Review
"Monumental and rapturous" —The New York Times
“It is overwhelming to contemplate the variety and history contained in this volume. The poems gathered here have the force of event. They were written as acts of public mourning, and as secrets; they are love poems and bitter quarrels. They are prized company.” —Parul Sehgal, The New York Times
"This vast anthology gathers voices both canonical and overlooked to build an implicit but unassailable case that Black poetry is central to American literature." —New York Times Book Review
"I've already ordered gift copies of the year's most revelatory book, African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song. Superbly edited by Kevin Young, this astonishing collection runs from Phillis Wheatley, an enslaved woman who wrote elegant verse, to such present day luminaries as Terrance Hayes and Claudia Rankine. The poems are steeped in the sorrow, pain and rage you'd expect from people treated so inhumanely. The writers featured in this volume — most of whom I didn't know — are poets who explore the whole range of human experience — love, death, jazz, food, menopause, fatherhood, gentrification, moon landings, even jive artists who wrap themselves in Black suffering just to get ahead. In different ways, they celebrate, in Lucille Clifton's words, "that every day/something has tried to kill me/and has failed." —John Powers, "Fresh Air"
"Simply, a landmark. It’s easy to read that as hyperbole, and yet Young, a major poet himself . . . spent six years assembling what amounts to an overwhelming, and often fun, thousand-page refocusing of our literary legacy. Legends and laureates are well represented . . . but where this collection excels is adding centuries of the lesser-known greats whose work was steady and remarkable, sometimes made furtively, sometimes with a touching thankfulness for ancestors. Together, it’s a kind of history of American history — jazz, Emmett Till, slavery — but also a celebration of arts movements. . . and a lively conversation across decades. . . . It’s addicting, and refreshing, and no doubt, the sort of holiday treasure a family hands down for generations."
—Chicago Tribune, “The 10 Best Books of 2020”
“Young, himself an acclaimed author of poetry and prose, has created a document both breathtaking and inspiring, historical and personal.” —TIME magazine (The 100 Must-Read Books of 2020)
"A remarkable anthology. . . . Including more than 240 poets, [African American Poetry] moves through eight periods, illustrating the various movements in this vast canon right up to our present moment." —Ron Charles, Washington Post
"This monumental volume, assembled by the poet and newly appointed director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, is long overdue. It opens with verse, first published in 1773, by Phillis Wheatley, who was sent to America via the Middle Passage and enslaved yet went on to learn English and commence the African American poetic tradition. The late June Jordan described the proliferation of Black poetry in America as “the difficult miracle,” and that miracle receives glorious tribute here." —O, The Oprah Magazine, “The 20 Best Books of 2020”
"In this landmark volume, clocking in at a whopping 1170 pages, one of our most talented contemporary poets presents the most ambitious anthology of Black poetry ever published. Beginning in 1770 and culminating in the artistic outpouring emerging through the Black Lives Matter movement, Young spotlights 250 important poets, each situated in an incisive historical and literary framework. Young also takes care to spotlight poetic movements and writing collectives, tracing the influence of creatives on the development of other creatives. Together, these 250 voices, old and new, celebrated and neglected, form a dazzling symphony of talent across generations, making for a breathtaking, expansive canon." —Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire, “Best Books of 2020”
"One of the U.S.’s most talented poets, Kevin Young is the perfect guide to reconstruct the American canon. His sweeping anthology of African-American poetry across U.S. history is an exhilarating collection of voices that have helped shape the country, many of whom never got their full due. By including new forms and overlooked schools, Young’s anthology promises to rewrite the history of American verse." —TIME magazine ("The 42 Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2020")
"[AFRICAN AMERICAN POETRY] offers spirited intergenerational conversations that reveal the testimony of poetry and allows readers to deepen connections with familiar writers and build an affinity for unfamiliar names and ever important messages of their work." —Smithsonian Magazine
"We are living in a Golden Age of American poetry, and many of the writers who make it so are black: Robin Coste Lewis, Nikky Finney, Tracy K. Smith, Terrance Hayes, Rickey Laurentiis, Honoree Fannone Jeffers, Saeed Jones, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Aracelis Girmay, Gregory Pardlo, Donika Kelly, Patricia Smith, Camille Dungy… this list could go on and on and on. And it does, and to read Young’s fabulously well-edited anthology of African-American poetry is to realize how deep the roots of this contemporary flowering are, how much variety and intensity there has been within African-American poetry decade-in and decade-out, since the dawn of the nation. Drawing in blues poets and hard to categorize experimental writers too, Young has made a volume for the ages which has the shock of beauty on every page." –John Freeman, Lit Hub
"This outstanding volume by New Yorker poetry editor Young . . . offers a deep, broad, and nuanced consideration of an essential American art form." —Kirkus Reviews (12 Books That Make Great Holiday Gifts)
“A defining, glorious, and invaluable anthology of African American poetry that reaches back to 1770 and concludes with today’s artistic flourishing in sync with Black Lives Matter. Vitality, beauty, anger, sorrow, humor, and hope all find original, resonant, and consummate expression throughout this expert gathering of works by both celebrated poets and many who will be new to readers, especially women and LGBTQ poets from earlier eras, and all 250 poets are succinctly profiled. Kevin Young provides a historical and literary framework in eight chronological sections, each discussed in substantial and enlightening detail in his elegantly composed and dynamic introduction. His coverage includes pivotal creative movements, including not only the Harlem Renaissance, but also the Chicago Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and such writing collectives as June Jordan’s Poetry for the People, Cave Canem, and the Dark Room Collective. In this powerhouse anthology, African American poets are clearly in dialogue with each other across generations, sustaining community. Written under siege both obvious and insidious, their poems engage with every aspect of life while tracking the ongoing quest for equality and justice. A profound and affirming pleasure to read and an imperative resource for every public library." —Booklist (Starred review)
"The giants are well represented in this enormous collection, including Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, Rita Dove and Natasha Tretheway. But so are more than 200 other poets worthy of wider recognition." —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ("33 Books to Read this Fall")
“New Yorker poetry editor Kevin Young takes on the monumental task of condensing 250 years of African-American poetry into this must-own anthology… Discover it.” —THE WEEK ("21 Books to Read this Fall")
"This thousand-page collection should be required reading for all Americans."
—San Francisco Chronicle
"Incendiary and dazzling..." —Poets & Writers
"African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song is one impressive collection …This is a book to be passed from hand to hand, generation to generation." — Shelf Awareness (Starred review)
“With this monumental work, Young has provided a lasting contribution to historical preservation and poetry.” —Publishers Weekly (Starred review)
Review
“This indispensable anthology will define the Black tradition for a new generation of students and scholars, and for everyone who loves good poetry. Its blend of the personal and the political reveals the sublime power of the written word, in slavery and freedom, to inspire, to protest, and to transcend.” —Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
“This is a historic achievement. Kevin Young has given us the most expansive anthology of African American poetry to date, magnificent in its breadth and scholarly in its depth. Including the well-known and the forgotten, this astonishing collection casts the widest net possible, making it evident that so much of the center of American poetry is Black poetry. I am grateful for this book because it gives me hope: genius will survive and sing truths.” —Cathy Park Hong, author of Minor Feelings
“Superbly thoughtful and authoritative, this volume is an exceptional accomplishment. Kevin Young has rightly chosen many poets and many styles, from Phillis Wheatley to right now, in celebration of an incandescent tradition with many interwoven strands. Here is a book to teach and learn from and read and re-read, to pick through and to re-discover: a revelation even for readers who thought they knew Black poetry.” —Stephanie Burt, author of Don’t Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems
About the Author
Kevin Young is Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and poetry editor of The New Yorker. He has previously served as curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University and director the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library. Young is the author of many books, including Brown, Bunk, Blue Laws, and Jelly Roll. Among the anthologies he has edited are Blues Poems, Jazz Poems, The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief & Healing, and, for Library of America, John Berryman: Selected Poems.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
From the introduction: The Difficult Miracle
This is the difficult miracle of Black poetry in America:
that we persist, published or not, and loved or unloved: we persist.
--June Jordan
For over 250 years, African Americans have written and recited and published poetry about beauty and injustice, music and muses, Africa and America, freedoms and foodways, Harlem and history, funk and opera, boredom and longing, jazz and joy. They wrote about what they saw around them and also what they dreamt up—even if it was a dream deferred, derailed, or outright denied. In sonnets and anthems, odes and epics, Black poets in the Americas confronted violence and indifference, legal barriers to reading and writing, illegal suppression of voting rights, and outright threats to their personhood, livelihood, and neighborhoods. They wrote from a world they made and a world that, at times, seemed designed to distract at best, to dis or destroy at worst. For African Americans, the very act of composing poetry proved a form of protest.
In this they were participating in a long line of creation, spanning back to the enslaved “Black and Unknown Bards” of the Negro spirituals, who transformed traditions and invented language to describe and change their conditions—and to take pleasure and power in their own inventiveness. African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song captures a quarter-millennia of Black poetry in the Americas from Phillis Wheatley to the present day. Whether we consider that timespan to consist of what June Jordan calls “the difficult miracle of Black poetry in America,” what Amiri Baraka names “the changing same,” or the pleasure that Toi Derricotte invokes when she says “joy is an act of resistance,” this anthology provides a comprehensive look at the centuries of song and struggle that make up African American verse, a legacy that is fruitful and large enough to barely be contained in one volume.
Black poetry has always lived beyond books. If Wheatley was first to publish a volume—one she had to go to England to find support for—then the first poem of record by a person of African descent in North America is Lucy Terry’s “Bars Fight.” Composed orally in 1746, the poem was passed around for generations till first mentioned in print in 1819 and printed in full in 1855, the same year as Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Poet Jupiter Hammon published several of his works, often pious, in newspapers and other outlets, starting in 1760; he was the first African American to published poetry in a magazine. But it wasn’t till Wheatley that an entire tradition coalesced, and fully began—with her poems addressed to British royalty and then-General Washington, contemplating creativity and creation and a freedom she ultimately would write herself into.
This book is organized in eight linked sections. Section One: Bury Me in a Free Land (1770-1899) features a rich array of poets, from Wheatley to Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, all of whom encountered (and wrote against) bondage in some way. Section Two: Lift Every Voice (1900-1918) considers poets from Paul Laurence Dunbar on, and the advent of the New Negro, including W.E.B. DuBois, novelist, poet, and anthologist James Weldon Johnson, poet and playwright Angelina Weld Grimké, and publisher and poet Fenton Johnson, whose prose poems inaugurate a modernist moment. Section Three: The Dark Tower (1919-1936) focuses on the Harlem Renaissance and beyond, especially what James Weldon Johnson in his introduction to Sterling Brown’s Southern Road in 1932 called the “Younger Group” of Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Hughes, Toomer, and Brown—a list notably missing any of the terrific women writers of the time, from Gwendolyn B. Bennett, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Anne Spencer, and the neglected by nearly all quarters Mae V. Cowdery, all robustly represented here. Indeed, this Dark Tower argues in its selections for women writers and LGBTQ voices sometimes ignored, and for a Renaissance that stretches from Paris to Philadelphia to D.C. to the American South and Caribbean.
Section Four: Ballads of Remembrance (1937-1959) takes us through the Chicago Renaissance of Gwendolyn Brooks and other poets of the wartime and postwar period, considering the period between the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement. The results consider place across the land—from Alabama to Cleveland to New Orleans—and poets whose work too often falls by the wayside. This includes everyone from Beat poet Bob Kaufman to Margaret Walker, the first Black person to win the Yale Younger Poets Prize (and the only one for nearly 70 years afterwards).
The second half of the book charts the ongoing boom in Black poetry, starting with the Black Arts Movement featured in Section Five: Ideas of Ancestry (1960-1975). This intense artistic and political outburst could fill, and has filled, many anthologies, but stands out for its foment in a short, intense period—from Amiri Baraka to Sonia Sanchez—much like the Harlem Renaissance before it. By expanding the period beyond the revolutions and unrest of the 1960s, we discover other poets who wrote alongside the movement, including Jay Wright and Michael S. Harper and Audre Lorde, who continued the work (and outlook) in the decades after, often shaped by Black Arts freedoms but also embracing a multitude of influences. The following Section Six: Blue Light Sutras (1976-1989) continues with poets like Ai, who almost exclusively wrote persona poems, as well as Pulitzer Prize-winners Rita Dove and Yusef Komunyakaa, or Sherley Anne Williams and Christopher Gilbert—all of whom wrote in personal ways about history and its music. These artists came to see that recognizing a multitude of influences, and capturing an array of voices, meant something deeply Black too.
The book ends with what is arguably another, more current renaissance, an explosion of talent and culmination of tradition that began appearing in the early 1990s. Sections Seven: Praisesongs for the Day (1990-2010) and Eight: After the Hurricane (2011-2020) consider what appears now two generations of “furious flowering”—borrowing a phrase from Gwendolyn Brooks that became the name of the important festivals and poetry center formed by scholar JoAnne Gabbin in 1994. One is tempted to say that over these last two decades we are newly in a time of writing collectives, but this would be ignoring the presence, going back through time, of June Jordan’s Poetry for the People in the 1990s, the Umbra Group in the 1960s, the Black Opals or Saturday Evening Quills of the 1920s, or even groups like Les Cenelles in the nineteenth century. Yet, this tradition found a newfound form in the Dark Room Collective, whose emergence in the late 1980s after the funeral of James Baldwin helped galvanize the current moment and eventually included Natasha Trethewey and Tracy K. Smith, two Pulitzer Prize-winning poets who have also served as U.S. Poets Laureate. They have been joined, in just the Pulitzer alone, by Tyehimba Jess and Gregory Pardlo—representative of increased and overdue recognition African American excellence. As a kind of coda, this book’s final, eighth section can only hope to provide a representation and overview of our current moment and mood, whose vibrancy and varied voices follow in the footsteps of the hundreds of years (and pages) before. One selection per poet can merely hint at the new songs being written, the struggles always underway, and those yet to come.
