Black Poets to Speak on Legacy of 1960s

Black activists and writers will speak this weekend in a three-day retrospective of the legacy of Afro-American poetry and politics.

Sponsored by the Afro-American Studies Department and Roxbury Community College, the conference will address the effect 1960s Black writers have had on contemporary poets and feature poets such as Angela Davis and Amiri Baraka.

"The time is good to ask younger writers for whom that period is either a golden or rotten age [what effect the Black poetry of the 1960s had on their work]," Chairman of the Afro-American Department Werner Sollors said yesterday.

Contemporary Black writers will discuss the influence their 1960s predecessors had on their own work. The 1960s witnessed a heyday in published Black poetry, said Carolivia O. Herron, assistant professor of Afro-American Studies and chair of the conference.

Compared with militant poems by writers like Baraka in the 1960s, poetry has become "more private, more personal, more subjective," said poet and author Ishmael Reed, visiting professor of Afro-American literature from the University of California at Berkeley.

But "there are still people writing political poetry," Reed added.

Black poets today write more on the politics of feminism and international issues, particularly the Black struggle in South Africa, than on domestic issues such as the civil rights movement as they did in the 1960s, said Herron.

Race still remains a theme in Afro-American poetry, said Professor of English Helen H. Vendler, who will participate in the conference tomorrow. "I don't see how any black poet could have not known from the age of two that there is a color question," she said.

"Superficially, it seems like a very calm period racially, but in talking more personally [with students] I see problems under the surface," Herron said about her experiences at Harvard. "There seems to be a lot more racial frustration than I would have thought possible," said Herron.

Black writers also face problems of tokenism, as evidenced by the typical under-representation of their work in anthologies, said Reed. "We are a multi-cultural civilization, but you really have to go out of your way to find a literary power to recognize that. It will be a long battle before it is canonized," Reed said.

However, Vendler, poetry critic for the New Yorker and the editor of the "Harvard Book of Contemporary American Poetry," said, "There is no bias against ethnic poetry" as long as it is good.

This morning June Jordan and Reed will speak, and this afternoon Davis will appear with Lorna Goodison and Etheridge Knight. Both programs will be held at the Massachusetts College of Art in Roxbury.

On Saturday the program will move to the Boston Public Library and on Sunday Harvard will host H. Rap Brown, Dove and Reed.