Blue Beat Syncopation

by Stanley E. Banks

Price 93 pages, $12.95 paper

ISBN 1-886157-36-7

The Kansas City Star Best Poetry Pick 2003

Along with his mentor Langston Hughes, Banks is one of the few poets who can claim a true fusion of the spoken word with the blues-music form. --John Mark Eberhart, The Kansas City Star

Blue Beat Syncopation reveals Stanley E. Banks' status as a literary child of Langston Hughes. To the rhythm of a "drowsy syncopated tune" Banks tells us exactly "what happens to a dream deferred" in his hometown of Kansas City, Missouri. Written over a span of 25 years, Blue Beat Syncopation chronicles the despair, death, and decay of urban America in a manner reminiscent of Hughes's poem "Harlem." Lamenting lost love, lost loved ones, and the loss of hope in a world defined by harsh realities, Banks humanizes people dismissed as "pathological" by social commentators. Capturing the music and the misery of the modal black experience in written form, Blue Beat Syncopation is an extended blues elegy, a counterpoint to the American progress narrative. --Jeffrey R. Williams, University of Missouri-Columbia

Some of these poems are made from stones and hard times. Banks sings the blues and his poems walk like blues people. They don't apologize for how they look or feel.
Funerals are just family reunions and so this book is like a bible for those of us who survive the violent streets and other deaths. --E. Ethelbert Miller, Howard University

Stanley E. Banks has received a National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellowship and Kansas City's Writers Place Award. His poetry collection On 10th Alley Way won the Langston Hughes Prize. Blue Beat Syncopation includes selections from the first twenty-five years of his literary career. He is artist-in-residence at Avila University in Kansas City.