Ethnic Poets

In recent years, American poetry has been greatly charged by the increased presence of poets from a wide range of cultural backgrounds. African Americans made their voices heard as far back as the 18th century, with poet Phillis Wheatly, but they assumed a more distinctive presence with the arrival of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s. Poets associated with this influential group included Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, and Sterling Brown. While Cullen preferred to write in traditional forms, Hughes and others worked to craft new forms reflecting African American voices and experience, taking inspiration from slang and inflection, blues songs, and African chants. Later poets such as Amiri Baraka, Etheridge Knight, Lucille Clifton, Ishmael Reed, Quincy Troupe, and contemporary spoken-word poets took inspiration from these early efforts, while Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden, and Melvin Tolson adhered more closely to established forms. Latino voices such as Gary Soto, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Martin Espada, Sandra Cisneros, and Jimmy Santiago Baca have also sought to express diverse cultural experience in their poems, as have Native Americans Linda Hogan, Sherman Alexie, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Joy Harjo. Among Asian Americans, the vastly different writings of Kimiko Hahn, Li-Young Lee, Arthur Sze, Michael Harper, Toi Derricotte, and John Yau show the artistic breadth of cross-cultural influence. In recent decades, the dramatic increase of work in translation and its widespread distribution have made poetry more than ever an international art, informed by a broad range of traditions.
North American immigrants and Native Americans claimed a literary voice in Canada during the 1990s. Lola Lemire represents the confusion of identity familiar in a plural culture like Canada’s, further complicated by the culture of the 20th century. Trinidad-born Dionne Brand, African-Canadian George Elliot Clarke Daniel, and David Moses, a writer of Delaware Indian heritage, are among Canada’s contemporary ethnic writers expressing the diversity within Canada’s historical plurality.