When Poets take on Precedents

In memory of the protest sonnets of Claude McKay
on Martin Luther King's Day

... by observing the ideological paradoxes manifest in America's treatment of minorities and by adopting Western literary traditions, and thus he gains a voice among those whose project of subjugation has been to efface the native cultural heritage of African-Americans and to silence the discourse of dissent. McKay challenges the American power structure.

from African American Review, Fall, 1994 by James R. Keller

Waltzing over a Cyberian Sunset


Are you sure there is no good reason
Why a people would live in a fog?
If it’s not about fear or cov’rin
Your behind, then buying a watch dog

That is way out of touch and knows it,
Is like living with clowns that wear shit
Eating grins on their face, a disgrace
That American’s had to embrace—

Eight long years with a stupid oil fake
Because Clinton’s hard penis goon child
Was the symbol of freedom gone wild,

Made hypocrisy the country's namesake,
A torment that will outlast the grief
For a war that bestowed no relief?

In the a world of supervillians and cyber comics,

Doctor Cyber was the commanding presence behind a global criminal network around the same time when Wonder Woman had relinquished her powers and her fellow Amazons retreated into another dimension.

I continued the experimental aesthetic by composing the Pushkin sonnet in bluesy 3-beat trimeter instead of conforming to the iambic dogmatism of the traditional sonnet,

for more on this sad debacle in American governance that won't go away...click here.