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Neglect
By
Laura Ivers Daddy what is
a dream?
A dream?
A dream is
nothing
but a balloon
drifting on a string.
If you let it
go,
it will float
far away from sight.
Daddy what is
a song?
A song?
A song is
nothing
but notes
spiraling though the air.
If you walk far
enough away,
it will cease to
be heard.
Daddy what is
a voice?
A voice?
A voice is
nothing
but a cry
whimpering in the night
If you ignore it
long enough,
it will settle down and die.
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I used my poetry to handle memories
that were surfacing from my childhood. At this time I
started reading the poetry of Langston Hughes . . . and then
everything just sort of fell into place. The abuse which took
place in my family seemed to mirror our racist society at large
and so I began to play with these themes within my writing.
I wanted to unveil the hidden structures that runs throughout
the three sisters of oppression: Racism, Sexism, and
Classism.
I sought to unveil not out of a sense of
revenge, but rather as a call to action . . . to heal over this
dreadful past. While I was doing my healing work, racism
got hooked up in my mind as the perpetrator. It felt like
it was literally raping my soul. And then there was the
coming to terms with my own Whiteness . . . for what my culture
had done. Writing these poems was the only way that I knew
how to ask for forgiveness; and it was the only way that I knew
how to effectively express my sense of outrage.
Poetry became my balm of salvation, my experience of Amazing
Grace.
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Life on Mars
By Tracy K. Smith
Tracy K. Smith, author of Life on Mars has been selected as the winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. In its review of the book, Publishers Weekly noted the collection's "lyric brilliance" and "political impulses [that] never falter." A New York Times review stated, "Smith is quick to suggest that the important thing is not to discover whether or not we're alone in the universe; it's to accept—or at least endure—the universe's mystery. . . . Religion, science, art: we turn to them for answers, but the questions persist, especially in times of grief. Smith's pairing of the philosophically minded poems in the book’s first section with the long elegy for her father in the second is brilliant." Life on Mars follows Smith's 2007 collection, Duende, which won the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, the only award for poetry in the United States given to support a poet's second book, and the first Essence Literary Award for poetry, which recognizes the literary achievements of African Americans. The Body’s Question (2003) was her first published collection. Smith said Life on Mars, published by small Minnesota press Graywolf, was inspired in part by her father, who was an engineer on the Hubble space telescope and died in 2008.
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The Last Holiday: A Memoir
By Gil Scott Heron
Shortly after we republished The Vulture and The Nigger Factory, Gil started to tell me about The Last Holiday, an account he was writing of a multi-city tour that he ended up doing with Stevie Wonder in late 1980 and early 1981. Originally Bob Marley was meant to be playing the tour that Stevie Wonder had conceived as a way of trying to force legislation to make Martin Luther King's birthday a national holiday. At the time, Marley was dying of cancer, so Gil was asked to do the first six dates. He ended up doing all 41. And Dr King's birthday ended up becoming a national holiday ("The Last Holiday because America can't afford to have another national holiday"), but Gil always felt that Stevie never got the recognition he deserved and that his story needed to be told. The first chapters of this book were given to me in New York when Gil was living in the Chelsea Hotel. Among the pages was a chapter called Deadline that recounts the night they played Oakland, California, 8 December; it was also the night that John Lennon was murdered. Gil uses Lennon's violent end as a brilliant parallel to Dr King's assassination and as a biting commentary on the constraints that sometimes lead to newspapers getting things wrong. —Jamie Byng, Guardian / Gil_reads_"Deadline" (audio) / Gil Scott-Heron
& His Music Gil Scott
Heron Blue Collar
Remember Gil Scott- Heron |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update
18 April 2012
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