Jericho Brown: Nativity
Come trouble’s birthday,
I think of every gift people get
They don’t use. Oh, and I
Pray.
Patricia Jabbeh Wesley: In the Other World
Our beloved lay down and then eloped
to that other world.
Countee Cullen: Heritage
Africa? A book one thumbs
Listlessly, till slumber comes.
Unremembered are her bats
Circling through the night, her cats
Crouching in the river reeds
Video: Joe Biden and Elizabeth Alexander discuss “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden
President-elect Joe Biden, poet Elizabeth Alexander, psychologist Angela Duckworth, and a chorus of working fathers and sons join Poetry in America host Elisa New to reflect on Robert Hayden’s sonnet “Those Winter Sundays.”
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: Bury Me in a Free Land
All that my yearning spirit craves,
Is bury me not in a land of slaves.
Video: Revolution
Revolution is comprised of 7 vignettes where individuals talk, discuss how being Black has impacted them and what the word revolution means to them.
Amiri Baraka: Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note
And now, each night I count the stars,
And each night I get the same number.
And when they will not come to be counted,
I count the holes they leave.
Amiri Baraka: The Liar
What I thought was love
in me, I find a thousand instances
of fear.
Audio: WeWeWeWe The Remarkable (for Gwendolyn Brooks)
The Pool Players.
Seven at the Golden Shovel.
Thomas Sayers Ellis: All Their Stanzas Look Alike
All their Selected Collecteds
All their Oxford Nortons
All their Academy Societies
All their Oprah Vendlers
All their stanzas look alike
Richard Wright: Haiku
I am nobody:
A red sinking autumn sun
Took my name away.
Video: Terrance Hayes, “American Sonnets For My Past and Future Assassin”
Terrance Hayes discusses his poetry collection, American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin at Politics and Prose in Washington DC on 7/16/18. Written during the first two hundred days … Continue reading
Video: How do you raise a black child? A poem by Cortney Lamar Charleston
A poem by Cortney Lamar Charleston — presented as a film directed by Seyi Peter Thomas of Station Film. HOW DO YOU RAISE A BLACK CHILD? From the dead. With pallbearers … Continue reading
Claude McKay: America
Although she feeds me bread of bitterness, And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth, Stealing my breath of life, I will confess I love this cultured hell that tests … Continue reading
Vox Populi 