| dc.description.abstract | Naomi Long Madgett—poet, editor, professor, and Detroit Poet Laureate—has a poetic career that spans over sixty years. Despite this, her work is rarely engaged critically. This thesis aims to present new scholarship on Madgett that engages her both within the context of the Black Arts Movement as well as the Womanist movement in literature. “The New Black Poetry: Naomi Long Madgett, “Newblack,” and the Search for Black Aesthetic(s)” examines the poem “Newblack” from Madgett’s collection Pink Ladies in the Afternoon (1972), a poem that responds the arguably prescriptive dictums of the Black Arts Movment of the 1960s and 1970s. Written through the narrative lens of a Black Arts Movement critic, Madgett explores the tension between the Black Arts Movement’s determinations for what qualifies as Black art and the individual perspective and directives of the artist. Through a nuanced exploration of both poetic form and aesthetic and ideological concerns, Madgett’s “Newblack” reifies her own beliefs as both a poet and editor in respecting the individuality and unique vision of the artist. I extend Madgett’s work during this period to create a literary lineage between her poetic concerns and the New Black Aesthetic Movement of the 1980s and 1990s, conceptualized most famously by poet and critic Trey Ellis, as well as Madgett’s import and connection to Evie Shockley’s critical volume Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (2011) and her poetry collection the new black (2011). “Singing a Dual Song: The Legacy of Phillis Wheatley and Naomi Long Madgett’s Sense of Place Poetry” also charts a literary lineage between Madgett and other Black writers, examining Madgett’s connection to Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1983) and the Womanist Movement in literature alongside other foundational Black Feminist scholars such as Barbara Christian, Carol Boyce Davies, bell hooks, and Layli Phillips. This article examines Madgett’s poem “Phillis” from her collection Exits and Entrances (1978), a narrative poem written from the poet Phillis Wheatley’s perspective. Through a reimagined narrative history, Madgett explores what Alice Walker calls Wheatley’s “contrary instincts,” a set of complex and often conflicting understandings of personal identity. Madgett imagines Wheatley’s revelation of her own “dual song” in her connection to both America and Africa. In this article, I tie these concepts of “contrary instincts” and the idea of a “dual song” to Carol Boyce Davies’s concept of “migratory subjects” from her book Black Women, Writing, and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (1994) in order to argue that Madgett moves our understanding of divided loyalties beyond a recognition of physical geography into a spiritual, artistic realm that defies space and time and connects Black women writers in a unique way. Finally, included in this thesis is the transcript from the interview I conducted with Naomi Long Madgett on July 15th, 2017, at her home in Detroit. | |
