4) OBAC grew out of Fuller's regular meetings with literary critic Conrad Kent Rivers and social activist Gerald McWorter (Abdul Alkalimat) in his apartment.
This reflected the fact that, in David Lionel Smith's characterization, OBAC "was a community-based organization" whose members "eschew[ed] formal affiliations with any other institution" except when it came to renting meeting space.
He relayed news that OBAC had postponed the magazine's launch party from February 15 to March 9.
Fuller's small gesture to Lee was of a piece with his editorial practice for Nommo: ensure that whomever he published had an organic connection to OBAC.
Rodgers was an OBAC poet, as I noted above, but her "Knowing the Difference" was not Chicago-specific.
There the city emerged as the concrete materiality of urban life with which OBAC poets had to tarry on a daily basis.
Whereas the earlier version tacked on the OBAC sketch as if it were an afterthought, in this later piece the group took center stage.
While many Chicago-born poems never enjoyed a national reception, all of them, according to Fuller's advising of OBAC, were pivotal in doing the work of imagining nationalism on the ground.
As OBAC grew in numbers, its output was oriented not toward literary genres or conventions but toward specific community programs and initiatives.
OBAC stressed that the figural was a function of the literal, and that poetic vision emerged out of a clear-eyed understanding of racial and class inequality as it was lived or experienced.
In a distinctly OBAC move, Lewis counterposes New York to Chicago, which is not named because it does not need to be named--the reader is already in the know.
