ABSTRACT
For Black Arts Movement poet Sonia Sanchez, “poetry is a subconscious conversation” with the collective consciousness, as well as with black cultural traditions from the diaspora. 1 About the source of her poetics, Sanchez states, “When I write, I tune in to the collective consciousness, and there I hear voices, lines, words, I hear music.” 2 The conditionality of this intravernacular conversation between poetry and music also affects the ways in which Sanchez perceives the interlinkings between historical consciousness and self-consciousness. For Sanchez and her new nationalist methodology of Blackness, to know one’s black self is always contingent upon being connected with and sustained by one’s history and cultural memory.
