Even as much of the world is still reeling from the coronavirus pandemic, people across the United States have taken to the streets, calling for racial justice and an end to police brutality. We asked 15 poets, including Kwame Alexander, Joy Harjo and Arthur Sze, about the poets and poetry they’re reading in this time of upheaval.
Kwame Alexander
I’m reading poets from the Black Arts Movement — Haki Madhubuti, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni — because they creatively mirrored the unrest of the enraged masses who took to the streets during the ’60s and ’70s … because they were politically galvanizing … because they reminded us of the beauty and goodness of being Black. All things we need in this moment.
Kwame Alexander is the author of “The Undefeated,” which won the 2020 Randolph Caldecott Medal and a 2020 Newbery Honor.
Chen Chen
I would not be the poet I am without the work and the mentorship of Black poets. I am rereading poems by Aracelis Girmay, my brilliant former teacher; Jericho Brown, who picked my book for publication, then helped me seriously revise it; and Robert Hayden, who passed in 1980 and who deserves a wider and more engaged readership today. I recommend “The Black Maria VIII” by Girmay, Brown’s “Duplex” that begins “I begin with love”; and “Ice Storm,” by Hayden.
Chen Chen is the author of “When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities.”
Natalie Diaz
Canisia Lubrin’s “The Dyzgraphxst” is on time in reminding us that language is a performance, a re-enactment of the deeds we have done and practice for those we might yet do. The pressure she puts on pronouns by disjointing who is defined by the “I,” the “you” and the “we” helps us to form what could be the most important questions of this radical summer: Who am I; who are you; who are we; in relation to the world we’d like to live in?
Natalie Diaz is the author of “Postcolonial Love Poem” and a 2018 MacArthur Fellow.
Camonghne Felix
Right now, on a daily basis, I’m turning back to “Poem About My Rights,” by June Jordan. In this moment of despair, “Poem About My Rights” reminds me of my inherent political autonomy, and of the urgent necessity that I use that autonomy to reach for political imagination — for some of us, political imagination and the ability to see and construct a safer, healthier future is not a matter of convenience, but a matter of life or death.
Camonghne Felix is the author of “Build Yourself a Boat.”
Forrest Gander
In “All That Beauty,” Fred Moten creates a kind of communitarian poetics, citing lists of others whose presences come to bear on poems that merge qualities of philosophy, free jazz, art criticism, political critique (focused on racism and social constructions of the self) and joyous sonic elán. Another flamboyantly risky, formally daring and profoundly relevant book is Srikanth Reddy’s “Underworld Lit,” which explores transnationalism and comparative literatures while ventriloquizing our 21st-century zeitgeist of restlessness and insecurity. “Runaway,” Jorie Graham’s expansive new book, insistently tunes us to the human urgency for wholeness, for the meanings of embodiment in a time when “some of us / are murdered, and some of us have mouths that keep saying yes….”
Forrest Gander is the author of “Be With,” which won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
Joy Harjo
Leslie Silko’s witchery poem, “A Long Time Ago,” attributes evil in the Americas to a story that could not be turned back; it is a classic and will be reprinted in the forthcoming anthology “When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry.” A new collection of poetry by Craig Santos Perez, “Habitat Threshold,” is a powerful sequence of poems addressing environmental destruction and how it is associated with racial and cultural hatred and injustice. I return to Audre Lorde again and again. Everything by her, begin with “Coal.”
Joy Harjo is the U.S. poet laureate and the author, most recently, of “An American Sunrise.”
Cathy Park Hong
Wanda Coleman, who died at the age of 67 in 2013, may be one of America’s best sonneteers but she was never celebrated as such during her lifetime because she didn’t play nice. Coleman was dismissed as too angry, too despairing, too contradictory, too unruly and too black. As a single mother who grew up in Watts, Coleman was too honest about the failures of this nation’s deep-rooted racism at a time when editors wanted black poetry sandpapered down for white readers. Now, thanks to the editorship of Terrance Hayes, Black Sparrow Press has published “Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems,” a handsome volume that includes many of her terrifying and fearlessly inventive sonnets: “towards the locusts of social impotence itself/i see myself thrown heart first into this ruin/not for any crime/but being.”
Cathy Park Hong is the author, most recently, of “Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning.”
Ilya Kaminsky
What is an epic of our moment? Can a lyric poem rival it? Among the poems I am reading and rereading right now, “Middle Passage,” by Robert Hayden (which can be found in his “Collected Poems”), looms large. Why? Because it explains American history better than any other text I have ever read. Describing a journey of a slave ship, Hayden’s is a documentary piece, yes, but also a chorus, a hymnal, an incantation, a lyric narrative, a drama, an epic account. It combines voices of the crew, a hymnal, a voice of a poet and speeches of litigants in court, among others; it’s an elegy but also a poem of protest. Its structure is spellbinding. Which is to say: It defies categories, and uses all of them to enact history and show the reader’s own complicity. It was written decades ago, but speaks to this very moment we are in: “you whose wealth, whose tree of liberty / are rooted in the labor of your slaves.”
Ilya Kaminsky is the author, most recently, of “Deaf Republic.”
Ada Limón
I love reading whole books of poems, but lately I have been simply reading individual poems over and over that speak to me in this moment. When I think of all the elders we have lost I keep reading the gorgeous elegy “Second Line,” by Robin Coste Lewis. For moments of historic context and lyrical power, I keep returning to the poem “Inheritance: Spinning Noose Clears Its Throat,” by Phillip B. Williams. I read not only to feel connected to the world, but to remember that people have managed to make incredible poems out of deep suffering. Just that simple fact gives me hope.
Ada Limón is the author, most recently, of “The Carrying.”
Shane McCrae
Of “Incendiary Art,” Patricia Smith wrote, “I wanted to explore the ways our streets, our homes and our bodies strain toward fire.” Now that we are all burning, the poem’s evocation of the tinder that was everywhere, strangely, soothes.
Shane McCrae is the author, most recently, of “The Gilded Auction Block.”
José Olivarez
I find myself returning to June Jordan’s poem, “I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies.” This poem is a cup of coffee on the days I feel exhausted by the state of our country and world. It’s a reminder to get to work.
José Olivarez is the author of “Citizen Illegal.”
Kiki Petrosino
I find myself returning to Canto 33 of Dante’s “Paradiso.” After journeying through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven, the pilgrim Dante finally achieves an ecstatic vision of the universe; he observes a series of revolving spheres whose orbits are governed by “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.” It’s exhilarating, in these days of strife and division, to imagine that divine love could encompass the multiplicity of creation, that we could be stars, spinning together.
Kiki Petrosino is the author, most recently, of “White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia.”
Safiya Sinclair
“2019” has been a necessary song for me in the last few months, not only for its beautiful urgency but also for its insurgent call to arms. Here Rickey Laurentiis so potently conjures not just the abhorrent centuries of violence against Black people in America, but the way the American media and its white gaze devours and almost seems to demand Black trauma and death as a bottomless norm. But this poem also reminds me of the capacious pleasures of the body; that our Blackness is defined not through pain but through its numerous delights, that I might listen to the wind in its leaves, even if in the United States, a tree is never just a tree.
Safiya Sinclair is the author, most recently, of “Cannibal.”
Arthur Sze
I’m reading “House of Fact, House of Ruin,” by Tom Sleigh. In these poems Tom Sleigh draws on his experience working as a journalist in the Middle East and Africa, confronting various forms of trauma without averting his gaze. His complex, disturbing vision and poetic mastery make this book an arresting read.
Arthur Sze is the author, most recently, of “Sight Lines,” which won the 2019 National Book Award for poetry.
Ocean Vuong
I turn often, when my nerve and courage fail me, to Li-Young Lee’s poems, especially to his debut collection, “Rose.” In a work of majestic hope cast through language rich and deftly sculpted, Lee manages to weld the holy with the hellish in ways that both mirror and expand the plight of our species, its history, its joys and wild beauties at once.
Ocean Vuong is the author, most recently, of “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” and a 2019 MacArthur Fellow.
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