Two Powerful Poets-Maya and Sonia!

Maya and Sonia! Two powerful female poets who through their poetry speak volumes to the world. They speak much to you and I. Let us learn a little about them and enjoy their works.

Maya Angelou-Maya may have changed her childhood name, but she has never forgotten her childhood. Born Marguerite Johnson in 1928 in St. Louis Missouri (Mocha, there's that St. Louis again!), the adult Maya Angelou recalls the events and difficulties of her past in her autobiography, 'I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.' In the poem 'Life Doesn't Frighten Me,' she explores the worries and concerns that a young person conquers as she moves toward adulthood. I don't know if any one of you have ever read the book or saw the movie but I can most certainly tell you this: it took great boldness for her to do so and to survive one of life's tragedies of being sexually assaulted by a mother's boyfriend. I can rightfully identify with Maya and I can definitely, very much so say that I too, have survived one of life's worst tragedies a young girl can ever experience and live through. I can write about it, talk about it and walk tall about it without shedding a tear. I survived just like Maya. And will continue to do so. I am a Phenomenal Woman just the same.

here is a poem 'Life Doesn't Frighten Me' by Maya Angelou

Shadows on the wll
Noises down the hall
Life doesn't frighten me at all
Bad dogs barking loud
Big ghosts in a cloud
Life doesn't frighten me at all.

Mean old Mother Goode
Lions on the loose
They don't frighten me at all
Dragons breathing flame
On my counterpane
That doesn't frighten me at all.

I go boo
Make them shoo
I make fun
Way they run
I won't cry
So they fly
I just smile
They go wild
Life doesn't frighten me at all.

Tough guys in a fight
All alome at night
Life doesn't frighten me at all.

Panthers in the park
Strangers in the dark
No, they don't frighten me at all.

That new classrooom where
Boys all pull my hair
(Kissy little girls
With their hair in curls)
They don't frighten me at all.

Don't show me frogs and snakes
And listen for my scream,
If I'm afraid at all
It's only in my dreams.

I've got a magic charm
That I keep up my sleeve,
I can walk the ocean floor
And never have to breathe.

Life doesn't frighten me at all
Not at all
Not at all.
Life doesn't frighten me at all.

maya angelou



Sonia Sanchez--born 1934

She was born in Birmingham Alabama in 1934, Sanchez has taught creative writing and African-American literature in at least eight universities across the United States. Now a professor of Eglish at Temple University, she has performed her poems and given poetry workshops in Australia, England, Cuba, Nicaragua and Africa, as well as the states. No other American figure blends the roles of mother, teacher, poet, and political activist more sincerely and energetically than Sanchez.

Her poems manifest the spiritual link between art and politics. If her earlier poems are to be appreciated, the reader must forget all "conceptions" of what the poem is, and listen attentively to Sanchez's attacks on the Euro-American politicial, social, and aesthetic establishments. Her work is intentionally non-intellectual, unacademic and anti-middleclass. "To blk/record buyers" is characteristic of her work which aims at teaching blacks to know themselves, to be self-reliant, and strong. In this poem, she attacks the Righteous Brothers for their aping a style which originated with black performers such as James Brown. What appears to be a list of the activities in the black urban community contains over three hundred years of black history. Sex, language and retorts, drinking, mocking war materials, crime and religion are the placeboes blacks have used for comfort. Sanchez's poem ends with the "AAAH, AAAH, AAAH, yeah" which both affirms her points and echoes the style of popular artists like Aretha Franklin and James Brown. Her language comes out of her immediate surroundings and accents her characters' lifestyles. Her refusual to use standard, academic English is a part of a political statement which undermines the use of language as a tool for oppression. Black women, men and children are her interests as far as relationships go. Two of her books are written for the young. "It's A New Day" and "A Sound Investment" are the titles. Sanchez's purpose is to teach black people to know themselves, to be themselves and to love themselves.

Here's the poem: to blk/record/buyers

don't play me no
righteous bros.
white people
ain't rt bout nothing
no mo.
don't tell me bout
foreign dudes
cuz no blk/
people are grooving on a
sunday afternoon.
they either
making out/
signifying/
drinking/
making molotov cocktails/
stealing
or rather more taking their goods
from the honky thieves who
ain't hung up
on no pacifist/jesus/
cross/ but.
play blk/songs
to drown out the
shit/screams of honkies. AAAH.
AAAH AAAH yeah. brothers.
andmanymoretogo.

1969. sonia sanchez

I hope that you have enjoyed the two poems by our dear poets with their unique styles. See ya next week!

Queen Writer

Poetic Art

Three Women Poets and their Poems.......

Hello. This week I am just going to write about several female poets and their poetry. This is in continuation of National Poetry Month. Female poets have contributed much in the way of their writings and have caused others to follow in their footsteps.

LUCILLE CLIFTON is author of several award-winning collections of poetry and is a two-time nominee for the Pulitzer Prize.
Lucille was born in Depew, NY and was educated at Howard University and Fredonia Stte Teachers' College. In addition to her career as a sales clerk, literature assistant, visiting writer, and poet-in-residence, Clifton has raised six children and published more than 20 books of poetry, fiction and children's literature. She was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, received the Juniper prize in 1980 and was named Maryand's official poet laurete. She says of herwork: "I m a black woman poet and I sound like one."


New Bones

we will wear
new bones again
we will leave
these raining days
break out through
another month
into sun and honey time
world buzz over us like bees,
we be splendid in new ones
other people think they know
how long life is
how strong life is
we know.

Miss Rosie

When I watch you
wrapped up like garbage
sitting, surrounded by the smell
of too old potato peels
or
when I watch you
in your own man's shoes
with the little toe cut out
sitting, waiting for your mind
like next week's grocery
I say
when I watch you
you wet brown bag of a woman
who used to be the best looking gal
in Georgia
used to be called the Georgia Rose
I stand up
through your destruction
I stand up

To My Last Period

well girl, goodbye
after thirty-eight years
thirty-eight years and you
never arrived
splendid in your red dress
without trouble for me
somewhere, somehow

now it is done
and i feel just like the grandmother who,
after the hussy has gone
sit holding her photograph
and sighing, wasn't she
beautiful? wasn't she beautiful?

Next poet is: GWENDOLYN BROOKS: Gwendolyn was born in Topeka, Kansas and grew up in Chicago. A graduate of Wilson Junior College, she has taught poetry at colleges and universities all over the country. In 1950, she was ther first African Amerivan to win the Pulitzer Prize. She was named poet laureate of Illinois in 1968 and was appointed poetry consultant to the Library of Congress in 1985, the first African American to hold the position. "My aim," she once said, :is to write poems that will somehow successfully call...all black people in pulpits...black people in mines, on farms, on thrones." Among her reently published books are Black (1987) and The Near-Johannesburg Boy 1986.

The Sonnet-Ballad by Gwendolyn Brooks

Oh mother, mother, where is happiness?

They took my lover's tallness off to war,

Left me lamenting, Now I cannot guess

What can I use an empty heart- cup for.

He won't be coming back here anymore.

Some day the war will end, but oh I knew

When he went walking grandly out that door

That my sweet love would have to be untrue.

Would have to be untrue. Would have to court our

Coquettish death, whose impudent and strange

Possessive arms and beauty of a sort

Can make a hard man hesitate- and change

And he will be the one to stammer, "Yes."

Oh mother, mother, where is happiness?

NIKKI GIOVANNI has recently publidhed an illustrated 'love poem' entitled Knoxville, Tenessee for her grandmother, Louvenia Watson. She is also the author of The Selected Poems of Nikki Giovani. She is also the author of The Selected poems of Nikki Giovanni(1996), the children's book The Genie in the Jar and other works. The 1996 winner of the Langston Hughes Award, Dr. Giovanni is a member of the National Advisory Board of the Underground Railroad Freedom Center. In April 2002, she was awarded the first Rosa L. Parks Woman of Courage Awaed.

AGE

we tend to fear old age as some sort of disorder

that can be cured with the proper dose of aspirin

or perhaps a bit of Ben-Gay for the shoulders

it does of course pay to advertise

one hates the idea of the first gray hair

a shortness of breath, devastating blows to the ego

indications we are doing what comes natually

it's almost laughable

that we detest aging

when we first became aware we want it

little girls of four or five push

with eyes shining brightly at gran or mommy

the lie that they are seven or eight

little girls at ten worry

that a friend has gotten her monthly

and she has not

little girls of twelve

cn be socially crushed

by lack of nobs on their chests

little boys of fourteen want

to think they want a woman

the little penis that simply won't erect

is shattering to their idea of manhood

if perhaps they get a little peach fuzz

on their faces they may survive

adolescence proving there may indeed be life

after high school

the children begin to play older

without kowing the price is weariness

age teaches us that our virtues

are either virtuous or our vices

foul

age doesn't matter really

what frightens is mortality

it dawns upon us that we can die

at some point it occurs as we surely shall

it is not death we fear

but the loss of youth

not the youth of our teens

where most of the thinking took place

somewhere between the navel and the knee

but the youth of our thirties whose career

decisions were going well

and we were respected for our abilities

or the youth of our forties

where our decisions proved if not right

then not wrong either

and the house after all is half paid

it may simply be that work

is so indelibly tied

to age that the loss

of work brings the depression

of impending death

there are so many too many

who have never worked

and therefore for whom death

is a consant companion

as lack of marriage

lower divorce rates

lack of life

presents death

the unwillingness to try

is worse than any failure

in youth our ignorance gives us couage

with age our courage gives us hope

with hope we learn that man is more

than the sum of what he does

we also are what we wish we did

and age teaches us

that even that does not matter.

Nikki G. is powerful...I did not have much background information, I have her website address but I could not get to it once I started this blog. next week, I will feature another one of her poems with a bio from birth. also Maya Angelou and Rita Dove....stay tuned!

Poet for the Week-Langston Hughes

This week I am going to feature Mr. Langston Hughes. This is in honor of National Poetry Month.

James Langston Hughes was born February 1, 1902 in Joplin, Missouri. His parents divorced when he was a small child, and his father moved to Mexico. He was raised by his grandmother until he was thirteen, when he moved to Lincoln, Illinois, to live with his mother and her husand, eventually settling in Cleveland, Ohio. It was in Lincoln, Illinois, that Hughes began writing poetry. Following graduation, he spent a year in Mexico and a year at Columbia University. During these years, he held odd jobs as an assistant cook, launderer, and a busboy, and traveled to Africa and Europe working as a seaman. In November of 1924, he moved to Washington, DC. Hughes first book of poetry, The Weary Blues, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1926. He finished his college education at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania three years later. In 1930 his first novel, Not Without Laughter, won the Harmon gold metal for literature.

Hughes, who claimed Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman as his insightful, colorful portrayals of black life in America from the twenties through the sixties. He wrote novels, short stories and plays, as well as poetry, and is also known for his engagement with the world of jazz and the influence it had on his writing, as in Montage of a Dream Deferred. His life and work were enormously important in shaping the artistic contributions of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920's. Unlike other notable black poets of the period-Claude McKay, Jean Toomer and Countee Cullen, Hughes refused to differentiate between his personal experience and the common experience of black America. He wanted to tell the stories of his people in ways that reflected their actual culture, including both their suffering and their love of music, laughter, and language itself.

Hughes died of complications from prostrate cancer on May 22, 1967, in New York. In his memory, his residence at 20 East 127th Street in Harlem, New York City, has been given landmark status by the New York City Preservation Commission, and East 127th Street was renamed "Langston Hughes Place."

In the Crisis magazine of 2002 January/February, Langston Hughes is featured. The Times and Life of Langston Hughes is so very interesting. Here are a few comments from some noted persons:

Julian Bond says: "I first met Lanston Hughes when he visited my college on one of the many speaking tours he made when poetry wouldn't support him. He was like his poetry: sly, humorous, deeply connected to his roots and race, kind and thoughtful, a fierce enemy of injustice and a keen observer of his time and place and fellow human beings. He-and his poetry-are very much alive today.'

Tricia Rose, Professor of American Studies, NYU says: "Langston Hughes is especially important because many of his works serve as a bridge between what many perceive as a value-laden separation between folk and 'serious' literature and poetry. Hughes took the voices of everyday folk quite seriously; he saw the literary soul in everyday life. It is precisely this inclusive, collective spirit that attracts young writers and readers today."

E. Ethelbert Miller, Humanities Council of Washington DC-"Langston Hughes looked into the mirror of hs race and fell in love with what he saw. Hughes was witness to the Great Migration of African Americans moving from the south up into the urban north. His work documents our history, humor, blues and good times. He is our dreamkeeper; a man who used every genre to celebrate Blackness. I've known writers-Langston Hughes in number one."

Houston A. Baker, Jr. Professor of English, Duke University says: "Langston Hughes was the first truly global Afro American poet. His work influenced writers from Cuba to Senegal, from South America to the Soviet Union. He moved through an array of literary and cultural genres with the spare economy of naural genius. His work-and, more imporantly, his almost missionary commitment to the souls of Black Folk-should be much better known to the present generation."

Hughes celebrated the human condition. check these lines out.

"Life Is Fine"

So since I'm still livin
I guess I will live on
I could've died for love
But for livin I was born
Though you may hear me holler
Or you may hear me cry
I'll be dogged, sweet baby,
If you're gonna see me die.

Poem (Youth)

We have tomorrow
Bright before us
Like a flame.

Yesterday
A night-gone thing
A sun-down name.

And dawn today
Broad arch above the road we came.

We march!

Langston Hughes

next week, Maya Angelou!!!