When NPR’s Code Switch went searching for “young poets who were livening up the literary landscape” in honor of National Poetry Month, they found themselves in the world of Rumpus contributor Kima Jones. Code Switch and Ms. Jones set out to crowdsource a poem, which they most certainly did. Kima followed up the collaboration with an essay titled “Writers of Color Flock To Social Media For A New Way To Use Language” wherein she talks about the accessibility of the form and identity:
“The poem can’t find its audience until the poet has turned on the little hallway light of empathy and mercy and meaning. Those are the building blocks of understanding and reconciliation. That is the foundation.
For too long, writers of color have been told there is no audience for our work. That unless we write towards the universal human—which, of course, is code for white person—our work would not be understood, or read or taught. We are told that regardless of the work the poem is doing, we should codify it in a way that it is accessible and understood and praised by the universal human.”
Read the full essay and see the crowdsourced poem here.
