Title: 12 Poems to Read for Black History Month | Academy of American Poets
Headings: 12 Poems to Read for Black History Month
12 Poems to Read for Black History Month
Tyehimba Jess on "We Real Cool" by Gwendolyn Brooks
Safiya Sinclair on "won't you celebrate with me" by Lucille Clifton
Rickey Laurentiis on "Heartbeats" by Melvin Dixon
Rowan Ricardo Phillips on "American History" by Michael S. Harper
Toi Derricotte on "Hurricane" by Yona Harvey
Marilyn Nelson on "Middle Passage" by Robert Hayden
Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib on “We Should Make a Documentary About Spades” by Terrance Hayes
Camille Rankine on "Let America Be America Again" by Langston Hughes
Mahogany L. Browne on “Brief History of Hostility” by Jamaal May
Ruth Ellen Kocher on "Coherence in Consequence" by Claudia Rankine
Afaa Michael Weaver on "For My People" by Margaret Walker
Camille T. Dungy on "On Being Brought from Africa to America" by Phillis Wheatley

Content: A great poem releases the language it uses from the tether of its normal terms—not to destroy language but to reveal the wounds therein and enliven them and, in turn, the entire language. That the explosive first line carries five stresses in its six syllables; that the poem posits a “me” and the possibility of multiple “yous” (an addressed second person and a rhetorical one); that the net is torqued into an embedded clause you have to see and swallow before moving on to the drowning; that we lose a sense of protagonist and antagonist, moral gravity; that the poem is in search of gravity among its tragic parts and dangling question—what to say but to read it, parse it, memorize it, and pay it forward? Why is it not in every canon? Can't find what you can't see, can you? Rowan Ricardo Phillips is the author of two books of poetry, Heaven (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015) and The Ground (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012). He divides his time between New York City and Barcelona, Spain.