Blue Village: A.B. Spellman, Joel Oppenheimer, and the Poetics of Interracial Community

Abstract This article explores the poetics of interracial community in the work of poets A.B. Spellman and Joel Oppenheimer. As participants in the United States’ first integrated avant-garde, Spellman and Oppenheimer played significant roles that parallel, in some ways, the friendships of better-known figures such as Amiri Baraka and Charles Olson while also offering their own unique take on such collaborations. By reading their poetry through the lens of what Aldon Lynn Nielsen has termed the future-anterior of African American cultural experience, the article attends to Spellman’s and Oppenheimer’s uses of blues concepts and tropes as a means to understanding their attempts to forge meaningful interracial relationships amid the downtown bohemia of midcentury New York. Thus, while focusing on historical poetics throughout, the larger implications of the article apply equally to cultural debates concerning integration, allyship, and racial justice, concerns that remain as timely today as they were in the civil-rights era.