In honor of Black History Month February 3 2022, I have chosen poet James Edwin Campbell who is known for popularizing southern black American dialect known as Gullah in his poems. Use of dialect in poems was a popular way to show the common man at work, play or life and poets like Paul Laurence Dunbar and Carl Sandburg continued the tradition Campbell started. 

During James Edwin Campbell's life, the US was in a period of building population, states, and expanding westward while dealing with reconstruction issues post-Civil War. 

At My Poetic Side there are many examples of James Edwin Campbell's dialect poems, but I would like to discuss "Mors et Vita" which I first read in the Dover Thrift Collection of African American Poetry. "Mors et Vita" is a simple poem of two stanzas of matching sets of lines. There are five lines that match in both stanzas but the last stanza has a final line that some might say he should have cut his darling. The last line is really optional but helps to cut the sing song nature of the poem and end triumphantly with a discovery.

Song is the reason I chose to discuss "Mors et Vita" because many of James Edwin Campbell's poems could be sung and are full of joy. It is the reason he was very popular, because if you can sing a poem, it can be used to entertain. In the growing Midwest, entertainment was much appreciated as the distances can be far between households.

His use of rhyme is inconsistent and appears in different lines, but the listener can perceive the rhyme as it is read. The rhythm combined with the rhyme makes it like a song.

What I like about James Edwin Campbell's story is his apparent education, success, broad appeal and happiness. His poem "A Memory Tone" could be about meeting his wife. 

Writing Assignment: Write a Poem with Two Stanzas of Five Lines that refer to different objects in each line, the second poem using the objects in a different manner. Make it a rhyming poem. How does it feel to read this poem?

For my second day in honor of Black History Month I am choosing another contemporary poet, Lameese Badr whose chapbook Dust to Dust is included in the New Generation African Poets Collection from Akhashic Books. Lameese Badr is a Sudanese poet based in Khartoum and one of the poems included in her chapbook is offered by Pank Magazine titled "Q/A with My Therapist". Her work uses a lot of space and features dust often, and this image below of the Nile taken near Abu Simbel Egypt offers the best image I have of what can inspire it.

 
​Lameese Badr's "Q/A with my Therapist" features questions that start with how often she thinks about death but provides a response that doesn't connect directly. This is true for the entire poem. First question, then response. The emptiness in this poem comes from the space between sentences and the disconnect in understanding death as a form of leaving as well as a disconnect between life and death and between home and community or people.

This airy feature of her poetry occurs in many of the poems, through the use of spacing, line breaks, thought or pronunciation breaks and offers the sense the writer is trying to capture something that goes beyond the concrete ability to touch someone. It's how emotions such as love are dealt with as well as disorientation between events or between time.

The preface for the chapbook by Samiya Bashir discusses sandstorms called haboob's that sweep through Central Sudan. A look at recent Sudanese news by the United Nations, offers more insight into some of Lameese's poems, particularly "Alternate" that offers both a jubilant view of a protest but also the grief that violence that occurred related to it brings. 

Two poems "Why We Couldn't Stay" and "After You Will Die at Twenty/ For Muzamil" offer clues to what life outside the home country offers, in terms of disconnection and in terms of giving up who you are. 

The style used, of open space and of slipperyness, the movement of idea to idea from stanza to stanza and line to line is very contemporary and post-modern. It requires flexibility from the writer and reader to follow along a path that changes from time, place, idea, emotion but because they are contained in the space of the poem, it holds additional meaning that is connected.  An example of this is shown in her poem "When the Man in the Uniform Knocks Three Times", "when it breaks me and i keep coming back for more when the maps you are". Here many questions arise, what can break someone, why would someone come back for more breakage, how a person can be a map, or place perhaps. The next line continues "drawing on my palm" which helps make sense of the maps questions but there the connection is formed between the two individuals and the process of making a map or being a map. This makes the poem much stronger by sharing meaning that goes beyond the words.

Throughout the chapbook, the sense of the poet offering love is a strength that goes beyond the other emotions of loss, grief, and change. It's very easy to read poetry and helps bridge the gap between Sudanese culture and other cultures. Find other Sudanese poets on Youtube, see below:

In honor of Black History Month February 1, 2020, I will restart my discussion about African Poets, some of them are contemporary and some historical because contemporary history is still history in the making. For my first discussed author, I have chosen Elizabeth Alexander who is a United States Poet living in New York. Her poem, "At the Beach" discussing a place we have all been and can relate to or if not, can find an example photography such as the one below.

Poetry Assignment: Write a poem about a time you were on the beach. Who was with you? What wildlife did you see? Why do you remember this time? What did you say? How did you feel? What did you sense--smell, touch, hear, taste, see? Do you have a photograph from your visit? Can you include the photograph in the poem?

"At the Beach is written in three stanzas (or paragraphs).

The first stanza mentions her former grief having less pain with regard to the photograph she is examining. She describes two lost friends in the context of the beach. Her use of virus resonates in 2022 with Covid19 infections widespread but in her poem, it seems to refer to HIV.

The second stanza mentions her current location, on the train. Her emphasis on alternative communication styles is suggestive of the alternative lifestyle of her friends. Communication is her job as poet so she's including herself and her community in the poem.

The third stanza wonders about the happiness of her friends as shown rather than told but she uses a literary reference to broaden the meaning in the use of Sula and Ajax.

Her verse is terse, the description of friends exists in a t-shirt, a sardine description and skin and bones. 

The style she is using is narrative, telling a tale, shifting from then to now to back then, and conveying changing emotion in the process from once grief to now not painful, once heavy, once full of happiness.

​Her work can be found in a number of collections on Amazon including the "Vintage Book of African American Poets."

The title “Sistas Stay Strong” by Eric Reese feels somewhat misleading when written by a male poet, but it does explain the content of the book of poems. The use of the word "Sistas" is slang for sisters and conveys the African sense of sister meaning family women and women friends. It starts by using consonance and addressing black women. The book provides homage to what black women have endured while using the reinforcement of command to continue with encouragement. Courage is needed as many of the poems show.

Most of the poems read as if the author had read the Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters at some time in the past, because they bare the same resemblance to gravestone inscriptions, that tell a brief moment about an individual or providing witness to some event. The poems are all short, tight, discussions that often start with an address to a person and then ends with a sharp note of wisdom at the end. The hooks are in the tight start, the cliffhangers beat a drum, meaning they often have a real impact on the reader.

​Topics vary throughout including the #Metoo movement, prostitution, rape, slavery, media, hair, skin, babies, equality. So as you can see, the poems offer why encouragement is needed. Examples from Sistas Stay Strong:
​
OF COURSE!
 
Was accused of murder
when she was just
avoiding rape.
 
and an example of encouragement:
 
SISTA GO GET IT
 
She didn’t know anything
other than being in the kitchen
but wasn’t intimidated
when she discovered that
she had the same power
to generate money in it
like her white counterparts

​Most of the poems brought back memories for me, the latter of working in a restaurant which has the equality of being where the unskilled first start out. The former "Sista Go Get It", reminded me of the terrible trial I had sat on during jury duty, where a woman was accused of killing her significant other with a kitchen knife. I hadn’t qualified for the jury because I had had previous experience of assault in my history. Later, after the trial finished and I was still on jury duty, I learned from a jury member the murder trial victim had previously killed other partners in self-defense, a psychologist explaining why this often happened. In the murder trial, the woman was black, my coworker’s daughter was white. Regardless of the race issue, the issue of violence, especially toward women is apparent throughout the book.
​
The situation of violence that I was aware of that disqualified me for the jury happened to a daughter of a coworker had stopped to help a man who stopped on the roadside in front of her. When the man came to my friend's daughter's window which she rolled down partially, he punched her in the face. Luckily, the daughter had pepper spray in her car and was able to get away. The police found he had pictures of her in his apartment, he’d followed her for some time.

So my long-winded set of examples is leading to a point, namely that poems don’t exist on their own. They feed from the world we live in, and feed back through the words to the community members, providing tales we can relate to and providing the music of verse to reinforce that things need to be different and can be different.

If you suffer from abuse in your relationship, please read "The Truth About Abusers" an article at Psychology Today.
 
Poems also connect to each other, forming a pattern and texture almost like cloth, that paints a picture that each instance can apply to more than one individual to create the sense that not just one person was wounded, we were all wounded.
 
My view of this collection of poems is that Eric Reese went beyond the Spoon River Collection that captured individuals in a graveyard, to capture the society of living and dead in our society. It connects and reconnects throughout, while being easy to read and understand.
 
In conclusion, this is one of the collections Eric Reese has written and has an opening dedication written by former President Obama. Eric Reese writes from his home in Philadelphia. It will be interesting to see what moves him to write in the future.