How I Came to Write Poetry
Harmon, Elaine

>>ELAINE: My name is Elaine Harmon. My literacy story is a little different. A long time ago when I was in high school one of my high school teachers used to make us do poetry journaling every single day and I used to just ask her, "Well what do you want us to put in it?" She said, "Oh, anything that you want to." So first I started doing these short journal entries and I kind of got into poetry that way and so I attribute my being a poet laureate to one of my teachers when I was in high school in my junior year and I started writing poetry and I continued and I'm still writing poetry to this day. When I was at the University of Illinois in the 1970s, I wrote a poem and entered it in a contest with the African American studies program through the Bruce Nesbitt Cultural Center. So I entered my poem; I didn't really think anything about it. Now you have to remember that this poem is during the 70's and it's when African Americans were really still in their kind of protest mode. So this is one that I won an award for and they gave me fifty dollars, which I thought back then was big money. This poem is entitled "Nigger, Color, Negro, Black". "Nigger, color, Negro, black. These four names will take you back. In lips nigger, bit real low, beaten, chained, moving slow, bought, sold, separated, maimed, some didn't make it, others remained. In shackles colored, mumbling all around, yes sir, no sir, kneeling on the ground. Tried to move up, pushed back down. Left the South going northward bound. In walks Negro, all sophisticated, tried to be intelligent, a little educated. Peace marches, picketing, for right to vote, demanding rights by desecration, quote by quote. In struts black, militant as can be, gonna fight honkey for the right to be free. He steals, he keels, and burn baby burn, burnt up the wrong things, never did learn. Harriet Tubman, Stepin Fetchit, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Stephanie Carmichael, all let freedom ring. Lest we forget from whence we came, we're oppressed people, no matter what name. Nigger, color, negro, black, if these four names take you back." And this is a poem that I came up with and it really did have a lot of meaning because of the struggle of the African Americans and the names that have changed through the years. So this a poem that I wrote and it kind of shows the growth of me as a poet. After I won I felt really good and really started writing poetry. So that's my literacy story.