For Black History Month February 11, 2022 I decided to discuss "Miryam Magdalit" by Jeremy Teddy Karn's chapbook from the New Generation African Poet Collection. He's a contemporary poet from Liberia living in the city of Monrovia. He lived through the Liberian Civil War. The chapbook is written as a series of poems about Miryam Magdalit, the woman who followed Jesus. Like the photo below, which looks like a UFO but is a bench around a garden, the chapbook looks like one thing but is another. It is accomplished by metaphor. A metaphor is a symbol for something that is used instead of what it is. 

SeeMost of the poems in the chapbook talk about the abuse of women and the suffering of the poet's mother, while painting the aftermath of war on the population. 

A specific poem by Jeremy Teddy Karn "The Anthonym of a Country's Name" is similarly metaphorical. He speaks of Liberia as if parsing the word but instead talks about the loss of life during the CIvil War and how difficult it becomes to discuss war. With Russia invading Ukkraine, I expect this is an difficulty many have.

Assignment: Write about the words in your country's name.

​See below to learn about other Liberian poets:

 PI chose James Weldon Johnson as my poet for the 10th day in honor of Black History Month. He was a civil rights advocate and helped build the Harlem Renaissance. One of the strong features of James Weldon Johnson's work is it's musicality, the sense that just reading it is like a song. That's why I chose the black castanets below, they offer rhythm to any music or dance and are helpful and low-cost way to establish a beat while you write or read or edit your poems.

Rather than talk about the most famous poem of his work known as the black national anthem or "Lift Every Voice and Sing" I chose another of his poems, "Art Versus Trade" on the Poetry Foundation website which also has a biography along with the one found if you click the first mention of his name. "Art Versus Trade" is something every artist must face and every poet. It's a poem that shares the same style that is used by Ice-T or Ice Cube with paired lines of rhymes. Except he chose to break the singsongness of paired rhymes with one line that doesn't rhyme, the last line of the first stanza. It looks like the poem will have five-line stanzas, except he merges two stanzas together adding additional lines in order to make it sound chatty. He then uses three pairs of rhymed lines followed by an additional line. 

One of the rules poets can break is the format of the stanza. Traditionally, poets wrote to form, here the poet wrote to keep the song and to remain on topic with what he wishes to say. His life ended just as the Great Depression hit, so perhaps the bad times he speaks of reflect that time period. The two lines:

"Oh, that mankind had less of Brain and more of Heart,   
Oh, that the world had less of Trade and more of Art;"  

appear in the last stanza, showing almost hope despite the octopus crushing the throat of poor art.  These lines serve as a turning point for the poem that ties back to the first stanza, before going back to being bleak. Contrast it with the joy in the video below. 

Assignment: Write a poem about the business of poetry, whatever you have learned about the struggle between work and art or music.

​Here's a video of Ray Charles performing James Weldon Johnson's "Lift Every Voice and Sing."

For a black poet for the letter "i", I needed to go to the "Anthology of Rap" edited by Adam Bradley and Andrew Dubois. Rap is poetry backed by a lot of music or little bit and is quite contemporary, two examples provided are work by rappers Ice-T and Ice Cube. The streets that appear in both rappers music are much gritter than the photography below of a New York City intersection. They are places where people trade drugs and use guns. Rap tends to be much more profitable than poetry because of the music business and people's desire to connect and dance.

Both rappers use pairs of rhymed lyrics in long stanzas of song. Both are narrative poets, they tell a story of events that continue for the duration of the poem. I will discuss Ice-T's rap "6 'N the Morning" while my other option was Ice Cube's "It Was a Good Day" that I provided below in Youtube format.  This latter rap has an element of humor because it ends with a famous "Not" meaning he laughs at the very idea of his poem.

Ice-T's rap "6 'N the Morning" is very long, separated by the use of Word to mark changes in the story. His rap starts vividly with action everyone can relate to "Fresh Adidas squeak across the bedroom floor, out my back window I make my escape, Didn't even get a chance to grab my old school tape" to the event of having the police arrive at his home. Most of the events are about being out on the street which many in the poetry world could not relate to: "Didn't want trouble, but the shit must fly, squabbled with this sucker, shanked him in the eye." Part of his appeal is the series of events, getting paid lots of money, getting dressed up, making love, escaping the cops, which can be as exciting as a movie, thus narrative poetry.

Writing Assignment: Write a narrative poem with pairs of rhymed lines making your day seem exciting

I'm behind on writing about a African/Black Poet for Black History Month since I took off a week and went to Iceland for Valentine's Day. However, there are many great African/Black Poet's deserving attention so I will try to catch up in the next days. For the eighth poet, I have chosen Edil Hassan's chapbook "Dugsi Girl" from the New-Generation African Poets Chapbook Set. Dugsi is a school to learn the Koran. That is why I have picked a photo below of a minaret and other structures from a Mosque in Egypt to help illustrate.

Dugsi girl contains a lot of poems that address a young girl's desire. It is rich with details about living in Somalia, in Morocco as a refugee and in Vermont where Edil Hassan attended college. An example of Edil Hassan's poetry is found online at Poetry Foundation titled Ghazal. Ghazal shows a mix of American style simplification in the syntax of the poem and rich Arab details. It is written as a series of two-line stanzas but isn't formalized as a ghazal. It doesn't mar the meaning in any fashion but gives the reader an idea about how her poetry is constructed. In Dugsi Girl, she maintains more formal meter but the song like quality of both comes through as the poetry is read aloud. 

My favorite of the chapbook is "Febbraio 1986", a poem about watching her mother with a man who isn't her father because it is before her mother marries.  The experience must have been surprising for a young girl, but she follows along in the sensuality her mother demonstrates with the man, rather than evaluate or judge what is happening. An example stanza is as follows:
               Lately your mother catches mouthfuls of frankincense.
               Crushes cinnamon bark between her teeth, her breath

This ability to set aside her immediate emotions and follow others enriches her poetry.  This ability to play with time and place is why one of her poems is titled "Dugsi Girl versus Time Travel". She often combines what she is feeling in a given moment, to some other occasion in another place. I expect to see her write much more poetry in the future with equal depth and richness of experience.

Writing Assignment: Write about watching your mother using two line stanzas

I've included a Youtube of a Somalian girl dancing after attending school to learn the Koran, Dugsi below to get an idea of the culture--clothing, music, etc.

For February 7 2022, I selected poet Charlotte L. Forten Grimke in honor of Black History Month. This US poet who lived until the First World War is important as a writer, political activist and one of the founders of the National Association of Colored Women. Read her biography.

I chose her poem "The Angel's Visit" because it recorded how she felt at the loss of her only child's life and is the most heartfelt. Other poems she wrote are dedicated or cite famous works of art or people like Wordsworth.

"The Angel's Visit" is written as ten stanzas of eight lines and tells a story of a mother grieving. It has two major turns in the poem, one when grief is answered by an angel, and a second turn when grief departs. Charlotte L. Forten Grimke's life changes as she goes on to be politically active, beginning a new life in Washington, DC. What is apparent in the poem is that she exhibits honest faith and real loss. Yet her poem is able to be measured and careful to convey meaning without sacrificing form.

The picture above is from the bridge of Angels in Rome, Italy at sunset. Below is an alternate use of an Angel by a modern band. It is one of the valuable aspects of poetry is it makes music lovely.

Writing Assignment: Write about an Angel that visits you for some reason. Use a fixed form but convey strong emotion.

In honor of Black History Month February 6, 2022 I chose to write about Mary Weston Fordham who lived during the reconstruction era following the Civil War, read her biography.

The image below was the closest photo I have of washer woman since I will write about Mary Weston Fordham's poem "The Washer Woman". The photo below was a carving in jade shown at the Brazil National Museum in Rio de Janeiros, Brazil. I'm not sure what it is meant to convey, maybe a stylized frog, but the posture is similar to a woman scrubbing clothing in a river that I watched in Belize, scrubbing the clothing with rocks.

Mary Weston Fordham's poem "The Washer Woman" appears in her collection of 66 poems titled Magnolia Leaves. The poem is written as seven stanzas of eight lines, with lines two and four and six and eight rhyming in each stanza. What is apparent from the poem is that Mary Weston Fordham had washed clothing and sympathized with the woman she was memorializing.

In the poem, she explicitly cites physical parts of the body affected by scrubbing clothing, the hands, the back, the arms, the legs, and the motion and the action and the sound. She repeats these traits to emphasize their tiredness when the poem makes a turn to God. Her glorifying Sunday shows how precious a day of rest could be and her homage to God for this break is heartfelt. 

Writing Assignment: Write about a job that you did repetitively until exhausted.

​See a modern poem about Washer Women below:

For Black History Month February 5 2022's Poet of the day, I selected Laban Erapu from the "Poems of East Africa" Collection. Laban Erapu is a poet and professor of Literature from Uganda.

Below is an image many of us encounter on the streets that remind me of Laban Erapu's poem "Guilt of Giving".

​Writing Assignment: Write a street poem showing what you see people do including yourself.

One of the reasons that I chose "The Guilt of Giving" is that it uses good imagery about people's reactions. The poem is told by a narrator and the reader sees what the narrator sees, in other words the camera follows along with the narrator. But the narrator encounters a beggar, and then the camera follows how the beggar reacts. But the camera then returns to the narrator and he's seeing people on the street and watches their reactions. Then once more the camera returns to the narrator and he makes another choice and the camera follows. Camera changes are another way of saying point of view. A camera on the narrator will feel his thought and see his motions. Camera changes to others will witness their physical responses and actions.

​Also with this poem, count the number of verbs. This is a highly active poem based on observation.

​Find more Ugandan poets on Youtube below:

In honor of Black History Month I decided to write about poet Georgia Douglas Johnson and Alice Dunbar Nelson because they were colleagues with different life histories but shared poems about their lives. The image below is of a grindstone, the means of making flour or a metaphor for work, and they share work imagery in their poems and share the frustration of working at work that seems beside the point. Both writers eventually write about racism, but their first frustration stemmed from their role as a woman. I found poems by both women in "Great Poems by American Women".

Georgia Douglas Johnson's poem, "My Little Dreams," uses language that conveys the sense of a woman wrapping up her embroidery or crochet for the night and putting it away, while talking about her dreams. Looking at other of her poems, she writes about a child and her worries for it, so the dreams could be construed to be about having a child but more likely wanting to write and being discouraged as a woman, a writer, and a black woman. Her poem is quite short, two stanzas of four lines with the second and fourth line of each stanza rhyming.

Alice Dunbar Nelson's poem, "I Sit and Sew," is a longer poem and dwells on the frustration of a woman sewing while the men are off at war. Her poem is written as three stanzas of seven lines. Each stanza had six lines with paired rhymes followed by a one-line refrain. It is a good poem to compare with Georgia Douglas Johnson's poem because both show frustration in different ways while doing similar tasks. 

Writing Assignment: Write about a task that frustrates you and show the action of the task in the poem. This is a good way to show emotion, transferring it to a task.

​Both women were leaders in the literary community and shared the bond of a shared workshop. 

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: