My favourite poet.

Hi guys!
Today, i am going to tell you about my favourite poet. Her name is Soina Sanchez. Did you know that she has lectured more than five hundred universitie s and colleges in the United Sates and has travelled extensively just to write her wonderful poems? Let me tell you more about her...

Sonia Sanchez
Sonia Sanchez was born Wilsonia Benita Driver on September 9, 1934, in Birmingham, Alabama. After her mother died in childbirth a year later, Sanchez lived with her paternal grandmother and other relatives for several years. In 1943, she moved to Harlem with her sister to live with their father and his third wife.
She earned a B.A. in political science from Hunter College in 1955. She also did postgraduate work at New York University and studied poetry with Louise Bogan. Sanchez formed a writers' workshop in Greenwich Village, attended by such poets as Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Haki R. Madhubuti (Don L. Lee), and Larry Neal. Along with Madhubuti, Nikki Giovanni, and Etheridge Knight, she formed the "Broadside Quartet" of young poets, introduced and promoted by Dudley Randall.
She married and divorced Albert Sanchez, a Puerto Rican immigrant whose surname she has used when writing. She was also married for two years to poet Etheridge Knight.
During the early 1960s she was an integrationist, supporting the philosophy of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). But after considering the ideas of Black Muslim leader Malcolm X, who believed blacks would never be truly accepted by whites in the United States, she focused more on her black heritage from a separatist point of view.
Sanchez began teaching in the San Francisco area in 1965 and was a pioneer in developing black studies courses at what is now San Francisco State University, where she was an instructor from 1968 to 1969. In 1971, she joined the Nation of Islam, but by 1976 she had left the Nation, largely because of its repression of women.
Sanchez is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry, including Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems (1999); Like the Singing Coming Off the Drums: Love Poems (1998); Does your house have lions? (1995), which was nominated for both the NAACP Image and National Book Critics Circle Award; Wounded in the House of a Friend (1995); Under a Soprano Sky (1987); Homegirls & Handgrenades (1984), which won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation; I've Been a Woman: New and Selected Poems (1978); A Blues Book for Blue Black Magical Women (1973); Love Poems (1973); Liberation Poem (1970); We a BaddDDD People (1970); and Homecoming (1969).
Her published plays are Black Cats Back and Uneasy Landings (1995), I'm Black When I'm Singing, I'm Blue When I Ain't (1982), Malcolm Man/Don't Live Here No Mo' (1979), Uh Huh: But How Do It Free Us? (1974), Dirty Hearts '72 (1973), The Bronx Is Next (1970),and Sister Son/ji (1969).
Sanchez's books for children include A Sound Investment and Other Stories (1979), The Adventures of Fat Head, Small Head, and Square Head (1973), and It's a New Day: Poems for Young Brothas and Sistuhs (1971). She has also edited two anthologies: We Be Word Sorcerers: Twenty-five Stories by Black Americans (1973) and Three Hundred Sixty Degrees of Blackness Comin''at You (1971).
Among the many honors she has received are the Community Service Award from the National Black Caucus of State Legislators, the Lucretia Mott Award, the Outstanding Arts Award from the Pennsylvania Coalition of 100 Black Women, the Peace and Freedom Award from Women International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), the Pennsylvania Governor's Award for Excellence in the Humanities, a National Endowment for the Arts Award, and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts.
Sanchez has lectured at more than five hundred universities and colleges in the United States and had traveled extensively, reading her poetry in Africa, Cuba, England, the Caribbean, Australia, Nicaragua, the People's Republic of China, Norway, and Canada. She was the first Presidential Fellow at Temple University, where she began teaching in 1977, and held the Laura Carnell Chair in English there until her retirement in 1999. She lives in Philadephia.

Below are the three poems that i especially like!

1)nothing will keep
us young you know
not young men or
women who spin
their youth on
cool playing sounds.
we are what we
are what we never
think we are.no more wild geo
graphies of the
flesh. echoes. that
we move in tune
to slower smells.
it is a hard thing
to admit that sometimes after midnight
i am tired
of it all.

2)under a soprano sky
1.
once i lived on pillars in a green house
boarded by lilacs that rocked voices into weeds.
i bled an owl's blood
shredding the grass until i
rocked in a choir of worms.
obscene with hands, i wooed the world
with thumbs while yo-yos hummed.
was it an unborn lacquer i peeled?
the woods, tall as waves, sang in mixed
tongues that loosened the scalp
and my bones wrapped in white dust
returned to echo in my thighs.
i hear a pulse wandering somewhere
on vague embankments.
O are my hands breathing? I cannot smell the nerves.
i saw the sun
ripening green stones for fields.
O have my eyes run down? i cannot taste my birth.
2.
now as i move, mouth quivering with silks
my skin runs soft with eyes.
descending into my legs, i follow obscure birds
purchasing orthopedic wings.
the air is late this summer.
i peel the spine and flood
the earth with adolescence.
O who will pump these breasts? I cannot waltz my tongue.
under a soprano sky, a woman sings,
lovely as chandeliers.

3)With exact wings
Your words sailed back
into your throat. Could
not fly forward.
Your mouth face
startled by this autumn
Thunder went south again.
I had forgotten the salute
of death, how it waits Militarily
on the outskirts of our skin.
I had forgotten how death
howls inside our veins.
O father, how much like a child
again I felt as I ran down doctors
painted on porcelain corridors.
O My father, as I breathed
inhaled for us both,
I began to sing a song
you sang when I was
little without a poet's name,
Afraid of all the shadows
cremating my bones,
Remember the nite,
The nite you said
I love you
remember...
I remembered your voice swollen
in a ritual of words on
152nd Street and St. Nicholas Place.
Now I, daughter of applause,
hands waterlogged with memory,
asked for nothing more
as I circled your hospital room,
sequined with our breaths
in an hour-glass of sound.

To end off, i would like to share with all of you a quote from Sonia Sanchez. It goes like this "...I write to keep in contact with our ancestors and to spread truth to people."

Bye!
Cleon Wong 1A4 (07)