Amardeep Singh

ALT Google Analytics chart showing active users average over the course of a year (October 2023-2024) for Amardeep Singh's digital anthology, "African American Poetry." The total active users listed are at 104,000.

ALT Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique style, the wearing of a stylistic mask, speech in a dead language: but it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without parody's ulterior motive, without the satirical impulse, without laughter, without that still latent feeling that there exists something normal compared to which what is being imitated is rather comic. Pastiche is blank parody, parody that has lost its sense of humor: pastiche is to parody what that curious thing, the modern practice of a kind of blank irony, is to what Wayne Booth calls the stable and comic ironies of, say, the 18th century.

ALT The True American By John Strong America, here is your son, born of your iron heel, Black blood and red and white contend along this frame of steel. The thorns deep in his brow are set and yet he does not cower, He goes with neither fears nor tears to crucifixion hour. Nor yet does hatred blur his view of mankind’s frail parade, From his commanding triple coign, all prejudices fade. The ebbing nations coalesce in him and flow as one, The bright shining rainbow sweeping back to God at set of sun! Mark well the surety of tread, the new song high in air, The new note in the nation’s throat, as permanent as prayer. America, regard your son, The Cosmopolitan, The pattern of posterity, The True American. Published in The Crisis, April 1927

ALT First stanza of Jessie Fauset poem. Click link to read whole poem.