Secret Daughter by June Cross

Author:June Cross
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2010-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

As a first-semester freshman, I applied for an upper-class poetry workshop. I was admitted but soon discovered that I knew little about the modern poets whose work formed the foundation of the class. In high school we had studied the usual suspects: Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and T. S. Eliot—early Eliot, not “The Wasteland.” I was unfamiliar with John Berryman or even Anne Sexton, although I had heard their names. Aunt Peggy did not want me to read them—particularly Sexton, because she didn’t want me “getting ideas.” Now I read them and became infatuated with the idea of writing from the depths of despair.

During class I experienced the sensation of being perched like a seagull at the window, observing myself while my professor and the upperclassmen discussed poems I didn’t understand. Rather than assume that the material itself didn’t speak to me or to my experience, I assumed that the fault was mine; what’s worse, I assumed that nothing I could say, write, or bring to the class would speak to my classmates’ experiences either.

Sensing that I was floundering, my professor suggested that I bring my “black perspective” to the class. I did not know what he meant, having only the perspective I had been raised with in Atlantic City. There was no academic canon of Afro-American literature taught in schools in 1971. I knew only what I had been taught, and I had no perspective on that at all.

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