Billy Collins May Know We've Forgotten Langston Hughes' History

Most people, I think, want to forget bad news. Especially when whatever tragedy that happened was the fault of him or her. Historically, the same is true. History is taught with a bias, and up until the last few decades, literary anthologies largely left out the people marginalized by American history. I have found two poems, one older and one newer, that speak to this.
In "Dinner Guest: Me", Langston Hughes laments the false humility of many white people as they "Murmur[] gently/ Over fraises bu bois,/ 'I am so ashamed of being white'." Although the white people say things like this, Hughes knows that they see him as "The Negro Problem". A "problem" emerging out of a history of slavery, lynching, and marginalization at the hands of white oppressors, no doubt. Billy Collins has an entertaining poem about twisted history titled "The History Teacher". This is one stanza from the poem:

                                         Trying to protect his students' innocence

                                         he told them the Ice Age was really just 

                                         the Chilly Age, a period of a million years 

                                         when everyone had to wear sweaters.

Although Collins' poem is much less disturbing than Hughes', I think they make a similar point. 

Hughes is observing that the people responsible for his people's history is attempting to appear innocent, and Collins is showing that we often retell history in a softer version. At the heart of the conversation about race in America lies a retelling of history. Whatever retelling of history we decide to believe will fundamentally alter the way we as people view reality and will also alter what we fundamentally believe. After that, the only choice is either to accept history and act appropriately or to ignore it and its victims and suppress them as "problems." 

Claude McKay and Chris Tonelli

Claude McKay and Chris Tonelli do not have much in common in their poetry. McKay is a Harlem Renaissance era socialist whose polemic poetry is charged with an anger over racial injustice, and Tonelli is a young living poet who focuses a lot on nature, observation, and the self. I did find one interesting similarity between two of their poems, however.
In one of his sonnets, "The Negroe's Tragedy," McKay takes the classic form of sonnet and uses it to express anger over the systematic racism that was rampant in his day (and still is today). In one of his poems in The Trees Around, "Prologue to a Song of Marriage," which is about a Greek myth, the last lines say, "I assume, muse, that you're/ the heavenly one here./ How could I turn back to you/ in light of such historic suffering?" I think the question is phrased toward the epic as a genre by addressing the muse, although Tonelli would obviously not be abandoning poetry itself. The similarity I see is that both poems are changing a tradition without abandoning it completely. "The Negroe's Tragedy" is a sonnet with a modern and polemic twist, and "Prologue..." is a poem about rejecting a muse.
Again, most of McKay and Tonelli is on different playing fields, but this similarity is important in light of modern American poetry itself. Just as Ezra Pound credited Walt Whitman with breaking the new word and announced that is was time to carve the wood, modern American poetry has been a break from tradition without completely abandoning it. Being hyperaware of tradition, while still breaking from its confines and reshaping it, seems to be the story of 20th century poetry.