Today's Headline: "On Phillis Wheatley Peters and the Poetry of Survival" This poem is from the collection entitled "Los heraldos negros" ["The Black Heralds"] published in 1919. "Ágape" is an ancient Greek word for brotherly or familial love, as opposed to eros. It is, in a sense, one of his easier poems to translate, although still full of syntactical oddities like: “I don’t know which doors will be slammed in whose face." “oddities” intended to convey the poet’s sense of alienation.
Margaret Jull Costa on "Ágape" |
|
|
What Sparks Poetry:
Readers Write Back
"Mamie Morgan’s poem grabbed me by the bare neck. 'Everyone I’ve Danced with is Dead,' does that mean everyone I have had sex with is dead? Everyone I have known? Dabbled with? Taken seriously? The line cook who kidnapped the narrator might be dead, and the poet Keats is, of course, dead. The poem mixes a volatile cocktail of trauma and youth, with the restaurant work so many of us landed into by necessity or chance, when we were at our most naïve, thrown into a crew of co-workers, lecherous managers, and ex-cons who FELT like family, but, ultimately, weren't."
Millicent Borges Accardi |
|
|
"On Phillis Wheatley Peters and the Poetry of Survival"
"[Wheatley] was named after the slave ship that brought her over the Atlantic to Boston to be sold to John and Susanna Wheatley as a young, sick child, naked body on the auction block. When they found Peters writing with a piece of coal on the wall of their home, instead of punishing her, they fostered her education, encouraging her to read and write poetry. When tracing my literary ancestry, I come from that chunk of charcoal, from that strain of self-reliance and persistence from the middle passage till now. 'It’s such a futuristic idea,' Terrance Hayes said, 'a world in which the descendants of slaves become poets.'"
viaLITHUB |
|
|
|
|
|
|
͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
