User:Ogre Art/Kwansaba

Kwansaba is the only African-America created form of poetry whose origins can be traced to a specific time and place. It was created in 1995 by the Eugene B. Redmond Writing Group in East St. Louis, IL, USA. It has a pattern of sevens: the poem consists of seven lines, each line contains seven words. With the exception of proper nouns and foreign terms, no word may have more than seven letters. This repetition of sevens might come from the fact that it grew out of poems written for Kwanzaa, one poem for each of the seven virtues celebrated that week.

While it is a relatively new form of poetry, its popularity is growing. There are hundreds of websites that have kwansaba written in them.