Poetry
Black Poetry Post #2 - Lucille Clifton
A Black Poem A Day - 30 Days of Black Poetry and Poets
DevotionReader Poetry Series: 30 Ways of Looking at Black Poetry
"Let the circle be unbroken"
Poet and literary critic Eugene Redmond, in his critical history of Black poetry—Drumvoices (1976)—explained the artistic connection between ancestral African oral tradition and the earliest Black poets
who emerged throughout the Diaspora as a result of the four centuries long Atlantic slave trade:
Mean, mean, mean to be free
“Mean, mean, mean to be free”: Racial bias still bound to Robert Hayden’s legacy
Forty years after the publication of his celebrated book, Selected Poems, in 1966, Detroit-born Black American poet Robert Hayden is still being defined according to the narrow margins of race which he resented and resisted throughout his literary career.
During an NPR interview not long ago, former United States poet laureate Billy Collins set off a firestorm when he said that “[Hayden] was not terribly popular with the African American community, you might say, in that he didn’t tend to write about subjects that were racial. You really can’t tell from many of his poems what his race is.”
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