Author: encomia

Where to go and what to do / When the beach is too sandy and water too wet / The sky too blue and the sun too bright . . . (Poetry by Christine (Liu) Young)

"When April with its showers sweet / The drought of March has pierced to the root . . ." (Excerpt from The Canterbury Tales Prologue by Geoffrey Chaucer)

"There once was a man from Nantucket. / He had enough and said, "I've had enough. / No limericks today, . . ." (Poetry by Jeremy O'Roark)

"Pressure and tension gurgles and bubbles / A stirring up of ideas and trouble . . ." (Poetry by Debbie Camper)

"It's me, myself and I, / And some South African wine, / On the brown leather couch that . . . " (Poetry by Margarita Chukhina)

"The silence of the brooding night, / Enfolds me with its eerie light; / I lie upon its shadowed breast / A pilgrim, wearying for rest . . ." (Poetry by Georgia Douglas Johnson)

When Langston Hughes published his early poem, "The Weary Blues," back in 1925, he was innovating literature and language, it's said, matching poetic form to musical form, and subject. According to poet Kevin Young, "Hughes was in fact the first to write poetry in the blues form," and his 1926 collection "The Weary Blues represents the… Continue reading The Weary Blues →

Fenton Johnson was born in Chicago and lived most of his life there, though he can be considered a poet of both the Harlem Renaissance and the lesser known Chicago Renaissance. He attended college at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago and later studied in New York at Columbia's School of Journalism before returning… Continue reading Tired →

Known as a poet of the Harlem Renaissance, Georgia Douglas Johnson (1880-1966) wrote four collections of poetry: The Heart of a Woman (1918), Bronze (1922), An Autumn Love Cycle (1928), and Share My World (1962). However, she was more than a poet--she wrote plays as well as a weekly column ("Homely Philosophy")--and she did not… Continue reading Let Me Not Hate →