three astounding black women poets
sigh. when I was beginning my journey to poet, way back in 1968, a horrible year, the white man who advised me made me aware of LeRoi Jones. now in his defense, he didn't know poetry, he didn't know American poetry, he didn't know American poets, and he knew just barely more than I did. his specialty was literature by white men (he didn't know he'd made that limitation) in the nineteenth century. he and I were such good examples of white privilege. we bathed in it, we basked in it, we basted in it, we simmered in it, we stewed in it, we sauteed in it, and we were oblivious to it. sigh. but he did know about LeRoi Jones, told me to find and buy a book of his. damn he was good! the professor who inadvertently gave me good advice, and LeRoi Jones, the poet. both hes. but white privilege is like an insulating blanket, and male privilege doubles the insulation. when I say I studied poetry, mainly what that means is that I read poetry like I had read science fiction when I was a teenager. oh, I read textbooks about poetry, but they were mostly a waste of time. but I read the classic poets, and I read poets of the twentieth century, beat poets, confessional poets, imagist poets, minimalist poets, modern poets. somehow in that reading, a crack in my privilege developed and let me discover women poets. I was floored. women had been every kind of poet in the twentieth century, still lived, and still wrote poetry that awed me. wake up call? sorta, but I heard it faintly, through yards of insulation. sometime in that process, I also learned that LeRoi Jones had reinvented himself as Amiri Baraka, and I bought a second book of his and was awed by poems in it. sigh. did that wake me up? no, it would be another ten years and another book by Amiri Baraka for me to learn that all along the twentieth century almost a parallel river of black poets had been writing poems in an English that was nothing like mine, and sometimes was exactly like mine, but their experiences of life in America were nothing like mine and were sometimes exactly like mine. to borrow a line from Hiram Sims, "I was confused." meanwhile, someone mentioned Maya Angelou, and Lindy bought a book of hers, then another, and another, and I began to read them and was amazed. and then I met Conney Williams, and he insisted that I participate in the Anansi Workshop, and I did, and was a little more humbled. damned good poets, damned good poems, and I was completely unaware of them until Anansi. I think Conney bought the collected poems of Lucille Clifton, and read two or three to me. So I bought that book and began working my way through it. then Wanda Coleman died and I finally learned about her. dear gods of poetry! how could I have kept them - Maya Angelou, Lucille Clifton, and Wanda Coleman - a secret from myself? but it was worse than that. I have here - I just laid my left hand on a stack of books - nine books by poets who are black women, and I know at least nine other poets who are black women, and I'm still ignorant. what I mean is that black women have written an awful lot of poems and I have read a few of them, I have heard a few others. my cave now has two rivers rushing through it, and I'm not only aware of poems by women who are black, but I'm especially aware of poems by Maya Angelou, Lucille Clifton, and Wanda Coleman. and these other nine women. I will be studying poetry the rest of my life.
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