Relections on Dawn Lundy Martin’s “Negrotizing in Five: Or, How to Write a Black Poem”

This semester we’ve read a number of poems that reflect upon what poetry is, what poetry does, and why and how to write (and read) poetry.

Last week we read Dawn Lundy Martin’s “Negrotizing in Five: Or, How to Write a Black Poem,” which obviously deals with these kinds of questions about poetry yet puts some new issues on the table.

It’s not an easy poem to grasp right away, so this week we’re focusing on parts of it and writing speculatively on what each of these parts might be about. When we have assembled and read these fragmentary interpretations, we’ll see if we’ve arrived collectively at a more complete understanding of the entire poem.

 

Poetry and Racism

For the past two years I’ve considered getting a blog like this up and running for English 375: American Poetry, but it took a recent incident of racist hatred to push me to action.

I regularly teach Countee Cullen’s poem “Incident” in the section of the course titled “When Something Happens.” This year I was planning for us to read it in Week Ten, which is about two weeks from now.

But because we have experienced a similar incident here at UMass, I’m hoping we can start reading this poem, thinking about it, and writing about the issue it addresses right away.

The great poet W.H. Auden famously remarked that “poetry makes nothing happen.” The question I put before you now is: “in the face of racism, can poetry make anything happen – and if so, what?” Responses may take the form of prose or poetry – whatever feels right to you.