Everett Hoagland
“We shall see; we shall see, hear, feel, understand
and act on the haunting, freeing facts.”
A distinguished poet and writer, Everett Hoagland is professor emeritus of English at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, where he taught African American literature and poetry workshops for thirty years. Educated at Lincoln University and Brown University, Hoagland was Poet Laureate of New Bedford, Massachusetts from 1994-1998. Beginning his writing in the midst of the Black Arts Movement and Civil Rights era, Everett Hoagland’s many works include: Black Velvet (1970), Scrimshaw (1976), This City and Other Poems (1999), Here: New & Selected Poems (2002), and more recently Homecoming (2014). Hoagland’s poems have appeared in revered literary journals, such as The American Poetry Review and Callaloo, and have also been frequently anthologized. He is the recipient of several awards, including the Gwendolyn Brooks Award for Fiction, ForeWord Magazine’s Best Poetry Book award, and the Langston Hughes Society Award.
Featured Poems
/ Everett Hoagland reads “love Child—a black aesthetic”
love Child—a
Sweet baked apple dappled cinnamon speckled sin of
Mine
Nutmeg freckled peach brandy and amber wine woman
WOW
With your piping hot and finger popping black African
Pepper pot not stopping steaming coffee flowing creaming
The brown sugar growing cane candy coming cocoa going
Crazy ‘bout brown sugar teases GOOD GOD and pleases
SWEET
JESUS that honey stained soul trained slow molasses ass
And HOT DAMN candied yam and sweet potato pie
Thighs and sweet raisin tipped coconut tits raising cane
Sugar
Stone brown sugar bowl belly to the bone to the bone
In rhythm with life rhythms without metronomes
Dance
Too well together in the horizontal harvest dance dance
Of the slurp slap sea bellies rapid clapping rhapsody in
The seeds’ ceremony through the tangled jungle vines we
Love in comely comes this black cat night purring in ears
Of our now we love earth humming bird humming under
The back and black of our now we love tuning fork thighs taut
We love screaming and curdled creaming cradled in
Crisis
Of our now we love now we love now my love now my
Love now my love
Love me now my love my love My Love NOW!!
Globs globs of tapioca textured essence of nascence ice-
Cream
Fire yellow white hot maggots seemin more than semen
Sperm jellied germ of god the rich pudding of love tiring
Tadpole
Couriers of destiny coursing toward the heaven halo
Aborrea
Of egg sun like yolk wonder deep in the night time of
Belly love
The moon tide stops womb waves of life wine time savors
Remembered good love and gourd opulent dark pump-
Kin belly
Harvest of love swollen organic sacristy abode to ex-
Quisite
Profanity
POP! A black pearl from god brand new small brown
Sugar
Lump velvet little wild rabbit burnished gold nugget rock
A
Bye rock a bye sweet blackberry pie and honey love
Syrup
Soul soft fur brown round little cup of rum nectarous
Distillation of the words “I love you”…. Godly milky
Mystical
Nascency succulent miracle
Related Links