African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song - REVIEW

"For more than 250 years," writes poet and scholar Kevin Young in his introduction to this landmark new anthology, "African Americans have written and recited and published poetry about beauty and injustice, music and muses, Africa and America, freedoms and foodways, Harlem and history, funk and opera, boredom and longing, jazz and joy." Across a turbulent history, from such vital centers as Harlem, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and the Bay Area, Black poets created a rich and multifaceted tradition that has been both a reckoning with American realities and an imaginative response to them. Cap­turing the power and beauty of this diverse tradition in a single indispensable volume, African American Poetry reveals as never before its centrality and its challenge to American poetry and culture.

One of the great American art forms, African American poetry encompasses many kinds of verse: formal, experimental, vernacular, lyric, and protest. The anthology opens with moving testaments to the power of poetry as a means of self-assertion, as enslaved people like Phillis Wheatley and George Moses Horton and activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper voice their passionate resistance to slavery. Young's fresh, revelatory presentation of the Harlem Renaissance reexamines the achievements of Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen alongside works by lesser-known poets such as Gwendolyn B. Bennett and Mae V. Cowdery. The later flowering of the still influential Black Arts Movement is represented here with breadth and originality, including many long out-of-print or hard-to-find poems.

Here are all the significant movements and currents: the nineteenth-century Francophone poets known as Les Cenelles, the Chicago Renaissance that flourished around Gwendolyn Brooks, the early 1960s Umbra group, and the more recent work of writers affiliated with Cave Canem and the Dark Noise Collective. Here too are poems of singular, hard-to-classify figures: the enslaved potter David Drake, the allusive modernist Melvin B. Tolson, the Cleveland-based experimentalist Russell Atkins. This Library of America volume also fea­tures biographies of each poet and notes that illuminate cultural references and allusions to historical events.

Only now, in the 21st century, can we fully grasp the breadth and range of African American poetry: a magnificent chorus of voices, some familiar, others recently rescued from neglect. With AFRICAN AMERICAN POETRY: 250 Years of Struggle & Song (Library of America; October 20, 2020; 978-1­59853-666-9; $45), a monumental new anthology expertly curated by poet and scholar Kevin Young, this precious living heritage is revealed for the first time in all its power, beauty. and multiplicity. Here are 675 poems in all, including many never before anthologized, along with newly researched biographies of every poet.

Discover, in these pages, how an enslaved person like Phillis Wheatley confronted her legal status in verse and how an activist like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper voiced her own passionate resistance to slavery. Read nuanced. provocative poetic meditations on identity and self-assertion stretching from Paul Laurence Dunbar to Amiri Baraka to Lucille Clifton and beyond. Experience the transformation of poetic modernism in the works of Langston Hughes. Fenton Johnson, and Jean Toomer. Understand the threads of poetic history-in movements such as the Harlem and Chicago Renaissances, Black Arts, Cave Canem, Dark Noise Collective - and the complex bonds of solidarity and dialogue among poets across time and place. See how these poets have celebrated their African heritage and have connected with other communities in the African Diaspora. Enjoy the varied but distinctly black music of a tradition that draws deeply from jazz, hip-hop, and the rhythms and cadences of the pulpit the barbershop. and the street.

Taking the measure of the tradition in a single authoritative volume, AFRICAN AMERICAN POETRY: 250 Years of Struggle & Song sets a new standard for a deep, authentic engagement with Black poetry and its essential expression of American genius.

This anthology is the centerpiece of Lift Every Voice: Why African American Poetry Matters, a yearlong national public humanities initiative that engages participants in a multifaceted exploration of African American poetry; with signature events in New York, Atlanta, Chicago, Kansas City, and Los Angeles, regional programming in public libraries nationwide, as well as a companion website featuring video readings, commentary, programming support, and much more. Lift Every Voice is presented in partnership with The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture with generous support from The National Endowment for the Humanities, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Emerson Collective.

About the editor: Kevin Young is the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, recently named a National Historic Landmark, and poetry editor of The New Yorker. He is the author of thirteen books of poetry and prose, most recently Brown (Knopf, 2018) as featured on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah; and Bunk (Graywolf, 2017), which won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Nonfiction, was longlisted for the National Book Award. and named a New York Times Notable Book. He is the editor of nine other volumes, including the Library of America anthology African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song (2020). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was named a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2020. He will be the director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture starting in January 2021.

 

AFRICAN AMERICAN POETRY: 250 Years of Struggle & Song

edited by Kevin Young

Library of America; October 20, 2020

978-1-59853-666-9

U.S. $45.00 / Can. $60.00

www.africanamericanpoetry.org

Now in its fourth decade, Library of America is a nonprofit organization that champions the nation's cultural heritage by publishing America's greatest writing in authoritative new editions and providing resources for readers to explore this rich, living legacy.