Minor Notes, Volume 1


 
 
 
 penguin classics
 MINOR NOTES,volume I
 joshua bennett is a professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth College. For his creative writing and scholarship, he has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. He is the author of four books of poetry and criticism: The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016), winner of the National Poetry Series; Being Property Once Myself (Harvard University Press, 2020), winner of the MLA’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize; Owed (Penguin, 2020); and The Study of Human Life (Penguin, 2022).
 jesse mccarthy is an assistant professor in the departments of English and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. His publications include chapter contributions to Richard Wright in Context, Ralph Ellison in Context, and The Cambridge Companion to the Essay, as well as articles in Novel, Transposition, and African American Review. He is editor of the 2022 Norton Library edition of W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk and author of Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?, a collection of essays, and a novel, The Fugitivities.
 tracy k. smith is the author of the memoir Ordinary Light, a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction, as well as four books of poetry: Wade in the Water, winner of the 2019 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; Life on Mars, which received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize; Duende, recipient of the 2006 James Laughlin Award; and The Body’s Question, which won the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Eternity, her selected poems, was short-listed for the Forward and T. S. Eliot Prizes. Smith served two terms as the twenty-second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry of the United States, appointed by the Library of Congress.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 Foreword © 2023 by Tracy K. Smith
 Introduction and compilation copyright © 2023 by Joshua Bennett and Jesse McCarthy
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 library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
 Names: Smith, Tracy K., writer of foreword. | Bennett, Joshua (Poet), editor. | McCarthy, Jesse, editor.
 Title: Minor notes / foreword by Tracy K. Smith; edited with an introduction by Joshua Bennett, and Jesse McCarthy.
 Description: New York : Penguin Books, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references.
 Identifiers: LCCN 2022037769 (print) | LCCN 2022037770 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143137269 (v. 1 ; paperback) | ISBN 9780593511220 (v. 1 ; ebook)
 Subjects: LCSH: American poetry—African American authors. | African Americans—Poetry. | LCGFT: Poetry.
 Classification: LCC PS591.B53 M56 2023 (print) | LCC PS591.B53 (ebook) | DDC 811.008/0896073—dc23/eng/20220810
 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022037769
 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022037770
 Cover art: Breakthrough, 2019, Jerrell Gibbs
 Interior design adapted for ebook by Estelle Malmed
 pid_prh_6.0_143148852_c0_r0
 
 
 Contents
 Foreword by tracy k. smith
 Introduction by joshua bennett and jesse mccarthy
 MINOR NOTES, VOLUME I
 THE POETS
 GEORGE MOSES HORTON
 Praise of Creation.
 On 
 Foreword
 In his poem “After Avery R. Young,” Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Jericho Brown writes, The blk mind is a continuous mind. This line emerges for me