Playing It Real: Nonsense Poetics, Identity, and African American Poetry for Children and Young Adults

This essay explores several young adult poems by Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Harryette Mullen and their relationship to nonsense and identity.  Rather than trace a literary influence of Anglo-European nonsense, this essay proposes that the oppression of African Americans in America (slavery, Jim Crow South, segregation, 20th century structural/corporate white) led to resistance and rebellion evident in the recycling, revising, and rescripting of literary nonsense in these authors’ works.  From the influence of folk rhymes, through the blues, jazz, and early hip hop, these writers write the 20th century nonsensical experience of African Americans in America.