Black Voices Matter
Quincey Troupe spoke with Bill Moyers at a Festival of Poets in 1995.
Nobody can say it like Quincey!
“People want to hear The Voice. They want to hear the poet sing. They want to hear something that connects to their life. You’ve got to write where you come from. Democracy needs poets in all their diversity because our hope for survival is in recognizing the reality of one another’s lives. Poetry is the most honest language we hear today.”
Now for honest words, I will let Audra, James, Countee,, Gwendolyn, Etheridge, Frances, Bell, Alice, Rita, lucille, Nikki, Paul, Robert, Langston, and DJ speak their truth.
1.
hear them cry
the long dead
the long gone
speak to us
from beyond the grave
guide us
that we may learn
all the ways
to hold tender this land
hard clay dirt
rock upon rock
charred earth
in time
strong green growth
will rise here
trees back to life
native flowers
pushing the fragrance of hope
the promise of resurrection.
~ Bell Hooks
Imagination
Imagination
creates the situation,
and, then, the situation
creates imagination.
It may, of course,
be the other way around:
Columbus was discovered
by what he found.
~ James Baldwin
Don’t Think
The most important thing
I know
about teaching
is that the teacher is also learning.
Don’t think
you have to know it all.
~ Nikki Giovani
you wish to speak of
black and white
no
you wish to hear of
black and white
have we not talked of human
every human comes
to every color
some remember some do not
~ lucille clifton
MIND SHINE
for Michelle
Woman
of color
lighting up
the
dark.
~ Alice Walker
Sometimes
Sometimes
who knows how?
the body & the soul
come back
together
again
the hand
holding the pen
writes
not advertising
but heart.
~ Alice Walker
The dedication page of The Vintage Book of African American Poetry
is dedicated to both editor’s parents with these words following their names and dates: “These parents believed the burden of past, present, and future is best handled with the grip of literacy.”
I said to Joe Frazier,
. . . . . . Always
keep one good Cadillac.
And watch how you dress
with that cowboy hat,
pink suits, white shoes –
that’s how pimps dress,
or kids, and you a champ,
or wish you were, ‘cause
I can whip you in the ring
or whip you in the street.
~ Elizabeth Alexander
Dunbar
Ah, how poets sing and die!
Make one song and Heaven takes it;
Have one heart and Beauty breaks it;
Chatterton, Shelley, Keats and I –
Ah, how poets sing and die!
~ Anne Spencer
Rain
Outside the cold, cold night; the dripping rain . . .
The water gurgles loosely in the eaves,
The savage lasses stripe the rattling pane
And beat a tattoo on November leaves.
The lamp wick gutters, and the last log steams
Upon the ashe-filled hearth. Chill grows the room.
The ancient clock ticks creakily and seems
A fitting portent of the gathering gloom.
This is a night we planned. This place is where
One day, we would be happy; where the light
Should tint your shoulders and your wild flung hair –
Whence we would – oh, we planned a merry morrow –
Recklessly part ways with the old hag, Sorrow . . .
Outside the dripping rain; the cold, cold night.
Haiku
Making jazz swing in
seventeen syllables AIN’T
No square poet’s job. Etheridge Knight
from Hymn to Lanie Poo: Each Morning
4
Each morning
I go down
to Gansevoort St.
and stand on the docks.
I stare out
at the horizon
until it gets up
and comes to embrace
me. I
make believe
it is my father.
This is known as genealogy.
~ Amiri Baraka
Aunt Chloe’s Politics
Of course, I don’t know very much
About these politics,
But I think that some who run ‘em
Do mighty ugly tricks.
I’ve seen ‘em honey-fugle round,
And talk so awful sweet,
That you’d think them full of kindess,
As an egg is full of meat.
Now I don’t believe in looking
Honest people in the face,
And saying when you’re doing wrong,
That “I haven’t sold my race.”
When we want to school our children,
If the money isn’t there,
Whether black or white have took it,
The loss we all must share.
And this buying up each other
Is something worse than mean,
Tough I thinks a heap of voting,
I go for voting clean.
~ Frances E. W. Harper
Haiku
Jazz is
the way brown sugar
would sound
if it was sprinkled
in your ear.
~ DJ Renegade
Dream Boogie: Variation
Tinkling treble,
Rolling bass,
High noon teeth’In a midnight face,
Great long fingers
On great big hands,
Screaming pedals
Where his twelve-shoe lands,
Looks like his eyes
Are teasing pain,
A few minutes late
For the Freedom Train.
~ Langston Hughes
AND last, a poem by Robert Hayden.
Frederick Douglass
When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful
and terrible thing, needful to man as air,
usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,
when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,
reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more
than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:
this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro
beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world
where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,
this man, superb in love and logic, this man
shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,
not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,
but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives
fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.
Writer, read these poet’s works. Stand in awe. Tell about it. Rejoice!
Resources
The Language of Life: A Festival of Poets, edited by Bill Moyers, Doubleday, 1995.
Nikki Giovanni, Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea, Harper Perennial, 2002
lucille clifton, Mercy, BOA Ed. Ltd. 2004
The Vintage Book of African American Poetry, ed. by Michael Harper and Anthony Walton, Random House Inc, NY 2000
Norton Anthology of African American Literature, ed. by Henry Louis Gates and Nellie Y. McKay, WW Norton & Co., 1997
Jimmy’s Blues and Other Poems, James Baldwin, Beacon Press, MA 2011
Hard Times Require Furious Dancing, Alice Walker, New World Library, CA 2010