A Difficult Miracle: Black Poetics in a Time of Crisis

A Difficult Miracle: Black Poetics in a Time of Crisis 

By Jari Bradley 

Prior to the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, I had never been to a writer’s retreat or a poetry workshop, period. The year was 2015, a year at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, a time when the entire country felt charged with a newfound energy for justice over public lynchings occurring to Black people regardless of gender or sexuality across state lines. I was green to the literary landscape then, outside of being a spoken word poet raised in the tradition of slam poetry as a youth. Standing on the Brown University campus after the first week of workshop, I kept returning to the drawn image of a Black woman I would come to learn as the first African American ever to have had a full length book of poetry published. I encountered Phillis Wheatley— named after the slave ship that captured her as a small child—for the first time at the Callaloo writer’s workshop, and wouldn’t understand her significance until years down the line of my own writing life. 

In June Jordan’s impeccable essay entitled, “The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America,” she details the curiosities of Wheatley’s life and poetry as that of an unnatural, yet brilliant miracle. That the set condition of Wheatley’s life— from the age of around 6 or 7, until the age of 21, the same age she is when her white mistress coincidentally dies— was one of the ultimate kinds of constraints any poet could ever face, one meant to be endured for perpetuity. After Callaloo, I would eventually begin to encounter the word “constraint” in poetry workshops as a way to discuss the more serious nature of what many outside of the curated spaces of Callaloo and Cave Canem deemed as true poetry, that being the traditional formulaic poems of the English language or what is colloquially known as form poetry.

When thinking of the case June Jordan makes of Phillis Wheatley as a difficult miracle, Jordan helps me to understand the larger complexities of the word constraintin the lives of Black poets, a complexity inherited from the miracle of Wheatley and others like her that knew the intimacies of both bondage and the bounty of a life carved out of a forbidden literacy. For me, Wheatley’s enslavement was both a physical and poetic constraint that all Black writers have been impacted by as descendants of people forced into chains on the sole basis of a set demarcation of blackness ascribed by way of skin color. In an effort to challenge the unabashed racialized critique of Black poetry Jordan states that, “…the difficult miracle of Black poetry in America, is that we have been rejected and we are frequently dismissed as ‘political’ or ‘topical’ or ‘sloganeering’ and ‘crude’ and ‘insignificant’ because, like Phillis Wheatley, we have persisted for freedom.” What I’ve come to find necessitates Black poetry and its poetics in an age of multiple mass genocide and ecological collaspe is the miracle of a tradition of writers working within both the physical and figurative constraints of a system intent on our being bound to enclosure(s) of anti-blackness, and the miraculous ways our writing practice continues its advance toward a liberated future in spite of constraint. 

In Arthur Jafa’s experimental documentary, Dreams are Colder than Death (2014), poet and cultural theorist Fred Moten names Blackness as “a critique of the proper,” or in other words, a critique at the root of ownership within the constraint of a system built on slavery as a people that were once owned. Moten is getting at an embodied condition of constraint or what we can name as an ascribed deviance and criminality to that of the Black body. That within that context, our very bodies being freed and their productions are what Moten describes in the film as “conspiracies to steal,” or to think of it another way, Black people taking autonomy of ourselves and our cultural productions was (and in many ways still is) an act against the law(s) of this land. When thinking back to the fact of Phillis Wheatley’s body as once property, to the additional fact of her tenacity as a writer of poetry in the language of her captors, one can only remark upon the legacy of Wheatley’spoetry as an embodied act of direct opposition to the State. And that this legacy of embodiment immediately situates the Black poet within a tradition of embodied resistance of the perpetual constraint of national and global anti-black systems and infrastructure meant to enclose us in perpetual servitude to the endeavors and interests of Western capitalist imperialism and settler-colonialism.

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What the productions of our work within poetry means for freedom is a wrestling with and critique of the continued strongholds of constraint around not just language in and of itself, but also the form and structure of meaning as it relates to our racialized corporeal realities. Poetry, acclaimed poet and political strategist Camonghne Felix writes in her latest book Let The Poets Govern, “…allows us to…see the impossible as possible. Poetry allows us to abstract the present in order to construct a new and unexpected future. It fractures—and deepens—time.” It is this allowance of poetry that serves as a miracle, a difficult one in the face of all the obstacles set in place to keep one from exercising the ability to abstract and construct new possibilities, new worlds even. The criticality of Black poetics as Black poets is embedded within the miracle our very existence presents, alongside our audacity to critique, interrogate, and charge a world literally built against us to be better as we model the impossible through our manipulation and improvement upon the very language historically and contemporarily situated to oppress us.  

In this way, it goes without saying that Black poets are no strangers to crises. In fact one can argue that Black poetry is, at its very inception, born from crisis. That Black poetry and its poetics was conceived at the helm and within the holds of ships of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. To reprise Fred Moten, he goes on to assert—by way of a quote from Frank Wilderson III— that he thinks it’s important to “remain in the hold of the ship.” That reason being because what was happening in those very holds of those ships gave way to fantasies of flight. Let us sit with the idea, sit with the difficult miracle it had to be to possess an imagination of freedom in such literal constraints.

Let us sit with, for a moment, the magnitude of such a miracle, born from such a preconceived impossibility. That is in essence what Black poetry and poetics is: a magnanimous miracle of imagination in the face of crisis. While this country falls deeper into its own crisis of identity and literacy, many are left to question just what do we do? I say look no further than the Black poets and artists who turn the very trees into altars at the resurgence of modern day lynching that has riddled 2026 alone with multiple accounts of hanging Black bodies. I say let us dare to dream in the face of genocide and mass incarceration, for it is in those dark depths, in those very enclosures that we’ve managed to possess and thus be possessed by a creativity which affords us to deeply interrogate and respond to such crisis.  

When asked why crises, or why Black poets are expected to make a liberatory experience out of art, I in kind ask who’s expectation? I don’t think anyone expects or expected anything of Black artists, poets, or Phillis Wheatley outside of doing what was told. To follow orders and to be used as free labor. I think if we are considering this as a question posed by the white-gaze; that these are the only expectations white people have of us, then I am thinking of how reductive that kind of gaze is, which only seeks to reduce Black art to Black pain. Again, I think the expectation of Black artists and poets within the throng of the empire was and has been nothing. Nothing but negation and non-being/non-belonging. I think while Black art is often only seen as an expression of Black pain, that is not all we are. That is not all there is. In the midst of rest we are at war. In the midst of play we are at war. We have always been at war because the condition and constraint of Blackness is an ontological crisis where we exist in an anti-black world that does not see us as human.

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It is precisely for this reason that what Black artists and poets create, and under such conditions, is what I consider a difficult miracle. It is unexpected and has largely been unprecedented. What we make is not suffering itself. What we write is not a manifestation of pain alone. Our cultural/artistic productions are created in spite of these things. What we make then contributes to the possibility of another mode of existence that we are so often denied. We were not thought of in any capacity which is why the gaze on Black artists and poets and their work is reduced to suffering alone. I think sometimes as Black artists we adopt those expectations of ourselves for multiple reasons: Just like sex, pain sells. There is a market for our narratives to be struggle stricken and then end on resilience. Other times there is pressure to create “meaningful” work which may center trauma. The fear being that we cannot make meaning without a resuscitation of trauma. But I am arguing that because Blackness in and of itself is a crisis, that is not all there is to Blackness, which is what the miracle is all about. 

What no one knew upon returning from the Callaloo workshop or my first year of Cave Canem was that technically, I was never supposed to be there. That I had just been thrust into the role of caretaking for my grandmother recently diagnosed with dementia. My uncle stated plainly that if I left for the workshop I would not have a home to return to, his threat of kicking me out of the home we shared with my grandmother. He often forbade me to leave the house for what he said was fear of leaving grandma unattended. The truth was my grandmother’s condition was being wielded over me as a means to keep me locked away from building on a life outside of his control. Attending those writing spaces meant risking not having a place to lay my head upon return. But what drove me to keep aspiring to be a writer is what I believe my grandmother sacrificed so much of her life for. All those nights, right before bed as a child staring into her open mouth as she read me bedtime stories from the piles of books she didn’t hesitate to buy me each time I asked. This man felt I owed her my life and in part he was right; I owed it to her to chase my dreams despite the constraint of her diagnosis and his abuse. My entire life as a writer and outside of being one has always been a miracle. A difficult miracle predicated on the love of my grandmother who saw in me early her wildest dreams.

Much like my grandmother, Phillis Wheatley’s sacrifices are responsible for the poet I am today. From encountering her a little over 10 years ago to now, I recognize that had it not been for her doing what no one had expected of her—or any of us for that matter—had she not dared to take the language of her oppressors and use it to profess her own predilections, desires, and dreams, I would simply not be. That the miracle has always been in the Black poet and artist’s ability to do what no one thought us capable of in the first place and to go beyond what little expectation has been held out for us at all. I descend from a people, a grandmother, an ancestor in Wheatley that defies the odds of crisis all together. That our existence is the miracle, and that we survive(d) to tell the story. That we survive(d) long enough to dream a dream of tomorrow, today. Despite the calamity and violent afterlife of slavery we are still here doing the work of those before amid the disbelief of our humanity. That, in the words of June Jordan, we persist. 

Works Cited

Felix, Camonghne. Let the Poets Govern: A Declaration of Freedom. One World, 2026.

Jafa, Arthur, director. Dreams Are Colder Than Death. Pumpernickel Films and Very Special Projects, 2014.

Jordan, June. “The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America.” Academy of American Poets, Poets.org, 2006.