The sonnet has been in wide use among African American poets since the late nineteenth century. This chapter traces the African American sonnet from its emergence through the Harlem Renaissance in order to understand the popularity of a form often associated with white European literature. It shows that the sonnet initially was a means for Black writers to get published in the genteel quality magazines which shaped literary and political debates around the turn of the twentieth century. At the same time, the sonnet served as a vehicle for community building and as a forum in which foundational questions of Black poetics could be negotiated. Discussing writers from Paul Laurence Dunbar to Langston Hughes, the chapter identifies four impulses that guided African American approaches to the sonnet form: the contests over the commemoration of the Civil War; the subversive appropriation of genteel poetic conventions; the self-confident political protest of the Harlem Renaissance; and the quest for a vernacular modernist idiom.

The mid 1960s and early 1970s Black Arts Movement (BAM) was an artistic and cultural renaissance rooted in the desire to mobilize an aesthetic tied to black self-determination. Like the multidirectional flow of this regional, national, and transnational movement (east, west, north, and south), the lines of the poetry were moving in many unexpected directions. BAM poets were committed to representing blackness, but the impulse to represent blackness often became inseparable from the impulse to experiment with new ways of representing blackness. The movement set in motion a deeper understanding of the inseparability of forms of black representation and forms of black experimental space. With a particular focus on the BAM in the South and black women poets who developed a southern Black Power feminist orientation, this chapter examines the subtleties and nuances of the poetics of space that shaped the BAM.

Now twenty-five years into the twenty-first century, the formidable legacies of Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000) come into clear view. She lent her lyrical voice to celebrating the dignity, complexity, and heroism of ordinary people. Her portraits of the residents of Chicago’s South Side, where she lived most of her life, achieve vitality because of her skillful fusion of Black cultural tradition with modernist aesthetics. She saw her poetry chronicling the history of a transforming society in the service of truth and universal humanism. Brooks wanted her poetry “to vivify the universal fact,” and early in her writing career she found that humanism all around her as she looked from the window of her small second-floor apartment at 623 East 63rd Street. This chapter discusses Brooks as the singular inspiration for the inaugural Furious Flower Conference in 1994, her passion for inspiring young people to explore their gifts of writing and reading, her own distinguished career as an award-winning American poet, and her deep devotion to the craft of writing and the inventiveness of language.

Linking worldview and geographical spaces, this chapter links place, aesthetic development, and ideological changes in the work of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka. From the mix of fantasy, sci-fi, bebop, and rhythm & blues of his home town, Newark, through his years in the (largely) white, avant-garde culture of Greenwich Village and his transitional plunge into Harlem’s Cultural Nationalist milieu, to his long final activism as Newark’s pre-eminent Marxist-Leninist poet, Baraka became one of the most controversial figures of the twentieth century. Throughout these changes, Baraka’s poetry, with its evolving combination of Black vernacular speech, avant-garde technique, and political acuity, profoundly influenced Black American poetry and, in the process, the nature of contemporary American poetry itself.

This chapter establishes the spirituals as the bedrock of African American poetry to characterize the tradition as inherently innovative from its origins to the present. It challenges the standard claim that African American poetry begins with texts written by enslaved persons reflecting familiarity with canonical British poetry. In this approach, criticism has generally considered African American poetry in dialogue with the mainstream canon, whether emulating or criticizing its values. Privileging written texts in conventional forms has resulted in devaluing poetry reflecting characteristics such as orality, performance, anonymity, and communal collaboration. It also results in wide acceptance of an African American poetry canon that historically has overlooked the innovative nature of this genre from its origins and an ensuing tradition of avant-garde poetry. From this biased perspective, the spirituals have been overlooked as the genesis of African American poetry, even though that is their rightful place. Viewing the spirituals as the true foundation of this tradition implies shifting some assumptions not just about these poems, but about the place and meaning of originality.

This chapter considers three significant New Negro Renaissance poets: Georgia Douglas Johnson, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Anne Spencer, and analyzes how they discussed themes of racism and gender inequality in their poetry. Although the critics of their day dismissed their poetry as raceless and apolitical, this chapter demonstrates how New Negro women writers utilized the domestic sphere of writing and wrote poetry that allowed them to articulate and explore their unspeakable desires. Black women poets were able to express their wholeness and sexual self-determination. Even though their writings may not have garnered critical acclaim and success, Black women writers were present and actively advancing Black feminist ideas. Extending the analysis of such scholars as Maureen Honey, Cheryl Wall, and Gloria T. Hull, this chapter illustrates that Black women writers fashioned a poetics that enabled them to discuss such subjects as sexuality and Black women’s right to autonomy and self-fashioned happiness. Their writings represent a profound yearning for freedom and sexual fulfillment, challenging the prevailing ideology that women’s primary realm of power was in the home.

This chapter characterizes The Sisterhood, a group of Black women writers who met in New York at least once a month for two years and who advocated for Black women at trade publishers such as Random House, at magazines such as Ms. and Essence, and eventually in academic departments as they moved their intellectual labor from political organizing in the 1960s and early 1970s to literary organizing in the late 1970s and then, after the 1980s, into colleges and universities. It traces how The Sisterhood’s collaborative labor shaped the reach, form, and content of African American poetry through a Black feminist poetics rooted in a both/and way of thinking and writing that insisted on the interdependence of political, literary, and academic spheres. They believed in literature as a tool for Black liberation. In works by poets such as Harryette Mullen, Erica Hunt, Mahogany Browne, Tara Betts, and Evie Shockley, each of these aspects of The Sisterhood’s poetic legacy remains visible in Black feminist poetry today.

Harlem’s sensuous poetics refers to an aesthetic sensibility that turned toward the possibilities of feeling, sense, and perception – the realm of the sensuous – to imagine new experiences of Black bodies and pleasure. Its poets drew from the maelstrom of urban life (nightlife in particular) to conjure new ways of inhabiting the body, new desires, and new ways of moving individually and collectively. They provided a new way to understand the role of Harlem as a space of illicit sexuality and self-expression in poetry. This chapter surveys this tradition, situating Harlem’s sensuous poetics in the context of representational challenges to the politics of respectability that shaped Black middle-class cultural norms in the era. It looks first to recurrent poetic tropes (such as the “dancing girl” and the “laughing boy”) that contested such politics. It then turns to the enunciation of a sensuous poetics within normative middle-class institutions such as women’s civic clubs and literary salons. In doing so, it argues that this tradition is less a set of formal principles than a way of being in the world that begins from the body’s sense perception and its felt response.

Following the Black Arts Movement, emerging Black cosmopolitan poets such as Rita Dove and Yusef Komunyakaa published poetry that appeared to be quite different than poetry of the 1960s and 1970s. Both poets took pains in their writing to assert both racial affiliation and a world citizen identity. While early cosmopolitan theory struggled to accommodate race, more recent scholarship by Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo (Black cosmopolitanism) and Susan Koshy (minority cosmopolitanism) provides useful conceptual frames that explain why a contemporary Black poet might pursue a cosmopolitan poetic and show how it works in actual poems. Readings of selected poems across both poets’ œuvres demonstrate their deepening cosmopolitan sensibility over time, revealing how they position themselves and their work within a frame inclusive of both Black identity and a relatively privileged, global perspective. Having established the features of a Black cosmopolitan poetics in the work of two major poets of this generation, a question arises. Does the poetry of the current generation of Black poets, those following Komunyakaa and Dove, perhaps exhibit a post-cosmopolitan perspective?

This chapter starts from the proposition that both poetry and diaspora entail ways of configuring relationships between the general and the particular that may deviate from dominant philosophical tendencies. Without assuming a uniformly shared style or way of thinking, I argue for diaspora as the name of a common historical situation for people of African descent. Noting the concept’s emergence in the 1960s as an alternative to and continuation of older configurations of Pan-Africanism, the chapter then offers brief sketches of some key figures – Kamau Brathwaite, Dionne Brand, and M. NourbeSe Philip – and their relationships to language, gender, and politics.

For poets Ted Joans, Bob Kaufman, and Jayne Cortez, jazz indexes a series of paradoxes and contradictions beyond standard accounts of the music and, in turn, beyond standard accounts of jazz poetry. In Joans’s live collaboration with saxophonist Archie Shepp We Have Come Back, the multiple versions of Kaufman’s ‘War Memoir’, and Cortez’s ‘If the Drum Is a Woman’, jazz reveals contradictions of racial, gendered, and national belonging in the Black Arts Movement era. These poems do not simply imitate jazz rhythms, but conceive jazz as a social form, part of the raced, classed, and sexed negotiations of bohemian community. Jazz becomes a way of thinking about practices of listening, about the way that art and cultural practices encapsulate the values of overlapping communities, and about the way that such practices serve as contested terrain. Drawing both prosodic energy and symbolic strength from jazz, these are also poems about jazz, about the stakes of listening to, consuming, appropriating, and appreciating the music, and about its role in the complex politics of the eras of McCarthyism, decolonisation, and the renewed rise of Black art.

“Poetry can be a genre of history,” proclaimed Natasha Trethewey, underscoring the role of historical poetry as a repository of cultural memory commensurate with and even more reliable than traditional histories. This chapter traces this distinctive turn to history among African American poets that emerged in the twenty-first century and characterizes aspects of the cumulative impact this verse has had of revising the nation’s history. It exemplifies this impact by analyzing “A Postcard From Okemah” by Terrance Hayes, which addresses a 1911 lynching; Evie Shockley’s “dependences,” which questions the reputation of Thomas Jefferson by demonstrating the contradictions between his words and his actions; and how, in leadbelly, Tyehimba Jess frees Huddie Ledbetter from the shadow of folklorist John Lomax and prominently positions him in the annals of American music. He offers a portrait of a Huddie Ledbetter who had agency, who hired a lawyer and sued for proper compensation, and whose musical contributions stand alone. In these new public histories, Hayes, Shockley, and Jess offer hope for a more just future.

This chapter traces the history and legacy of Furious Flower, conceived as a conference on Black poetry and poetics in 1994 and continuing to this day as an academic and cultural center housed at James Madison University. While such institutionality may find itself, at times, at odds with the most radical parts of the African American poetic tradition, it is nevertheless a fundamental way to establish historically marginalized writing in the literary consciousness of a nation. This chapter examines the shape and the substance of Furious Flower’s dedication to archival recording while also looking at the organization’s attempt to chart a poetic landscape for African American poetry after the Black Arts Movement, in an era that has seen explosive growth in the production of poetic work but, precisely due to that growth, is increasingly hard to describe as a unified “tradition.” The chapter identifies how, through its dedication to audiovisual material, Furious Flower has turned scores of deeply ephemeral events into something that can be experienced across time and space, repeatedly, for the sake of research, teaching, community-building, and history-telling.

How might we read Paul Laurence Dunbar as a poet of place and landscape? Dunbar wrote his poetry in an era where local color, regionalism, and realism were dominant forces in American literature, and his poetry engages in complex ways with these generic traditions. At the same time, Dunbar’s poetry, particularly his writing in non-dialect verse, is deeply influenced by his lifelong study of and engagement with British Romantic and Victorian poetic traditions, and the modes of environmental representation through apostrophe, lyric meditation, and balladic narrative central to these traditions. I read Dunbar’s explorations of place and landscape in dialogue with these intersecting influences, in and through which Dunbar develops a sustained reflection on struggle, displacement, violence, and unfreedom as the fundamental conditions of Black experience in the post-Reconstruction era United States. Less oriented by local specificity or realist detail, evocations of landscape and place in Dunbar’s work engender abstract and self-reflexive meditations on terrains of anti-Black violence and pain as well as sites of retreat and resilience in the face of these conditions.