Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

Khalil Murrell, Program Associate, Poetry

In light of America’s evolving narrative on race, how do today’s writers of color, specifically those of the so-called Hip-Hop Generation, add to one of the nation’s most difficult conversations? How do they embrace a legacy, but also speak authentically about race and ethnicity today without regurgitating the voices of, say, Amiri Baraka, Jayne Cortez, Nikki Giovanni, and Langston Hughes?

Certainly all of these questions cannot be answered here, if at all or through any medium in one sitting. Still, many writers of color including Thomas Sayers Ellis, Suheir Hammad, Kevin Young, and Willie Perdomo have been deeply entrenched in this on-going conversation through their work. These are just some of countless contemporary writers who have added fresh perspectives to race dialogue in poetry.

Newark native Kyle Dargan also adds to this rich conversation, through verse, in his first collection, The Listening. Dargan carries with him an immense reverence for tradition as well as his cultural and artistic heritage —black poets who have come before him—especially evident in poems such as “Search for Robert Hayden,” and “This Knight” written to Etheridge Knight. You can see why heritage is important to Dargan as you watch him interview his grandmother, Ruth Dargan — the first black police detective on the Newark police force – about their generational differences in how they view Newark and the President. (He also wrote an article about it here). His work most often tries to make sense of history and the post-Civil Rights world by bridging gaps between two generations. He seems to find ways to pay homage and yet move forward…to accept and renounce observations in the world.  (Listen here to “Karaoke” and “Quagmire”).

But it’s limiting to see Dargan exclusively through this lense. To read his work is to be present with a writer whose senses are acutely aware of the people and spaces around him. Even his profile picture above seems reminiscent of Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On? album cover. Dargan is, in fact, watching and listening to everything in the present world: the Ali-Frazier fight (Listen to “1975”); his grandparents’ stories; Gnarls Barkley’s St. Elsewhere album; squirrels in East Orange (Read “Redefinition”); his stepfather shaving (Listen to “On Men”); the priests at St. Benedict’s Prep in Newark; and even his friend, Dwayne, getting knocked out at the basketball court in Montclair.

A self-described child of hip-hop, Dargan is also as clever with the word as he is reverential. Read “Of the Sun,” where the first word of each left-aligned line reads downward: “a dark body with yellow skin.” His subjects and references are often musical – Rock N Roll by Mos Def, the Jacksons, a letter from Muddy Waters to Michael Harper. Dargan says Bouquet of Hungers, his second book, was arranged like some of his favorite albums – De La Soul is Dead, Mama’s Gun, Songs in the Key of Life, Electric Circus, etc. – because “they expanded the boundaries and weakened the perceived limitations of their genres.” His work, both hip and academic, attempts the same. Dargan is not just a poet who simply observes the world, he is actively engaged in it.

A recipient of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, Kyle Dargan is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Logorrhea Dementia, and editor of POST NO ILLS magazine. He is the former managing editor of Callaloo and currently a professor at American University in Washington, D.C. where he also lives.

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The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in Newark is October 7 – 10
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Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry

Toi Derricote’s amiable demeanor belies the intensity of the inner searching at the core of her poem, “Invisible Dreams.”

Only a poet determined to give voice to whatever she discovers about her most secret self could write the lines:

I have to make a
place for my body in

my body.  I’m like a
dog pawing a blanket

on the floor.  I have to
turn & twist myself

like a rag until I can
smell myself in my myself.

Derricotte makes this look easy. It is not. Such poems are written by sheer force of will, a refusal to turn away from what she sees, regardless if what is seen inspires anger, fear or shame. To call her poems fearless is to diminish the achievement. They are forged, not without fear, but in spite of it.

Galway Kinnell has said that part of the poet’s task is to go deeper than the “merely personal” into the “profoundly personal,” to that inner space where we discover the universal and the personal are one. Derricotte takes us there in poem after poem.

But the journey has not been easy. Although she started writing poems at the age of ten, she showed them to no one but one cousin when she was fourteen. His response was so negative that she didn’t show her poems to anyone again until she was twenty-seven. By then, she had given birth to her first son in a home for unwed mothers, gone on to complete a degree in special education and launched her teaching career. Having kept her writing life a secret for many years, she earned her master’s degree in English and creative writing from New York University at the age of 43.

Since then, she has garnered many awards for her writing; co-founded Cave Canem, a workshop retreat for African American poets; and published the poetry collections Tender (1997) which won the 1998 Paterson Poetry Prize, Captivity (1989), Natural Birth (1983) and The Empress of the Death House (1978), and The Black Notebooks, a literary memoir. She teaches at the University of Pittsburgh.

The text of “Invisible Dreams” can be found in Tender.

Be sure to return for upcoming Poetry Fridays, when we will feature many poets from past Dodge Poetry Festivals in the weeks ahead, including Jorie Graham, Tony Hoagland, Taslima Nasreen and others.

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