Poet's Corner: 20th century Black history through poetry

Here we are half way through Black History month and I ask myself, "What really is black history? Is it always the dates that we are told that significant things happened? Or rather is it understanding what happened or what we know has happened and what we have become because it has happened?"

Rather then sit down with a book chronicling the events and times of Black history, let me suggest taking the time to read through the poems in "The Poetry of Black America: Anthology of the 20th Century" edited by Arnold Adolff , with an introduction by Gwendolyn Brooks, (winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Poet Laureate of Illinois and the Library of Congress's Consultant in Poetry and one of the most highly awarded poets of our time who died in 2000). Give it serious thought.

Insight, sensitivity, feelings of a reality many of us never have to experience in a manner many of us never have to experience. Unless we are Black, Black history is not our history as we experience it, but thanks to these incredible poets, we can be exposed to its impact from their eyes, their ears, their hearts, their experiences. Many of the poems in this book are too long to include here, but how I hope you will take the time to read them.

They get inside your soul. Poems such as "Floodtide: For the black tenant farmers of the south" by Aksia Muhammad Toure or June Jordan's "In Memorium: Martin Luther King, Jr.", Julia Field's "Poems: Birmingham 1962-64", and the many poems of Ishmael Reed, Richard Wright, Conrad Kent Rivers, Keorapetse W. Kgositsile., and a hundred more. Here are just a few.



Scottsboro, Too, Is Worth Its Song: A Poem to American Poets

I said:

Now will the poets sing,--

Their cries go thundering

Like blood and tears

Into the Nation's ears.

Like lightning dart

Into the Nation's heart.

Against disease and death and all things fell,

And war,

Their strophes rise and swell

To jar

The foe smug in his citadel.



Remembering their sharp and pretty

Tunes for Sacco and Vanzetti,

I said:

Here too's a cause divinely spun

For those whose eyes are on the sun,

Here in epitome

Is all disgrace

And epic wrong,

Like wine to brace

The minstrel heart, and blare it into song.



Surely. I said

Now will the poets sing,

But they have raised no cry.

I wonder why.

- Countee Cullen (1903-1946)



i remember...

i remember...

january,

1968

its snow,

the desire that I had to build

a black snowman

and place him upon

Malcolm's grave.

- Mae Jackson



leroy

I wanted to know my mother when she sat

looking sad across the campus in the late 20's

into the future of the soul. there were back angels

straining above her head, carrying life from our ancestors.

and knowledge, and the strong nigger feeling. She sat

(in that photo in the yearbook I showed Vashti) getting into

new blues, from the old ones, the trips and passions

showered on herby her own. Hypnotizing me, from so far

ago, from that vantage of knowledge passed on to her passed on

to me and all the other black people of our time.

When I die, the consciouseness I carry I will to

Black people. May they pick me spart and take the

Useful parts, the sweet eat of my feelings, And leave

The bitter bullshit rotten white parts

Alone.

- Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones)

Syndicated columnist Barbara Perlman-Whyman's writes the weekly good reads column.

If you would like to submit poetry, a book review of your own or what your book club is reading email bpwhyman@sbcglobal.net.