MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Wynn Yarbrough The University of the District of Columbia

Children’s poetry represents a world adults think children recognize, replete with nostalgia (for adults), crises (for children), and visions of emotional, physical, and material landscapes where both adult and child sensibilities interact. African- American children’s poetry often contains representations of work that are descended from the first oral literatures (field hollers, work songs) to avant-garde work (blues, nonsense) of the late twentieth century. Poets such as Langston Hughes, M.B. Toleson, Effie Newsome, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden, and Wynton Marsalis have created poetry where children are witnesses and/or characters in poems where the working landscape of adults represents an awareness of how work is essential to survival and progress, whether in maturation or material gain. And various critics, literary and historical, have commented on representations of work in society and in literature (Mull, Scott, Hall, Poulin Jr., Conrad, among others). This presentation will examine the works of these poets and these critics’ commentaries to demonstrate that work, like magic, games, and play is also the material of children’s poetry and that the theme of work is essential in the development of African-American children’s poetry, mirroring the cultural, political, and literary evolution of the United States in the 20th century.