[MUSIC] Born in Jamaica, McKay came to the US in 1912. Several of his influential early sonnets were published in Liberator while he lived in New York, conserved as co-executive editor of the magazine from 1919 to 1922. His towering sonnets, remains some of the most fears indictments of American racism ever written. Outcast From 1922, invokes the slave trade to depict what it means to be a racial other, t live as though you are an alien in your own country. For the dim regions, whence my fathers came, my spirit, bondaged by the body, longs. Words felt, but never heard, my lips would frame; My soul would sing forgotten jungle songs. I would go back to darkness and to peace, but the great Western world holds me in fee. And I may never hope for full release while to its alien gods I bend my knees. Something in me is lost, forever lost. Some vital thing has gone out of my heart, and I must walk the way of life a ghost. Among the sons of earth, a thing apart. For I was born, far from my native clime, under the white man's menace, out of time. Haunted by a past they never knew, exiled to an impossible present, blacks in America at the time were doubly imperiled. They existed apart from the ordinary social space of lived time. And yet were urgently endangered nonetheless. McKay took the romance and consolations of the historical sonnet and replaced them with a hand grenade of protest. His speaker harbors a spiritual and historical relation to Africa but it is forever lost to him as a reality. Nonetheless he carries it within as a lack, a wound, that haunts him while he wonders a white world which still holds him in bondage. Discriminated against, confined to poverty, and racially barred from white centers of power. Africa serves in the poem as a figure for everything he's blocked from achieving. Everything that racism circumscribes in his identity. And that lack, as a result, becomes his identity. A realization that builds to the astonishing intensity of the last four lines. Among the sons of earth, a thing apart. For I was born, far from my native clime. Under the white man's menace, out of time. Out of time in a dual sense. Running out of time but also cast out of normal human time. McKay's poem are as much a part of the New York legacy and the early period of American modernism as the experimental verses inspired by modernist painting. Moreover, McKay adopted the sonnet, not in reaction against experimental modernism, but rather in an effort to install his revolutionary agenda within the heart of literary tradition. His collected poems, finally published in 2004, present nearly a third of his poems for the first time. They were written, but never published. To credit his and other eloquent committed voices as formative ones in modern American poetry, is also to reposition American poetry partly within a transnational project of anti-racist and anti-imperialist critique. That also helps us not only understand, but also give full attention to the transformative history of Whitman's heritage. Perhaps our most unapologetically American of major poets, Whitman's embrace of his nation's belief in its manifest destiny is transformed amongst this many international followers into the reverse. A revolutionary impulse toward popular resistance to state power. Beginning early in the 20th century and continuing to the present day, Whitman's catalogs, his democratizing outreach ,and his long lines have empowered a political aesthetic that Whitman himself could never have foreseen. Part of that re-articulation of Whitman's voice.and style was centered in New York, but it spread across the globe. That transformative work helped progressive poets disarticulate Whitman's gay advocacy from his nationalist ideology. Later in the century, that impulse would bear fruit in the work of Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, and many other poets. [MUSIC]
