African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song ed. by Kevin Young

Abstract

Reviewed by: African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song ed. by Kevin Young Mildred R. Mickle African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song, edited by Kevin Young. New York, Library of America, 2020. 1150 pp. $45.00 hardcover. Kevin Young's 1,100-plus-page anthology provides an intriguing selection of African American poetry that was published from the late eighteenth century all the way to 2020. The lineup of poets in this book rightly begins with Phillis Wheatley, whom Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in The Trials of Phillis Wheatley (2003), terms "the mother of African-American literature" (50). Wheatley's groundbreaking, pre-Revolutionary War poetry, published in Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), provided a much-needed critique of the foundation of American conceptions of independence. At the anthology's opposite end we have poets younger than forty, such as National Book Critics Circle Award winner Ishion Hutchinson and Aja Monet and Jamila Woods, activists and civic engagers of the twenty-first century who are training the next generation of poets and paying homage to those who have died in the ongoing struggle for agency and autonomy. In between are selections by nineteenth-century enslaved and free poets, poets of the Harlem Renaissance, poets of the Black Arts Movement, and work by a number of Pulitzer Prize winners: Gwendolyn Brooks (1945), Rita Dove (1987), Yusef Komunyakaa (1994), Natasha Trethewey (2007), Tracy K. Smith (2012), Gregory Pardlo (2015), Tyehimba Jess (2017), and Jericho Brown (2020). Young also represents a variety of award-winning poets from abroad, including 1992 Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott, who lived much of his life in St. Lucia, and the Emmy-winning Kwame Dawes, who came to America from Ghana and Jamaica. Here too is much-loved Maya Angelou, a three-time Grammy winner and the author of the 1992 presidential inaugural poem. Young also makes a concerted effort to present work by lesser-known poets. In his introduction, which is titled "The Difficult Miracle," Young writes: [End Page 577] African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song captures a quarter-millennium of Black poetry in the Americas, from Phillis Wheatley to the present day. Whether we consider that time span to consist of what June Jordan calls "the difficult miracle of Black poetry in America," what Amiri Baraka names "the changing same," or the pleasure that Toi Derricotte invokes when she says "joy is an act of resistance," this anthology provides a comprehensive look at the centuries of song and struggle that make up African American verse, a legacy that is fruitful and large enough to barely be represented by one volume. (xxxix-xl) Not only was it "difficult" for African Americans to write and publish poetry, but it is also difficult to capture the scope of that extensive body of literature accurately. What Young has achieved in this volume is to be commended. He does note that he made the executive decision to omit certain types of oral poetry like the blues and spirituals (xlii-xliii), but he compensates for that lack by including "poems in translation by American poets of African descent writing in languages other than English" (xliv). And, to narrow the selection further, he limits the geographic region to the United States and parts of the Caribbean. It would have been helpful to have poems from some of the French-language writers of the Negritude movement, such as Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor, who were influenced by Langston Hughes's efforts in the Harlem Renaissance. America is a postcolonial state, and the literary production of African Americans contributes significantly to the development of a postcolonial ethos. That very effort sent shock waves back to countries like Césaire's Martinique and Senghor's Senegal as black artists there struggled to find their own postcolonial aesthetic. Césaire's and Senghor's works have been translated into English from French. Still, it is easy to see why Young had to limit the scope of this volume. Already over eleven hundred pages long, the book hardly had room for more. The anthology is divided chronologically into eight sections; Young titles each with a quotation...