This article was written by Isaac Yebio of Walter Johnson High School
Poetry has always held a special place in the Black community. It has been one of the most prominent art forms used by African Americans and has spread its roots across the Black diaspora. During the civil rights era, prominent poets such as Langston Hughes used the medium to express political sorrows and the struggles of the Black community. Other poets such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Robert Hayden and Ruby Dee also used the medium to express their frustrations and views of the fight for civil rights.
Black people have always used the arts to express our detriments. During slavery in the 1700s, enslaved Black people would make and sing songs about the trials they faced on plantations. This development in music would later grow to the birth of genres such as soul, jazz, and ultimately the rap genre. Rap, an acronym combining rhyme and poetry, is a descendant of poetry and heavily relies on rhyming and was also used as a medium to talk about issues regarding Black people.
Black poetry, specifically, differs from other forms of poetry culturally, structurally, and thematically. The structure of Black poetry relies on music, building blue rivers of words upon euphonious beats. It embodies the deep soul of music within the Black community since its genesis in America. From that structure builds a unique, clandestine scripture of prose that connects Black people through the guilds of shared ordeals, the quintessential Black experience. In efforts to express themselves against America’s generalizations of Black people, Black poetry offers sanctuary in dramatic lines of dialogue and binding verses of literary identity.
Poetry is more than just a simple way of writing, but a path to express the deepest anguishes of the heart without the blockings of colloquial speech. This unbridled form of expression is exactly why it is so favored among Blacks; poetry breaks past conventional barriers of literature. It doesn't yield to any one form and follow a strict byline of rules, but instead meshes to the laureates’ demand of the prose. It is a succinct dialogue between both the African and American identities and how they coexist to form the person.
Thus, Black poetry exists at the zenith of this intersection. Prose combined with the presence of the African American identity, forming a distinctly unique monolith of cultural abundance. From it comes an endless cornucopia of strength that adapts to the culture and time, perpetuating the need of Black poetry,
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