Black History Month: Don L. Lee

Don L. Lee, also known as Haki R. Madhubuti, is the poet that Leroi Jones, also known as Amiri Baraka, wishes he could be.

Lee's writing is amazingly powerful, but unfortunately he hasn't received nearly as much credit as Baraka, possibly because he doesn't create media conundrums just to get free publicity, even if Baraka's is for his issues as well as his work. Lee, who got his MFA from Iowa's writing workshop, was one of the strongest black poets of the 60s and 70s -- I would say he was perhaps the strongest black male poet of the period.

The poems of his I know best are those collected in two anthologies connected to Gwendolyn Brooks: Jump Bad: A New Chicago Anthology, edited by Brooks in 1971, and The Poetry of Black America, edited by Arnold Adoff and with an introduction by Gwendolyn Brooks from 1973. Both books may seem a bit dated now, but they are both filled with fantastically powerful works, and the poems of Lee are the highlights of both. Perhaps, then, it shouldn't come as too much of a shock that he founded the Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature.

Here's just a little taste of Lee's talent. One of my favorite poems of his is called "But He Was Cool," a satiric portrait of a clueless hipster. All you need to know is right there in the poem's subtitled: "or: he even stopped for green lights." Nothing cooler than that.