Identity
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If lyrics voice a first-person perspective on the world, they also work to compose a self through dynamic interaction with that world. The question of lyric subjectivity has in fact long been at the heart of lyric studies. The Italian poet Francesco Petrarch describes how it is only by “crying out in paper and ink” (that is by writing poems) that he discovers who he is (“I am not what I am” he writes in artful, paradoxical agony) and the Jamaican poet Safiya Sinclair evokes an entire history of slavery and colonialism in her remaking of Shakespeare’s verse into lyrics of feminist postcolonial selfhood (CITE?). Calling the self from diffusion into clarity, lyrics demand recognition—the dignity of identity and identification—that the anthologies foregrounded here illustrate. |
3000 Years of Black Poetry
by Alan Lomax and Raoul Abdul, editors
Dodd, Mead & Co, 1970. Ethnomusicologist, folklorist, archivist, and political activist, best known for his extensive recordings of blues music, Alan Lomax teamed up with Raoul Abdul, classical singer and literary assistant-friend of Langston Hughes, to publish this important, controversial anthology. Including Black poets from Akhenton in ancient Egypt to Amiri Baraka, this volume sketched out the contours of the long, transnational history of Black poetry.
While the Earth Sleeps We Travel
by Ahmed M. Badr, editor
Andrews Mcmeel Publishing, 2020. Between 2018 and early 2020, Ahmed M. Badr—an Iraqi-American poet and former refugee—traveled around the world, holding storytelling workshops with hundreds of displaced youth: those living in and outside of camps, as well as those adjusting to life after resettlement. This volume combines Badr’s own poetry with the narratives and poems of dozens of young refugees, amplifying the individual perspectives of people who are often treated as no more than statistics.
The Dream of the Poem
by Peter Cole, translator
An anthology of over four hundred poems by fifty-four poets writing in Hebrew from Andalusia, this is the most comprehensive gathering of medieval Hebrew poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain (ca. 950-1492) ever assembled in English by the award-winning translator (and Yale faculty member), Peter Cole. Not only does this volume chronicle an extraordinary body of Jewish verse, marked both by provocative sensuality and intense faith; it also embodies the multilingual histories of poems, particularly through the practice of translation.