"Poetry Lets Us Remember—and Move On"
"Sometimes, our pain calls for something other than straightforward prose. Poems can offer new ways to understand our experiences—especially those that are confusing, distressing, or just hard to put our finger on. For poets like Natasha Trethewey, poetry is an 'act of remembering'; she used it to process memories of her mother’s death and her stepfather’s abuse."
via THE ATLANTIC |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Amaud Jamaul Johnson on Gwendolyn Brooks's "A Lovely Love"
"I was twenty and an undergraduate at Howard University, taking Dr. Jon Woodson’s Survey of African American Poetry. He was suspicious of labels and spent the first weeks of class arguing against his own course title. His first lecture began with a summary dismissal of Maya Angelou, who a year earlier was Bill Clinton’s Inaugural Poet. He would hand out poems with the authors’ names blacked out, and ask: “What makes this a Black poem, or is this good or bad?” We had to defend our answers. Our shortcomings were immediately evident. This is how I was introduced to Gwendolyn Brooks’s 'A Lovely Love.'" |
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