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Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry
More than seventy poets are represented in this innovative new anthology of African American poetry since the 1960s.
This is not just another poetry anthology. It is a gathering of poems that demonstrate what happens when writers in a marginalized community collectively turn from dedicating their writing to political, social, and economic struggles, and instead devote themselves to the art of their poems and to the ideas they embody. These poets bear witness to the interior landscapes of their own individual selves or examine the private or personal worlds of invented personae and, therefore, of human beings living in our modern and postmodern worlds.
The anthology focuses on post-1960s poetry and includes such poets as Rita Dove, Ai, Nathaniel Mackey, Natasha Trethewey, Kevin Young, Terrence Hayes, Elizabeth Alexander, Major Jackson, Carl Phillips, Harryette Mullen, and Yusef Komunyakaa—artists who, using a wide range of styles and forms, are cultivating a poetry of personal voice and interiority that speaks against the backdrop of community and anscestry.
This is not just another poetry anthology. It is a gathering of poems that demonstrate what happens when writers in a marginalized community collectively turn from dedicating their writing to political, social, and economic struggles, and instead devote themselves to the art of their poems and to the ideas they embody. These poets bear witness to the interior landscapes of their own individual selves or examine the private or personal worlds of invented personae and, therefore, of human beings living in our modern and postmodern worlds.
The anthology focuses on post-1960s poetry and includes such poets as Rita Dove, Ai, Nathaniel Mackey, Natasha Trethewey, Kevin Young, Terrence Hayes, Elizabeth Alexander, Major Jackson, Carl Phillips, Harryette Mullen, and Yusef Komunyakaa—artists who, using a wide range of styles and forms, are cultivating a poetry of personal voice and interiority that speaks against the backdrop of community and anscestry.
617 pages, Paperback
First published May 7, 2012
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239 people want to read
About the author
Charles Henry Rowell
12 booksCharles Henry Rowell is the founder and editor of the premier literary and cultural journal of the African diaspora, Callaloo. He is a professor of English at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas, where he lives.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
December 5, 2019
"If Ezra Pound couldn't make it cohere
who am I, small-voiced, half-blind, to interfere
with what people like to do to each other?" - First stanza from "Poetry" by Michael Sibble Collins
This is a fantastic book looking at African-American poetry from the end of the Harlem Renaissance until about roughly-2012. Though the earliest poet is Melvin B. Tolson, the book does not really start its chronology until the 1950s and Gwendolyn Brooks & Robert Hayden. The title of this anthology comes from Hayden's "For a Young Artist" ("He strains, an awkward patsy, sweating strains leaping falling. Then--/silken rustling in the air, the angle of ascent achieved."), which seems to be a poetic re-telling of A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings. The book is divided into a prologue section which includes the modernist-influenced writers of the 1940s thru 1960s, the Black Arts Movement which rejected formalism and modernism, and the dissident writers that--while influenced by the BAM--rejected its strict socio-political stance when it came to art and re-embraced writers like Hayden (who was shunned by the Black Arts Movement). After this section we get to the actual "contemporary" poets that this book was published to introduce. It covers writers who have been writing from the late-1970s to now.needed need to fill a gap in my knowledge regarding contemporary African-American poetry (and contemporary literature in general). The book lives up to the hype that Norton Anthologies usually come with. The editor's introductory essays were excellent guides and he offers a wide-enough selection that no matter your taste there is a poet for you in this book. Of course, I need not fall in love with every poet and poem--but that is not the point; I was introduced to more forms and more writers and now I have more literature to track-down.
"Lying
awake at 4 A.M.
whatever the space beside you holds
you are yourself alone
and whatever there is of truth
turning in crevices light can't touch
it must be that which wakes you
in a quiet room a woman works
arranging words, a world
where she might live
it changes little day to day
but the mind is changed
as light changes, as the leaves turn
and whatever holds that space inside her
it is so much harder, vaster, colder
than this near mortal, however breathing, however loved." by Constance Merritt
who am I, small-voiced, half-blind, to interfere
with what people like to do to each other?" - First stanza from "Poetry" by Michael Sibble Collins
This is a fantastic book looking at African-American poetry from the end of the Harlem Renaissance until about roughly-2012. Though the earliest poet is Melvin B. Tolson, the book does not really start its chronology until the 1950s and Gwendolyn Brooks & Robert Hayden. The title of this anthology comes from Hayden's "For a Young Artist" ("He strains, an awkward patsy, sweating strains leaping falling. Then--/silken rustling in the air, the angle of ascent achieved."), which seems to be a poetic re-telling of A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings. The book is divided into a prologue section which includes the modernist-influenced writers of the 1940s thru 1960s, the Black Arts Movement which rejected formalism and modernism, and the dissident writers that--while influenced by the BAM--rejected its strict socio-political stance when it came to art and re-embraced writers like Hayden (who was shunned by the Black Arts Movement). After this section we get to the actual "contemporary" poets that this book was published to introduce. It covers writers who have been writing from the late-1970s to now.
"dear grandmaI checked this book out from the library because I
la luna
the moon
dear grandad
el sol
the sun
eagle above el cielo
tortoise below la tierra
________crayon in hand
________lapis de cera
a child inocencia
tries to get her
eyes back" -- el corazón--toward an ars poetica by Giovanni Singleton
"Lying
awake at 4 A.M.
whatever the space beside you holds
you are yourself alone
and whatever there is of truth
turning in crevices light can't touch
it must be that which wakes you
in a quiet room a woman works
arranging words, a world
where she might live
it changes little day to day
but the mind is changed
as light changes, as the leaves turn
and whatever holds that space inside her
it is so much harder, vaster, colder
than this near mortal, however breathing, however loved." by Constance Merritt
Read
April 9, 2013Without even glancing at the ample prefatory material Rowell provides, most readers can discern his sympathies from the title: while another editor might have chosen a phrase from the reader-friendly Langston Hughes—“Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair”—instead Rowell goes for the lesser-known Robert Hayden, who studied his craft under Auden and published ANGLE OF ASCENT: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS in 1975. To underscore his leanings, Rowell uses as an epigraph lines from “For a Young Artist”:
He strains, an awk-
ward patsy, sweating strains
leaping falling. Then—
silken rustling in the air,
the angle of ascent
achieved.
The poem is included with others—“Elegies for Paradise Valley” and “A Letter from Phillis Wheatley” by Hayden, one of the three “modernist” forerunners Rowell includes, along with Gwendolyn Brooks and Melvin B. Tolson. Why the deletion of Hughes, which has already made the book controversial? Is it, as Michael S. Harper puts it in “Don’t Explain: A Ballad Played by Dexter Gordon,” “Langston’s cues had a feel for lineal substitution but no feel for incremental leaping”?
Rowell organizes his material in chronological fashion, following Part 1’s “Precursors: The Modernists, 1940-1960” with two subsequent sections. “The 1960s and Beyond” begins with the Black Arts Movement, whose eponymous poem by Amiri Baraka remains its most famous. Or notorious, when we recall phrases about slimy-bellied “owner-jews” and “girdlemamma mulatto bitches.”
Writing as LeRoi Jones, the earlier Baraka produced BLUES PEOPLE, an invaluable means of cultural understanding; however distasteful we may find “Black Art,” he, with poets such as Sonia Sanchez and Nikki Giovanni, made writing about subjects other than race, and in tones other than that of separatist anger, possible.
Yet perhaps the best refutation of Baraka comes from a poet born a year earlier, Gerald Barrax, who opens ANGLE OF ASCENT’s following section, “The 1960s and Beyond: Outside the Black Arts Movement.” His statement of aesthetic principles prefaces the two poems included—these brief essays, most unpublished until now, are among ANGLE OF ASCENT’s most compelling features—and Barrax states that “passion alone is not enough to turn an angry, passionate young man into a poet, especially if the only passions he has are anger and hate.” Not that Barrax can he be accused of shying away from ugly emotions in “Eagle. Tiger. Whale.,” about violence against African American women, and “King: April 4, 1968.”
A reviewer could expend her entire word count with names and fragments of lines in ANGLE OF ASCENT, but Lorenzo Thomas’s “Onion Bucket”—separated from Barrax by the much beloved Lucille Clifton—begins with a line that resounds through the volume’s remainder: “All silence says music will follow.” For it’s “music” that does indeed “follow” in Part 2’s “Heirs: First Wave, Post-1960s”: Wanda Coleman, the self-described “Los Angeles Blueswoman”; Cornelius Eady; Gayl Jones; Harryette Mullen, whom I’ve described elsewhere as the love-child of Gertrude Stein and W. C. Handy, given MUSE & DRUDGE and her shared birthplace with the latter—Florence, Alabama; Nathaniel Mackey; Marilyn Nelson, whose germinal essay “Owning the Masters” remains a must-read; and in terms of influence, perhaps most importantly, Rita Dove and Yusef Komunyakaa.
In fact, Dove, our country’s first African American Poet Laureate, and Komunyakaa may be seen as the parents of two entire new generations of black poets—“Second Wave, Post-1960s” and “Third Wave, Post-1960s”— whose number comprises nearly half the book’s pages, featuring nearly every well-known poet to those conversant with the genre in any hue. All three “waves” illustrate as well the need for a new reckoning with African American poetry in terms of its past interwined with “the music of what happens” now.
Rowell organizes each section alphabetically, beginning with Elizabeth Alexander, our most recent inaugural poet, and places Tracy K. Smith, this year’s Pulitzer Prize winner, toward the end. As founding editor of CALLALOO in 1976, he has not only launched the careers of many holding major awards—and in the cases of Dove and Natasha Trethewey, appointments as Poets Laureate—but also provided a home for brilliantly gifted writers who aren’t household names. (At least not yet, sometimes despite various accolades.) I’ve selected a pair represented by as-yet unpublished books: Rockefeller/Bellagio Foundation fellow Kendra Hamilton, and Madgett winner Crystal Williams.
For Hamilton and others, a sense of self-fracture remains, as can be seen in “Belle’s Promenade: Nassau Street, Princeton.” “Belle” is the primary character of a manuscript-in-progress called MIRROURS OF THE WORLD, and the work consists of a character’s microcosmic reverie and trap, which will soon tighten its net around her “mulatto” identity. Having landed a job at Princeton’s library, she will meet J.P. Morgan, who allowed Greene to continue her mother’s “deceptions”—i.e. “passing”—while she helped him develop what passed for taste:
Here, amid all my deceptions
—fatherless child
from sun-washed Cape Verde
mama’s genteel pretensions—
is also everything that’s
true in my life.
The American books I pop
like chocolate drops on the tongue.
The fine bindings, incunabula,
for which I hunger as a child awaiting
Easter supper.
And no mere riches of our pretty
world can save me.
What could? The confrontational anger of the Black Arts Movement may not have been the answer, but it provided the ground for self-confrontation, like Greene’s and many of the youngest poets here, including Williams, Rowell’s penultimate poet. No “crystal stair” provides an escape from the problem she examines on Hayden’s hometown freeway, named for “Edsel Ford,” from a new manuscript, Detroit as Barn:
People close to you are hungry & you have ignored it. People close to you have lost their jobs.
Today somebody’s mother has died. Today somebody’s child has
been murdered. Today some body lost sight.
& your Lumina runs.
Your Lumina runs well. Luminosity.
woman: No one is coming to save you. There is nothing from
which to be saved.
The implicit dictum here is that we must save each other: no color is mentioned, only gender. If even that division seems false and inconsequential, see Jericho Brown’s “Prayer of the Backhanded,” where what seems to be a recurring word ends a prayer for his homophobic—yet a new dimension of black identity being explored—father.
While there may, in fact, be “nothing from which to be saved” except our own solipsism and anger, ANGLE OF ASCENT’s other essential message explains why such anthologies remain essential themselves: how can white America see and/or read itself except through what Toni Morrison calls “what moves at the margins,” especially since what moves there was brought to these shores by force and the subject of so much historical cruelty?
Rowell’s accomplishment, though monumental, is not without imperfections: the question of Hughes will linger of course, and isn’t to be decided by me; but far more recently, where are Erica Dawson, Willie James King, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Mona Lisa Saloy, Tim Seibles, and Claude Wilkinson? My knowledge of each poet’s work remains, however, relatively new, and their own ascent may not have yet made them visible on Rowell’s radar—or they may have been among the problematic aspects of assembling an anthology he discusses in the preface. That negates not in the slightest the anthology’s importance. ANGLE OF ASCENT is an enormous and solid bequest to readers of American poetry: let us give thanks.
(originally published in SHENANDOAH, Spring 2013, Volume 62, Number 2)
He strains, an awk-
ward patsy, sweating strains
leaping falling. Then—
silken rustling in the air,
the angle of ascent
achieved.
The poem is included with others—“Elegies for Paradise Valley” and “A Letter from Phillis Wheatley” by Hayden, one of the three “modernist” forerunners Rowell includes, along with Gwendolyn Brooks and Melvin B. Tolson. Why the deletion of Hughes, which has already made the book controversial? Is it, as Michael S. Harper puts it in “Don’t Explain: A Ballad Played by Dexter Gordon,” “Langston’s cues had a feel for lineal substitution but no feel for incremental leaping”?
Rowell organizes his material in chronological fashion, following Part 1’s “Precursors: The Modernists, 1940-1960” with two subsequent sections. “The 1960s and Beyond” begins with the Black Arts Movement, whose eponymous poem by Amiri Baraka remains its most famous. Or notorious, when we recall phrases about slimy-bellied “owner-jews” and “girdlemamma mulatto bitches.”
Writing as LeRoi Jones, the earlier Baraka produced BLUES PEOPLE, an invaluable means of cultural understanding; however distasteful we may find “Black Art,” he, with poets such as Sonia Sanchez and Nikki Giovanni, made writing about subjects other than race, and in tones other than that of separatist anger, possible.
Yet perhaps the best refutation of Baraka comes from a poet born a year earlier, Gerald Barrax, who opens ANGLE OF ASCENT’s following section, “The 1960s and Beyond: Outside the Black Arts Movement.” His statement of aesthetic principles prefaces the two poems included—these brief essays, most unpublished until now, are among ANGLE OF ASCENT’s most compelling features—and Barrax states that “passion alone is not enough to turn an angry, passionate young man into a poet, especially if the only passions he has are anger and hate.” Not that Barrax can he be accused of shying away from ugly emotions in “Eagle. Tiger. Whale.,” about violence against African American women, and “King: April 4, 1968.”
A reviewer could expend her entire word count with names and fragments of lines in ANGLE OF ASCENT, but Lorenzo Thomas’s “Onion Bucket”—separated from Barrax by the much beloved Lucille Clifton—begins with a line that resounds through the volume’s remainder: “All silence says music will follow.” For it’s “music” that does indeed “follow” in Part 2’s “Heirs: First Wave, Post-1960s”: Wanda Coleman, the self-described “Los Angeles Blueswoman”; Cornelius Eady; Gayl Jones; Harryette Mullen, whom I’ve described elsewhere as the love-child of Gertrude Stein and W. C. Handy, given MUSE & DRUDGE and her shared birthplace with the latter—Florence, Alabama; Nathaniel Mackey; Marilyn Nelson, whose germinal essay “Owning the Masters” remains a must-read; and in terms of influence, perhaps most importantly, Rita Dove and Yusef Komunyakaa.
In fact, Dove, our country’s first African American Poet Laureate, and Komunyakaa may be seen as the parents of two entire new generations of black poets—“Second Wave, Post-1960s” and “Third Wave, Post-1960s”— whose number comprises nearly half the book’s pages, featuring nearly every well-known poet to those conversant with the genre in any hue. All three “waves” illustrate as well the need for a new reckoning with African American poetry in terms of its past interwined with “the music of what happens” now.
Rowell organizes each section alphabetically, beginning with Elizabeth Alexander, our most recent inaugural poet, and places Tracy K. Smith, this year’s Pulitzer Prize winner, toward the end. As founding editor of CALLALOO in 1976, he has not only launched the careers of many holding major awards—and in the cases of Dove and Natasha Trethewey, appointments as Poets Laureate—but also provided a home for brilliantly gifted writers who aren’t household names. (At least not yet, sometimes despite various accolades.) I’ve selected a pair represented by as-yet unpublished books: Rockefeller/Bellagio Foundation fellow Kendra Hamilton, and Madgett winner Crystal Williams.
For Hamilton and others, a sense of self-fracture remains, as can be seen in “Belle’s Promenade: Nassau Street, Princeton.” “Belle” is the primary character of a manuscript-in-progress called MIRROURS OF THE WORLD, and the work consists of a character’s microcosmic reverie and trap, which will soon tighten its net around her “mulatto” identity. Having landed a job at Princeton’s library, she will meet J.P. Morgan, who allowed Greene to continue her mother’s “deceptions”—i.e. “passing”—while she helped him develop what passed for taste:
Here, amid all my deceptions
—fatherless child
from sun-washed Cape Verde
mama’s genteel pretensions—
is also everything that’s
true in my life.
The American books I pop
like chocolate drops on the tongue.
The fine bindings, incunabula,
for which I hunger as a child awaiting
Easter supper.
And no mere riches of our pretty
world can save me.
What could? The confrontational anger of the Black Arts Movement may not have been the answer, but it provided the ground for self-confrontation, like Greene’s and many of the youngest poets here, including Williams, Rowell’s penultimate poet. No “crystal stair” provides an escape from the problem she examines on Hayden’s hometown freeway, named for “Edsel Ford,” from a new manuscript, Detroit as Barn:
People close to you are hungry & you have ignored it. People close to you have lost their jobs.
Today somebody’s mother has died. Today somebody’s child has
been murdered. Today some body lost sight.
& your Lumina runs.
Your Lumina runs well. Luminosity.
woman: No one is coming to save you. There is nothing from
which to be saved.
The implicit dictum here is that we must save each other: no color is mentioned, only gender. If even that division seems false and inconsequential, see Jericho Brown’s “Prayer of the Backhanded,” where what seems to be a recurring word ends a prayer for his homophobic—yet a new dimension of black identity being explored—father.
While there may, in fact, be “nothing from which to be saved” except our own solipsism and anger, ANGLE OF ASCENT’s other essential message explains why such anthologies remain essential themselves: how can white America see and/or read itself except through what Toni Morrison calls “what moves at the margins,” especially since what moves there was brought to these shores by force and the subject of so much historical cruelty?
Rowell’s accomplishment, though monumental, is not without imperfections: the question of Hughes will linger of course, and isn’t to be decided by me; but far more recently, where are Erica Dawson, Willie James King, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Mona Lisa Saloy, Tim Seibles, and Claude Wilkinson? My knowledge of each poet’s work remains, however, relatively new, and their own ascent may not have yet made them visible on Rowell’s radar—or they may have been among the problematic aspects of assembling an anthology he discusses in the preface. That negates not in the slightest the anthology’s importance. ANGLE OF ASCENT is an enormous and solid bequest to readers of American poetry: let us give thanks.
(originally published in SHENANDOAH, Spring 2013, Volume 62, Number 2)
April 4, 2013
I was positively thrilled when I saw I had this book on hold at my library. My enthusiasm was not misplaced. I would recommend this handsome anthology, edited by Charles Henry Rowell, to anyone with even a vague interest in contemporary African American Poetry. The introduction, "Writing Self, Writing Community" is informative. The book is well-organized into historical sections--the Modernists, the Black Arts Movement, etc. What richness! The title is taken from a poem by the peerless Robert Hayden:
He strains, an awk-
ward patsy, sweating strains
leaping falling. Then--
silken rustling in the air
the angel of ascent
achieved.
He strains, an awk-
ward patsy, sweating strains
leaping falling. Then--
silken rustling in the air
the angel of ascent
achieved.
October 17, 2021
An excellent anthology to read and an excellent anthology to own. What I appreciate most about this poetry anthology is the insight each poets gives into their writing process. Before each selection, the poets discuss the craft of writing by way of small compositions.
Plus, any poetry anthology that contains the works of Tracy K. Smith is a must own.
Plus, any poetry anthology that contains the works of Tracy K. Smith is a must own.
February 3, 2018
Introduced me to a lot of cool poets I'd never read before. Excellent collection here.
December 31, 2016
Stunning collection. Comments and author's comments are great, and one of the reasons I love anthologies, particularly where context is important, as is the case with many poets shared here.
December 27, 2019
Absolutely brilliant collection of African American poetry.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews