WHAT I SAY - Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America

This is the long-planned second volume of the anthology project that began with Every Goodbye

Ain’t Gone. The division between the two collections is chronological, though we have chosen

not to announce that explicitly in the titles of the volumes.

The first volume began with writers, such as Russell Atkins and Melvin B. Tolson, who were

already engaging in formal experimentation in the 1940s. While Tolson is the earliest poet in

that book, his posthumous poems published in the volume date to the 1960s, and thus mark

Tolson’s increasing role as an innovator well known to the poets who were to form the Black

Arts Movement. Atkins’s poems, on the other hand, date to the late 1940s, and mark the earliest

stages of the avant garde experimentation documented in Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone.

With the publication of What I Say following Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone, readers have available

a broad prospect on the more radical poetries of black America from the close of the second

World War to the present moment. In the words of C.S. Giscombe, we have complicated the

yakety-yak.