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San Francisco Poet's New Book "The Armageddon of Funk" Honored by Black Caucus of ALA

by Luis Rodriquez (lrodrig555 [at] aol.com)
The Black Caucus of the American Library Association has awarded The Armageddon of Funk, by Michael Warr, an “Honor Books For Poetry” Award. Tia Chucha Press published Warr’s book in the fall of 2011. The BCALA announcement wrote: “In The Armageddon of Funk Michael Warr wages his own “funky” war using an arsenal of words, ideas, and personal experiences. From his soulful and historicized tribute to the legendary James Brown to his ode to the great Gwendolyn Brooks, this collection traverses the Black experience giving the reader a poetic soundtrack to Black life.”
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PRESS RELEASE
For Immediate Release / February 2012
Contact: Luis Rodriguez 818-898-0013 or Michael Warr 415-606-4781

SAN FRANCISCO POET’S NEW BOOK “THE ARMAGEDDON OF FUNK” HONORED
BY THE BLACK CAUCUS OF THE AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION

“…a poetic soundtrack to Black life.” – Black Caucus of the ALA on “The Armageddon of Funk”

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – The Black Caucus of the American Library Association has awarded The Armageddon of Funk, by Michael Warr, an “Honor Books For Poetry” Award. Tia Chucha Press published Warr’s book in the fall of 2011.

In announcing the award the BCALA wrote: “In The Armageddon of Funk Michael Warr wages his own “funky” war using an arsenal of words, ideas, and personal experiences. From his soulful and historicized tribute to the legendary James Brown to his ode to the great Gwendolyn Brooks, this collection traverses the Black experience giving the reader a poetic soundtrack to Black life.”

Warr, who spent his early childhood living in the Hunter Point projects, discovered Gwendolyn Brooks, the first Black to receive the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, in the book “Three Thousand Years of Black Poetry,” which he stole from his junior high school library. Reading her poems at that early age he arrogantly thought, “I can do that.” Moving to Chicago in his early twenties he would meet Ms. Brooks, become friends with her, and benefit from her generous support of a literary arts center he co-founded. She recognized Warr’s poetry with the “Gwendolyn Brooks Significant Illinois Poets Award.”

The Armageddon of Funk is described by Northwestern University Press as: “Tracking a non-linear trek across terrain as distinct as Timbuktu and Baton Rouge, and beliefs as “contrary” as Christianity and Communism, in “The Armageddon of Funk” Michael Warr manages to interconnect a world of opposites. Via “poetic memoir” we join his navigation through the “apolitical,” rigid, morality of the Jehovah Witnesses; the revolutionary theories and free-love of Black Panthers and Marxists; the promise of a bourgeois future from bank executives; a screaming soldier brandishing an AK-47 in his face, a blizzard of white termite wings; an interrogation under Haile Selassie’s Jubilee Palace; hallucinating of “of cornbread islands” at Chicago’s “Velvet Lounge,” and many “Street Signs, Convolutions, and other California Coincidences” as one poem is titled in this second collection. Warr’s poetry, like his life, is full of interruptions and circularity that captures the broad sweep of the times and microscopic idiosyncrasies of the moment.”

Tia Chucha Press in 1991 first published Michael Warr with his groundbreaking work, “We Are All The Black Boy.” Warr is also a recipient of poetry awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, San Francisco’s Beat Museum, and others. A former resident of Chicago, IL and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, he is now living again in his hometown San Francisco, CA.

For more information go to Armageddonoffunk.com.
§The Armageddon of Funk, by Michael Warr
by Luis Rodriquez
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The Armageddon of Funk
§Poet Michael Warr
by Luis Rodriquez
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Poet Michael Warr
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