Claude Wilkinson writes poetry of the seen and unseen Consider everyday activities and objects, like a flight of doves, mowing the grass, pressing a flower or four-leaf clover in a book, salvia in the flower garden, or snow. We see them, we experience them, we sometimes wonder at their beauty or even meaning. (As a kid, I often wondered at the meaning of mowing the grass every week, and I decided it was something put on this earth to aggravate children.) Poet Claude Wilkinson looks at these things, and he sees what we see, but he sees more. He notes the visible and what can be seen, but he a ..read more

For Ben Okri, even the darkest stories are about hope Standing in Hatchard’s Bookstore on Piccadilly Street in London, I’m looking through the shelves of poetry. Hatchard’s is the oldest continuously operating bookstore in London, having opened in 1797. It’s next door to Fortnum & Mason, and across the street from the Royal Academy of Arts. The Ritz Hotel is one block west, while Piccadilly Circus is two long blocks to the east. Hatchard’s poetry section is not huge, but it’s sizable, larger than what you find in most American bookstores. A small table display of books occupies the space ..read more

The young Langston Hughes wrote poems for adults — and children In 1924, a young Black man named Langston Hughes (1902-1967) arrived in New York City. Born in Joplin, Missouri, he had lived in a considerable number of places and traveled as a sailor to even more. But it was to New York he came, and it was there he would not only make his literary name but lead what came to be known as the Harlem Renaissance. The young Langston Hughes Two years after his arrival, he published his first poetry collection, The Weary Blues. Almost a century after its publication (and now off copyright), it con ..read more

Shane McCrae gives a young boy a voice – and a life In his latest collection, Sometimes I Never Suffered, poet Shane McCrae tells a story. Or perhaps he’s telling several stories that are different threads of the same story. Thirty-six poems become one poem, and one story, and they do what good poetry always does — leave the reader unsettled and reflecting upon something new in the reader’s experience. The story also leaves the reader wondering what might happen and what should happen. McCrae uses a historical figure, Jim Limber, to tell his story. Limber was a young boy of mixed race who wa ..read more

Yrsa Daley-Ward First Known Via Instagram If you like to be jolted out of your comfort zone, read bone by Yrsa Daley-Ward. The 72 poems in the collection are always arresting and often shocking, telling you this is who the poet is, like it or lump it. And she doesn’t care if you lump it. As you read through poems of love, struggle, power, sensuality, sadness, joy, and trauma, you sense the poet is someone who not only defies expectations but also ignores them. Born in northern England of a Jamaican mother and a Nigerian father, Daley-Ward was raised by her Seventh-day Adventist grandparents ..read more

The voice of Claude McKay lives on At 22, Claude McKay (1889-1948) published his first book, Songs of Jamaica., reflections of Black life in the country told in dialect. It was 1912. The stipend from an award for the book helped him to travel to the United States, where McKay wanted to study modern agricultural practices and bring them back to his country. He briefly attended Tuskegee Institute in Alabama before landing at the University of Kansas. During the next two years, the pull of words changed his focus. By 1914, McKay knew he was a poet. In 1922, now living in New York, McKay publish ..read more

Carl Phillips invites you to a dream You read the poems in Pale Colors in a Tall Field by Carl Phillips. And you quickly gain the sense of walking into a dream. A vivid dream might happen in vivid colors, crowding out other, paler events and memories. But as Phillips suggests in his poems, those paler images are important, too. In their own way, even as they might recede, they shape not only what we dream, but who we are and how we live. That’s the soul of this collection, a dream journey into memory reality, and identity. Phillips works the soft whites, the pale blues, and the light greens ..read more

A Modernist Classic by Jean Toomer Jean Toomer (1894-1967) was a writer bundled with a host of seeming contradictions. He was heralded as part of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, but he never wanted to be considered a Black writer, preferring to be called an American writer. Born Nathan Pinchback Toomer, he changed his name at least twice; his maternal grandfather called him Eugene after his father (also a Nathan) abandoned the family. When he began his writing career and for 20 years after, he used the name “Jean Toomer,” changing it again to Nathan Jean Toomer. He wrote movingly of Bla ..read more

Poet-a-Day: Meet Ashley M. Jones I first learned about Ashley M. Jones from Megan Willome’s post Creating an “I Love Poetry Moment”: Magic City’s Ashley M. Jones. When I learned that Jones was a lover and writer of poetic forms, I immediately ordered, then devoured, her collection dark / / thing. I’ve since enjoyed corresponding with, and following on Facebook, a woman whose life reflects as much truth-telling fervor as her poems. Jones has two poems (from that collection I bought) in How to Write a Form Poem: a villanelle and a sestina. Below is a sneak peak—the first two stanzas—of her “Ki ..read more

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