It is said that poets are the visionaries of a society that show what is in people’s hearts, as well as the future. With their art, their words, and their meaning, they capture human experience. They create scenes that defy the imagination in terms of creativity, but nevertheless, are remarkably normal. They are normal because they are capturing true human experience. However, it is so uniquely captured, it resonates with meaning in people’s hearts and minds. Poets reflect the mind of society quite often as a microcosm of the time period they are writing in. In the poetry anthology The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry, edited by poet visionary Rita Dove, over one hundred of the most significant poets of the twentieth century have been compiled. Each poet’s work captures human experience in a way that carries a small piece of the overall historical-based discussion in a given poem. In particular, the works of Derek Walcott, Etheridge Knight, Amiri Baraka aka LeRoi Jones, Audrey Lorde, Lucille Clifton, and Michael S. Harper are a microcosm of the face of the multi-faceted Black diaspora that has rebuilt its identity, post colonialism and segregation, and continues to remember the past in order to preserve a greater future.
Derek Walcott is a well-known poet from St. Lucia in the West Indies. He won the 1992 Nobel Prize for Literature and he often travels back and forth between the West Indies and the United States. As such, Walcott carries a discussion of the migration narrative within him that is significant. He discusses the Atlantic slave trade and captures the plight of the intellectual attempting to grasp the history in his poem “A Far Cry From Africa”, “statistics justify and scholars seize/the salient of colonial policy./What is that to the white child hacked in bed? To savages, expendable as Jews?” (304). Translated, this line says, “as European imperialism is studied from a historical or analytical perspective, it downplays the reality of colonization and the unimaginable cruelty that was experienced by those living during those times and how it affects the people today”. A reader can clearly see that this is Walcott’s sincere belief and perspective that he writes his poems from. This is further validated by his poems “After the Storm”, “Light of the World”, and Book VII of “Omeros”, where he captures the individual and personal life experiences of people living in the West Indies as people in love, as people with jobs, and not as slaves or descendants of slaves, and according to the article “Sea Changes: Post-Colonialism in Synge And Walcott” by Sandra Sprayberry, Walcott uses the sea as an significant metaphor in his work, "the sea is a signifier of colonial religious and economic oppression for Walcott” (Sprayberry 119). This can especially be seen in “After the Storm”. Walcott uses his poetry to reveal that Afro-Caribbeans are individuals and not merely statistics or African subjects to be dissected. Derek Walcott represents the voice of the Afro-Caribbean subject that calls out to society to not see Afro-Caribbeans as another victim of colonization, but as individuals with a culture and souls, something colonization attempted to suppress and that White supremacy attempts to overshadow as a way to cover up the past. With the recent coverage of Haiti in various news outlets as solely "the poorest country in the Western hemisphere", this discussion becomes especially relevant.
Etheridge Knight represents the life of the imprisoned African American in his poem “The Idea of Ancestry”. In it, he discusses the reality of the large African American clan and its various archetypes. According to “The Space Between Everything” by Terrance Hayes in the PARIS REVIEW, Knight came from two different backgrounds, “He was born in 1931 in Corinth, Mississippi, a town founded only about around eighty years before his birth. Thus the “ancestors” of his most anthologized poem, “The Idea of Ancestry,” only go back not to Africa but to his grandparents. The Cozarts on his mother’s side of the family counted themselves among the town’s founders; they were landowners, cotton farmers, entrepreneurs, musicians, and storytellers. His father, on the other hand, was a laborer from Ramer, Tennessee, a smaller-than-small town twenty minutes from Corinth”. Having done time in prison from 1960-1968 for robbery (314), Knight writes a poem about the pictures of his family he has taped to his jail cell. He illustrates with his words how the eldest person in his family, the last living grandmother (or grandparent) keeps track of everyone in a Bible with everyone’s birth and death date written down, similar to the story New York 1 anchor Cheryl Wills shared about her grandparents. He talks about how beautiful the women in his family are, and how cute his young niece is. Knight creates a short monologue recounting several memories that are significant to him, “I walked barefooted in my grandmother’s backyard/I smelled the old land and the woods/I sipped corn-whiskey from fruit jars with the men/I flirted with the women/I had a ball till the caps ran out and my habit came down/” (315). Knight reveals that he fell into drugs, which what most likely led to the robbery that imprisoned him. Rather than be seen as a heartless criminal or primitive drug addict, as African Americans who go to jail are often characterized as, Knight’s poem his reveals his inner self in that he is actually a person with a heart and a family who loves him. Knight shows the humanity behind the African American prisoner and re-humanizes that life experience. Knight later went on to become a successful writer-in-residence at several universities.
Poet Amiri Baraka was an African American man who had an extremely successful life as an Ivy-league educated man and veteran of the U.S. Air Force. Baraka’s poems all carry the intensity of a soldier as well as the intellectualism of a college Professor. According to the NPR Remembrance article by Neda Ulaby, “Amiri Baraka's Legacy Both Controversial And Achingly Beautiful”, Baraka “co-founded the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. His literary legacy is as complicated as the times he lived through, from his childhood — where he recalled not being allowed to enter a segregated library — to the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center” (Ulaby). His poems carry a uniqueness that is clearly Baraka’s own language of life. His poem, “Black Art” is a clear example of his unique spin on language, “Knockoff politicians airplane poems, rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr….tuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuh……..rrrrrrrrrrrrr…Setting fire and death to whities ass. Look at the Liberal Spokesman for the jews clutch his throat & puke himself into eternity” (319). Amiri Baraka was a Black revolutionary. Being that he was both in the military and in the highest levels of education, as well as growing up during segregation, Baraka probably saw many things that caused him to be anti-status quo. He saw Black oppression and fear, which angered him. He also saw what was needed for Black freedom, “We want a black poem. And a Black World. Let the world be Black Poem And Let All Black People Speak This Poem Silently or LOUD” (319). Baraka represents the African American subject that refuses to accept being invisible and chooses to be who THEY want to be, regardless how of threatened oppressive forces are by his thirst for freedom from them.
*Part Two to be published next week!
