To the Right Honorable William, Earl of Dartmouth

By Phillis Wheatley

Hail, happy day, when, smiling like the morn,
Fair Freedom rose New-England to adorn:
The northern clime beneath her genial ray,
Dartmouth, congratulates thy blissful sway:
Elate with hope her race no longer mourns,
Each soul expands, each grateful bosom burns,
While in thine hand with pleasure we behold
The silken reins, and Freedom's charms unfold.
Long lost to realms beneath the northern skies

She shines supreme, while hated faction dies:
Soon as appear'd the Goddess long desir'd,
Sick at the view, she languish'd and expir'd;
Thus from the splendors of the morning light
The owl in sadness seeks the caves of night.
No more, America, in mournful strain
Of wrongs, and grievance unredress'd complain,
No longer shalt thou dread the iron chain,
Which wanton Tyranny with lawless hand
Had made, and with it meant t' enslave the land.

Should you, my lord, while you peruse my song,
Wonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung,
Whence flow these wishes for the common good,
By feeling hearts alone best understood,
I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate
Was snatch'd from Afric's fancy'd happy seat:
What pangs excruciating must molest,
What sorrows labour in my parent's breast?
Steel'd was that soul and by no misery mov'd
That from a father seiz'd his babe belov'd:
Such, such my case. And can I then but pray
Others may never feel tyrannic sway?

For favours past, great Sir, our thanks are due,
And thee we ask thy favours to renew,
Since in thy pow'r, as in thy will before,
To sooth the griefs, which thou did'st once deplore.
May heav'nly grace the sacred sanction give
To all thy works, and thou for ever live
Not only on the wings of fleeting Fame,
Though praise immortal crowns the patriot's name,
But to conduct to heav'ns refulgent fane,
May fiery coursers sweep th' ethereal plain,
And bear thee upwards to that blest abode,
Where, like the prophet, thou shalt find thy God.

For more on Wheatley, see https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/phillis-wheatley

For more on Professor Kirsten Lee, see her website: https://cla.auburn.edu/directory/kirsten-lee/

To learn more about Niki Herd, you can visit her website.

The Stuff of Hollywood was just published by Copper Canyon Website. Please visit their website to purchase a copy.

Photo credit: Madeline Brenner

On January 31, we met at Calvin University for its January Series and spoke with Marilyn Nelson about poetry and her work for a live audience.

For more on Marilyn Nelson, visit her website or The Poetry Foundation.

This poem is the title poem of an extraordinary book called How I Discovered Poetry

It was originally published in The Fields of Praise: New and Selected Poems

Thank you to LSU Press for permission to read and discussion this poem on our podcast.

For more on Carl Phillips, please visit the Poetry Foundation.

For more on David Baker, please visit the Poetry Foundation.

"To Autumn" has been read from Carl Phillips' latest book of poetry, Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020.

The latest book by Carl Phillips is a collection of essays called My Trade Is Mystery. Purchase at Yale University Press or Amazon or wherever you get your books.

Clifton wrote from the perspective of a Black woman and many of her most famous poems address race and gender. Clear-eyed about struggles and hardships, insistent in her calls for justice and equality, Clifton's poetry carries a consistent joy and hope, which is apparent (and abundant) in "spring song."

Clifton's poetry was known for its lean style, paring everything down to its essential elements. In addition to award-winning collections of poetry, Clifton also wrote sixteen books for children (and had six children herself).

For the text of "spring song," and for a recording of Lucille Clifton reading it, see The Poetry Foundation.

For more on Lucille Clifton see her biography at The Poetry Foundation.

For an introduction to Lucille Clifton, see the poem sampler "Lucille Clifton 101" by Benjamin Voigt.

Links:

• spring song by Lucille Clifton | Poetry Foundation
• Poetry Foundation
• About Lucille Clifton | Academy of American Poets
• Lucille Clifton 101 by Benjamin Voigt | Poetry Foundation

Thanks to W.W. Norton & Company for granting us permission to read this poem. Reginald Dwayne Betts's introduction to the Collected Poems of Robert Hayden is very moving, as is the afterword by Arnold Rampersad.

For a series of insightful observations about Hayden's sonnet, see Ross Gay, Aracelis Girmay, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Patrick Rosal, and Ira Sadoff, "Poets Respond: A Discussion of "Frederick Douglass" by Robert Hayden." American Poetry Review, 38.3 (2009): 25-28.

For a helpful close reading of the poem, see Fred M. Fetrow, "Robert Hayden's 'Frederick Douglass': Form and Meaning in a Modern Sonnet." CLA Journal 17.1 (September 1973): 78-84.

For the full text of the poem, see here: "Learning to Read"

Janaka Bowman Lewis is an Associate Professor of English at the University of North Carolina--Charlotte, and she includes a chapter on Frances Ellen Watkins Harper in Freedom Narratives of African American Women: A Study of 19th Century Writings.

For a good recent article about this poem by Madeline Zehnder, see Commonplace.

For more on Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, see the Poetry Foundation.

For good resources on F.E.W. Harper, especially materials related to the recovery and teaching of her first book of poems, Forest Leaves, see the Just Teach One archive at Commonplace.

For the best collection of Harper's work, see Frances Smith Foster, A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader

For further reading, see Harper's most famous novel, Iola Leroy.

Links:

• Learning to Read by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper | Poetry Foundation
• Frances Ellen Watkins Harper | Poetry Foundation
• Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Media Theorist - Commonplace - The Journal of early American Life
• Just Teach One: Early African American Print » Frances Ellen Watkins (Harper)’s Forest Leaves (ca. 1846)
• A Brighter Coming Day — Feminist Press
• Iola Leroy by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: 9780143106043 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

We Wear the Mask
BY PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!

For more on Paul Laurence Dunbar, visit The Poetry Foundation.

For more on Rafia Zafar, see her personal website at Washington University in St. Louis.

Youtube has a brief clip from the Library of America hosting Kevin Young's discussion of "We Wear the Mask."

Elizabeth Alexander also discusses this poem for the Library of America.

For more on the poetic form of the rondeau, see the Academy of American Poets.

Links:

• Paul Laurence Dunbar | Poetry Foundation
• Rafia Zafar | Arts & Sciences
• Home | Rafia Zafar | Washington University in St. Louis
• Kevin Young Discusses "We Wear the Mask" by Paul Laurence Dunbar - YouTube
• Elizabeth Alexander Comments on "We Wear the Mask" by Paul Laurence Dunbar - YouTube
• Rondeau | Academy of American Poets

For the poem (including a reading and discussion of the poem by Tracy Smith), see the Poetry Foundation.

For Solmaz Sharif's discussion of the political implications of erasure poetry, see "The Near Transitive Properties of the Political and Poetical: Erasure": https://thevolta.org/ewc28-ssharif-p1.html

See also "Erasure in Three Acts" by Muriel Leung.

For more on Tracy K. Smith, see The Library of Congress.

For a look at the various drafts of the Declaration of Independence, visit this page on the Library of Congress website: https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jefferson/jeffdec.html

Thanks to Graywolf Press for granting us permission to read this poem, which appears in Wade in the Water (2018).

Thanks to Harvard University and photographer Stephanie Mitchell for granting us permission to reproduce Tracy Smith's photo.

Links:

• Declaration by Tracy K. Smith | Poetry Foundation
• Tracy K. Smith | Library of Congress
• Look | Graywolf Press
• Erasure in Three Acts: An Essay by Muriel Leung | Poetry Foundation

For more on Countee Cullen, see the Poetry Foundation.

Here is the text of the sonnet:

Yet Do I Marvel
Countee Cullen

I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind,
And did He stoop to quibble could tell why
The little buried mole continues blind,

Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die,
Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus
Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare

If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus
To struggle up a never-ending stair.

Inscrutable His ways are, and immune

To catechism by a mind too strewn

With petty cares to slightly understand

What awful brain compels His awful hand.

Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:

To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

For the main collection of Countee Cullen's poetry, edited by Gerald Early, see My Soul's High Song.

Links:

• Countee Cullen | Poetry Foundation
• Yet Do I Marvel by Countee Cullen | Poetry Foundation
• My Soul's High Song: 9780385412957: Cullen, Countee: Books

For the text of "Those Winter Sundays," click here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46461/those-winter-sundays

For more about Robert Hayden, click here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/robert-hayden

We love Reginald Dwayne Betts's introduction to the Centenary Edition of Robert Hayden's Collected Poems, edited by Frederick Glaysher. Please do find a copy at your local library or at your favorite bookstore: https://wwnorton.com/books/9780871406798

For the text of Langston Hughes's poem "Johannesburg Mines," see here.

For more on Langston Hughes, see the Poetry Foundation.

For more on social poetics, see Mark Nowak's book by that name.

For more on the poetry of witness, see Sandra Beasley's essay "Flint and Tinder."

For Anna Akhmatova's "Instead of a Preface" in her great work Requiem as an alternative approach, see here.

Thanks to Harold Ober Associates, Inc., for granting us permission to read this poem on our podcast.

Links:

• Poem: Johannesburg Mines by Langston Hughes
• Langston Hughes | Poetry Foundation
• Social Poetics – Coffee House Press
• Sandra Beasley: “Flint and Tinder – Understanding the Difference Between ‘Poetry of Witness’ and ‘Documentary Poetics’”
• Requiem Poem by Anna Akhmatova - Poem Hunter

See her poem here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ejbSCjg2qo

See this great article by Virginia Jackson and Meredith Martin about Amanda Gorman's Inauguration Poem at Avidly:
The Poetry of the Future

For more on Amanda Gorman, see The Poetry Foundation: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/amanda-gorman

Toi Derricotte is the author of five books of poetry and a collection of prose called The Black Notebooks. She has won numerous awards and fellowhips, including the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Distinguished Pioneering of the Arts Award from the United Black Artists, the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement, the PEN/Voelcker Award, and two Pushcart Prizes. With Cornelius Eady she co-founded Cave Canem in 1996, an organization committed to furthering the artistic and professional opportunities for African American poets. "The Minks" comes from her 1990 book Captivity, which explores the legacies of slavery and its impact on African American families in the present day. It is included in I: New and Selected Poems published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, which granted us permission to read it for this podcast.

Carl Phillips, our guest for this episode, is also an award-winning poet of multiple collections, most recently Pale Colors in a Tall Field (2020). He has had three books nominated for a National Book Award and has won the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, a Pushcart Prize, the Kingsley Tuft Poetry Award, and numerous fellowships and other awards. Thank you to Carl for joining us today as our first guest!

For more on Toi Derricotte, please see here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/toi-derricotte

For more on Carl Phillips, please see here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/carl-phillips

For the full text of "The Minks," please see here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42872/the-minks

Links:

• The Minks by Toi Derricotte | Poetry Foundation
• Toi Derricotte | Poetry Foundation
• I - University of Pittsburgh Press
• Carl Phillips | Poetry Foundation — the Kingsley Tuft Poetry Award

For help in our preparations for this podcast, we want to thank Professors Bill Maxwell and Vince Sherry at Washington University in St. Louis, both of whom have often taught Claude McKay and this poem in particular. Bill Maxwell in addition has written extensively on McKay, and we encourage you to look up his work.

For the complete collection of McKay's poetry, see Bill Maxwell's edited volume:
Claude McKay, Complete Poems

And for more information on McKay, please visit the Poetry Foundation:

Links:

• Amazon.com: Complete Poems (American Poetry Recovery) (9780252075902): McKay, Claude, Maxwell, William: Books
• Claude McKay | Poetry Foundation

To hear Cornelius Eady reading the poem and discussing it, see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QezAVP_HiY

For a foundational essay about Phillis Wheatley and her work, please see June Jordan's essay, "The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America."

For two examples of the way Wheatley has inspired other artists and writers, please see the work of Cornelius Eady and Honoree Fanonne Jeffers.

Eady, "Diabolic"
Eady, "To Phillis Wheatley's Mother"
Eady, Interview

Jeffers, The Age of Phillis

Links:

• The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America… | Poetry Foundation
• Cornelius Eady Reading and Discussing Phillis Wheatley's "On Being Brought from Africa to America" Read by Cornelius Eady - YouTube
• Honoree Fanonne Jeffers, The Age of Phillis – HFS Books