Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Robert Hayden, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Vladimir Lenin, Karl Marx, Che Guevara, Pablo Neruda, Mao Tse-tung, and the Beat Generation writers.
In November 1969, Robert Chrisman co-founded The Black Scholar (TBS) with Nathan Hare and Allan Ross, a white printer and activist.
[1] These demands were eventually won but Chrisman paid a high price for the victory; he and Nathan Hare were fired from their teaching positions.
Disappointed with the way in which black struggles were being represented by the mainstream media, Chrisman, Hare, and Ross concluded an independent journal was needed.
As a poet Chrisman experimented with a broad range of styles and subject matter, while maintaining a modernist poetics characterized by formal rigor and lyrical density.
"[7] US popular culture prompts Chrisman's poetic reflections on the operations of collective fantasy ("Carnival II", CE; "Chaplin", TDW).
[9] Deeply engaged with material environment, Chrisman's explorations of urban and wild spaces interweave physical and social observation ("The Birds", CE; "Ghost Dance", MC; "Emerald City" and The Stranded Grebe", TDW).
In archetypes and narratives from Greek and Roman mythology,[10] Chrisman finds powerful existential motifs ("Philoctetes", CE; "Perseus' Blues" and "Procne is Among the Slaves", TDW).
Chrisman frequently wrote elegies ("My Father's Mittens")[9] and celebrations of friendship ("At Maya and Paul's", CE; "Los Naranjos", TDW).
These are: In 2001, Chrisman co-edited with Laurence Goldstein the anthology Robert Hayden: Essays on the Poetry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press).
Additionally, Chrisman was a prolific essayist who covered a wide range of subject material, from black incarceration and global political struggles to the literary genre of the slave narrative.
His many essays include: Robert Chrisman died on March 10, 2013, at his home in San Francisco of complications from congestive heart failure.