African Poetry

[genoveva]

I'm doing a project comparing African poetry with African-American poetry. Any suggested poets would be greatly appreciated! :nod:

[muhsin]

Find Jared Angira's "No Coffin No Grave","If", and many more. His poems are straight foward ones.

If you are not asking for those that are simple, so, I 'll tell you to find the collection of Nigerian J.P Clark's.

But also Sly-Cheney Coker's poems are good ones, but advisibly, go to Google website and search for them.

Good Luck.

[mono]

Though I admit of knowing very few African poets, of African-American poets, I can recommend Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Margaret Burroughs. No doubt, I will likely think of more, probably the moment I turn off my computer :D, and will try to list more as I think of them.

[genoveva]

I read my firsts of Gwendolyn's yesterday:


The Mother

Abortions will not let you forget.
You remember the children you
got that you did not get,
The damp small pulps with a little
or with no hair,
The singers and workers that
never handled the air.

You will never neglect or beat
Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.
You will never wind up the
sucking-thumb Or scuttle off ghosts
that come.

You will never leave them,
controlling your luscious sigh,
Return for a snack of them,
with gobbling mother-eye.

I have heard in the voices of the
wind the voices of my dim killed children.
I have contracted.

I have eased My dim dears at
the breasts they could never suck.
I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if
I seized Your luck And your lives
from your unfinished reach,

If I stole your births and your names,
Your straight baby tears and
your games,
Your stilted or lovely loves,
your tumults, your marriages, aches,
and your deaths,


If I poisoned the beginnings of your
breaths, Believe that even in my
deliberateness I was not deliberate.

Though why should I whine,
Whine that the crime was other than
mine?--
Since anyhow you are dead.
Or rather, or instead, You were
never made.

But that too, I am afraid, Is faulty:
oh, what shall I say, how is the
truth to be said?

You were born, you had body,
you died.
It is just that you never giggled or
planned or cried.

Believe me, I loved you all.
Believe me, I knew you, though faintly,
and I loved, I loved you All.

Written by Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000)

[mono]

I read my firsts of Gwendolyn's yesterday:


The Mother
Very nice, genoveva! ;)
Though very brief, I always liked the following Brooks poem, very relevant to her era --

We Real Cool

We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.
Though quite depressing, few poets, I believe, can express such a mood in its entirety and so eloquently --

A Sunset Of The City

Already I am no longer looked at with lechery or love.
My daughters and sons have put me away with marbles and dolls,
Are gone from the house.
My husband and lovers are pleasant or somewhat polite
And night is night.

It is a real chill out,
The genuine thing.
I am not deceived, I do not think it is still summer
Because sun stays and birds continue to sing.

It is summer-gone that I see, it is summer-gone.
The sweet flowers indrying and dying down,
The grasses forgetting their blaze and consenting to brown.

It is a real chill out. The fall crisp comes
I am aware there is winter to heed.
There is no warm house
That is fitted with my need.

I am cold in this cold house this house
Whose washed echoes are tremulous down lost halls.
I am a woman, and dusty, standing among new affairs.
I am a woman who hurries through her prayers.

Tin intimations of a quiet core to be my
Desert and my dear relief
Come: there shall be such islanding from grief,
And small communion with the master shore.
Twang they. And I incline this ear to tin,
Consult a dual dilemma. Whether to dry
In humming pallor or to leap and die.

Somebody muffed it? Somebody wanted to joke.