Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry

ISBN-13: 9780820334318

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Publication Date: 12-01-2009

Pages: 432

Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.10(d)

CAMILLE T. DUNGY is an associate professor in the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University. She is the author of two poetry collections, What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison and Suck on the Marrow, and has helped edit two other poetry anthologies. SEAN HILL is currently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. He received his MFA from the University of Houston in 2003 and was awarded a Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing in 2006. Hill's poems have been published widely in journals, including Callaloo, Indiana Review, and Ploughshares. MAJOR JACKSON's debut volume of poems, Leaving Saturn, selected by poet and novelist Al Young to receive the 2000 Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet, was nominated for a 2002 National Book Critics Circle Award and has received critical attention in the Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, Parnassus, Philadelphia Inquirer, and on National Public Radio's All Things Considered. His poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Boulevard, Callaloo, Grand Street, Post Road, the New Yorker, among other literary journals. Formerly the Literary Arts Curator of the Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia, he is the recipient of fellowships and awards from Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Pew Fellowship in the Arts, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, as well as a commission from The Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia. In 2003, he received the prestigious Whiting Writers' Award. He has given readings around the country and participated in many festivals including Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, Poetry Society of America's Festival of New American Poets, and The New Yorker Festival in Bryant Park, New York City. He is a graduate of Temple University and University of Oregon's Creative Writing Program. Major Jackson is an associate professor of English at University of Vermont, a faculty member of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Queens University of Charlotte in North Carolina, and a former Witter Bynner Fellow for the Library of Congress. He lives in South Burlington, Vermont. CLARENCE MAJOR is a prizewinning poet, painter, and novelist. He is the author of thirteen previous books of poetry. As a finalist for a National Book Award he won a bronze medal for his book Configurations: New and Selected Poems, 1958–1998. Among other awards he is also the recipient of a National Council on the Arts Award, a New York Cultural Foundation Award, and the Stephen Henderson Poetry Award for Outstanding Achievement, all three for poetry. His poetry has appeared in hundreds of anthologies and periodicals, in English and in foreign languages. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California at Davis. MARK McMORRIS is author of The Black Reeds (Georgia) and other collections. He has published his poems in New American Writing, Callaloo, Conjunctions, and other journals. McMorris is an assistant professor of English at Georgetown University. NATASHA TRETHEWEY was the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, 2012–14. She is the author of four collections of poetry: Thrall, Domestic Work, Bellocq’s Ophelia, and Native Guard, for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. She is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University. FRANK W WALKER is the 2013-2014 poet laureate of Kentucky. He is an associate professor of English at the University of Kentucky and the editor of Pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture. A Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry recipient, he is the author of five collections of poetry, including Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York, which won the Lillian Smith Book Award, and Isaac Murphy: I Dedicate This Ride. MARGARET WALKER (1915-1998) wrote poetry, essays, the novel Jubilee, and a biography of Richard Wright. She created pioneering programs in the humanities and African American studies at Jackson State University, where she was a faculty member for almost three decades. CAMILLE T. DUNGY is an associate professor in the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University. She is the author of two poetry collections, What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison and Suck on the Marrow, and has helped edit two other poetry anthologies.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Nature of African American Poetry
Camille T. Dungy xix

Cycle One: Just Looking

Ed Roberson “We Must Be Careful” 3
Lucille Clifton “the earth is a living thing” 6
Al Young “The Mountains of California: Part I” 7
G. E. Patterson “The Mountain Road Ends Here” 8
June Jordan “Queen Anne’s Lace” 9
George Moses Horton “On Summer” 10
Nikki Giovanni “The Yellow Jacket” 12
Yusef Komunyakaa “Eclogue at Twilight” 14
Marilyn Nelson “Ruellia Noctifl ora” 16
Rita Dove “Evening Primrose” 18
Robert Hayden “The Night-Blooming Cereus” 19
George Marion McClellan “A September Night” 22
Thylias Moss “Sweet Enough Ocean, Cotton” 23
Helene Johnson “Metamorphism” 25
Toni Wynn “a brown girl’s nature poem: provincetown” 26
Gerald Barrax Sr. “What More?” 27
Ed Roberson “be careful” 29
Rachel Eliza Gri÷ths “Watching Blackbirds Turn to Ghosts” 30
Alvin Aubert “If Winter Comes, Can Spring?” 32
Evie Shockley “31 words
• prose poems [#12]” 33

Cycle Two: Nature, Be with Us

Ravi Howard “We Are Not Strangers Here” 37
James A. Emanuel “For a Farmer” 39
Gerald Barrax Sr. “To Waste at Trees” 40
Carl Phillips “White Dog” 41
Evie Shockley “you must walk this lonesome” 42
Cyrus Cassells “Down from the Houses of Magic” 43
George Marion McClellan “The Ephemera” 49
Ruth Ellen Kocher “Sleepwalker on the Mountain” 50
Richard Wright #543 51
Mark McMorris “Aphrodite of Economy” 52
Marilyn Nelson “Arachis Hypogaea” 53
Anthony Walton “In the Rachel Carson Wildlife Refuge, Thinking of Rachel Carson” 54
Camille T. Dungy “Language” 55
June Jordan “For Alice Walker (a summertime tanka)” 56
Lucille Clifton “generations” 57
Yusef Komunyakaa “Work” 58
Ross Gay “Poem to My Child, If Ever You Shall Be” 60
Sterling Brown “To a Certain Lady, in Her Garden” 63
Ed Roberson “Urban Nature” 65
Reginald Shepherd “September Songs” 66

Cycle Three: Dirt on Our Hands

Richard Wright from 12 Million Black Voices 71
Anne Spencer “Another April” 74
Gerald Barrax Sr. “Barriers” 75
Lenard D. Moore “A Young Peacock” 76
Major Jackson “Urban Renewal: XIII” 77
Audre Lorde “The Bees” 78
Anthony Walton “Carrion” 80
June Jordan “look at the blackbird fall” 82
Wanda Coleman “Flight of the California Condor” 83
Camille T. Dungy “Since Everyone Can Never Be Safe” 87
Patricia Smith “Won’t Be But a Minute” 90
Michael S. Harper “Called” 91
Jean Toomer “Harvest Song” 93
Arna Bontemps “A Black Man Talks of Reaping” 95
Melvin Dixon “Wood and Rain” 96
Claude McKay “Joy in the Woods” 97
Margaret Walker “Sorrow Home” 99
Honorée Fanonne Je≈ers “Blues Aubade (or, Revision of the Lean, Post-Modernist Pastorale)” 100
Ed Roberson “romance” 102
Alice Dunbar-Nelson “April Is on the Way” 103

Cycle Four: Pests, People Too

C. S. Giscombe “Boll Weevils, Coyotes, and the Color of Nuisance” 109
Amber Flora Thomas “Miscarriage in October with Ladybugs” 114
Gregory Pardlo “Man Reading in Bed by a Window with Bugs” 116
Major Jackson “Pest” 117
Tim Seibles “Ambition II: Mosquito in the Mist” 119
Richard Wright #459 122
Thomas Sayers Ellis “The Market” 123
Tara Betts “For Those Who Need a True Story” 124
Lenard D. Moore “Postcard to an Ecologist” 126
C. S. Giscombe “Nature Boy” 127
Robert Hayden “A Plague of Starlings” 128
Janice N. Harrington “O Believer” 130
Audre Lorde “The Brown Menace or Poem to the Survival of Roaches” 132
Kwame Alexander “Life” 134
Kamilah Aisha Moon “What a Snakehead Discovered in a Maryland Pond and a Poet in Corporate America Have in Common” 135
Shane Book “The Lost Conquistador” 137
Lucille Clifton “the beginning of the end of the world” 141
Natasha Trethewey “Carpenter Bee” 142
Yusef Komunyakaa “Yellowjackets” 144

Cycle Five: Forsaken of the Earth

Alice Walker “The Flowers” 147
Phillis Wheatley “On Imagination” 149
Nikki Giovanni “For Saundra” 151
G. E. Patterson “The Natural World” 153
Langston Hughes “Lament for Dark Peoples” 154
Anne Spencer “White Things” 155
Rita Dove “Parsley” 156
Paul Laurence Dunbar “The Haunted Oak” 159
Albery Whitman from Rape of Florida, Canto I 162
Douglas Kearney “Swimchant of Nigger Mer-Folk (An Aquaboogie Set in Lapis)” 166
Clarence Major “Water usa” 167
Major Jackson “Migration” 168
Ruth Ellen Kocher “February Leaving” 169
Ed Roberson “blue horses” 171
Gwendolyn Brooks “Sick Man Looks at Flowers” 172
Arna Bontemps “Prodigal” 173
Cynthia Parker-Ohene “potters’ field” 174
Natasha Trethewey “Monument” 175

Cycle Six: Disasters, Natural and Other

Mona Lisa Saloy “Disasters, Nature, and Poetry” 179
Askia M. Touré “Floodtide” 184
Sterling Brown “Children of the Mississippi” 188
James A. Emanuel “Emmett Till” 191
devorah major “sign post” 192
Audre Lorde “Song” 193
G. E. Patterson “The Sacred History of the Earth” 195
Yusef Komunyakaa “A Greenness Taller Than Gods” 196
Patricia Spears Jones “San Francisco, Spring 1986” 197
Carl Phillips “The Cure” 199
Natasha Trethewey “Liturgy” 201
Jean Toomer “Reapers” 203
Ishmael Reed “Earthquake Blues” 204
Amber Flora Thomas “Erasure” 206
Douglas Kearney “Floodsong 2: Water Moccasin’s Spiritual” 208
Anne Spencer “Requiem” 210
Robert Hayden “Ice Storm” 211

Cycle Seven: Talk of the Animals

Sean Hill “A Shepherd’s Tale” 215
Jean Toomer “Beehive” 218
Rachel Eliza Griffiths “Black-and-White Dusk at Limantour Beach” 219
Paul Laurence Dunbar “Sympathy” 221
Melvin B. Tolson “The Sea-Turtle and the Shark” 222
Richard Wright #175 224
Harryette Mullen “European Folk Tale Variant” 225
Wendy S. Walters “Man Raised as Chicken” 226
C. S. Giscombe “Far” 227
Shara McCallum “The Spider Speaks” 228
Cyrus Cassells “The Hummingbird” 229
Tim Seibles “The Herd” 230
Cornelius Eady “Speed” 233
Ishmael Reed “Points of View” 234
Wanda Coleman “Requiem for a Nest” 235
Clarence Major “Surfaces and Masks: XXX” 236
Toi Derricotte “The Minks” 237
Janice N. Harrington “Possum” 239
Afaa Michael Weaver “The Appaloosa” 244
G. E. Patterson “April Lyric / All I Know Is” 245

Cycle Eight: What the Land Remembers

Honorée Fanonne Je≈ers “April in Eatonton” 249
Robert Hayden “Locus” 252
Myronn Hardy “Jaguaripe” 254
Janice N. Harrington “What There Was” 256
Frank X Walker “Wind Talker” 258
Lucille Clifton “mulberry fi elds” 260
E. Ethelbert Miller “I Am Black and the Trees Are Green” 261
Amaud Jamaul Johnson “The Maple Remains” 262
Douglas Kearney “Tallahatchie Lullabye, Baby” 264
June Jordan “Out in the Country of My Country” 265
Rita Dove “Three Days of Forest, a River, Free” 266
Claudia Rankine “American Light” 267
C. S. Giscombe “Look Ahead, Look South: the future” 269
Margaret Walker “Southern Song” 270
Ed Roberson “Wave” 271
Evie Shockley “her table mountain” 272
Sherley Anne Williams from “Juneteenth: The Bicentennial Poem” 274
Indigo Moor “Tap-Root” 276
Marilyn Nelson “Last Talk with Jim Hardwick” 278
Michael S. Harper “History as Apple Tree” 279

Cycle Nine: Growing Out of This Land

Camille T. Dungy “Writing Home” 283
Richard Wright #559 286
Yusef Komunyakaa “The Millpond” 287
Sean Hill “Seven Pastorals at Sixteen” 290
Janice N. Harrington “Before a Screen Door” 293
Indigo Moor “Pull” 295
C. S. Giscombe “Two Directions” 297
Marilyn Nelson “My Grandfather Walks in the Woods” 298
Stephanie Pruitt “Mississippi Gardens” 300
Gerald Barrax Sr. “I Called Them Trees” 301
Wanda Coleman “Beaches. Why I Don’t Care for Them” 303
Ruth Ellen Kocher “At 57, My Father Learns to Grow Things” 305
Gregory Pardlo “Suburban Noir” 306
June Jordan “Letter to the Local Police” 307
Frank X Walker “Homeopathic” 309
Terrance Hayes “Root” 310
Audre Lorde “What My Child Learns of the Sea” 312
Remica L. Bingham “The Ritual of Season” 313
Mark McMorris “More Than Once in Caves” 315
Al Young “Pachuta, Mississippi / A Memoir” 317

Cycle Ten: Comes Always Spring

Marilyn Nelson “First Skunk of Spring” 321
Anne Spencer “[Earth, I Thank You]” 325
Sean Hill “Bemidji in Spring” 326
Nikki Giovanni “Winter Poem” 328
Claude McKay “After the Winter” 329
Joanne V. Gabbin “For Alexis” 330
Ross Gay “Thank You” 333
George Marion McClellan “Spring Dawn” 334
James Weldon Johnson “Deep in the Quiet Wood” 335
Alice Dunbar-Nelson “Violets” 336
Claudia Rankine “The Man. His Bowl. His Raspberries.” 337
Camille T. Dungy “What to Eat, and What to Drink, and What to Leave for Poison” 338
Langston Hughes “Earth Song” 342
Jessie Redmon Fauset “Rondeau” 343
Kendra Hamilton “Southern Living” 344
Elizabeth Alexander “Geraniums” 346
Margaret Walker “My Mississippi Spring” 347
Tim Seibles “Fearless” 348

Credits 351

List of Contributors 361

Index of Authors 379

Index of Titles 383