Young Poets and Black Spaces: Vanessa Howard’s Poetics of Nature

Abstract

This article explores the poetics of nature in the work of Vanessa Howard, a young poet involved with The Voice of the Children workshop, a group of Black and Latinx teenaged writers in Brooklyn, New York, who worked with poet June Jordan and educator Terri Bush from 1967 to 1971. A significant poet whose work has not received sufficient scholarly attention, Howard uses nuanced strategies to craft a poetics of nature that acknowledges injustice and remakes possibilities for envisioning and depicting Black spaces. Across a range of poems, Howard figures internal capacities of perception and imagination, and visions of natural and urban landscapes that counter external environments constrained by racial and economic injustice. The fact that Howard created her innovative poetics of nature as a young person demonstrates the importance of recovering and including young poets in considerations of African American poetry and poetics.