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LYNNE THOMPSON: Hello! My name is Lynne Thompson, Poet Laureate for the City of Los Angeles, and I’m so happy to welcome listeners to this installment of Poems on Air, a podcast supported by the Los Angeles Public Library. Every week, I’ll present the work of poets I admire, poets who you should know, and poets who have made a substantial and inimitable contribution to the art and craft of poetry.

LYNNE THOMPSON: As Poems on Air enters the month of December and the end of my term as Los Angeles Poet Laureate, it’s a good time to reflect on the poetry ancestors who’ve been seminal in the development of contemporary poetics. All poetry lovers can think of numerous persons to comprise such a list but first up on this podcast: Robert Hayden. Although Hayden became the first African American to be appointed as consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress (later called the poet laureate), Professor Arnold Rampersad said, “…Hayden threatens to slip deeper and deeper into obscurity.” To any reader of his work, such an outcome is unthinkable as he was—and continues to be—as de-scribed by the author Gary Zebrun, a poet “ceaselessly trying to achieve…transcendence.”

LYNNE THOMPSON: Today’s poem is "Frederick Douglass" by Robert Hayden.

"Frederick Douglass"

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful
and terrible thing, needful to man as air,
usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,
when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,
reflex action; when it is finally won, when it is more
than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians,
this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro
beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world
where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,
this man, superb in love and logic, this man
shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,
not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,
but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives
fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing

LYNNE THOMPSON: The Los Angeles Poet Laureate was created as a joint program between the City’s Department of Cultural Affairs and the Los Angeles Public Library and this podcast is available wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening!

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• Back to Poems on Air: Episode 88



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