1986, brought together cultural workers and creative artists searching for "new tools, concepts, vehicles, and challenges within regional and global contexts."

In the early 1990s Kwanzaa (based on a 7-day ritual) Celebration based around the Nguzo Saba (Seven Principles) was introduced to the United States by Dr. Maulana Karenga. Eugene Redmond says in a 2004 Drumvoices Revue that "Over several months I toyed with the Swahili words Kwanzaa (first fruits) and Saba (principles) until the term kwansaba hit me like fresh--or ancestral---love."

The Kwansaba is a poem consisting of seven lines. Each line has no more than seven words. Each word has no more than seven letters. Thus, the form, revolving around the number 7, adding up to 49 words, is based on the seven principles of the Kwansaa celebration.

Redmond continues to explain the importance of the number 7 in "astronomy, numerology, and mythology." In 2004 Drumvoices Revue published a special series of Kwansabas for Katherine Dunham, who arrived in East St. Louis in 1967, "at the height of the Black Arts Movement and one year after the invention of the Kwansaba."

Since then, special contests and themes featuring the Kwansaba have been featured in Drumvoices Revue. I attended a workshop Eugene Redmond led in which he shared Kwansabas inspired by Richard Wright's "Black Boy." Wright wanted his life to "count for something. Drumvoices #15 (2007) featured this example of a kwansaba for Quincy Troupe.

KWANSABA FOR QUINCY TROUPE
by Reginald Lockett

Lion roaming the vast Serengeti of verse
On the Great Plains he stalks words
Dogs the scents of verbs and nous
King of musical lines tracks poetry's song
In the forest there stands his prize,
A sleek gazelle of a poem desired
He makes a quick study and pounces.

The Eugene B. Redmond Writers Club meeting in its 21st year now holds twice-monthly meeting on the first and third Tuesday from 6-8 p.m. in Building B of the Library of teh East St. Louis Higher Education Campus, 601 J.R. Thompson Drive, September through May. All writers, beginners to professionals are welcome.