Angles of ascent: a Norton anthology of contemporary African American poetry

Part 1: Precursors

Modernists, 1940s to 1960s

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000)

The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith

Riot

Boy breaking glass

Robert Hayden (1913-1980)

For a young artist

Elegies for Paradise Valley

A letter from Phillis Wheatley

Melvin B. Tolson (1898-1966)

from Harlem Gallery

Chi

The 1960s and beyond

The Black arts movement

Amiri Baraka (1934-)

Black art

In memory of radio

An agony. as now.

A poem for Black hearts

AM/TRAK

Mari Evans (1923-)

I am a Black woman

Nikki Giovanni (1943-)

Nikki-Rosa

Ego tripping (there may be a reason why)

Bobb Hamilton (1928-1998)

Poem to a nigger cop

David Henderson (1942-)

Downtown-boy uptown

Calvin C. Hernton (1932-2001)

The distant drum

Haki Madhubuti (1942-)

But he was cool, or : he even stopped for green lights

Larry Neal (1937-1981)

Malcolm X - an autobiography

Carolyn Rodgers (1940-2010)

how i got ovah

Breakthrough

Sonia Sanchez (1934-)

Homecoming

Malcolm

blk/rhetoric

A poem for my father

Poem no. 3

Towhomitmayconcern

A.B. Spellman (1935-)

I looked & saw history caught

Edward S. Spriggs (1934-)

For Brother Malcolm

The 1960s and beyond : outside the Black arts movement

Gerald Barrax (1933-)

Eagle. Tiger. Whale.

King : April 4, 1968

Lucille Clifton (1936-2010)

lazarus

leda 1,2,3

far memory

Jayne Cortez (1936-)

Solo finger solo

In the morning

Michael S. Harper (1938-)

The yellow dishes

Yaddo, Mrs. Ames & Black men

Coliseum pool, 1960 (dream)

Don't explain : a ballad played by Dexter Gordon

June Jordan (1936-2002)

What would I do white?

Current events

Adreinne's poem : on the dialectics of the diatonic scale

Bob Kaufman (1925-1986)

from Jail poems

Battle report

I have folded my sorrows

Walking Parker home

African dream

Etheridge Knight (1931-1991)

The violent space (or when your sister sleeps around for money)

The idea of ancestry

Hard rock returns to prison from the hospital for the criminal insane

Belly song

Audre Lorde (1934-1992)

Coal

To my daughter the junkie on a train

Fishing the white water

Clarence Major (1936-)

On watching a caterpillar become a butterfly

The great horned owl

Clay Bison in a cave

Territorial claims

Colleen J. McElroy (1935-)

Paris subway tango

Crossing the Rubicon at Seventy

Ishmael Reed (1938-)

I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra

The Pope replies to the Ayatollah Khomeini

Ed Roberson (1939-) Sit in what city we're in

Eclogue

Ntozake Shange (1948-)

my father is a retired magician

nappy edges (a cross country sojourn)

Primus St. John (1939-)

The cigar maker

Trap a Congo

Catch and release

Lorenzo Thomas (1944-2005)

Onion bucket

Downtown boom

Alice Walker (1944-)

Revolutionary Petunias

On stripping bark from myself

Sherley Anne Williams (1944-1999)

from letters from a New England Negro

Mrs. Josiah Harris / August 25, 1867

Miss Ann Spencer / August 30, 1867 ; October 22, 1867 ; November 24, 1867 ; February 15, 1868

Al Young (1939-)

The song turning back into itself₃

Ravel : Bolero

A dance for Ma Rainey

Part 2: Heirs

First wave, post-1960s

Ai (1947-2010)

Hoover, Edgar J.

Conversations

The curious journey of Ulysses Paradeece after a hurricane

Cyrus Cassells (1957-)

Sally Hemings to Thomas Jefferson

Wild Indigo, because

The white iris beautifies me

Wanda Coleman (1946-)

Ars poetica

Bedtime story

American Sonnet (17)

American sonnet (54)

Toi Derricotte (1941-)

Holy cross hospital

The weakness

Invisible dreams

The minks

Melvine Dixon (1950-1992)

Climbing Montmartre

Paring potatoes

Turning forty in the 90's

Heartbeats

Rita Dove (1952-)

Nestor's bathtub

History

The fish in the stone

Daystar

Heroes

American smooth

Hattie McDaniel arrives at the coconut grove

The bridgetower

Cornelius Eady (1954-)

Photo of Miles Davis at Lennies-on-the-Turnpike, 1968

Crows in a strong wind

Christopher Gilbert (1949-2007)

She

Absentee landlord

Touching

C.S. Giscombe (1950-)

The northernmost road

The 1200N road, going East

Jewelle Gomez (1948-)

My chakabuku mama (a comic tale)

El beso

Angela Jackson (1951-)

The love of travellers (Doris, Sandra and Sheryl)

Two trains

Ida rewrites

Gayl Jones (1949-)

Deep song

Foxes

Composition with guitar and apples

Patricia Spears Jones (1951-)

Wearing my red silk Chinese jacket

Thanksgiving

Yusef Komunyakaa (1947-)

Venus's-flytraps

My father's love letters

"You and I are disappearing"

Facing it

Blue light lounge sutra for the performance poets at Harold Park Hotel

Lingo

[The jawbone of an ass. a shank]

The devil comes on horseback

Requiem

Nathaniel Mackey (1947-)

Song of the andoumboulou : 16

Glenn on Monk's Mountain

Sound and severance

Thylias Moss (1954-)

The day before Kindergarten : Taluca, Alabama, 1959

Timex remembered

One for all newborns

Mulberry breath as proof of the wave in form of question

The culture of near miss

Me and Bubble went to Memphis

Harryette Mullen (1953-)

Unspoken

All she wrote

Black Nikes

[if your complexion is a mess]

[Of a girl, in white]

Marilyn Nelson (1946-)

Mama's promise

Daughter's, 1900

Second wave, post-1960s

Elizabeth Alexander (1962-)

The Venus hottentot (1825)

Boston year

The blue whale

Thomas Sayers Ellis (1963-)

Sticks

View-master

Bright moments

All their stanzas look alike

Mr. Dynamite splits

First grade, all over again

Godzilla's avocado

Forrest Hammer (1956-)

Lesson

In the middle

from Goldsboro narratives , #4, #7, #28

Kendra Hamilton (1958-)

The science of wearing a dress

Belle's promenade : Nassau Street, Princeton

Myronn Hardy (1972-)

Undertones

On a beach : my life

The headless Saints

Making stars with Jacob Lawrence

Terrance Hayes (1971-)

What I am

At Pegasus

Derrick poem (the lost world)

Touch

Wind in a box

Major Jackson (1968-)

Don Pullen at the Zanzibar Blue Jazz Café

Some kind of crazy

from Urban renewal : viii. Block party ; xvi. ; xxi.

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (1967-)

The gospel of barbecue

Fast skirt blues

Hagar to Sarai

The wife of Lot before the fire

A. Van Jordan (1965-)

Regina Brown hears voices, kills son week before Christmas, December 18, 1996

from

The Flash reverses time

Black light

from thought clouds

Mixed couple, 1908

Discovering the camera

Carl Phillips (1959-)

Blue

X

Leda, after the swan

As from a quiver of arrows

Fretwork

Speak low

Civilization

Reginald Shepherd (1963-2008)

Orpheus plays the Bronx

How people disappear

Skin trade

Icarus on Fire island

Homeric interim

Patricia Smith (1955-)

Prologue - and then she owns you

She see what it sees

Up on the roof

Don't drink the water

Sharan Strange (1959-)

Childhood

Froggy's class

Last supper

Natasha Trethewey (1966-)

Flounder

Limen

Bellocq's Ophelia

Letter home

Elegy for the native guards

Pastoral

Incident

Myth

Kevin Young (1970-)

Letters from the North Star

Eddie Priest's barbershop & notary

The game

For the Confederate dead

Crowning

Third wave, post-1960s

Jericho Brown (1976-)

Track 1 : lush life

Prayer of the backhanded

Track 4 : reflections

Track 5 : Summertime

Michael Sibble Collins (1959-)

Six sketches : when a soul breaks

Poetry

Bryan, Texas procession

Kyle Dargan (1980-)

Search for Robert Hayden

Microphone fiend

Palinode, once removed

Man of the family

Camille T. Dungy (1972-)

What to eat, and what to drink, and what to leave for poison

Cleaning

880-01 Swarm

The killed rabbit

Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon (1971-)

Garden

Lost

Bop : the North Star

Crystal Williams (1970-)

This parable, this body

Extinction

Enlightenment

Ronaldo Wilson (1970-)

Brad Pitt, Kevin Bacon, and the Brown Boy's mother

Serena Williams, whiteness, and the act of writing

On the C train the Black object ponders Amuzati's family eaten in the Congo.