Lee, Don L. - Lee, Don L. 1942–
Lee, Don L. 1942–
Black American militant poet, author of Don't Cry, Scream! and Black Pride.
Don L. Lee … forges his strident, occasionally guttural verses out of the coarse sights and sounds of the tenements and streets and soul dives that middle-class Americans never see. "I write for and to black people," he told me the first time we met at Cornell. And if others, who don't speak the language, stumble over his slang and nonwords and sentence fragments and sounds made of strung-out letters, well, the poet can't be bothered.
Daniel Greene, "In Prose and Poetry, the New Black Voices," in National Observer, July 14, 1969.
As [Gwendolyn] Brooks points out, Lee is "at the hub of the new wordway." Don L. Lee is a technician, poet-linguist continuing the development of a new language for black poetics, the language of familiar experience, the same language black readers have grown...
[The entire page is 1149 words long]
Join eNotes
Over 3,500 study guides, question and answer forums, literature criticism, reference content, and much more!
Navigate
