This is an excerpt from an interview with Professor Sonia Sanchez, one of the most famous contemporary African American poets. This excerpt demonstrates Prof. Sanchez’s efforts in and views of poetic craftsmanship. As a poet who has been experimenting with various poetic forms like the blues and jazz poems, the sonnet, and the haiku, and reshaping them into her own forms, she believes that a poet has the freedom of choosing form. For her, different forms serve different purposes, and the efforts in the innovation and renovation of forms not only serve the construction of the poem but also express the joy and freedom of writing. Musicality, embodied in the structure, writing, and typographical arrangement of her poems, is a remarkable feature, which, she believes, crosses genders and colors and serves as a means of communication among peoples. Black English, especially the urban black vernacular, is largely used in her poems to exhibit and celebrate the black existence in America and to serve the growth of humanity. Her pursuit in poetic craftsmanship registers her spiritual freedom, self-affirmation and self-pride as a female African American poet.
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