Tag Archives: Langston Hughes

Poets of Color Syllabus Status: Done!

Whew! It’s taken me about two weeks to create a syllabus for my Poets of Color course at Mills College. Classes start this week, and as some of you may know, I very suddenly found myself being offered this Fall semester teaching position. So it’s been a scramble.

I’ve been thinking about not just poetry by writers of color, but poetics essays, and essays about writing life as well. Two that will join Carlos Bulosan’s “The Writer as Worker,” to kick off the semester:

  • Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926). What strikes me about this essay is its relevance in 2010. I don’t know that a classroom full of emerging poets needs to be immersed so much in “po-biz,” but I believe writers of color experience this on a consistent basis — can we ever be regarded and read simply as writers, or will ethnic identifiers always take precedence. And if ethnicity will always take precedence, then how is it handled, by editors, by fellow writers, by educators teaching the work of writers of color?
  • Meta DuEwa Jones, “Descent and Transcendence in African American Poetry: Identity, Experience, Form” (2009). I feel like this essay is an elaboration of Hughes’s essay; Hughes envisioned generations of African American writers into the next century, and in Jones’s essay, we see similar issues still being discussed among these generations subsequent to Hughes.

Later on in the semester, we’ll read Hayan Charara’s “Animals: On the Role of the Poet in a Country at War.” I haven’t yet read it in its entirety, but am glad to have found it. I hope it’s clear that I do want to talk about political poets and political poetry, about social responsibility, about the reach and effect of a poem upon an individual and upon a populace.

OK. I am still scanning and uploading PDF’s, and I’ve found some good multimedia. So as much as done can be done, the syllabus is done. My first class is this Wednesday evening. What a rush.

Addendum: Um. How could I forget to mention that we will also be reading Audre Lorde’s “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” from her collection of essays, Sister Outsider. Also, an excerpt of Allison Hedge Coke’s Seeds. Saul Williams’s “The Future of Language,” from DJ Spooky’s anthology, Sound Unbound. Finally, Thomas Sayers Ellis’s “The New Perform-A-Form.”

Poem: For the City that Nearly Broke Me 12

Thank you to Anisa Onofre, who was inspired by this series of poems to write her poem, “The Mestiza Speaks Of Her Other Names,” riffing off Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” You can find Anisa’s poem here. And because I thrive in this kind of poetry gift economy, I’ve written a poem inspired by Anisa, and by Langston Hughes.

–

The Expat Speaks of Memory

I’ve known home:
I’ve known home fierce as the drum and fragrant as the
bloom of sampaguita in tangled vines.

My memory thirsts mythic for home.

I bathed in its young waters, cool and crystal.
I made poems at the river’s mouth and it opened me with music.
I prayed to the serpent who slithered its path to the bay.
I heard the singing of elders who slaughtered
chickens at its banks, and I’ve seen the first seedlings
sprout, fed by these offerings of blood.

I’ve known home:
Drum, sampaguita home.

My memory thirsts mythic for home.

–

I realize this poem smacks of sentimentality, so I must think of it within the context of this series (and I hope you do too).