Arts & Entertainment
Second Tuesdays Poetry Night -- Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry
Monthly poetry reading featuring noted Bay Area poets. Followed by open mic at the.
with guest poets Al Young
and Cynthia Parker-Ohene
Camille T. Dungy, the editor of Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, calls her book a first of its kind. The nearly 200 poems in the anthology reach back to the mid-1700s, but Dungy says people rarely think of black poets as writing in a genre that brings to mind having the leisure — and time — to contemplate a field of flowers.
"The way that the tradition of nature poetry has taken off in America in particular is often about a pastoral landscape, a very idealized rural landscape, or a wilderness landscape in which people are involved," Dungy tells NPR's Renee Montagne. "And black people have been typically working in the land, and that's not part of the idyllic version of things. And then also the majority of African Americans have tended to live in urban landscapes, and so there's a very different view, quite often, of the natural world." – NPR