Kevin Young reads two poems by Lucille Clifton, choosing them because the poet “writes about history in such a powerful way.”
Young, who edited the new Library of America anthology of Black poetry, called “African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song,” said that he paired Clifton’s short poem “why some people be mad at me sometimes” with an untitled one because of how they “talk to each other.”
“i am accused of tending to the past / as if i made it, / as if i sculpted it / with my own hands. i did not,” the latter one reads.
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