Category: poetry

William Thomas Caine, Getty Images (2003) When we were growing up, my mother never let us identify people by race or class.  In conversation with her, the "white girl" in my class had to become the girl who sat in the left corner, carried the green backpack; the "poor" kid became the kid who lived [...]

There is an uncanny silence surrounding Ai’s recent death from late-detected cancer on March 20.  So much so that I didn’t believe it to be true and looked to “reputable” sites for days for confirmation.  But turns out it’s true: she’s joined the ancestors. When I first read Ai she scared me; or maybe it [...]

Kathleen Cleaver, 1968 Could’ve been my penchant for big hair and accessories made from natural materials.  I dunno.  But the Black Arts Movement’s aesthetic spoke to my poetics at just about the time I decided that defining it would be useful to my writing growth.  It seems restrictive that art should only exist to be [...]

I was smack in the middle of trying to figure myself out and make that self fit Some-Damn-Where when I discovered Audre Lorde via her “biomythology:” Zami: A New Spelling of My Name.  (Didn’t quite work out for me). But the line that grounded this airy Aquarius for a sec went: Do not pretend to [...]

First I read him. I was relieved to find a style I related to.  Drawn to ideas as much as—probably more than—technique in my poetic affections left me more than a little befuddled, skeptical, and lonely in many a writing workshop. Then I heard him read. And I was like yup.   Never graduated to groupie [...]

I have theme songs; they change fairly frequently and have run the range from Beautiful by Bobby Brown and Damian Marley to Carl Carlton's Bad Mamma Jamma. Less often, I’ve had theme poems.  But for a few good years, this was one of them. (Poem follows after the jump). Instructions to the Double Tess Gallagher [...]

I was on line to be a Kappa Sweetheart.  Through the early 90s, Black fraternities would often have auxiliary organizations for young women who had not yet earned enough credit hours to pledge a sorority.  The auxiliary was really a social network of freshmen, sometimes sophomores, that was supposed to support the members of the [...]

I really never had a favorite poet. What I’ve found in individual poems, a few collections, and sometimes (though rarely) in poets has usually been fleeting, a weapon I discover in the heat of the fight, use for the battle, and discard once my demons have been fought and retreat. What follows this month—it’s National [...]