African American poetry: 250 years of struggle & song

Introduction / by Kevin Young --

Bury me in a free land: 1770-1899 --

Lift every voice: 1900-1918 --

The dark tower: 1919-1936 --

Ballads of remembrance: 1936-1959 --

Ideas of ancestry: 1959-1975 --

Blue light sutras: 1976-1989 --

Praise songs for the day: 1990-2008 --

After the hurricane: 2009-2020

ONE: BURY ME IN A FREE LAND 1770-1899. On imagination ; On Recollection ; On the Death of the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield. 1770 ; To S. M. a young African Painter, on seeing his Works ; To His Excellency General Washington / Phillis Wheatley --

An Address to Miss Phillis Wheatly, Ethiopian Poetess, in Boston / Jupiter Hammon --

[Bars Fight] / Lucy Terry --

A Mathematical Problem in Verse / Benjamin Banneker --

To Eliza ; The Slave's Complaint ; On hearing of the intention of a gentleman to purchase the Poet's freedom ; Division of an estate ; The Art of a Poet ; George Moses Horton, Myself / George Moses Horton --

An Appeal to Woman ; The Grave of the Slave / Sarah Louisa Forten --

Concatination [Selected Pottery Verses, 1834-1862] / David Drake --

The Natives of America ; Reflections / Ann Plato --

Armand Lanusse: Epigram ; Camille Thierry Ideas ; Pierre Dalcour: Verse Written in the Album of Mademoiselle _____ ; Victor-Ernest Rillieux: Love and Devotion/ Les Cenelles --

America ; To Cinque / James M. Whitfield --

Hope and Confidence / Charles L. Reason --

A Life-Day / George B. Vashon --

The Emigrant / Benjamin Clark --

Song for the First of August / James Madison Bell --

A June Song ; A Parting Hymn ; In the earnest path of duty / Charlotte Forten Grimḱe --

Toussaint L'Ouverture ; Self-Mastery / Henrietta Cordelia Ray --

from The Rape of Florida ; A Question / Albery A. Whitman --

The Slave Mother ; Bury Me in a Free Land ; Learning to Read ; A Double Standard ; Songs for the People / Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.

TWO: LIFT EVERY VOICE 1900-1918. The House of Falling Leaves / William Stanley Braithwaite --

Driftwood / Olivia Ward Bush --

America ; Character or Color

Which? ;

Late Mother / Carrie Williams Clifford --

Paul Laurence Dunbar / James D. Corrothers --

A Prayer ; And What Shall You Say? ; Supplication ; A Woman at Her Husband's Grave / Joseph Seamon Cotter, Jr. --

Dr. Booker T Washington to the National Negro Business League / Joseph Seamon Cotter, Sr. --

A Litany at Atlanta / W. E. B. Du Bois --

We Wear the Mask ; A Negro Love Song ; When Malindy Sings ; When de Co'n Pone's Hot ; An Ante-Bellum Sermon ; Sympathy ; A Death Song ; Compensation / Paul Laurence Dunbar --

Violets ; I Sit and Sew ; The Proletariat Speaks / Alice Dunbar-Nelson --

The Black Finger ; A Mona Lisa ; El Beso ; You ; Rosabel ; The Eyes of My Regret ; Trees ; Tenebris ; Grass Fingers ; To Keep the Memory of Charlotte Forten Grimké / Angelina Weld Grimké --

Wooing ; A Spade Is Just a Spade ; Here and Hereafter / Walter Everette Hawkins --

Retrospect / Josephine D. Heard --

When I Die ; The Lonely Mother ; Who Is That A-Walking in the Corn? ; from African Nights / Fenton Johnson --

Lift Every Voice and Sing ; Sence You Went Away ; O Black and Unknown Bards ; My City ; Go Down Death / James Weldon Johnson --

from The Fledgling Poet and the Poetry Society / George R. Margetson --

Ode to the Sun / Eloise Bibb Thompson --

To a Little Colored Boy / Priscilla Jane Thompson --

The New Negro / Lucian B. Watkins.

THREE: THE DARK TOWER 1919-1936. Japanese Hokku ; Negro Woman ; Effigy / Lewis Grandison Alexander --

Heritage ; Lines written at the Grave of Alexander Dumas ; Fantasy ; To a Dark Carl ; Dirge for a Free Spirit ; I Build America ; Epitaph / Gwendolyn B. Bennett --

The Return ; A Black Man Talks of Reaping ; Southern Mansion ; The Day-breakers / Arna Bontemps --

Ma Rainey ; Old Lem ; Slim Greer ; Strange Legacies ; Southern Cop ; To a Certain Lady, in Her Garden ; Let Us Suppose / Sterling A. Brown --

Portraiture ; Black Baby ; Impressions from a Family Album ; Coveted Epitaph ; Denial ; Idle Wonder / Anita Scott Coleman --

Longings ; Goal ; Farewell ; Having Had You ; Four Poems

After the Japanese ;

For a New Mother ; I Look at Death / Mae V. Cowdery --

Yet Do I Marvel ; Incident ; Tableau ; Saturday's Child ; Heritage ; from Epitaphs ; From the Dark Tower ; Uncle Jim ; Scottsboro, Too, Is Worth Its Song / Countee Cullen --

No Images ; Nineteen-twenty-nine ; My Lord, What a Morning ; Down-Home Boy ; Carry Me Back / Waring Cuney --

The Mask ; Solace / Clarissa Scott Delany --

Dead Fires ; La Vie C'est la vie ; Oblivion / Jessie Redmon Fauset --

My Last Name / Nicolas Guillen --

Notes Found Near a Suicide / Frank Horne --

The Negro Speaks of Rivers ; The Weary Blues ; Mother to son ; Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret ; Beale Street Love ; Cross ; Personal ; Midwinter Blues ; Bound No'th Blues ; Dream Variations ; I, Too ; Song for a Dark Girl ; Let America be America Again ; from Montage of a Dream Deferred ; Madam and the Rent Man ; from Ask Your Mama / Langston Hughes --

The Singer ; The Maestro / Eva A. Jessye --

The Heart of a Woman ; Cosmopolite ; Black Woman ; Old Black Men ; Common Dust ; I Want to Die While You Love Me ; Interracial / Georgia Douglas Johnson --

Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem ; Poem ; Invocation / Helene Johnson --

Jamaica Market / Agnes Maxwell-Hall --

Christmas in de Air ; The Harlem Dancer ; Harlem Shadows ; If We Must Die ; On Broadway ; The Tropics in New York ; The Lynching ; America ; My Mother ; "The white man is a tiger at my throat" / Claude McKay --

Man and Maid / Myra Estelle Morris --

Shadow / Richard Bruce Nugent --

Requiem ; This Is My Vow / Lucia Mae Pitts --

October Prayer ; Flag Salute / Esther Popel --

Black and Blue ; The Tree of Hope / Andy Razaf --

At the Carnival ; White Things ; Sybil Warns Her Sister / Anne Spencer --

Five Vignettes ; Her Lips Are Copper Wire ; from Cane ; from Essentials ; Be with Me / Jean Toomer.

FOUR: BALLADS OF REMEMBRANCE 1936-1959. To Satch (American Gothic) ; Nat Turner or Let Him Come ; If the Stars Should Fall / Samuel Allen --

Narrative ; Night and a Distant Church ; It's Here in The ; Spyrytual / Russell Atkins --

from A Street in Bronzeville ; Beverly Hills, Chicago ; The Bean Eater ; We Real Cool ; A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon ; The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till ; The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock ; The Lovers of the Poor ; Malcolm X ; The Second Sermon on the Warpland ; Paul Robeson ; The Life of Lincoln West ; The Boy Died in My Alley ; Infirm ; I Am a Black ; An Old Black Woman, Homeless, and Indistinct / Gwendolyn Brooks --

To Julia de Burgos ; Ay, Ay, Ay of the Kinky-Haired Negress ; Poem of the Unborn Child ; Farewell in Welfare Island ; The Sun in Welfare Island / Julia de Burgos --

The Small Bells of Benin ; Etta Moten's Attic / Margaret Danner --

from Ebony Under Granite ; Mojo Mike's Beer Garden ; Four Glimpses of Night / Frank Marshall Davis --

Sorrow Is the Only Faithful One ; The Morning Duke Ellington Praised the Lord and Six Little Black Davids Tapped Danced Unto / Owen Dodson --

Those Winter Sundays ; Frederick Douglass ; Middle Passage ; Runagate Runagate ; A Letter from Phillis Wheatley ; Paul Laurence Dunbar ; [American Journal] / Robert Hayden --

The Truth ; Jazz Is My Religion ; The Nice Colored Man / Ted Joans --

Hawk Lawler: Chorus ; I, Too, Know What I Am Not ; Would You Wear My Eyes? ; War Memoir ; Walking Parker Home ; Crootey Songo ; Heavy Water Blues ; Blues for Hal Waters ; Oregon / Bob Kaufman --

from Dark Testament ; Prophecy / Pauli Murray --

A Private Letter to Brazil ; Review from Staten Island ; Man White, Brown Girl and All That Jazz / Gloria C. Oden --

Young Poet / Myron O'Higgins --

Harlem Dawn ; A Definition ; Jean-Jaques / Oliver Pitcher --

Booker T. and W.E.B. ; An Answer to Lerone Bennett's Questionnaire On a Name for Black Americans ; A Poet Is Not a Jukebox / Dudley Randall --

Ballad of American Mores ; Face of Poverty / Lucy E. Smith --

Dark Symphony ; from Harlem Gallery, Book I: The Curator / Melvin B. Tolson --

For My People ; Molly Means ; October Journey / Margaret Walker --

Between the World and Me ; Selected Haiku / Richard Wright.

FIVE: IDEAS OF ANCESTRY 1959-1975. Still I Rise ; Phenomenal Woman / Maya Angelou --

Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note ; Look for You Yesterday, Here You Come Today ; Notes for a Speech ; The Liar ; Short Speech to My Friends ; Three Modes of History and Culture ; SOS ; Black Art ; Why's 12 / Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones) --

King: April 4, 1968 / Gerald Barrax --

Blues ; All God's Chillun ; The White River ; Sam Lord / Kamau Brathwaite --

"in the inner city" ; miss rosie ; good times ; admonitions ; "being property once myself" ; the lost baby poem ; from some jesus ; cutting greens ; homage to my hips ; "the light that came to lucille clifton" ; jasper texas 1998 ; why some people be mad at me sometimes ; "i am accused of tending to the past" ; Jump Rope Rhymes (transcribed) ; study the masters ; to my last period ; wishes for sons ; "surely i am able to write poems" ; "won't you celebrate with me" / Lucille Clifton --

How Long Has Trane Been Gone ; Orisha ; Rape ; Jazz Fan Looks Back / Jayne Cortez --

Son of Msippi ; Black Star Line ; Outer Space Blues / Henry Dumas --

I Am a Black Woman / Mari Evans --

I Would Be for You Rain / Sarah Webster Fabio --

High on the Hog / Julia Fields --

Black Power ; Nikki-Rosa ; For Saundra ; Ego Tripping ; A Poem for Carol ; Legacies / Nikki Giovanni --

American History ; Dear John, Dear Coltrane ; Nightmare Begins Responsibility ; Reuben, Reuben ; Tongue-Tied in Black and White ; Last Affair: Bessie's Blues Song ; The Love Letters of Helen Pitts Douglass / Michael S. Harper --

Do Nothing till You Hear from Me ; A Coltrane Memorial / David Henderson --

Medicine Man / Calvin Hernton --

What Would I Do White? ; These Poems ; I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies ; Poem about My Rights ; Poem for Haruko / June Jordan --

Blues for Some Literary Friends & Myself ; For Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers / Keorapetse Kgositsile --

A Poem for Myself ; The Idea of Ancestry ; The Bones of My Father ; Haiku ; For Freckle-Faced Gerald ; The Violent Space ; Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane ; For Eric Dolphy ; Feeling Fucked Up / Etheridge Knight --

On Being Head of the English Department / PInkie Gordon Lane --

Coal ; Revolution Is One Form of Social Change ; A Litany for Survival ; Power ; Lunar Eclipse ; Inheritance

His /

Audre Lorde --

But He Was Cool ; Don't Cry, Scream / Haki Madhubuti (Don L. Lee) --

Swallow the Lake ; Hair / Clarence Major --

Malcolm X

An Autobiography ;

Don't Say Goodbye to the Porkpie Hat / Larry Neal --

26 Ways of Looking at a Black Man / Raymond R. Patterson --

Howlin Wolf ; Big Maybelle / Sterling D. Plumpp ; From Where the Blues? ; "WE NEED" ; " ; Metagnomy / N. H. Pritchard --

Beware: Do Not Read This Poem ; Paul Laurence Dunbar in the Tenderloin ; The Reactionary Poet / Ishmael Reed --

sonnet ; poll ; the poor houses ; othello jones dresses for dinner ; American Jazz Quartet / Ed Roberson --

how i got ovah / Carolyn Rodgers --

for our lady ; A Poem for My Father ; A poem for my brother ; from Philadelphia: Spring, 1985 ; haiku (for Osage ave and Doorknop) ; haiku (for mungu and morani and the children of soweto) ; two haiku (for Clarence H. Watson and The Count) ; tanka (for papa Joe Jones who used to toss me up to the sky) ; haiku (for domestic workers in the african diaspora) ; haiku ("man. you write me so") ; tanka ("like dark old men the") ; haiku ("like ermine when i") ; haiku ("i want to make you") ; blues ; Song No. 2 / Sonia Sanchez --

Whitey on the Moon ; The Revolution Will Not Be Televised ; Home Is Where the Hatred Is / Gil Scott-Heron --

After Vallejo / A. B. Spellman --

Inauguration ; Song / Lorenzo Thomas --

One for Charlie Mingus ; Poem for My Father ; After Hearing a Radio Announcement: A Comment on Some Conditions / Quincy Troupe --

A Far Cry from Africa ; Codicil ; Blues ; from The Schooner Flight ; Sea Canes ; Volcano ; Easter ; from Omeros: Chapter VIII / Derek Walcott --

Women / Alice Walker --

blues for franks wooten ; from Maumau American Cantos: Canto 4 / Tom Weatherly --

How Stars Start ; Dance of the Infidels ; Boogie with O.O. Gabugah ; The Old O.O. Blues ; A Poem for Players / Al Young.

SIX: BLUE LIGHT SUTRAS 1976-1989. Twenty-Year Marriage ; I Can't Get Started ; Two Brothers ; The Good Shepherd: Atlanta, 1981 / AI --

from Haiti / Will Alexander --

Titta / George Barlow --

Soul Make a Path Through Shouting ; Sally Hemings to Thomas Jefferson / Cyrus Cassells --

from Portrait of a Nude Woman as Cleopatra / Barbara Chase-Riboud --

What It Means to Be Dark ; Mastectomy ; from American Sonnets / Wanda Coleman --

Harriet in the Promised Land / Sam Cornish --

Blackbottom ; The Weakness ; On the Turning Up of Unidentified Black Female Corpses ; Black Boys Play the Classics / Toi Derricotte --

Leaving Eden ; from The Arcanum Poems ; Father / Ralph Dickey --

Tour Guide: La Maison des Esclaves ; Turning Forty in the 90's ; Wednesday Mourning ; Heartbeats / Melvin Dixon --

The House Slave ; David Walker (1785-1830) ; Adolescence

II ;

Banneker ; from Thomas and Beulah ; Canary ; The Return of Lieutenant James Reese Europe ; Hattie McDaniel Arrives at the Cocoanut Grove ; from Sonata Mulattica / Rita Dove --

The Dance ; The Supremes ; from Brutal Imagination / Cornelius Eady --

Brown Girl Levitation, 1962-1989 ; Concerto no. 7: Condoleezza [working out] at the Watergate / Nikky Finney --

Some Pieces ; Hand Me Down Blues ; Dark Mirror / Calvin Forbes --

This Bridge Across ; Time with Stevie Wonder in It ; Chris Gilbert: An Improvisation / Christopher Gilbert --

Vernacular Examples ; Palaver ; Sotto Voce / C. S. Giscombe --

For My Mother (May I Inherit Half Her Strength) ; For Claude McKay / Lorna Goodison --

Goldsboro Narrative #4: My father's Viet Nam tour near over ; Goldsboro Narrative #28 ; Goldsboro Narrative #33 ; Goldsboro Narrative #7 ; Annual Visit of the Quiet, Unmarried Son / Forrest Hamer --

Heavy Corners ; Civil Servant ; For My Own Protection / Essex Hemphill --

"C"ing in Colors: Blue / Safiya Henderson-Holmes --

Surplus Future Imperfect ; Woman, with wings ; Should you find me / Erica Hunt --

Deep Song / Gayl Jones --

i done got so thirsty that my mouth waters at the thought of rain / Patricia Spears Jones --

Fragments from the Diary of Amelie Patiné, Quadroon, Mistress of Monsieur Jacques R _____ / Sybil Kein --

from The Women of Plums / Dolores Kendrick --

Annabelle ; More Girl Than Boy ; Letter to Bob Kaufman ; Blue Light Lounge Sutra for the Performance Poets at Harold Park Hotel ; February in Sydney ; from Dien Cai Dau ; Venus's-flytraps ; My Father's Love Letters ; Anodyne ; Ode to the Maggot / Yusef Komunyakaa --

Falso Brilhante ; Song of the Andoumboulou: 31 / Nathaniel Mackey --

Gra'ma ; Try to Understand Papa ; Throwing Stones at the All White Pool ; Fade to Black / Colleen J. McElroy --

Life in a Sterile Environment: A Case Study ; The Day before Kindergarten: Taluca, Alabama, 1959 ; A Reconsideration of the Blackbird ; An Anointing ; Poem for My Mothers and Other Makers of Asafetida ; The Lynching / Thylias Moss --

from Muse & Drudge ; from Sleeping with the Dictionary / Harryette Mullen --

A Strange Beautiful Woman ; Sleepless Nights ; Lonely Eagles ; Star-Fix / Marilyn Nelson --

How I Became the Blues / Brenda Marie Osbey --

The Broken English Dream / Pedro Pietri --

The Black Back-Ups / Kate Rushin --

All the Way Home ; from Dreamer / Primus St. John --

Trying for Fire / Tim Seibles --

from for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf / Ntozake Shange --

Building Nicole's Mama ; Don't Drink the Water / Patricia Smith --

from Free! / Sekou Sundiata --

Inside the Blues Whale ; Scrapple ; Washing the car with My Father ; John Henry Sleeping in High Grass / Afaa Michael Weaver --

from Letters to a New England Negro / Sherley Anne Williams.

SEVEN: PRAISE SONGS FOR THE DAY 1990-2008. Blue ; The New Religion / Chris Abani --

The Venus Hottentot ; Nineteen ; Ars Poetica #28: African Leave-Taking Disorder ; Ars Poetica #100: I Believe ; Praise Song for the Day / Elizabeth Alexander --

loose strife ; Doug Flutie's 1984 Orange Bowl Hail Mary as Water into Fire / Quan Barry --

Verbal Mugging / Paul Beatty --

Prayer of the Backhanded ; Bullet Points ; 'N'em ; Another Elegy ; The Tradition / Jericho Brown --

A Balance of Blues & Angels / Darrell Burton --

nap-i-ness / Kyle Dargan --

Natural ; Black Funk / Kwame Dawes --

Wednesday Poem / Joel Dias-Porter --

Frequently Asked Questions #10 / Camille Dungy --

View of the Library of Congress from Paul Laurence Dunbar High School / Thomas Sayers Ellis --

Sugar and Brine: Ella's Understanding ; Salt / Vievee Francis --

burial ; A Small Needful Fact / Ross Gay --

Santa Ana of Grocery Carts ; Teeth ; Ode to the Little "r" / Aracelis Girmay --

Seeing the Body / Rachel Eliza Griffiths --

Black Mary Integrates the School House / Duriel E. Harris --

Touch ; Satchmo Returns to New Orleans ; The Golden Shovel ; Carp Poem / Terrance Hayes --

How to Listen ; Euphoria ; Ferguson / Major Jackson --

The Gospel of Barbecue / Honorée Fannone Jeffers --

Charity on Blind Tom ; General Bethune on Blind Tom ; Blind Boone's Vision ; Minnehaha / Tyehimba Jess --

Jesse Owens, 1963 ; Rope / A. Van Jordan --

Thirty Lines About the Fro ; My Father's Kites / Allison Joseph --

Drop it Like It's Hottento Venus / Douglas Kearney --

Hostage / Daniell Legros Georges --

Plantation ; from Voyage of the Sable Venus ; "Lucy Terry Prince Prepares for Her Marriage" / Robin Coste Lewis --

Ode to the Diasporican / Mariposa --

from Good Stock Strange Blood / Dawn Lundy Martin --

from The Big Smoke ; Robot Music / Adrian Matejka --

What the Oracle Said / Shara mcCallum --

The Keepin' It Real Awards / Tony Medina --

Blackout 1977 / Tracie Morris --

gayl jones ; cecil taylor ; johnny cash ; I ran from it but was still in it / Fred Moten --

On Confessionalism / John Murillo --

Written by Himself ; Raisin / Gregory Pardlo --

Bembe-Faced ; Arroz con Son y Clave / Willie Perdomo --

Blue ; Cotillion ; A Great Noise ; Speak Low / Carl Phillips --

I want to not have to write another word about who cops keep killing / Khadijah Queen --

from Citizen: An American Lyric / Claudia Rankine --

The Difficult Music ; The Lucky One ; Hesitation Theory ; My Mother Was No White Dove / Reginald Shepherd --

from The Lost Letters of Frederick Douglass ; statistical haiku (or, how do they discount us? let me count the ways) ; ode to my blackness / Evie Shockley --

Don't You Wonder, Sometimes? ; The Universe Is a House Party ; Declaration / Tracy K. Smith --

Offering ; Snow / Sharan Strange --

Ode to Gentrification / Samantha Thornhill --

Flounder ; Drapery Factory, Gulfport, Mississippi, 1956 ; Graveyard Blues ; Pilgrimage ; Miscegenation ; Incident / Natasha Trethewey --

Strip ; RR Lyrae: Matter / Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon --

Wind Talker ; Work Ethic / Frank X. Walker --

Dissidence ; Gwendolyn Brooks / Anthony Walton --

"The reeds shook. A wide flat ass cradled in leather pants. This" / Simone White --

Amethyst Rocks / Saul Williams --

Money Road / Kevin Young.

EIGHT: AFTER THE HURRICANE 2009-2020. How Can Black People Write about Flowers at a Time Like This / Hanif Abdurraqib --

La Negra Takes Medusa to the Hair Salon / Elizabeth Acevedo --

Cento Between the Ending and the End / Cameron Awkward-Rich --

America Will Be / Joshua Bennett --

A Postmodern Two-Step / Reginald Dwayne Betts --

upon viewing the death of basquiat / Mahogany L. Browne --

Massa's House / Dominique Christina --

Nashville / Tiana Clark --

Dear _____, / DeLana R. A. Dameron --

My First Black Nature Poem(TM) / LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs --

I saw Emmett Till this week at the grocery store / Eve L. Ewing --

Aunt Flo and Uncle Phineas / Sean Hill --

(Afterward) One Corner More / Notes on a Letter to the Singer Abbey Lincoln from Her Lover, Abraham Lincoln / Harmony Holiday --

After the Hurricane / Ishion Hutchinson --

Kansas / Gary Jackson --

Kudzu / Saeed Jones --

The moon rose over the bay. I had a lot of feelings / Donika Kelly --

One Country / Rickey Laurentiis --

Still When I Picture It the Face of God Is a White Man's Face / Shane McCrae --

Closer / Anis Mojgani --

#sayhername / Aja Monet --

The President's Wife / Morgan Parker --

Violins / Rowan Ricardo Phillips --

History / Camille Rankine --

Black Can Sleep / Justin Phillip Reed --

Children Listen / Roger Reeves --

Why Is We Americans / Alison C. Rollins --

Object Permanence / Nicole Sealey --

Gnawa Boy, Marrakesh, 1968 / Charif Shanahan --

Fisherman's Daughter / Safiya Sinclair --

dinosaurs in the hood / Danez Smith --

Your National Anthem / Clint Smith --

Prayer / Phillip B. Williams --

Ode to Herb Kent / Jamila Woods.