    
Chrishayden
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 2189
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, May 17, 2006 - 02:27 pm: | 
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I just got through listening to a broadcast of Fresh Air on NPR. Billy Collins, former Poet Laureate of the USA and current Poet Laureate of New York, was on, adding commentary as Terry Gross (she sure is) was playing a new CD of poets reading their work.
Before they play a cut of Robert Hayden Collins states that "Hayden was not well known in the African American community because he did not write on black subjects."
I about vomited. Robert Hayden, if you didn't know, wrote poems like "Runagate Runagate" about runaway slaves, "Middle Passage" about the slavery Middle Passage, "Frederick Douglass" about Douglass, and "A Ballade of Rememberance" which was about an incident involving segregation in New Orleans.
Until the 60s he was ONLY known in the black community, published only in little magazines and Negro Digest or Black world or his own chapbooks.
I am going to light that fool Collins up as well as Gross but do you see what we have to deal with--this guy was poet Laureate of the U.S. and he didn't know jack about one of the most famous poets in the literary canon (for those of you who doubt, he is in the Norton Anthology of Modern American Poetry which anybody worth his salt who studies the subject has).
Is it no wonder that our art and history continues to suffer at the hands of such know nothings? |
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