Crossing a sea of black poetry

These were the days when poets started singing and chanting their poetry before audiences, putting it on record. From the late '70s through the mid-'90s, African-American poetry - along with American poetry generally - despite the conservative political climate, continued to regain its good health. New voices of poets born in the '40s - Ellease Southerland, Quincy Troupe, Sherley Anne Williams, Calvin Forbes, Marilyn Nelson Waniek, Nathaniel Mackey, Christopher Gilbert and others - emerged or gained prominence for the first time. A richness and universality of theme and technical maturity were present in much of the work.

Waniek, for example, was not afraid to explore the much-trod territory of the traditional ballad and to come up with refreshing results. Here is the opening quatrain of "The Ballad of Aunt Geneva":

Geneva was the wild one.

Geneva was a tart.

Geneva met it blue-eyed boy

and gave away her heart.

Adding the younger poets of this period - C.S. Giscombe, Michael S. Weaver, Cornelius Eady, Opal Palmer Adisa, Patricia Smith, Karen Mitchell, Lucinda Roy, Lenard D. Moore, Carl Phillips, Elizabeth Alexander, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Kevin Young and others - to the list makes the '90s look like another renaissance, one bolstered by the proliferation of technology into an outburst of diverse creativity many times greater than that first one in the '20s.

Giscombe's, Roy's and the other voices of this newest generation of poets are as individual and as rooted in the culture as I imagine it's possible to be in this day and age of internationalism and multiculturalism. Their voices are constructed out of intense cultural and artistic conflict and cross-fertilization. This, for example, is Weaver's last stanza in "My Father's Geography":

At a phone looking to Africa

over the Mediterranean,

I called my father, and, missing

me, he said,

"You almost home boy. Go on

cross that sea!"

"Go on cross that

sea," indeed.

In African-American poetry, there were many seas to cross and there are many seas yet to cross - most of them at home, on these shores. In 1931 James Weldon Johnson wrote a new preface to his classic 1922 anthology, The Book of American Negro Poetry. Near the end of that introduction, Johnson wrote, "I do not wish to be understood to hold any theory that they [Negro poets] should limit themselves to Negro themes; the sooner they are able to write American poetry spontaneously, the better." That, as it turns out, is a domestic "sea" African-American poets have now clearly crossed.

At the end of Johnson's long preface, he wrote: "Much ground has been covered, but more will yet be covered. it is this side of prophecy to declare that the undeniable creative genius of the Negro is destined to make a distinctive and valuable contribution to American poetry."

These poets have produced a body of work that is clearly the evidence of that "distinctive and valuable contribution" Johnson spoke of 65 years ago.