Uncovering how poetry refigures Black history to imagine a more just present and future
“Poets are lyric historians,” proclaimed Langston Hughes. Today, historical poetry offers a lyric history necessary to our current moment—poetry with the power to correct the past, realign the present, and create a more hopeful, or even hoped-for, future. The Necessary Past: Revising History in Contemporary African American Poetry focuses on six of today’s most celebrated poets: Elizabeth Alexander, Natasha Trethewey, A. Van Jordan, Kevin Young, Frank X Walker, and Camille T. Dungy. Their works reimagine the interiority of Black historical figures like the so-called Venus Hottentot Sara Baartman and the would-be spelling champion MacNolia Cox, the African American Native Guard who fought in the Civil War and the unknown victims of domestic violence, Jack Johnson and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Medgar Evers and those freed and enslaved in the early nineteenth century. These poets shift the power dynamic in revising our shared history, reconfiguring who speaks and whose stories are told, and writing a past that frees readers to change the present and envision a more just future.
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction The Contemporary Wave of Historical Poetry
Chapter 1 Praising the Seers: Celebrating the Historical Influence of Robert Hayden, Michael S. Harper, and Rita Dove
Chapter 2 Digging Up the Past: Elizabeth Alexander’s The Venus Hottentot
Chapter 3 Tending the Graves: Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard
Chapter 4 Achieving the Extraordinary: A. Van Jordan’s M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A
Chapter 5 Sampling History: Kevin Young’s To Repel Ghosts: The Remix
Chapter 6 Reconciling the Past: Frank X Walker’s Turn Me Loose
Chapter 7 Excavating Captive Lives: Camille T. Dungy’s Suck on the Marrow
Conclusion The Historical Impulse, the Zeitgeist of a Generation
Notes
Bibliography
