When my mother read this poem she said "so you were listening to me after all!" This poem represents the kinds of wisdom Black mothers communicate to their Black children, wisdom designed to keep them safe in a racist world. I know I didn't act like it, but yeah Ma, I was listening.
Lillian-Yvonne Bertram on "Coming of Age Stories" |
|
|
Dylan Thomas's Lost Fifth Notebook
"The poems in the first four notebooks are almost always clean copies. In the fifth, many poems undergo radical revision, allowing us to trace Thomas’s creative processes at first hand....Among the deleted passages were many of great beauty and originality, some of which Thomas reworked elsewhere. There were also three stanzas, in two of the poems, which had never been seen before."
viaTHE WIRE |
|
|
| | Poetry Daily stands with the Black community.
We oppose racism, oppression, and police brutality.
We will continue to amplify diverse voices in the poetry world.
Black Lives Matter. |
|
What Sparks Poetry:
Dan Beachy-Quick on "Alcman 89"
"Studying my declensions, conjugating those verbs, the endless rote memorization of vocabulary, all felt meaningful in relation to this wild, instinctive possibility—that thinking was the body’s work, that apprehension in all its senses (grasping, fearing, knowing) was the thinking poetry could offer, a thought that is a sensation, as natural and instinctive as the hawk’s dive is to hawk or the mouse’s hiding is to the mouse, all eyes bright with purpose." |
|
|
|
|
|
|
