New Anthology of African American Poetry

 

Kevin Young has edited a new anthology of African American poetry--just published by the Library of America. It includes poets not usually seen in anthologies as well as poems not usually seen by poets we're accustomed to seeing. It's a great book. 

African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song (LOA #333): A Library of America Anthology (The Library of America) edited by Kevin Young

"The Old Marrieds," by Gwendolyn Brooks

 Short poem by the Pulitzer Prize winning poet Brooks (1917-2000)--and a rare poem that begins with the word "But."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25Ew31iICl4

"And What Shall You Say?" by Joseph S. Cotter, Jr.

30-second video/reading of a poem by Joseph S. Cotter, Jr., that was published in James Weldon Johnson's celebrated anthology The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922).

link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBZZx6YNSPA

"Unsuspecting," by Jean Toomer

Six-line poem by the author of Cane (1923). Toomer: 1894-1967

reading/video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNQHIdef6Ts

"Length of Moon," by Arna Bontemps

Short reading/video of poem by Arna Bontemps, Harlem Renaissance poet, professor, editor, novelist, and librarian. His historical novel, Black Thunder, based on an actual slave uprising, is terrific.

link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVau0JZ9CHY

Contrarian Poets

Not that you asked, but from my earliest days of reading poetry up to now, I've been drawn to the poetry of contrarians who chose not to fit into the popular or popular-literary conventions of the day. Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins are good examples, and I started reading their poetry when I was a teen. True, Dickinson worked in what fit loosely into ballad/hymn traditions, but disrupted most of the conventions with regard to subject matter, meter, rhyme, and world-view. Hopkins was a Jesuit priest who usually had his poems get around to praising God, but I had the sense that wasn't his main emphasis, which was on exploding the iambic line. Like Dickinson, he had an unusual worldview insofar as he was drawn to what was imperfect, improvised, messy. "Pied Beauty" expresses this view best, perhaps.

Then there's Karl Shapiro and Langston Hughes. Shapiro was in some ways part of the literary establishment insofar as he edited Poetry magazine, taught at big universities--as many poets did after World War II--co-wrote a book on English/Irish/Scottish/American prosody, and early on worked in rhyme and regular meter. But as with Dickinson and Hopkins, he disrupted the tradition as much as he worked within it. As to subject matter, he wrote about killing flies, auto wrecks, troop ships, and the like, though he could produce a good love poem here and there. He deliberately cultivated an eccentric image of himself, as a Jew who was far from orthodox, a Jew who thought Pound shouldn't get the Bolingen Award because of his fascism, an "atheist who says his prayers," a "bourgeois poet" in an era when the alleged anti-bourgeois Beats were all the rage, and so on. He belonged but thumbed his nose at belonging. He mocked at will.

Smack in the middle of the Modernist era, Hughes wrote accessible verse about a wide swath of Black experience. He did the latter way before it became a crucial part of African American literature. It was as much a political, existential stance as it was a literary one. Like William Carlos Williams, he occupied the accessible turf of Modernism, contrary to Joyce, Eliot, Pound, and all their deliberately "difficult" imitators. Hughes also went all in on socialist politics in the 1930s--until Mussolini invaded Ethiopia and Hitler started his race war and Stalin conducted his own genocide. Again, based on existential reality, Hughes supported the war against the fascists.

Luckily, I was able to take classes from Shapiro, and maybe that reinforced my contrarian nature. I chose not to pursue an MFA and preferred to earn a Ph.D. I was never part of any local, regional, national, or online movement, clique, or club. This wasn't out of a desire to make a point; really, it's just that I didn't enjoy or need that kind of thing, for whatever reasons. It is true that, having grown up in a town of 225 in the High Sierra, I was indeed a hick with a built-in eccentricity feature. I was West Coast, and in spite of all the powerful regional movements in American poetry, the East still rules. I grew up in an era when there were legions of male poets who fashioned themselves hard-drinking tough guys who, when they taught classes, liked to be cruel, or to not show up, and to cultivate some version of a renegade persona. It got so de rigeur that I recoiled from it.

Nowadays, I avoid all the online groups and cliques, although I say, "More power to them." Whatever gets and keeps poets writing is more or less all right with me. I'm still drawn to poetry that goes against the grain in some easily discernible way. I never got the hang of L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry, although I got what they were aiming for. Too often, it just seemed like gibberish or, when not gibberish, excessively taxing on the reader's patience.

I think much African American and otherwise "ethnic" poetry--Latino/a/x, Asian American (many sub-groups), Native American--brings a huge amount of energy and innovation to poetry and is often the best of the Spoken Word stuff.


hans ostrom 2019