Introduction / by Kevin Young -- Bury me in a free land: 1770-1899 -- Lift every voice: 1900-1918 -- The dark tower: 1919-1936 -- Ballads of remembrance: 1936-1959 -- Ideas of ancestry: 1959-1975 -- Blue light sutras: 1976-1989 -- Praise songs for the day: 1990-2008 -- After the hurricane: 2009-2020
ONE: BURY ME IN A FREE LAND 1770-1899. On imagination ; On Recollection ; On the Death of the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield. 1770 ; To S. M. a young African Painter, on seeing his Works ; To His Excellency General Washington / Phillis Wheatley -- An Address to Miss Phillis Wheatly, Ethiopian Poetess, in Boston / Jupiter Hammon -- [Bars Fight] / Lucy Terry -- A Mathematical Problem in Verse / Benjamin Banneker -- To Eliza ; The Slave's Complaint ; On hearing of the intention of a gentleman to purchase the Poet's freedom ; Division of an estate ; The Art of a Poet ; George Moses Horton, Myself / George Moses Horton -- An Appeal to Woman ; The Grave of the Slave / Sarah Louisa Forten -- Concatination [Selected Pottery Verses, 1834-1862] / David Drake -- The Natives of America ; Reflections / Ann Plato -- Armand Lanusse: Epigram ; Camille Thierry Ideas ; Pierre Dalcour: Verse Written in the Album of Mademoiselle _____ ; Victor-Ernest Rillieux: Love and Devotion/ Les Cenelles -- America ; To Cinque / James M. Whitfield -- Hope and Confidence / Charles L. Reason -- A Life-Day / George B. Vashon -- The Emigrant / Benjamin Clark -- Song for the First of August / James Madison Bell -- A June Song ; A Parting Hymn ; In the earnest path of duty / Charlotte Forten Grimḱe -- Toussaint L'Ouverture ; Self-Mastery / Henrietta Cordelia Ray -- from The Rape of Florida ; A Question / Albery A. Whitman -- The Slave Mother ; Bury Me in a Free Land ; Learning to Read ; A Double Standard ; Songs for the People / Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.
TWO: LIFT EVERY VOICE 1900-1918. The House of Falling Leaves / William Stanley Braithwaite -- Driftwood / Olivia Ward Bush -- America ; Character or Color--Which? ; Late Mother / Carrie Williams Clifford -- Paul Laurence Dunbar / James D. Corrothers -- A Prayer ; And What Shall You Say? ; Supplication ; A Woman at Her Husband's Grave / Joseph Seamon Cotter, Jr. -- Dr. Booker T Washington to the National Negro Business League / Joseph Seamon Cotter, Sr. -- A Litany at Atlanta / W. E. B. Du Bois -- We Wear the Mask ; A Negro Love Song ; When Malindy Sings ; When de Co'n Pone's Hot ; An Ante-Bellum Sermon ; Sympathy ; A Death Song ; Compensation / Paul Laurence Dunbar -- Violets ; I Sit and Sew ; The Proletariat Speaks / Alice Dunbar-Nelson -- The Black Finger ; A Mona Lisa ; El Beso ; You ; Rosabel ; The Eyes of My Regret ; Trees ; Tenebris ; Grass Fingers ; To Keep the Memory of Charlotte Forten Grimké / Angelina Weld Grimké -- Wooing ; A Spade Is Just a Spade ; Here and Hereafter / Walter Everette Hawkins -- Retrospect / Josephine D. Heard -- When I Die ; The Lonely Mother ; Who Is That A-Walking in the Corn? ; from African Nights / Fenton Johnson -- Lift Every Voice and Sing ; Sence You Went Away ; O Black and Unknown Bards ; My City ; Go Down Death / James Weldon Johnson -- from The Fledgling Poet and the Poetry Society / George R. Margetson -- Ode to the Sun / Eloise Bibb Thompson -- To a Little Colored Boy / Priscilla Jane Thompson -- The New Negro / Lucian B. Watkins.
THREE: THE DARK TOWER 1919-1936. Japanese Hokku ; Negro Woman ; Effigy / Lewis Grandison Alexander -- Heritage ; Lines written at the Grave of Alexander Dumas ; Fantasy ; To a Dark Carl ; Dirge for a Free Spirit ; I Build America ; Epitaph / Gwendolyn B. Bennett -- The Return ; A Black Man Talks of Reaping ; Southern Mansion ; The Day-breakers / Arna Bontemps -- Ma Rainey ; Old Lem ; Slim Greer ; Strange Legacies ; Southern Cop ; To a Certain Lady, in Her Garden ; Let Us Suppose / Sterling A. Brown -- Portraiture ; Black Baby ; Impressions from a Family Album ; Coveted Epitaph ; Denial ; Idle Wonder / Anita Scott Coleman -- Longings ; Goal ; Farewell ; Having Had You ; Four Poems--After the Japanese ; For a New Mother ; I Look at Death / Mae V. Cowdery -- Yet Do I Marvel ; Incident ; Tableau ; Saturday's Child ; Heritage ; from Epitaphs ; From the Dark Tower ; Uncle Jim ; Scottsboro, Too, Is Worth Its Song / Countee Cullen -- No Images ; Nineteen-twenty-nine ; My Lord, What a Morning ; Down-Home Boy ; Carry Me Back / Waring Cuney -- The Mask ; Solace / Clarissa Scott Delany -- Dead Fires ; La Vie C'est la vie ; Oblivion / Jessie Redmon Fauset -- My Last Name / Nicolas Guillen -- Notes Found Near a Suicide / Frank Horne -- The Negro Speaks of Rivers ; The Weary Blues ; Mother to son ; Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret ; Beale Street Love ; Cross ; Personal ; Midwinter Blues ; Bound No'th Blues ; Dream Variations ; I, Too ; Song for a Dark Girl ; Let America be America Again ; from Montage of a Dream Deferred ; Madam and the Rent Man ; from Ask Your Mama / Langston Hughes -- The Singer ; The Maestro / Eva A. Jessye -- The Heart of a Woman ; Cosmopolite ; Black Woman ; Old Black Men ; Common Dust ; I Want to Die While You Love Me ; Interracial / Georgia Douglas Johnson -- Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem ; Poem ; Invocation / Helene Johnson -- Jamaica Market / Agnes Maxwell-Hall -- Christmas in de Air ; The Harlem Dancer ; Harlem Shadows ; If We Must Die ; On Broadway ; The Tropics in New York ; The Lynching ; America ; My Mother ; "The white man is a tiger at my throat" / Claude McKay -- Man and Maid / Myra Estelle Morris -- Shadow / Richard Bruce Nugent -- Requiem ; This Is My Vow / Lucia Mae Pitts -- October Prayer ; Flag Salute / Esther Popel -- Black and Blue ; The Tree of Hope / Andy Razaf -- At the Carnival ; White Things ; Sybil Warns Her Sister / Anne Spencer -- Five Vignettes ; Her Lips Are Copper Wire ; from Cane ; from Essentials ; Be with Me / Jean Toomer.
FOUR: BALLADS OF REMEMBRANCE 1936-1959. To Satch (American Gothic) ; Nat Turner or Let Him Come ; If the Stars Should Fall / Samuel Allen -- Narrative ; Night and a Distant Church ; It's Here in The ; Spyrytual / Russell Atkins -- from A Street in Bronzeville ; Beverly Hills, Chicago ; The Bean Eater ; We Real Cool ; A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon ; The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till ; The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock ; The Lovers of the Poor ; Malcolm X ; The Second Sermon on the Warpland ; Paul Robeson ; The Life of Lincoln West ; The Boy Died in My Alley ; Infirm ; I Am a Black ; An Old Black Woman, Homeless, and Indistinct / Gwendolyn Brooks -- To Julia de Burgos ; Ay, Ay, Ay of the Kinky-Haired Negress ; Poem of the Unborn Child ; Farewell in Welfare Island ; The Sun in Welfare Island / Julia de Burgos -- The Small Bells of Benin ; Etta Moten's Attic / Margaret Danner -- from Ebony Under Granite ; Mojo Mike's Beer Garden ; Four Glimpses of Night / Frank Marshall Davis -- Sorrow Is the Only Faithful One ; The Morning Duke Ellington Praised the Lord and Six Little Black Davids Tapped Danced Unto / Owen Dodson -- Those Winter Sundays ; Frederick Douglass ; Middle Passage ; Runagate Runagate ; A Letter from Phillis Wheatley ; Paul Laurence Dunbar ; [American Journal] / Robert Hayden -- The Truth ; Jazz Is My Religion ; The Nice Colored Man / Ted Joans -- Hawk Lawler: Chorus ; I, Too, Know What I Am Not ; Would You Wear My Eyes? ; War Memoir ; Walking Parker Home ; Crootey Songo ; Heavy Water Blues ; Blues for Hal Waters ; Oregon / Bob Kaufman -- from Dark Testament ; Prophecy / Pauli Murray -- A Private Letter to Brazil ; Review from Staten Island ; Man White, Brown Girl and All That Jazz / Gloria C. Oden -- Young Poet / Myron O'Higgins -- Harlem Dawn ; A Definition ; Jean-Jaques / Oliver Pitcher -- Booker T. and W.E.B. ; An Answer to Lerone Bennett's Questionnaire On a Name for Black Americans ; A Poet Is Not a Jukebox / Dudley Randall -- Ballad of American Mores ; Face of Poverty / Lucy E. Smith -- Dark Symphony ; from Harlem Gallery, Book I: The Curator / Melvin B. Tolson -- For My People ; Molly Means ; October Journey / Margaret Walker -- Between the World and Me ; Selected Haiku / Richard Wright.
FIVE: IDEAS OF ANCESTRY 1959-1975. Still I Rise ; Phenomenal Woman / Maya Angelou -- Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note ; Look for You Yesterday, Here You Come Today ; Notes for a Speech ; The Liar ; Short Speech to My Friends ; Three Modes of History and Culture ; SOS ; Black Art ; Why's 12 / Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones) -- King: April 4, 1968 / Gerald Barrax -- Blues ; All God's Chillun ; The White River ; Sam Lord / Kamau Brathwaite -- "in the inner city" ; miss rosie ; good times ; admonitions ; "being property once myself" ; the lost baby poem ; from some jesus ; cutting greens ; homage to my hips ; "the light that came to lucille clifton" ; jasper texas 1998 ; why some people be mad at me sometimes ; "i am accused of tending to the past" ; Jump Rope Rhymes (transcribed) ; study the masters ; to my last period ; wishes for sons ; "surely i am able to write poems" ; "won't you celebrate with me" / Lucille Clifton -- How Long Has Trane Been Gone ; Orisha ; Rape ; Jazz Fan Looks Back / Jayne Cortez -- Son of Msippi ; Black Star Line ; Outer Space Blues / Henry Dumas -- I Am a Black Woman / Mari Evans -- I Would Be for You Rain / Sarah Webster Fabio -- High on the Hog / Julia Fields -- Black Power ; Nikki-Rosa ; For Saundra ; Ego Tripping ; A Poem for Carol ; Legacies / Nikki Giovanni -- American History ; Dear John, Dear Coltrane ; Nightmare Begins Responsibility ; Reuben, Reuben ; Tongue-Tied in Black and White ; Last Affair: Bessie's Blues Song ; The Love Letters of Helen Pitts Douglass / Michael S. Harper -- Do Nothing till You Hear from Me ; A Coltrane Memorial / David Henderson -- Medicine Man / Calvin Hernton -- What Would I Do White? ; These Poems ; I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies ; Poem about My Rights ; Poem for Haruko / June Jordan -- Blues for Some Literary Friends & Myself ; For Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers / Keorapetse Kgositsile -- A Poem for Myself ; The Idea of Ancestry ; The Bones of My Father ; Haiku ; For Freckle-Faced Gerald ; The Violent Space ; Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane ; For Eric Dolphy ; Feeling Fucked Up / Etheridge Knight -- On Being Head of the English Department / PInkie Gordon Lane -- Coal ; Revolution Is One Form of Social Change ; A Litany for Survival ; Power ; Lunar Eclipse ; Inheritance--His / Audre Lorde -- But He Was Cool ; Don't Cry, Scream / Haki Madhubuti (Don L. Lee) -- Swallow the Lake ; Hair / Clarence Major -- Malcolm X--An Autobiography ; Don't Say Goodbye to the Porkpie Hat / Larry Neal -- 26 Ways of Looking at a Black Man / Raymond R. Patterson -- Howlin Wolf ; Big Maybelle / Sterling D. Plumpp ; From Where the Blues? ; "WE NEED" ; " ; Metagnomy / N. H. Pritchard -- Beware: Do Not Read This Poem ; Paul Laurence Dunbar in the Tenderloin ; The Reactionary Poet / Ishmael Reed -- sonnet ; poll ; the poor houses ; othello jones dresses for dinner ; American Jazz Quartet / Ed Roberson -- how i got ovah / Carolyn Rodgers -- for our lady ; A Poem for My Father ; A poem for my brother ; from Philadelphia: Spring, 1985 ; haiku (for Osage ave and Doorknop) ; haiku (for mungu and morani and the children of soweto) ; two haiku (for Clarence H. Watson and The Count) ; tanka (for papa Joe Jones who used to toss me up to the sky) ; haiku (for domestic workers in the african diaspora) ; haiku ("man. you write me so") ; tanka ("like dark old men the") ; haiku ("like ermine when i") ; haiku ("i want to make you") ; blues ; Song No. 2 / Sonia Sanchez -- Whitey on the Moon ; The Revolution Will Not Be Televised ; Home Is Where the Hatred Is / Gil Scott-Heron -- After Vallejo / A. B. Spellman -- Inauguration ; Song / Lorenzo Thomas -- One for Charlie Mingus ; Poem for My Father ; After Hearing a Radio Announcement: A Comment on Some Conditions / Quincy Troupe -- A Far Cry from Africa ; Codicil ; Blues ; from The Schooner Flight ; Sea Canes ; Volcano ; Easter ; from Omeros: Chapter VIII / Derek Walcott -- Women / Alice Walker -- blues for franks wooten ; from Maumau American Cantos: Canto 4 / Tom Weatherly -- How Stars Start ; Dance of the Infidels ; Boogie with O.O. Gabugah ; The Old O.O. Blues ; A Poem for Players / Al Young.
SIX: BLUE LIGHT SUTRAS 1976-1989. Twenty-Year Marriage ; I Can't Get Started ; Two Brothers ; The Good Shepherd: Atlanta, 1981 / AI -- from Haiti / Will Alexander -- Titta / George Barlow -- Soul Make a Path Through Shouting ; Sally Hemings to Thomas Jefferson / Cyrus Cassells -- from Portrait of a Nude Woman as Cleopatra / Barbara Chase-Riboud -- What It Means to Be Dark ; Mastectomy ; from American Sonnets / Wanda Coleman -- Harriet in the Promised Land / Sam Cornish -- Blackbottom ; The Weakness ; On the Turning Up of Unidentified Black Female Corpses ; Black Boys Play the Classics / Toi Derricotte -- Leaving Eden ; from The Arcanum Poems ; Father / Ralph Dickey -- Tour Guide: La Maison des Esclaves ; Turning Forty in the 90's ; Wednesday Mourning ; Heartbeats / Melvin Dixon -- The House Slave ; David Walker (1785-1830) ; Adolescence--II ; Banneker ; from Thomas and Beulah ; Canary ; The Return of Lieutenant James Reese Europe ; Hattie McDaniel Arrives at the Cocoanut Grove ; from Sonata Mulattica / Rita Dove -- The Dance ; The Supremes ; from Brutal Imagination / Cornelius Eady -- Brown Girl Levitation, 1962-1989 ; Concerto no. 7: Condoleezza [working out] at the Watergate / Nikky Finney -- Some Pieces ; Hand Me Down Blues ; Dark Mirror / Calvin Forbes -- This Bridge Across ; Time with Stevie Wonder in It ; Chris Gilbert: An Improvisation / Christopher Gilbert -- Vernacular Examples ; Palaver ; Sotto Voce / C. S. Giscombe -- For My Mother (May I Inherit Half Her Strength) ; For Claude McKay / Lorna Goodison -- Goldsboro Narrative #4: My father's Viet Nam tour near over ; Goldsboro Narrative #28 ; Goldsboro Narrative #33 ; Goldsboro Narrative #7 ; Annual Visit of the Quiet, Unmarried Son / Forrest Hamer -- Heavy Corners ; Civil Servant ; For My Own Protection / Essex Hemphill -- "C"ing in Colors: Blue / Safiya Henderson-Holmes -- Surplus Future Imperfect ; Woman, with wings ; Should you find me / Erica Hunt -- Deep Song / Gayl Jones -- i done got so thirsty that my mouth waters at the thought of rain / Patricia Spears Jones -- Fragments from the Diary of Amelie Patiné, Quadroon, Mistress of Monsieur Jacques R _____ / Sybil Kein -- from The Women of Plums / Dolores Kendrick -- Annabelle ; More Girl Than Boy ; Letter to Bob Kaufman ; Blue Light Lounge Sutra for the Performance Poets at Harold Park Hotel ; February in Sydney ; from Dien Cai Dau ; Venus's-flytraps ; My Father's Love Letters ; Anodyne ; Ode to the Maggot / Yusef Komunyakaa -- Falso Brilhante ; Song of the Andoumboulou: 31 / Nathaniel Mackey -- Gra'ma ; Try to Understand Papa ; Throwing Stones at the All White Pool ; Fade to Black / Colleen J. McElroy -- Life in a Sterile Environment: A Case Study ; The Day before Kindergarten: Taluca, Alabama, 1959 ; A Reconsideration of the Blackbird ; An Anointing ; Poem for My Mothers and Other Makers of Asafetida ; The Lynching / Thylias Moss -- from Muse & Drudge ; from Sleeping with the Dictionary / Harryette Mullen -- A Strange Beautiful Woman ; Sleepless Nights ; Lonely Eagles ; Star-Fix / Marilyn Nelson -- How I Became the Blues / Brenda Marie Osbey -- The Broken English Dream / Pedro Pietri -- The Black Back-Ups / Kate Rushin -- All the Way Home ; from Dreamer / Primus St. John -- Trying for Fire / Tim Seibles -- from for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf / Ntozake Shange -- Building Nicole's Mama ; Don't Drink the Water / Patricia Smith -- from Free! / Sekou Sundiata -- Inside the Blues Whale ; Scrapple ; Washing the car with My Father ; John Henry Sleeping in High Grass / Afaa Michael Weaver -- from Letters to a New England Negro / Sherley Anne Williams.
SEVEN: PRAISE SONGS FOR THE DAY 1990-2008. Blue ; The New Religion / Chris Abani -- The Venus Hottentot ; Nineteen ; Ars Poetica #28: African Leave-Taking Disorder ; Ars Poetica #100: I Believe ; Praise Song for the Day / Elizabeth Alexander -- loose strife ; Doug Flutie's 1984 Orange Bowl Hail Mary as Water into Fire / Quan Barry -- Verbal Mugging / Paul Beatty -- Prayer of the Backhanded ; Bullet Points ; 'N'em ; Another Elegy ; The Tradition / Jericho Brown -- A Balance of Blues & Angels / Darrell Burton -- nap-i-ness / Kyle Dargan -- Natural ; Black Funk / Kwame Dawes -- Wednesday Poem / Joel Dias-Porter -- Frequently Asked Questions #10 / Camille Dungy -- View of the Library of Congress from Paul Laurence Dunbar High School / Thomas Sayers Ellis -- Sugar and Brine: Ella's Understanding ; Salt / Vievee Francis -- burial ; A Small Needful Fact / Ross Gay -- Santa Ana of Grocery Carts ; Teeth ; Ode to the Little "r" / Aracelis Girmay -- Seeing the Body / Rachel Eliza Griffiths -- Black Mary Integrates the School House / Duriel E. Harris -- Touch ; Satchmo Returns to New Orleans ; The Golden Shovel ; Carp Poem / Terrance Hayes -- How to Listen ; Euphoria ; Ferguson / Major Jackson -- The Gospel of Barbecue / Honorée Fannone Jeffers -- Charity on Blind Tom ; General Bethune on Blind Tom ; Blind Boone's Vision ; Minnehaha / Tyehimba Jess -- Jesse Owens, 1963 ; Rope / A. Van Jordan -- Thirty Lines About the Fro ; My Father's Kites / Allison Joseph -- Drop it Like It's Hottento Venus / Douglas Kearney -- Hostage / Daniell Legros Georges -- Plantation ; from Voyage of the Sable Venus ; "Lucy Terry Prince Prepares for Her Marriage" / Robin Coste Lewis -- Ode to the Diasporican / Mariposa -- from Good Stock Strange Blood / Dawn Lundy Martin -- from The Big Smoke ; Robot Music / Adrian Matejka -- What the Oracle Said / Shara mcCallum -- The Keepin' It Real Awards / Tony Medina -- Blackout 1977 / Tracie Morris -- gayl jones ; cecil taylor ; johnny cash ; I ran from it but was still in it / Fred Moten -- On Confessionalism / John Murillo -- Written by Himself ; Raisin / Gregory Pardlo -- Bembe-Faced ; Arroz con Son y Clave / Willie Perdomo -- Blue ; Cotillion ; A Great Noise ; Speak Low / Carl Phillips -- I want to not have to write another word about who cops keep killing / Khadijah Queen -- from Citizen: An American Lyric / Claudia Rankine -- The Difficult Music ; The Lucky One ; Hesitation Theory ; My Mother Was No White Dove / Reginald Shepherd -- from The Lost Letters of Frederick Douglass ; statistical haiku (or, how do they discount us? let me count the ways) ; ode to my blackness / Evie Shockley -- Don't You Wonder, Sometimes? ; The Universe Is a House Party ; Declaration / Tracy K. Smith -- Offering ; Snow / Sharan Strange -- Ode to Gentrification / Samantha Thornhill -- Flounder ; Drapery Factory, Gulfport, Mississippi, 1956 ; Graveyard Blues ; Pilgrimage ; Miscegenation ; Incident / Natasha Trethewey -- Strip ; RR Lyrae: Matter / Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon -- Wind Talker ; Work Ethic / Frank X. Walker -- Dissidence ; Gwendolyn Brooks / Anthony Walton -- "The reeds shook. A wide flat ass cradled in leather pants. This" / Simone White -- Amethyst Rocks / Saul Williams -- Money Road / Kevin Young.
EIGHT: AFTER THE HURRICANE 2009-2020. How Can Black People Write about Flowers at a Time Like This / Hanif Abdurraqib -- La Negra Takes Medusa to the Hair Salon / Elizabeth Acevedo -- Cento Between the Ending and the End / Cameron Awkward-Rich -- America Will Be / Joshua Bennett -- A Postmodern Two-Step / Reginald Dwayne Betts -- upon viewing the death of basquiat / Mahogany L. Browne -- Massa's House / Dominique Christina -- Nashville / Tiana Clark -- Dear _____, / DeLana R. A. Dameron -- My First Black Nature Poem(TM) / LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs -- I saw Emmett Till this week at the grocery store / Eve L. Ewing -- Aunt Flo and Uncle Phineas / Sean Hill -- (Afterward) One Corner More / Notes on a Letter to the Singer Abbey Lincoln from Her Lover, Abraham Lincoln / Harmony Holiday -- After the Hurricane / Ishion Hutchinson -- Kansas / Gary Jackson -- Kudzu / Saeed Jones -- The moon rose over the bay. I had a lot of feelings / Donika Kelly -- One Country / Rickey Laurentiis -- Still When I Picture It the Face of God Is a White Man's Face / Shane McCrae -- Closer / Anis Mojgani -- #sayhername / Aja Monet -- The President's Wife / Morgan Parker -- Violins / Rowan Ricardo Phillips -- History / Camille Rankine -- Black Can Sleep / Justin Phillip Reed -- Children Listen / Roger Reeves -- Why Is We Americans / Alison C. Rollins -- Object Permanence / Nicole Sealey -- Gnawa Boy, Marrakesh, 1968 / Charif Shanahan -- Fisherman's Daughter / Safiya Sinclair -- dinosaurs in the hood / Danez Smith -- Your National Anthem / Clint Smith -- Prayer / Phillip B. Williams -- Ode to Herb Kent / Jamila Woods.
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