The Poetry of Black Culture

As a painter uses watercolors or oils to create a picture, poet Brenda Marie Osbey uses language to create her images and tales of black culture in her native New Orleans.

She will read from her work today at Los Angeles City College as part of “CityWorks,” a public reading series sponsored by the college department of English and English as a second language.

“I think that language distinguishes itself in poetry, but the language has to work,” she said.

Osbey, 35, writes narrative poetry, which she says is getting more popular than it was when she began working at her craft as a 16-year-old undergraduate at Dillard University in New Orleans.

“When I first started writing poems, I was writing what I thought were short lyric poems,” she said. Her early advisers and critics pointed out that her work told stories, and encouraged her to keep it up.

She has been publishing consistently in journals for 15 years and has three books out, including the book-length poem “Desperate Circumstance, Dangerous Woman,” published in 1991.

Her newest book, “All Saints,” is “sitting with the agent right now,” she said. It focuses on the lives of revered black people, such as San Malo, who led a slave revolt in the 1700s.

The poem “brings together a lot of the things that I’ve been trying to do with voice and texture and language, and talks about history. In some places, I was able to achieve a little bit of humor,” she said.

The readings will be in the college Student Center, 855 N. Vermont Ave., at 11 a.m. and 7 p.m. Both readings are free and open to the public.