*Part Two of the Poetic Stylings of the Black Arts Movement

Audre Lorde is a literary intellectual and feminist whose poem, “Power”, is an anthem for not just African Americans in the face of police brutality, but African American mothers in particular. In the poem, Lorde narrates her outrage when a White police officer is acquitted by a jury for the killing of a ten year old Black boy. In his article, “Poems for Peace: How to build a collection that moves beyond anti-war poetry”, Philip Metres discusses a prevailing theme in Lorde’s poem, “In 'Power', written in response to a not-guilty verdict in the case of a police officer who killed a 10-year-old boy, Lorde casts the stakes of poetry in starkly violent terms: 'The difference between poetry and rhetoric / is being / ready to kill / yourself / instead of your children.' In Lorde’s recalibration of Yeats’s distinction between poetry and rhetoric, poetry is a kind of self-murder, insofar as it calls one to be ready to sacrifice the self for the sake of the future. The line breaks exacerbate the tension between violence against another and violence against oneself—and suggest that these violences are intimately connected” (Metre). “Power” experiences the gamut of emotions: a mother’s despair at seeing her son dead in his own blood and trying to frantically revive him, the rage of a police officer who uses his station in life to express his hate, the voice of a Black woman coerced by White supremacy into excusing the murder of a Black boy, and the emotions of Lorde herself, who she states as being too deep to access, but carries within it a rage and a deep sarcasm. “…and one day I will take my teenaged plug and connect it to the nearest socket raping an 85 year old white woman who is somebody’s mother and as I beat her senseless and set a torch to her bed a greek chorus will be singing in ¾ time “Poor thing. She never hurt a soul. What beasts they are” (323). Lorde’s poetry and her narration of rage, despair, and disappointment with humanity is a microcosm of the feelings the Black community experiences when crimes are committed towards the community, but the law protects the perpetrator instead of getting justice for the victim.

The poems by Lucille Clifton are similar to Etheridge Knight’s “The Idea of Ancestry” in the sense that they are intently hers and are a discussion of her personal life. In “homage to my hips”, she creates a comical picture of how her voluptuousness is freeing and a reader can get the sense that her voluptuousness is a metaphor for Black womanhood. She characterizes her hips as not being able to be held down, of being adverse to pettiness, that they free (a nod to the past history of slavery), and that they weave a special kind of magic that hypnotizes men. Through “homage to my hips”, it can be seen that Clifton sees herself as a strong Black woman, “these hips have never been enslaved,/ they go where they want to go/they do what they want to do” (335).

“At least we killed the roaches” by Clifton carries a discussion of the mundane and domesticity, but then abruptly interjects a contradicting image of violence. In the poem, Clifton narrates her family taking back control of the kitchen from the roaches who had been all over, even in the pots and pans. Clifton says she was twelve. She states at the end of the short poem a scene that contradicts the previous feel of the poem, “…such cleanliness was grace/when I was twelve. Only for a few nights, and then not much, my dreams were blood/my hands were blades and it was murder murder/ all over the place” (336). This violent scene is random, and comes to Clifton in a dream outside of the picture of domesticity the poem initially expressed. One can only surmise that Clifton shows this contrast in order to provide a sense of shock to the reader.

Clifton narrates the death of her husband in her poem, “the death of fred clifton”, from his point view as he dies in her arms. The poem is transcendental, as it covers themes of death and the spirit, and includes elements of revelation, and ideas reminiscent of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”. In the poem, Clifton narrates her husband as detaching from his body in death and “seeing”, despite not having physical eyes to see life directly. Here, she brings into discussion “Allegory of the Cave”, “there was all around not the/shapes of things/but oh, at last, the things/themselves” (336). It is said in many spiritual traditions and accountings of near death experiences that the soul of a human detaches from the physical form, what fred clifton calls “the edges of me”, and starts to see more of life right before they pass on. Clifton takes this idea and narrates it through the death of her husband. As stated in the The New Yorker article “Remembering Lucille Clifton” by Elizabeth Alexander, “Clifton believed and showed in her poems that there is but a sheer curtain between the living and the dead. She often conversed with the dead, crossing back and forth without comment, for in her worldview the dead and the living are in constant conversation. In “The Death of Fred Clifton,” the poet’s dead husband describes the exhilarating revelation and vision that death offered….The philosophy that this poem exemplifies is now of comfort to the readers and poets who mourn her passing” (Alexander).

Clifton also creates a humorous love letter to her womanhood in her poem, “to my last period”. In this poem, Clifton personifies her menstrual cycle as a “hussy” who comes to town to cause trouble once a month. However, her menstrual cycle is over, she no longer menstruates and she looks back on it in fondness with humor, “now it is done,/and I feel just like/the grandmothers who,/after the hussy has gone,/sit holding her photograph and sighing, wasn’t she/beautiful? wasn’t she beautiful?” (336). In this poem and other poems, Clifton describes Black womanhood in a unique way. She discusses maidenhood, life as a young a woman, and then finally, as a mature older woman who looks back on the past. Clifton’s discussion in her poetry represents the confidence and love contained in Black womanhood.

The poems of Michael S. Harper carry the same intensity and a similar discussion as the poems of Audre Lorde. He discusses his family, he discusses history, and he discusses the struggles he as Black man has had to endure. In doing so, he embodies the struggles all Black men go through as Black men in a racial supremacist society. This can be seen in his poem, “Grandfather”, “In 1915 my grandfather’s/neighbours surrounded his house/near the dayline he ran/on the Hundson/in Catskill, N.Y./and thought they’d burn his family out/in a movie they’d just seen and be rid of his kind: the death of a lone black is the Birth of a Nation or so they thought” (351). Harper captures the intensity of the times when Blacks had to live in fear of lynching and the motivations of those who would carry out the lynchings. Harper also captures the strength of his grandfather as he faces the lynch mob head on and forces them to turn away. “Grandfather” reveals the face of Black Americans who did not live in fear of White supremacy, but combated it directly.

In “Dear John, Dear Coltrane”, Harper discusses the life of John Coltrane, a well-known African American jazz musician and how he kept playing music even through sickness and unto death. He repeats the lines “a love supreme, a love supreme” (348-49), and this most likely is a compliment and an observation of Coltrane’s music on Harper’s part. According to The Oxford Companion to African American Literature, “Manipulating old European and American myths and creating new ones illustrates a goal and technique Harper uses throughout his poetry, beginning with his first volume, Dear John Dear Coltrane (1970). In the volume, John Coltrane, who Harper knew, is both the man and his jazz, the talented and tragic musician, and his wholistic worldview and redemptive music. With an understanding of black music similar to W. E. B. Du Bois's in his description of the African American "sorrow songs," Harper includes the music of poetry as similar affirmation of the importance of articulating suffering to gain from it and survive it” (Andrews et al). “Dear John, Dear Coltrane” is a poem that is an homage to the late jazz musician, but to African American music in general. The work of Michael S. Harper is a voice that pays homage to the Black community in the midst of adversity. Harper represents African American pride that is both conscious and defiant of being categorized as an “Other”, but affirms its existence and its right to exist.

Poetry contains a unique purpose in the Black diaspora and the overall human experience. In an environment in which Black people have to assert their identity as non-slaves, and as free people. No other culture, with the exception of Native American culture, has to do this in the world. The historical narrative of Africans is does not allow for the same level of humanity as the other races. Therefore, poets such as the ones mentioned, in their duty to reflect the heart of society must take up the soul-bearing, dangerous, transformative task of shouting out to the world that Blacks are a free people with lives, spirits, and hearts. They have a culture. They have spirits waiting for them on the other side. They have anger. They have love. They have history. They have all things that make a human a human and they have had to fight for it. This alone makes the poetic voice of the Black diaspora not only worth hearing, but it also makes it intrinsically unique and provides a REAL definition of what it means to be human.