Why Poetry? Ten Poets and Poems To Read As We Close Out Black History Month.
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by Jari Bradley
During the peak of the pandemic in 2020, there were numerous online poetry readings being held for the public to attend. I was just finishing my Master of Fine Arts program after three years on the East Coast, and with all the calamity that the world felt comprised of at that time, I began to quietly ask myself “why poetry” as in, why was poetry something people still cared to sit through quarantine to listen to when the whole world seemed to be collapsing around us? Was it simply about gathering or was there more to it than a simulated sense of community?
These questions were especially heavy for me in the moments when we endured headlines about the murder of yet another Black person during the pandemic, namely that of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota of that same year. To think that in the middle of a global crisis, it wasn’t enough for an unknown disease to be taking the lives of Black people, but that this country could still find the time to violently perpetuate the loss of Black life was devastating. Left to parse through his last words, George Floyd’s utterance of I Can’t Breathe, and the literal boot on his neck came to represent the systemic boot on ours.
All of this was occurring as I was searching to find the reasons why poetry was a medium we as a society were still clinging to. This was a time when so much had been said about poetry declaring it a declining artform, one that some would argue has most recently experienced a resurgence of popularity among younger audiences via social media platforms such as Instagram and TikTok.
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Now that we have entered 2026 under a presidential administration that has completely rearranged all that anyone could ever trust or believe possible at the hands of a sitting president, we have undergone the weaponization of the military against its own citizens, the intense censorship of the country’s news media outlets, and most recently, three individual people (Keith Porter Jr., Renee Nicole Good, and Alex Pretti) have been gunned down and killed by ICE agents. One of those individuals, Renee Good, was also a poet.
I realize now what it is about poetry that I continuously work to discover, asking myself that original question “why poetry” over and over again. Poetry, despite how formal schooling continues to present it to us as craft specific, fails to recognize and honor its relationship to the masses as an extension of one’s ability to speak truth to power.
That there has always been a cultural relevance and relation between poetry and the people, which allows for a kind of collective consciousness, or at least a collective appreciation for individuals speaking up about the world in which we inhabit, and the impact of such being a kind of enlightening experience for all within ear shot who have also been left by our said administration and those in power to feel powerless, insignificant, and entirely disposable from being at the sole whim of systemic injustice.
Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, wherever the activists and the movement was, so too were the poets on those same microphones and bullhorns demanding justice.
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Here are ten poets whose work and voices have never left the people, and have thus provided us all creative road maps by way to express our collective heartbreak and outrage at the system(s) that claim to protect us. These poets, who in some way themselves have had direct connection to institutional brutality, expose the origins of such delusions of the state and interrogate everything from the quotidian, to sex and gender within society to provide a genuine outcry for justice against the victimization and unrest caused by the political theater we are experiencing in today’s time by a government that continues to insult our individual and collective intelligence by still naming our country a democratic one.
A winner of the 2022 92Y’s Discovery Contest, we are made to witness, Allen’s poem here as a tour de force of complex historicity in its execution and deliverance as a play on a singular word with various ties to her home city of Chicago. “Drill” provides an intimate look into family legacy entrenched within systemic violence, where the poet champions all possible iterations of the word and its complicated histories within the Windy City. Allen gives us the ability to speak against and to conditions of surveill ance and state sanctioned violence within US cities that have long been subject to political sabotage and retaliation for decades.
Audre Lorde— “A Song for Many Movements”
An opponent of silence, the legendary poet Audre Lorde takes you through the gallows of what remains after revolution, or at least its attempt. In what feels part warning, part prophecy, the poem conveys a similar sentiment that can be appreciated in today’s current political climate. According to Lorde it is our responsibility to act instead of faltering to silence.
Danez Smith—”An Elegy for My Neighbor, Renee Nicole Good”
In what reads as an open letter, Smith Minneapolis born, writes an elegy that brings home the proximity each of us have to one another as well as that to the outfitted dogs in uniforms federally sanctioned to openly terrorize the American public, Smith’s neighbor of the Twin Cities being one of their latest victims. Smith openly praises Good’s determination around community care just moments before being gunned down. This poem doesn’t hold us up in dreamy language, but gets right at the core of what each of us as citizens and more importantly, neighbors are up against in today’s America. From one poet to the next Smith pays their condolences in the only way wordsmiths know how, while brilliantly exemplifying the kind of love each of us should have for one another’s existence.
Karisma Price— “After the 1916 Film”
New Orleans bred and born Karisma Price’s speaker displays a sharp inquisitive nature on full display in this poem, wherein the speaker’s response to a 1916 race film draws upon some of the speaker’s own declarative statements about the self and race. Price inquires about an all black-cast and the ensemble of respectability/civility. What does it mean when the body is deemed a skill and/or a sentence that isn’t allowed to end ?
Aurielle Marie— “gxrl gospel ii: when thrown against a sharp white background”
Holy in its rollick and reckoning, this poem is a juggernaut of language and resistance. Activist and poet Aurielle Marie comes to testify in this poem and does not disappoint. Conveying what it is like being the only black woman in the room, we are given an in-depth look into the feeling of that kind of all too familiar entrapment. Reminiscent of an investigation such as Marlon T. Riggs’ Black Is…Black Ain’t, Marie gives us a poem that engages a similar sentiment from the perspective of a black queer woman.
June Jordan— “Poem About My Rights”
A poem so ahead of its time, and yet such a timely piece for when it was written,Poet and teacher June Jordan gives us a means of seeing a poem do so much with what it has. Particularly on days where I feel like I am not enough in my own body, in this poem Jordan reminds me that “I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name.” When considering a poem that speaks to living under the current pressures of today, Jordan reminds us that our autonomy is ours and that our bodies are not merely disposable to be used up and spit out by the statues of power..
A poet lost to police violence, and gone too soon was Dumas’ emergent voice and style of poetry that spoke to the urban underbelly of America. With his invocations of particular African Traditional Religious deities and imagery met with the Southern roots African Americans share as a result of the aftermath of slavery, Dumas channels the ancestors to exemplify the resilience of a determined people.
brittny ray crowell—i’m not here to talk about the rats or roaches
Holding space for the sacred in what others would deem scarcity and lack, crowell holds out mercy for humble beginnings. The visceral imagery within the poem alone activates the blood and bone of memory. Finding pride in what so many work years to disassociate themselves with, this poem finds the glory of growing up between the ashy legs and feet of siblings and cousins, or cousins as siblings. Extended family and extensions of love are encapsulated in this dazzling poem that reminds us there can be beauty in the struggle.
Wanda Coleman—American Sonnet 91
Acknowledged by Terrance Hayes as the poet to modernize the sonnet form into one capable of holding much more than imagined, the American sonnet is the incredible invent of a Black woman that wrote poems out of Los Angeles California which reflected the conditions of life during the active years of Coleman’s writing. Haunted but also lyrical, Coleman tackled what most formal poets looked down upon and did not consider worthwhile poetics. Coleman reminds us that the content of our lives are still worth pockets of beauty and song, despite how turbulent the times.
Educator and Co-founder of Cave Canem, I am taken by having sat in front of him as a student for two weeks out of the summer, and for his expressant tenderness, and care taken to address his students during these turbulent times. Listening to Eady’s performance of the piece, chosen to be read for the New York mayoral inauguration of Zohran Mamdani, I was so incredibly moved by the sincerity in the poem’s tone and repetition in places that I had forgotten could be broken, and thus places that could use a healing touch. Proof, and its dedication to his trans, fat, and other alt forms of being embodied students including myself was allowed to feel held in those six some odd minutes. In a time of such intense cruelty, Eady provided a balm to the rest of us seeking refuge from the onslaught of transphobia and the intense rise of racial violence brewing in the country and around the world.
Jari Bradley is a Black transmasculine poet and scholar. Originally from San Francisco, they live in Houston.