Gregory Pardlo is a contemporary American poet known for blending personal narrative with cultural, political, and philosophical reflection. His poetry often explores identity, family history, race, and the complexities of modern life in the United States.
Pardlo gained major recognition with his Pulitzer Prize–winning collection Digest (2014), which offers a mix of lyric poems and prose pieces. In this collection, he reflects on his upbringing, his father’s involvement with the Black Panthers, and his own journey through uncertainty and self-discovery. His voice is both intimate and intellectually engaging, often shifting between humor and seriousness.
His poems are notable for their conversational tone, making complex ideas feel accessible. Pardlo frequently experiments with form—moving between traditional verse and prose poetry—while maintaining emotional depth and clarity. Themes of resilience, memory, and transformation run throughout his work.
Overall, Gregory Pardlo’s poetry stands out for its honesty, cultural insight, and ability to connect personal experiences with broader social realities.
Double Dutch
The girls turning double-dutch
bob & weave like boxers pulling
punches, shadowing each other,
sparring across the slack cord
casting parabolas in the air. They
whip quick as an infant’s pulse
and the jumper, before she
enters the winking, nods in time
as if she has a notion to share,
waiting her chance to speak. But she’s
anticipating the upbeat
like a bandleader counting off
the tune they are about to swing into.
The jumper stair-steps into mid-air
as if she’s jumping rope in low-gravity,
training for a lunar mission. Airborne a moment
long enough to fit a second thought in,
she looks caught in the mouth bones of a fish
as she flutter-floats into motion
like a figure in a stack of time-lapse photos
thumbed alive. Once inside,
the bells tied to her shoestrings rouse the gods
who’ve lain in the dust since the Dutch
acquired Manhattan. How she dances
patterns like a dust-heavy bee retracing
its travels in scale before the hive. How
the whole stunning contraption of girl and rope
slaps and scoops like a paddle boat.
Her misted skin arranges the light
with each adjustment and flex. Now heather-
hued, now sheen, light listing on the fulcrum
of a wrist and the bare jutted joints of elbow
and knee, and the faceted surfaces of muscle,
surfaces fracturing and reforming
like a sun-tickled sleeve of running water.
She makes jewelry of herself and garlands
the ground with shadows.
For Which it Stands
For a flag! I answered facetiously. A flag of tomorrow,
fluent in fire, not just the whispers, lisps, not just the still there
of powdered wigs, dry winds. Who wants a speckled
drape that folds as easy over smirch as fallen soldier?
This is rhetorical. Like, "What to the Negro
is the fourth of July?" A flag should be stitched with a fuse.
Jefferson said for each generation a flag. Maybe
he said Constitution. I once raised a high-top flag
of my hair, a fist, a leather medallion of the motherland.
I studied heraldry and maniples (which are not
what you might guess), little sails and banners
down to the vane of a feather. Because his kids were
rebel cities my father loved like Sherman. Because
I wanted history I could touch like the flank of a beast.
My wife's people are from San Salvador. They sent us
with a guard, his AK shouldered like a mandolin, among
anil-tinted shawls and jerseys, across tiled and pocked
concrete, and the gated stalls of El Centra. I felt sacred
as a goat there, too, as I did below the Mason-Dixon
where our only protection was the Fourteenth Amendment.
Afraid our Yankee plates would be read aggressive as a Jolly
Roger we rented a compact in Atlanta. Charleston, Savannah,
Montgomery, and after Birmingham we were broke.
Skipped Selma. Slept at B&Bs where my dreams power-
washed layers of footnotes and Februaries, revealing
the surreal sheen of Apollo Creed's trunks, the apocalyptic
Americana of Jacko moonwalking around a tinfoil Buzz
Aldrin planting the corporate ensign. Years passed. I grew
youthless in my dad-pants, but still puffed at pinwheels
and windsocks, launched glyphs of grillsmoke and one day
it came to me, as if commissioned, Theaster Gates's Flag
from old fire hoses, a couple dozen, like vertical blinds, no,
like cabin floorboards of canvas colored rusty, brick dust, some
cheerless drab-and-custard, beside a medley of vespertine
blues, hoses evoking landscapes of sackcloth and gunny,
texture of violence and tongues inflamed by shine, holy ghost.
Ross, Duchamp, Johns, et al., are integrated here with officers
of the peace, their dogs, and, in evidence, their pretend
tumescence Gates has hung to cure like pelts
or strips of jerky.
How did it feel to shield spirit with flesh? I mean,
what did it do to the body, water furry as the arm
of an arctic bear? What thirst did it ignite?
Gates's salute is a torch song, a rhythm
of hues marching over a pentimento of rhyme.
I approve its message, its pledge to birth a nation
of belonging and to teach that nation of the fire
shut up in our bones.
Palling Around
He heard in curtains of sleet cleaving
from magnolia leaves encrypted Aztec
frequencies, he said. When the sun
god liquors loose each ashen tongue
the planet tattles. We are advised
to listen: this he'd grunt to signal his
dwindling fuse and the bartender would
show him the door. In his honor I tune
my form to the emanations of this vibrant
life: Either someone's dropped a blue
coin and I've picked up the murmur of its
ribs—a quarter kiltering beneath the blond
brick arcade of the whispering gallery
at Grand Central—or someone's table
is ready. No matter that I set my phone
to airplane while I thumb these lines, I can
still be reached by tender thought: a dirgeful
brass cortège stirs the ear inside my chest.
The man has passed. I got the text today,
and now feel at least obliged to observe
silence. Observe this café thick with humid
bodies, mugs wafting florets of breath, steam
revealing patterns in the glassy chatter.
For that he is a phantasm rumoring now
a timeless doom, quiet as the carousel
of a partial print. For that he is finally
transcendent. For that we convened for
drinks by some clockwork of urban chance
each week, my year adrift in the East Village.
For that I renounced him, and now regret
having done so. For that I vibed with his
passions—more, the deeper we reached in
our cups, rifling our mind's files for magical
thinking and secrets in our blood's chemical
record. I've traveled years through boot-black
redactions of thought to find his apparition
greet me with a raised fist in the dream of a
leather trench coat that crunches like gravetop
snow, dream of the self-schooled on secondary
sources. He hung a cardboard pyramid to cover
the bed in which he slept and quested visions
toward the headwaters of paranoia: nightsweats
of tar, drumbeats marooned in the distant hills,
Legba tapping his cane on the edge of sanity.
If you see something. What a fear of hobgoblins
and philistines can blind our better senses.
At the table beside me children play mosquito
tones they say are there, but I am unable to hear.
Raisin
I dragged my twelve-year-old cousin
to see the Broadway production of A Raisin
in the Sun because the hip-hop mogul
and rapping bachelor, Diddy, played
the starring role. An aspiring rapper gave
my cousin his last name and the occasional child
support so I thought the boy would geek to see a pop
hero in the flesh as Walter Lee. My wife was newly
pregnant, and I was rehearsing, like Diddy
swapping fictions, surrendering his manicured
thug persona for a more domestic performance.
My cousin mostly yawned throughout the play.
Except the moment Walter Lee's tween son stiffened
on stage, as if rapt by the sound of a roulette ball.
Scene: No one breathes as Walter Lee vacillates,
uncertain of obsequity or indignation after Lindner offers
to buy the family out of the house they've purchased
in the all-white suburb, Walter might kneel to accept,
but he senses the tension in his son's gaze. I was thinking,
for real though, what would Diddy do? "Get rich
or die trying," 50 Cent would tell us. But my father would
sing like Ricky Scaggs, "Don't get above your raisin',"
when as a kid I vowed to be a bigger man than him.
That oppressive fruit dropped heavy as a medicine
ball in my lap meant to check my ego, and I imagined
generations wimpling in succession like the conga
marching raisins that sang Marvin's hit song. Silly,
I know. Outside the theater, my cousin told me
when Diddy was two, they found his hustler dad
draping a steering wheel in Central Park,
a bullet in his head. I shared what I knew of dreams
deferred and Marvin Gaye. (When asked if he loved
his son, Marvin Sr. answered, "Let's just say I didn't
dislike him.") Beneath the bling of many billion
diodes I walked beside the boy through Times Square
as if anticipating a magic curtain that would rise,
but only one of us would get to take a bow.
ZoSo
Those hammer-ons on Over the Hills made my fingers bleed.
That is, my devotion to their shapes made my fingers bleed.
Child of Crowley, Bukka White, paddling hips across the stage,
Time's architect, sketch blueprints lesser innovators read.
Sight the neck like a rifle barrel. Diagnose the truss rod sound.
Let's caress the fretwork, inlays pearl and filigreed.
Contracts offer details juke growlers shrug off like sheet music.
"How much," they only want to know, "am I guaranteed?
On the frontiers of sound we are nocturnal, we move in shivers,
we watch bobcats, as night-blooming cereus lingers, feed.
My mind is a fuzz box today. Hellhound's got my scent, cornered me
in Room 12-B with the hangman's disposition whiskey drinkers need.
The left hand's a gyromantic dancer, sinister. The cat's cradle
of tablature captures the dragonfly's hover, its speed.
At fourteen I walked the rivulets. A pilgrimage. Late harvest.
I cut my teeth on a washtub bass line shimmering like a centipede.
Spirits filled burn piles on the beach. Smoke and salt infused
the fuselage that hummed the lunar music six strings received.
Shoulda quit you on the shoulder, G, singing backward alphabets
of sky. Fingerprinted, you thought they made your fingers bleed.
