Hostname: page-component-7dd5485656-wxk4p Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-10-30T18:25:17.124Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“One week later in the strange”: A Pandemic in the Time of Black Poetry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 April 2021

Michele Elam
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Image of the first page of this content. For PDF version, please use the ‘Save PDF’ preceeding this image.'

Information

Type
Theories and Methodologies
Information
PMLA , Volume 136 , Issue 2 , March 2021 , pp. 258 - 268
Copyright
Copyright © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Modern Language Association of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Works Cited

Alexander, Elizabeth. “Praise Song for the Day.” Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52141/praise-song-for-the-day.Google Scholar
Alexander, Elizabeth.. “Words That Shimmer.” On Being, 23 July 2015, onbeing.org/poetry/one-week-later-in-the-strange/. Originally aired on 6 Jan. 2011.Google Scholar
Angelou, Maya. “On the Pulse of Morning.” Poets.org, Academy of American Poets, poets.org/poem/pulse-morning.Google Scholar
Baldwin, James. “The Creative Process.” 1962. Creative America. Reprinted in Baldwin: Collected Essays, edited by Toni Morrison, Library of America, 1998, pp. 669–72.Google Scholar
Baraka, Amiri. “S O S.” S O S: Poems, 1961–2013, Kindle ed., Grove Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Bouie, Jamelle. “Black Like Kamala.” The New York Times, 14 Aug. 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/08/14/opinion/kamala-harris-black-identity.html.Google Scholar
Bristow, Nancy. American Pandemic: The Lost Worlds of 1918 Influenza Epidemic. Oxford UP, 2017.Google Scholar
Brown, Sterling K. “‘This American Experiment Never Had Me in Mind’: Sterling K. Brown on Lincoln's Legacy.” Interview by Fahima Haque, The New York Times, 14 Feb. 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/02/14/us/sterling-k-brown-lincoln-documentary.html.Google Scholar
Coleman, Nancy. “Why We're Capitalizing Black.” The New York Times, 5 July 2020, http://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/05/insider/capitalized-black.html.Google Scholar
Cullen, Countee. “Heritage.” 1925. Gates and Smith. Norton Anthology, vol. 1, pp. 1354–56.Google Scholar
Du Bois, W. E. B. “Criteria of Negro Art.” 1926. Gates and Smith, Norton Anthology, vol. 1, pp. 771–78.Google Scholar
Du Bois, W. E. B.. Excerpt from The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. Gates and Smith, Norton Anthology, vol. 1, pp. 687–778.Google Scholar
Elam, Harry J. “Reality Check.” Critical Theory and Performance, edited by Reinelt, Janelle and Roach, Joseph, 2nd ed., U of Michigan P, 2006, pp. 173–90.Google Scholar
Elam, Michele. The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium. Stanford UP, 2012.Google Scholar
Elam, Michele.. “Why Obama Is Black Again.” History News Network, 30 Jan. 2009, historynewsnetwork.org/article/60960.Google Scholar
Ellison, Ralph. “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke.” 1958. Shadow and Act, Random House, 1964, pp. 45–59.Google Scholar
Ellison, Ralph.. Invisible Man. 1952. Vintage, 1972.Google Scholar
Fleming, Julius B. Jr. Abstract of “Transforming Geographies of Black Time: How the Free Southern Theater Used the Plantation for Civil Rights Activism.” American Literature, vol. 91, no. 3, 2019, doi.org/10.1215/00029831-7722140.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gates, Henry Louis Jr., and Smith, Valerie. “Gwendolyn Brooks.” Gates and Smith, Norton Anthology, vol. 2, p. 324.Google Scholar
Gates, Henry Louis Jr., and Smith, Valerie, editors. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature., 3rd ed., W. W. Norton, 2014.Google Scholar
Glaude, Eddie S. Jr. Exodus! Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America. U of Chicago P, 2000.Google Scholar
Hansberry, Lorraine. “Lorraine Hansberry Discusses Her Play A Raisin in the Sun.” Interview by Studs Terkel. Studs Terkel Radio Archive, 12 May 1959, studsterkel.wfmt.com/programs/lorraine-hansberry-discusses-her-play-raisin-sun.Google Scholar
Harper, Michael. “History as Apple Tree.” 1972. Gates and Smith, Norton Anthology, vol. 2, pp. 834–36.Google Scholar
Hartman, Saidiya V. Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.Google Scholar
Hayden, Robert. “Middle Passage.” 1962. Gates and Smith, Norton Anthology, vol. 2, pp. 229–33.Google Scholar
Hughes, Langston. “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” 1921. Gates and Smith, Norton Anthology, vol. 1, pp. 1304–05.Google Scholar
“James Baldwin Debates William F. Buckley.” 1965. YouTube, 27 Oct. 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFeoS41xe7w.Google Scholar
Johnson, James Weldon. “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46549/lift-every-voice-and-sing.Google Scholar
Jones, Meta DuEwa. “Politics, Process and (Jazz) Performance: Amiri Baraka's ‘It's Nation Time.’” Amiri Baraka Issue, special issue of African American Review, edited by Harris, William J. et al. , vol. 37, nos. 2–3, Summer–Autumn 2003, pp. 245–52.Google Scholar
Komunyakaa, Yusef. “Facing It.” 1988. Gates and Smith, Norton Anthology, vol. 2, pp. 1268.Google Scholar
“Letter to the Poetry Foundation from Fellows and Programmatic Partners.” 6 June 2020, docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf4u5Ns8Blz0gutuanOHF6I026Xi0dE9lT36HQtg5pDKeT5uQ/viewform.Google Scholar
Liu, Jennifer. “Read the Full Text of Amanda Gorman's Inaugural Poem ‘The Hill We Climb.’” Make It, CNBC, 20 Jan. 2021, www.cnbc.com/2021/01/20/amanda-gormans-inaugural-poem-the-hill-we-climb-full-text.html.Google Scholar
Lorde, Audre. “Poetry Is Not a Luxury.” Gates and Smith, Norton Anthology, vol. 2, pp. 643–46.Google Scholar
Micheaux, Oscar. Within Our Gates. Micheaux Book and Film Company, 1920.Google Scholar
Miller, James. “What Does It Mean to Be an American? The Dialectics of Self-Discovery in Baldwin's ‘Paris Essays’ (1950–1961).” Twentieth-Century American Literature, special issue of Journal of American Studies, vol. 42, no. 1, Apr. 2008, pp. 51–66.Google Scholar
Moten, Fred. “Some Questions regarding the Persistence of (Black) Poetry.” Presidential Plenary: Poetics of Persistence in Black Life, 2021 MLA Annual Convention, Modern Language Association, mla.confex.com/mla/2021/meetingapp.cgi/Session/10467.Google Scholar
Nora, Pierre. “Between History and Memory: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” History and Memory in African American Culture, edited by Fabre, Genevieve and O'Meally, Robert, Oxford UP, 1994, pp. 284–300.Google Scholar
Outka, Elizabeth. Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature. Columbia UP, 2019.Google Scholar
“Poem-a-Day Guest Editors in 2020.” Poets.org, Academy of American Poets, poets.org/poem-day-guest-editors-2020.Google Scholar
Quinn, Alice. Introduction. Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America's Poets Respond to the Pandemic, Alfred A. Knopf, 2020, pp. xv–xviii.Google Scholar
Rankine, Claudia. “The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning.” The New York Times, 22 June 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/06/22/magazine/the-condition-of-black-life-is-one-of-mourning.html.Google Scholar
Rankine, Claudia.. “Weather.” Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America's Poets Respond to the Pandemic, edited by Alice Quinn, Alfred A. Knopf, 2020, p. 128.Google Scholar
@repjohnlewis (John Lewis). “Do not get lost in a sea of despair. …” Twitter, 27 June 2018, 11:15 a.m., twitter.com/repjohnlewis/status/1011991303599607808?lang=en.Google Scholar
Rogin, Michael. “‘The Sword Became a Flashing Vision’: D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation.” American Culture between the Civil War and World War I, special issue of Representations, no. 9, Winter 1985, pp. 150–95.Google Scholar
Sanchez, Sonia. “blk / rhetoric.” 1969. Gates and Smith, Norton Anthology, vol. 2, pp. 711–12.Google Scholar
Schuessler, Jennifer. “Poetry Foundation Leadership Resigns after Black Lives Matter Statement.” The New York Times, 9 June 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/06/09/books/poetry-foundation-black-lives-matter.html.Google Scholar
Sharpe, Christina. In The Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke UP, 2016.Google Scholar
Shockley, Evie. “Black Aesthetics as (a Poetics of) Persistence.” Presidential Plenary: Poetics of Persistence in Black Life, 2021 MLA Annual Convention, Modern Language Association, mla.confex.com/mla/2021/meetingapp.cgi/Session/10467.Google Scholar
“The 1619 Project.” The New York Times Magazine, 2021, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html.Google Scholar
Smith, Tracy K. Wade in the Water. Graywolf Press, 2018.Google Scholar
Sundby, Alex. “Read the Full Text of Biden's Inaugural Address.” CBS News, 20 Jan. 2021, www.cbsnews.com/news/president-joe-biden-inauguration-address-text/.Google Scholar
Tillet, Salamishah. “When Culture Really Began to Reckon with White Privilege.” The New York Times, 9 Dec. 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/12/09/arts/black-artists-open-letters.html.Google Scholar
Trethewey, Natasha. Native Guard: Poems. Mariner Books, 2007.Google Scholar
Walker, Margaret. “For My People.” 1937. Gates and Smith, Norton Anthology, vol. 2, pp. 319–20.Google Scholar
Wilson, August. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. Plume, 1985.Google Scholar
Young, Kevin. “Exodus.” 2011. Gates and Smith, Norton Anthology, vol. 2, pp. 1510–11.Google Scholar