The Preacherly Text: African American Poetry and Vernacular Performance

VEN THOUGH African American critical theory has finally come into its own, theorists have yet to give black poets their proper voice in constructing an African American literary tradition. With few exceptions, recent scholars in the field have focused attention on a canon of fiction and autobiography to the exclusion of poetry.' While the ground-breaking work done in the early 1970s by Bernard Bell, Stephen Henderson, Blyden Jackson and Louis D. Rubin, Eugene Redmond, and Joan Sherman remains important today, surprisingly few studies of the diversity of African American poetry have been published in the last decade. A notable exception is Vera Kutzinski's treatment of comparative New World poetics in Against the American Grain; while moving outside the boundaries of the strictly African American texts, her discussion encourages us to rethink the concepts-such as race, geography, and national identity-that have defined our sense of the African American poetic canon.2 Fortunately, the most important single-author studies from the 1970s, including the work of Kimberly Benston (Baraka), J. Lee Greene, Onwuchekwa Jemie, and Werner Sollors, have been joined by more recent volumes-for example, those by Rudolph P. Byrd, Wayne F. Cooper, Robert M. Farnsworth, William J. Harris, D. H. Melhem, and Arnold Rampersad. Scholars know more about individual African American poets now than they ever did before. In many ways, however, black critical theory has yet to respond to the rich voices of black poets from the past.