Poetry
Having "paid her dues" as a student in numerous workshops where she endured the canon's litany of dead and near-dead white male poets like Matthew Arnold, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Robert Lowell, often as the only black student, Derricotte first published in a "major" magazine, the New York Quarterly, in the fall of 1972. Her literary reputation and publications flourished, culminating in her first book, The Empress of the Death House, published in 1978 by Lotus Press. Derricotte's second book, Natural Birth, was published in 1983 by The Crossing Press. Her third book, Captivity, first published in 1989 by University of Pittsburgh Press, has enjoyed second (1991) and third (1993) printings. In 1996, Norton Publishing Company accepted for publication Derricotte's The Black Notebooks, a book she began in 1974 when her family became one of the first black families to move into Upper Montcair, New Jersey.
In Derricotte's poetry, the taboo, the restricted, and the repressed figure prominently; they are often the catalysts that prompt her to write, to confess the painful. Often stylistically compared to so-called confessional poets like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, Derricotte, in opting for candor over decorum, wants her "work to be a wedge into the world, as what is real and not what people want to hear." This self-dubbed "white-appearing Black person," reared as a Catholic in a black, working-class Detroit community, complicates the myth of monolithic blackness with poems that speak into consciousness obscure, unconventional black bodies. And in an academy whose poststructuralist theories often either depersonalize bodies with esoteric discourse or overemphasize them with hyperbolic identity politics, Toi Derricotte's poems brave the charged, murky depths of much current poetry, stamping the language with her own complex, quirky vision
She is currently a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. With Cornelius Eady, she co-founded Cave Canem Foundation, a summer workshop for African American poets.
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Famous quotes containing the word poetry:
“Poetry, and Picture, are Arts of a like nature; and both are busie about imitation. It was excellently said of Plutarch, Poetry was a speaking Picture, and Picture a mute Poesie. For they both invent, faine, and devise many things, and accommodate all they invent to the use, and service of nature. Yet of the two, the Pen is more noble, than the Pencill. For that can speake to the Understanding; the other, but to the Sense.”
—Ben Jonson (1573–1637)
“For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word, a verse, and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
““Poetry’s unnat’ral; no man ever talked poetry ‘cept a beadle on boxin’ day, or Warren’s blackin’ or Rowland’s oil, or some o’ them low fellows; never you let yourself down to talk poetry, my boy.””
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)