With the Wind in Your Hand: On Haki R. Madhubuti

In 1969, Gwendolyn Brooks remarked that Haki R. Madhubuti, then known as Don L. Lee, sat “at the hub of the new wordway.” He was mingling with the likes of Amiri Baraka, Lucille Clifton, Jayne Cortez, Larry Neal, Kalamu ya Salaam, and Sonia Sanchez to define the poetic substance and energy of the Black Arts generation. Influenced largely by Detroit doo-wop and jazz, and continually considering the relationship between poetry and music, he published the iconic volumes Think Black (1967), Black Pride (1968), Don’t Cry, Scream (1969), and We Walk the Way of the New World (1970), all from Broadside Press. These works display the rhythm, humor, social insight, and vernacular sensibility that made him one of the nation’s most-read poets and led to his inclusion in over one hundred anthologies. They also portray his commitment to reworking, as he put it, “old stereotypes and themes and images to bring us more understanding of ourselves as individuals and as a group of fragmented, oppressed people.”

It is hard to miss the influence of Langston Hughes on the young Madhubuti. It’s especially evident in the relationship between Hughes’s “I, Too,” and Madhubuti’s “They Are Not Ready,” the earlier poet’s general determination giving way to specific revolutionary expressions by the latter. Indeed, while still a teenager, Madhubuti purchased and studied a secondhand copy of The Poetry of the Negro, the landmark collection edited by Hughes and Arna Bontemps in which Hughes is featured.

Madhubuti’s latest work, Taught by Women: Poems as Resistance Language (Third World Press, 2020), is a love letter, a Black valentine to women of all stripes who have contributed positively to the person he is. No introduction to Madhubuti should fail to mention his decades-long friendship with Brooks, about whom he writes:

with the wind in your hand,
as in trumpeter blowing,
as in poet singing,
as in sister of the people, of the language,
smile at your work.
—From “Poet: Gwendolyn Brooks at 70”

We can wish the same for Haki R. Madhubuti.