With
a tip-o’-the-hat to Hannah Eko who featured these talented Black
poets and others last year in her Colorlines blog post here
are some creative forces you should know. Descriptive text by Eko.
Camonghne
Felix’s work a musical
blend of the poetic and the political. A Cave Canem fellow
and National Book Award finalist, she is also a former political
strategist for the Ms. Foundation, speechwriter for New York
Governor Andrew Cuomo, and was a strategic communications director
for the Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign. Her poetry wrestles
with the complexities of Black womanhood, sexual assault,
and the legacies of heartbreak.
Badu
Interviews Lamar
Badu: This cyclone of good fortune.
You handling?
Kendrick:
Happy
blessing myself.
graduated,
struggle
come
big far
a blur .
Problem is my bubble. Tell me
“You’re crazy by
yourself,”
“Kendrick”
I’m
in my
own world.
let
everything consume me.
The other
end,
has a
conception
of who
what
comes from me, from
within
no matter
passing or playing ball.
Was a hole building
up for this
pen, I wanted to be
the best
so I’m
taking it.
—Camonghne Felix
Yona Harvey is a
poet unafraid to weave worlds with experiment and nuance.
She is the author of Hemming
the Water and one of the first Black women to write for Marvel,
as one of the in World of Wakanda. Winner of the Kate Tufts
Discovery Award, Harvey has also led workshops on mental health
through Creative Nonfiction magazine. Her writing has been
praised for its verve and playful investigation of motherhood,
Afrofuturism, and romantic love.
Sonnet for a Tall Flower
Blooming at Dinnertime
Southern Flower, I want to quote the bard,
to serenade you, to raise a glass to you.
Long & tall you are always parched
& hungry. You wobble in strong winds,
you
puff your bright hair when it rains, you
toss off the lint of dandelions, you
lean into the evening haunts
with your indifferent afro. You
were born in the old-world city, the
invisible
dark girl city, the city that couldn’t
hold
a candle, a straight pin, a slave-owner’s
sins
to you. You are the most beautiful
dark that hosts the most private sorrows
& feeds the hungriest ghosts.
—Yona Harvey
Tyehimba Jess was
winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry Her is a former
artist-in-residence for Cave Canem and Chicago’s Poetry Ambassador
to Accra, Ghana. He was also a contributor to The
New York Times’ historic 1619 Project. A native of
Detroit, his first book, leadbelly, was an adventurous
biography in poetic form, which covered the life of the legendary blues
musician. Known as a “rare poet who bridges slam and academic poetry,” his
writing career has spanned over two decades.
martha
promise receives leadbelly, 1935
when your man comes home from prison,
when he comes back like the wound
and you are the stitch,
when he comes back with pennies in his
pocket
and prayer fresh on his lips,
you got to wash him down first.
you got to have the wildweed and treebark
boiled
and calmed, waiting for his skin like a
shining baptism
back into what he was before gun barrels
and bars
chewed their claim in his hide and spit
him
stumbling backwards into screaming
sunlight.
you got to scrub loose the jailtime
fingersmears
from ashy skin, lather down the cuffmarks
from ankle and wrist, rinse solitary’s
stench loose
from his hair, scrape curse and confession
from the welted and the smooth,
the hard and the soft,
the furrowed and the lax.
you got to hold tight that shadrach’s face
between your palms, take crease and lid
and lip and brow and rinse slow with river
water,
and when he opens his eyes
you tell him calm and sure
how a woman birthed him
back whole again.
—Tyehimba Jess
Mahogany L. Browne is a
writer, organizer, and poet who served as MC for the Friday
Night Slam at the Nuyorican Poet’s Café for over thirteen years. Her work, which centers the lived
experience of Black women and girls, has been nominated for a
NAACP Image Award. She is the
author of two young adult novels and currently serves as the Executive
Director of Bowery Poetry Club.
Inevitable
when I dropped my 12-year-old off at her
first
homecoming dance, I tried not to look
her newly-developed breasts, all surprise
and alert
in their uncertainty. I tried not to
imagine her
mashed between a young man's curiousness
and the gym’s sweaty wall. I tried not
picture
her grinding off beat/on time to the
rhythm
of a dark manchild; the one who whispered
“you are the most beautiful girl in
brooklyn”
his swag so sincere, she’d easily mistaken
him for a god.
—Mahogany L. Browne
No comments:
Post a Comment