Haki R. Madhubuti: Selections

[Jump to poems by publication year: 1960s, 2000s, 2010s, 2023]

Haki R. Madhubuti (1942-present) is regarded as an architect of the Black Arts Movement and is founder and publisher of Chicago’s Third World Press. Madhubuti has published more than 36 books, directed the Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and Creative Writing for more than 20 years, cofounded the first MFA in Creative Writing at a predominantly Black university, and cofounded the International Literary Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent. Madhubuti is a recipient of the 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.

Influenced largely by Detroit doo-wop and jazz, and continually considering the relationship between poetry and music, he published the iconic volumes Think Black (1967); Black Pride (1968); Don’t Cry, Scream (1969); and We Walk the Way of the New World (1970), all from Broadside Press. These works display the rhythm, humor, social insight, and vernacular sensibility that made him one of the nation’s most-read poets and led to his inclusion in over 100 anthologies. They also portray his commitment to reworking, as he put it, the “old stereotypes and themes and images to bring us more understanding of ourselves as individuals and as a group of fragmented, oppressed people.”

- from “With the Wind in Your Hand: On Haki R. Madhubuti” by Keith Gilyard, published in Poetry, April 2023

Haki Madhubuti’s writing is inseparable from his work. A leader of the Black Arts Movement, Madhubuti published more than 35 books, many with the press that he began. Third World Press, founded in 1967 by Madhubuti with support from Johari Amini and Carolyn Rodgers, is one of the country’s oldest independent Black publishers. In the more than 55 years since, the press has published iconic Black writers and thinkers, including Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka, and Sonia Sanchez. The publishing house also opened four Chicago schools dedicated to nurturing young Black readers and writers.

This organizational mission can be traced back to Madhubuti’s childhood and the profound effect Richard Wright’s Black Boy had on him. Madhubuti describes, “I hated myself. I hated my circumstance, I hated my life. I hated my color. … I’m beginning to read [Black Boy], and for the first time in my life, I was reading literature that was not an insult to my person.” ¹

Throughout his career, Madhubuti has worked to grow his individual transformation into large-scale social change. On the Black Arts Movement, he said, “[T]he mission is how do we become a whole people, and how do we begin to essentially tell our narrative while at the same time mov[ing] toward a level of success in this country and in this world? And we can do that. I know we can do that.”² This dream can be found in the Black autonomy of Third World Press and the Black collectivity of his coconspirators Rodgers and Amini. It can be found in the guidance of fellow Black poet Dudley Randall, who established Broadside Press in his basement. It can be found in the mentorship he and countless others received from Gwendolyn Brooks, who in Madhubuti’s words, “recognized the unfinished Don Lee, to become Haki Madhubuti.”³ In a time of extreme upheaval, Madhubuti carries on the lessons and legacies of the Black Arts Movement through his enduring poetry, Broadside Press, and the collective ethos that runs throughout.

Haki Madhubuti's selected poems in order of publication

“Rwanda: Where Tears Have No Power”(1969)

Who has the moral high ground?

“Who has the moral high ground?” A push for pan-African identity arose in tandem with the Black Arts Movement. Today, we see this desire to connect Black Lives Matter across borders, to ground Black identity within rich and expansive histories. In this poem, Madhubuti draws parallels between Black violence on “small corners in northwest, d.c.” and intraethnic conflicts happening within “small foreign names on a map made in europe.” He draws distance, first from “the boys of d.c.” He finds them to be only “disguised as me,” to “know nothing about their distant relatives.” Not until a strange break in syntax—“and do not cry at funerals anymore”—are they drawn together: “our house, block, territory.” When the poem expands from a local to an international scale, Bosnians, Sri Lankans, and Rwandans feel as distant as “the boys of d.c.,” as distant as if he is one of them. The poem resorts to the “numbers and frequency” he earlier maligned: “bodies / by the tens of thousands,” “quarter of a million people.” This violence makes the news, but this violence, still, produces “no more tears.”

The poem raises the question: What are the difficulties of Black collective identity? How do distant parallels meet? Can fault lines come together? Perhaps, the poem seems to suggest, connection is by way of the chasms.

“For the Consideration of Poets”(2004)

where is the poetry of resistance,
the poetry of honorable defiance

How can poetry be resistance? What is the role of writers in collective struggle? Madhubuti does not answer these questions in his poem, articulating a “poetry of resistance” only by way of what it is not. Rather, the message of the poem is housed inside the poem and also moves through it. The poem functions to call on other poets to consider and to call for collective change. 

Reflecting on his career, Madhubuti says, “My life has always been involved in not only writing but also in social justice and building independent Black institutions.”⁴ This is reflected in his founding of the Third World Press Foundation, which includes both a publishing house and schools dedicated to nurturing the next generation of Black readers and writers. In this poem and others, which are not separate from his life, words combine with action, and neither can exist without the other.

“Gwendolyn Brooks: America in the Wintertime(2017)

we never saw you dance but you had rhythm,
you were a warrior before the war,
creating earth language, uncommon signs and melodies,
and did not sing the songs of career slaves.

Taking up from “For the Consideration of Poets” and the enunciation of poetry as resistant, this poem confronts the fact that “terror is also language based.” In search of an inverse, Madhubuti asks, “Where are the kind language makers among us?” He reaches into the past, writing to (and also from) mentor Gwendolyn Brooks. In an interview, Madhubuti characterizes Brooks as his primary influence and as a friend, “a mentor and lifeline to thousands of poets, children, and writers seeking an island of hope.”⁵ Madhubuti, like Brooks, stares headlong into the destruction wrought by weaponized language. At that colossal scale, what is any one individual to do?

In the poem, Madhubuti cuts his incisive critiques, the rapid accumulation of all that is wrong, with a distillation to kindness: “america / if you see me as your enemy / you have no / friends.” Writing after Brooks, Madhubuti carries on both Brooks’s writing (“creating earth language”) and her work (“creating an army of poets”), her friendship and her “yes,” which any one individual can create.

From the Lilly Poetry Prize winner folio in Poetry magazine, April 2023

“Claiming Language, Claiming Art V”(2023)

Black recall, sharing, teaching, never forgetting

What is the role of the poet in political revolution? Is it to be furious? Is it to plant flowers? These are the questions Madhubuti takes up in this two-part poem. Furious, Madhubuti sharply critiques the causes of destruction and names exactly what is needed. But then he concedes, and his language falls short: “the next line giveaways and missed melodies of poets and their poems.” What he wants is to put into words how the poets, “they who made words into life,” do even more than put life into words. He’s talking about the feeling of reading Richard Wright for the first time: “Here I am, being smacked in the Face. ‘Wake up, Negro, because there’s another world out here, which you know nothing about.’”⁶ But this furious approach leaves him far from the feeling of this world, which he can write about but can’t live in. Bereft, he asks where the poets have gone. 

In “Flowers,” he answers. They’re everywhere, in the “world over and under,” “local backyards of rocks, glass, and no hope,” “all where flowers will grow with little water, sun, or helping hands.” The life of words abounds in the projects, in the “body-sweet sweat of workers,” and here, he becomes furious—putting to words the world’s problems that produce this sweat—before “forcing memory, Black recall, sharing, teaching.” He gives a role call, recalling the first time he saw this other world with all those present and absent in it, and in effect, he calls on the next generation to read them. How can poetry be an act of both creativity and creation? Of putting life into words and making words into life?

“Clearing the Forest, This Precious Coupling” (2023)

everybody needs a tree
rooted deep and dark-grounded, Black
lineage connected joyfully tied to click-song music
opening life’s veins: vision, hearing, defining dances, and heritage

In his editor’s note honoring the 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize recipients (Madhubuti is one), Poetry editor Adrian Matejka writes, “[A poet’s work] is deeply communal even as it serves as a single trumpet amid the bandstand.”⁷ In this poem, Madhubuti clears his desk, so to speak, contemplating his own legacy. At first, the tree stands on its own, and Madhubuti seems on his own, reinforced so that he can give reinforcement to others. However, the tree stands because it is deeply rooted in lineage and tradition. And the tree, in a nonpaternalistic and nearly roleless turn, stands “to state and announce to my daughters as they jump the broom.” This line’s and the speaker’s openness steps back, not directing but enabling: his mere presence lets them “be.” The i of the poem is lowercase. It is articulated in relation, in shared sharing—“i and we are here infused in the creative language of. …” It is not one, nor one’s own, insofar as it is taken up by others—“i am their. …” Even as Madhubuti serves as a single trumpet, stands as one tree, his writing and work are given over to the “precious coupling” from which he writes his i.

^{1“The Good Fight: An Interview with Haki R. Madhubuti on Taught By Women”}

^{2The Black Arts Movement Collection}

^{3“The Good Fight: An Interview with Haki R. Madhubuti on Taught By Women”}

^{4“The Good Fight: An Interview with Haki R. Madhubuti on Taught By Women”}

^{5“Guest Blog: Poet Haki R. Madhubuti on Gwendolyn Brooks”}

^{6“The Good Fight: An Interview with Haki R. Madhubuti on Taught By Women”}

^{7Poetry, April 2023}