A great deal has been written in recent years about the purported lack of motivation in the children of the Negro ghettos. Little in my experience supports this yet the phrase has been repeated endlessly and the blame in almost all cases is placed somewhere outside the classroom.
Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. It would make sense that the poetry would reflect some of those same values some of the same techniques.
