In other voices: the millennial poets and personae.

WHEN I ASKED TYEHIMBA JESS, AUTHOR OF THE RECENTLY published collection Leadbelly (Verse Press, 2005), why he wrote his poems in the voice of the titular blues legend, he told me he felt a kinship to the musician. Writing the poems provide a link of experience and perception that transcended the barrier of years between the two men.

Leadbelly's life provided Jess with a means to self-exploration beyond the confessional.

Leadbelly, born Hudson Ledbetter, is a legend. But legends are often stripped of the commonplace thoughts and actions that make them human. Jess was compelled to write poems that complicate our perceptions and reveal our misperceptions of his character's life, art and times.

In this way, Jess's work converses with a growing number of books by a group of writers I call Millennial Poets: thirty-something African American poets writing in the first decade of the new millennium. In their first and second books, these young black poets often employ personae to create more fully fleshed out characters, and they frequently include explorations of the past and various ties of kinship or community.

We are many in number, the Millennial Poets. In our multitudes, we defy definition. Still, there seem to be some trends. A catalogue of the books written by thirty-something black poets who have been published or contracted within the past five years would show several interesting and interrelated trends. Writing over and in the margins of existing texts, stories and assumptions, this generation of black poets uses new and renewed poetic modes to develop an understanding of self, community and responsibility to history.

"When your history has been compromised," says Doug Kearny, author of Fear, Some (Red Hen Press, August 2006), "there is a point where you want to simplify it. Then you complicate it again."

Multiple Angles

Rather than embracing only one angle of an argument, books by Millennial Poets approach characters, time periods and situations from a variety of points of view. Consider the split poems several of these poets write: two narratives nm side by side and can be read individually or in tandem; one poem becomes two, simultaneously reinforcing and contradicting the individual stories being told.

"I had to figure out new ways to approach the story," says Jess, when asked about why he merged the voices of John Lomax and Huddie Ledbetter in several poems. There are always several ways of looking at one question. Through form, voice and narrative these poems embrace those multiple possibilities for articulation and interpretation.

As the first children of the post-desegregation era, this generation is seeking new definitions of and boundaries for community.

Having lost one form of community, we find ourselves charged with creating new ones. Novels in verse or interconnected, thematically driven poetry collections have gained popularity over the past several years. A push towards a greater coherency and cohesiveness drives the artist towards the development of interconnected series.

"We have an epic tendency," says Gregory Pardlo, 2005 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in poetry and assistant professor of English at Medgar Eyers College, City University of New York. "A few loose poems would not do justice to many of the subjects we choose to investigate." The strategy of interconnectivity allows the poet to view a question through several lenses and from several angles. Various skins can be inhabited, and the lifelike masks required of good personae poems demand that these skins are fully fleshed. Fallacies, sensibilities and iconographies can be investigated more subtly and thoroughly when references and commentary are delivered in the speakers' voices throughout a frill-length collection of verse.

Historical biographical collections available today reflect an interest in perceived and constructed knowledge. Without the poets' compassionate eyes, Natasha Trethewey's 1911 prostitute in Bellocq's Ophelia (Graywolf Press, 2002) and A. Van Jordan's 1936 near-champion speller in Macnolia (W. W. Norton & Company, 2004) would be nameless and faceless in the annals of United States history, both public and personal:</p> <pre>

They say she was almost the national spelling champ I don't know, really, but I'm telling you-She's the best damn maid in town.

(from "In Service," Macnolia) </pre> <p>What we know about MacNolia Cox, like what history has told us about too many other black American figures, could be limited by what people like the white doctor speaking in the poem quoted above said about her. Fortunately, Jordan's book, like those of others in this generation, invites us beyond such limits, thus reconstructing history through the appropriated voices of figures from the past: "I came from a pride of proud women, and we take good care of our young" ("From" Macnolia).

Unerasing the Past

Jordan's is the reinvented history of a real individual whereas Trethewey's Ophelia is a composite, a fictional character drawn from the voices and blurred records, both real and imagined, of erased women. Millennial Poets seem to be resisting such erasures in ways that enlarge and expand upon similar efforts made by our predecessors. Consider the charge sent through the poetry community when Elizabeth Alexander released the Venus Hottentot (The University Press of Virginia) in 1990. The title poem, by redefining the terms and lens through which the body and life of Sartje Baartman would be viewed, forecast an emergence of books with similar projects.

"There are issues that a linear view of history does not do justice to. Labor issues, political, economic and artistic issues, these are all interconnected," says Pardlo. "There is something now that valorizes the rewriting of history." A generation reared in schools that ignored our history but for the week or month each year when black history is delivered, recycled and prepackaged, we know we must seek and complicate our own stories if we are to replace majority perceptions that erase the individuality instilled by fully formed and feeling minds.

Coming of age in the post-apartheid era in America, we are the first generation of black Americans with broad access to education, publication and many other tools necessary to and expected of the progressive thinker and writer. "There are more people than ever with access to U.S history and to the history of U.S. poetry; and we can use those tools to plumb the subtleties of these systems" says less. To do this, many poets of this generation employ personae, inhabiting and fleshing out the skins of their poems' figures. In an interview with Jill Petty, Trethewey said of her first book, Domestic Work (Graywolf Press, 2000), "I'm remembering in some of those poems memories that aren't mine immediately but ones that are given to me, and I think those become part of who you are, too." By drawing the distances and proximities between souls, we connect them and testify to this connection. This enlarged definition of self and kinship expands the focus of these new books and allows for a greater degree of intimacy and empathy.

Living as I do near Appomattox, Virginia, where, as the sign says, "the country was reunited," I understand the tendency toward nostalgia and glorification where history is concerned. It is possible, and even likely, that those who reference the past and their communities might construct an over-rosy image of what and who have gone before. As a whole, it seems the Millennial Poets have avoided such a trap. The books I refer to consistently expand the frame of focus in a manner that complicates and contextualizes individuals. The creation of the authentic voices required for compelling historical personae poems means that heroes cannot be all good, villains not all bad; the world must be as full of ugliness as beauty. Obvious rules for good writing, certainly, but the freedom to honestly articulate the failings as well as the strengths of a community, a history, an iconic individual (real or imagined) is a liberty not afforded to artists in all eras. It is, I think, one of the entitlements and responsibilities that will allow this generation of writers to thrive.

Camille Dungy is assistant professor of English at-Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia. Her collection of poems is What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison (Red Hen Press).

NEW PERSPECTIVES

These forthcoming or recently published books by African American poets are partly or entirely comprised of historical personae poems:

American Smooth by Rita Dove W. W. Norton & Company, September 2004 $22.95, ISBN 0-393-05987-1

American Sublime by Elizabeth Alexander Graywolf Press. October 2005 $14, ISBN 1-555-97432-5

Bellocq's Ophelia by Natasha Trethewey Graywolf Press, April 2002 $14. ISBN 1-555-97359-0

Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York by Frank X. Walker University Press of Kentucky, February 2004 $18. ISBN 0-813-19088-6

Brutal Imagination by Cornelius Eady Putnam. January 2001 $14. ISBN 0-399-14720-9

Drag by Duriel Harris Elixir Press, September 2003 $14, ISBN 1-932-41800-8

Fear, Some by Doug Kearny Red Hen Press, August 2006 SBN 1-597-09071-9

Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem's First Decade Edited by Carolyn Micklem Tel Derricotte and Cornelius Eady university of Michigan Press, February 2006 $19.95. ISBN 0-472-06924-1

Leadbelly: Poems by Tyehimba Jess Verse Press, October 2005 $14, ISBN 0-974-63533-2

Macnolia by A. Van Jordan W. W. Norton & Company, June 2004 $23.95, ISBN 0-393-05907-3

Outlandish Blues by Honoree Fannone Jeffers Wesleyan University Press, March 2003 $13.95, ISBN 0-819-56584-9

Red Summer by Amaud Jamal Johnson Tupelo Press. April 2006 $16.95, ISBN 1-932-19532-7

Slave Moth: A Narrative in Verse by Thylias Moss Persea Books, February 2004 $24 ISBN 0-892-55289-1

Song of Thieves by Shara McCallum University of Pittsburgh Press February 2003. $12.95, ISBN 0-822-95813-9

They Shall Run: Harriet Tubman Poems by Quraysh Ali Lansana Third World Press. June 2004 $15.95. ISBN 0-883-78257-X

What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison by Camille Dungy Red Hen Press. February 2006 $15.95. ISBN 1-597-09000-X