This chapter explores the role of poetics in theorizing blackness. That is, if the question of being is an abiding issue in black studies and if that question figures through discourses about black writing, how does poetics contribute to this study? Rather than engage blackness as a content in poems, the chapter considers poetry as an intervention in language. This attentiveness to language characterizes a kind of thinking that is manifest in poetics and that generates possibilities for engaging the philosophical relationship between expressiveness and blackness.

This chapter locates Claudia Rankine’s highly celebrated book Citizen in a lineage of African American artists participating in a similar mode of renovation, which is the production of distinctive kinds of poetry based on linking past artistry and heritage to forward-facing experimentation. It challenges how Citizen was treated as exceptional by the press and prize committees that celebrated it when in fact Rankine herself carefully put her poems and essays in conversation with a number of predecessors, including Richard Wright and Zora Neal Hurston, and with such contemporaries as Nikky Finney, Erica Hunt, and Harryette Mullen. It then connects Rankine to the younger writers Morgan Parker and Aurielle Marie, who, like Rankine and visual artist Glenn Ligon, adapted Hurston’s well-known essay "How It Feel to Be Colored Me" to new purposes. Lineage and innovation united with a heritage of renovation make Citizen outstanding and deserving of its accolades but not unique so much as an extension of innovative African American literary practice.

This chapter conceives of Black Lives Matter-era poetry of mourning as forms of elegiac activism through which contemporary Black poets, including Lauren Alleyne, Mahogany Browne, Sequoia Maner, darlene anita scott, Nate Marshall, and Jericho Brown, achieve interconnected aims of refusing the naturalization of police and vigilante murders while making legible the ecology of US racism and of opening up a space to affirm Black being – or what Kevin Quashie terms “Black aliveness” – so that they participate in the antiracist struggle without being defined solely by it. Examining the work of poets who have been part of artistic resistance via #Blackpoetsspeakout videos as well as that of those who are better known for their published collections, this chapter also shows the diverse range of available forms and modes Black poets avail themselves of as they engage in elegiac activism and the Black world-building that it entails. Ultimately, this chapter emphasizes the durability of poetry in general and elegy in particular as intergenerational vehicles that link the poets and racial-justice movements of decades past to the pressing concerns of the present as well as to Black futures.

Phillis Wheatley Peters’s America was both a place and an idea, a reality and an aspiration. Through her writings she transformed herself from being a victim in the actual America into a voice for the America she envisioned. Wheatley Peters’ works should be considered diachronically, recognizing the significance of when she wrote what and to whom, rather than synchronically, as if her positions were unchanging over time. Anyone who attempts to identify her political beliefs must consider how free she was to express them, as well as whether the voice we hear is that of the author, rather than that of a persona she has created. Her image of America evolved radically during the 1770s, as did her vision of her place and role in it. The many ways in which Wheatley Peters subtly and indirectly confronted the issues of racism, sexism, and slavery are increasingly appreciated. Her ambition to be recognized as America’s unofficial poet laureate should be undisputed. Considered a remarkable curiosity during her lifetime, Wheatley Peters is now recognized as a major historical, literary, and political figure, whose significance transcends her ethnic, gender, and national identities.

This chapter defines Black feminist poetics as being a "miracle" rather than a "luxury" in that poetic articulation becomes a way to confront how ideas of US citizenship and personhood are predicated on positing Black women as a necessary "rapeable other." It identifes key moments of collaboration and key poetic premises – non-hierarchy, survival, poetry as essential to self-concept and imagining alternative social relations – by which Black women poets have articulated critical alternatives to social norms in order to capture the beauty of their own being.

The efforts among dozens of editors to reprint and thus circulate compositions by Black poets in anthologies across the decades constitute an extraordinary ongoing saga in the production of African American literature. Without collections bringing together large groups of Black poets in the pages of individual books, the view of an interconnected Black literary tradition may have been far more difficult to realize. Further, the presence of Black poets in primarily white anthologies diversified the racial and cultural hegemony of those collections and extended the readership of African American writers.