Modern black poetry has emerged as an art form whose viewpoint (theme), style (structure), and language (diction and usage) focus on a particular kind of sensibility and consciousness in conflict with the world in which the poetry moves. The black aesthetic addresses the consciousness of blackness and deplores traditional poetic niceties in favor of "poems that kill"--those whose themes are provocative, critical, and militant. The ugliness, despair, and anonymity that characterize the black experience in America surface in the works of many poets. The turbulence of the 1960s and 1970s demanded a turbulent poetic structure. Some poets imitated the street vernacular; others employed creative typography as a structural device. However, the key ingredient in the black poetic stance is language. The black arts poet attempts to elicit a vocabulary of response and feeling that is both painful and disgusting in language as begrimed and degraded as the life and issues the language depicts. An essentially urban expression, black poetry of this period made frequent use of signification or "playing the dozens." Humor is often used, along with insults and obscenities. But there is also linguistic elegance, such as virtuoso free-rhyming, hyperbolic and cryptic imagery, lazy rhythmic effects, and so on. (NKA)