The Black Matter Is Life: Poetry for Engagement and Overcoming

A Virtual Poetry Reading & Discussion

Join us this winter for a virtual series of public conversations entitled, The Black Matter is Life: Poetry for Engagement and Overcoming. In this series, we will explore and discuss the rich tradition and innovation found in African American poetry.

Poetry is a powerful art form, one that offers profound insights into what it means to be human. Through the creative, succinct, and melodious use of language, poets render into words their joys, their challenges, their vulnerabilities, and their discoveries, thus providing shape and meaning to the human connection and shared emotional experience.

In the wake of our nation’s current unrest, this program is designed to build bridges across the racial divide by introducing the audience to the writings of a number of African American poets whose work has shone a light on a rich cultural heritage that has often gone unexplored. This program asks the audience to consider how African American poetry provides tools for healing our nation’s deep racial wounds.

About the Poets
Statement of Intent
Poetry Study Guide
Poetry Event Flyer (pdf)

Program Description

To begin this exploration of the vast diversity within African American poetic tradition, UNH professors Reginald Wilburn and Dennis Britton will facilitate three online conversations. Each discussion deconstructs four poems grouped by themes. Conversations will center these poems within the context of the African American literary tradition, their cultural heritage, the traditions they encompassed, and the relevance this tradition has to us today. The series will also explore the question, “Why does African American Poetry matter?”

November 18 | 5:00 PM

Signifyin(g) on a Tradition

Featuring guest poet Lynne Thompson

Phillis Wheatley—Imagination
Lawrence Dunbar—When Malindy Sings
Langston Hughes—Harlem & Theme for English B
Sonia Sanchez—Haiku and Tanka for Harriet Tubman

Read Rye Public Library Community Poem by Mimi White, Lisa Houde, Jess Ryan & Andrew Richmond here Helicon

December 9 | 5:00 PM

In Protest

Featuring guest poet Patricia Smith

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James Weldon Johnson—The Creation
Audre Lorde—Litany for Survival
Danez Smith—dear white america
Elizabeth Alexander— Ars Poetica #1,002:  Rally

January 21 | 5:00 PM

Love, Love, Love

Featuring guest poet Jericho Brown

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George Moses Horton—The Lover’s Farewell
Gwendolyn Brooks—Lovely Love
Nikki Giovanni—Resignation
Jericho Brown—Like Father

Collaborative Poetry Writing Project

The Black Matter is Life: Poetry for Engagement and Overcoming program will also offer the community an opportunity to come together to create twelve-line poems inspired by one of the poems selected for discussion at the online events.

A community is defined as a family, a group of friends, a library or school staff, town employees, or a collection of individuals. We also welcome “communities” of one—you write all 12 lines. Go for it!

A reading of the collaborative poem will conclude each event. This community engagement project will run concurrently with online discussions.  For more information on this component of the program please contact our partners:

November 18 – Rye Public Library, Andrew Richmond < arichmond@ryepubliclibrary.org >
December  9 – Keene Public  Library, Gail Zachariah < gzachariah@ci.keene.nh.us>
January 21 – Nashua Public Library, Carol Eyman <Carol.Eyman@nashualibrary.org>

Guest Poets

Lynne Thompson is the author of Start With a Small Guitar (What Books Press) and Beg No Pardon, winner of the Perugia Book Award and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award. In 2018, Jane Hirshfield selected her manuscript Fretwork (2019) as the winner of the Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize. Thompson is the recipient of multiple awards among them an Individual Art Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles, a Tucson Literary Award, and a finalist nod from the Derricotte-Eady Chapbook Prize. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her most recent work appears or is forthcoming in Ninth Letter, december, and2020’s Best American Poetry. Thompson serves on the Boards of Cave Canem and the Los Angeles Review of Books and is Chair of the Board of Trustees at her alma mater, Scripps College.
 Patricia Smith is a poet, teacher, and performance artist. She is the author of Incendiary Art (Northwestern University Press, 2017), winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Award in poetry; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (Coffee House Press, 2012), winner of the 2013 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, given for the most outstanding book of poetry published in the United States each year; Blood Dazzler (Coffee House Press, 2008), which was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award; Teahouse of the Almighty (Coffee House Press, 2006), a 2005 National Poetry Series selection; Close to Death (Zoland Books, 1993); Big Towns, Big Talk (Zoland Books, 1992), which won the Carl Sandburg Literary Award; and Life According to Motown (Tía Chucha Press, 1991).
Jericho Brown is author of the The Tradition (Copper Canyon 2019), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the winner of the Whiting Award. Brown’s first book, Please (New Issues 2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection, The Tradition won the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in The Bennington Review, Buzzfeed, Fence, jubilat, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, TIME magazine, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University.

 

Program Facilitators

Dr. Dennis Britton is an Associate Professor of English and the University of New Hampshire, Durham where he teaches courses on Shakespeare and medieval and Renaissance British Literature.  He is the author of Becoming Christian:  Race, Reformation, and Early Modern English Romance (2014) and coedited with Melissa Walter Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study:  Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies (2018).  Dr. Britton is a member of the Boards of Directors of New Hampshire Humanities and Black Heritage Trail, NH.

 

Dr. Reginald A. Wilburn is an associate professor of English specializing in African American literature and culture, Milton, and intertextuality studies at the University of New Hampshire, Durham.  His monograph, Preaching the Gospel of Black Revolt:  Appropriating Milton in Early African American Literature is the first work of literary criticism to theorize African Americans’ subversive reception of John Milton, England’s epic poet of liberty.  A former U.S. Marine, Dr. Wilburn is an alumnus of the Institute for the Recruitment of Teachers (Phillips Academy) where he serves as faculty and curriculum coordinator.  Dr. Wilburn has received two UNH teaching award and mentors students in the Office of Multicultural Student Affairs.

Series Sponsors