African American poetry has long articulated survival in the face of enslavement, segregation, economic hardship, violence, and cultural erasure. Survival poetics may express resilience through irony, faith, humour, memory, music, love, or communal solidarity. The term is useful because many poems do more than document suffering; they demonstrate strategies of persistence, dignity, and imaginative survival under conditions designed to diminish or destroy.

Survival poetics encompasses a wide range of formal strategies for representing endurance under conditions that should, by any reasonable measure, have broken the individual or community in question. Students should resist reading survival poetics as merely affirmative or as minimising the reality of what was survived; the most honest examples hold the cost of survival — the psychic damage, the moral compromises, the losses along the way — alongside the fact of continuation. Etheridge Knight, Lucille Clifton, and Yusef Komunyakaa are exemplary poets of survival. Related terms include community survival, defiant joy, grief work, intergenerational trauma, and hope against hope. The theological concept of "redemptive suffering" is a framework that some Black survival poets embrace and others explicitly reject.