Feb

25

Black History Month 2007

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

February 25, 2007 |

In honor of Black History Month, I’d like to offer introductions to three writers whose work you might enjoy.


Bobby Norfolk is not, strictly speaking, a writer, but he is a teacher and full-time storyteller who also worked for ten years as a National Park Service Ranger. Since I was a child and had a book of stories about the wily African spider Anansi, who sometimes plays tricks and sometimes gets tricked, I’ve loved this character. Norfolk’s recording Anansi Time, a collection of his tellings of Anansi stories, is the most delightful and entertaining I’ve ever heard.

norfolk.jpg

Norfolk begins the tape by explaining that when he visited Ghana a woman told him, “At four-thirty every afternoon, we try to gather together and have Anansi time.” Although marketed to children, Norfolk’s sense of humor will also appeal to adults, and, hey, some days we could all use some Anansi time.

 

 

 

Nikki Giovanni is a poet whose collection Love Poems brings together works from her previous books as well as twenty new poems.

giovanni1.jpg Dedicated to her late friend Tupac Shakur, Giovanni makes her no-nonsense attitude clear in poems such as I Do Have My Likes And Dislikes in which she says, “I like caviar and pecan fried chicken and double decker sandwiches/white bread extra mayo”. Funny, smart, and frequently serious all at the same time, Giovanni is also known for the expression, “Sacred cows make the best burgers.” She can also be wonderfully affirming, such as in Her Flying Trapeze:

Some will tell you the glass is half full

Others see it as mostly empty

An ounce of prevention is a pound of cure

She flies through the sky two tattoos on her thigh

Alone on her flying trapeze

Surprisingly few people have heard of Robert Hayden, even though his poem Those Winter Sundays may be one of the most anthologized poems of the Twentieth Century. In spite of fearing the “chronic angers”, the poem ends with the beautiful and surprising couplet:

What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Perhaps what’s most surprising is that, as well known as this particular poem is, Robert Hayden’s other poems aren’t more widely recognized. He speaks with a clear, thoughtful elegance about mundane things, like workmen shooting down starlings on the Fisk Campus where he taught, and, as he walks among them, says, “the troublesome/starlings,/frost-salted lie, troublesome still.”

rhayden.jpg The subjects in Hayden’s Collected Poems range from works of art–Monet’s “Waterlilies”, Richard Hunt’s “Arachne”, Egyptian masks–to Greek mythology, American history and literary history, with poems about Crispus Attucks, Nat Turner, and Phillis Wheatley. His poem Astronauts, one of his last, before he embarked on the ambitious American Journal, ends, like Those Winter Sundays, with a question, but this time a question for all of us:

    They loom there
heroic antiheroes,
smaller than myth
poignantly human.
Why are we troubled?
What do we ask of these men?
What do we ask of ourselves?


Comments

Name (required)

Email (required)

Website

Speak your mind

<< Post Navigation >>

« « Beer Of the Week (February 25, 2007). | Dark Side of the Moon. » »



-->