Jahan Ramazani

Bio

Jahan Ramazani is University Professor and Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English at the University of Virginia. His most recent books are Poetry in a Global Age, Poetry and Its Others, and A Transnational Poetics, winner of the ACLA’s Harry Levin Prize. He is editor of The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Poetry and coeditor of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

Contributions

Patricia Smith, Black Mourning, and Elegy’s Others

Peer Reviewed

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If Claudia Rankine is right that “The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning,” how do you write a poem that does justice to the ongoingness of that condition, the changing same of Black grief and death, from the Middle Passage to Black Lives Matter? [1] Rankine’s celebrated mixed-media, didactic Citizen: An American Lyric, which includes elegiac prose poems for Trayvon Martin, James Craig Anderson, and others, represents one way to meet the challenge. [2] For another Black American poet who...

Tags:

elegy race