Archives for February 2022

Over the month of February, we’ve shared poems, forms, and history of local and not-so-local poets as part of Black History Month. We’ve saved a list of the articles we published for future reference on a Black History Month page.

Who are the local Black poets whose words excite you?

There are so many more wonderful African American poets whose words have inspired and pushed us. Keep reading and learning by visiting some of these sites.

Poets.org “12 Poems to Read for Black History Month”
Poetry Foundation “Celebrating Black History Month”
TeamBonding.com “11 Inspiring Poems To Celebrate Black History Month”

Susan Conley writing in Ploughshares shares “Yusef Komunyakaa speaks in a gravelly Southern baritone, tinged with a Cajun flavor that reflects his childhood years in Louisiana. He is a man who chooses his words carefully, splicing his speech with long silences, until his conversation resembles something close to a jazz riff — very fitting for this acclaimed poet who says “oral language is our first music, and the body is an amplifier.”

We were honored to include Yusef’s poem “Gingkoes” in the 2012 issue of The Worcester Review which honored Chris Gilbert.  You can read Gingkoes at theworcesterreview.org.

Photo by David Shankbone. Komunyakaa at the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Awards in March 2012; his book The Chameleon Couch was nominated for the poetry award.

Douglas Kearney is a poet, performer, and professor of poetry at the University of Minnesota. Kearney favors a nontraditional layout in his poetry, what he calls “performative typography”. Here’s an example found on poetryfoundation.org.

You can also take Kearney’s free course, “Sharpened Visions: Poetry Workshop” on Coursera for an introduction to the elements of poetry, popular poems, and a chance to workshop your own poems with poets around the world.

Learn about Douglas Kearney at his website, https://www.douglaskearney.com/.
Visit Kearney’s Coursera free course at https://www.coursera.org/learn/poetry-workshop.
Check out the Poetry Foundation for other inspiration at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/152478/-a-ship-crashes-down-.

Click the image on the right to see the full-size image.

Despite spending much of her life enslaved, Phillis Wheatley is recorded as the first African American to publish a book of poems. Wheatley, (1753-1784) a Senegalese child kidnapped and sold into slavery when she was seven or eight years old, published “Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral” in London in 1773. Her work brims with gratitude, faith, and hope. She wrote a great many funeral pieces, requested by friends and patrons. Many poems allude to Greek and Roman myths, are based on religious teachings of the period, and refer to nature and the wonders it personifies.

Hymn to the Evening (excerpt)

Soon as the sun forsook the eastern main,
The pealing thunder shook the heavenly plain;
Majestic grandeur! From the zephyr’s wing,
Exhales the incense of the blooming spring.
Soft purl the streams, the birds renew their notes,
And through the air their mingled music floats. (Wheatley 38)

In 2020 the American Antiquarian Society hosted a program with poet, writer, and essayist Honorée Fanonne Jeffers about her newest book of poetry, The Age of Phillis. It delves into the pre-slavery life of the African child renamed Phillis. A recording can be found at https://www.americanantiquarian.org/public-program-honor%C3%A9e-fanonne-jeffers-0.

Image – Statue of Phillis Wheatley, The Boston Women’s Memorial (from https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=53991)

Catherine Reed is a fixture in the poetry community. She has been the featured poet at area poetry readings for many years. Reed also served on the WCPA’s board of directors.

In her latest collection of poems, In Fire Goes Out Without Wood, Reed invites us to journey with her to where ministry and poetry meet. In their senior years, we will encounter a couple holding hands, laughing, and skipping down the street like two teenagers. A mother grieving her son in jail sits in a rest home waiting. The Intruder who does not discriminate. A child who stares and no longer recognizes grandmother who now wears a mask. We will hear the words of a six-year-old perched on her daddy’s shoulders, “my daddy’s going to change the world,” and moments later, her dying daddy pleading for his life with a knee on his neck.

SAHARA, Dark Horse, Ballard Street Poetry Journal, The Purple, and Windfall have published her poetry. She won the Barbara Pilon Poetry Contest and Dark Horse Third World contest. She is the author of four books of poetry: Crossing Boundaries, Between Midnight and Dawn, Sankofa, and Fire Goes Out Without Wood. She is the host of WCCATV’s A Journey of Words.

She is a graduate of Clark University, Worcester, MA, Kaleo School of Ministry, Woburn, MA, Hartford Seminary BMCP, Hartford, CT, Brigham and Women’s Chaplaincy Program, and attended Boston University School of Theology. She is an Associate Pastor of John Street Baptist Church of Worcester and retired Protestant Chaplain of The College of the Holy Cross.

Worcester’s Clemente Course in the Humanities Literature class will acknowledge Black History Month in two ways this month: 1) they will do an ekphrastic writing exercise using Otto Bettmann‘s photo I am a Man (March 1968).

The picture is from the 1968 Memphis Sanitation workers’ strike, which was supported by Dr. King and other civil rights advocates. King would be killed in Memphis that April.

In addition, we will do a ‘translation’ exercise. In other words, we will read Langston Hughes ‘Harlem’, and each student will ‘translate that into their personal language.

Thanks to Clemente Worcester faculty member Mark Wagner for the photo and context.

Mary Bonina wrote, “The 1970s and 80s were an exciting time for anyone interested in poetry living in Worcester.” She wrote this in an article about Chris Gilbert, who earned an MA in psychology from Clark University in 1975. Catherine Reed recalls that Gilbert chaired Worcester’s “Free People’s Poetry Workshop” for a time.

Of his poetry, Mark Doty writes: “No one else sounds quite like Christopher Gilbert… His voice feels timeless in its immediacy, and the poems startle in their almost uncanny ability to grant readers access to a mind at work.”

The Worcester Review dedicated the 2012 special section to the strong impression that Gilbert left on Worcester. You can read the introduction by the section editor Gene McCarthy at https://worcestercountypoetry.org/chris-gilbert-into-the-emerging-landscape/.

You can also learn more about Chris Gilbert at https://poets.org/poet/christopher-gilbert.

Mike True was a co-founder of the WCPA.  Since his passing Assumption College has hosted a poetry reading in his honor.  This year the event will be held on Thursday, February 17, 2022, at 7:30 pm.  Jonathan Blake will be the featured reader.

Details can be found in the event listing or on the Assumption College Facebook listing.

Lucille Clifton (1936 – 2010) was a prolific poet and children’s book author. Clifton’s work was easily identified by its purposeful lack of punctuation and capitalization. She served as Maryland’s poet laureate from 1974 until 1985 and won the National Book Award for her collection “Blessing the Boats.”

Her poetry ranged from social upheavals and the African-American urban experience to her role as a woman and poet.

On the anniversary of her death, we share her poem,

“sleeping beauty

when she woke up
she was terrible.
under his mouth her mouth
turned red and warm
then almost crimson as the coals
smothered and forgotten
in the grate.
she had been gone so long.
there was much to unlearn.
she opened her eyes.
he was the first thing she saw
and she blamed him.”
— lucille clifton, “sleeping beauty”

In December 2019, the City of Worcester selected the first youth poet laureate in Massachusetts, Amina Mohammad.  Over her two years in office, Mohammad, who grew up in Worcester’s Main South neighborhood, would move from live readings to a virtual world that included not just poetry but finishing her high school years and starting college.  

As her term was coming to an end, she shared, “… poetry comes in all shapes and forms, and this would be the best way to express how you feel about this certain situation that’s going on.”

You can read more in her discussion with Devy Forcina at https://worcesterculture.org/writing-expressing-and-healing-an-interview-with-amina-mohammed-worcester-youth-poet-laureate/.

You can also read her poem “Change” at https://www.uml.edu/Magazine/Summer-2021/amina-poem.aspx.  You will also find a selection of Mohammad’s poems on the City of Worcester’s poet laureate’s webpage (http://www.worcesterma.gov/cultural-development/poet – scroll to the bottom). 

Pushcart Prize-winning poet Terrance Hayes has published seven books of poetry, poems that examine culture, race, music, and masculinity. Hayes plays with formal constraints in his poetry and created the Golden Shovel poetic form to pay homage to admired poets. To write a Golden Shovel, take one word from each line of a pre-existing poem – these words will serve as the final word of each line of your own poem.

Check out Hayes’ Golden Shovel after Gwendolyn Brooks’ “We Real Cool” here and try writing a Golden Shovel of your own.

In September 2020 Worcester’s Bedlam Book Cafe hosted a virtual poetry reading and discussion with (NYC poet and American Antiquarian Society Fellow) and Tim Seibles (former Poet Laureate of Virginia).  You can find a recording of the event on our YouTube channel – visit https://youtu.be/tvC57_yn8BI.

David Mills is the author of After Mistic (Massachusetts slavery poems), The Sudden Country, and The Dream Detective. He has received fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, Breadloaf, The New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Lannan Foundation. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Colorado Review, Crab Orchard Review, Jubilat and Fence. The Juilliard School commissioned and produced a play by Mr. Mills. He has also recorded his poetry on RCA records and ESPN and lived in Langston Hughes` landmark Harlem home.

Tim Seibles is the author of several poetry collections including Hurdy-Gurdy, Hammerlock, Buffalo Head Solos, and Fast Animal, which was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award and winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize. Tim is a former NEA fellow and recipient of a fellowship from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. His latest collection, One Turn Around the Sun was released in 2017. He recently completed a two-year appointment as Poet laureate of Virginia.

Etheridge Knight (1931 – 1991) lived in Worcester and hosted his Free People’s Poetry Workshops for part of his life.  These workshops were free and were open to anyone who wished to attend. Those who wanted to learn bought Knight drinks throughout the night, and in return, he would look over their poetry and offer advice. Apocryphally, Knight explained that if someone ís reading poetry and can stop a drunk man with a bladder full of beer on his way to the bathroom, you know it ís a good poem.  A version of the Free People’s Workshop continues today with artists, poets, musicians, dramatists, and others meeting to discuss and share their work.

In September 2018, the WCPA honored Knight by renaming the performance portion of the WCPA’s Annual College Poetry Contest.  The “Etheridge Knight Performance Prize” is awarded to a single individual each year and includes a cash prize.  College and universities in central Massachusetts chose a participant to represent the school at the event.  Craig Blais of Anna Maria College is chairing the contest again this year.

You can find additional information about Etheridge Knight in the Literary Tour section of our website.

One of the celebrations that take place during February is Black History Month. It’s a time to celebrate the accomplishments of African Americans. While we should celebrate Black history every month, this dedicated time allows everyone to share, remember, and embrace the influence of Black heritage and culture.

To celebrate Black History Month, we’ll be sharing poems, forms, and history of local and not-so-local poets who occupy a special place on our bookshelves. Join us in celebrating these poets and their words.

Let’s start with poet Amanda Gorman. Ms. Gorman is an award-winning writer and cum laude graduate of Harvard University, where she studied Sociology. In 2017, she was appointed the first-ever National Youth Poet Laureate by Urban Word – a program that supports Youth Poets Laureate in more than 60 cities, regions, and states.

You can watch a recording of Amanda Gorman sharing a poem to kick off 2022 at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aCJhuDIirg.

Visit Amanda’s website at https://www.theamandagorman.com/.