In times of increasing racial tensions, it can be difficult to know what to do with one’s anger, righteous or otherwise. And it can be just as difficult to know where to get an honest picture of the worldviews of people we may consider, for whatever combination of reasons, “other.”
Earlier this month, I posted a list of 5 Contemporary Poets Christians Should Read and a follow-up on my blog with more poets Christians should read. This week, in light of our nation’s unrest and anguish, I want to offer a list of (mostly) recent poets who have spoken earnestly and powerfully about their experience of being black in America.
Listening to the cries of these poets is an act of love and solidarity. It’s a way of noticing and lamenting their struggle—a small but tangible step toward understanding the sense of degradation too often experienced by minority communities. Reading these poets won’t be comfortable and will likely make some of us angry at times—but getting angry because of injustice is biblical. As Christians we serve a God who does not shrug his shoulders at injustice, and neither should we.
Listening to the cries of these poets is an act of love and solidarity. It’s a way of noticing and lamenting their struggle.
Some of these poets are persons of faith, and others are most certainly not. But they all write prophetically, calling down fire on various forms of prejudice and other capital “s” sins. There are many more than those I list below; this is a huge genre. Some might say that it’s too much of a bad thing. Political poetry, or outrage as a headspace, isn’t somewhere you want to spend a great deal of time. But it isn’t somewhere you want to pass by either.
Terrance Hayes
Hayes’s masterpiece is Lighthead, one of my favorite books by anyone in the last 20 years. For our purposes, though, seek out his project American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin. The title tells you much of what you need to know about the book. He argues that people of color are disproportionately targets for assassination, that this has been the case in the past, that it will be in the future, and that all of this is a particularly American phenomenon. You wouldn’t know from the title that those words are also the name of every poem in the book, and that the sonnets are formally inventive and fun when they’re not driving stakes into the heart of a heartless—as it sometimes seems to him—system.
Read the full essay at The Gospel Coalition →
Originally published in The Gospel Coalition, 2020-06-03.
Image credit: Image from The Gospel Coalition article page (https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/01180211/6-Black-Protest-Poets-Worth-Reading.jpg)
