5 10 90 https://digitallis.isg.siue.edu/files/original/48079398318f5a1eb6fd6f6589714d3b.pdf 711348a2c311df0695774b166c52f6ef PDF Text Text BIBLIOGRAPHICAL INDEX This bibliography is designed to serve the needs of beginning and advanced students of Black Poetry. It is not intended to be ex- so hostt,e.-.e.beenany haustive since~many biblio graphies repeat the same items. Nor/\8-ttempt to cite the numerous single collections of poems because checklists and specialized bibliographies are available. Moreover , most anthologies, critical studies and histories, list such collections --in selected bibliographies and biographies. Since many Bla ck poets publish privately or with small and relatively unknown publishing houses, the student will want to examine regular listings and reviews in periodicals such as Black World, Journal of Black Poetry, Freedomways, Black Books Bulletin, CLA Journal, Black Creation, Obsidian: Black Literature in Review, and others. Some of the small Black publishers list titles on inside cov ers of their books; and scores of records and tapes of readings, films, breadsides(single poems), pamphlet publications and tracts can be obtained from individual poets and the small houses . Recently, larger recording companies like Folkways, Flying Dutchman and Motown, have begun to record and distribute Black poetry. However, the task of locating and developing a checklist for the myriad publications and publishing activities of Black poets still awaits some serious student of Black literature. In the meantime there are a number of important bio-bibliographical works which one can consult: Afro-American 1~riters(Turner), Living B )/ Black American ib , A Bio-~iographical Dictionary of Black Writers of the u.s.A.(Jackson and Page), Index AMer1co. n to Black Poetry(Chapman) and Black A::vJriters Past and Present: A BioBiblio grphic al Directory(Rush, Meyers and Arrata). �J :r. GENERAL RESEARCH AIDS Adams, Russell L. Great Negroes, Past and Present. The Arthur B. Spingarn Collection of Neg ro Authors. Bailey, Leaonead. Broadside Authors: Baskin, Wade and Richard rL Runes . Bontemps, Arna. Chicago, 1964. Washing ton, D.C., 1948 . A Biographical Directory. Dictionary of Black Culture. Detroit, 1971. New York, 1973. "The James Weldon Johnson Memo rial Collection of Ne gro Arts Yale University Library Gazette, XVIII (October 1943), 19-26. and Letters." ----· - "Special Collection of Negfoana." Library Quarterly, XIV Circa, (1944), 187-206. Brignano, Russell C. Black Americans in Autobiography: An Annotated Biblio- graphy of Autobiographies and Autobiographical Books Written Since the Civil War. Durham, North Carolina, 1974 . Burke, Joan Martin. and Events. Civil Rights; a Current Guide to t he People}Organization New York, 1974. Chapman, Abraham. The Negro in American Literature and a Bibliography of Literature by and about Negro Americans. Chapman, Dor othy H. , /omp. Index to Black Poetry. Boston, 1974. Great American Ne groes in Verse, 1723-1965 . Culver, Eloise _Crosby . D . C;J Stevens Point, Wis., 1966. Washington, c. 1965. Davis, Lenwood G. cals, Articles." "Pan- Africanism: A Tentative Check List of Books, Periodi- Black Wor l d, XXII (December 1972), 70-96. Deodene, Frank and William P . French . Preliminary Checklist. Black American Fiction Since 1952: A Chatham, N.J., 1970 . Black American Poetry Since 1944, A Pre--1:::11=-=a• - - - - - - - - - - - - - ---......... liminary Checklist. Chatham, 1971. Dictionary Catalog of the Jesse E. Moorland Collection of Negro Life and History. �2- 9 Vols. Boston, 1970. Dictionary Catalog of the Schomburg Collection of Negro Literature and History. 11 Vols. Boston, 1962, 1967. Drzick, Kathleen, John Murphy and Constance Weaver. Annotated Bibliography of Works Relating to the Negro in Literature and to Negro Dialects. Kalamazoo, Mich./ 1969. DuBois, W.E.B., and Guy B. Johnson. ___ ______... .._ Volume. Rev . Ed. Encyclopedia of the Negro: Preparatory New York, 1946. A Select Bibliography of the Negro American. 3rd ed. Atlanta, 1905. Guzman, Jessie P., ed. Negro Year Book, Tuskegee, Ala'l 1947. Houston, Helen Ruth. 11 Contributions of the American Negro to American Culture: A Selec ted Checklist." BulleJtin of Bibliography, Vol. 26, No. 3 (July - September 1969), 71-83. Index to Periodical Articles by and About Negroes (formerly A Guide to Negro Periodical Literature and Index to Selected Periodicals). International Library of Negro Life and History. 10 Vols. Washington, D.C., 1967-1969. Irvine, Keith, ed. Encyclopedia of the Negro in Africa and America. Shores, Mich., c. 1973. Jackson, Agnes .,, M. and James A. Page, comp,. tionary of Black Writers of the U.S.A. J1$in, Janheinz. A Biobibliographical Die- New York, 1975. A Bibliography of Neo-African Literature from Africa, America, and the Caribbean. New York, 1965. Johnson, Harry A. Multimedia Kaiser, Ernest. ' St. Clair aterials for Afro-American Studies. "The History of Negro History." 1968), 10-15, 64-80. New York, 1971. Negro Digest, XVII (February �Kaiser, Ernest "Recent Books." Major, Clarence. Freedomways, in each issue. Dictionary of Afro-American Slang. McPherson, James, et al, eds. Blacks in America: New York, 1970. Bibliographical Essays . New York, 1972. Miller, Elizabeth and 2nd ed. ary L. Fisher. The ~egro in America: A Bibliography. Cambridge, Mass., 1970. µurphy, Beatrice f., et al, eds. Bibliographic Survey: The Ne 0 ro in Print. Washington, D.C., Vols. 1-7 (1965-1971). Porter, Dorothy B. "Early American Negro Writings: A Bibliographical Study." Paoers of the Bibliographical Society of America, XXYIX (1945), 192-268. ----· J. ___ _ _ _ _ _ Early Negro Writing 1760-1837. Boston, 1971. • ~ North American Negro Poets: of Their Writings, 1960-1944. Hattiesburg, 1iss ., 1945. Puckett, Newbell Niles . (ed. by _urray Heller) History and eaning. Black Names in America: Boston, 1975 . Querry, Ronald and Robert E. -Plemin~. Periodicals." A Bibliographical Check List "A 1 or king Bibliography of Black Studies in Black Literature, Vol. 3, No . 2 (Summer 1972), 31-36. Rowell, Charles H. "A Bibliography of Bibliographies for the Study of Black American Literature and Folklore." Journal. Black Exper ience, A Southern University LV (June 1969) 95-111. Rush, ThereJf, Carol Meyers ad Esther Arrata, com~ s . Writers Past and Present: Black American A Bio-Bibliographical Directory. Scarecrow Press, 1975. C. Sho~kley, Ann Allen and Sue P. Chandler, eds. A Biographical Directory. New York, 1973. Living Black American Authors: �)chomburg, Arthur A. New York, 1916. A Bibliographical Checklist of American Negro Poetry. (Schomburg Collection). Smith, Jessie Camey. "Developing Collections of Black Literature." Black World. XX (June 1971), 18-29. Toppin, Edgar A. A Biogra hical Histor of Blacks in America Since 1528. New York, 1971. Turner, Darwin T. Williams, ola. Afro-American Writers. comp. New York, 1970. "A Bibliography of Works Written by American Black Women." CLA Journal Vol. XV, No. 3 (March 1972), 354-377. Work, Monroe N. A Bibliography of the Negro in Africa and America . Yellin, Jean Fagan . New York, 1928. "An Index of Literary Materials in The Crisis, 1910-1934: Articles, Belles-Letters, and Book Reviews . " CLA Journal, XIV (1971), 452-465. �5 J[ • PERIODICALS Amistad The Anglo-African Bandung - It! Black Academy Review Black Books Bulletin ihl llM:k-CeU•,i&n Black Creation Black Dialogue 1h~LA.c.k. t,,.t'LCbC.e. B l ; Orpheus: Te Blac A Journal of African and Afro-American Literature. Position Black Review The Black Scholar Black Theatre Black World (formerly Ne~ro Digest). 8Qf (8l.M~& 61'\ l)Q.ff ►) _g__ica~o Defender Chicory CLA Journal Confrontation: The Crisis: A Journal of Third World L/terature A Record of the Darker Races Dasein Douglass' Ebony Encore Essence onthly �Fire Freedom's Journal Freedomways Harlem Quarterly Hoodoo Black Literature Series Impressions The Journal of Black Poetry The Journal of Black Studies The Journal of Negro Education The Journal of Negro History ~ berator The Messenger b\W8MO Negro American Literature Forum Negro History Bulletin The Negro Quarterly New York Amsterdam News Nkombo Nommo Obsidian: Black Literature in Review Opportunity: Phylon: A Journal of Negro Life The Atlanta University Review of Race and Culture Players Presence Africaine: Cultural Revue of the Negro World RenA?--ssance II Roots: A Journal of Critical and Creative Expression Soulbook �7 The Southern Workman Studies in Black Literature Tuesday Ex-Umbra Umbra Yardbird Reader �I .fil.ANTHOLOGIES Abdul, Raoul, ed. The :Magic of Black Poetry. New York, 1972. Abdul, Raoul and Alan Lomax, ed: 3000 Years of Black Poetry. Adams, William, Peter Conn and Barry Slepian, eds. Poetry. New York, 1970. Afro-American Literature: Boston, 1970. Afro-Arts Anthology. Newark, 1966. u ,-... Alhamisi, Ahmed and IarAn K. Wanfgara, eds. Black Arts: An Anthology of Black .y Creations. Detroit, 1970. Ambrose, Amanda . An Anthology pf Black Poets. My Name is Black: New York, 1974. ATJO'""IVS..J l.i,_o:'4,1-d~ EtJNJCtii"-, 1-/o...,,.,..d 441a' ala.dy$ m.;f4J1.,~s,e:lf, De• f A"., v(; l-,S ,._ -1',, .. tfo/i,,, ,BO Co.11fe.mporAr1_ _§J!,sl[ /'1mcr,c4:, {!p.4 4'e-r,..,,;r, t.~f-q s l97~. ( 7<:"'~""-S Cui<le ~y #11,on,/ J,, Jl!),-g3r.,1'f'.) t doff, Arnold, ed. I Am the Darker Brother: An Anthoiogy ot Moaern Poems by ~j ( ~~t~ Black Americans. New York, 1968. J---- It Is t he Poem Singing Into Your Eyes. New York, 1971. -----· Black Out Loud: Anthology of Modern Poems by Black - - - - ~l3L<,..c.~ ~ A~egh,nin,%~!2..~~~oeTt-y. NewVo.-.K;ltf1'4-· Americans. New York, 1970. ----· The Poetry of Black America. New York, 1973. Arnold, David, Ahmos zu-Bolton and J. Shifflet, eds. The Last Cookie. Vol. I, No. 1., San Francisco, Calif. 1 1972. Baker, Houston A., Jr., ed. Black Literature in America. ".\ Barksdale, Richard and Kenteth Kinnamon, eds. lew York, 1971. Black Writers of America . ,:J New York, 1972 s Battle, 'Aol , ed . CD. Ghetto ' 68. Soul Session . Beniq, Irvinf , ed. New York, 1968. ewark, 1969 . The Children. Bell, Bernard W. , ed ~ ., ew Yor , 1971. Modern and Contemporary Afro- Amer ic an Poetr_y. The nest of 40 Acres Poetry. New York, c. 1972. Boston, 1972. �(6l.ulc. \.\,i't.--, M~e.,....) Black Poets Write On! An Anthology of Black Philadelphian Poets . Philadelphia,\ 1970. Bontemps, Arna, ed. -----, omp. ., New York, 1941. Golden Slippers. Hold Fast to Dreams . Booker, Merrel Daniel, Dr. , et . al., eds. Boyd, Sue Abbott, ed . Poems by Blacks . 1970-1972.,lqJ'/ .. Brenan, Paul, ed. New York, 1963. American Negro Poetry. New York, 1969 . Cry at Birth. Vol. 1 -lII. (st(U•lli>~ ~.tk 1/oL,lll t)\Y\k.,e You Better Believe It. Fort Smith, Arkansas, ~o...db'1 Early Negro American Writers. Brooks, Gwendolyn, ed. Jump Ba : Burning Spear: A Broadside Treasury . and Uiysses Lee, eds. Calverton, Victor F ., ed. Washington, D.C . , 1963. An Anthology. ew York, 1970. Anthology of American Negro Literature. Whispers from a Continent: New York, 1929. The Literature of Contemporary ew York, 1969. Black Africa. Chambers, Bradford and Rebecca 1-oon, eds. Literature. The Negro Caravan. Arno, 1969. The Black Woman: Cartey, Wilfred. Detroit, 1971. Detroit, 1971. An Anthology of Afro-Saxon Poetry. Cade, Toni, ed . Chapel Hill, N.C. , 1935. A New Chicago Anthology . Brown, Sterling A., Arthur P . Davis New York, 1941: L~YlfJed.J ~nnoa.Ledt) Baltimore, Md . , 1973. Brawley, Benjamin, ed. ed. ew Yor c, 1971. Right On! Anthology of Black New York, 1970. Chapman, Abraham, ed. , ,,,-----.... ed . Afro-American Slave Narratives. Black Voices: New York, 1970. An Anthology of Afro-Ameri can Literature. New York, 1968 - --, ed. New Black Voices. Chometzky, Jules and Sidney Kaplan, eds. Anthology from the Massachusetts Review. New York, 1971. Black and White in American Culture: e Amh~rst, Mass ., t969 . J �JO Clarke, John Henrik, ed. Harlem: Voices from the Soul of Black America. New York, 1970. Collins, Marie, ed . Coombs, Orde, ed. Black Poets in French. New York, 1972. We Speak as Liberators: Cornish, Sam and Lucian W. Dixon . Young Black Poets. Chicory! New Yo r k, 1970. Young Voices from the Black Ghetto . New York, 1969. D a, Cromwell, OteliA, Lorenzo )t. Turner Negro Au t hors. Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets . New (K•\SS'1ed \ctlef) Cunard, Nancy, ed. Negro Antholo gy . Cuney, Haring, Langston Hughes Poets . Readings from New Yor k, 1931. Cullen, Countee, ed . York, 1927. and Eva B. Dykes, eds. London, 1934 . and Bruce L Wright, eds. Lincoln University New York, 1954. Danner, Mar garet eJ•The Brass House . 1 -----., eel. ..--.... David, Jay, ed. Regroup . Black Joy. Richmond, Va . 1968 . "Richmond, Va., 1969. New York, 1971, - Davis, Arthur P . and Saunriers Reddinr;, eds . ing from 1760 tote Present . Cavalcade: Roston, 1971. Davis, Charles T. and Daniel Walden, eds . On Being Black: Americans from Frederick Douglass to the Present . Dee, Ruby, eel . Glowchild . Dreer, Her man, ed. Edwards, Gregory, New York, 1970 . American Literature by Negro Authors . Wayt•Ce Writings by Afro- tew York, 1972.· Loftin and Gregory Ware, eds . Feeling, Thinkin~, Reacting .... New York, 1950. The Black Community Circa, 1971. The Editors of Vantage Press, comp~s. New York, 1972. Negro American Writ - New Voices in American Poetry, 1972. �Ellma~ Richard and Robert O'Clair, eds. The rorton Anthology of l odern Poetry. 1ew Yor '-• 197 3. Emanuel, James A. and Theodore Gross, eds. America. 0 New York, 1968. Feldman, Eugene and Eug ene Perkins , eds . Prisoners . Poetry of Prison: Poems by Black Chicaso (Du Sable Museum of African American History), c. 1971. Ford, Tick Aaron, ed . Black Insights: - 1760 to the Present . of Black Literature . Gersmehl, Glen, ed. Giovanni, Nikki . Significant Literature by Afro-Americans Wattham, Mass . , 19 71. Freed~an, Frances S. , ed . The Black American Experience: Night Comes Softly . Iary Anne, ed. A New Anthology . ew York, 1970 . Words Among America. Goldstein, Richard, ed . Gross, _D_a_r_k_S-ym ~ _h_o_n~y~ : __1_e~g_r_o_ L_i_t_e_r_a_t_u_r_e_ 1_·n_ New York, 19 71. ewark, 1971. The Poetry of Rock . New York, 1968. Oh, Man, You Found Me Again . Boston, 1972. Gross, Ronald, Geor ge Quasha, Emmett Williams, John Robert Colombo and Walter Lowenfels, eds . Haslam, Gerald W., ed . Forgotten Pages of American Literature . Hayden, Rober t, David Burrows Li terature . Hayden, New York, 1973 . Open Poetry . and Frederick Lapides, eds. Boston, 1970. Afro-American New York, 1971 . obert, ed . Kaleidoscope: Poems by American Negro Poets. New York, 1967. Henderson, Stephen . Understanding the New Black Poetry; Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic References . Hill, Herbert, ed . 1940- 1962 . New York, 1973 . Soon, One Horning: New Writing by American Negroes, New York, 1963 . Hollo, Anselm, ed . Negro Verse . London, 1964 . 570 �Hopkins, Lee Bennett, comp. ---- ·------- Hughes, Langston, ed. On Our Way; Poems of Pride and Love. The Book of Negro Humor . New York, 1966. La Poesie Negro Americaine. __.........-- New York, 1974. Paris: Editions Seghers, 1966. New Negro Poets U.S.A. Hughes, Langston and Arna Bontemps, eds. Rev . ed. Bloomington, Ind., 1964. The Poetry of the Negro, 1946-1970. Garden City, New York, 1970. Hunter, Paul, Patti Parson and Tom Parson, eds. Revolut ionary Poems. Images: Seattle, Washington, 1970. An Anthology of Black Literature. Jackson, Bruce, ed. The Whites of Their Eyes: Brooklyn, New York, c. "Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me": 1972. Narrative Poetry from Black Oral Tradition.Cambridge, Mas sachusetts, 1974. - - - -') ~ Prisons . ed. Wake Up Dead 1aft: Afro-American Workson3s from Texas Cambridge, 1972. Johnson, Charles S., ed. Ebony and Topaz: Johnson, James Weldon, ed . A Collect ion.. , The Book of American New York, 1927. egro Poetry. Rev. ed . ew York, 1931. The Boo'- of American Je3ro Spirituals. 1 1925; The Second Boo Jones, LcRoi an Writing . of Negro Spirituals. Larry Neal, eds. Black Fire: New New York, ork, 1926. An Antholo~y of Afro-American 1 ew York, 1968. Jordan, June, ed. Soulscript: Kearns, Francis F. . , ed. ture for the 1970's. Keegan, Frank L., ed. Afro-American Poetry. T~e Black Experience: An Anthology of American Litera- New York, 1970. Bl~cktown, U.S. A. Garden City, New Yor e, 1970. Boston, 1971. �Kendricks, Ralph, ed. Afro-American Voices: Kerlin, Robert T., ed. 1 's-1970's. Negro Poets and Their Poems. New York, 1970. 2nd ed. Washington, D.C., 1935. King, Woodie . Black Spirits: A Festival of New Black Poets in America . ew York, 1972. Knight, Etheridge, ed. Kramer, Aaron, ed. Black Voices from Prison. On Freedom's Side: New York, 1970. An Anthology of American Poems of Protest. New York, 1972. Lane, Pinkie Gordon, ed. Discourses on Poet_!Y, Vol. 6 . Fort Smith, Ark . , 1972~ Poems bv Blacks (Annual). Lanusse, Armand, ed. Creole Voices: Ed. Edward M. Colemen. Poems in French by Free 1en of Color. Centennial ed. Locke, Alain, ed. Four Negro Poets. -----. The New Negro: Washington, D.C., 1945. New York, 1927. An Interpretation. Long, Richard A. and Eugenia Collier, eds. of Prose and Poetry. 2 Vols. Lowenfels,. Walter, ed. Fort Smith, Ark., 1973. New York, 1925. Afro-American Writing: An Anthology New York, 1972. From the Belly of the Shark. In A Time of Revolution: New York, 1973. Poems From our Third World. New York, 1969 Poets of Today. - -. New York, 1964. The Writing on the Wall. Garden City, New York, 1969. Major, Clarence, ed. The New Black Poetry. Miller, Adam David, ed. Dices or New York, 1969. Black Bones: Black Voices of the Seventies. Bos ton , 1970. Miller, Ruth, ed. 1971. Blackamerican Literature 1760-Present. Beverly Hills, Calif., �Miller, Wayne Charles, ed . A Gathering of Ghetto Writers - Irish, Italian, Jewish, Black, Puerto Rican. Moon, Bucklin, ed. Primer for White Folks. Moore, Gerald and Ulli Beier, eds. Murphy, Beatrice. Ebony Rhythm. ---- • Baltimore, 1963. New York, 1938. New York, 1970. fasterpieces of ~egro Eloquence . Poetry of Soul . ew York, 1914. New York, 1971, Woke Up This Mernin! Norfolk Prison Brothers . New York, 1945. New York, 1948 and 1968. Today's Negro Voices. A"X••• , ed. acholas / {m; .... Modern Poetry from Africa. Negro Voices. Nelson, Alice Dunhar, ed. ~-----, New York, 1972. New York, 1973. (Introduction by l lma Lewis) Who Took The Weight? Boston, 1972 . Osofsky, Gilbert, ed. Bibb, William Puttin ' on Ole fassa: . Brown The Slave ~1arratives of P.enry and Soloman Northrup. tew York, 19h9. f"\ Patterson, Lindsay, ed. An Introduction to Black Literature in America from 'V 1746 to the Present. ----- Washin ton, .C. , 1969. A Rock A~ainst the Wind: Black Love Poems. New York, 1973. -Per 'ins, Eugene, ed . Black Expressions: An Anthology of .Jew Black Poets. Chicago, 1967. Pool, Rasey E. , ed. Beyond the Blues: New Poems by American Wegroes. Lympne, Kent, England, 1962. Porter, Dorothy, ed. Ragain, Kathy, ed . Randall, Dudley, ed. Black Poets. Early egro Writing, 1760-1837. Boston, 1971. Occasional Papers, Plays and Poetry; Vol.I Kent, Ohio, -19 71. Black Poetry: A Supplement to Anthologies Which Exclude Detroit, 1969. S'73 �15 and Margaret Burroughs, eds . Death of alcolm X. -----,. ______ For Malcoln .,._____________ Poems on the Life and_ Detroit, 1969 . The Black Poets. ed. Redmond, Eugene1\ Sides of the River: Jew York, 1971 . A ini Anthology of Black Writings. East St . Louis, Ill., 1969. Reed, Ishmael, ed . 19 ecromancers from Now: Writing for the 70's . Garden City, N. Y. , 1970 . Yardbird Reader, Vol. 1. Robinson, William H. , ed . ----. Dubuque, Iowa, 1969 . ew York, 1972 . For Love of Our Brothers . Rollins, Charlemae Hill, comp . Sanchez, Sonia, ed . Berkeley, 1972 . Early Black American Poets. Nommo . Rodgers, Carolyn, ed . An Anthology of Original American Christmas Gif' . Chicago, 1970 . New York, 1963 . Three Hundred and Sixty Degrees of Blackness Comin ' at You . New York, 1971. Schulberg, Budd, ed . lt Jf 5 D Fr om the Ashes: l ~dntj Ii O&pc, Voices of Watts . d £int Tells · ew York, 1967. Tbird Hor Jd Yei ce@ NBif I ; l!9M: • Shapiro, Norman R. Ne 1td de: Black Poetr from Africa and the Caribbean . New Yo r k, 1970 . Shuman, R. Baird, ed. A Galaxy of Black Writ ng . Shuman, R. Nine Black Poets. aird, ed. Simon, Myron, ed . Durham, N. C. , 1968 . Ethni c Writers in America . New York, 1972 . Simmons, Glor ia M. and Helen D. Hutchinson, eds . d a, Standfo~ BarbAra Dodds, ed . Literature. New York, 1971 . Durham, N. C. , 19 70 . Black Culture. I, Too, Sing America: New York, 1972 . Black Voices in American �Talley, Thomas .' ed. Taylor, Clyde, ed. Ten: Negro Folk Rhymes. Port Washington, New Yort:, 1922, 1968. Vietnam and Black Ar.i.erica. An Anthology of Detroit Poets. Tisdale, Celes, ed . Betcha Ain't: Garden City, 1'1'ew York, 1973. Fort Smith, Ark., 1968. Poer.is from Attica. · netroit, Mic,.,;, 1974 . Tisdale, CeJ.es, ed. ~e Be Poetin '. Buffalo, ?ew York, 1974. • ahd R&iMl" S"'-vlT4..,e.ds. Gi•ltt 1ll9': "" ""'t'toloty o~-tkirJ W•t WWt-tfi11, • , AJeu,~ Troupe, Ouincv, ed. atts :Poets and Writ;rs. Los Angeles, 1968. f'f15'. -r..t,c,pe,J t/flin<y Turner, Darwin T. , ed. , Blac American Literature: Torhees, Lillian and Robert W. O' Brien, eds. Athyna, Penn (c. 1932) (Schorn- Washington, l· illiam D. and Samuel Beckoff, eds. Black Literature: An Anthology New York, 1972, Watkins, Hel, ed. Black Review No. 1. ---- • Black Review No .2. Watkins, Sylvester C., ed. Columbus, Ohio, 1970. The Brm,m Tl:Wh, Antholo~y of Verse by l'1egro Students at Talladega College. of Outstanding Black Writers. Poetry. ew York, 1971. rew York, 1972. Antholo~y of American Negro Literature. Weisman, Leon and Elfreda S. Wright, eds. New York, 1944. Black Poetry for All Americans. New York, c. 1972. Wer theim, Bill and Irma r,onzalez, eds. Talkin' About Us. White, Newman I. and Walter C. Jackson, eds. Negroes. New York, 1970. An Anthology of Verse by American Durham, N.C., 1924. Wilentz, Ted and Tom Weatherly, eds. Poetry. Natural Process: An Anthology of New Black New York, 1971. Wood, Clement, ed. Negro Songs, An Anthology. Woodson, Carter G., ed. Girard, Kansas, 1924. Neg ro Orators and Their Orations. Washington, D.C., Wormley, Beatrice and Charles W. Carter, eds. An Anthology of Negro Poetry by a~ NegroesAOthers . (N.P., N.D.). Works Progress Administration.(Schomburg \ Collection) Young, Al., ed. Yardbird Reader Volume II. Berkeley, Calif. 1972. s 75 1925. �°N. LITERARY HISTORY AID CRITICISM A. General Adams, William. Afro-American Authors. _..-----.._ ed ') Allen, Samuel. Boston, 1971. Afro-American Literature: lonfiction. -------------------- Boston, 1970. "e ritude and its Relevance to the American Negro Writer." The American Negro Writer and His Roots. araka, Imamu Amiri (LeRoi Jones). New York, 1960. "The Black Aesthetic". Pp. 8-20. Negro Digest, XVIII (September 1969), 5-6 . Baker, Houston A. , Jr. "Balancing the Perspective: American Literary Artistry . " A Look at Early Black Negro American Literature Forum . Vol . 6, No.3 (Fall 1972), 65-70 . Baker, Houston A., Jr. Culture . Long Black Song: Essays in Black American Literature and ~ Charflottesville, Virg., 1972. ~ Jr. Baker, Houston A., "~, ~~ -H and the Literature of Black America." XXI (September 1972), 30-35. Bontemns, Arna. "The Black Renaissance of the Twenties." Black World, XX (November 1970), 5-9. "The Harlem Renaissance . " The Saturday Review of Literature, XXX (March 22, 1947), 12-13, 44. - - - -~ ----. e<l. The Harlem Renaissance Remembered. "The I'fo gro Contribution to American Letters." '-l'eg_ro Reference Book . 1 850-87 8 . ew 'ark, 1972. Ed. John P. Davis. The American F.ng le ,mod Cliffs, '. J. , 19 66. t!_P. �"The Ne·w Black enaissance." regro Di gest , I ( ovember 1961), 52-58. ----· "Famous .JPA Autho r s . " Brawley, Benjamin. !eEro Di gest , VIII (June 1950), 43-47. Early Negro Aflerican Writers. Chapel Hill , N.C. , 1935. "The "f'.Tegro in American Literature." The Boolanan, brr The 1920 1 s: Three (October 1922), 137-141. Branz, Stephen II . Harlem Roots of egro Rac ial Consciousness: enaissance Authors. Brooks, Russell. ew York, 1964. "The Comic Spirit and the Negro's New Look." CLA Journal, VI (1962) , 35-43. Brown, Lloyd W. "Black Entitles: Names as Symbols in Af ro-American Literature." Studies in Black Literature, 1 (Spring 1970), 16-44. '- e.d, ~ Wt::11-e"'i"' At'f'iC.O. ~.!l.f!h.f ~meri'-AS'• Lo~ An9e..Le.r; 1'17 ], Brown, ?terling A. "The American Race Problem as Reflected in American Litera- ru ---- ~ ture". The Journal of Neg ro Education, VIII (1939) 275-290. - ---· "The New Negro in Literature (1925-1955)." Thirty Years Afterward . Ed . Rayford W. Loga 7 et. The New Negro al. Washington, D.C., 1955. Pp . 57-72. Calverton, Victor F . The Liberation of Amer i can Literature. "The Negro and American Culture ." New York, 1932. The Saturday Review of Literature XXII (September 21, 1940), 3-4 . Chapman, Abraham . "The Harlem Renaissance in Literary History ." CLA Journal, XI (1967) , 38-58 . Clarke, John Henrik. "The Neglected Dimensions of t he Harlem Renaissance." ___ __ "The Origin an1?rowth of Af ro-American Literature." Black World, XX (November 1970), 118-129. .., Digest, XVII (December 1967), 54- 67 . Q~ Blcu.k. Voic.cs) • 577 Negro �Clay, Eugene. Congress . "The Negro in Recent American Literature . " Ed. Henry Hart. "-:-\ clayton, Hora'jt.e R. l!,, 1966 . Pp . 145-153. "Ideological Forces in the Work of Negro Writers." ._ and Beyond: New York, 1935. American Writer's The Negro Writer in the United States. Anger Ed. Herbert Hill. New York, Pp . 37-50 . Colloquium on Negro Art: The First World Festival of Negro Art (1966) . Pre- sence Africaine Editions, 1968 . Conrad, Earl. "American Viewpoint: Blues School of Literature . " The Chicago Defender, December 22, 1945, p . 11. Cook, Mercer and Stephen Henderson. the United States. Cooke, M.G., ed . The 1':ilitant Black Writer in Africa and Madison, Wis . , 1969 . Modern Black Novelists: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N. J. Cosgrove, William . "Modern Black Writers: Literature Forum . Cruse, Harold . The Divided Self." Vol . 7, No . 4 (Winter 1973). 120-122 . The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual . New York, 1967. Cullen, Countee. "The Dark Tower" . Davis, Arthur P. "Growing Up in the New Negro Renaissance: Opportunity, monthly column, 1926-1928. American Literature Forum, II (1968~ 53-59. --- • - fnc,n-- Negro American , 1920-1935." Negro • ~ ~Tiiwe..,_: ~P,.,.o-tlme..,ic..o.nW,,,fe..,.s'1900-l'{_/:zQ., Wo.;h 1nffon ~.c ') /914-, Dickstein, Morri;:---tiThe Black Aesthetic in White America." Partisan Review, XYJCVIII (Winter 1971-1972), 376-395. DuBois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. Eleazer, Robert B., comp. of American Literature. Ellison, Ralph. Chicago, 1903 . Singers in the Dawn: A Brief Supplement to the study Atlanta , Ga., 1934. Shadow and Act. New York, 1964. 57! �Erne1i{a, Leatrice W. l _.......- Evans, Mari. "Black Art and Artists in Cleveland." ---.. Black World, XXII (January 1973), 23-33. "Contemporary Black Lfterature." Black World, XIX {June 1970), 4, 93-94. Fabre, Michel. "Black Literature in France." Studies in Black Literature, Vol. 4, No •. 3 (Autumn 1973), 9-14. Fleming, Robert E." 'Playing the Dozens' in the Black Novel." Studies in Black Literature, Vol. 3, No. 3 (Autumn 1972), 23-24. Ford, Nick Aaron. Annual "Critical Survey of Significant Belles Letters by and About Negroes." Phylon, XXII (1961), 119-134; XXV (1964), 123-134. "Black Literature and the Problem of Evaluation." College English, XXXII (1971), 536-547. Black Studies: Threat or Challenge? Port Washington, N.Y., 1973. "On the Teaching of Black Literature with the Aid of Anthologies." College English, Vol. 34, No. 7 (April 1973), 996-1013. "What Every English Teacher Should Know About Black Studies." The CEA Critic, Vol. 36, No. 4 (May 1974), 19-27. Fuller, Hoyt W. "Black Images and White Critics", Negro Digest, XIX (November 1969), 49-50. - - - - , _,,,.,---.... ed. "A Survey: Black Writers' Views on Literary Lions and Values," Negro Digest, _XVII (January 1968) , 10-48, 81-89 . . "Perspectives." • Negro Digest and Black World, monthly column • "The Negro Writer in the United States." Ebony, XX (November 1964), 126-134. Gayle, Addison, Jr. 10 Years Later." ---,------~- "Reclaiming the Southern Experience: Black World, XXIII ed. in the Creative Al:ts. J (September 1974), 20-29. Black Experession: New York, 1969. The Black Aesthetic Essays by and About Black A®ericaps �The Black Aesthetic. Gerald, Carolyn. "The Black Writer and His Role." Negro Digest, XVIII (January 1969), 42-48. Gibson, Donald B., ed. Five Black Writers. Green, Elizabeth Lay. New York, 1970. The Negro in Contemporary American Literature. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1928. Hairston, Loyle. "Is Black Writing American Literature?" Freedomways, Vol. 13, No. 1, 1973 (First Quarter), 50-54. 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"The Negro Writer and His World." 8-10 (June-November 1956), Pp. 324-332. Lash, John. Annual "Critical Summary of Literature by and About Negroes." Phylon, XVIII (1957), 7-24; XIX (1958), 143-154, 247-257; xx (1959), 115-131; XXI (1960), fll-123. Llorens, David. "What Contemporary Black Writers Are Saying," Nommo, I (Winter 1969), 24-27. k "Writers Converge at Fis~ University." Negro Digest, XV (June 1966), 54-68. Locke, Alain L. "Dry Fields and Green Pastures." Opportunity:Journal of Negro Life, Vol. 28 (Jan. 1940), 4-10, 28. - ---) e &. ---...._ Loggins, Vernon. New York, An Interpretation. The Negro Author: New York, 1925. His Development in America to 1900. 1931. Margolies, Edward. Mason, Julian. ture Forum~ The New Negro: Native Sons. New York, 1968. "Some Thoughts on Literary Stereotyping." Negro American Litera- Vol. 6, No. 3 (Fall 1972), 63-64, 70. Matthews, Geraldine A. and the African-American Materials Staff. Writers, 1773-1949: Mezu, S. Okechukwu, ed. Black American A Bibliography and Union List. Modern Black Literature. Buffalo, ~Y., 1971, �Miller, Ruth. Backgrounds to Black American Literature. Scranton, Pa., 1971, "The Negro Writer and His Relationship to His Roots." Negro Writer and His Roots. Mitchell, Loften. Murray, Albert. New York, 1960. Black Drama. The American Pp. 1-8. New York, 1967. The Hero and the Blues. Columbia, Missouri, 1973. lki: : e~ Hisssazi rzcss . ----- The Omni-Americans: ' American Culture. --- . Neal, Larry. New Perspectives on Black Experience and New York, 1970. South Again to A Very Old Place. "Any Day Now: New York, 1972. Black Art and Black Liberation." Ebony, XXIV (August 1969), 54-58, 62. "Our Prize Winners and What They Say of Themselves." Opportunity, IV (1926), 188-189. O'Brien, John. Interviews With Black Writers. O'Daniel, Thurman, ed. New York, 1973. Langston Hughes, Black Geni us: A Critical Evaluation. New York, 1971. Redding, Saunders. "American Negro Literature." The Ameriaan Scholar, XVIII (1949), 137-148. ------. To Make a Poet Black. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1939. (Reprint, College Park, Maryland, 1968). Rourke, Constance. New York, 1942. Sellin, Eric. Literature, Shapiro, Karl. "Tradition for a Negro Literature." Roots of American Culture. Pp. 262-274. "Nee-African and Afro-American Literatures." Vol. 1, No.2 Journal of Modern (1970-1971), 249-253 • "The Decolonization of American Literature." ,., Bullettin, XXXIX (1965_) 842-853. Wilson Library �Simon, Myron. "Ethnic Writers and Mainstream Literature." The CEA Critic, Vol. 34, No. 2 (January 1972), 20-25. Spingarn, Arthur B. "Books by Negro Authors." The Crisis, 1938-1965, annual feature. Studies in the Literary Imagination Vol. VII, No. 2 (Fall 1974) 1-152. Number: (Special The Harlem Renaissance). Taylor, Clyde. "Black Folk Spirit and the Shape of Black Literature." Black World, XXI (August 1972), 31-40. Thompson, Larry, ed. Vol. 139, No 3. Yale Literary Magazine (special issue), (Fall 1969), 2-40. Thurman, Wallace. 31 "Black Words." "Negro Artists and the Negro." The New Republic, LII (August 1927), 37-39. Trimmer, Joseph F. tion. Black American Literature: Notes on the Problem of Defini- ~uncie, Indiana, 1971. Turner, Darwin T. "Afro-American Literary Critics." Black World, XIX (July 1970), 54-67. In A Minor Chord. • Carbondale, Ill., 1971 • "The Teaching of Afro-American Literature." • College English, XXXI (1970), 666-670 . ) ......--.... - Experience: Jean Briqht and Richard Wright, eds. African and Afro-American Literature. Wade, Melvin and Margaret Wade. C and Spa,ite." (June 1972), 391-408. "Ellison, Gordone and Tolson: Some Notes on the Blues, Style Black World, XXII (December 1972), 4-29. Washington, Mary Helen. 1974), 10-18. Waltham, Mass., 1972. "The Black Aesthetic in the Black Novel." Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 2, No.~ Walcott, Ronald. Voices from the Black "Black Women Image Makers." Black World, XXIII (August �West, Carole Cannon and Allen Williams. in the Secondary School." "Awareness : Teaching Black Literature Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 3, No. 4 (June 1973), 445-471. Whitlow, Roger. Black American Literature. Williams, Kenny J. 1787-1930. They Also Spoke: Chicago, 1973. An Essay on Negro Literature in America, Nashville, Tenn., 1970. Williams, Sherley. Literature. Give Birth to Brightness: A Thematic Study in Neo-Black New York, 1972. Wright, Bruce McM. "The Negritude Tradition in Literature." $tudies in Black Literature, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Spring 1972), 1-3. Yellin, Jean Fagan. 1776-1863. Black Figures in American Literature, New York, 1971 Young, James O. Baton Rouge, The Intricate Knot: Black Writers of the Thirties. 1973. I a;; i &isll!M il lil:aill19B II111t Du11aa, �LITERARY HISTORY AND CRITICISM !3.Poetry Baraka, Imamu Amiri. "Black Revolutionary Poets Should Also Be Playwrights." Black World, XXI (April 1972), 4-6. _,:? Barksdale, Richard K. "Trends in Contemporary Poetry." Phylon, XIX (1958) , 408-416. "Urban Crisis and the Black Poetic Avant-Garde." Negro American Literature Forum, III (1969), 40-44. Bell, Bernard w. The Folk Roots of Contemporary Afro-American Poetry. Detroit, 1974. "".\ Bennett, M.W. Berger, Art. "Negro Poets". "Negroes With Pens." Bland, Edward. Mainstream, XVI (July 1963), 3-6. "Racial Bias and Negro Poetry." Bone, Robert. (1965), - Negro History Bulleftin, IX (1946), 171-172, 191. "American Negro Poets! Poetry, bIII (1944), 328-333. A French View." Tri-Quarterly, No. 4 185-195. Bontemps, Arna. "American Negro Poetry." ---· "Negro Poets, then and Now." Braithwaite, William Stanley. The Crisis, bx (1963), 509. Phylon, XI (1950), 355-360. ''Some Contemporary Poets of the Negro Race." The Crisis, XVII (1919), 275-280. Brawley, Benjamin G. "Three Negro Poets: Horton, Mrs. Harper and Whitman. Journal of Negro History, Vol. 2 (Oct. 1917), 384-392. Breman, Paul. Bigsby. "Poetry Into the Sixties." Deland, Fla., 1969. Vol. II, Brooks, Gwendolyn. "Poets Who Are Negro." ------- "Introduction." ed. The Black American Writer. Ea. C.W.E. 99-109. Phylon. XI (1950), 312. ~ New York, 1973. The Poetry of Black America. Arnold Aidoff, v �-· Report From Part One. Brown, Sterling A. "The Blues." Detroit, 1972. Phylon, XIII (1952), 286-292. "Negro Folk Expression: and Songs." Phylon Spirituals, Seculars, Ballads XIV (1953), 45-61. Negro Poetry and Drama. Washington, D.C., 1937. Outline for the Study of the Poetry of American Negroes. New York, 1931. "The Blues as Folk Poetry." Folk-Say, A Regional Miscellany, (1930), 324-339. Bush, Roland E. "Negritude: A Sense of Reality." Black World, XXII (November 1972), 36-47. Carter, Lawson, Robert Hayden and Judson Phillips. How I Write I. New York, 1972. Cartey, Wilfred. "Four Shadows of Harlem." Negro Digest, XVIII (August 1969), 22-25. Chapman, Abraham. "Black Poetry Today." Arts in Society, V (1968), 401-408. Charters, Samuel B. The Poetry of the Blues. Collier, Eugenia W. "Heritage from Harlem." New York, 1963. Black World, XX (November 1970), 52-59. - • "I Do Not Marvel, Countee Cullen." CLA Journal, . XI (1967), 73-87. Davis, Arthur P. "The New Poetry of Black Hate. 1' CLA Journal, XIII (1970), 382-391. Daykin, Walter I. "Race Consciousness in Negro Poetry." Sociology and Social Research, XX (1936), 98-105. De Costa, Miriam (Sugarman). "Social Lyricism and the Caribbean Poet/Rebel." CLA Journal, Vol. XV, No. 4 (June 1972), 441-451. �Echeruo, M.J.C. "American Negro Poetry." Ellison, Martha. Poetry." Phylon, XXIV (1963), 62-68. "Velvet Voices Feefn Bitter Fruit: A Study of American Negro Poet and Critic, IV (Winter 1967-1968), 39-49. Ely, Effie Smith. "American Negro Poetry." The Christian Century, XL (1923), E~~~~!l~ ~....H l\~~~,~~a.~<. Son'1ffeft-~.'"ttA,k \.UO ... ld )JC.K\V(se,Tf'twd,t .. 11"15), , Flasch, Joy. Melvin B. Tolson. Fowler, Carolyn. 2 -l(5i ,ru New York, 1973. "A Contemporary American Genre: Pamphlet 1 Manifesto Poetry." Black World, XXIII (June 1974), 4-19. Furay, Michael. "Africa in Negro American Poetry to 1929." African Literature Today, II (1969), 32-41. Garrett, Delois. "Dream Motif in Contemporary Negro Poetry." English Journal, LIX (1970), 767-770. Garrett, Naomi M. Poetry." "Racial Motifs in Contemporary American and French Negro West Virginia University Philo~ical Papers. Gayle, Addiso1::) Jr., Claude McKay: Gibson, Donald B., ed. The Black Poet at War. Modern Black Poets: XIV ( 1963) , 80-101. Detroit, 1972. A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1973. \ Glicksberg, Charles I. "Negro Poets and the American Tradition." The Antioch Review,"VI (1946), 243-253. Good, Charles Hamlin. "The First American Negro Literary Movement." Opportunity, X (1932), 76-79. Heath, Phoebe Anne. "Negro Poetry as an Historical Record." Vassar Journal of Undergraduate Studies, III (May 1928), 34-52. Henderson, Stephen. Understanding the New Black Poetry; Black Speech Music as Poetic References. Horne, Frank S. "Black Verse." New York, 1973. Opportunity, II (1924), 330-332 • • & Black �,.. Jackson, Blyden and Louis D. Rubin Jr. Black Poetry in Americat: Two Essays -.J in Historical Interpretation. s. Johnson, Charles Baton Rouge, 1974. "Jazz Poetry and the Blues. " Carolina Magazine, LVIII (May 1928), 16-20. Johnson, James Weldon. James Weldon Johnson. Jones, Edward A. "Preface." The Book of American Negro Poetry. New York, 1931. Voices of Negritude. Kerlin, Robert T. Ed. 3-48. Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, 1971. "Conquest by Poetry." The Southern Workman, LVI (1927), 282-284. -----. Contemporary Poetry of the Negro. Hampton, Va,, 1921, "A Pair of Youthful Negro Poets." The Southern Workman, LIII (1924), 178-181. , ' -. 49: "Present Day Negro Poets." Southern Workman, (Dec. 1920), 543. ---- • "Singers of New Songs." Kilgore, James c. Opportunity, IV (1926), 162-164. "Toward the Dark Tower." alack World, XIX (June 1970), 14-17. Kjersmeier, Carl. Lee, Don L. "Negroes as Poets." "Black Poetry: The Crisis, XXX (1925), 186-189. Which Direction?" Negro Digest, XVII (Sept.- Oct. 1968), 27-32. _. ~ . Dynamite Voices: Locke, Alain. Black Poets of the 1960's. "The Message of the Negro Poets." Carolina Magazine, LVIII (May 1928), 5-15. ~ ._ ' Mo.l~o~. t(av-L. t~,we.~ t-l«u":l~otof Cot\,emeo ►o.ey n l'C\~W'ICA.t\ I ~c,~ Moore, Gera-r'd. Ed. eicl~o,.J<, 1173, 'l?oe1:ry in t:he Harrem Renaissance.: C.W.E. Bigsby. Morpurgo, J.E. 16-24. Deland, Fla., 1969, Vol. II, "American Negro Poetry." Detroit, 1971. ~or:.. ~; A-'+-, u0Wk£4 o•L !ID '-11..A-·a,6.I-"~ ... ~:::.,ij"'1'.I ~ , The Black American Writer. 67-76. Fortnightly, CLXVIII (July 1947), ' �Morton, Lena Beatrice. "Negro Poetry." Negro Poetry in America. Boston, 1925. Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Frank J. Warnke and O.B. Hardison. "Negro Poets, Singers in the Dawn." Ed. Alex Preminger, Princeton, N.J., 1965. fp. 558-559. The Negro History Bulletin, II (1938), 9-10, 14-15. 3J. a Pool, Rasey. NE Las tin§ i Iii€ !IC&id!ii§ st !he E!&SS "The Discovery of American Negro Poetry." M 96¥1 1556. Freedomways, III (1963), 46-51. Ramsaran, J.A. "The Twice-Born Artisrts' Silent Revolution." Black World, XX (May 1971), 58-68. Randall, Dudley. "Black Bards and White Reviewers." The Black Position, Number 1 (1971), 3, 15. Redding, J. Saunders. To Make A Poet Black. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1939. (re- print College Park, Maryland, 1968). Redmond, Eugene B. "The Black American Epic: Its Roots, Its Writers." Black Scholar, II (January 1971), ~5-22. -f4',(. - - - - • ,, F"'e Gw.Kt>oftts-."iil:,.y.~u,o:t\.O\t't. tt,..-s61•JS!' ~tll\SUS "How Many Poet's Scrub the Rivers Back?" • I The @£101m• ~l'f 15') Confrontation, (Spring, 1971), 47-53. ---- . Lance Jeffers. "Introduction." When I Know the Power of My Black Hand, by Detroit, 1975. Rodgers, Carolyn M. "Black Poetry-Where It's At." Negro Digest, XVII (Sept. 1969), 7-16. Rollins, Charlemae. Famous American Negro Poets. New York, 1965. "''3 RH'""~ I l\t\ClM&. ael'\To "~'l~s 6 f l!lw.lCtl otnel\ \n 6\h-o-t\111t.=uo.r1 e.n.(~lti~~ 1-1.I \I (sf~,'tl btt11115'J Sheffey, Ruthe. "Wit and Irony in Militant Black Poetry." XXII (June 1973), 14-21. Black World, 6 �Sherman, Joan R. Invisible Poets: Afro Americans of the Nineteenth Century. Urbana, 1974. Smitherman, Geneva. Black Poetry." "The Power of the Rap: The Black Idiom and the New Twentieth Century Literature, Forthcoming, 1973. (Also available through ERIC). Staurter, Donald Barlow. Taussig, Charlotte E. V. A Short History of American Poetry. New York, 1974. "The New Negro as Revealed in His Poetry." Opportunity, (1927) , 108-111. TeL'}lo~,cLyde~•~"'Y OvmlU! Le~o.c.yo I= o.Lon~•BIIH1k ~ira'jet\~~k.Wt'"W.1 )(XIV(Se,-..,._,,~ 'H' Thurman, Wallace. "Negro Poets and Their Poetry." The Bookman, LXVII (1928), 555-561. Tinker, Edward Larogue. Les Cenelles, Afro-French Poetry in Louisiana. New York, 1930. White, Newman I. "American Negro Poetry." South Atlantic Quarterly, XX (1921), 304-322. "The Umbra Poets . " Mainstream, XVI (July 1963), 7-13 . "The Undaunted Pursuit of Fur y . " Valenti, Suzanne. "The Black Diaspora: and Black Americans." Wagner, Jean. Time, XCV (April 6, 1970), 98-100 . Negritude in the Poetry of West Africans Phylon, XX,"CIV (December 1973), 390-398. Les poetes negres des Etas-Unis: clans la poesie de P.L . Dunbar a L. Hughes. ---· Walker, Margaret. ----• reliqieux Paris, 1963 . Black Poets of the United States: Langston Hughes . Le sentiment racial et From Paul Lawrence Dunbar to (translation by Kenneth Douglass) Urbana, Ill., 1973 . "New Poetstr.J Phylon, XI (1950), 345-354 . "Racial Feeling in Negro Poetry . " South Atlantic Quarterly, XXI (1922), 14-29 . Work, Monroe N. (1908), 73-77 . "The Spirit of Negro Poetry." The Southern iJorkman, XXXVII �~ FOLKLORE AND LANGUAGE Abrahams, Roger. Deep Down in the Jungle: Streets of Philadelphia. ---· Negro Narrative Folklore from the Hatboro, Pa., 1964. "Playing the Dozens ." Journal of American Folklore, 75 (19 62), 209-18. ---· Positively Black. Adams, E.C .L. Nigger to Nigger . Prentice-Hall, 1970. New York, 1928. Q, Allen, William Francis, Charles Pickard WAre and Lucy Mc im r,arrison. Songs o~~he United States. ~ew York, 1867. Andrews, Malachi and Paul T. Owens. Slave New editions, 1929 and 1951. Black Langu~ge . Seymour-Smith Publishers, 1973. Baratz , Joan C. and Roger W. Shuv. · Teaching Black Cli.ildren to Pead . Center for I A,ertlA'1 /./ '1 ~ro.sc.h_;Id~Wc1L~~Wa.ltef'\Matt~ i~S(~lCompl, AC4mpl'eher1c;.veA~notite..l 8t'oUOC\w.tP"'I o~lac.l( ~ s • Applied Linquistics 1969. • Brewer, J. Has on , American Negro Folklore. "American Negro Folklore ." Brown, Sterling A. "The Blues." - -. Phylon, .·rv Austin, Texas,/qs-f• ~lon, XIV (1958), 286-292. "Negro Folk Expression; Songs." Phylon, VI (1945), 354-361. Dog, Ghosts, and Other Texas Negro Folk Tales. • &ton f!.o•~f/fl'f-1 Chicago, 1968. Spirituals, Seculars, Ballads and (1953), 45-61. "Negro Folk Expression. #1. Folk Tales and Aphorisms ." Phvlon, Vol. XI, Att1-anta, Ga., 1950. '----"' Charters, Samuel B. The Country Blues, New York, 1959. Claerbaut, David, Black Jar gon in White America. Grand Rapids, 1972. Conley, Dorothy L. ,"Origin of the Negro Spirituals." The Ne ro Histor XXV (1962), 179-180. I �Corbett, Edward P.J. "Students' Right to Their Own Language." College Composi- tion and Corrnnunication, Vol. XXV (Fall 1974), 1-32. Dalby, David. "African Survivals in the Language and Traditions of the Wind- ward Maroons of Jamaica ." African Language Studies 12, 1971. Th Mui /, ---· Black ~ New World. Patterns of Communication in America African Studies Program. Davis, Ossie. the Indiana University, 1970. "The English Language Is My Enemy . " DeStefano, Jo Hanna S. English . 4.nJ 'White: American Teacher (April Language, Society and Education: 1967). A Profile of Black C.A. Jones Pub., 1973. Dillard, Joey Lee . Black English: Its History and Usage in the U.S. New York, 1972. ' Diton, Carl. Thirty-Six South Carolina Spirituals. Dorson, Richard~ - , ed. African Folklore . New York, 1972. American Negro Folktales. Dundes, Alan, ed. "Evolution in Folklore: Remus Stories. " Fisher, Miles Mark . Some West African Proto-types of the Uncle Drums and Shadows: Athens, Ga., 1940. Harris, Joel Chandler. New York, 1963. Survival Studies Among the Georgia (New ed.: New York, 1972). Treasury of the Blues. New York, 1949. Daddy Jake the Runaway, and Short Stories Told After New York, 1889. Haskins, James and Hugh F . Butts. 1973. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1973. Negro Slave Songs in the United States. Bandy, E.C. and Abbe Niles, eds. Dark. Readings in the In- Popular Science, XLVIII (November 1895), 93-104. Georgia Writers' Project. ~tal Negroes . New York, 1967. Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel: terpretation of Afro-American Folklore. Ellis, A. B. New York, 1928. The Psychology of Blac Language. New York, �I-lug es, Langston and Arna Bontemps. Hurston, Zora Heale. Bruce, ed. The Book of ~ r o Folklore . ilules and }'fen. New York, 1958. Philadelphia, 1935. Wake Up Dead -fan: Afro-American Work.songs from Texas Jahn, Ne~ro Spirituals. Jones, LeRoi. Black 1:usic. - •. Blues People: Krebhiel, Henrv Edward. tional usic. 11 Frankfurt, Ma., 1962. New York, 1967. Negro Music in vhite America. Afro.:..American Folksongs: eu York, 1963. A Study in Racial and fa- Tew York, 1914. Labov, William !_Study of the Non-Standard English of Negro and Puerto Rican ,... Speakers in Nev York City . Cooperati,ve Research Report 3288, Vol. 2, 1969. V Language in the Inner_C_i_t_,y_: ,_ __S_t_u_d_1._·e_s_i_n_t_h_e_B_l_a_c_l_c_E_n--'__g l_i_s_h_V_e_r- • nacular. Philadelphia, 1972. Sociolinguistic Patterns . ----· Philadelphia, 1973 . The Social Stratification of English in New York City . Washington, D. C.: Center for Applied Linquistics, 1966 . The Study of • on-Standard English . Champagne, Ill . : Center for Applied Linquistics, 1970. Landeck, Beatrice . Echoes of Africa in Folk Songs of the Americas. Leffall, Delores C. and James P . Johnson, Bibliography . Loman, Bengt . New York, 1961. Black English • an Annotated Washington, D. C. , 1973 . Conversations in a Negro Dialect . Washington, D.C . : Center for Applied Linquistics, 1967. Lomax, John Avery and Alan Lomax. 1934. • York, 1936 ~ American Ballads and Folk Songs . New York, Negro Folksongs as Sung by }eadbelly, New �(~~fo><,c Lovell, John. "Reflections on the Origins of the Negro Spiritual." Negro American Literature Forum, III (1969), 91-97. . ~ . • Iii L Ha.Min•e@J - - . BL9r5ck, Sana ~'th• Fort• irtc:l-&-& Fk,n♦,1bu.!-,ofK-wh A~!"f'•ftm•"'"" ~,,.., VO. WA~ Ni ajar, Clarence. Dictionary o{ Afro-American Slang. New York, 1970. Oflt- ew '/ot-K.1 fl}'; Marsh, J.B.T. The Story of the Jubilee Singers; With Their Songs, 7th ed., London, 1877. Matthews, M.M. Some Sources of Southernisms. McGhee, Nancy B. CLA Journal, "The F'o lk Sermon: University of Alabama Press, 1948. A Facet of the Black Literary Heritage." III (1969), 57-61. Morse, J. Mitchell. "The Shuffling Speech of Slavery: Black English." College English, Vol. 34, . o. 6 (March 1973), 334-843. Odum, Howard W. and Guy B. Johnson. The Negro and His Songs. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1925. • egro Workaday Songs. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1926. Oliver, Paul. Blues Fell This Morning: The 1eaning of the Blues. L11•s. N.f~YorL ,,,_, . <•••w-e~st.Titn.1 Sandilan s, an wenty Negro Sp1rituals. New York, 1960 . Morija, Basotoland, 1951 and 1964. Scarborough, W.W. ~ "Negro Folklore and Dialect". Scarbourought, Dorothy. Arena, XVII (1897), 186-192. On the Trail of Negro Folk Songs. Cambridge, Hass. 1925. v Shirley, Kay. Shuy, Ro~er W. ---· Tlie Book of the Blues. New Yorl:, 1963. Cross-Cultural Analysis. Washington, D.C . , 1972. Discovering American Dialects., Champagne, Ill.: von<L NatA_l . Council of Teachers of English, 1967. -· Field Techniques in an Urban Language Study. -· Social Dialects and Language Learning. Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1968. 1orw. NatJ\l Council of Teachers of Fn~lish, 1964. Champagne, Ill.: �, and Fasold , Ralph H. Teaching Standard English in the Inner City. Fashington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linquistics, 1970. Silverman, Jerry. One Hundred and Ten American Folk Blues, New York, 1958. f, Smith, Arthur L., Delvenia Hernandez and Anne Allen. of Other aces, Ethnic Groups and Cultures. How to Talk With People Los Angeles: Trans-Ethnic Educa- tion Communication Foundation, 1971. Language, Communication & Rhetoric in Black America. J. Smith, Arthur L. 1 ew YorJ.r, 1972 . • 4 } Transracial Communication, Englewood Cliff, N.J., 1973 . - and Andrea L. Rich. Emma Goldman, 1Kalcolm X. Samuel Adams, Durham, N.C . , 1970,. Boston, 1969 . Rhetoric of Black Revolution . • ------~ - ... Rhetoric of Revolution: and Stephan Robb. The Voice of Black Rhetoric: Selections. Bos- ton, 1971. £ (Smitherman, Geneva.'\ '-God Don ' t Never Change1 : "(~ spective." Black English from a Black Per- "'J I'#.,, College English, Vol. 34, No . 6 (March 19 73), 828-833 . - - • lllo.d~ L&11111•.t• Q.t\d$.HlT" .. C, ;$.eyNls. ~ Sov(.' Spalding, Henry D. , ed. N4.W '/ot,. Encyclopedia of Black Folklore and Humor . JC l li:s JJHiag c, New York, 1972 . Stewart, W.A. "Continuity and Change in American egro ialect." Florida Language Report 7::)(1968) . Sullivan, Philip E. "Buh Rabbit: Going Through the Changes." Studies in Black Literature, Vol . 4, No . 2 (Summer 1973), 28-32. Talley, T. W. Negro Folk Rhymes, Wise and Otherwise. Thuman, Howard . Deep River . New York - - - •1htNe~a,,o~t,i~•Tu.LSp,ea~t Turner, Lorenzo D. New York, 1922. 1955 . of:L,pe ... ~ l)Qaih. l'lew v~rk,tf/'11• Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect . Univer sity of Chicago Press, 1949; University of Michigan Press, 1974. Twiggs, Robert D. lass., 1973. Pan-African Language in the Western Hemisphefe· North Quincy, �Twining, Nary Arnold. tive . " CLA Journal, XIV (1970), 57-61. Welmers, William E. White, Newman I. A~rican Language Structures. American Negro Folk Songs. Wolfram, Walter A. -----~- ~ Cambridge , Mass., 1928. egro Speech. Center for Applied Linquistics, 1969. and Nona H. Clarke, Black-White Speech Relationships. Washington, D.C.: Work , John W. ___________ _ Univ. of Calif. Press, 1973, A Sociolinguistic Description of Detroit Washington, D.C.: .__ "An Anthropological Look at Afro-American Folk Narna- Center for Applied Linquistics, 1971. "Negro Folk Songs." Opportunity, I (1923), 292-294. S17 - - - - �- ~ . DISCOGRAPHY AND TAPE INDEX A. Collec tions (phonogra~ African Drums . Ethnic Folkways Library FE 4502 A/B. African Origins and Influences. Folkways FA 2691, Afro-American Blues and Game Sonrs. Record in~ E !~500, FE 4530, FS 384. Ed . by Alan Lor.1.ax. Library of Congress FS ll+. Afro-American ~~usic. F /Or. James. 2 Asch 702 . Afr_~_!'.merican Spirituals, Work Songs and Ballads . Ed. by Alan Lor.1.ax. Folkways FA 2650-59 . A Gathering of Great Poetry for Childr en, Vol. 2 . W/ Gwendolyn Brooks . Caedmon TC 1236. A Hand is on the Gate. Dir. by Roscoe Lee Brm-me . American Folk Songs for Children. Perf . by Bessie Jones . . ta~e Se~ es. Folkways 9040. Southern Folk Heri- Atlantic 1350 . .Al'lerican Poems of Patriotism and Prose . Incl . James Weldon Johnson . Caedmon TC 1204. Animal Tales Told in Gullah Dialect . Anthology of Music of Black Afri ca . Anthology of egro Poets . Ed . by Duncan Emrick . AAFS L44-46 . Everest 3254 / 3 . . A Ed . by Arna Bontemps . (Read by Langston Hughes, Sterli ng Brown, Cl aude McKay, Countee Cullen, Mar garet Walker Brooks . ) Ba_2-tism: Cullen . and Gwendolyn Folkways Records FL 97991. A Journey Through Our Time . Dir . by Maynard Solomon . Incl . Countee Recor ded by Hugh Tracey . Columbia KL 213 . Vanguard VSD 792 75 . Bant u Music From British East Africa . �1/1) Been in the Storm ~o Long: Spirituals and Shouts, Children's Game Songs . Folkways Records FS 3842. Belafonte at Carnegie Hall . Beyond the Blues: RCA Victor LOC 600G. American Negro Poetry . Ed . by Rosey E. Pool. Vinette Carroll, Cleo Laine, Gordon Heath, Brock Peters.) Black Scene in Prose, Poetry and Song Vol . I . (Read by ARGO RG 338. Perf. by Vinnie Burrows . Spoken Arts SA 1030. 1'1e ~ Black Perf . by ViRnie Burrows . Scene in Prose , Poetry and Song, Vol. II . Spoken Arts SA 1031 . ...,,,... ,,..,,._ Hotown/Black Forum B - 456 - L. The Black Voices: On the Streets in Watts . Classics of American Poetry . Weldon Johnson . ALA Records 1970 Stereo . ~ / Ear tha Kitt . Incl. Langston Hughes and James Caedman TC 2041. Cultural Flowering: Music and Literature. Folkways FL 9671, FL 9792 FL 9790, 1 FL 9788, FJ 2806, FL 2941, FA 2659. -- Deep South(?acred and Sinful . Perf. by Bessie Jones . Southern Journey Series. Prestige International 25005. Discovering Literature. Incl . James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes. The Sound of Literature. Drums for God . Houghton-Mifflin 2-262-18. (Recorded live in Cameroone, Congo, Ethiopia, Liberia, Malaswi, Nigeria, Rhodesia) Epic LF 18044. Expl~ring Literature. Exquisite Yellow . W/Eartha Kitt. Houghton-Mifflin 2-26248. Incl . Paul Laurence Dunbar . Theatre Alumni Associates . Suny, Albany, New York. Famous Poens That Tell Great Stories. Incl. James Weldon Johnson. Farewell Recital (Spirituals). fAnderso~faria~ Decca DL 90lf0. RCA Victor LSC2781 �I/I Folk Hus5_c of Bt ioT)ia. Follmays FF 440L,. Fol c 'fos ic TJ. S .A., 7ol. I. Folvways Fl:: 4530. nreat Poems of the English Language: Sha espeare to Dylan Thomas. Incl . Countee Cullen CMS 554. Head Start Child Development Group of :Mississippi. Georgia Sea Islands, Vol. III . Asch 701. Perf. by Bessie Jones . Southern Journey Series. Prestige International 25002. Get On Board: Jegro Folk Songs . Perf. by Broi,mie cGhee and Sonny Terry . Folkways FP 28. The___0_l_o~f Ne_gro Histo rv. Fritten and 'farrated by Lan~ston Hughes. Folkways FC 17752 (new no. FP 752). God's Trombones and Selected 20th Century 'egro Poetry . Johnson, Alice Childress, and P. Jay Sidney. Jazz Canto - Vol. I. Poetry Jazz Album . Perf. by James WeLd oV\ Educational Audio Visual 75 R 440. Read by Lan~ston Hughes. World Paci- fie PJ 124Lf. John's Island, Its People and Songs. Folkways FS 3840 . Les Ballets Africains de Keita Fodeba, Vol . I . Disgues Vogue CLVL' 297. t:--L~ 1q4 ~~9Q,,ce-\-Wa.LKei,- OLe'f.OJldet- Reo..ds f>oems of Pa.11 avroence.. 'l)vnlu.n 4.nd..ta.Yn-es fl.l~it{r,nt-oh,uon. f=ult'wo.y.s, • 1issa Luba . Sung ~y Joachim Ngoi and Les Troubadours du Roi Ba"do~in. Phillips PCC 606. Music Down Home . Ed . by Charles Edward Smith . usic From the . South. Folkways FA 2691. Field Recordings by Frederic Ramsey Jr. Folkways FP 650-59 . Music of Equatorial Africa. National Poetry Festival . Recorded by Andre Didier. Incl . Gwendolyn Brooks an Folkways FP 4402. Langston Hughes. of Congress LWO 3868, 3869, 3870. Negro Blues and Hollars. Ed . by Marshall W. Stearns. AAFS 159 . Library �Negro Folk nusic of Africa and America. Negro Folk Rhyth,ls. Folkways FE 4500. Perf. by Ella Jenkins and Group. Folkways FA 2374 . .._/ Negro Folk Music of Alabama. Negro Folksongs and Tunes. Folkways Records P417-418 471-474. W/Elizabeth Cotten. Folkways FG 3526. Negro Folk Songs for Young People Sung By Leadbelly . (Leadbelly). Sung by Heddie Ledbetter Folkways FC 7533 #2 . Negro Folk Stories and Music. Negro Po~ts Anthology . Negro _Poets in USA . Folkways 4417/8 4471/4. Folkways 9791. Folkways 9792. egro Prison Camp Work Songs. egro Prison Songs. Folkways FE 4475. Perf . by Mississippi State Penitentiary Prisoners. Tradition Records TLP 1020 . • Negro Rel laious Sone~_~nd Services. Ed. by B.A. Botkin . Negro Songs, Stories and Poetry for Young People . AAFS LlO. -- Folkways Records FC - "\ 7110, 7114, 7312, 7003, 7103, 7104 , 7533 , 7654 . Negro l• ork Songs and Calls. The New Black Poetry. ew Jazz Poets. Ed . by B. A. Botkin . Educational Audio Visual IRR 136. Ed. by alter Lowenfels. Newport 1958, Mahalia Jackson. AR Records BR 461 (Broadside). Columbia CS 8071. Noe'l Et Saint-Sylvestre A Harlem . 26() V. AAFS L8. Do cument Herbert Pepper . Ducrltet-Thomson 69 . One, Two,_J_!lree and A Zing, Zing, Zing. Play ~n,1 Dance Son9.:s an Tunes. Ed . by Tony Sc wartz. Ed . by B .A. Bot dn . Folkways FC 7003 . Librar y of Conaress Re- cord in~ AAFS L9 . Poens and Ballads Fron 100 Plus American "Poems . D;i.r. by Paul Molloy . Scholastic ,ecords FS - 11008. Poems From Black Africa. Caedmon S 1315. Ed . by Lan~ston Hug es. Caedmon TC 1215. Read by James Earl Jones . �Poetry and Jazz, Jazz eanto, Vol. I. and Ben Wrirht. World "Pacific Perf. by John Carradine, Hoagy Carmichael ecords. ' Poetry of the Negro. Read by Sidney PoAtier and Doris Belack . Glory GLP-1. Poets for Peace. Perf. bv Owen Dodson . Spoken Arts 990 R 68-2582 . wt4rd P~_try International Incl. Braithwaite . 2 Argo MPR 262 13. E1\ Poets of \est Indies. Caedmon S. 1379. ~pin ' Black in a White World . Perf. by The Watts Prophets. ALA 1971. Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle and Other Modern Verse. ton Hughes . Incl. Langs- Scholastic Records FS 11007. Th<:.__Rhythms of the World . Written and Narrated by Langston Hughes. Folkways FC 7340 (new no. FP 740). Roots of Black America. United States.) (Traces Black Music from Africa to the Caribbean to Folkvays 9704 . Sava_pna~copators!African Retentions in the Blues . - Prod . hJc,aul Oliver . CBS 52799. Selma Freedom Songs . Documentary Recording by Carl Benkert. • Sidney Pottier Reads Poetry of the Blackman W/ Doris Belack. Folkways FH 5594 . United Artists Records UAS 6693. Singers in the Dusk . 1usic, poems read by Charles Lampkin . Ficker Recording Service XTV 25689 . Skip Rope . (Thirty three skip rope games recorded in Evanston, Ill .. ) Folk- ways FC 7029. ?ong~of American Negro Slaves . Folkways Records FD5252 . Songs _of_ the Selma 11ontgomery March . Perf . by Pete Seeger and others. Folk- ways 5595 . Snectr~~ in Black: Poems by 20th Century Black Poets . Scott, Foresman and Co. 4149. �Spirituals Et ~irituals . Folklore. Sung by Harry Belafonte. Perf. by Howard Univ . Choir . RCA 430-213. RCA Victor L f 2126. Spok'=!l_ Anthology of American Literature ; the 20th Century . Johnson and Countee Cullen . Incl. James Weldon Univ. of Arizona Press Records R63-1127. Spoken Arts Treasury of 100 1odern American Poets Reading Their Poems, V. 13. l /Gwendolyn Brooks. Spoken Arts 1052. Spoken Arts TreasuI.Y_ of 100 Modern American Poets Reading Their Poems . (Read by Jame s W. Johnson, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Owen Dodson, Gwendolyn Brooks.) SA-P-18 . The Story of Jazz. Written and Narrated by Langston Hughes . Struggle for Freedom. Folkways FC 7312. Folkways FH5717, FH5511, FD5525, FH5502, FH5522, FD5252, FH5523, FC7752. Today's Poets , Vol. IV. Incl. Robt. Hayden. Tou_Jth__!l_oems for Tough People. Scholastic Records FS11004. Incl. Don L. Lee 's , Etheridge Kni ~ht ' s Poetry. Caedmon Reco r ds, Inc. (1971). 17 alues in Literature. Incl. James Weldon Johnson. Houghton- ifflin 2-26409 . a, T-Jal ': _ Jo'.~ether Children: Sun~ by Vinnie Burrows . Th~ He_~r_y_ lue~. The Black Scene in Prose, Poetry and Song. Spo-en Arts SA 1030. Written and Nar rated by Langston Hughes . _i_osld Faflou~~Je~r9_2.nirit uals . vefe VSPS-36. Perf. ~Y Fisk Jubillee Singers. !,Single Poets (pho~o,V'<lph) Angelou, !'aya . The Poetry of ~ro.ya Angelou. Brait waite, F.d,•1 ard. - ReAd and Islands . l~asks. GWP P. ecords ST2001. Aro,o PLP 1184 / 5 . Argo PLP 1183. Folkways FA 2372. �---· Ri~hts of Passage . Brooks, Gwendolyn. ~ Don L. Lee . Brown, Elaine . Gwendolyn Brooks Reading Her Poetry: W/Introductory Poem Caedmon TC 124Li . Seize the Time . Read and Sung by Elaine Br own . Brown, Sterling and/Hughes1wLangst:;j Hughes. Ar~o PLP 1110/1 . Read by Authors . Brown, Sterling . Works of Sterling Brown and Langston Folkways FP90 . The Dixie Bel le . From Their Works . Vault 131. Sterling Brown and Langston Hughes Reading Folkways 9790 . and 16 Poems . Folkways 9794 . FL (nqo, Shall I Tell 1y Children . tJho Are Black? til..s ~ - F-oU(w~y~ B1-1<.>wn.., .> ... L,i-,CI . Burroughs, 1ar garlt Sound- A-Rama SOR 101 . Cortez, Jayne . ....... Celebr a t i ons and Solitudes . Crouch, Stanley . Stra t a - East ecords, Inc . SES-7421. ~ Ain ' t No Ambulances for No Ni ohs Tonight . Flying Dutchman FDS 105 . Cullen, Countee . Dodson, Owen . To Make A Poet Black . The Dream Awake . Caedmon S-1400 . Spoken Ar t s SA1095 . Fabio, Sar ah Web s ter . Boss Soul. --- 0 Soul Ain't • Soul Is . ____ Giovanni, :Jikki . , Hughes, Langston . Folkways FL-9710 . Like A Ripple On A Pond . Truth Is On It s Way . Black Ver se . Folkways 9711 . Niktom 4200 . .$1!--~~.Ri3ht-On R~u»Js fl_R 05001 , Buddah 2005 . Did You Ever Hear The Blues? United Ar t ists ~ Big Miller ' s Renditions of ... , 304 7. The Dream Keeper and Other Poems of Langston Hughes . Read by Langston Hughes . Folkways FC 7104 (new No. FP 104) . - J �~-----. Arts Langston Hughes Reads and Talks About His Poems. Spoken SA 1064. Poems By Langston Hughes. Read by Langston Hughes. Af!~ Records 454. The Poetry of Langston Hughes . Caedmon (1968). Rul:ry Dee and Ossie Davis Read From Selected Poems of Langston Hu~hes. VTC 1272 (Caedmon 1272). ~ - and ~ Hargare_;J. Writers of the Revolution . Black Forum BB 453 . Johnson, Weldon James. Four Readings From God ' s Trombones. By James W. Johnson . Musicraft Album #21. ---· nryce God's Trombones. Read by Bond. God's Tronbones. Read bv Harold Scott. Folkways FL 9788. United Artists TJAS 5039 . Jones, LeRoi. Black an Jones, Le~oi. §~nny ' s Time Now. The Last Poets. Beautiful. .. Soul and Madness. At Last: Ri~ht On ! Blue Thumb BTS 52. Blue T umb BTS 39. The Last Poets . , Jihad Productions Jihad 663 T11e Last Poets. Chastisenent. Jihad Productions Jihad 1001. East Wind Associates, Douglas 3. Juggernaut Records(!) J~ St. LP 8802 . This Is 1adness. The Last Poets II. Douglas Comr:i~ons Stereo 20583. b1L.e.~K ,(v\"Ti'~, 1Y\ ,e C..olle.c,ted &em Q.f ~Li\o'"\c:1. Len--.o n .:Te f ~e . ...s on . Ml:la""' PNK:IV<-Ttl1t1 Cor11pfJ.ny • ~.edmond, Eu<;ene B. Blood Links and Sacred Places. Black River Writers 110-13A Sonia. Scott-Heron, Gil. --- t Sanchez. Folkways 9793. Pre_e_H=!:_11. Flying Dutchman~l0153 . Pieces of a ~an. Flying Dutchma~ereo FD 10143. RvTUn ,BV'u~e . QPcu-nG\...·. ch·ltd~eno~The SvV\ ,Blat t A~T\·~,s <o~ovp . • Po,e rY\ Or (o ro..1ttvd e,. • l3lo.c.K ,4V't,·s-r-' Gr--oup • �1/1 Small Talk At 125th And Lenox . Flying Dutchman Prod . , Ltd . FDS- 131. Van Peebles, ____ !elvin . iff1 Ain ' t Supposed to Die A }atural Death . rp 47 ~ (:, ~ A-s ~e..-,,-ovsM-8.Jleor[l4-11acK. A <t M • Brer Soul . ~ A & SP 4223 . 1 SP 4161 . wa.l ken fY\ ~ "19ltr et. a. ~ P~/ .e.1. Mo.r<40..t--U W0;,.( ke1,, fud ..Qf Nlar>'J"- ne;t W4. Ike"'. l'o lf:w1,.y.r PL Cf 7r£ , J ( Note: Most of the educational and cultura l institutions Single Poets (tape ) w~ere Bl a ck poets have read also maintain audio and/ar video tapes of rea dings.} Brooks, Gwendolyn . Eckels, Jon. Family Pic tures . Broadside Voices . Hofile Is Where The Soul Is . Emanuel, James A. Panther Man . Broadside Voices. The Treehouse and Other Poems . ~ '40.rpe.~, Mt"c.ho.eL.S. ij,isLi.r.y~~ Hodges, Frenchy Jolene . Jeffers, Lance . Black Wisdom . Knight, Etheridge . Poems From Prison . Broadside Voices . Broadside Voices . Broadside Voices . We Walk The Way of The New World . tfurphy, Beatrice M. a n d ~ Cities Burning. Moving Deep . Walker, 1argare.:=._. X, farvin . Broadside Voices. The Rocks Cry Out. Poem Counterpoem . Broadside Voices . Ilroadside Voices. Prophets for A__}Tew Day. Black Man Listen . Broadside Voices . Broadside Voices. Broadside Voices. We A BaddDDD People . Stephany . LP-BR-1. Broadside Voices. - - - - ~ and(Dann:.::("Marg7~. Homecoming. Broadside Voices . Broadside Voices . Readin' and Rappin' . Sanchez, Sonia. ru.,..,0·1~ --p~es~. Broadside Voices . Spirits TTnchained . Don't Cry, Scream . Randall, Dudley. Broadside Voices . tfi4t'1:nPtt't." VYl\V€.~~·,;v oP My Blackness is the Beauty of This Land '. Kgositosile, Keorapetse . Lee, Don L. Broadside Voices . Broadside Voices. Broadside Voices. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Eugene B. Redmond Digital Collection Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document Text Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context EBRWritings_08_33to36 Title A name given to the resource First typed draft of Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry: A Critical History, Bibliographical Index, p. 559-606 typed with handwritten edits Relation A related resource Eugene B. Redmond Digital Collection Language A language of the resource English Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For digital rights and permissions, see <a href="https://www.siue.edu/lovejoy-library/about/policies.shtml">https://www.siue.edu/lovejoy-library/about/policies.shtml</a> or contact <a href="mailto:library@siue.edu">library@siue.edu</a> for direct inquiries. In copyright. <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/</a> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Redmond, Eugene B. https://digitallis.isg.siue.edu/files/original/1739bdc2d4df3577b4c9dd930e205905.pdf f584abca46f4e5ae18e51a3653c37988 PDF Text Text CHAPTER VII CONCLUSION: AFTERTHOUGHTS As promised in our Preface we have tried to avoid forcing our research and findings into manicured paradigms and neat frames. ,.. However, Drumvoices cf' ih~ YY1 Ot,#iert\ ~ does advance theories and theses--manyAwell known and someAoriginat ·-- ~O 11\\·:!1 s-Tvdy hqs bee ,~rm&Ja critical history;and one must take stand§. Indeed, the poets have taken their own stands, as individuals and groups, since to project an inner self to the public is to assume a stance: to work out one's systems of beliefs, perceptions, relationships and values within the function or framework of poetry and poetics. Y)().,V_e,, Such stands/\.always And e.& represent~critical choices for poets./\7or Afro-American poets they have C~ealed a unique crisis-continuum in that so many "unusual" factors attend their written "commitments." One factor was the apparent self-mockery that initially accompanied the poets' use of written English. For the early bards, there was the simple--but grave--task of "proving" their ability to employ literacy skills; this test alas, was conducted by "liberal" slave masters while many sta tes made Black literacy a crime punishible by imprisonment, beating, and, in some cases, even death. There was much confusion and misdirection of values and energies in the earlier poetry: the poets were neither encouraged nor allowed to retain an African flavor (let alone language). The Christianization of slaves had aided in the development of a ghastly "duality"--or wall between the African and himself--which cluttered the poets' self- and world-views, indeed sending S53 �most Black intellectuals into psychic chaos. This tendency, called a "veil" by W.E.B. DuBois, held Afro-American poetry in a state of moral limbo up through the beginning of the twentieth century. And though there were exceptions (Horton, Whitfield, Whitman, Frances Harper), any one with proper background study can understand the isolationism and alienation of a Phillis Wheatley or a Jupiter Hammon who refused freedom for himself, but advocated it for young Blacks. One need only read David Walker to discover the boundaries of Negro "freedom" in the "free" states of farly America. In the meantime, a folk tradition--on the plantations, among escaped slaves, out of the minstrel era--was also developing. This folk strain in the poetry (separated by Wagner from the "spiritualist" vein) has survived as a conscience, more or less, of Afro-American letters, philosophy and art. And even though critics, like Wagner, make false distinctions between the folk and the literary {or spiritualist) realms, all but a few of the J,,.f.tY.-e. "intellectual" poetsA,delved into the folk roots and origins in one way or another. This fact is not as obvious in poets like Countee Cullen, Claude McKay or Jean Toomer, as it is in, say, Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, Sterling Brown and Langston Hughes--but it iden11~,&.t At the Ca.v-,'oe,,,./t-. same time, however, the ambivalent attitude toward the Christian God and white people is as evident in the /tis folk poets asAin those steeped in book theology. Examination of the artificial boundaries established between folk (oral, gestural) poetry and literary (intellectual, book) poetry has not been pursued with enough intensity by critics and writers. Europe or larger America ,have Je.pnec,,ia1e,J Just because communal art forms does not �mean that Afro-America has to follow suit! And, as we stated Or does it? in the beginning of Chapter VI, the social-connnunal value #it of/lpoetry has yet to be viewed in the context of Black reading trends and habits. fi,.,. :: we know Blacks place great emphasis on the dramatic presentation of a poem. Witness the magnetism and charisma of poets at live readings and the development of a national Black audience for poetry via such vehicles as Ellis Haizlip's tv show, Soul. All of the foregoing statements tie in with our opening remarks about stands and positions taken by poets. For, if the trans-literation, if you will, of the thought or impulse to the page results in a reduction of poetic intensity, then the silent reading of the poem cuts a similar nerve-contact between reader and the originating idea or instinct. One has only to hear an "intellectual" poet like Robert Hayden read his own works to understand this principle. Our point, then, is that much of the a•t•r••••t straight-laced poetry of the early periods has less meaning for us when it is not delivered in its natural environments of church services, abolitionist rallies, choir-singing, dances or social activities. For example, one should avoid listening to a poor reader present dialect poems of Dunbar, Davis or CorrOthers. A number of devices and themes ~ poetry. are central to Afro-American And while there have been instances (Wheatley, Hammon, Ann Plato, the Creole Poets) when poets 1•• have been innnune to the social whirlwind, most Afro-American poets have been in that whirlwind. Hence, patterns of segregation in America turned a "curse" into a 11 blessing11 (to paraphrase Alain Locke) and provided Black poets with private languages, forms, styles and tones. From the ditties, blues, Spirituals, dozens, sermons and jokes, the �poets fashioned an endless stream of poetic forms and fusions (Tolson d~~ •the Plndaric ode in a blues form). And that same segregated pattern gave these poets their ominous themes, their grave tones and temperaments which, coupled with their crisp insight into America's contradictions t'O 1o and paradoxes, allowed them to project,/\prophes_;:,andt\refine their "duality" into one of the most powerful aesthetical tools available to any group of writers. Hence the Afro-American poet has his own private (cultural) F o v- e~AM\)LeJ symbols and themes as well as those of the larger world.~ost Black poets have written poems about lynching••••••ll)but most Euro-American poets have not. Slave~y, • Themes related to/\job discrimination, thee(ffiO\V~\,enc.e, of h o...ne Les.s r'>eS$ Qnc\ res+Less ne.ss ~ a..,, Christian God, psychic 1'vnivl't . in a white world,Apoverty reinforced / r--,vey.~ a.nd TV'~tfl.SJ. by oppression, racism, prejudice,~castration, pius the landscape of terror and fear resulting from a web of social inequities, all, in one way or another, work themselves into Afro-American poetry. O ■ r•etm?J ••••s Mo Though certain forms and themes have historically dominated AfroUhi u£ •••••*A VO..-. f,fft.b characterize The ·. se oPthem .. American poetry, and divergent approaches t --rhe Outside ofAdominating clusters, -themes I noweve~ interests and preoccupations. M<.Ln 11 oPfhese r;ends ')r-, 'f for hundreds of years--even if such a fact is obscured by a socio-media representation with all its accompanying pathological emphases. • I .. .J ,..._ ........----... c..:lT,~l (tat, ton· g be Any young Black'sAanalysis of white culture t\'\<.waes. · ~ , his own unstated or implied cultural preferences.) slim �True, Africans in the new land have lived theJl:ightmare amidst talk of an _!unerican Dream; and, understandably the darker poets' songs are full of unpleasantries and recollections of that Nightmare. Black poetry Can But the end of f\tVt.,.be self-pity, chauvinism, ideologue, rhetoric or complaint (Baraka says ''.the !nd of wan is his Beauty"). , Thus Margaret ~ Walker, amidst her sisters' use of "safe" female subjects and her brothers' trips to the altar of the white literati, is able to celebrate Black life (For My People). Robert Hayden transcends artificial barriers between (G\t\O VS) himselfAand nature and enters the flower (Night-Blooming Cereus) as does Henry Dumas in Play Ebony Play Ivory and Pinkie Gordon Lane in Wind Thoughts. Other examples of such diversity and sensitivity abound: Owen Dodson (Powerful Long Ladder), Langston Hughes (The Dream Keeper), Alice Walker (Once), Raymond Patterson (26 Ways of Looking at A Blackman), ·Joyce Carol . ~e. Thomas (Blessing), and~cross-spread of almost any anthology. We have said the poet takes a stand not inherent in, say, the musician's, when he commits his thoughts to paper. social change (:And 'I\ position\,til().?not c~e And: ove..14 The pasf-,f'<2w }/i unrest, the Black poet ,whose aesthetic or religious ALi1neJ. wftlt.,tiJat: ~ of vested interest group~ up before many a stran~court, at which times his own feelings and wel-6 tJ/:fen sensibilities · I\ - neutralized · in favor of the "popular latex brand." Serious critics and "cultural stabilizers" need to examine such "one-way" approaches to poetry/criticism, especially as they have occured over the last 10 years. We mention this "side" show of the contemporary ,, ,, poetry scene because its presence has often dirtied the waters of open thought and either crippled or destroyed many a budding talent. In a few t,,$ �cases, it has even muffled a rich or significant voice. However, it is time the critical flood gates were "opened" completely and honestly. Only in this way can Afro-American poetry continue to breathe the breath of the ancestors. Finally, as winds of change shift, speed up or slow down, and the "tradition" congeals, readers and poets must ask about ultimate designs and inherent missions. As the drum stands at the cross-roads of traditional African and Afro-American culture, so the poet should stand at the center of the drum. Most poetic principles, and the language asssociated with them, rely on the vocabulary of sound and music. Music is the most shared experience--the most vital commodity--among Afro-Americans. is music's twin. And poetry word Both the metaphysical and the metaphorical,\stem from and return to the drum: life, love, birth and death labored out in measured rumble or anxious coicophony. Between the lines are the rattle of choruses, the whine (hum) of guitars, and the shriek of tambourines, framed by rivers that will not run away. them, cross them. And the drumvoices urging us to cross � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Eugene B. Redmond Digital Collection Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document Text Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context EBRWritings_08_32 Title A name given to the resource First typed draft of Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry: A Critical History, Chapter VII. Conclusion, p. 553-558, typed with handwritten edits Relation A related resource Eugene B. Redmond Digital Collection Language A language of the resource English Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For digital rights and permissions, see <a href="https://www.siue.edu/lovejoy-library/about/policies.shtml">https://www.siue.edu/lovejoy-library/about/policies.shtml</a> or contact <a href="mailto:library@siue.edu">library@siue.edu</a> for direct inquiries. In copyright. <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/</a> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Redmond, Eugene B. https://digitallis.isg.siue.edu/files/original/ef065bf72b1366e9deda6cf963c47d46.pdf d074750f9f4dba023b981659125bcd2d PDF Text Text CHAPTER VI FESTIVALS & FUNERALS: BLACK POETRY OF THE 196Os & 19 7Os They winged his spirit & wounded his tongue but death was slow coming Who killed Lumumba What killed Malcolm festivals & funerals festivals & funerals festivals & funerals & festivals & funerals .• . Jayne Cortez Overview The space between festivals and funerals can be infinite or it can be deathly short . her poem. - So Ja"'yne Cortez\ says} through the twistings and turnings in But whatever the space, or the pace, we all slip, slide, soar, and trip as we make our way between the polarities (assigned each at birth) +he Ktridol= ofl\life we live and the kind of death we die . 197Os often face• life and death "straight up" : Black poe~ of the 19 6Os and though, as we have seen, Black poets in o ther times did not cringe from the breaches of racial nightmares, violence , sexuality , unbeautiful language, wicked or religious folkisms, and the demands of music which each of them seemed to hear--albeit from "different11 drummers .• To attempt a discussion of contemporary Black poetry is to turn others ' tongues into flames: " Blasphemy!," "I was the first!," i �"We started it!," "That anthology was incomplete since it didn't include beaQh me!," "It all /fts3•a e. in this place or that place!, " "His/her poetry is not Black enough!," and so on. Nevertheless, the "smoke" from the sixties is beginning to clear and, while more hinl sight is needed, there are important observations that should be made. Hence in this chapter, the format will follow preceding ones--bvt J4.ta: with a 1118t :i.o s ae 1-e de-emphasis in biographical-critical notes on individual poets. eo.rl.it Most serious poets who began writing in the late fifties,11xties . andr{>e~ent1es, still have much growing and threshing to do . volumes really contain earlier poetry . Also many recent So it is not easy to evaluate (or even list) Black poetry produced over this period. Yet, historically speaking, certain undeniable trends have pccurred, and they look roughly like this: Black Poetry since the Harlem Renaissance (see Brown, Redding, Henderson, Jackson) has had cycling currents of "rage and " fire " though not the sustained gush witnessed in the mid and late sixties; Black poetry after 1945 expressed a belief (see Ray Durem) that white liberals were not really interested in mounting the ( 01-- 1oim5'aU -the "''o/'IJ "final" chariots of fire/ion behalf of Blacks (despite Communist Socialist pronouncements); t:ff.es Black poetry of the ~ -.vi six1ks _/ and earl) ,f:9680 provided a }f:i.vil ond PoL;J'itaL e.t:M o.T-e. ~1ghts groundswellAfor the volcanic burs ~ of the later sixties; In Black poetry of the early sixties there was planted the anvil which shaped the stylistic, attitudinal and linguistic character �of what is known as the New Black Poetry; Current Black poetry, despite "evolutions" and "changes," has not radically altered or laid to rest the best work of Hughes, J"o..mer. ot'" fe,nfc,11\ Johnson Gllii72RI, Davis, Toomer, Walker, Hayden, Brooks, Tolson and Dodsonj Except for what Stephen Henderson calls "tentative" answers, Black poetry defies all definitions (like Mari Evans' f "Black Woman")--splintering off into ennumberble directions, styles, forms, themes, considerations and ideas. f This chapter, all above considered ( ! )) will briefly sketch the ,r:; from the fifties into the mid-sixties. L,c._ ban ia15 Again, chronology will be ""'"•••~since many of the poets listed were writing in the forties and fifties; .rvh ffa.nud L. but most did not rece1ve~attent1on until the sixties. The sketch will include a general look at transitional poets (older and younger) as their work appears in about a half dozen anthologies (from I Saw How Black I Was, 1958, to Kaleidoscope, 1967) and what few volumes were being brought out at the (he examination (see Locke's and Bontemps' • divisions time. 1f>en ~ of the Renaissance)~takes up the poets who came to recognition under the banner of the Black Arts Movement and who loosly fall into the category of New Black Poetry. Older poets--Hayden, Brooks, Randall, Walker, and others--will be briefly re-visited to see if the "new" mood wrought any significant changes in their views and/or their poetry. we 10uch ~e,n ci--i-t'c.,,'-' m Thougll\.alae s Hiitii.,u~a. bi stow, this book is primarily a historical guide- designed to aid sad ½a; -{.aders in their exploration of Black poetry. Only a naive person �would attempt, at this stage, a full critique of the poetry of the 1960s and 1970s. However, there are stylistic patterns, similarities, and thematic clusters which will be pinpointed and assessed from time to time. Some of the most provocative of recent studies of contemporary Black poetry are Henderson's The Militant Black Writer in Africa and the United States i r,1,,q with Mercer ~oo~• Joy Flasch's Melvin Tolson (1972) ; and Understanding the New Black Poetry (1973); Sh~ rley Williams '• Give Birth to Brightness (1972); Gibson's GIiii Modern Black Poets (1973) and Jackson ' s and Rubin's Black Poetry in America (1974) . '3) 152 gq ] "] l 1 1er) :JI. Literary and Social Landscapet - L.e.~eL Assassinations, highApolitical corruption, upheaval, violence, change, .~_l"-s~!l~p .11 e!! ,,: a.LL • ideolog:i-es, flaming rhetoric --•/\ contemrQrary period. i!IIA d I2 N describe the Revolutions (of all kinds) mock and mold the world. From Cuba to Vietnam, Harlem to Chile, Pakistan to Watts, Nigeria to Indonesia, Kenya to Berkeley~ Jackson State to Kent State-- the facts and ovell'cast, h owevei,.) A~ riot symbols of change have been dramatic and violent .rf!~w~h ().r1 -tAwa.r ted ma.i or tie vt-ltJp me1its l[ i whe1-> ~ 9/\in the Black sphere/\ tneqlop was declininef[by the mid-fifties)' j?-.,1'' BLMt. and 7azz ' s greatest living interpreter, Charlie Parker, was dead. A)lusicians c.onlTh "ed.probing new forms under the leadership of Miles Davis, and vocalists"9 John Coltrane, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Wes Montgomery, Charles, ~ 1 ! , Ornette Coleman, Billy Eckstine, Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday, who died in 1959 . D~~tQ ~~v~, g,Llie - i,l],i?ft~n, Ray Ella . /\.Holiday's name and fame again reached a worldwide audience when, in 1972, Diana Ross, formerly of the Supremes, starred in the controversial movie, Lady Sings the Blues. Saxophonist Coltrane, a major influence on the current generation of musicians and poets, died in 1967. An innovator, he sparked new interest.$ in music wit1} j �aMOllJ,\6ffi•tui,mives) his "sHeets W of soun~',.a ppe fdl · • 1u t;;Q }ilq"am iaribucaa•nl!l ~~ The / iftiesAalso witnessed the maturation of/4hythm and /lues, popularized by Black radio disc jockeys . weaving 1· 1i 3 · 3 f 1 I gs J RF 1 g Inter- Jg Pl Ji social • - - • • commentaries with the news, they Resvtlf"'a lo. 1e,.-, anticipated the new oral poetry of the,.,ixties. )'tP±n ufifg from these broadcasting styles were programs like Bandstand (started in the late fifties). Young white America watched Blacks dance, listened to Little Richard and Chubby Checker, and tried to imitate it all on TV and in their homes. /I This 1/ period gave birth to the first white superstar Soul artist--Elvis Presley. •f~J..a••lllii·r.-•·-••-•~j~s-llllllih■iWE•t~a.xlliiil·..-~all!llll!t~e!lllll!t•l••-.::t c:fhe "f new lllack social music, and the dances accompanying it, freed white American youngsters from the prudish and self-righteous inhibitions of their foreparents. &ut"-fhti4 t. r~mG\m.S ~(>i!.t_tott('. tt eda.OC$ f:'rooM11\-f t-/t¥1"17~. Generally, American science and industry developed more rapidly than in previous periods. ~ Russia launched Sputni~k, a feat which was followed v by~erican-Russian science and space-exploration race which 9~ continues. new..s ~ Telt star paved the way for -••J-••~i@~coverage of global activities while h~v-e \!, biochemical warfare and atomic researchJ\.became the nightmares people live4 daily. The American literary scene was swamped with political novels, satire, writings on the war and experimental-j ournalistic prose. The "underground " newspaper emerged as a major vehicle for this new writing. · ,ii~ 1 · {f~r,-fii)'( · . 11 present. psyc h o 1 ogy ~-emp 1 aye d 1.n ~ar 1.er I\.W:J ti § s~s s t1. The symbolism and FI owever, t h e influence of the writers from the Depression and war years is giving way to gadgetry and a new wave of existential concern. Black, Jewish, Chicano, Indian and Asian writers are grabbing more of the literary stage.~ I$ ..r-een 1n the vie.w ethnit. s(.)ur-"'a.Ls o.ncl fubl,st.;.jco mp,u,re.s t-lsweu..as ntVJ inier-e~t estt:bL1'the.cl f ub Lish e"'s , 0 �5~A. Contemporary white and third world writers of influence include: John Cheever, N. Scott Hornaday, Ralph Ellison, Bernard Malamud, Frank Chin, John Hersey, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Ch~ a Achebe, Ernest Gaines, James Baldwin, Paul Chan, Flannery O' Connor, Albert Murray, Ishmael Reed, William Styron, James Ngugi, William Demby, Shawn Hsu Wong, John Barth, William Melvin Kelley• and Irvin Wallace. Black writers are included in the general listing because during the contemp.orary period, many of them achiev~d recognition on ~uh.'1bga.Clb}" "''.s ~l..5!.!''fil ( ) Sol.cl. ,~~- ..6J,. MU.Lioncop,e..r~ par with the best writers everywhere. J-teed el!iellllllfl[:lll=iil• was nominated in two categories for ihe National Book Award in 19 ]3'.l Aflt~mportant con- Amet-t'c.o,11, temporary/..poets are: Stanley Kunitz, Cyn Zarco, Robert Hayden, Richard Eberhart, Robert Penn Warren, Jose 1ontoya, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lawson Inada, Theodore Roethke, Karl Shapiro, Robert 1?rgas, llelvin Tolson, John Berryman, M\c.~~ c.H().y./!_ er Henry Dumas, Victor Hernandez Cruz, ~l ob~rt Uowell, Daniel Halpern, Richard Amir.I' Wilbur, Paul Vesey, James Dickey, Imamu1'!3araka, Sylvia Plath, William Bell and James Wright. Hayden received a National Book Award nomination in 1972 . art/Jf.s Many of the Black prose writers)~nd poets (some from the pre- and post-war schools) died during the contemporary period (Tolson, Bontemps, Hughes, Wright, Durem, Dumas, DuBois, Horne, Rivers, Toomer, Malcolm X, etc.). Indeed death, in one way or another, not only preoccupied writers (white and Black), but was often romantically pursued. Beat poet Kenneth Rexroth asked "Why have 30 American poets committed suicide since 1900?" Those poets not concerned ~e(F-des); ffi\,e, et., M enTs with death were investigating decadence or the • • • • • ~f society. The development of contemporary poetry cannot be viewed properly without understandi ng the "Beat" period . As a partial product of the Be Bop er, • - - Beat poets emulated the hip mannerisms and aped the "man alone" (drop-out) image associated with musicians. Be Bop was one way the Blackman used to fi ght the commercialization of his ar~ He also used it in playing �"Something," in the words of Thelonious Monk, "they can ' t play." (~, ,-..._ meaning whites). Important &n lllt Beat poets were Lawrence Fedlinghetti, Rexroth, All! n Ginsberg, and Gregory Corso, among the whites f.> and Bob o.. u116C ~ I ~,8; SpeL.MAll 7 among the Kaufman, Lef oi Jones, F ' fed Joan Blacks. The Beat Movement, which nurtured occultism, rejection of the Establishment and an existential view of life, was centered in New York's Greenwich Village and the San Francisco Bay area. Ir 'Al~•-••••·~~died in the early /ixties. Kaufman is viewed by many as the unsung patriarch of the era. $0Me.., ~ ~critics say major white poets of the movement enthusiastically took their cues from Kaufman's innovations, but were not so %, 7111d:.. 9'\in re- cognizing his influence. ltl J" (1261) • As a kind of spiritual heir to Toomer, Kaufman is a complex, sometimes fragmented, but brilliantly original poet. His work, like that of many of his contemporaries, is influence by Eastern religious thought and the occult. Stylistically, Kaufman has the "sweep" of Whitman coupled with the best techniques of modern poetry. He passionately experiments with jazz rhythms in poetry and often invokes jazz themes, moods and musicians. fvil Many Beat poets and enthusiasts later joined or were spawned by the {ights struggle which was intensified by several things: Martin Luther King's Montgomery bus boycott in 1955-56; sit-ins and other dramatizations of segregation and discrimination; the challenges of Jim Crow in travel in 1961 (CORE); the widening activities in SNCC (1961-64) and the March on Washington (1963). Other significant activities _enflamed and �inspired the hearts and imagination of Black American youth especially. The Muslims' (Nation of Islam) growth to 50,000 members by 1963 and the Congressional action on Civil Rights Legislation were two seemingly unrelated but strategically important events. The growing influence of the Muslims suggested that many Blacks no longer believed America was C.h{U')Qf..S sincere in its pledges to implementl\e~n when they became law. Qt.+'\ l\~(pA,,,f~ of='viol.fn,e, their distrust were the continued,\.ftlli•ge, night-ridings in the jouth; and harrassment of Blacks in public places and their homes. With the bitter taste of Emmi tt Till's murder still on their tongues, Blacks reeled under the killings of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner, Halcolm X, Medgar Evers, King, the Kennedy brothers, and the three Black Panthers r ~:1..1.e,, in a Chicago apartment). #.y 1966, however, Lci..A by police ha.J Black Power signs and slogansAbegdn to replace the "We shall overcome-Black and White Together" exclamations. • wetA1-t1nf Young Black America, •orttitofll, Afro hairdos and African jewelry, attended cultural festivals, back-tofJLM \<. pciwo• t ohFt~ntu; Africa rallies,f\'.'oetry readings, and _ . read (III community news published in revolutionary broadsides and tabloids. Rhetorical forays by H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael, young SNCC officers, set off a flurry of state and national laws against inciting to riot and the transpor of weapons across state boundaries. or i r) • S~t.$ Ja rse and swal--l ~ties.\ignited in fthl flame'.: .-.... setAt he stage for gun battles between police and the often 14 "imagined" snipers. These conflagrations were repeated in scores of cities after Dr. King was assassinated in 1968. Watts poet Quincy Troupe captured the shock and horror, and chronicled the official reaction, in his poem "White Weekend": �The deployed military troops surrounded the White House and on the steps of the Senate building a soldier behind a machine gun 32,000 in Washington & Chicago 1,900 in Baltimore Maryland 76 cities in flames on the landscape and the bearer of peace still lying in Atlanta ••. In the last stanza, Troupe notecsi with curdling irony: Lamentations! Lamentations! Lamentations! Worldwide! But in New York, on Wall Street #At the stock market went up 18 points this writing, fallout from the Black Revolution reverberates around the globe. Black journalist Thomas Johns_!on reports Irish revolutionaries sing "We Shall Overcome." Posters and emblems commercialize everything from African hairstyles to the raised clenched fist--the initial symbol of Black unity and defiance. A wave of Black movies--called Blaxploitation-- ~f'~L~s, beginning with "white" experimental ~ i k e Putney Swope (1969). is capturing a multi-million dollar theater patronage. Black movies retrieved the crippled movie industry from the brink of disaster. Meanwhile, the murder, incarceration and political harrassment of Black men and women mat e them heroes and heroines in Black communities--yet ironically symbolizel the torment and "genocidal schemes" of America (see Samuel Yette's The Choice). 4 l'f �Criss-crossed by paradoxes, political contradictions, social revolts --- and religious _ . ambivalences , the Black community is nevertheless regenerated by its singers and performers. Black popular music has not only reached unprecedented audiences, but unprecedented money-making capabilities. wht<-~ }hythm and ,;6.ues, s!!i![tl to ha ~Adied about 1965 , gave way to "Soul"-"I ' ma Soul Han," Sam and Dave announced in the late Sixties. The Impressions told lovers that you "gotta have soul" and Bobby Womack reminded listeners that the "Woman ' s Gotta Have I.t " --presumably "Soul." W>ntcfL..1 '4fVf<.oti •..1 Black recording companies 11 are 11"'~1b oc, , the .... largest onef being M<Crown (Detroit) , and Hebb a Sten ,. Curtis Hayfield ' s soundtrack album Superfly (1972) sold more than 22,000,000 copies and Marvin Gay ' s What ' s Going On (1971) set records for album sales. Recently, however, Stevie Wonder has surpassed them all. Literally dozens of singing groups--modeled on the quartets and ensembles of the ( ifties-are releasing albums regularly. These folk or "soul" poets have become _,d r.~pt_~ more "conscious" in recent years and many now ~ ~essages and exaltations of Blackness . their songs with political Much of this new wave came on the heels of severe criticism by Barak~ who admonished the singers for doting on unrequited love. he st\,dJ ifteme, Like \t\ Too many)f{ire preoccupied"witht\' 'my baby ' s gone, goney(!) Black consciousness activity--and creativity in general--now flourishes . Related involvement includes: development of Black acting ensembles; opening of free schools and Black universities; establishment of Black Nationalist/ i ultural communes; increase in the number of Black bookstores and African boutiques; establishment of Black Studies programs on white and Black �campuses and, in some cases, quota systems for enrolling Black students; the escalation of Black deman~ for "cream of the crop" jobs such as tv ;, announcing and the hosting of variety shows; expansion and creation of new roles for Black newspapers, magazines and radio stations; formation of ~L ~D gzL1M1111lUm~NwlP""lnM112~0a""'lf!s~t~aw~~')\~JBlack Cong;essional caucus• and similar units i n ~ ano Lel ista'T"'"~ bo~lte.s professional~ · · and, finally and importantly, new engagement with Africa and her problems and possibilities. Indeed, future trips to Africa-- to the "Mother country" or "Homeland"--are discussed at all age and social levels. Much of this renewed interest is understandable in light of the emergence during the contemporary period of several African nation states and the increased fraternization among Africans and Afro-Americans. Malcolm X, ,tudel\ ' ~ r)d. ':) . ca~onized today by great numbers of Black~ntellectuals, did much to foster this current interest in Africa. Shot to death at a expelled from the Nation of Islam, and had formed a splinter group known as the Organization of Afro-American Unity. His Autobiography of Malcolm X (with Alex Haley, 1965), which (as he predicted) he did not get to see in print, chronicles' his odyssey as Malcolm Little, hustler "Detroit Red," Malcolm X, and El-Hajj Malik El Shabazz. h~s k.eet1 N-ionized by Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Ossie Davis, Baraka and various other shcolars, activists and artists. Black poets, especially, have found Malcolm (and Coltrane) a limitless source of inspiration. can be seen in For Malcolm: A partial indication of his impact on poets Poems on the Life and Death of Malcolm X (1967), edited by Dudley Randall and Margaret G. Burroughs. Shabazz" Robert Hayden noted that: In "El-Hajj Halik El �He X'd his name, became his people's anger, exhorted them to vengence for their past; rebuked, admonished them , Their scourger who would shame them , drive them 4.tthe from the lush ice gardens of their servitude. First World Festival of Negro Arts, held in Dakar, Senegal, in 1966, Hayden was awarded the Grand Prize for Poetry . A major event, the festival was attended by experts, scholars , artists and enthusiasts of the Black Arts who gathered for 24 days to hear papers and discussions, view art exhibits) W cultural performances, and give prelim ' nary direction to the Black Arts Movement. one of the architects (with -- NegritudeI #/la clsair~ . . Damas) : f a philosophy of Black Humanism.•1•l•·•.-.-•N11s~n~s.e~§iiaa zrsu wt et tJJe esngj : · ard artjsts "C$k\e,rtSenghor,(senega~ ~ Presiding over the festival was znd Ills J Ii Q!l!Jd@ I J 1 & a I t . t · s te JJ es tr als Fr African-oriented publications such as Pr~sence Africaine and Black Orpheus have renewed their interests in Black American writers . Likewise, Black American journals and popular magazines (Black World, Journal of Black Poetry, The Black Scholar, Essence, Encore, Ebony, Jet, etc.) have begun to publish more materials by and about Africans . The revolution in the Black Arts was signaled by many events including the First Conference of Negro Writers in Harch of 1959. Langston Hughes was an important figure t here--as he was at the Dakar gathering seven years later . The First American Festival of Negro Art was held in 1965 and the Second AFNA ' �took place in November of 1969 in Buffalo, N.Y. Interlacing these and other conferences, symposia and conventions, were exciting developments and experiments in New York, Chicago, Watts, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Baton Rouge, St. Louis, Cleveland, Detroit and Washington, D.C. During these periods of social turmoil and artistic upsurge writers and poets often aligned themselves with ideological positions and regional movements. Consequently, Black Arts communes and regional brands of Black consciousness grew concurrently. Splits between older fvil f..ights workers and Black Nationalists were paralleled by splits between older writers and it younger pracw,oners of "Black Arts." The splits were not always clear-cut, however, for many older activists and poets joined the new mood in spirit, thematic concern and personal life style, while some of the younger writers retained the influence of the earlier moods. Complicating things even more • were the variants on the domtnant themes of each camp. Gwendolyn Brooks, Randall, Margaret Danner, Margaret Walker and John Oliver Killens are among the older group of writers who vigorously took up the banner of the new mood. rt.PL c...-t Younger writers whose works I{ J ., IJ/f'ome "tradition" include Henry Dumas (Poetry For My People, 1970 and Play Ebony Play Ivory, 1974), Conrad Kent Rivers (The Still Voice of Harlem, 1963, etc.), Julia Fields (Poems, 1968), Al Young (Dancing, 1969, etc.), and Jay Hright (The Homecoming Sinrrey, 1972) to name just a few. ~he creative promise of this period was dealt a severe blow by the untimely deaths of Dumas and Rivers in 1968) These poets are deeply influenced by the moods and preoccupations of the period (self-love, racial injustice, violence, war, Black ¢onsciousness and;{istory) but they work along tested lines and experiment within careful and thought-out frames of references. Most of the writers of the period �(their styles and ideologies notwithstanding) have found themselves engulfed at one time or another in heated debates over questions related to the vf.~\6 "Black Aesthetic," the relationship of writer to reader, Black,.__• white audiences, and the part politics should play in their life and work. At this writing, these discussions continue in most sections of the Black forld. The flurry of ideological and aesthetical debate among the poets (and other writers) has often been precipitated or attended by critical writings, historical ~ies, social essays and public political statements. Some of the individuals associated with initiating the plethora of rhetoric on the question of a "Black" aesthetic (and related issues) are Ron Karenga, 1 -~ " Gwendolyn Brooks, Barak.a, ~Ct-yleJ Edward Spriggs, , a, H~f IL" Fuller ..,S,.C,tlClgJf Redding, Cllllll!li~ t lison, ' P11 (Black World), Larry Neal, Ernest L•r,. Kaiser, Mel Watkins, Ron Welburn, - - ~ Randall, Lerone Bennett, Jr., Nathan Scott, James Emanuel, Toni Cade-Bambara, John Henrik Clarke, Don L. Lee, Ed Bullins, and Stanley Crouch . A number of important studies, literary and cultural, by Black and white writers, aided in whetting or prolonging the critical thirsts. are: -me~~ Some of tliaAimportant and/or controversial writings The Militant Black Writer: in Africa and the United States (1969), Cook and Henderson; Black Expression (1969) and The Black Aesthetic (1971) Gayle Jr., ed,; Muntu: Literature: The New African Culture (1961) and Neo-African A History of Black Writing (1968), Jahn; Langston Hughes: Black Genius (1971), O' Daniel, ed.; Black Poets of the United States: Paul Lawrence Dunbar to Langston Hughes (1963, French edition; 1973 English trans., Douglas), Wagner; Before the Mayflower (1962), Bennetta (196 ; Shadow and Act Ellison; Understanding the New Black Poetry (1973), Henderson; Colloquim on Negro Art: First World Festival of Negro Arts, 1966 (1968), �I Editions Presence Africaine; The Negro Novel in America (1965), Bone; Mother is Gold: A Study in West African Literature (1971), Roscoe; The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967), Cruse; Native Son\: A Critical Study of- Twentieth-Century Negro American Authors (1968), Margolies; Dynamite Voices: Black Poets of the 196O's, vol. I (1971), Lee; Blues People (1963), Black Music (1967), Home: Social Essays (1966), and Raise Race Rays Raze (1971), Baraka; and Give Birth to Brightness (1972), Williams. A number of Black critics, artists, and activists heatedly de- nounce whites who research or criticize Black literature, saying that only those who have lived the Black Experience can write about it. Another group holds that whites can report on Black writing if they are sincere and sympathetic. The Black Arts Movement , as the contemporary period is sometimes called, took place in the shadows of what many Black social critics have "second Reconstruction." termed ••Athe Hence, much of the writing is a revolt against political hypocrisy and so~ial alienation. In the angriest poetry, authors shower,.. disdain and obscenities on the "system" and whites in general. Refusing "integration" even if offered, younger poets deridef American values and attitudes. "Unlike the Harlem group ," Hayden noted, "they rejected entry into the mainstream of American literature as a desirable goal." Of course, more than a few of the older poets were writing in the/ixties and are writing today. Many of them, however, were sometimes laid aside by young readers who were unable to separate "poetry" from the fiery declamations of Carmichael, Brown and innumerable local spokesmen and versifiers. Often the poets exchanged superficial indictments, indulged in name-calling and, as groups or individuals, began rating each other on their "levels of Blackness" even though no criteria existed then and none exists today for .I lf{)O �such judging . . Nuch of the dispute centered around the question o f wh o II starte d" the Black Arts or New Black Poetry movements . While it is true that there ~ -leading ligp.ts of the new movements, it is misleading and false to .say that -one geographical region of the country or one group of persons is solely. responsible for either the main (or major) writing output or for kicking off. any tradition of Blacks writing about themselves. Such a stand would dismiss the fro-American musical past, on the one hand, and distort the historical development of the creative wri t ·ing and thought on the other. Anyway, the - question of who started what is not that significant. During the sixties and intv the seventies, literally hundreds of Black poets started writing and publishing--in tabloids, magazines, broadsides, anthologies and individual collections . were the new publications: of Black Poetry . regions. Also showcasing the new poetry Umbra, Black Dialogue, ~ d The Journal Significant clu~ters of poets developed in geographical And the atmosphere was enhanced by a number of African thinkers, artists, poets and novelists who arrived ~/\America to teach, lecture, perform and travel. The importance of this interaction among Blacks from various parts of the globe cannot be overemphasized. Black writers and students now read African, West Indian and Afro-Latin writers. �Hughes acquainted American audiences with African literature in his anthologies: An African Treasury: Essays, Stories, Poems by Black Africans (1960) and Poems from Black Africa (1963). Whispers from a Continent: In 1969, Trinidadian Hilfred Cartey edited The Literature of Contemporary Black Africa. Marie Collins compiled Black Poets in French (1972) and Keor l petse Kgositsile edited The Word Ls Here (1973). Other scholars and writers also wrote critical studies or edited anthologies of African and Caribbean literature. Black writing received a significant boost when in 1971 Senghor and Afro-Cuban poet Nichol' s Guill~n were nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature--thus fulfilling James Weldon Johnson ' s 1922 prophecy that the first Black writer to achieve substantial international fame would not come from America. Heightening the feeling of the period was Charles Gordone ' s winning of the Pulitzer Prize for drama (No Place to Be Somebody, 1970). -wn Black writers now publishing or living in the U. S. are Nigerian novelist-poet Achebe, exiled South African poet Kgositsile, Nigerian poet-playwright Wale Soyinka, Ghanaian poet Kwesi Brew , South African critic Ezekiel 11phahlele, Nigerian poet-playwright Ifeanyi Menkiti, Martinj~Y? poet-playwright clsaire and Guianese poet-scholar Damas. The writers fraternize, ex- Hphahlele, for example, has written critical (i1UJ4"' drJ.y11 studies of Black American writing (Voices in the Whirlwind, 1972) while~ change ideas and compare styles. Brooks has praised African writing (Introduction, Kgositsile ' s ~1y Name is Afrika, 1971). South African poet, Hazisi Kunene, wrote the Introduction ko~, Awoonef"(~ ~ Me"'•"Y> h~s ,vl,Li.JJ.ed-rtf,.te l,oo~s it11kt c,.s. for Cesaire ' s Return to Hy Native Land _(1969 t r a n s l a t i o ~ _... e;4..,.,, Poet ? Csever:~ ~re-American expatriate artists and writers returned to America during the current period for either temporary or permanent residency . d/TfAdded to ll 1h~ . activities and ~ changes ~ he establishment of �Black publishing houses (Broadside Press, Third World Press, The Third Press, ______ ..... etc.) and hundreds of .-w. news organs and literary journals. Ii" ...... have also been published. A number of important anthologies Some of the more notable ones include Beyond The Blues, Pool, 1962; Sixes and Sevens, Breman, 1962; American Negro Poetry, Bontemps, 1963; Soon One Morning: New Writing by American Negroes, 1940 - 1962, Hill, 1963; New Negro Poets, Hughes, 1964; Kaleidoscope, Hayden, 1967; Black Voices, Abrahams, 1968; Black Fire, Jones and Neal, 1968; The New Black Poetry, a.bAvL Major, 1969; Soulscript, Jordan, 1970; 3000 Years of Black Poetry, .a...~and Lomax, 1970; New Black Voices, Abrahams, 1972; The Black Poets, Randall, 1971; Black Spirits, King , 1972; and The Poetry of Black America, Adoff, 1973. In addition to these and other nationally distributed anthologies, many collections of Black Literature were compiled and published in various regions • �tkom 1111111-.-=zll8Sl=m:t:::::mc::a::::m::i::ticl;:m:!!:1mm::ila;c:::iillia::~:;;=i]i~~;;:=a-==-=mmsm:c:t:a ~M~ 111 ~--olll_!I P!llple!El!!!! o!!l:: (d~e!Jii r z::t: t\f\:t:ldl:cy~oc,:c:cftas~ : r;:..n ril:Ja!dn,::Cel!l~tlL c::;tm n "=et: cl~t crti · h·e· t-fl h1 P · · · Lucille Clifton (Good Times, News About the Earth.;:: ,.... Pinkie Gordon Lane (Wind Thoughts), :Nii :::1 Harper (Dear John, Dear ~C~o.:!:l~t_Er~aEn:5=ei_,__2:!lI2;i~s~t~o_Ery__y2i~s~Y~o~u~r~O~wn~EH~e~a~r:.Et:_Eb~e:f!a~t~1•_.. .._ ) , ,11■•••e Cuney (Puzzles) , Troupe (Embryo) , Sterling Plump (Half Black Half Blacker) , Jayne Cortez (Pisstained Stairs and the Monkey Man ' s Wares, Festivals and Funerals ~. Dumas , Rivers/ Nikki Giovanni (Black Judgement, Black Feeling, Black Thought , Re: Creation) , Reed ( atechism of 4. neoamerican hoodoo church t1µ--. ) , David Henderson (De Mayor of Harlem ) , Arthur Pfister (Bullets, Beer Cans & Things), Baraka (Black Magi1~ .a ), John Ec~ s (Home is Where the Soul Is) , - - Bontemps (Personals) , Hayden(Selected Poems , Words in the �Mourning Time ), Lee (Think Black, Black Pridr" 0 ), ~onia Sanchez (~II~o~m~e~c~o~m~i~n~gi• • • •? , Randall (Cities Burning and !ore to Remember), Crouch (Ain ' t No Ambulances for No Ni and the Las" ; Vhs Toni ht), Hughes (The Panther Norimarr, jok:f nC~OR!tiru 1l~A«l m } , Atkins (Heretofore) ~ May Miller (Into the Clearing~ Austin Black (The Tornado in My Houth), Tolson (Harlem Gallery), Young.) James A. Emanuel (Panther Man), Vesey (Ivory Tusks) , Mari Evans (I Am A Black Woman) , Julia Field ~ Stephany (Hoving Deep), Etheridge Knight (Poems from Prison), Gwendolyn Brooks (In the Hecca, Riot, Family Picturei a ), Roy Hill (49 Poems, etc.), Ray Durem (Take ~o Pt~ePDff~) . Far from being exhaustive, this list is merely p4rlad~ representative of the!\.great poeti Many of the po~ts a lso writ • ehildr~n, S'··stories (Evans, Jordan,Clifton) 4twl o.n a L O Cl-'- a.nn*,u7.iCTNHlpe.,a-u.}°"'d •t....,t """'~ """'',t•s ..i•• fiction( Heed, Youn~) A. ' cri ti e irm1(Neal) . l lte list grows and changes con,.-, stantly, especially in view of the (Oft unfolding of surprises . Suffice it to say that the contemporary mood of Black poetry is multi-leveled and complex . There are generalities; one is that most of the poets unreservedly saturate their work with obvious Black references and cultural motifs . There is also an anti-intellectual flavor as many poets turn their backs on academic or Western forms. 1s. rtvett This t-':: el- ,' a general disregard for the esoteric, clo ie,vre literary and sometimes •••Aallusions white poetry. employed in much -rn . :rs Lo.,.'',. There are exceptions, of course-- notably i nAs pecial ~symbo lism I of Musli,11 poets (Marvin X, Askia Toure, Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, and others). These exceptions can also be seen in works of poets who explore African Ancestor Cults, Voodoo, mysticism and African languages C,eed, K. Curtis Lyle, ilE Tour~, Kaufman).ac:za otho~So. Dumas, Norman Jordan, Sun Ra, Generally, though, Black poets are �framing t:iilll:l:lll!l!l~ allusions, images and symbols in the more concrete cultural motifs, as indicated in a line from li!Zi l+ Redmond's "Tune for a Teenage Neice": "spiced as pot-liquor . " :.m:. _TH_E_•\/..:...:0::.J.ic=E=S~O-"-n,..,__T__II_E_ _T_OT_E_M_S!J--rA. 'Soon, One Morning~ Threshhold of the New Black Poetry My Blackness is the beauty of this land. ---- Lance Jeffers Wright called ,._ Blacks "America's metaphor" and Lance Jeffers -tl,e1tttU referred to~ 'the beauty of this land." -thQ. .-.i S oth • ••••m•••~ stances were taken well in advance ofl\'Black Pride" poetry of the sixties and seventies. Margaret Walker ' s discussion of her playmates in the Alabama "dust" (1937) is not self-deprecating; and Gwendolyn Brooks' f portrait~fatin Legs Smith (1945) is far from being unhappy. These are only four randomly selected poetic affidavits of Blacks viewing themselves "po sitively" before the advent of the New Black Poetry. We could, of course, bring up hundreds of examples from Hughes. the poetry of Phyllis Wheatley through But the point, already made, is simply that one is seriously remiss in looking at recent Black poetry without considering its history. The poets who wrote and published between 1945 and 1965, for example, did not work in sealed chambers of tunneled vision . S<.~ .F Each group, each cluster of concern, evolved from~ vhat had been written or said before. Some of these poets were heavily influenced by white writers , teachers, and critics. However, the best of them applied their knowledge and tools to the service of the Black literary tradition. Others ~ere under the direct tutelage of Slacks (Paul -.tl•ts "'~u,., Vesey studied with .-rl\ Johnson, Ro,....,. Joyce Yeldell with Hayden) and became part /\ �of a continuing line of Black.C::-•=P• thought and writing (Vesey in turn taught Arthur Pfister). Whatever their make-up, or their mission, the poets as a group show great facility with language, depth of insight and passionate concernf for their collective and individual hurts l as Blacks and as humans. ~t,,p...VftfteJ°' The works of thes ~ poets, and that of their older pen-fellows, can be found in several anthologies: Poetry of the Negro (1949, 1970); the bilingual Ik zag hoe Zwart Ik Was (I Saw How Black I Was, 1958); Beyond the Blues (1962); American Negro Poetry (1963); Burning Spear (1963); Sixes and Sevens (1963); Negro Verse (1964); New Negro Poets: USA (1964, 1966); Poets of Today (1964); the bilingual Ik Ben De Nieuwe Neger (I Am the New Negro, 1965); and Kaleidoscope (1967). Bontemps and Hughes edited Poetry of the Negro in 1949/ jhe first major collection since Cullen ' s Caroling Dusk . ft was revised by Bontemps in 1970 after Hughes' • death. Interestingly, some of the 1949 entries \.,dude are deleted while the table of contents has been doctored to ..._,..,,new entries .o,..c-lt-o I 'l\p 1l I Randall, Evans and I Bontemps, a Renaissance also edited American 1'o Dureml\,coincide with their age-line. poet who did not publish a volume until 1963 (Personals), Negro Poetry, a task which gave him the opportunity to pick the best from the past as well as the present .I V!y«Mcl-1:hf - .i e..w Mow .....,~ ~ 'ttn,.... -- Ito.de ~ was Q.t, d Swere published in Holland and England and edited by Rosey Pool, with the assistance of Paul Bremen. ~iftre.oF Dr. Pool (1905-1973), a~ Iolland llf , came across Cullen when she was preparing a paper on American poetry in 1925. covery led to a life~long interest in Black culture and poetry. This disDuring 1959/60 she toured the United States on a Fulbright travel grant, spending several months visiting and lecturing at 27 Black colleges and universities. work in Black poetry has drawn mixed reactions from cautious Black writers and critics. But her importance in helping to bring attention to Black poets, �despite cries of "exploitation," is undeniable. Even more controversial is Bremen, who appears to fancy himself as an English Jean-Paul Sar*; he originated the Heritage Series--"devoted entirely to the works of Afro-American authors"--with Hayden's A Ballad of Remembrance in 1963. Since that time Bremen, who edited Sixes and Sevens and You Better Believe It: Black Verse in English-(1973), has released more than 20 volumes of Afro-American poetry . Randall's Broadside Press servQ es as the American distributor of the slim books which have included the aesthetical and historical range of Black poetry: Horne (Haverstraw, 1963) ·, Bontemps, Rivers (The Still Voice of Harlem, 1968; The Wright Poems, 1972), - - Evans (Where is all the Music?, 1968 but withdrawn "at the author's request"), Atkins (Heretofore, 1968), Lloyd Addison (The Aura & the Umbra, 1970), Audre Larde (Cables to Rage, 1970), Randall, (Love You, 1970), Ir; 1 Reed, whom Bremen calls "the best Black poet writing today" (Catechism of d neoamerican hoodoo church, 1970), James W. Thompson (First Fire: Poems 1957-1960, 1970), Dodson, Harold Carrington (Drive Suite, 1972), Clarence Major (Private Line, 1971), the "first non-American contributor" Mukhtarr lustapha (Thorns and Thistles, 1971), Durem (Take No Prisoners, 1971), and Hayden (The Night-Blooming Cereus, 1972). Bremen notes that both Mari Evans and Raymond Patterson ordered their books withdrawn because they "were suspicious of the contract terms." In addition to such "suspicion," felt also by other Black poets, there is great resentment of Bremen's fast-draw critical evaluations of the poetry--which bro<>.der to"1ter--rts are often caustic, ridiculous~ narrow, and reflect a lack of & 13 3 1 : of Black poetry. poets. He calls Durem, for example, one of the first "Black" His statement about Reed, coming as it did in 1970, di es violence to both the author and the critical atmosphere in which Black poets grapple everyday. He says Dumas was born in the "incredibly named town" of Sweet �Nevertheless (alas!), one wonders where these Black poets .., published if such 11 dis.e ases" as Bremen did not exist. • Negro Verse, edited by Anselm Hollo, has no introduction or forward, but does include a dozen blues and Gospel song-poems. New Negro Poets was )n7hetitLe T'/H>G~' edited by Hughes with a Forward by Gwendoly,. Use of the word "new" A.exemplifies Gwend{llyn the kind of spirit that was in ascension at the time. ~Brooks ~._sea.r-d- is also her usual/\,definitive self: At the present time, poets who happen also to be Negroes are twQce-tried. They have to write poetry, and they have to remember that they are Negroes. Often they wish that they could solve the Negro question once and for all, and go on from such success to the composition of textured sonnets or biant villanelles about the transcience of a raindrop, or the gold-stuff of the sun. They are likely to find signi- ficances in those subjects not instantly obvious to their fairer fellows. The raindrop may seem to them to represent racial tears--and those might seem, indeed, other than transient. The golden sun might remind them ti they are burning. There is an attitude in this statement that the Gwendolyn Brooks of 1968 will reject: "poets i(ho happen also to be Negroes." But she reflects Cullen in the "dark tower" and his ruminating on the "curious thing" of the Black poet. She also presages the twistings and turnings in Jayne Cortez' f "Festivals & Funerals." ~ , in introducing the "New Negro Poets," she informs the reader that "here are some of the prevailing stars of an early tomorrow." Walter Lowenfels '#f decision to include "20 Negroes" in Poets of Today was spurred in part by his recognition (along with Shapiro) that "most general �anthologies of American poetry exclude Negroes." An authority on Whitman, Lowenfels shared an award with E.E. Cummings in the thirties, and has helped a number of Black poets make it into print: Dumas, Troupe, Patterson, Redmond, Carrington, Major, Reed, Harper, Hayden, and many others. Lowenfels' was the first new white-edited anthology to include such a substantial number of Blacks. There were 85 poets in all. One of the most important of these anthologies is Burning Spear which contains the work of the Howard Poets: Walter DeLegall (1936Govan ) , Jeffers c,<f/q , Percy Johnston (1930- LeRoy Stone (1936- ) , Al Fraser , Oswald ), Nathan Richards ) f and Joseph White. Burning Spear, subtitl~ An Anthology of Afro-Saxon Poetry, was an outgrowth of the Dasein Literary e~ o.l,L,'sJie.J Society, located at Howard University, which J("laS1&1!11i11••• Dasein: A uarterl Journal of the Arts in 1961••--~ as publisher while DeLegall was editor. Johnston, its founder, served Their connection with the older group of poets and scholars is evident in the advisory board A. Brown, Arthur P . · Davis, Owen Dodson and Eugene C. Holmes. fait : Sterling Fraser, Govan, w e.r-e.. Jeffers, Stone and White ?<' A..contributing editors. Poets in the inaugural issue of Dasein, which doubled as a memorial to Richard Wright, were Delores Kendrick, Clyde R. Taylor, Jeffers, William Jackson, Vernon A. Butler, Robert Slaughter, Laura A. Watkins, Govan, Fraser, Delores F. Henry, R. Orlando Jackson, DeLegall, Johnston and Stone. There is no single unifying thread running through either Dasein or Burning Spear but Black influences and subjects are clearly imbe d. Burning Spear, for example, is published by Jupiter Hammon Press, another connection-in name--to the tradition of Black poetry. In a back-cover note, the eight contributors are called "a new breed of young poets who are to American poetry what Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis i �are to American jazz." After this important analogy, the statement continues: These eight Afro-Saxon poets are not members of a literary movement in the traditional sense of the word, because they do not have in common any monist view about creativity or aesthetics. Collectively, however, they are indifferent to most critics and reviewers--since criticism in America is controlled and written in the main by Euro-Americans. ii H U Poems by DeLegall, Jeffers, Johnston and Stone also appear in Beyond the Blues "1nd.. and in numerous "little" magazines. MA..all of the poets participated in reading-lecture programs leading up to the wider interests in poetry in the later sixties and seventies . DeLegall (Philadelphia) 1 a mathematician and electronic data processing specialist, published in many anthologies and quarterlies, and Ted~ read his poetry and lectured at various eastern and · southern colleges. Fraser (Charleston) is a political scientist with a specialization in African Affairs . Along with DeLegall, Stone, Govan, Johnston and Richards, he has been recorded reading his poetry at the Library of Congress. Fraser cultivated a coffee-shop audience for his readings and appeared before college groups . He is a philosopher-mathematician. One of the older members of the group , Jeffers (San Francisco) is credited with having " influence" on the Howard Poets. He has taught English and writing at half a dozen American colleges and universities. His first volume of W,o. poetry was My Blackness is the Beauty of This Land (1970) and ~second, When I ,\N"t,O Know the Power of My Black Hand, Broadside Press . b~u9lti ~out in 1975 . Both are published by Jeffers has also written novels, short stories and criticism. �Johnston (New York) currently teaches at a college in New Jersey and with ---. Stone "co-authored the revolutionary verse pamphlet Continental Streamlets. Also a playwright, Johnston published a pamphlet of his poetry, Concerto for Girl and Convertible in 1960 and was considered the leader of the Howard Poets. 1 White is a native Philadelphian whose work appeared in Liberator, Poets of Today, and other places. He is a technician for FAA and has written short stories as well as successful prose-poems. As a group, the Howard Poets represent one of the toughest intellectual strains in contemporary Black poetry. Maybe the fact of their having such diverse interests, backgrounds, and training aided in their vitality, virtuosity and power. To be sure, these are "conscious" poets; but--avoiding slogans and sentimental hero-worship--they present precise analyses and interpretations of their world. Most of them grew up in the Be Bop era and so their subjects quite naturally include Miles Davis, Lester Young, Charles "Yardbird" Parker, Clifford Brown, Sonny Rollins, Thelonious Monk, and other makers and contributors to that period. struggle :a .- ,4 ,.c.or-.ce'f\ ¢ P.o" merge$ with ~ . a.n Aawareness uttft/ivil ;ights and of the "bomb," middle class pretensions, history, mythology, religion, and the various trends in poetry: Beat poetry, jazz Black modernity, and folk lyrics.tlneLegall celebrates the Black presence ("Hy Brownskin Business") and satirizes a pretentious Howard coed ("Requiem for A Howard Lady") who is "cultured" and performs every social amenity perfectly. She wears "High-heeled tennis shoes'; but he hopes, near the poem's end, that the president of The Universal Institute of Eugenics will send a New species of female who will be robed in clothes of "sincerity" and who can be called "A Woman." II �In "Ps alm for Sonny Rollins " he announcef that he is Absorbed into the womb of the s ound . I am in the sound The sound is in me. I am the sound. Rollins, the Harlem pied piper, will lead his listeners to "truth," "Zen," ~ · · fu ~ r~~ "Poetry," and "God . " "f'f'After "The Blast" (nuclear bombingJ/\there will be ... no I, no world, no you. /J.nd /('ovan also writes convincinely as in "The Lynching": He was soaked in oil and the match thrown. He screamed, he cried, he moaned, he crackled in his fiery inhuman dance . Govan's interests span the turbulence in "Hungary , " space exploration ("The Angry Skies Are Calling"), and "Prayer" wherein he asks "Christ" for a new dawn's light! Jeffers is a living example of the -....a helpless p l ight of many a Black writer. 11 i}m e,-,'ic«n Although he had been writing for several decades, his work was whit~~listed by anthologists and his poetry did not appear in book form until the seventies . "My Blackness is the Beauty of this Land" stands as a rebuff to those who say " Illack" poetry wasf'invented" ~ecentlyJ Jeffers' s poem, written in the fifties , is a t once defiantJ -1 proua Jruv-bvleni' My blackness is the beauty of this land, my blackness, tender and strong, wounded and wise, The narrator, after the fashion of Hargarct Walker, chronicles the hurts, the happinesses, and the hungers of Blacks . These he stands against his �"whiteness" and the perversions of larger America. mines the same vein: past. "Black Soul of the Land" rich reliance on the well-deep strength of the Black The "old black man" in Georgia is "leathered, lean, and strong." And these are secrets that "crackers could not kill": a secret spine unbent within a spine, a secret source of steel, a secret sturdy rugged love, a secret crouching hate, a secret knife within his hand, a secret bullet in his eye. The poet asks the old man to pass on his source of strength so that he, and his fellows, will be able to "turn black" the soul of the nation and America shall cease to be its name. Jeffers gathers up a fury of love, anguish and commitment in other poems: . "Her Black and African Face I Love," "The Man with A Furnace in His Hand," "Negro Freedom Rider," "Her Dark Body I Cluster,"" Black Han in A New Day," and "Prophecy." Johnston echoes Jeffers, though in a different voice· and style, in many of his poems. prit1A.~v' But Johnston's~conefern is with Black music and musicians. "To Paul Robeson, Opus No. 3" celebrates the multi-faceted talents of the man whose song "stood Brooklyn on its feet." magnificent tribute to the President of jazz: tinues to "ignite the heart." "In Memoriam: Prez" is a Lester Young whose music con- In "Fitchett's Basement Blues, Opus B" Johnston wonders why everytime I want Coltrane or Sonny all I get is Brubeck, ... �"Dewey Square," with its "Beat" repertoire and interests in contemporary everyman, is a poetic summary of the collective history of Johnston's generation. Words for "unkinking hair,11 recollections of radio shows, reminders of Relief and WPA, and Duke Ellington, all leave Johnston with the knowledge that nothing Has changed but my postal zone. In other pieces he surveys the current and past Black musical scene: "'Round 'Bout Midnight, Opus 17," "Variation on a Theme by Johnston," and "To Bobby Timmons." c//. "Black is My Reward" Richards says, noting that Sorrow came, and I left the world ••• Anf experimentalist, his "Do Not Forget to Remember" includes a " prelude" and an "interlude." Like the other poets, he writes primarily in free verse Consiin+lv (almost no rhyme) and in the foregoing poem he~epeats "A petal falls ." The Howard Poets all touch grief and anguish, as does Richards in "God Bless This Child and Other -Children ••• Requiem." ~ resembl~i.ce Atkins. e-R,P:a:t:j 2111,n·~ In syntax and vocabulary, it the beats and ~ Kaufman and Lll~tt41.y m&~l9:::::iiillll.,_ Words and phrases like "matronymic diva," "sepiacenic martyr," "albumenic hawk," "womb-prize," and "black aegis" convey the mystical and eerie sense implied~ · the repetition of "sleep" and the innovative typography of the poem Leroy lso experimental and original is ~Stone. Miles Davis' I "Flamenco Sketches" is separated into five parts: cannons, enart and bill. His study of ouvert, selim, New York is "red in weeping" and Chicago is "Black- draped" as Miles utters in "mutes." The music captures the Dissonant nostalgia of one kiss of a Spanish lady as it weaves in and oU:t of transcontinental experiences and locations~ Davis' ti use and 'knowledge of ·world music is revered. Finally, \ �, the music is asked to Comment on a cloud of oriental ninths comment! In "Notes from the Cubicle of A disgruntled Jazzman" Stone becomes a verbal maestro ripping in "changes," rattling up "thirteenths," storming the "minor mode," and whipping up "passing tones"--all "with impunity." ~Epk.vfuite' s "Black is A Soul" repeats "<lown" as the -e_ersona drops into "depths," "the abyss," and the "infinite" vfuere black-eyed peas & greens are stored ..•• This poignant revelation is mad.e in the end: I raise my down bent kinky head to charlie {----& I'm black. & shout I'm black I'm from Look ~ack. f!:'" We think immediately of titles like Think Black (Lee) and "Say It Loud-I'm Black and I'm Proud" (James Brown) even though this poem preceded them by several years--to say nothing of Joseph Cotter, Jr. 's "Is it Because I'm Black." But White can also do light and touching things as in "Picnic" and "Day is Done" which places "music in the air" as he prepares for bed and his "woman" sets her hair. His ironic, satirical "Inquisitive" displays the range of these poets. The narrator wknders where "Gods" and "buddhas" hide if the earth and sky are both visible to man. �(cMllf Little critical attention has been given the,Howard~~ or any of the other poets •.,.rfitU well-Known wr-:i\nQ ft c upp4iaa · ag vn~~m'rlltt._ including •t.,.as well as Anderson (1938- perrod during this ...~ . names: Cuestas (1944- Joyce Yeldell (1944Hernton (1932- ), Peter T. Rogers, John Sherman Scott, Carmell ), Vesey, Sarah Wright (1929- ), Robert Earl Fitzgerald (1935- Zack Gilbert (1925Latimer (1927- ), ), James Emanuel (1921- Herbert Clark Johnson (1911- ), Nanlf James P . Vaughn (1929- Ishmael Reed (1938(1942- ), Yvonne Gregory ), Roscoe Lee Browne ), Oliver Pitcher (1923- ) , ·) , David Henderson ), Thurmond Spyder, A.B . Spellman (1935- Mance Williams, Tom Dent, LeRoi Jones (1934- , ), Bette Darcie ), Mary Carter Smith (1924- ) , Adam David Hiller (1922- ), Don Johnson (1942- ) , ), Catherine Carter ), Robert J. Abrams (1924- ), William Browne (1930- ) Alba (1915-1968), Frank London Brown (1927-1962), Isabella Maria Brown (1917), Ernest J. Wilson, Jr. (1920- , ) , Rivers, McM . Wright, ), Roy Hill, Sam Cornish (1938- ), Frank Yerby (1916- ) ), Hoyt ), Ossie Davis (1922- ), Oliver La Crone (1915- Pauli Murray (1910- , ), Calvin ), Sarah Webster Fabio (1928- ), Carl Gardener (1931- ) ), Gloria C. Oden, Mose ), Alfred Duckett (1918- Lerone Dennett, Jr. (1928- (1930- ) , Katherine ), Gordon Heath, Horne, Ted ), Lula Lowe Weeden (1918- Carl Holman (1919- (1917- , ), Naomi Madgett, James C. Morris, O'Higgins, Patterson, Simmons, James W. Thompson (1935- (1919- ) ) , Margaret Danner, Gloria Davis, - - - Dur em, Mari James Randall (1938- Fuller (1927- ), Julian Bond (1940- ), Leslie M. Collins (1914- Evans, Micki Grant, Julia Fields (1938Joans (1928- Johnson Ackerson, Charles ), Eugene Redmond (1937- John Henrik Clarke (1915- But they are legion, ), Vivian Ayers, Helen ) , �Ed Robe~~on1 Morgan Brooks, Solomon Edwards (1932Polite (1932- ) ,/\Yilma Howard, George Love, Allen Ho.--t Leroi ), Lloyd Addison (1931- B',bb~ },~Durwood Collins (1937- ), Bobb Hamilton, ~fay Hiller, Stanley Morris, Jr. (1944 dn ~~lo~1es K11is non-exhaustive list was often intermingled with early poets (as far back as Phyllis Wheatley~ _ . older ones (Johnson, :McKay, Dunbar)./ I and spiced with a good offering of post-Renaissance poets (Walker, Brooks, Tolson, Hayden). Names like Fuller, Bennett, Jr., Holman, Yerby, Davis, and Clarke, fall in the category of "occnsional" poets--most of whom undertook full-time duties as novelists, editors, lawyers or teachers. Other important movements paralle l to this phase were the emergence of literary magazines (Free Lance, Phylon 4 ~ ) , especially on Black college campuses; Black newspapers' renewed interest in verse; ~l:,s met\ of poets-in residences at southern Black colleges; the flowering of regional "movements" or writing collectives--such as those in New York's Greenwich Village (Y ry,en, (casper Leroy Jordan, Atkins), Howard's Dasein Group, the Detroit poets, and Georgia Douglas f Johnson's home-based workshops • - • • • • in Hashington, D.C. all of these developments occurred e~cL11s.1~q4' c._. .t Not among Black poets, however,At:1-iere also were racially mixed writing communes and editorial staffs. Julia Fields, for example, was in residence at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference in England and studied for a while in Scotland. Redmond, who won writing awards and published in little magazines between 1960 and 1965, worked with the staffs of the Three Penny Broadside (Southern Illinois University) and Free Lance (Washington University). Other poets and their outlets were Dumas (Trace, Anthologist), Patterson, Jones (Floating Bear,Yungen), Gloria C. Oden (Urbanite, The Poetry Digest, The Half Moon), Rivers (Kenyon Review, Antioch Review, 1 Development of f~4ffiening audience was a centr 1 a../m in most of these activities . For example, on June 16, 1957, young poets Calvin Hernton d .Raymond Patterson read together at I c.(3'8 �Ohio Poetry Review), Spellman (Kulchur, Metronome, Umbra), Hance Williams (Blue and Gold), and Audre Lorde (Venture). Margaret Danner published a As ta.,-lt AS series of poems in Poetry magazine •~1952 and in 1956 became an assistant editor . Of these parallel movements and developments, one other deserved special notice . Though not on par with. the Howard Poets, the Umbra Workshop parti- cipants aided in the production and distribution of Black poetry in the early sixties. Centered in New York 's Greenwich Village, the Umbra poets were founded by Tom Dent (New Orleans), Calvin Hernton (Chattanooga) and David Henderson (New York). The workshop , which also involved artists and fiction writers, published the first issue of its Umbra quarterly in 1963. Other issues came out in 1964, 1967-68 (an anthology), 1970-71 (tabloid anthology) and 1974-75 (I..a..t.in ful.ul issue). who now d \..,ec1s the Dent first served as editor and Henderson, publication from Berkeley, took over in 196 7. attracted to the Umbra workshop were Others Reed, Rolland Snellings (now Askia Tour~), Nonnan Pritchard, singer Len Chandler, dancer Asaman Byron, the Patterson brothers (Charles and William), painters Gerald Jackson and Joe Overstreet, Lennox Raphael, Dumas, James Thompson, Julian Bond, Sun-Ra, Durem, Steve Cannon, and Joe Johnson. damaged by two events. The promise of the Umbra group was One was a failure to print an interview (conducted by Raphael and others) with Ralph Ellison. The second, resulting in a serious -tt11l" split among members, was a controversial anti-Kennedy poem~by Durem. President Kennedy had just been assassinated when the Durem piece was approved by the editors. taste. Hernton, Dent and Henderson decided rt ~was in bad Others, according to Henderson, wanted the poem printed and subsequently "kidnapped Pritchard, who was treasurer, 'threatening him with bodily harm t" 316 ~ast 6th Street in New York Gi·ty. A f avroi·t ~ vuew York gathering place for readings was the Market Place Gallery{2305 ~eventh Avenue) where Roscoe Lee Browne was featured in the late fifties . In July and ~~ Augus~ ~f 1960 a numb~r ,o.t:_ Black poets --r-ea..dJ '":' there: Lloyd son, 0 ert J . Abrams , ~5q>wne, Phil Petrie, Allen Polite, Sarah 9 �The incident is viewed as one of the near-fatal blows to the Umbra group. Later Snellings, the Pattersons, and others went Uptown to work with Jones ' I newly formed Black Arts Repertory and School. The work of Umbra contributors range from the occasional and humorous - Durem . Bond to the serious Poems by Durem, Henderson, Hernton , Dent • and Thompson , also appearf in the early anthologies along with work of other " Village" poets such as G. C. Oden, Spellman, Jones (Newark), and Joans (Cairo, Illinois). later anthologies: Some are also represented in two Black Fire (1968) and The Poetry of Black America (1973). Though racial consciousness is not blatantly evident in these poets , the protest is there, especially the works by Durem, Henderson, and Hernton. . ..j1.e. Umbra made clear its twofold aim 1.n • ~1.naugura 1 issue: Umbra exists to provide a vehicle for those outspoken and youthful writers who present aspects of social and racial reality which may be called ' uncommercial ' but cannot with any honesty be considered non- essential to a whole and healthy society .. • We will not print trash, no matter how relevantly it deals with race , social issues, or anything else . ~ent views "Love" as a " blue tom" lurking " icily" in the darkness. Henderson sees a "Downtown-Boy Uptown" and asks : Am I in the wrong slum? His " Sketches of Harlem" include the " GREAT WHITE WAY" and a small Black boy confusing the moon and the sun . 14, was born in Seattle . Durem, who ran away from home at age While still in his mid-teens he joined the Navy and became a member of the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War. Hughes tried to find a publisher for his works as early as 1954 . himself Durem said: "When I was ten years old I used my fists. Of When I was . Wright, Hi l t on Hosannah, M.D., and Brown e (reading the works of Hernton). Others associated wi th the project Clark and Langston Hughes. 1../ O 4 inc l uded John Henrik �thirty-five, I used the pen. I hope to live to use the machine gun •.•• The white North-American has been drunk for four hundred years." His work does not have the finish of a Hayden or Brooks, but he provides an exciting shot in the arm for this period of Black poetry (though Bremen's tit/~/ "first black poet/ is unwarranted). Take No Prisoners (1971) contains many of Durem's memorable poems and a "Posthumous freface," ~ signed in 1962 although he died in 1963. "White People iot Trouble, Too" surveys the plight of whites following the Depression, recession and war, and notes that such an intrusion in the affairs of whites does not equal slavery. After all, life (or history) calls for One tooth for one tooth. Most of Durem's poems are short, satirical, ironical and musical as in "Broadminded": Some of my best friends are white boys. When I meet 'em I treat 'em just the same as if they was people. He writes of Black history, slavery, social inequities, prison life, and "pale ~~t poets" to whom he confesses his~s not "sufficiently obscure" to meet white critical standards. Strangely, Take No Prisoners does not include "Award"-- "A Gold Watch to the FBI Man (who has followed me 11) for 25 years~-which traces the agent's surveillance of the narrator through the "blind alleys" of Mexico, the high Sierras, the Philharmonic, L.A., Hississippi, and other places of violence and mayhem. But it is not all over, the agent is told, for in the end I may be following you! �The work of Village poets was highlighted by the versatile and prolific Le ~oi ~.g. Jones (] liter Imamu Amiri Baraka) , Spellman, and Ted Joans. Before his new " "Black" stance of the mid and late sixties, Jones published in little avant garde magazines (editing several himself) and was identified as the most talen t ed Black among the Beats. His two volumes , Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961) and The Dead Lecturer (1964), show him as a hip, arrogant, musically-involved cat with a tough intelligence . as he noted, were Lorca, His influences at the time, Williams , Pound • and Charles Olson. ~ w~ He illl1'_an adventurer in style with an elliptical and sometimes sacril~gious posture. poets: Such an aesthetical philosophy was shared by the Black Mountain George Oppen , Robert Greely, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov , Paul Blackburn, Edward Dorn, Gi~ berg, Corso , Gary Snyder and Hichael McClure. A music critic for such magazines as Downbeat, Jazz and Metronome, with an 1 intense interest in Black music, Jones nurtured a careful ~ar his verse. fensible. 11 in Hence, the belief that Jones "suddenly became Black" is indeIn "Lines to Garcia Lorca"--the great Spanish poet--he uses a section of a "Negro Spiritual" as an inscription. The poem is typical of Jones ' s ability to merge numerous ideas, symbols and images in one poem . Lorca ' s death is lamented as Jones uses excerpts from the Catholic mass, reflects on his childhood, explores mythology, gathers bits of poetic confetti from nature and hears Lorca " laughing, laughing"--maybe mocking his killers-Like a Spanish guitar . In "Epistrophe" he finds peering out the window "such a static reference." So he wishes "some weird looking animal" wo~ come by. In the title poem from his first volume--Preface--he adjusts to the way "ground opens up" �and takes him in whenever he goes out to "walk the dog." Life is as monotonous as the "static reference" of window watching: Nobody sings anymore. another Village poet closely identified with the Beats, published Beat, and o1'he"' voLl)me~ All of Ted Joans (1961), and The Hipsters (19611 -- His most widely known poem from this period is "The .38" with its debts to Hughes (whom he acknowledged), Whitman and the Deats. Beginning every line with the phrase "I hear," Joans narrates the murder of an unfaithful wife and lover by her husband: I hear it coming faster than sound the .38 I hear it coming closer to my sweaty forehead the .38 I hear its weird whistle the .38 I hear it give off a steamlike noise when it cuts through my sweat the .38 I hear it singe my skin as it enters my head the .38 I hear death saying, Hello, I'm here! As a group, Joans, Jones and Spellman can be carefully compared to the Howard Poets. They are in the same age range and their themes and interests are di b~t1 similar. T(Spellman, like Jones} studied at Howard Univer,tity and hasl(.cm,tr . - n disc jockey ~FM radio stations. w tl. His book reviewsft{rticles on j a z z ~ have appeared in Kulchur, The Republic and The Nation. volume of poems, The Beautiful Days, was published. In 1964 his first He has also published a book-length study of Black music (Four Lives in the Bdop Business, 1966). S4t$ In "Zapata & the Landlord" the "thief," the speake~, is running in "circles." The poem is a humorous treatment of revolutionary struggle in a Latin American country. In "What is It" Spellman applies a similar technique. This time a cat "hides in your face," in the corners of the mouth and in "that strange canyon" behind the eyes. "A Theft of Wishes" is experimental in its use �of jagged lines and shifts between the tangible and surreal worlds. In the end we are told that home is where we make our noise. Another poet who joins this "irref{nt" generation is the Beat innovator - Kaufman of the San Francisco nay area. sides from Ferlinghetti's City Lights Books: His first works came out as broad"The abominist Manifesto," "Second April" and "Does the Secret Hind Whisper." Kaufman's poetry, con- veying protest through understatement and irony, is marked by unusual and surreal images. His books are Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness (1965) and · Golden Sardine (1967). Solitudes was published in French, "immediately" achieving "a notoriety rare among books of poetry by foreign poets." Sardine). (jacket, Leading French magazines reviewed the book, publishers noted, adding that "Today in France Kaufman is considered among the greatest Negro-American poets alive in spite of his continuing exclusion from American anthologies, both hip & academic." Kaufman's themes are racial memory ("African Dream"), jazz ("Walking Parker Home," "West Coast Sounds--1956."), other poets and writers ("Hart ••. Crane," "Ginsberg," "Camus: I want to Know"), incarceration (a series of 34 in Jail Poem§), history, mythology and religion. In "The Eyes too" he says My eyes too have souls that rage .••• A "Cincophrenicpoet" meets with "all five" of himself where a vote is taken to "expel" the "weakest" one who resents it and soars over all limits to cross, spiral, and whirl. Somewhat typical of Kaufman ' s elliptical constructions and wacky imagery is "lf eavy Water Blues": �The radio is teaching my goldfish Jujitsu I am in love with a skindiver who sleeps underwater, My neighbors are drunken linguists, & I speak butterfly, Consolidated Edison is threatening to cut off my brain, The postman keeps putting sex in my mailbox, I put my eyes on a diet, my tears are gaining too much weight. In this form and style, Kaufman is not only related to the Beats but to Jones, Joans, Spellman, Atkins, and the~£ ted young Los Angeles poet K. Curtis Lyle. Among the older poets who did not come into prominence until the 1960s were Vesey (Columbus, Ohio), Holman (Minter City, Mississippi), 1-lcM . Wright (Princeton, New Jersey), O'Higgins (Chicago), Duckett (Brooklyn), Atkins ~ (Cleveland), Emanuel (Nebraska) A Randall (Washington, D.C.). These poets, and others of their generation, are not similar enough to be labeled a "school" or "movement" but they came of age during the integration push when words Like "identity" and "humanity" engendered more philosophical discussion than they do today. These are the men who went to World War II, opposed lynching 0)14 attended northern white graduate schools. Most were occasional poets pursuing academic or professional careers.iesey as a poet and professional, bridges"'"\n~ middle passage between Africaf and ~fro-America. At Fisk University he studied creative writing under James Weldon Johnson, then went on to law school at Harvard. While studying at the sirbonne in Paris some of his poems were published, through the intercession of Richard Wright, in the French magazine Presence Africaine. I Vesey has helped greatly in the interpretation and �w d.1ssem1nat1on . . . d e. o f Negritu Paul Vesey (birth name Samuel Allen) is the name under which he published his bilingual volume of poems: Zahne (Ivory Tusks, 1956, Germany). Elfenbein Vesey works with skill and precision. he "The Staircase" is a poem on which, ~ I \ says, "I would rest my case, I think, and that of the Negro in this land ~ ~(Blues)* _1he poem studies the Black predicament through the plight of a man for whom the "stairs mount to his eternity." Perhaps, like Sisyphus, the stair is purposefully "unending" since the rotten floor, the "dripping faucet" and the "cracked ceiling" also remain. The man is joined by a "twin" who later goes "exalted to his worms." Vesey also writes an elegy for Dylan Thomas ("Dylan, Who is Dead"), a praise-po€ftt for - - ~ baseball legend Satchel Paige ("American Gothic"), and a powerful <T'A Moment, Pleo. set!) piece~interweaving two different ideas and themes: ge.ri~L. c.1re,,urr1s1irice.s theJ\m= 1•t and J h;t of man; the other As,'l._l'ewin4 *'•.4 called "nigger" by two adol~ent girls. tribute to Louis Armstrong. one viewing the universe spec-iPk the!feality of being Black and "To Satch" is reminiscent of Tolson's Speaking in the poem, Satchel Paige says one morning he is going to grab a "handfulla stars," throw three strikes to burn down the "heavens," And look over at God and say W'l M·~ ~ How about that! , . . Holman s work is among the few entries for poetry in Soon, One Horning. But he is also '('~rE_e.~~r anthologies. He has led an active life as a jivil fights fighter (Information Officer of the United States Commission on Civil Rights) editor (Atlanta Inquirer), writer• and teacher. at Chicago University he won several awards for writing~ While a student Holman, whose poetic subjects range from complex psychic meditations to racial pride, is very good indeed but much overlooked. The leisure class finds clocks "intrude too �early" in "And on This Shore." The general indifference is also captured: Across the cups we yawn at private murders. w-~,c~ "Picnic: The Liberated" examines the shifting uncertainities withf\leisured southerners must live. The tension of everyday southern life lie underneath the merriment of the picnic grounds where men rotate the liquor in "dixie cups" and "absently" discuss "civil rights, money and goods." Yet as the I<.. "country dark" comes in and they return to spri~ered yards and "mortgaged houses" they do not know they are Privileged prisoners in a haunted land. Yet this same poet can hear "Three Brm•m Girls Singing" through the "ribs of an ugly school building." h~ ~ Celebrating the Black musical past, Holman /\them Fuse on pure sound in a shaft of April light: ..• ~t'OC.e. Mcl1. Wright, now a Federal District Judge in New York, was a Lincoln University poet and)with Hughes and Cune~editecl Lincoln University Poets (1954). He served overseas in World War II, later receiving law training at Fordham. While he was in the Army in Wales, he published a volume of his poetry_, From the Shaken To1-1er (1944). "The African Affair" finds Md!. Wright on a safari to find out what "Black is." He discovers it in "prisons," in the "devils dance," where "deserts burn," the Niddle Passage, and areas ~ whM•t :bi?ll[i' "conscience cannot go." His search carries him deep into Africa where "traders shaped my father's pain." In "Four Odd Bodkins for :My Analyst" one finds that "outraged flesh of secret guilt" has come from the pressures of "circumstance" and "need." . Finally, "When You have gone from ooms" there are "never bloor.1ing petals" and "never burning suns." .-u talled ~, 81111i,.,\,u Bvatcraps oa11& 0 'Higgins~ a membe-r of the "tribe of wandering poets." �After studying with C\ 7i ~ Brown at Howard, O' Higgins won Lucy Moten and He later served in World War II, Julius Rosenwald Fellowships in writing. after which he co-authored, with Hayden, The Lion and The Archer (1948). O' Higgins ' s style is less formal than either Holman's or McM. Wright's. He is closer to Vesey, especially in poems like "Young Poet" and "Two Lean Cats" in which the rain fell like "ragged jets" and made a "grave along" the street. The lean cats, running in "checkered terror" into a poolroom, find that a "purple billiard ball" makes the color scheme explode. The much anthologized "VaticideN("For Mohandas Ghandhi") sees Gandhi "murdered upright in the day" and left with his flesh "opened and displayed." likening Gandhi's death to ~ But, Christ's, the narrator says such a person who created the "act of love" knows the guilty carry his "death to their rooms." Gandhi's "marvelous wounds" contain the sun and the seas.1/nifferent, yet similar, these poets sought through their individual voices to deal with man's current and past hurts. Atkins, for example, saw the "swollen deep" rise higher as he "went walking" in section two of "Fantasie." A "restless experimentalist with a very high regard for craftmanship," Atkins was a founder of Free Lance. (1950) which Rivers called the "oldest black-bossed magazine around." Between 1947 and 1962, Atkins's poetry appeared in numerous journals and other outlets. A few are View, Beloit Poetry Journal, Minnesota Quarterly, Naked Ear, Galley Sail Review. His volumes of poetry are Phenomena (1961), Psychovisual Perspective for Musical Composition (1958), Two by Atkins (The Abortionist and The Corpse: Objects (1963), and Heretofore (1968). as complex as the poetry itself. Two Poetic Dramas set to Music, 1963), Atkins' I aesthetical ideas are often An early training in music and literature, he said in Sixes and Sevens, that he was trying for "egocentrical phenomenalism: an objective construct of properties to substantiate effect as object." He /I' �searches after the "designed imagination." In "Night and a Distant Church" he moves "Forward abrupt" then "up" through a series of intermingling "mmm" ~ and "ells" with words like "wind" and "rain ." There is more than --;. hint of Tolson ' s ability to meander among Graeco-Romanf and Afro-American traditions in Atkins '~ poetry. But he is unique. "At War" informs the reader that beyond the "turning sea's far foam" the "ephemera" of a "moment's dawn" sudden ' d its appear .•.. Later, in the same poem, after allusions to Hemf ngway, the silence splits: \.:., Listen a moment--!Sh! Listen--! inl that hurry~as of a shore of fugitives. Once Atkins ' s technique is understood, however , his poetry can be enjoyed for its witty, wacky, off-beat, philosophical musings. In " Irritable Song" he inverts, reverses and convolutes regular syntax: Or say upon return Coronary farewell Leaves me lie . Dare, sir? Ugh! Be nay ' d Tomorrow, tomorrow in today? Atkins writes of the fine arts, John Brown ' s raid on Harper ' s Ferry, Black ahd heroes ("Christophe"), the "Trainyard at Night1 '/\. the Cleveland lakefront • -~ At another end of the stylistic and thematic pole is Randall, a librarian by training and trade who , as we shall see in our discussion of poets of the late sixties, figures prominently in the development of an audience for the �New Black Poetry. Randall also served in World War II and writes poems about the war, love, violence, art and the Black presence. His well known "Booker T. and W.E . B. ," digesting the Washini1>uBois controversy, was seen by DuBois and this pleased Randall. The poem first appeared in Midwest Journal, 1952. Randall has also written about and translated Russian poetry . With Nargaret Danner he co-authored Poem Counterpoem (1966) and his Cities Burning appeared in 1968 . More to Remember (1971) pulls together Randall's poems from "four decades . " His work has been published in Umbra, Beloit Poetry Journal, and other places. He initiated the Broadside Series (posters) in 1965 with his own "Ballad of Birmingham." The series grew quickly, laying the foun- dation for his Broadside Press, the most significant Black press in America. Randall's work of this period has the stamp of formality. He writes in ballads and free verse forms but he has a tightness that will be relaxed in the late sixties. • • • • • • • • "Legacy " chronicles the hurt, physical and mental, of a land "Lit by a bloody moon." But the one who is . "moulded from this clay" vows that My tears redeem my tears. "Perspectives " recasts the time-irrnnemorial theme of ~we ~- • only pass this w~ There is no need to complain about discomfort, the poem says, because even the mountains--in their hugr:')eness--are dissolved "away" by the seas. Randall ' s Pacific Epitaphs are recollections of the war. are epigrammatic and haiku-like. The short pieces Here is a poignant one ("Iwo Jima"): Like oil of Texas My blood gushed here. Prominent in a group of Detroit poets (Margaret Danner, Oliver La Grone, Naomi Long Madgett, James Thompson and others), Randall often enmeshes himself �in a sense of personal injury over his people's history. This tendency, and a debt to the Black poetic tradition (especially Sterling Brown), can be seen in "The Southern Road" where the "black river" serves as a "boundary to hell." The country is "haughty as a star" And I set forth upon the southern road. The variety of styles and themes found in these poets is found also in younger poets of their generation: Patterson, Addison, Browne, Redmond, Jay Wright, Anderson, Hernton• and Polite come readily to mind. poets, Patterson is particularly interesting. Of these His "Black all Day" yielded from its second line the title for I Saw How Black I Was. /J-Lso Q._ po.11e..s.on Lincoln University poet,A.,_won an award for his poetry while still an undergraduate. A native New Yorker, he studied political science and English, and has worked as a counselor for delinquent boys and an English/nstructor. Patterson said in Sixes and Sevens that his first poem· was written during World War II as the "out-growth of a Cain-and-Abel conflict without the dire consequences." "Three Views of Dawn" includes the "silken shawl of night," the disappearance of "corner specters" and the "splitting" of "stillness." The musical "Tla Tla" presents free verse spiced with alliterative language ~ of landscape, season and nature. 31!!37J~ "Alone," the protagonist "keeps poems warm" as he watches over the sleeping lovers as well as the "numb " who wake and weep. Patterson did not publish a book until 1969; and its title, 26 Ways of Looking at A Black Man, shows the influence of .Lnagists and modernists (see Stevens ' s 13 Ways of Looking at A Black Bird). It also reveals much about the Black poet's ability to forge and merge his academic training 5/ �with his own indigenismt- The speaker in "Black all Day" is "looked" into "rage and shame" by a white passerby; but he vows that "tomorrow" I ' ll do as much for him. Patterson constructs a solid poetic foundation, "stone on stone," as he paints precise portraits of " the brave who do not break" when provoked ("You Are the Brave"), or the "lost, the "tireless and raging souJ._:.' ("Envoi") . In the work of Patterson, and the younger group of the period, one finds anger or protest, though the general tendenc1 is toward experimental verse which pinpoints the surest and richest human feelings. jects more often than not reflect this fact. Phyllis Wheatley As Black poets, their subihey dt noi' sl'llln But/\variety. · hitd/\6et11 the most well known female poet until the mid ~1'~iJ•Ellli?lillt••t•l• century when Frances Harper took up the banner of fame though not of skill. • Ulil" A leier new mood was ~evidenced in the work of I Angelina Grimke, Georgia Douglas, Johnson (the most famous poet after Frances Harper), Gwendolyn Bennett, AnuiSpencer, Alice{Neiso?t:?un~, Helene Johnson (a young spark in the Renaissance), Margaret Walker~ and Gwendolyn Brooks. I'\, Ll >I ~nrf'1c A Between the forties and sixties, the n~er of publishing women poets increase\ 't(ottry · (men ) ; and since in America has remained under t h e tvpew.is,or,f SW t>.,.o wh ites women in general have not had the range of opportunities open to men, certainly the Black woman went the worse way of that flesh ! t.S poets of the period,lstill 1:owsma:itte-impressive: But the list of Black women Gloria C. Oden (Yonkers, New York), Nanina Alba (Montgomery), Margaret Danner (Pryorsburg, Kentucky), Mari Evans (Toledo), Julia Fields (Uniontown, Alabama), Vivian Ayers �(Chester, South Carolina), Audre Lorde (New York), Naomi Long Madgett (Norfolk), Pauli Murray (Baltimore), Sarah Wright (Witipquin, Maryland), Nay Miller (Washington, D.C.), and Yvonne Gregory (Nashville), among the dozens of occasional and regional names.<fl..n 1952--two years after Gwendolyn Br(loks won the Pulitzer Prize--G.C. Oden, who uses her initials "as a way of being anonymous," received a John Hay Whitney Opportunity Fellowship for The Naked Frame: A Love Poem and Sonnets. She has worked as a senior editor of a major publishing house and currently teaches English in Baltimore. In the fifties, she joined the Village poets in New York where she read her poetry in coffee shops, reviewed books and worked on a novel. Her poetry has also appeared in The Saturday Review and The Poetry Digest. Noting that she appeals "primarily to the intellect," Hayden (Kaleidoscope) compared her to Cullen, adding that she "is concerned with poetry as an art expressing what is meaningful to everyone, not just a vehicle for protest and special pleading." Although G.C. Oden uses a variety of forms, her poems are usually . .-, i :i'i::!:, tart. crisp an d ~RtQx2cctua1:cy "The Carousel" in an empty park rides me round and round, 0 5eV'Ve$ and the dark drops for her as she i'il!!!l~~her surroundings with explicit word-choices: "sight focusses shadow." In "Review from Staten Island" an item in the view is "spewed up from water . 11 Later we are told that "One gets used to dying living" and "even the rose disposes of summer." We hear the dislocated woman in " ... As when emotion too far exceeds its cause" (phrase from Elizebeth Bishop). Retreating from heartbreak, she admits that she too knew "love's celestial venturingt.": I, too, once truste<l air that plunged me down. Yes, I! I �Nanina Alba is similarly terse and poignant. The Parchments (1963) and The Parchments II were published before her death in 1968. English, fsic She taught and French in public schools and was for a long time a member of the English Department at Tuskegee Institute. use of Greek /ythology to draw a subtle " unwise" actions. c&e,l , analogy "Be Daedalus" makes between Blacl<S and Icarus, _ Death comes as a "tax" for "parching" the sun: Suns can be brutal things. "For Malcolm X" recalls "History ' s stoning." -n-•e;h l Margaret Danner is lflA•illlllai- sensitive. Born in Detroit, she has spent the greater part of her life in Chicago where she was one time editor of Poetry. Her poems in that publication in 1952 prompted the John Hay Whitney Fellowships Committee to offer her a trip to Africa. And in 1962 the literary group with which she identified in Detroit was the subject of a special issue of the Bulletin of Negro History . She has published four volumes: Impressions of African Art Forms in Poetry (1962), To Flower (1962), Poem Counterpoem (with Dudley Randall, 1966) and Iron Lace (1968). A former poet-in-residence at Wayne State University, she founded Boone House, a lively center for the arts in Detroit, and a similar cultural program in Chicago: Nologonya ' s. She employs African tenninology and theme; but she can also write delightfully in other veins as in "The Elevator Man Adheres to Form." wings" the elevator reminds her of "Rococo art. " The " tan man who Struck by his elegance--and +iit. rod " Godspeedings"--the ~~anders why so intelligent and artful a "tan" man has to run elevators. It is a meticulous poem, subtlety exposing the lie that education qualifies you. She finally wishes the elevator man ' s services cou Jd be employed toward lifting them above their crippling storm. �Far From Africa: Four Poems is a sheet of sights, sounds and suggestions carrying the reader across "moulting days" in "their twilight,,'' ("Garnishing the Aviary"), "lines" of "classic tutu ,.'' ("Dance of the Abakweta"), "eyes lowered" from "despair," ("The Visit of the Professor of Aesthetics") and a bed of green moss, sparkling as a beetle, Mari Evans is another kind of transitionalist--shifting from /ivil Jights poetry of the early phase to, finally, a more obvious "Black" stance of the later period. ''he has worked as a civil service and instructor of writing. employe~;4v show hostess and producer, Sometimes referred to as a spiritual, if not technical, heir to Gwendolyn Ilrooks, Mari Evans employs irony, suspension, and rich folk idioms in a free verse style. / \ death ' and funeral, wonders if '' "The Rebel," pondering Cv f'-IOSt;\'y /se. ~e__..,,.s .aa kO-'l. Olollrl 11 Gtt!iositr- want to know whether she has really died or just wants to cause "Trouble.;;:" There is humor and satire in "When in Rome" as the poet interlaces (in the manner of Vesey's "A Homent, Please") two different conversations. Black maid,"M affie dear," is allowed to eat "whatever" she likes~ The Alternating ~r'OM the maid ' s silent resp.onses with the recitation of a menu 9Athe middle class environment ("Rome"), the poem incidentally records the traditional soul food items which the maid craves. "The Emancipation of George-Hector" ("the colored turtle") shows a growing impatience with one-step-at-a-time social change policy. The turtle used to stay in his "shell" but now he peeks out, extends his arms and legs, and talks. and sentimental. But this same poet can wax philosophical "If there be Sorrow" it should be for the things not yet dreamed, realized or done. Add to these the withholding of love, love �"restrained." In "Shrine to what should Be" an audience is asked to "sing" songs to "nobility," and "Rightousness." The children should bring "Trust," the women "Dreams," the old men "constancy." Ironically the audience is told to ignore tears that fall like a "crescendo," and constantly as "a soft black rain." Her tribute to Gospel singers is telling in " ••• And the Old Women Gathered." One cannot (despite "Rome") escape one's self, the poet says, as she notices that the "fierce" and"not melodic" music lingered on even as "we ran. " 4 . p·ie ld s, f.,t.ru ll 1 yJISeA-~c.J.tin · . di e d at Knox Co 11 ege --. J u1 ia IHI L I f/1 spirit• , stu (Tennessee) ,in England and Scotland, and has taught • high school and college. Her work appeared in Umbra, Massachusetts Review and other journals. Along with Margaret Walker, Tom Dent, Alice Walker, Pinkie Gordon Lane-. and Spellma/ she is among the few good Black poets who now voluntarily live in the South. Her first book, Poems, was brought out by Poets Press in 1968, the same year she received a National Council on the Arts grant. She is substantially represented in R. Baird Shuman's Nine Black Poets (1968) and her East of Moonlight was published in 1973. She also writes short stories and plays. Iler main poetic subjects are racism, death, love, violence and history. "The Generations" come and go and in between there are "The wars." And in between them are the seasons, flowers, "lavender skies," dawns, "Sombre seas," and the "embryonic calm." ,, "AArdvark" has achieved "fame" since "Malcolm died and the poet muses: Looks like Malcolm helped Bring attention to a lot of things We never thought about before. She again salutes this martyr in "For Malcolm X" whose "eyes were mirrors of our agony." In "No Time for Poetry" the reader is advised that midnight is ( �th notA_time to beseech one's muse: too much "calm." the "spirit'' is "too lagging" and there is But the morning is ideal since it carries "vibrations of laughter" and has no "orange-white mists." "broken-hinged doo 11 1 ,oA.a As a "woman," listening,)near the man talk of war ("I Heard A Young Man Saying"), the narrator "somehow planned on living." And the "bright glare of the neon world" sends " gas-word s bursting free" in "Madness One Monday Evening." i,h Pauli Murray and Sarah Wright are sometimes poets who also write,\other 4en..--'.s. ~••~, Pauli Murray pursued training for law while she won academic awards and fellowships for her writing. A 9'1vil lights pioneer, she published one 0.. volume of verse (Dark Test~nent, 1969) and a family history (Proud Shoes, 1956). In "Without Name," she is revealed as a formal but excellent craftsman. are no names for true feeling : There let the "flesh sing anthems to its arrival." Sarah Wright, Lnown as a novelist (This Child's Gonna Live), co-authored Give About Black writers she said( ii,. 1961) Me A childJin 1955) with Lucy Smith. "My motto is tell it like it damn sure is." "black outlines in living flesh." and traffic lights. In "Window Pictures" she sees · -the · l · b etween d rivers . "Urgency" viewsAre 1 at1ons11p "God" is "thanked" that the car stops so the passenger can "glory" a while in the "time-bitten punctuationJ"?f the "pause. 11 Vivian Ayers, the daughter of a blacksmith, attended Barber-Scotia College (Concord) and Bennett College (Greensboro) where her major interests were drama, music and dance. She published a volume of poems (Spice of Dawns) and an allegorical d.rama of freedom and the space age (Hawk), performed at the University of Houston's Educational Television Station. lives in Houston where she edits a quarterly journal, Adept. Currently, she "Instantaneous" features a man being "stunned" by the bolt of "cross-firing energies" and grabbed up jn a blaze resonant as a million hallelujas-- ••• 7 �A:Q. man inhabits another man who, dying, gasps faintly: "My god--this is God .. . " j \n m.oo~ m.;u.,zo.!aJ differentl\is Naomi Long Madgett, who moved to Detroit from Virginia in 1946 to teach at a high school. from Wayne State University. She holds a Master ' s degree Associated with the Detroit group of poets, she has published four volumes: Songs to a Phantom Nightingale (1941), One in the Many (1956), Star by Star (1965, 1970), and Pink Ladies in the Afternoon (1972 ) . Currently she teaches English at Eastern Michigan University and runs the newly established Lotus Press. projects was Deep Rivers: A Portfolio: One of its first 20 Contemporary Illack American Poets (1974), which includes a teachers ' guide prepared by the poet . Editors for Deep Rivers include Leonard P . Andrews, Eunice L. Howard, and Gladys M. Rogers . The 20 poster poets are Paulette Childress White, Jill Witherspoon, William Shelley, G. C. Oden, Naomi Madgett, Patterson, La Grone, Pamela Cobb, Pinkie Gordon Lane, Etheridge Knight, Randall, Hayden, Thompson, Margaret Walker, June Jordan, Gerald W. Barrax, Audre Larde, Redmond, Harper and Kaufman . 1• Naomi Hadgett ' s " Simple" ("For Langston Hughe jf is realistically humorous . Simple sits in a bar, wanting to talk to someone, when he is approached by a hand-out seeker who needs to change his clothes Birt wJthi11g, "but my lan ' lady ' bolted the door. " AJoyce)r{vill tap "impatiently" and leave the bar and Simple wondering what "he wanted to say ." In "Mortality" we learn that of "all the deaths " this one is the " surest. " Some deaths are merely "peace" but vultures "recognize" the "single mortal thing" that r:-'I holds on to life and they wait hung,arily for the time ~ When hope starts staggering. Han must come to grips with the things of this world, we are told in ,I • �"The Reckoning": And why and how and what, and sometimes even if. Poems from Trinity: women and humans. A Dream Sequence convey uncertainties and fears of One character has been besk/i)ged by "dream and dream again" ("4") and a naked day "corrodes the silver dream" but the music will not -----,,. "cease to shiver_,'' ("18"). "After" is a lamentation for "mortals" without "wings" to fly away from the "purple sadness" of night. And "Poor Renaldo" is "dead and gone wherever people go" when they "never loved a song." even "hell" must have "music of a sort." But "";) Finally sculpted, like the others, i_.., the poem turns to more sorrow near the end. Renaldo, though dead, is "still unresting." e~~lv q~e~i Audre Lorde'sAwork reflects/lt'kill and control. In the early sixties she wrote: I am a Negro wmaan and a poet--all three things stand outside my realm of choice. My eyes have a part in my seeing, my breath in by breathing, all that I am in who I am. love are of my people. All who I was not born on a farm or in a forest, but in the centre of the largest city in the world-a member of the human race hemmed in by stone, away from earth and sunlight. But what is in my blood and skin of richness, comes the roundabout journey from Africa through sun islands to a stony coast, and these are the gifts thr_ough which I sing, through which I see. This is the knowledge of the sun, and of how to love even where there is no sunlight. This is the knowledge and the richness I shall give my children proudly, as a strength against the less obvious forms of narrovmess and night. (Letter o.c<.o,npo.nyltlj poems S11b~:1tedib ~i'(es ond reveru} �thus gives a balanced account of heQelf as• woman, Black and poet. dimen~i ns And all these~lmtllilll she handles quite well in her poetry,-~ She has published three volumes: The First Cities (1968), Cables. to Rage (1970) and From a Land where other People Live (1973), which was nominated for a National Book Award. In her early poetry she reflects on "Oaxaca" (in Mexico) where the "land moves slowly" under the "carving drag of wood." The drudging field work goes on while the hills are "brewing thunder" and one can observe All a man's strength in his sons' young arms .••. "To a Girl who knew what side Her Bread was Buttered on" describes the girl as a "catch of bright thunder" apparently guarded by (and guardian of) bones. Ordered to leave the bones, she watches as they rise like "an ocean of straw" and trample~ti , hei,, over-see~ Iii 11 1 J U:8 @I!!!!' "into the earth." "forth in the moonpit of a virgin." S:11ftor ~ "comes like a thin bird"-- The "N.9mph" is brought In "How can I Love You" the 1n Te4Jo~ ike the u] J af -later to become "great ash." ! ;w! S"C.ot-n!4 1 magnificent Phoenix bit J <Ms No wonder, the speaker confirms, that your sun went down. The light that makes us fertile shall make us sane. And we hear that the "year has fallen" in "Father, the Year •.. " Audre Lorde's work cuts sharp paths of 4ti, !gliL ad light across the n.ea1t!hi:tg ignorance whk.~ C.onf'u$~oti dfltls i5Troe and prli iiY"R around her • 1 ~'And Fall shall sit in Judgment" "-examines love, ot concluding that "in all seasons" it is false, but the same. A much-neglected poet is May Miller, of Washington, D.C., whom Gwendolyn Brooks acknowledged as "excellent and long-celebrated" (Introduction, �The Poetry at BJack Aroeti~~). Her work can be found in three volumes: Into the Clearing (1959), Poems (1962), and she is one of three poets represented in Lyrics of Three Women (1964). Currently a member of the Commission on the Arts of the District of Columbia, she has been a teacher, lecturer, dramatist and has published her poetry in a number of magazines: Common Ground, The Antioch Review, The Crisis, Phylon• and The Nation. "Calvary Way" shows a Christian influence with a twist of irony and gore·. Mary is asked how she felt, "womb-heavy with Christ Child," as she tasted the "dust" of an "uncertain journey." finally asks Mary: Recalling the crucifixion, the poem "Were you afraid?" The "roaches are winning" in "The last Warehouse" where humans seek to "abnegate survival laws" and kill roaches until they are "sa turated with their decrease." The characters in "The wrong side of Morning" were shaken from a "nightmare of wings" and a.ssembl.es "mushrooms of huge death" as the poet powerfully m!f:!!,=:t-limages and layered meanings. "Procession" employs the dramatic technique (made famous by Brown and others) of interlacing the formal English of the poem with italicized Black expletives and refrains such as "Ring, hammer, ring!" It is the procession of Christ but the reader easily understands, noting the Black idioms, that it slavery and racism. if~OBlack procession through the labyrint+ of '-" There is a series of juxtaposed contradictions like "Time is today, yesterday, and time to come," "moving and motionless," and "infinite takes familiar form," :re?: while "we seek conviction." Christian mythology pervades Hay Hiller's work (though she Black-bases it). In "Tally" the subjects "lay there drained of time" and empty like the "bulge of hour glass" while "Lucifer streaked to reality." �The deaths of Dumas and Rivers left voids and created still more anxieties, coming as they did (1968) in the midst of racial turbulence. However, by the mid-sixties both poets had written a great deal of poetry and a great deal about themselves . Rivers died an unnecessary death in what has been called an "impulsive" act. white policeman in a New York subway. other . Dumas was shot to death by a wi't\nn Both deaths occu:{ed/\months of each Rivers was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and attended public schools in Pennsylvania, Georgia and Ohio . His college days were spent at Wilberforce University, Chicago State Teachers College and Indiana University. In high school (1951) he won the Savannah State poetry prize. Rivers was greatly influenced by Hughes, Wright and his uncle Ray 1'1civer. His five books, two of them published posthumously, are: Perchance to Dream, Othello (1959), These Black Bodies and This Sunburnt Face (1962), Dusk at Selma (1965) , The Still Voice of Harlem (1968) -. and The Wright Poems (1972, with an Introduction by friend-novelist Ronald Fair). Ohio Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, and Antioch Review were only a few magazines in which his work appeared. Responding to a request (1962) to comment on himself as Black man and poet, Rivers said, among other things: I write about the Negro because I am a Negro, and I am not at peace with myself or the world. I cannot divorce my thoughts from the absolute injustice of hate. I cannot reckon with my color. I am obsessed by the ludicrous and psychological behavior of hated men. And I shall continue to write about race--in spite of many warnings-- �until I discover myself, my future, my real race. I do not wish to capitalize on race, nor do I wish to begin a Crimean War: I am only interested in recording the truth squeezed from my observations and experiences. I am tired of being misrepresented. Adding to the statement, Rivers said "beauty and joy, which was in the world before and has been buried so long, has got to come back." ~\"O 11~J, But Rivers saw little "beauty and joy" •'l_his own mind' s eye. His poetic landscape is often bleak and filled with deep psychic yearnings and wanderings through the ambivalences of Black-white relations. is also torment and brooding. There In this , _ he bears some kinship to Dumas. For both delve deeply into psychology, bu't are at the same time accessible. Rivers spent much time researching his past and reading from the great volumes of world literature. During the mid-sixties in Chicago he parti- cipated in discussion groups--involving Fair, David Llorens and Gerald McWorter--out which --irir grew the now well-known Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC'l: 1 1 Arts programs ~of t h t poems. · · g. o.. :Sg ID~prominent veh ' ~ Po.-. · a;,.u,..,, Black Rivers talks about his own death in several "Postscript" is a poem which "should not have been published." The narrator says he was "living and dying and dreaming" all at the same time in Harlem. And, toying with his own fate i ~ k e of Wright's "sudden death," he recalls the elder writer's "prophecy"~ that he too "soon would be dead." The theme of death--often moral, spiritual or physical as in Hayden-- can be found in pieces like "The Death of a Negro Poet," "Prelude for Dixie," "Four Sheets to the Wind," "Three Sons," "Asylum," and all of The Wright Poems. �d1 es. s In "Watts, " he JliAllll•!t!es generations of fear, horror, history and anguis~ ~,1f-t epigrammatic · · ~__ f ury- ~ · 1 y apparent ease: a d eceptive Must I shoot the white man dead to free the nigger in his head? a.. iii n: 9dil,1y.4weak assessment of Rivers '• poetry, Haki Madhubuti (Lee) said this poem " asks a revolutionary question" (Dynamite Voices , Vol. I). Such a " question," ,~one, wh\C.h of course, tfontinuaily turns or revolves . Dut, 41tl.e.""'.•'Athe w~th lllli-•.... deep semantics aside, the comment is blind to Rivers ' ea.vs d v,a..Lt' L fears and sores/ \ • • • • • by America ' SA._nightmare. t?gt' answers ~ Sl4.p,s1tc.~ verbal · · -tt.~1 ne't1htw- • d He knew .-A5 impl €•b'\m:je would make these hurts disappear . A~ , such criticism violates the poem , robbing the poet of his many-layered concerns and analytical powers . River~ is not all somber ancl bleak, however; in " The Still Voice of Harlem" he announces: I am the hope and tomorrow of your unborn . Even amidst the contradictions and uncertainties of racial/political ping-pong (" In Defense of Black Poets ")! A black poet must remember the horrors . Especially since Some black kid is bound to read you . ~a- . The "Note on Black Women" asksf',t:hey teach the poet "honor, " " humor ," and "how to die, " presumab l y t he reborning death . sheet . The Wright Poems is an elegaic " To Richard Wright " exclaims/ alnost with defeat, that �To be born unnoticed is to be born black, and left out of the grand adventure . Wright" ~ refers to the novelist as young Jesus of the black noun and verb . Other poems find the poet wandering or searching through the " spirits" or "bones" of Wright. In "A Mourning Letter from Paris " Rivers recalls knowing and feeling ~eve~o..L o(.h,~ gl-'>eu,c,c.utL,u~eu~l;,1.., rot191 s 0.~t rr-•M~4 t ~"t'k, s•pTe1tt b•"'J''"!i JSSCI~ f: (lloct&YI • "Harlem ' s hone ed voice . " _ Off.ffsimilar in feeling and the;-~ ~t,i,.!a lmost never in voice and £:. form, is the work of,.,pumas wh~"Negritude ranges across time and space . " H,,.,., forn .&iilliim11M12er-.1111a,._~ . "OvrntU in Sweet Home, Arkansas, ~moved to New York when he was 10 years ~ old and completed public schools in that city . He attended City College of New York and Rutgers between stints in the Air Force and other activities. Active on the little magazine circuit, he won a number of awards and helped establish several publications. At the time of his death, he was teaching at Southern Illinois University's Experiment in Higher Education in East St. Louis . In 19 70, SIU Press published two posthumously collected volumes: Poetry for My People and ' Ar k of Bon' and Other Stories, edited ~ -,,o,.ts h,tcn~ f'ltf. Chatfield and Redmond. Hale • ,-e-,..• t't-1,r,., Random House re- issuedA_t' ry Play Ebony Play Ivory &, fl Redmond.@@ gsi• o5 . Though there have • J .w.Wi . ~iiilililiiiiWN-~•---•••••liiiil~~ been no full-length critical studies of Dumas ' ' poetry, Jay Wright and Baraka assessed him in the SIU eif''YI the new K4 . U>· C,ot\(lf'fl\S e.. and Wright ' s Introduction is retained in ltc.h1t t,'- s . Wn.ght, himself a major poet of the era, ,.imz=..i."the .--. linguistic ~lm!IN& and ~ musical range of Dumas: None of this is perverse, intellectual play . of Dumas ' sense of history. It is indicative In "Emoyeni, Place of the Winds," ) �he writes "I see with my skin and hear with my tongue." ••• The line, I suggest, asserts some elementary truth about Dumas ' , and not alone Dumas ' , poetic techniques. is grounded in that line. This book ..• What Dumas means i~ that there are racial and social determinants of perception, ideas that he was just beginning to develop. The mind articulates what the senses have selected from the field, and this articulation is, in part, determined by what the perceiver has learned to select and articulate .• , ,11 ii C t £3 U L 1 lg L &lib 2§ Uii&L if&tp@hS i PJ&L &lid 5 IS In '{I] hear with my tongue," Dumas asserts that the language you speak is a way of defining yourself within a group. The language of the Black community, as with that of any group, takes its form, its imagery, its vocabulary, because Black people want them that way. Language can protect, exclude, express value, as well as assert identity. is why Dumas' language is the way it is. That In the rhythm of it, is the act, the unique manner of perception of a Black ~ man. rrWriting with the removed passion of the friend that he was, Wright makes vital statements not only about Dumas but about the whole area of Black creativity, perception and stance in the world. Indeed Dumas jutted all these antennae r from his poetry which he wrote to maintain "ou~ precious tradition." Lin- guistically, Dumas' f base is formal English, a blend of Black African languages, Arabic, and Gullah from the islands off the Carolinas and Georgia. His cosmos �is shaped by the rich textures of Black religious and spiritual life, expecially old time church services and Voodoo. Wright notes: and gospel music, particularly, were his life breath. "The blues Only Langston Hughes knew more, ~ rat least as much, about gospel and gospel singers •... Music seemed to Dumas to be able to carry the burden of direct participation in the act of living, as no poem, that was not musically structured, could .... " "Dumas was searching for an analagous structure for poetry." As a poet, Dumas combines the past, present and future, often inseparably, as in "Play Ebony Play Ivory": for the songless, the dead who rot the earth all these dead whose sour muted tongues speak broken chords, all these aging people poiijon the heart of earth. Curses and curdles, mysticism, blessings and warnings abound ~· ~ °f?,'+ 1e ft) / : Vodu green clinching his waist, obi purple ringing his neck, Shango, God of the spirits, whispering in his ear, thunderlight stabbing the island of blood rising from his skull . . Later, in this same poem ~ come, must come: ' the word takes precedent over all; what must �No power can stay the mojo when the obi is purple and the vodu is green and Shango is whispering, Bathe me in blood. I am not clean. ,~ Je,m,td His intercontinental, intergalaxia! soa~ ewrls,~any and all devices at his command. ~ explores the dense rhythms (" of percer,tion") as in "Ngoma" where he compares the belly of a pregnant woman to the drum head . h.,J /:::d. 11d The~ •1ts r listens to the baby ' s heart; the drummer listens to the voices of the ancestors: aiwa aiwa it is the chest-sound same that booms my chest aiwa aiwa a strong sound running like feet of gazelle ~ em~ aiwa aiwa ---, merges goat skin The ~ rescendo, with its bu~lt- in ,n c..fAn and woman ' s belly in the • JI ory q 1 £!'¥\roar: the goat-skin sings the boom-sound louder louder sings the goat-skin louder the goat-skin sings the boom-sound louder sings the goat-skin louder louder louder boom the goat-skin b.,om-sound louder louder louder The rich, experimental language, couched in several " traditions, " is seen �everywhere in this major voice (" from JackhglJlilley") : The jackjack backing back ancl stacking stone city-stone into cracked hydraulic echoes of dust ?1 ( " Root Song" ): Once when I was tree flesh came and worshipped at my roots . fr ("A Song of Flesh") love) _,,. maddened IL,' When I awoke) I took the sleeping mountains of your breasts tenderly tenderly between my quivering lips and I guillotined the stallions, drowned the eagles, and drove the tiger fish back into the sea of your heart . There are also "many" poets in Dumas . NNll--•i~e:1-A combination of Dunba r, Hughe s J . Walker, coupled with the best of the riming poets of the sixties) - produces -,i..,'s . . - sanguine and humorous Black truth ("I Laugh Talk Joke" ): i laugh talk joke smoke dope skip rope, may take a coke jump up and down, walk around drink mash and talk trash beat a blind hoy over the head with a brick knock a no-legged man to his bended knees �cause I ' m a movinl fool never been to school god raised me and the devil praised me catch a preacher in a boat and slit his throat pass a church , I might pray but don ' t fuck with me cause I don ' t play There are epic poems like " [osaic Harlem" and " Genesis on an Endless Mosaic," a blues series , experiments in African forms (using spontaneity and ritual), and mystical/exploratory poems like Thoughts/Images , Ke£ , Ikefs and Saba. Gnc) r,wi i'4l 1i/ fO'""P1/ ~bvt'') -th rt i.vh;c~ b In one " Saba" Dumas uses bizarre imagery/\ to render ~ ~hard to describe: sx waterings streams striking aorta vibraphones sx veinings myriads of flag,ella flucksing rite Dumas possessed a boundless love for the acoustical leap and the dramatic " implosion" (as he put it) of ideas in poetry . haye on Black poetry remains to be seen . What influence his ideas will 2111'/i It would have been ,;J1,lll![il•~ interesting if his work , much of it written in the early and mid-sixties , had been �available in collected form when the first <:KC-V C,.rec:J Poetryl\rue bd,R8 f,H.i3t1 t . r, The Amer ican temperament (disfavor i ng Black writers t elling their truths) kept Dumas and Rive r s running . Dumas sought his peace in the deep well of his own folk culture and in occasional excursions into mysticism, Afric ~ ancl Voodoo. Rivers buried himself in the "identity" issues and brooded over his plight as a brilliant Black in a country where the two adjectives together are neither believable or legitimate. both left~ fegacies .fo~ o-.c.c,, ..."t Gftd fo..t.-reAL"•·n1 -&£t.., AUessw,e,a,r of bu.nu' potJli.y o.9'Cl a.,";.,~,....d' sec CjyJc"Tlylo..1 •tfffN.y bu...as:Le~ao, o~A. len,~ $1R9eto-"(ij,gllAM-~ B. ' Griefs of Joy~ The Poetry of Wings & The Black Arts Hovement No 1 Sept. \9'15'). nothing remains the same . And my spirit reaches out to you my love without apologies without embarrassment with only the thought that this is right for us that moving towards you is like touching leaves in autumn our minds and spirits interlocked like death . ---- Pinkie Gordon Lane, "griefs of joy" One major difference between the cultural/political upsurges of the twenties and the sixties/seventies was location: the Renaissance was centered literarily , if not always geographically, in Harlem; but its �recent successors can be found in every North American community with a substantial Black population. Another difference was in degree of artistic-political consciousness. To be sure, the cultural and political arms of the Renaissance were, on occasion, interlocked. But such marriages never reached the current state of 11 wholeness" and "continuit~ In the early days of this period there were (are) "stars" of the New Black Poetry; but the glitter often attended activities "outside" of the poetry. Or, put differently, the stars sometimes put "outside" topical stimuli "inside" what is no longer defensible as-"poetry.tt This often meant that the star poets had no connection whatever with a Black literary or folk poetry tradition as such. In- stead theirs was a utradition" of immediacy, political urgency, and newspaper headlines, combined with high-school type punch-lining. This is not to say good "poetry (of whatever definition) was (is) not being written or that charlatans were always on the"take." There is much evidence to support the belief that dozens of these soothsayers were sincere and honest--and had chosen what appeared to be the 11 simplest 11 and "fastest" vehicle for expressing thoughts about '1Revolution~ and "Black Togetherness" or raising the "Collective C0 nsciousness." Such a situation was not helped by the learned poet-activists who sometimes advised young writers to give up "Western" influences and a "white" language. These advisors usually stopped short of suggesting ways in which young poets and writers might assimilate another language into their works. Yet this need to identify and institute an alternative language is a pressing one. In the meantime, impressive contributions toward such a realization have been made by such beacons as James W~ldon Johnson, Melvin Tolson, Margaret Walker, Henry Dumas, Ishmael Reed, Jayne Cortez and others. However, the insincere versifiers usually _fell by tilie wayside in a short time, paving the way, like the Phoenix bird, for still more soap box mounters. At the same time, a number of poets--whose wits and crafts were ~7~ �not about them in the early phase--took to the woodshed to become much better handlers of the word. a "panorama of violence." All this occurred, Larry Neal notes, against Indeed by the late sixties Black communities all over America had been turned uJVide of the Black Revolution. own by police and spokesmen/supporters 12 Young shock troopers like Carmichael,N3rown, Charles Koen, Ron Karenga, Huey Newton, and Eldridge Cleaver had already forced the "old time" Black leadership to take a seat. Now, with father having destroyed son (Williams, Baldwin), the poets were free to declaim, proclaim and exhort. o.entrA-i the~oetic tradition-- This trend a l o n e ~ shoe~ since it created a flood of polemicists and pamphle teers who could/would ,'n not discuss poetry inNiistorical contexts. It caused further shock by labeling itself "Black" and renegotiating its own "roots." (the word "Black" :r has appeared throughout the history of Black poetry, but before the sixties it was not used as a categorical f\*...e.nceto poetry written by Afro-Americans.) Hence much of the New Black Poetry has been viewed as non-poetry or anti-poetry (in a traditional literary context) because among other things, it J,,e:, · not depend primarily on subtlety and recondite references. to be ,Pi1.~c,LAr f.eo..lVt' o f' seen what impact this · Black poetry will have on the literacy trends in Afro-America. Jackson (Black Poetry in America), for example, begins his own discussion of the ew Black Poetry by building a convincing -ft.e. h'2w analogy between the rise in Black literacy and the popularity of~poetry. ,,, Henderson (Understanding the New Black Poetry) assures his readers that Black readers or listeners clearly "understand" what their poets are saying and are participating more and more as judges o f ~ aesthetical qualities in the poetry and the poets' deliveries. II But while this chapter will conclude with a few broad critical observations, the immediate aim is to �continue the sketch of the poetry ' s development, interpolating from time to time pertinent critical and illuminating data. There are dozens of ways to approach the New Black Poetry. One could, for example, examine its theme, structure and saturation (Henderson), or its several types (Carolyn Rodgers, see bibliography). Starting with important names is another way; the Black Aesthetic (Gayle, Fuller) approach is another way. Then there is the magic of Black poetry (Baral4 , Tour~, '1 Neal, Dumas). Jlusic is also a favorite OtfP fJJ Harper, Jayne Cortez). One could go on and on: ( 811 J4 Crouc h , Re6:IJ ucasce but the poetry has been written and one place to start is with its emergence. New York certainly played a key role in the new movement; but it did not, we said earlier, play the key or only role. Areas of the East (Phila~., "l"l"t delphia, Boston Baltimore, Washington, D.C.) enhanced_the boo~ . Midwest centers were Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, East St. Louis-St. Louis J and Kansas City, to name some. Related events also took place in the South where there was another "rising" in Atlanta, Nashville, Jackson, Baton Rouge, Tuskegee, Houston,- and Toogaloo. The West added richly from Los Angeles, San Francisco Bay area, Sacramento • and Seattle. i'ht. b evelopments related to poetry mc.h,4'e ~numerous Black Arts activities (connected to cultural or nationalist programs) located at settlement houses, community centers, museums, centers for the dissemination of ideologies, anti-poverty SvRfo .."t".c.a.,.,,,i,Jo..lSo l'n ff.re f:o.,. W\ot~ projects, and educational institutions. l:iifljl · plethora of tabToi~ck-oriented, journals, flyers, posters, books, pamphlets t and records . .._ ~ f great importance were the new Black bookstores, African curio shops, walls of "respect" (Cleveland, Akron, Chicago, St . Louis, New York, Newarl-J ~ , art exhibits, weekly festivals and jubilees, writers ' conferences, writing workshops, the flood • \ �of liberation flags (black-green-red), Black-oriented -,Y talk and variety or-CvL-tii1'6...l S'y~b ol...1 >P«c.i' t.. c.,.i,iy ~ shows, and other physical/\ · , Ji handshakes_!',.-eir----.._i....~==t"'.African clothes, hairdos and jewelry new consciousness. New York was an important show-place for the It had the residue of the post-Renaissance years (the iomburg Library and Micheaux 's Bookstore) in Harlem as well as numerous 'RLo..d<- surroundin~ltommunities. New organizations · ,he such as ta- Barbara Ann Teer ' s National Black Theater, ~New Lafayette Theater, VD..'1"\C,VS hew and a.-llllarlem fultural ~roje~1I_ flowered in the amazed light of older institutions like Freedomways magazine (Clarke and «a•aea:t Kaiser) which has published many of the new poets: Tour~ ~ (Snellings~ Madhubuti (Lee), Henderson, Clarence Reed, Welton Smith, LlGyd T. Delaney, W.D. Wright, Joanne Gonzales, Mari Evans and others. Freedomways also offers lively reviews and commentaries on poetry, literature and the Black Arts scene. From the variegated atmosphere of New York gushed forth a tide of 1n olnero.v>eos hwi'nei 1-lenderson, Larry Neal Black poets, some ••!l!la,.rt!ade their mark earli"erf.; (1937- ), Reed, Patterson, Sun-Ra, Sonia Sanchez (1935(1936- June Jordan (1936- ), S.E. Anderson (1943- ), Hernton, Quintin Hill (1950- Baraka, Audre Larde, John Major (1948- ' ), Albert Haynes A, (FLurence Ar,~ 1 (tQ</7-) > ),~ Howard Jones ( 941) , N.H. Pritchard (1939- J~mes AY'Un5(on!o nes(iq.1'1Lennox Raphael (1940- ) ?, ) '/\John A. \Jilliams, Lebert Bethune (1937- ), ) , 1,/,t, ), Lethonia Gee, Bobb Hamilton, Q.R. Hand, </usef Inan, Ray Johnson, Odaro (Barbara Sho.rion Bovr>l<e Jones, 1946), Clarence Reed, usef Rahmanl(Ronal<l Stone)/ Barbara Simmons, Lefty Sims, Welton Smith (1940Clarence Major (1936(1939- ), Spellman, Edward Sprij (1934), Gi-OS'fCl'lo~dCfho-""> \)ouqh»-Y LOVl~ (I q4 ~- ) ), A.L orenzo Thomas (1944),/.f-ichard Thomas ~"u ), Jay Wright (1935- ), Ted Wilson, Lloyd Addison (1931- Q'Ut-) Kattie M. Curob~ James Arlington Jones (19361933- '' O?t1-5- ) ), ), Jayne Cortez (via Watts, °" ), Ema nuel, Calvin Forbe~, Alexis Deve~ux (1950- ), Nikki Giovanni L<>~~ �(via Fisk, 1943- ), Tom Weatherly (1942- Djangatolum (Lloyd M. Corbin) Q. 9Lf9- ), ~~e ), Ron Welburn (1944Jackson (1946- ) ' ), Joe Johnson (1940), Julius Lester (1939), Elouise Lofti•n (1950), Judy Gy /tl1n k(l'11'\J (iq44- ') Simmons/( Felipe Luciano (1947), L.V. Mack ) , At.::harles Lynch (1943(194 7- ) , Rhonda Mills, .@!!Ill K.W. Prestwidge. (tf.fto- } od i 81t0<f'to11 , Larry Thompson (1950- ), The New York Black Arts scene (poetry specifically) was all-a-whir with the excitement of publishing and reading poetry aloud at the infinite number of gatherings. older, often revived1 ones. his death in 1967. Joining these younger writers were Hughes oversaw much of the proceedings until And there were old, as well as new, outlets for the poetry which was being read at the Apollo, Carnegie Hall, New Lafayette Theater, Slugs East, Lt'be~iv f-4,,v.se ~~rd! H@rie 1?8'1!'k, and in countless community centers and churches. Most of these poets were not native New Yorkers; and a great number even were not psnpolii ailsiy there during the height of the Black Arts Movement-but often in outlying areas like Bridgeport, (Youth Bridge) Yale, Fredonia, Brockport, Rutgers, Brooklyn, Boston (Elma Lewis ' s Center for Afro-American At11 t$Lc,.c,K. Ac.o.demy ot At-T.u.nd LettT.-..s Cultur ~~ and Bedford Stuyvesant. But, while they had separate Black Arts programs, most looked to the movement in New York. Workshop there were: Douglass Creative Arts In addition to the Umbra Harlem Writers Guild (Clarke, Killens), Frederick Center♦ Poetry Workshop, the Afro-Hispanic Workshop, ~ Workshop for Young Writers, the Columbia Writing program (Killens) A. Black Arts Repertory and Theatre/School (Baraka, Snellings). Glv~, l..o..'1Le to #ie p.-ets. Among the new journals/\ fw e Umbra (1963), Soulbook (1964), Black Dialogue (1965), Journal of Black Poetry (1966) (ironically, the last three were begun on the west coast), Pride, Black Theatre (1969), Cricket (1969), Black Creation (1969), AfroAmerican: �A Third World Literary Journal (1973, Syracuse), BOP (Blacks on Paper, Brown University, 19'(/4), Continuities: Words from the Communities of Pan-Africa, City College New York, 1974), Impressions (1974), Cosmic Colors, c, bslc:hg.n dr - /\ (Fredonia, 1975) . T(During a speech at Howard University's First National Conference of Afro-American Writers (November, 1974), Tour~, recounting the tumultuous years and developments, said those responsible for the "Black arts and aesthetic movement" were "activists as well as artists." It seemed \..e. Ro, :!ones so, for this particular pattern was most obvious as Jia uah../\ returned to Newark 1ff (renaming it "New Ark") and changed his name l imamu Amiri Baraka, reflecting cin h 1n.-i 1 i.11 the great influence of the Nation of IslaTI}l\and fl\J Q~l\'t!c~es in African Fovndaftlit {jL,.d,. Ah-U eep11►forf1t,ea(;e ctn:I sdtoo'lculture. Having 1-• '/\'to re-educate the nearly half a million Harlem Negroes to find a new pride in the color," he (;(JeAT:G_~o establish Spirit House --- ~ ~e~.,tl'\Sf11~,:Co?t~ (Newark), and such s+w,il i 11 t 1\as Spirit House Players and Hovers, the African Free School (with its Kawaida doctrine), Jihad Publications, Committee for a Unified Newark, and to help launch several national Black political con. vent ions. He was a f oun cl er (1970) o f t h e;:,/\..~t~~,t..y ( tlif I ilrgr stri"f e-ri"dd en Congress of African Peoples. During the 1967 riots (insurrections) in Newark, Baraka was arrested with several companions and charged with possession of two handguns and ammunition. Between his arrest and the trial "Black P~ple!" was published BA"' .seems ti> "°'"e b"e11 UJY1vlc7etJ 11n1he.JJ;enjhilll!_,. ., PoeM s,~e Th «--""'.,,. t,t~ . t"° ch-th Cov i.Trt1ctm in Evergreen Review.A The poem openly encouraged looting, theft, murder of whites, and general insurrection: "Hhat about that bad short you saw last week"; "You know how to get it, you can get it, no money down, no money never"; "he owes you anything you want, even his life"; "Up against the wall motherfucker this is a stick up!"; together and kill him .my man": "Smash the window at night"; "Let's get �... let ' s get together the fruit of the sun, let ' s make a world we want black children to grow and learn in do not let your children when they grow look in your face and curse you by 1r pitying your tarnish ways. ~u ~v It was the kind ofAiii,,lip and tfage that ch_aracterized Baraka' s (a11dA other Black poets ' ) ~e,..se.. I\_••• ~ '\so.: ~\<:.6... wo.s ~ti"' aq..wTed bv1" ,. .,,._ between 1965Al969. ~wrim~ t hia pedeN Mlrntta: •~ a number of /\t a..ted _developments occurred. Impressed by the Mt3a.i~ "of Ron Karenga wk om he rne:t <t(hile teaching l • ?Pg at San Francisco State College in 1967), returnetl to Newark and organized the Black Community Development and Defense Organization (BCD). His efforts eventually aided in the election of a Black mayor .Kenneth Gibson deve.Lo pmem ts . These ti.a· u~s A..w ere having great impact on regional and national Black political/poetry scenes . Baraka ' s picture•paire~~ (with bandages from the 1967 scuffle with Newark police) began appearing on \sCl: t walls of cultural centers, dormitories and homes . ~'(/any observers were somewhat wary of Barakq , having seen him go through the "changes " from Beat poet w::•i~L•l...,.....,,_l~i~t~-.~·5.,..3._, to Harlem and Black Arts, into Newark antl political work , ( f or great insight into all this, see Theodore Hudson ' s From LeRoi Jones to Amiri naraka, 1973 J ♦ Yet Baraka ' s influences were felt in most centers of the New Black Poetry--and even in places where his poetry had not actually been !ead; or, if read, not fully understood and digested . It was not unusual to hear a Black youth quote a few lines from a poster-poem or from a live reading, but who, when questioned about Bara·a ' s works, did not know the name of a single one . After The Dead Lecturer, Baraka (also playwright) published Black rlagic: �Poetry ,1961-1967 (1969), In Our Terribleness ( 1970), Spirit, Reach (1972), j as well as numerous essays and stories. With Neal he co-edited Black Fire (1968) which, along with Major ' s The New Black Poetry (1969) show-cased the new poetry') . In the Forward to Black Fire, Baraka called Black artists "the founding Fathers and . . 1others, of our nation. We rise, as we rise (agin) . By the power of our beliefs, by the purity and sJ:;rength of our actions." Usi'n.3 his ~~nie, htw C}V" 4 m rYHU\ 0,.'00 4>'11"l r~, he.. v l•e,v..,e.cl 1N po.en O.V\6 W-;.iil,~s: o.s:. _; . holy man . The black artist. The man you seek. maker of peace. you seek. speaker . The lover. Look in . The The climber the striver. We are they whom The waior. Find yr self . The Find the being, the The voice, the back dust hover in your soft eyeclosings. Is you. or minus, you vehicle! selves. The black man. Is the creator . Is nothing . We are presenting. Plus Your various We are presenting , from God, a tone, your own . Go on. Now . He thus set• the "tone" for poets/philosophers , reiterating at the same time w~sberna _-r:; ·much of what --••.i.•<1exclaimed in other writings ac~0~5 the Y\<Mt-O O • Neal , a perceptive critic and balanced theoretician, d!IIIIIP published two volumes: Black Boogaloo: Notes on Black Liberation (1969 , Journal of Black Poetry Press , Forward by Jones) and Hoodoo Hollerin ' BeBop Ghosts (1975) . 1 His Afterword to Black Fire is tantamount to Hughes ' famous ~declaration ~f the twenties. Presenting "artistic and political work" =A~~~ be "called a radical perspectiv~ • Black Fire should be read "as if it were a critical re-examination of Western political, social and artistic values. " and exhorting other writer s, Neal continued: We have been, for the most part, talking about contemporary Challenging �realities. We have not been talking about a return to some glorious African past. total past. But we recognize the past--the Many of us refuse to accept a truncated Negro history which cuts us off completely from our African ""' ancest ♦ ry. To do so is to accept the very racist assumptions which we abhor. Rather, we want to comprehend history totally, and understand the manifold ways in which contemporary problems are affected by it. Speaking against the hindsight of psychology and turbulence , Neal added: There is a tension within Black America. its roots in the general history of race . And it has The manner in which we see this history determines how we act. should we see this history? it? How What should we feel about This is important to know, because the sense of how that history should be felt is what either unites or separates us . Finally, he sums up what can be called the credo or modus operandi of the New Black Poetry and the Black Arts Movement: The artist and the political a~tivist are one. both shapers of the future reality. They are Both understand and manipulate the collective myths of the race . warriors, priests, lovers and destroyers . Both are For the first violence will be internal--the destruction of a weak spiritual self for a more perfect self . be a necessary violence . But it will It is the only thing that will destroy the double-consciousness--the tension that is in the souls of black folk . �It was the kinq of challenge that sent many a newly Blackened poet or activist into the long night of the soul to purge himself of real or imagined enemies of his people. Poetically speaking, however, it was Baraka's "Black Art" that set much of the pace, form and violent tone in the New Black Poetry~ Poems are bullshit unless they are teeth or trees or lemons piled on a step. Or black ladies dying of men leaving nickel hearts beating them down. Fuck poems and they are useful, wd they shoot come at you, love what you are, breathe like wrestlers, or shudder strangely after pissing. We want live words of the hip world live flesh & coursing blood. Hearts Brains Souls splintering fire. We want poems like fists beating niggers out of Jocks or dagger poems in the slimy bellies of owner-jews. Black poems to smear on gir<llemamma mulatto bitches whose brains are red jelly stuck between 'lizabeth taylor's toes. Whores! Stinking We want "poems that kill." Assassin poems, Poems that shoot guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys 4:SI �and take their weapons leaving them dead with tonges pulled out and sent to Ireland. Knockoff poems for dope selling wops or slick halfwhite politicians Airplane poems)rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr rrrrrrrrrrrrrrr ... tuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuh ... rrrrrrrrrrrrrrr t ··· Setting fires and death to whities ass . . . . We want a black poem. / And Black World. Let the world be a Black Poem And let All Black People Speak This Poem Silently "Black Art" was often cited as the sanguine embodiment of the Black Aesthetic and a rejection of white culture and life style. Poems, Baraka states, must not only have guts and earthiness (like Blacks)) but they must , also be weapons and shields against racism, police, merchants, hustlers, crooked politicians and status-climbing Black bourgeo~ie. Above all, they should exalt Blackness ("sons," "lovers," "w_arriors," "poets," and "all the loveliness here in this world.") These then are the dominant themes in much of the New Poetry and the philosophies stated (with radical divergencies) from coast to coast. Baraka's purge extends through poems like "Poem for HalfWhite College Students," "The Racist," "Little Brown Jug" ("WE ARE GODS"), "W.W." (attack on wig-wearing women), "CIVIL RIGHTS POEM" ("Roywilkins is an eternal faggot"), "Ka 'Ba," and finally, in "leroy," his last will and testament: �When I die, the consciousness I carry I will to black people . May they pick me apart and take the useful parts, the sweet meat of my feelings . And leave the bitter bullshit rotten white parts alone . But there are also sensitive love poems in the later period, poems caught up in the stressed life of Blackne.ss ("S t erling Street September" ) : "the beautiful black man, and you, girl, child nightlove, ••• : We are strange in a way because we know who we are. Black beings passing through a tortured passage of flesh . In his Forward to Black Boo_saloo, Baraka says of the world : " the soldier 1l, ~/~Je t,) poets will change it. " /.. What Neal ' s volume changed has not yet been ascertained f/h(l"lf, C,o,. ~tJ..fi;Cl WAS p11obo.W.y r,.t(:er-J.1hi but it certainly contains ambitious and successful poetry. His debt to the older generation of poets, artists and thinkers, can be seen in poems like "Queen Hother ' s Sermon, " " The Middle Passage and After, " " Love Song in the Middle Passage," " Garvey ' s Ghost, " "Lady Day," " Harlem Gallery: From the ~ Ins id et,''/.. "Halcolm X--An Autobiography. " Making use of mysticism, chant and musicographic interpolations . Neal (re: Dumas) . is effective--moving,sensing, and feeling: Olorum Olorum Olorum The horror of "The Middle Passage After" is seen in the "Decked, stacked, pillaged" slaves. "Long Song in fiddle Passage" views the Red glow of sea-death mornings. �Other poems ("Song," "Jihad," "Kuntu," "Orishas") reveal Neal's interests in supernaturalism, African philosophy and the allusive, mystical powers inherent in the "word." He seeks poetically to implement the ideas he stated in Black Fire and a special Black issue of lJ.1E. (~ D...r.rn..Review) in summer of 1968. The issue, edited by ;m,B.'s contributing editor Bullins, compiled ideas and plays rooted in what was then called the "new" consciousnes, also featured IAM4. work by Sonia Sanchez and Adam David Hiller. #weal's "The Black Arts Movement" was a blue-print for Black Arts and political change. Echoing statements in Black Fire, he argued against "any concept of the artist that alienates him fron his community," and noted: Black Art is the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept. As such, it envisions an art that speaks directly to the needs and aspirations of Black America. In order to perform this task, the Black Arts Movement proposes a radical reordering of the western cultural aesthetic. It proposes a separate symbolism, mythology, critique, and iconology. The Black Arts and Black Power concept both relate broadly to the AfroAmerican's desire for self-determination and nationhood. Both concepts are nationalistic. One is concerned with the relation between art and politics ; the other with the art of politics. But his idea of a "separate" aesthetic was not embraced by all Black poets, artists, or intellectuals. Neither was there • complete agreement (or understanding) among its own proponents. For example, Spriggs, a versatile �artist an<l thinker, led a boycott of Major ' s The New Black Poetry on the grounds that it was being brought out by a white publisher (International Publishers) . But Spriggs had not objected earlier to use of his work in Black Fire, also published by whites (Morrow). His position statement appeared in The Journal of Black Poetry (Fall, 1968): how in the hell are the black publishers ever going to get off into it if not by the assistance of the writers . how are distributorships ever going to mature with the publishers if the highly marketable works of wm kelly, j . killens, ja wms, 1 neal, e bullins, leroi j, or the like never comes their way? does the concept of black power and black arts extend that far? i say yea, i say yea, yea . Spriggs joined a large n umber of critics and pract ; ners of the Black , \:" u U e,1-" > Le ~ > Arts--Toure, Neal , Crouch , "-1 '3u!lins, ,\Goncal ves--in the controversy over Black writers ' roles and responsibilities . Despite the controversy, however, Major ' s anthology appeared as a kaleidoscopic offering of the New Black Poetry. Major included a perceptive and fitting Introduction: THE . INNER crisis of black reality is often studded in these poems by the swift , vividly crucial facts of social reality; which consists in part, anyway, of all the implications and forces of mass media, the social patterns, the bureaucratic and mechanical mediums of human perceptions, even of the quickly evolving nature of the human psyche in this highly homogenized culture, in all of its electric processes and specialist fragmentation . Black reality, in other words, is like any other reality profoundly effected by technology . The �crisis and drama of the late 1960s overwhelms and threatens every crevice of human life on earth. These poems are born out of this tension. Avt--vt..'i !. In his own poetry, Major"-e.rnsss u:e Vietnam, alienation, impending world destruction, Black history, music, mythology, and personal excursions into dreams. He published The Dictionary of Afro-American Slang (1970), Swallow the Lake (1970), Symptoms and fadness (1971), Private Line (1971), The Cotton Club (1972) and The Syncopated Cakewalk (1974), as well as novels and essays. He has also directed the Harlem Writers Workshop. ledgements to Poetry, Lowenf els , I 1 In the acknow- 1ajor indebts the anthology to many influences: 1 Reed, Raphael, Art Berger, tl: 3t • Smith, ~ Fuller, Nat HenJtoff, 121' 14 Randall, t1P--■lt1-l Atkins, Bremen, ~ Young, and David V Henderson. Major's "Down Wind Against the Highest Peaks" is typical of his style: ~harpf-ana\angledjtwisted language, spacings that replace punctuation, tidbits of world knowledge applied to the racial state~ent (satire or exhortation), and experimental typography. Recalling his "passage" he sees "Tonto Sambo Willie"--noting that even Mexico--"an asskissing nation"--now has the "super-blonde" on its "billboards." In the midst of all these events, the poets vigorously promoted programs which extended their concepts and visions. Spriggs and Ahmed Alhamisi were corresponding editors of the Journal; naraka, l!ajor, Nazzam Al Sudan (now El Huhajir) and Neal became contributing editors. was later joined by Tour~. Editor-at-large Bullins In the seventies Ernie :Mkalimoto was added as a contributing editor with Major's name disappearing. Major, Randall, Neal, Spriggs, Bullins, Baraka~ and Alhamisi have all served as guest special editors. An important influence on (and outlet for) the new poetry, the Journal was �" in many ways born of Soulbook and Dialogue" (Goncalves, now Dingane , Journal editor). The magazine continues to print the newest poetry, zeroing in on other areas like the West Indies (Summer, 1973), printing lively news and announcements, as well as reviews and criticism . Its Spring , 1968, issue, for example , was dedicated to Joseph T . Johnson, Los Angeles poet who had recently been killed. I Abdul Karim edited Black Dialocue with Spriggs, Toure, and Goncalves serving as associate editors. Relocating in New York in the late sixties, Dialosue ' s new editorial board was represented by Spriggs, Nikki Giovanni, Jaci Early, Elaine Jones, S . E . Anderson and James Hinton . Alhamisi and Carolyn Rodgers became Midwest editors; Spellman, Julia Fields and Akinshiju became editors for the South; and Joans and Kgositsile took over as Africa and at-large editors . Soulbook ' s editorial board now includes: Hamilton, Alhamisi , Carol Homes, Baba Lamumba, Zolili, Ngqondi Masimini and Shango Umoja . Among the administrative staff is Donald Stone (Rahman) whose I work appears in Black Fire and all the journals . f Along with Spriggs, Toure, and Larry 1iller (Katibu ) , Rahman aided Baraka at Spirit House . His "Transcendal Blues," full of chant /song a nd line- exper i mentation, fuses the world of Black music (and musicians) with the " strife riddled concrete bottoms of skyscraper seas ." Rahman ' s influences, obvious in his name, are seen in his statement that a " riff " so high and grand "Could be Allah ." Finally winding the poems into a tribut e to the Black woman (" Bitter bit her bitterness humming") , he rejects Christ i ans and whites and warns that ~ My spear s shall rain • ... / (The Islam influence is a l so seen in other poets of the period : Spriggs, I Toure, Baraka, Iman, Neal, Alhamisi, Dumas, Marvin X, Sonia Sanchez, who roevl.-A.-r-, along with Nikki Giovanni emer ged as one of the most1t•' J IT IA. poets of the �era . These women poets and others--Aud r e Larde, J une Jordan , Mae J ackson , Ka tt ie M. Cumbo , Jayne Cortez, Al exis Deveaux, EpSli se Loftin, Odar o (Barbara Jones) II" heLplld 9- -..,,. .::r eatef § a new wave of exc i tement about t he pos s ib il ities and potential s •"J[t;u:I', wome1$oet r y b ,dding t o this h Mlth-y SlOMV\ ii §Aof a c tiv e 6Ji;. int e r e st a r e the new Bl ack :: oug 'a magaz i nes l i ke Encor e w om t.11 poet' The most famous oc•&•ill91!!@~••••tlllii~is Ni kki Giovanni , 3 & a - llfNia wh.u/\s ose-1·11 . · h ts d o no t profound thinker and provocative speak er, '-1 a s an d insig Jl'('tat'\c ■ \t\to h er, l I ti poet r y . Her route to New Yo r k was by way of Tennessee and Fisk Univers i ty where she was a member of Killens ' Write r s Wo r kshop . Fame came i n the late sixties a f t er she penned a series of volatile prose- l i ke statement s wh i ch wer e star tling : and even more so, coming from a woman . In the s i xt i es s he pr ivately published her poetr y and was l a t e r brought ou t by Broads id e Pr ess and larger publ isher s . Her volumes include Black Feeling, Bl a ck Talk, Black Judgement (1970 ) , Re-Creation lj p;::;::;r.(1970), My House (1972) and a book of poems for children, Spin a Soft Black Song (1971). Her anthology of Black women poets, Night Comes Softly , -'lc2 ~~e.4- was ~•± ➔ l in 1970 and she has recorded albums, written an autobi ography , and publ i shed a series of "conversations" with Margaret Walker . ~1Jrnt rous. the new poets, she has been accor ed Aaccolades: Su~t oP Year Award; £ eatur~ " · andMi\<£ D1,u,w Johnny Carso~ in ••s Highly controversial among Mfflll Q ~nc.es L ca :i:Uiss Ebony «. and Essence; appear ..A on the tt mvih. speaker 1~ed p1enTbF Qr\I l~A sought-after '1iilllla f~oWI ho~ 4 •N foman of the nett on the college circuit; ru1udsJ • ·Ahonorary doctorate degree • ~Wilberforce University and labeled the "Princess of Black Poetry" by _,,jf enounced ~ Ida Lewis, Encore editor . as an "individualist" by Madhubuti (Lee) and praised by Margaret 7T°Walker and Addison Gayle , ho.s re.feireJ Nikki Giovanni Aa ai d ~"'~i•W@ij@!~a~S~I...,"""'l""~t-•J•l•;IJlllll•Falei~I- ;th~ la..loel •4f1111±"fl!l!§.iolfllff..,',~zj z a "Revolutionary . " Her singing of "God Bles s America" on # See , as related reading, And!'.ea Benton Rushing ' s " Images of Black Wom~n in Afro - Amer i ean Poetry" (Black World, Sept ember , 1975).• tf</'Z �national television , after receiving the "Woman of the Year Award," prompted Sorn e S &N- tol\~n1.ch~ on-. '1n1'1-e µ,om.Al'\ who1 letters to Black publications questioning her sincerity .,;1uring the sixtie) 41a wrote "Of Liberation": Dykes of the world are united Faggots got their thing together (Everyone is organized) Black people these are facts Where ' s your power •••• Honkies rule the world The most vital commodity infaerica Is Black people Ask any circumcized honkie •.. The final stanza of this '"poem1"warns: Our choice now is war or death Our option is survival Listen to your own Black hearts "Concerning i.ne Responsible Negro ~ith the New Black Poetry. £00 1%uch Power" echoes other themes in The "responsible negros" are "scared" and on the run. She tells them that your tongue must be removed since you have no brain to keep it in check In "Reflections on April 4, 1968," she calls Dr. King's assassination "an act of war." . In "The Great Pax Whi{ e" she paraphrases a section from Genesis in the Bible, noting that the word was "Death"; "death to all niggers . " ve..ti ca..l. Prose, a line of interest jutted through the otherwise pt] · 1A@cr0Lr,~ . Occasionally The pants �~r>' for~ of "Beautiful Black Me1y'~'hugl what i like to hug." There is the characteristic ~ repetition and emotion-freighted language as in.,,._ True Import of the Present Dialogue, Black vs Negro": Nigger Can you kill Can you kill Can a nigger kill Can a nigger kill a hankie Can a nigeer kill the Han •.. Can you stab-a-jew ••• Can you run a protestant down with your ' 68 Eldorado ••• Can you piss on a blond head ...• The poem continues, reciting names of the "enemy" and cataloging crimes and wrong-doings visited on Blacks, finally asking: Learn to kill niggers AJ Learn to be Black men Lff;ruch of what Nikki Giovanni was saying in the sixties moved Black youth--it was not always safe or chic to disagree even if you wanted to--and some of it was admirable. But these things do not make her work defensible as poetry. "Hy Poem" and "Poem for Aretha" are certainly worthy, even noble, subjects ~ 119:1li41 fall leisurely down the page, angling here and there but revealing nothing of the insight into human beings or poetic power that one finds in a poem by 1 \-\er Po-eT...y w~r. t.y ..iasm ().l'\Q im~t ..y4nd he~•1~<1r-ced"-themess-how he~ AS 4 VlC.Ot'>IOCIS ' ievoL,1i'o Helene Johnson, Margaret Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks, or Jayne Cortez. f\ "Nikki-Rosa," M ..,_ C.t. Qtf6 '\ her most often quoted poem from the early period, is l( laiBh I fut · to-th-t \AV f,e l I wall It has a believa ble f1iu .:.n t!tc conversation-like language (characteristic of �h.on£sl1,.y ,{t.s 1a.f her poetry~and ~/\detaill \ . ~ the inner reaches of the collective Black fxperienc/ as she unfolds the story of family fun and misfortune: your biographers never understand your father ' s pain as he sells his stock and another dream goes And though you ' re poor it isn't poverty that concerns you My House is a newer Giovanni . The venom has lessened, though some of the rampage is evident in a poem like "On Seeing Black Journal and Watching Nine Negro Leaders ' Give Aid and Comfort to the Enemy1 to Quote Richard Nixon . dr"!'t - lH'~a;here dl"(echn,iue.. ' llT 1mpt-~.,e.m ls no.,swn~(i . stylf , - - L~ngvo.&e. w n The poems deal with love, the city, childhood (always her rites of woman-passage), Africa and Afro-American culture. Ytf:_r promise and potential can be glimpsed in "Africa I": on the bite of a kola nut i was so high the clouds blanketing africa in the mid morning flight were pushed away in an angry flicker of the sun's tongue ...• rtmihlsr.tti1 o ft'\Anee.S H e.►•.s~ Nikki Giovanni's importanceJ(\ies more in her personal influence (especially her great drama on albums and in public) which has inspired many youns Black women to write about themselves and their world. But some of them, like Mae Jackson who won Black World's Conrad Kent Rivers Award, have yet to show the M4.CCan~ca.,tsort~ I poet with "stuff" of poetry in their writings. 1969 by Black Dialogue Publishers. " You was published in Nikki Giovanni t-.rrote the Introduction and �Mae Jackson, in turn, dedicated the book to her. Poet is full of the "complaints" that quickly became monotonous in the poetry of the sixties. In themes and usages, the poems resemble Uikki Giovanni ' s work. "To a Reactionary," "To the degro Intellectual," and "Note from a Field Nigger," \h the,\confused '>om eii',nQ,S, are familiar • and disturbed annals of the new poetry. Sonia Sanchez, closely identified with the new poetry and the new consciousness, alternates between terse, explicit verse, and the sprawling, prosaic meanderings that often serve; the auditory demands of the new audiences. Formerly married to the poet Etheridge Knight, she has actively worked as Iler books are Homecoming (1969), We a Baddddd a playwright, poet and teacher. People (1970), It ' s a New Day: Poems for Young Brothas and Sistus (1971), Love Poems (1973) and an antholo~y from her young Writers Workshop at the Countee Cullen Library in New York, Three Hundred and Sixty Degrees of Blackness Comini at You (1972) . . "Malcolm" is a lament and a night-filled memory for her: Yet this man this dreamer, thick-lipped with words will never speak again and in each winter when the cold air cracks with frost, I ' ll breathe his breath and mourn my gun-filled nights. Her "for unborn malcolms," however is another approach . Constricting words, structure, and «,t tempting to achieve a Black street speech, she tells Blacks �to "git the word out" to the "man/boy" murderer who is taking a "holiday." Dlacks are "hip to his shit" and when "blk/princes' die again white "faggots" "will die too." Olalll lfn i'q."e An experimentalist, Sonia Sanchez added herl\.v oice to the flood of angry, cynical and derisive language in the new vers ~ ("d~ition for blk/children"): a policeman is a pig in a zoo 4ll with~the other piggy animals. and until he stops killing blk/people cracking open their heads remember. the policeman is a pig . (oink/ oink.) She also joined the poetry of Black love and man-woman unity, seeking through her particular style and voice to heal wounds of doubt, mistrust and loneliness. tll t.t,"-' In "to all sisters" she says "hurt" is not the 11 bag"~-1omen "shd be in." They are advised to love the Black man who makes them "turn in/side out." journey has carried her from the ,. . :._·, ~~ be.a.vlv P,t~'I dttlAm•t'L-s •i c!f the '\ Her revolutionary to the quiet ...... f't_urbulcnce~of _L_o_v_e_P_o_em_s--being, maybe, among the first of the new ...... poets to ful~ fill Randall ' i=, prediction that Black poetry would "move from the �declamatory to the subjective mode." June Jordan published Who Look at 1e (1969), Some Changes (1971), an anthology, Soulscript (1970), and a volume of poetry by students in her Brooklyn creative writing workshop, The Voices of the Children (1970). 'Poem~ !.~ Ex iLe ~ l'etii,.t,~ Her last volume of poetry is w Da ~1974). Concise, analytical, and book-folk based, her poetry is also a free verse style characteristic of "Uncle Bull-boy" relates the death UUl'l(4 of a man whose eyes "were pink with alcohol." Thel\brother (uncle) reminisces, practically all the recent Black ~try. in the manner of Black men, about tneir sharing of street-talk, expensive shoes, and alcohol. And finally: His brother dead from drinking Bullboy drank to clear his thinking saw the roach inside the riddle. Soon the bubbles from his glass were the only bits of charm t which overcame his folded arms. udre Lorde 1 s "Rites of Passa&e" (for MLK Jr) eulogizes Dr. King: Now rock the boat to fare-the-well. and remembers him this way Quick children kiss us we are growing through dream. Huch of Audre Lorde's recent work concerns young people; even the title of her latest book, From a L Where other Peo le Live (1973), carries the awe and dream of the child's world. She writes now about teachers, men-women relations, seasons, dreams, "As I Grow up Again " and "Blad-. Uother Woman" �who thinks of her own mother's strength when "strangers come to compliment" her: I learned from you to deny myself through your denials. Among the younger New York women poets, Judy Simmons, Alexis Deveaux and Elo1ti~Loftin sing out. "' Judith's Blues (Broadside) was published in 1973. The poems submerge themselves in the troubled human psyche ("Schizophreni~ , and explore the "Youth Cult," "Women," and "Daffodils"--although the titles do r!'.ot reveal the poet's pithy searchings. Reflecting Judy Simmons' study of psychology, the poetry yields its meaning as the multiple layers of tensions and insights are uncovered. In "Schizophrenia" the "animal squats" next to the "piano" in a "corner" with an abnormal number of legs, arms, and a mouth that stretches from "forehead to abdomen." But the poet assures herself that if she does not lose control <115 it won't come back ~<--e)( • (U~~~ inside of me tElouise Loftin's poetry (Jumbish, 1972, Emerson IIallJ has youthful, zesty -the eo.se o ~ 6l:the LA11~11At°' imagery, indicative perhaps off,....these new techniciansK: • "Rain Spread" informs that Last night thre~ her legs open to me .••• ~ e, She has the new woman sensibility, a good knowledge off ocial landscape, and the cynicism often found among today ' s young, gifted and Black. caught" displays her hurp.or and wit: if they catch you "gettin �with your pants down (ffing your guard or peeing for free if they catch you doing something crazy with quotes around it and try to make you feel like you been catched you must -be doing some thing ok # Spirits in the Streets (1973) is Alexis Deveaux ' s strange but fascinating prose-poetry account of growing up in Harlem . • A West Indian mother, dispair &~ over a husband ' s misuse of his wife and children, complains: lord why he beat that woman so? and them children god only know what ' s gonna happen to them. eatin poison . jesus have mercy . children. has lye . eat you up inside you can ' t be too careful with you got to watch them every second. The world is so evil honey you know what i mean? merciful jesus shame them with the last word . These examples represent only a fraction of the new poetry being written by younger (and older) New York area poets. - (J_qt/-<f-) ~ Others are Catherine Cuestas, wesJy lsrOLVYl) F~ Phillip Solomon, Gayle Jone~ , Stephen Kwartler, R_anessa Howard, s -~ illt!l.~ ~v!k_~ �~ "'-e. !,om e.. and Glen Thompson, to name ~,-.. mrm:lfal. Poets whoN'57 t] the earlier period also published new items . ahd uu.tr,c.h e d · I in 1 Henderson ' s Felix of the Silent h(s . Forest (1967) was introduced by Jones1',. 'iia mlfmeographed The Poetry of Soul bears no date . he .-iii tnc.,•d 1~ He also publ ished De Hayor of Harlem i n 19 70 , the same year t~~to Berkeley . Essentially a Harlem poet, Henderson sur veys everything from the "Harlem Rebellion, Summer 1964" to "Har lem Anthropo l ogy ." ~ he t r ansit ions and out r eachings of thes e poets a r e a lso evident in a poet like Toure' who in 1968 went to teach Black Stud i es at San Francisco State College . His works are J~(l97 0 , Third Horld Press) and Songhai ! (1972) , I the latter published by Songhai Press and introduced by Killens . _ Toure ' s " Soul-gifts" are amply spiced with philosophy, Black history, Black music, Islamic influences, and "Juju" which says Coltrane ' s horn is "cascading fountains of blood and bones." Songhai ranges from satire. of Diana Ross CM1iq<Al1m.$0F A":" and Dionne \larwick to ,._i-n~incere activists• _!:he magical power of words t, V~f crtb ~ :!' structure N-deal Black society . Tour~ ' s list of influences ( see Forward) explains much about some of the Bla~k poetry emanating from the New York area: foal, Dumas, naraka, Goncalves, Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders , Cecil McBee--all called " Poets of a Nation-in- Formation. " Related developnents of the New York movement can be seen in such projects as the .(;.ThP ttP ' ~ (Sol B~ tle) anthology of the Workshop for Young Writers in Harlem; Uakra , a new Iloston-based journal devoted to the examination " of events, the arts, ideas " ; Betcht Ain ' t (1974), Celes Tisdale ' s anthology of "Poems from Attica " ; a new anthology of young poets, We Be Poetin ' (1974), Tisdale; and Writers Workshop Anthology . No unifying thread runs through the work of New York area poets, except that of a relentless acceptance and pursuit of their Blackness . One notes, however , �that mysticism, examination of the occult, cosmic-musical forms and subjects, than in the poetry of other regions . But these are, of course, generalities which await more hindsight and research before they can be finalized and presented as significant phe- nomena in the larger tapestry of the poetry. Finally, for the New York area, the fire of the oral tradition was ignited by the dramati<:Jincan,ry (<lrumaccompanied) declamations of "the Last Poets" and "the Original Last Poets." Along with Gil Scott-Heron, their impact on the Black masses ~;n.llte. exce,n;a" ,,t 6, l ho.s "triem MIIN~ een Aotviau~ ➔ · ~1 ( Scoff-lltro1tt(wleo he., •~e so,.,eT•I•-~) 1\-ue w. ,..,,, • .,;o'tl '' ht>..I)(! rempol"O.l"f s1i1,1dt:.,. 5cotF,l/e,,.(Jlf (Amb,.,,~s b(c,~tJfoJ1 and n;. • .,,-eontJe,.~«ll~ Ir/~ u~ ~ 8 r ts nd tnsl JI t; 1c/~ of'p,-dfcf-GJttd e • h± dL&l!l@!l!C , IS & 2h!t&dd..ph.1!&2! tJliG &CECirl d During the New York resurgence a number of things were going well for Black Poetry in Pennsylvsnia. ~~ Lincoln '3 .. 011~ 0 Universi t y--which produced Tolsont\ Hughes wl"IJ\¥\l- --delivered another /\di verse of poets during this period: Carl Greene, Mary-Louise llorton, Everett Hoagland, S.E . Anderson, d'lf'},{_nenjamin, Gil Sco{-Heron, Bernadine Tinner, Rita i~1itchead, and others. Hoagland is a Broadside poet (Black Velvet, 1970) and Scott-Heron (Free Will, Pieces of a Han, etc.) is a recording poet-singer. Converging at points like the Muntu Black artist group--founde<l by Neal, C.H. Fuller, theoretician Jimmy Stewart, and arybelle Moore--Philadelphia poets found various (6...,l kinds of assistance. Other Philadelphia poets are~Greene (1945), Lucy ir• Mttt,,-k_~{l..vlotn) Smith from the older school, F.J. Bryan.51\(1943) , ~ larence Maloney (1940- ), �Pat Ford, Joseph Bevans Bush, Janet N. Brooks, 7 A.rd Carol Jenifer/\ Don Miz f ell. l I I (J@(@ Works by some of these youthful poets are in \:,/ Black Poets Write On: An Anthology of Black Philadelphia Poets (1970), published by the Black History 1useum Committee. duction states: Harold Franklin's Intro- "A BLACK POET_!.?.. A KIND OF WAiOR"--thus linking Philadelphia ac.vltvt\ L. t..ehffi""J sentiments to those in New York and Boston. The Black Butterfly, Inc.,kwas one of the several cross-roads for various cultural/political activities in Philadelphia. Its founder was Ualoney (now Chaka Ta) whose Dimensions of ~rnin~s published in 1964 in Paplona, Spain. "Good Friday: celebrates a "sultry brown girl' who "seems a superior animal." "sepia siren" also holds the "semen" of a "vivid passion." poets explore city life, Africa, and exalt Blackness. 2 A .. 1." This Philadelphia There is, too, the rage and vehemence often found in New York and Chicago poetry. pg• "Cool Black Nights" (Traylor) also captures driving street rhythms and f hymes: them hard-loOMl)8 hard-talking hard-loving Cool black dudes and them fine-looking fine-walking fine-talking fine-loving them fine soul sisters .... w~ Pittsburgh there Aborn the short-lived _B_l_a_c_k_L_i_n_e_s_:_A_J_o_u_r_n_a_l_o_f_B_l_a_c_k_ Studies (1970). It published Pittsburgh area poets like Ed Roberson, August I �dbo.t11\e 8,u1itt toa /\swell Wilson, lnnno nr Armstrong and Redmond. as poets from the Midwest like Al Crover The University of Pittsburgh Press opened up to Black poets that same year, publishing l t Coltrane, 1970; Song: • Harper (Dear John, Dear Can I get a Witness, 1973), Roberson (When Thy King is a Boy, 1970), and Gerald Barrax (Another kind of Rain, 1970). Roberson's m-.Kes c,.se o~ -tedou~ue poetry the gamut of : 1c u;,and styles--from neat drama to slanted ~A spacings and slashes. In "mayday" there is an "underside of heaven" and the warning from one misunderstood that he is "armed" to fi,t,'t the final kindling of your dreaming. "Othello Jones Dresses for Dinner" is a satirical look at the "Guess Who's ~oming to Dinner" theme. -: After dating . a white woman, the narrator assures her parents that he is "well mannered." Roberson adds his voice to a growing group of Pittsburg poets which includes Kirk Hall (1944- J,y <l4wf;..t$ beet1 Poetic talent - · · ~ -rath~sootl\ I l in ired"-ss 11ibe ). Washington, D.C. ) where early seve.n1ie.$ Sterling Brown continued to teach into the ~at~ gjyt · u . Howard, by now leading all Black universities in the new consciousness, was the scene of a number of significant disturbances toward "-- f e l')'lA.. ~ new~INiiliNlll!,e ~o;t a ~nudged the school While Howard's poetic history can be traced through the early days of Sterling Brown (and into the Howard Poets), the school has produced a number of younger writers: Clay Goss, Richard Wesley, E. Ethelbert Niller (Andromeda, 1974), and Paula Giddings. 1mo..: '(l. --~=&'11~-'iiiiliie ' - ~5 new was deepened and broadened by the appointments of the Guianese poet Damas and Stephen Henderson (English Chairman at Morehouse) who heads the Institute for the Arts and Humanities. « Howeveriward drama A was~••.:laffl: against a series of developments in the surrounding communities: Federal City College (Scott-Heron), Center for Black Education (Garrett), soc �New Thing in Art and Architecture (Toppper Carew)) G h v H& :Ji,,. The New School of Afro-American Thought (Gaston Neal), Drum & Spear Bookstore ani (and Press) A.. the D.C . Black Repertory (Hooks). In addition to Damas and Henderson, the Institute has added Madhubuti (Lee) , Kil lens, Goss, Brmm, Arthur P . Davis and Ahmos Z.JBolton . the program ' s service to poets has been invaluable. J: ~c.tU Selected for/\",onor~ have been Baraka, Gwendolyn Br~oks, Joans , and Dodson. poets were also featured in t~~Jt~teinnual Already Synposium: A number of Lucille Clifton, Coss, Scott-Heron, Adesanya Alakoye, Hiller• and Mari Evans. I Toure, Johnston and Kgositsile were guests for a program examining the African Cultural Presence in the Americas . Several poets have been invited to read and be recorded for the permanent audio/video library: Jayne Cortez, Crouch, Davis, Sarah Webster Fabio, Harper, Jeffers, Joans, Redmond, Sonia Sanchez, Scott-Heron, Bruce St. John, Margaret Walker, and Jay Wright. In 1968 Gaston Neal said his "philosophy" was "to purge myself of the whiteness within me and link completely with my Black brothers in the struggle to destroy t!1e enemy and rebuild a Black Nation." Ile appeared to be working at that task for a while before the Afro-American school closed. he said the tone of his life resembled a "growled mingled" In "Today" w't1'. the groan of the past .... and he lamented the jungles which had been J/ deflowered by napalm ... • T'&arl Carter, another D.C. poet, appears in Understanding the New Black Poetry. He evokes the spirits of the "Heroes" of Orangeburg, Jac}cson, Memphis, New York, and Nashville, recalling that during a riot in Nashville he was Riding somewhere in my mind with q.dridge Cleaver ... • 50 / \ �"Roots" is an unsuccessful attempt to fuse the drama of colloquial Black language with a formal English narrative about his grandmother.ither poets living or publishing in the D.C. area during the sixties and seventies .,... Aflcl Co..-.-.ie ohd Ro • ~ tfo ir\ ts, were Bernadette Golden (1949) , Ile~len Quigless (1945)" ~ Beatrice Murphy (1908of Black ), who over the years has contributed greatly to the growth poetry;_, JtAJ - , ledited three important anthologies: Ebony Rhythm (1947) anJ Today ' s Negro Voices (1970). Her own volumes of poetry are Love is a Terrible Thing (1945) and, with Nan1 Cry Out ( ~ . Negro Voices (1938), Arnez, The Rocks Her own poetry has moved from a traditional meter to a traditional free verse dealing, in the new phase, with tensions caused by overemphasizi~g "white" and "Black," and war . She is currently director of the Negro Bibliographic and Research Center and serves as managing editor of its publication Bibliographic Survey: The Negro in Print . Poetry by other D. C. area poets can be found in Transition, a journal of Howard ' s Afro-American Studies Department. Hardine and Veronica Lowe . Adjacent to n·.c., Lucille Clifton (19 36- Editors are Hiller, Iris Holiday, Ella tL 1-t"'"es t.o-ci~~t-ecl 8_sl~IL6'11l). in Baltimore) more is addeJ to thf;/f/em . ) , Sar:i Cornish and Yvette Johnson (1943. produced poetry /fh_eJ~l-.,1 ) have vtw'se• ~-•A 1ll.t $rlhdsw,flrtkt bt£+C~~..,•"!ood I\ Times (1969) , Good News • About the Earth (1972) and An Ordinary Woman (19 74) are vo l umes tp£Udaced by Lucille Clifton who also writes ~ children ' s books . She currently teaches a t Coppin State College in Baltimore where she lives with her husband and six children . temperament . to ~ Even her titles suggest something about her spirit and In the swamp of depression and bleakness, it is indeed warming someone proclaim Good News ! which will not " rust or break ." " Eldridge" is compared to a meat "cleaver" And there is humor, irony and truth in �,, "Latelfy": where the "always drunk" delivery man says: L, 'I ' m 25 years old and all the white boys my age are younger than me. 1 But· while some sing good times in the kitchen, there are also other acknowledgements: 11 .falcolm, 11 "Eldridge, " "Bobby Seale," and the student-participantsirt d~1t ~o.1i\ns /\.a t Jackson and Kent States. Good News About the Earth gives a Black or con- ----------- temporary setting to fiblical stories. 1~e 'lft-x WOM(J..r.Ly Most are unique, like I\ Mary": this kiss qs A.soft as cotton over my breasts all shiny bright something is in this night oh Lord have mercy on me i feel a garden in my mouth between my legs i see a tree An Ordinary Woman is consciously woman and the poems, like those in other fu.. volumes, deal with everyday things--"ordinary" things. LvfiLle cL\tron A.has However, become more of the mystic, using surreal and allusory imagery as in "Kali," l~ 11, ere ,:s "The Coming of Kali," "Her Love Poem, " and "Salt." !\ ' Cod's Mood": • t'-h �He is tired of bone, it breaks. Ile is tired of eve's fancy and adam's whining ways. Cornish is a poet, teacher and editor. His books include Angles (196 7), Winters (1968), Your Hand in Hind (1970), Generations (1971) t and People _Be_neath. the Window (n.d.). With W. Lucian, he edited Chicory: Young Voices from the Black Ghetto (1969) which developed into a series still being published by the Enoch Pratt Free Library (Community Action Program). editor of Chicory is Melvin Edward Brown. Current Cornish has much stylistic ammu- nition an<l is a precise navigator of language. He tells" 1IDDLE CLASS GIRLS WITH CRIPPLED FINGERS \AITING FOR ME TO LIGHT THEIR CIGARETTS": your fingers folded in your lap control the serpent in your eyes your face never staring with a smile in your ruffled ~ co1F your eyes populate the brick with restless stares. The influence of Cornish and others can be seen in Exproos Yourself(l973) , an "anthology of student writings" from .l!.dmondson High School and I Speak (1973), poems by students at Coppin State College--"the Coppin poets." 04 �l.onl ~~ t,),C • The~ Baltimore,\poets Cl~N"\ continue the ' ■•,(hi:221. of poetry - •--- that embraces the South where many poets now live: wk-, V l\'t'L "''tt\1Ly ',·vui" Spellman, Jeffers, '";"''' ,·,,;., )A, Pinkie Lane, the BUCARTSOUTH Margaret Walker, Alice Walker (19L14- poets (New Orleans), the Ex-Umbra poets (North Carolina Central University,l, Betty (.Ylorih Ca.roL.ino. ~~re IJNt'J ~tTy) Gates (Niles College, Alabama), Gerald Barrax (1933- a\'\d Powell), Leo -J. Has on (Atlanta) A.. Lorenzo Thomas. given new blood to poetry through The ~, Ladele X (Leslie \"'e~ ib·n-- receive$ and .w••~-.~~-•~•-••••11111111111111111•• contihu4-(. flow of poets and teachers to and from the South. Some well known older names are Johnson (James), Braithwaite, Tolson, Hayden, Jeffers and Vesey. wllohe.vtT...,.•t '" ..cct11'1 vu,., ,;, 1'-e -a111:,1v.-aungcr poets ~ outh are Audre Larde (Toogaloo) _, Redmond (Southern), Wright (Too galoo and Talladega), Spellman ( !orehouse), and Kgositsile (North Carolina A & T). al.So vnde ne. The South_." ! > has,\aiii~- · =tllllllllllll• 1 I 23 &Wei dramatic changes as a result of the Black Consciousness Move- ment. C-. \ ymbols are everywhere: The Free Southern and the Dashiki theaters in New Orleans, SUDAN South /West poetry-music theater group in Houston, the Theater of Afro-Arts in Miami, and Atlanta's Black Image. In Atlant « , Spellman organized the Center for Black Art which publishes Rhythm (1970). Stone became editor, Ebon (Sigemonde Kharlos Wirnberli) poetry editor and Spellman editor of essays and features. The surmner (1971) issue of Rhythm was also a memorial to Donald L. Graham (1944-1971), poet-theoretician who succeeded 'illens. as director of the Writers Workshop at Fisk . had published three books: Graham, who was also a musician, Black Song, Soul lotion., and Soul Notion II. Rhythm said he "was running one of the baddest workshops in the South" and "teaching at the Revolutionary People's college in Nashville." 1t-1~ '"fwe,m· l :tl'\sm-\)te ,f '\\e \\La.(.~ wo. .w, AL.so ,-n A,\Lt.h~ \~ liarearet Walker , a long time teacher at Jackson State College in Mississippi, hosted in 1973 the bi-centennial celebration of the publication �of Phyllis Wheatley ' s Poems. Her own poetry, however, has changed somewhat from the stance she took in For Py People . Yet Prophets for a New Day (1970) and October Journey (1973) are difficult to judge against her other work~ jrie turned to the novel in the fifties and sixties were published in journals between 1930 and 1960 . the / ivil(ights J'ovement _. t I .I 11 t ~ several poems in October Prophets is a chronicle of ace ::nt n 1 D r rm She writes about " Birmingham, " " Street Demonstration, " " Jackson, Mississippi, " bibLi(J(l on Washington, and the ~ Eu--rtE,. e 1'_•,rewllprophets rophets: ' the March " Jeremiah ," " Isaiah ," "Amosc." and " Joel. " h.1 ~ alcolm, Medgar Evers, Andy Goodman, Michael Schwerner~ftai James Chane~ ~ fought " oppression" in Louisiana, Mississippi and Georgia . October is a quieter mood, employing a variet ballad in "Harriet Tubman ." forms including the 1 of verse J" sonnetJ is seen in " For Hary ~1<"-9i:t~e.t-W4Llc:C.,.S T///ltlil\own uni~ue And McLeod Bethune" and " For Paul Lawrence Dunbar ." ,(he earlier poet is suggested in " I want to Hrite": I want to write songs of my people . · un-f,1.197'1 Alice Walk.er, novelist and poet ,~ shar ed the state of ~ississippi ( ::)Uc: · $~l) b ,vith Margaret Walker. Her vo l umes § I t (? are Once (1968 ) and Revolutionary Petunias (1973) the t itle of which, judging from other statements she has made, is prob ~bly also a pun. Her poems ,rldvJe .1tt1.n~fAher averown civil right s a c tivities, general experiences, andK orne satir e . A poem in Once relates the story of the young Black man who wanted to integrate a white beach in Alabama- -in the "nude ." to Petunias: She announces her debts in the dedication George Jackson, " heroes and heroines, and friends of early SNCC, " Bob Moses, and Fannie Lou Hamer . These poems (written in personal tones) deal �with his tor~ - - folk-strength and the stuff the Black South is made of: " romance" that "blossomed" in pews at funerals; women with fists that "battered" doors; " Sunday School, Circa 1950" ; a " backwoods woman" who kills her husband ' s murderer, tlien reminds her executors to water the petunias . And she also writes of a different kind of "Rage" : The silence between your words rams into me like a sword . Yet another Mississipian and poet is Julius Eric Thompson, a history teacher at Toogaloo . Hopes l ied up in Promises was published in 1970 and aims at ::,. lifting the new consciousness above mer e " hopes." Thompson writes about being a Black man in Mississippi, "Delta Children," Martin Luther King "Black Power." There is also a series of poems on Africa. rt!f&,l,i In Louisiana much new poetry has been old poets alike. and iiei1d1n.«t from the pens of young and «,LL Zu-Bolton, now 1'in '!'LC . , ,\edits Hoodoo magazine through Energy Blacksouth Press in DeRidder. He formerly co-edited The Last Cookie based in DeRidder, San Francisco, and Geneva, 1ew York . Hoodoo I, dedica ted to two Black student s killed by po licemen on the campus of Southern University in November of 1972, contained work by Lorenzo Thomas, Hay Miller, Pinkie Lane, Kalamu Ya Sa laam, Jerry Ward, and other southern-based poets. Hoodoo 2 & 3, a double issue published in 1975, contains work of more southern poets: Arthenia Bates d illican, Alice Walker, and Charles Rowell, as well as selections frora the broader world of Black writing. Energy BlackSouth Press will also publish A Niggered Amen, Zu-Bolton's first volume of poerns.1,u_nder the guidance v11we,.si1i/ of t he late English chairman, Melvin A. Butler, Southern1'established the short-lived Black Experience, the first issue of which contained several �poems by Alvin Aubert, a Southern alumnus who now resides in New York and edits Obsidian: Black Literature in Review. Aubert's Against the Blues (1971) surveys blues, love and his Louisiana heritage. Pinkie Lane, new English Department head at Southern, published Wind Thoughts (1972f as well as several Broadsides: Two Poems (1972), Poems to ~Iy Father (1972), and Songs to the Dialysis Machine (1972), all brought out by South and West, Inc., of Arkansas. South and West is also the publisher of the annual Poems by Blacks (1970, 1971, 1972) for which Pinkie Lane has become permanent editor. Butler inaugurated the annual Black Poetry Festival in 1972. In the program of the first festival, he stated: · The Black Poetry Festival provides a rare opportunity to bring together professional and apprentice poets in an effort to define and legitimize all forms of Black poetic talent as a prelude and postlude to defining and legitimizing the reality of Black people. Hopefully, the results of our efforts will be a better understanding and a greater appreciation of the lives, aspirations and achievements of Black people. ,~~ ~ inclvci,hq '1iiilll,.'"l:he festivals "-.ll&l®e.•Jt=a•ll,21!!1'&98 attracted a number of poets I\ H~hubiti, Sonia Sanchez, Randall, Redmond (writer-in-residence, summers 1971-72), Zu-Bolton, Knight, Aubert, Lucille Clifton, Kalamu Salaam, Neal, Audre Lorde. and Irma HcLaurin. proql\4MS The ~~• •~:k , which included student poets and musicians, have inspired a Poetry Writing Workshop under the supervision of Rowell, an English instructor., The first two volumes of Poems by Blacks contain a rich lode of southern poets: Leon E. Wiles (Philander Smith College), Elijah Sabb (Little Rock), Book.er T. Jackson (Little Rock), Eddie Scott (Memphis), Otis Woodard (Memphis), Arthur Pfister (Tuskegee Institute, Beer Cans Bullets Things & Pieces, �L, nd 1-h,rdnd; 1972) '/\Upton Pearson (Jackson, 1ississippi), ~Jacquelyn Bryant (Meridian), Lois be11~l~ t-f-1..t-~tU..(1'o,.Ucv,~ssee)) --t,.t, te. y Miller (Baton Rouge ) , ~ arbara Jean Knight (Memphis ~tnd Katheleeen Reed (Shreveport). Although Pinkie Lane did not edit the first two issues of Poems, she acte<l as advisor and her own work was substantially represented . a gifted• word-manipulator with She is onl ur.unate skill and passion . North of Baton Rouge/ in Jew Orleans, the Free Southern Theater had burned out by the late sixties, but out of its workshops came Nkombo which carries the work of BLKARTSOUTH writers . Tom Dent, one of the founders of 0.0.rr\ FST, and jointly edit the publicat ion. Some BLKARTSOUTH poets are Isaac Black, Dent, Salaam, Renaldo Fernandez, Nayo (Barbara i1alcolm), Raymond Washington and John O'Neal. Again, no single thread ties these poets together--except the "movement" in the South . But their concerns for the movement are often expressed better outside of -.... poetry. • - - - - In 1969 BLKARTSOUTH published individual voluues of poems by Salaam (The Blues Herchant), Fernandez (The Impatient Rebel), :fayo (I 1 ant He a Ho1:1e) ,-. and Washington (Visions From the Ghetto). Afro-American salvation. "Racist Psychotherapy" is Black ' s blue-print for He advises Blacks to spend less time rapping and drinking and more time working for the cause . In "Ray Charles at Mississippi State" Dent says I hear people waiting for the riot to begin in their hearts .... ( Of "The Blues, " Salaam says:, ,,,--,---- .. ~ it . is . not sub mission . . . \ , But bo much of his work is speecht · Salaam has also published Hofu Ni Kwenu: Hy Fear Is For You (1973) which received a mixed review from Rowell in the �4 h.:is September, 1974, issue of Black World . ~1 ~ an editor of the <1 Vcl Lv~ bL.e pvbLt ,41, • New Or leans-based Black Collegian) A Fellow BLKARTSOUTHerner Nayo writes a " Bedtime Story" : an exchange between mother and son about " revolution. " Answering the son ' s question, "when we gonna have the revolution?" , the mother says " soon son ." The other poets castigate whitey and praise Blacks. ironicall y they write very little about southern life . the Congo Square Writing Workshop . But, Dent currently leads There are also writing workshops at Dillard and Xavier Universities . Cu ~I\ tr\ Julia Fields, ~ ~ iving in North Carolina, brought out East of tlf Moonlight in 1973, but one of her most eloquent testimonies is " High on the Hog " which establishes her right to have " caviar" or " Shrimp souffle" over " gut " or " Jowl. " Some menus an<l political stances are over-exoticize<l by revolutionaries , she says, and she has "earned" the right to do what she likes . She has even heard " ·laus Haus " screaming and " Romanticizing pain. " But she has paid her dues, and had enough pressures from both sides of the color line . o..h4 ~~ e p .. .,.. do.► t The subtlc,edoe , but direct powe) of Julia Fields s ugge sts ~ Black poetry.,. }"o.shvilLe ftf:~om. bh ii .ill! t I O A ] i tl\~ecLoof' ; cameAJohn Oliver Killens1 i1¥pa -•Hi t Writers Conferences at Fisk University, the most important one taking place i n j pring of 1967 . Hayden, who had been at Fisk since the forties left in 1968 after a series of brushes wi th proponents of the Black Aesthetic . The 1967 con- ference (probably the straw that broke the camel ' s back for Hayden) is seen by some as a major juncture in the New Black writing . Gwendolyn Brooks taU:.ed about it in her autob •t ography, fargaret Walker discussed it with Nikki Giovanni in their published "conversations, " and Hoyt Fuller wrote glowingly of it in Black World . ivriters atte nding the conference were David Llorens, Fuller, �Ron Iilner, Clarke, Bennett, Margaret Danner, Nikki Giovanni, Randall, Lee, Margaret Walker, Sonia Sanchez, Jones.-. and Margaret Burroughs. Probably held in the South for symbolic reasons, the conference provided the first real national dramatic arena for old and young writers . Gwendolyn Brooks (a "Negro" then, she has said) recalls being "coldly respected" after just having flm-m to Nashville from "white white South Dakota." However, she was among the first (with Randall and Fuller) to take up the banner of the Black Aesthetic and the causes of the young writers. Such action, of course, was displeasing to a number of white and Black poets, not the least among them Hayden who refuse, to acknowledge the existence of a "separate" aesthetic for Blacks (Kaleidoscope ~ f ;anu:ry, 19681 Black World pol ) . Althougb the Fisk -el- 9alil f has been followed by dozens of Black colleges all over the South, Midwest and East, there is still no monolithic stand on "directions" but some writers keep trying to give then anyway. R,p1e indication of the healthy diversity araong Black writers. :is the journal Roots, published at Texas Southern University. Lditors are To!!lr.ly Guy, Jeffree James, Lo-l't.t\JO 'fh omo.~ ls tlL,d A ss.ot:JoTetl t,., il1-\ thE pucUe4.rton , Turner· 1lhorton, and Hance Williams. I\.Volume I, number I contains essays, art and the works of several poets, most of them southerners. The f poetry, devoid of monotonous theme or style, represents a broad range of interests in linguistics, subjects and forms. gazed forever backwards." m'lo/ in "a love supreme" says "all my eyes ~ In 'she' 11 never know 11 Mickey Leland writes of various aspects of the social and physical landscape, including the "Kinky haired boys" who build "arsenals of straw. 11 Clarence Hard notes in. "Hanging On" that the rent has gone up, eviction is immt•nent, there is no food for the baby, and Hanging on aint easy .... I �j . .ahmad j. ' s title "ilar<l Head Hakes a Soft Ass" implies the poem ' s statement. And fantasy eternalizes, "like a good high," for Tommy Guy in "Brother." - 'the themes of unity, self-esteem, the African "motherland," and anger remain in the new poetry as the Midwest and West contribute immensely to ~ 'rs rilliance and the controversey. Ohio, for example, rcpre- sented a unique gathering of diverse views on the new consc1ousness, attracting a number of poets to aid the work of Norman Jordan (1938Kilgore ,._ (all f ~ Cleveland) an<l Hernton. Now at Oberlin, Hernton succeeded ~-.,.,,, ~ Redmond K~ Jn Ii ,ro B writer-in-residence there began a residency at Ohio University. during Hernton ' s leave-of-absence . ) , Atkins, James ~ the same yea rJ'fr oupe ~bfu " Sarah Webster t(1as also taught at Oberlin However, Cleveland activity was spurred by a long tradition of Black writers including Hughes, Chesnutt (one of the founders of Karamu House) and Atkins. host of youn3er poets: This continuu1'1 produced Jordan and a Anthony Fudge, Larry Howard, Larry Wade, Art' Nixon, Clint Nelson, Robert Fleming (Ku Uais magazine), Alan Bell , Roland Forte, Ted Hayes, E. Buford and Bill Russell of the Muntu Poets . Other participating writei artists were Clyde Shy, Ameer Rashid and Anetta Jefferson . for poets and their activities came from various places: Support the Cleveland Call and Post, Afro-Set Black Arts project , United Black Artists, Free Lance and Karamu House where Jordan ' s plays were produced. Kilgore writes out of a strong tradition of Black humanism nurtured in religious homes . His volumes are I,lJ.e Big Buf,falo and OS}lEp; ,fQSi:W~ (1969), Midnight Blast (1970) and A Time of Black Devotion (1971). The poens expose the contradictions in American Democracy and survey the "Iligh Rise Dreams " of est I 3 fl& Blacks caught in the urban renewal scrabble . Devo tion, dedi- cated to Coretta Scott King, vibrates with concerns for Black students, Third �World survival, and a fascination with Fra:/i,. Fanon~ different kind of poet, Jordan is sometimes angry, cynical and violent; other times prophetic and mystical. He has published three volumes: Destination: Ashes (1967, 1971), Above Haya (1971) , and / with Harc)' a Gage, Two Bo&ks (1974). Dedicated to the "Community," Destination contains Jordan's best and most memorable poems. In Cleveland he emerged as a major force in the new Black poetry, uniting the older tradition, symbolized by Free Lance, and the Huntu Poets. Destination, first published privately by Jordan, was later brought out by Third World Press (Chicago) with an Introduction by Lee, who said he "learned" that Hughes had no need to "re-write and revise." (!) Anyway, Destination chronicles Jordan's own development from the period of civil rights through Black Power. His poetry is all free verse, usually simplistic narrative making ample use of dramatis persona from every walk of Black life. There is alcoholism, violence, pover~y, loneliness and exaltation of Blackness. "I Have Seen Them" describes those on relief, hungry and cold} praying for "miracles." Nellie Reed used to be a t irl-about-town, "Laughing and dancing," but now at 26 she is dead and her ghost "trembles" in an alley wine bottle "needing a fix." Jordan also spoofs "High Art and All that Jazz": Fuck you and your damn verbs let me tell it like it is and "Feeding the Lions" (1966) is his most anthologized poem. The "army" of brief-case-carrying social workers invades Black neighborhoods each morning, pas8l out checks, mov~quickly from one door to another, and, after filling �\4.s ~ quota} leavet 'before <lark." There are also poems about mysticism, religion, mythology, and karma, including drawings of eyes, triangles and circles--all reflecting the many influences on Jordan's work and the approaching new mood (Above Maya). But Destination, with its short, expigrammatic verses and parables, sees through allusory, romantic "unity" near the end and mounts an attack on revolutionary charlatans, back-sliders of the movement and those who view violence as the only solution to racism. Yet "Cosmic Witchdoctors" reaffirms his faith in Black writers working far into a "liquid night'J they provide the foundation for tomorrow's liberation. Jordan's belief in the mystical, magical powers of the word can be seen in the name Vibration, a Cleveland magazine with which he was closely associated. It is "Dedicated to the Resurrection of the Mentally and Spiritually Dead." a. Ohio journals: poets found outlets for their work in Vibration and other Black Ascensions (Cuyahoga Community College), Proud Black Images (Ohio State University) and Lifeline: When America Sings She Croaks (Oberlin). Oberlin students also produced a special Black issue of the college ' s Activist magazine; it contained poems by both students and well known poets. a staff member of Black Ascensions, published Migration in 1972. Cleveland poet, B. Felton (1934- Fudge, Another ), brought out Conclusions with an I1tro- duction by Atkins who praised the young poet for not consciously engaging in the "disfigurement of perceptions" to polemicize a "constricted kind of 'relevance.'" In "An Elegy to Eternity," Felton, a vibrant poet, says: Tear-ducts swell, bursting in a delight of flood and fury. Garfield Jackson, a young prize-winning poet, is one of the editors of �Proud Black Images. pages: Many young and older Ohio poets are included among its Forrest Gay, Dianne Gou:J_d, Jackie Toone, Ebrahim Aljahizz, Mohssen Aslam (Chris Jenkins), Battuta Lukamba Barca, Linda Callender, Beverly Cheeks, Antar Sudan Mberi, Leatrice Emeruwa, Roslyn Perry Ford, Ray Montgomery, Kilgore, Jordan♦ and others. ()._ Although the journal's title sets -.."conceptual pace and places it in the stream of the new consciousness, there is no unifying theme or idea in the poetry. John Whittaker calls "Singers, Dancers," the "doers of initial deeds" and Implementers of the inevitable Black life. Hernton, who attended Ohio schools, became writer-in-residence at Central State University, in the sixties. He published The Coming of Chronos to the House of Nightsong in 1963 and since then he 1as written many books and articles on America's social/sexual hangups. in the first issue of Confrontation: One of his most powerful poems appeared A Journal of Third World Literature (summer, 197O)/ foun<led and edited by Troupe at Ohio University. "Street Scene" shows Hernton playfully looking at the identity question along with other things. When he meets and speaks to his "dream" on the "street," he receives this answer: "Go to hell, sonofabitch." Confrontation also publishes other Ohio poets; yet, its concerns are broad as seen in the names of contributing editors: Damas, Sergio Mondragon, Fernando Alegria, Neal, Redmond, Tam Fiori, David Henderson, Melvin Edwards and Wilfred Cartey. Ats• ,1&owe.l i~i,"1,in,of.11,c. nlft,,toltlt«I-~ • •Gther Ohio comrnunitiesA.r am1tb ~ l ~ '" " ts 932; 22 r I. CincinaJ ti' s first J.' Black Arts Festival was organized by Nikki Giovanni in 1967 and out of this effort grew The New Theater. Herbert Martin (1933- 5 15 ), New York the Nine �Hillion and Other Poems (1969), made an immeasurably valuable contribution to the understanding of Black poetry when he organized the Paul Laurence Dunbar Centennial in 1972 at the University of Dayton. Indiana heaved forth precious words from Gary, Indianapolis, PurJue, Terre Haute and other areas. Mari Evans organized arts and consciousness programs in Indianapolis and Bloomington. I Am a Black Woman,containing poems written over several years, unfortunately did not find a publisher until 1970. However, the book deservedly received the Black Academy of Arts and Letters Second Annual Poetry Award. She has been closely identified with activities in Chicago where Third World Press publishes her children ' s writings. Her title poem is a spiritual, psychological and historical journey of the Black , woman whose "trigger i re/d fingers" now seek the softness of my warrior's beard ••. • A major poe}• f5R : p t 94 it combines the best of the modernists techniques with a chart-work of music so as to give the impression of someone singing or humming along with the read ~ • j l k, Mari Evans scans other fields of Black life, writing about lonely and dejected women, self-pride, violence, Black unity and Africa. In "Who can be Born Black" she joyously and defiantly asks: Who can be born black and not exult! Also closely associated with the Chicago and Detroit movements is Etijidge Knight (1933- ), who was serving a 20-year term in Indiana State Prison when Poems from Prison (1968) appeared · 1 ■ with a Preface by Gwendolyn �Brooks. She called his poetry Vital. Vital. This poetry is a major announcement ••• And there is blackness, inclusive, possessed and given; freed and terrible and beautiful . Her ovm version of the Black Aesthetic was expressed in the same statement: " Since Etheridge Knight is not your stifled artiste, there is air in these poems." Knight roams the deep crevices of Black spiritual and psychic experiences as he combines the language of the prison sub-culture with the rhythms of Black American street speech. He bounces or drives hard--a poetry of "hard bop " --looking at prison life, love and ancestry. Exceptional pieces are the folksy "Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane," the mystical and mythical " He Sees through Stone, " the genealogical "The Idea of Ancestry," the innovative Haiku sections, and "On Universalism" Bl.cu,k.$ 1 which warns against applying " universal laws" toA"pains" and " chains " in America . His technical abilities are poignantly displayed in haiku " 9": Making jazz swing in Seventeen syllables AIN ' T No square poet ' s job. Knight, who was later released from prison, also edited Black Voices From Prison (1970) and in 19 73 Broadside Press published Belly Song and Other Poems . He loses his reach when he tries to over-intellectualize in his poetry . \~~ct' ~v~p -~ ~d ~y Mi' ii' 3 :ht L 1 1 3 L pea; I p I slips into polemic s. = I t 1 lJ hi And j2£ 1t1.S Belly Song . secorJd The ..._,. book has some fine moments but it sometimes However, Knight is still stretching out as a poet, currently doing research into oral literatu~e with the aid of a Guggenheim grant . 5.t,] �Belly shows him pursuing this tradition in "The Bones of My Father" which smile at the moon in Mississippi from the bottom of the Tallahatchie. Finally, a number of poets from this general region of the Midwest and South are included in a special Black Poetry issue of Negro American Literature Forum (spring, 1972) edited by Redmond. The Forum is published by Indian~ State University School of Education and edited by John Bayliss, an Englishman. It regularly reviews Black literature. Chicago is a Hidwest heart and has a long tradition of Black Arts, going back to, and before, Count Basie's opening at the Sunset Club in 1927. However, some of the more recent forces helping to shape the new poetry movement there -th-e Po.-.mtcl bL.e are: Wor--K~kof artd South Side Community Arts Center, ~ ohnson Publications, Kuumba's,1Root LM4Y4d..e't f341 ..."'" t>~~ Theater (Francis and Val Ward), the DuSable Museum of African American '1listory,\) OBAC, Institute of Positive Education and Third World Press (Nadhubi ti~ Free Black Press, Afro-Arts Theater, Malcolm X ~ g e , Oscar Brown, Jr., Muhammad Speaks, Ellis Bookstores, Chicago Defenderl\ Philip Cohran (Artistic Heritage Ensemble) • -1 J Much of the new poetry scene e}!AC~ , generates from I 5 Fi C J 1 and Gwendolyn Brooks. Fuller, Black World managing editor, is also advisor to OBAC's Writer's Workshop. .().; In" 1969 (fall) issue of Nommo, the workshop's journal, Fuller said: Black is a way of looking at the world. The poets of OBAC, in revealing their vision, celebrate their blackness. In this moment in history, what might under different circum- �stances be simply assumed must necessarily be asserted. And the OBAC poets know--if others do not--that pale men out of the West do not define for mankind the perimeters of art. This they want all black people to know. In the Journal ' s winter issue of the same year, Fuller said OBAC members were "seeking" to be "both simple and profound." They display an " imaginative re- presentation of their e1~periences ," but they also seek " to be revolutionary." In the first quote, Fuller's tone, carrying the battle-baiting phrase , "even if others do not," seemed to have been a signal for , among others , Don L. . ,nisN1. own ,.~on a 11 f rants. to continue ttac~t 0."' Lee (1942- ), cows, as Lee U ~ it, and since "others do not " know what the youthful Chicago There ~ Blacks presumably did know , Lee's assignment was to teach them. no sacred Gwendolyn Brooks concurred with most of this feeling, embracing as it were a "new" Blackness and (unfortunately) self-deprecation: engaging in " It frightens me to realize that, if I had died before the age of fifty, I would have died a ' Negro ' fraction ." Lee/ following the examples of Randall and Baraka, began Third World Press--a valuable vehicle for the new poets--and changed his name in the early seventies to Haki R. Madhubuti . He also estab- lished the Institute for Positive Education which publishes Black Books Bulletin( with himself as edito9. Sterling Plumpp (1940- ,..,., Other poets (A.-e. included in the editorial staf ~ ), Johari Amini (Jewel Latimore) (1935- ), Emanuel, Sarah Webster Fabio, the late~ lorens ( who launched Lee ' s national career in Ebony, Harch 1969) jllt an~ ~ / a 11. 1 OBAC was founded in 1967 and poets of varying temperaments were attracted to it and Gwendolyn Brooks ' workshops: Rodgers (1943- ), Walter Bradford (1937- 5 ), Carl Clark (1932- Carolyn ) ' �Mike Cook (1939- ), James Cunningham (1936- Sam Greenlee , Phillip Royster (1943- Lee, Linyatta (1947(1933- ) , Sharon Scott (1951~ ), Ronda Davis (1940- ), ), Peggy Kenner (1937- ), ) , . . . Sigemonde Wimberli (Ebon) ), and~ontinual stream of newly arriving poets. Other Chicago area poets are Stephany Fuller, Eugene Perkins, Irma McLaurin, Lucille Patterson, Jerrod, Zack Gilbert (1925- ), Alicia Johnson (1944- ) , Ruwa Chiri allll'l- 1 The work of many Chicago area poets can be found in Nommo, Black Expressions, Black World, Black Writers ' News, Huhammad Speaks, and in the anthologies A Broadside Treasury (1971) and Jump Bad: edited by Gwendolyn Brooks. A New Chicago Anthology (1971), both They can also be found in ... numerous other nationally-distributed anthologies and journals. 7 I§ QW . l3lack World, as name and concept, was~ oncession won by Chicago area artists and activists, who protested against the old nam)l'1'egro Digest) in the late sixties. Fuller continues to guide the magazine's new image through the ticklish waters of co~troversy and change. iii _ . Black World's issues, and But many readers have been critical of Some. particularized stands, 11,.l ack of "open" forum on ·rsA tendency 4 Nevu-n.eteu to circumscribe individuals and groups. I\.- the beew. journal has /tt1n indispensable aid to ;.;;- Black poets and writers, printing their work, identifying anthologif"sV noting books published, and serving as /1~~-irlit,lt:. facilitat,or for prizes and • • • • contact. ~j fJv ~o...me.. f /1 ~ ), ~W~(Jer/fit. 1 e c. h~\ltV\&e oPp.,_bdvG1'n9 4 Jo11.,.nt'-L 1°hdt ~\.'\ irtfC«d· 1it new SOJ)ht~lictTion a.~d; Among all new poets, Madhubuti is second only to Nikki Giovanni in the . , com m.,01Ty P~e,es number of accolades and the commercial attention he and his poetry have received. A sampling of critics, poets and scholars who feel he is one of the greatest of the new poets would have to include Stephen Henderson, Fuller, Gwendolyn Brooksylargaret Walker, Paula Giddings, Baraka, Mari Evans, Randall and Gayle. �he. Gwendolyn Brooks has said lf&dt1&ha5,f\ resembles Jesus Christ and her Introduction to Jump Bad hails him as "the most significant, inventive, and influential black poet in the country." P~e. ~qui.sire iJb j l\of reading + 1 Overlooking, for the moment, the " all" the poetry in the "country" before making such PA ... Ad. C,~ICO a stater.1ent, it simpm; is · L in view of the "collective" policy--and 1-0.silto'l..$ the anti-individualist,e11 ii )8a--which allegedly forn the cornerstone of the Chicago poetry scene. Mtihvfov1l ..-..1\h as published five volumes of poetry: Think !Hack! (1967), Black Pride (1968), Don ' t Cry, Scream (1969), We ifalk the Way of the New World (1970), Directionscore: (1973). Selected and New Poems (1971) and The Book of Life His Dynamite Voices, Vol. I (Broadside), published in 1971, is a study of 14 Blac;'- poets of the sixties; but\,!t reveal~ike his other \~ c,1-1•ftic,: a. Sm? njJtcN4 that h~ a hazy thinker, who lacks discretion ancf,ij: irm understanding of the Black poetry tradition. He spends an entire page, for example, illuminating and apparently advocating the use of the word "motherfucker." And any book about the sixties should not cone off the press without exami- ning the poetry of LeRoi Jones/Imamu Baraka. Madhubuti attributes the fathership d-,e~ tto't of the New Black poetry to Baraka, but • ijif!flifilntly ii ;j,111upa:S!k uf~ iscuss :a·• ..., the man ' s poetry . There are other, incredible flaws in the book, for which this young poet ' s ~ mentors must share some blame . As a critic, he did not (could not!) cultivate the "distance" of a Johnson, Brown, Redding, or Henderson, and consequently--already lacking discipline and training--could not really see the poetry. The bookl Is redeeming values, such as they are,' ,-r.s possibly reside in ~incide~tal informat-ion and .,_... bibliography. As a poet, Lee fares better, employing wit, irony, understatement and f1gri••~1, ~5 . (In the rn~N:rt o~ 8l4.c k so.L ""r,·ov-.": 'ttesv1 SAves.-S&H,reen Sio.mps!0_ · ~- · J\.But there are excellent poets in Chicago \M'ho ha.e,e. b,en dw•FU hi, �f'oLr1r r:<l l ~ age i (Plumpp, Cunningham, Rodgers, Gilbert, etc . ) l Ml!P llifr Id i His themes range from what Arthur P . Davis has called "The New Poetry of Black Hate," - through love and Black pride, to the ha ar,a pontificat ions in The Book of Life where he re-ar ranges sayings and parables stated better by Aesop, bush Afr icans , Plato, d1 Baraka♦ and Tolson . Like ikki Giovanni and others , hi s early work re-inforced t he self-love coacept, castigated whitey and encouraged Elacl- unity. Host of his 11e r. we"",e " sunnned up in the titles Think Black! ~!11111!!~ and Black Pride; his devices are everyday conversation ,( often not wellI ...~ ~• • n,t ,t,aa10., 1 wroug 1t but sometimes quite startling nd musical rhythms ("The Hall"). These he adjusts in an often effective typography which moves in parallel . ,n columns vertically or horizontally on the pages. In Introductions to his .,.,'e.sio . books an~•~ riticaJ! 1 articles Ha<lhubuti ••-,i1iAg1.ves "directions" to Black writers--as he does in much of ~.S poetry. · d..#1 "First Impressions Poet's Death," -.,.elegy for Conrad Kent Rivers, t,;~111111=1!!"~ un-talked-about ~~a h A~\'f'OV\'fQl'\ 4 ch.-.ul'lltlU s lcAthe often oP S.o1-ne cJ,e. 1111111111••• caus{iremature Black deaths . ilJll••iM!~Aof "too bv't much" sex and drink, he says1r--, "poets who poet" seldom die from overexposure. But he can unknowingly dabble with the most complex aspects of Black life as in "The Self-Hatred of Don L. Lee" wher:e, after stµdying Black history, he learns to love the "inner" person and hate (with vehemence) my light brm-m outer . �Certainly a profound and tragic dilemma is stated here: since hating one's color will not change it; and since one has to live with it for the rest of one's life. It is a good poem for studying the so-called "solution" that some Black writers claim to have "found" to the identity problem. I . ... WI I .1/one of his most fanous poems is "Don't Cry, Scream." Praised highly by Stephen Henderson, the poem paraphrases the her{ tical rantings of Ron Karenga who A tribute encouraged Illacks to renounce the Blues. 1'-t ( h I e..-.c{fLr ph u ?) to Coltrane, ,\is largely graphicf\:•1itt1 occasional areas of intelligibility. Then ti,/$ so.11en,1 there is ~ self-disgust: n i cried for billy holl iday. v the blues. we ain't blue the blues exhibited illusion., of manhood. t,4ou1c.oulo C.e,L~'1n ~~ve•~vot.ved''withoc.,Ti't'l bL.ue.s 7 Even the German Janheinz Jahn knew better. f\ And certainly, today, Hadhubuti must face the question: it"? if the blues were destructive, then l,ow did he "make Indeed, how did anyone "make it" without the totem of survivalisms necessary to "cross over"? Madhubuti ' s influence on the new poetry has been substantial, however, though in most instances the influence has been in the th e... ''.ttu,J''"~,n /\ . e 1u i 0~ J.t H VJ OLad<.. area of politics rather than poetry. vv ~ 11n ,. v he t\0-i \\el.~e.d tt \)Op1>Lo. Carolyn Rodgers ' volumes are Paper Soul (1968), Songs of a Blackbird r, ,~ f>otrru II (1969), 2 Love Raps (Broadside) (1969), Blues Gittin Up (1972) and How I Got GYII, (1975). Womanly and convincing, she writes of young women, love, revolutionaries and music. In "Phoenix" she recalls traveling "with the wind" and hearing the many voices screaming blooddrops of time. "Jazz" describes "three" at the bar, the clicking of drinking elasses, and the murmur of thick mouths •..• �"Rebolushinary x-mas/eastuh julie 4/etc . etc. etc." is a satire on "militants." And she tells us that bits of me splintered ir():o a mirror in "Look at My Face a Collage ." These ideas and themes, and many others, can also be found in the poetry of Johari Amini, Plumpp and Cunningham . Johari Amini ' s books include Images in Black (1967), A Folk Fable (broadside) (1969), Let ' s Go Somewhere (1970), and A Hip Tale in Death Style (1972) . She relies heavily upon Bl ack colloquialisms, usually achieving success. But she has other ranges as· can be seen in " Brother" whic 1 longs for the " soil" of Black poeple, where they can feel the universe shudder .... wo.. l(ja.-e Plumpp ' s,iPortable Soul (1969 ) , Half Black, Half Blacker (19 70) and Steps to Break the Circle (19 75) . A southernPr with a backr.round in psychology, he has also written a provo c ative study called Black Ritu a l•~ His interests are seen in t it l es like " From Manless Sisters to Big Bad Rappers," "Black Messages" ("believe in us " ), "Living Truth" ("black history ... a banned epic"), and 1'egypt (For Black Notherhood)": an everlasting sunrise awoke ... • One of the most perceptive, skillful and innovative poets, however, is Cunningham. His one volume is The Blue lished widely in periodicals. arratot (1974) and he has been pub- "The City Rises" as a sad stiff wooden place "St. Julien ' s Eve: For Dennis Cross" ji wonderfully mixes the senses; the •• s-tA hbQJ ..,;, narrator is l\the " ear" by Brahms, and then there follows great poetry: the wind-man tearing at the bridge as a man stands wondering �why does the river float up to the sky A Tolsonian thrust, "Rapping Along with Ronda Davis" is a delightful combination of Hoon beams & yams ~nd shows Cunningham 's ability to place disparate orderings in his poetic vise. "A Street in Kaufman-ville: or a note thrown to carolyn from rodgers place" is a study of the "fragments" of Bob Kaufman in whom the poet sees a madness unli1.e my own .... ~riving " From the Narrator 's Trance," a song thumbed-down a cruiser for a ride .... Cunningham also writes of other poets and artists. In conducting his fascinating experiments with the language, he celebrates the wide span of the hybrid Afro-American heritage. And certainly, here is a poet to be closely watched . Gilbert, My Own Among other Chicago poets who published volumes are: Hallelujahs (1971); Chiri, An Acknowledgement to Hy Afro-American Brother (1968); Perkins, TI.lack is Beautiful (1968); Wimberli (Ebon) Ghetto Scenes (1968) and Revolution (1968) ("a new Illack voice to alarm the establishment"-Perkins); Nargaret Burroughs, What Shall I Tell my Children 11.1110 are Black (1968); Greenlee, Blues for an African Princess (1971); Lucille Patterson, Hoon in Black (1974); Stephany, Hoving Deep (1970); Royster, The Black Door (1971); Kgositile , Spirits Unchained (1969) and For Melba (1970); Butler, Black Visions (1968); and Jeif d, To Paint a Black Picture (1969). Yet a newer group, not all Chicagoans, have been published in Third World Press ' New Poets series: Angela Jackson, Voodoo/Love Magic (1974); Damali (Denise Burnett), I Am that We Hay Be (1974); Fred Hord, After Hours (1974) and • �Sandra Royster, Women Talk (1974) . • w 1d.e.. These young poets deal with a ~ ariety of "~~w,\&IC!I\ subjects, though with a n 11 Il variety of forms; mostly, however, they are concerned with revolution, self-pride, heterosexual relations and Black life in urban America. Among the many good things which emerged from Chicago was the "new" Gwendolyn Brooks who, as we saw in Chapter V, has always been solid in her Blackness and won<lerfully magic in her poetry. The Brooks of In the Mecca (1968), Riot (1969), Family Pictures (1970) and Aloneness (1971) is not drastically different from her former self. In Report From Part One (1972), her autobiography, she apparently approved the use of a Madhubuti Preface which tells more about his own reading and writing problems than it does about this great woman ' s poetry . Madhubuti complains about her complex verse; but her poetry has never been " easy" to read (probably never will) and Riot continues that tradition of toughness, a poetry which yields meaning after many readings. She employs mythology, history, sarcasm and dramatic ,, dialogue to reveal white middle class pomposity even in face of a " Riot 11 • 5He. e. fl <JP Svt-vey.s Bing Crosby and Melvin Van Peebles, and MilflllD•Aof love. l'\l ater The " Black philosopher" is the thread that spines the section cal led The Th ird Se rmon on t he Warpland. There are traces of her terse earlier style, particularly her unique word-sound progressions: as her underfed haunches jerk jazz. And a white liberal, observing a riot, asks "But WHY do These People offend themselves?" adding that it is time to "help. 111/E.amily Pictures contains the snapshots of her new young heroes, the people who helped her become "Black." But despite well-meaning salutes to Kgositile, Don, Bradford, and young Africans, there is a monotony of praise. J,, owe~e,,.J Admittedly, l\no one is perfect, and she is apparently • �struggling as hard with commitment as she is with the new poetry . In Spe.etlilto Yhe f "<'&t,e~i - To ;, L,~I" "Speech to the Young , " dedicated to1i,.own children, the sensitive mother-poet gives adviCe that many another young person might cuddle and cherish: Live not for The-End-of-the-Song. Live in the along . C(,HJ"I\Ot'l Such i,.l • • comes at an important juncturewhen the world is moving right along, to use a cliche , and leaving behind those too mired in their own "self-revelations" to look, listen and learn . Yet one crowning salute to this great lady of Black letters was an impressive anthology of poetry and testimonials, To Gwen with Love: A Tribute to Gwendolyn Brooks (1971) , assembled by Madhubuti and others . Chicago poets were only a skip from places like Gary, Indianapolis, ~ allowtcl Detroit, St . Louis, Clevelandi\ Kansas City~ and the closeness ' interchanges on all levels . hi~ Motown ' s poetry output, like that of other communities, was also interwoven with related symbols and expressions of the new consciousness: Hargaret Danner ' s Boone House for the Arts, Rev. Cleage ' s Shrine of the Black 1 !adonna, Motown Records , Broadside Press, Vaughn ' s Bookstore, and area Black studies projects . The poetry hub for the late sixties anJ seventies, of course , is Randall ' s Broadside Press. Randall has changed as a poet and person, he says, in ways that perhaps parallel the changes in Gwendolyn Brooks. A "father" figure among some new Black poets, he publishes dozens of them (over 100· at this writing) , releases new books of his own poetry, serves as distributor of Breman's Heritage Series, and travels widely as a lecturer , teacher, librarian and translator of Russian poetry. A formalist by training and tempera ent, Randall described his new poetic stance in a statement in Hodern and Contemporary Afro-American Poetry �(Bell, 1972): My poetics is to try to write poetry as well as I can. I think I have said elsewhere that the function of the poet is to write poetry . }1y earlier poetry was more formal. Now I am trying to write a looser, more irregular, more colloquial and more idiomatic verse. I abhor logorrhea , and try to make my poems as concentrated as possible. Indeed, Randall has tried to do just that--moving from a traditional to a loose, conversational verse . This he attempts in volumes like Love You (19 70) and After the Killing (1973). When Randall is describing a girl in an African ,·~ village or the "Miracle" of love, he • • • • •Agenuine . . and strong . P!T._ poems like " Green Apples" and "Words Words Words" ~ him "~A• rt But Ma'ttLt his #\ · • rKe..Tc:he.s These and other pieces are merely vertical prose, appearing as 1,.il I uglied letters . Qnd UL But he is primarily a librarian, publisher, and editor whose service to Black poets has been and remains invaluable . This is seen not only in his production of their work, but in the many anthologies which he has edited. With Chicagoan 1argaret Burroughs, he co-edited 1alcolm : Poems on the Life and Death of Malcolm X (196 7), a foresightful and commanding work . his I P § Also to credit are Black Poetry (1969 ) and The Black Poets (1971), the latter i mbalanced and apparently quickly thr own t ogether since it has practically no Introduction and contains no bio-bibliographical material on the poets. In addition to Randall and Margaret Danner, other poet~ in this upper Midwest area are James Randall (1938Thomas (1939- ) , Richard ), William Thigpen (1948-1971), Naomi Hadgett, Hayden, Rocky Taylor (Tejumoll Ologboni) (1945Atlante;) - ), James .Thompson (1936- · (,<141 ) ), Pearl Cleage Loma\ (now living in • Halaika Wangara (1938- Ay..N(<.ko\.6.s (_'£,okc~-P.•1 f'\ot-nin': ~ ) , Ahmed Alhamisi (19L10- ftlft\t4 ~f l!(dl • ~f ), P!!!'y '!f ,Sou l).I �Reginald Wilson (1927- ), Sonebeyatta (1956- Leonead Baily (1906- ), Melba Boyd (1950- Jill Witherspoon (1947(1950- ), Carolyn Thompson (1944), Shirley Woodson (1936- ), ), ), La Donna Tolbert (1956- ), Darnell Hawkins (1946- ), Stella Crews Sor1t 0F'1'he1t" wonks ) and FrencK Hodges (1940)- 4 ~ " can be found in Ten , A Broadside Treasury, The Black Poets, and in the small An 1'rnpor't"~-r v0Lurt1e ~I'\"\ th~ a.reo.. is Fbl!l-ed'it'ar ALh~W\1Si~ .!3,LAc..k. A~: A1111i.,Log_y .eF~'"'eiw'!S(wit#i 'Nr,• individual volumes regularly published by Broadside Press. /\ For further details on Detroit and other Broadside poets see Broadside Authors and Artists (Linead Bailey, 1974). James Randall has published Don ' t Ask Me Who I Am and Cities and Other Disasterg (1973). His poetry is intense, commanding and dramatic. In "Net,mrk News, 11 we are told that For years he ' d watched the growing madness of the State. There is irony and pathos as in "Street Games" where a boy is black as the ancient curse of Africa A different kind of poetry is written by Ologboni uho intermingles drum rhythms, incantatory meditations and sharp establishment-directed barbs in Drum Song (1969), Introduced by Gwendolyn Brooks . The poet is also an artist who tells us in "Untitled" that the night contains indifferent stars •••. Hayden has been teaching at the University of Michigan, his alma mater, since the late sixties when he left Fisk, wndar pre sSJJT 91h Hournir i ime (1970) anticipat "Festivals & Funerals. " His Words in the the theme of Jayne Cortez ' • overpowering He seeks a place where man will no longer be called nigger, gook, ki t e or hunkie, but 11 man. 11 There are frightening poems and terrifying images in Words as Hayden surveys the " Sphinx" ("my joke and me"), " Soledad" .("cradled by drugs, by jazz"), 11 Kodachromes of the Island " W6rlj~I �(" fingerless hands " ) and " El-Hajj Halik El-Shabazz" ( " the waking dream" ). ~e poet~ " Zeus over Redeye" reflects on 1,.• visit to the Redstone Arsenal. It is an intense drama, joining other .great poems as a major statement on our times . ·,rwe.-'tE~ Western man ' s l\mythic totem, his depravity, his quixotic movements at the speed of a blur, the human " loom" of tension--all are staged against the 0 t'the. backdrop ~missile arsenal where death-machines bear the names of ancient Graeco-Roman mythological figures . mythologies " to "come to birth ." Such naming allows * l 1 1 · t " new Among terms associated with Hayden ' s nightmarish world of visible/invisible and anticipated violence are dragon, hydra, basilisk, tulips, corollas, Zeus, Apollo, Nike and Hercules . The missiles tower ( " stasis " ) as a sacred phallic grove ..•. Apparently the guides at the arsenal cannot satisfactorily answer questions about the missiles ' destinies and dangers: Your partial answers reassure me less than they appall . I feel as though invisible fuses were burning all around us burning all around us. Heat-quiverings twitch danger ' s hypersensitive skin . The very · sunlight here seems flammable. And shadows give us no relieving shade. Dismal and final, Hayden ' s poem adds its own particular tone, style and language to the lengthening totem of the New Black Poetry. For, despite his disagreements with the Black Aestheticians, there is no doubt that 3t �"Zeus" reaffirms a belief expressed by younger, sometimes louder, poets: that the Western world is doomed to destruction at its own hands (will " off itself, " a younger poet might say) . •■l•t■ l•jMsllli·-•1•z-.ii1t•z~s"'l!!S~C~EM!L•l•••1. In fact, the theme of an app roachin g end i s quite "American" in poetry, still being preached by white poets and spokesman: from Bob Dylan to Billy Graham. Rich contributions have also been made by poets and artists in southern Illinois and Missouri. East St. Louis and St. Louis, though located in two R''"""' different states and separated by the Nississipp \ , have a mutual history that goes back before the days of the famous Dred Scott Case. These Black communities, alternately warring and loving, worked closely together during the height of the Black Arts Movement . Poets and artists were drawn to or supported by BAG (Black Artist Group), House of Umoja, The Blacksmith Shop of Black Culture, Black Liberator project, the House of Truth, Impact House, the Experiment in Higher Education at SIU, Sophia House, Katherine Dunham's Performing Arts Training Center (EHE-SIU), Black Diver Writers, and the Southend Neighborhood Center. Fw,m 11,i's ~ ( AJute) (/141- ) Some of the poets ,en t,he area f e Bruce Rutli1AJ Rhea Sharl em G_!'rant, Sherman {!4tn. . ) Fowle~ ~,e.(A1't.,(S,.tlh"Z"'o~'t\\o.J Redmon~ ia Conley f\(who later joined OBAC) 51.A.vndw,..R~1n"td~,,(J'1Sl-) 'AArthur Dozier, Bobb ~ui-, BrCWJ1f'~47- Qcf4J- ) E11iot ~, Austin Black (1928) (who went to Los Angeles), Fred Horton, "'I (iq 3f-) Mo.~ .-.c S,mpr.ort{/<if'/-- ) Dwight Jenkins, Rome~g_:=oxx,, nonald Hend~rson, Henry Osborne, Jon lfq4, ~) Wilson, Vincent Clark, Gloria Wafke~ <i"lc,.S'.;.)1 t'en""l Herman Vincent T~rrellj . Reginald Allen Turnage, (1~'11-) O'f50- ) Qqcl(p- J '' (t.q ,a- ")J NtJi. i-o"nso'I Wayne Lofti1't) Derrick Wrigh,1' Gregory Anthon~ Katherine Dunham, and others -1 Writings by these poets are included in Sides of the River: A Mini-Anthology of Black Writinss ( ~ , Betty Lee ' s Q I Proud ·~agazine Ghic~ d ffers prizes)) The Mill Creek Intelligencer, a special issue of Sou ' wester (fall, 1968, selected by Redmond), The Black Liberator, The Creator (1969), Tambourine (1966 , iJhite and Schwartz), Collection (1968), 3,A new St. Louis lriters Workshop, guided by Shirley La Flore , . includes Marci Howell, Candalaria Silva, Patricia Williams, Wal Arnusa, Geraldine Oole and Debra Anderson. SI / �J(olume I of Poems by Blacks (1970). Dumas, who taught for a year at East St. Louis ( ~ 1967-1968), and Redmond co-sponsored writing programs in the Rap-Write Now Workshops and Black River Writers group. Collection was student-produced under Dumas' supervision, with Fowler and Linda Stennis serving as editors. Elliott writes, in "The Dream Time," about the "spirochete womb" of the mother of the universe, the Phoenix, and the death "fashioned at the end" of 500 years. Great Phoenix that she was, the mother of the universe now leaves the dreamer <If_ With only her great murky sexuality •... [[Elliott is a dreamer and Surrealist but Black ushers in a different temperament with his The Tornado in Hy Mouth (1966). He has the irreverence of the Beats, the funkiness and drive of the hard boppers, and the sexuality of one in hot pursuit. "Asexual Flight" says a man ' s last wish is to be banished to the isl~nd of remiss and lo'!se his love. dil,!MmA. Another ..._..A is presented in "Razor Mama Democracy/ the ache in 3-D" where the blue haze hurts and now the hair is turning "into an aching grey." . Black salutes "the gladiator" in "Coeval Drums for Leroi" but in the meantime he covers quite a bit of ground: "the dead arterial insanity"; "futility in jagged crags"; "Kierkegaard/Sartre"; "like dripping brine"; "over the window of my being"; and finally "Her power in howling winds" brings A DRUlfBEAT FOR LEROI. �"Black & Funky" is subtitled "a hypothetical orgasm" and there is in "DAMN YOUR god!" A·~••--- \ c.o~ oc.<..cum His "(a poem for HALCOLM X)" is subtitled "the liberated war-horse." In "Carrying a Stick," Fowler asks: Who cares, that I had yesterday's stale gum for breakfast? "Thinking" allows various imageitreatn and burst fort1} vomiting tidings only the mind can hear. in ,, ~4t iu.c.e/' Student-mother Romenetha Washington write~bout the pressures on today's wht1 Black woman ~watchG• people Scurrying from sun to sun .•• , Also pulled along, she says . I protest but still I run. vsei irony tr'> Loftin, a young poet who writes with economy and simplicity,f\8ummarizmg ~right and Baldwin Q in "Reality": out of the cotton fields and burning suns to overcrowded cities and shades of slums Redmond and Fowler founded Black River Writers publishing company which brought out Sides of t1e River. Currently under the supervision of Catherine Younge, the press has published Redmond's volumes: A Tale of Two Toms (broadside) (1968), A Tale of Time & Toilet Tissue (pamphlet) (1969), Sentry of the Four Golden Pillars (1970), River of Bones and Flesh and Blood (1971), Songs From an Afro/Phone (1972), In A Time of Rain & Desire (1973), 3,3 �and an Lp , Bloodlinks and Sacred Places (1973) . Consider Loneliness as These Things was published in 1973 by Centro Studi E Scambi Internazionali in Italy. Redmond, a native of East St. Louis, strives f l#) Black familyhood (immediate and extended) in his poetry; though he attempts to do this without forced a."c! by allowing the allegiances, without " disfigurement of perceptions, " ~ to ~low deed-shaping words , \ ~ naturally. ] iztniss]lrc His poetry ranges from humorous folk portraits l i1'e "Invasion of the Nose" : His nose was his radar, His eyes icy darts that moved faster than speed-of-sound jets. He could rap like a pneumatic drill Or croon like Smokey Bill when the occasion arose . to considerations of love under strain as in " Inside My Perimeter" : Inside my perimeter Of fears A unit of guerillas Strikes at the barbed-wire Hovels that hoard our love: That incarcerate our needs-An insurgent army Storms the bastille of pride Shells this facade of custom, Knells the collapse Of the straw men· inside us-Accepts the sun , Allows the contorted face of �Stress to smile again-To glow again! Allows Love to Live . Elsewhere in the larger area there were/are other goings-on in poetry: Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas City where Wilbur Rutledge (19lf0- ) and others associated with the Afro-American Cultural Center and the Black Writers Workshop received assistance and exposure. Among these poets are Mary Ruth Spicer, Guiou Taylor, Willesse Hester and Jackie Washington. in Anthology: Some of them are included ~vt{:ec\ge.. Black Writer ' s Horkshop (Kizna, 1970) andJYet!!hing;h@ has pub- lished Joma (1971) ~ Located at the University of Denver for the year 1974-197~where he who'iook. substituted for Hphahlele .i a ■ i.a0Aa leave of absence, Kgosi{ile (1938- ) articles, poems and interviews have been published on an international scale, and he has taught at several American colleges and universities. In addition to books already mentioned, he has published My Name Is Afri kt (1971) and edited The Word is Here: Poetry from Modern Africa (1973) . His own e1e sthetic is stated in his Introduction to the anthology: Poetry, the word at its most ex1ressive, can be a prayer, an appeal, condemnation, encouragement, affirmation--the list of endeavors is endless. And if it is authentic, as anything else expressive of a people ' s spirit, it is always social. This concept he embraces in his own poems, especially in Africa where in the Introduction, Gwendolyn Brooks writes that his Art is life worked with; •• • ' t ern poets, Bruce 4,one of the most inventive and talented of Midwes Rutlin, has not ·published widely.µeA~ his bi gly ori gi n ~l style on LPs: Ofama: Children of the Sun{l971 , with saxophoni s t Ol iver Lake) and sJ.S- �His Afro-American brothers incorporated the Africanisms into their works and, \?Lt<C Kgositsile combines his own indiginisms with a mastered fluency ofl\American L 09 ISh\S :S. ~II s _ He assays the whole of our tumultuous times (in Africa and America), intermingling an acquired Black street language with a demanding and stringent form. One cf the most able craftsmen, he W~ites excellent poems about children, women, violence, music, Malcolm X, Lumumba, Gwendolyn Brooks, African dances, --:-, Billy Hol l iday, or "The Nitty Gritty" in which the once furious songs are now v frozen on battered black lips . • . . (J,T\ G,u,t~"'"'"°'~ 4-r,d Du'Ley ~o.Mt•l<.., , ... _ I ,. • ru t.c.tosili,tt is W.:,llt-5 ~ r:rlY'" ,cwt:6« \ r \ 4 ' p..i..vw..~1iietA k • • Tl1e poets of the East, South, Midwest and near West are a bit more than a hop, skip and jump from California, but many of them were inspired by -r,./ appearances, national magazine coverage, and cross-country tours of the Watts poets. Born, as it were, between the California sun and the rebellion of 1965, the Watts Writers' Workshop was initially under the direction of Budd Schulberg. Later, as older writers left and newer ones came in, the suner- vision of the· workshop was assumec;l by Harry Dolan and Herbert Simmons. f 'I! La1"ed s there~ ur e of culture and influence included the Watts Happening Coffee House, , ,.., ,,-.. the short-lived Shrew magazine, the Watts Repertory Theater, the ~ l qu~ arian Bookstore, the Sons of Watts, the Black Panthers, Karenga's US organization, f,~~-t and Frederick Douglass Writers' House which housed thel\:fatts writers program. Among those associated with this and other writing groups were Hilton HcFarlane, Clyde Mays (1943- ), Troupe (1943- Bowen, Pamela Donegan (1943- ), Stanley Crouch (1945- ), Emmery Evans (1943- Lance Jeffers, Lino, K. C~rtis Lyle (1944- Eric Priestly (1943- ) , ), Simmons (1930- ... Ojenke (Alvin Saxon, 1947- C.K. Moreland, Jimmy Sherman (1944Hayhand, James Thomas Jackson (1927David Reese Moody (1933- ), Fanita (1943- ) , ), Vallejo Ryan Kennedy (1947- ), Leumas Sirrah (1948- Cleveland Sims (1944- ), Robert ), Johnie Scott (1948- ) ' , ), Ernest ) , Fannie Carole Brown (19L12- ), Edna Gipson (1946- ) ) , ), Jayne Cortez (1933- Poem of Gratitide(l972) . Rutlin is_ a St. Louisan. ) ) , ' �Noto. r?.cl.,;JSo"(~ Onf~).; Blossom Po.we (1929- ) , Sonora McKeller (19H- LAt'\c• w:ui ~"'"' s., Birdell Chew (1913- ), K idhiana , and others . ) , ~ arley Mims (1925- ), Their works are in two From the Ashes (1967 , Schulberg) and Watts Poets and Writers anthologies: (1968, Troupe). Other poems are scattered through such periodicals as Los Troupe~ 4n1°h<>lb~y, p1,1bH\ hecl.bytht \it,\tte. of-&spe~1j t1.e~t.eci~ o.. Angeles Magazine , Shrew, Confrontation , and West. A , · -i1I, f:', * 'the owren~ M~Joi,. .5'1•1t&•vp ~rn61\9 WAlts u,.-·, n ..s,11u 11L.7,1t9 in,..,011pe.._,,c1 ~,01eno;\Sb o e"s o.-M•n~ O· ~ Seen as a movement, the Watts group, in quality and quantity, emerge as one of the most powerful on the New Black Poetry scene (roughly resembling the magnificent Howard group) . For although the poetry is not uniformly good or 0..... or excellent, there isAcourage t!liz"'t-=IIW,j@I\V ision , , style• and theme• that one .-ttiE. looks hard to find in N>ther groups. This may be due in part to the migratory patterns of Blacks in the West--most of these poets were not born in Los Angeles--and the racial kaleidoscope of California . Whatever the reasons, there is a prismatic range in the poetry that moves from the earth- woman musicality of Jayne Cortez, across the allusory and often mystical excursions of Lyle, to the signifying blues interludes of Crouch who has also written some daring and seminal criticism in Black World and the Journal of Black Poetry . Ain ' t ~o Ambulances for no Nigguhs Tonight (1972) is the title of both his book and Lp recording which includes " rap" as well as poetry, with liner notes by Lyle . Crouch uses folk forms and them~ intertwined with music and various dramatic techniques . Many of the poems are dedicated to musicians like Parker and Coltrane; others attempt the complicated spontaneity of live jazz solos. The title poem anticipates the day of the final riot when there will not be "no " ambulances for "nigg~hs ". " got on his job" like Nat Turner. e~ ays - and others . ,\ t. o,._hJ N•nyh•--~,•rr.r, his influences are Artaud,'Octavio {DWld..Q!\.w ~ But the poem ' s hero, Monkey Junior, I Paz, Cesar Vallejo, Cesaire, His poetry is grounded in elliptical phrases and obscure information i �which he constricts into frightening, surreal images and states. "Sometimes I Go to Camarillo & Sit in the Lounge" describes how the poet stares into "an awning of spirit," viewing the world as yellow trumpets of starving blues ){et hearing a Vietnamese mother ' s "ultra-high-frequency screams." We are told that "cobalt bullets" smash the heart of the "lone ranger" in "Lacrimas or there is a need to Scream." However, Lyle's most famous poem is "I Can Get it for You iJholesale," a statement on the contemporary political-religiousracial scene One..oP"t/2t f,~QS 1 l",S tJt PD 'o/1 Lyle nA.S .-.e,ur.J ti ~ ~ m J ~ L , I ~ ,£ ~ - : 2 ; • ~~ev-,oh~l:1) "1'h ivl,.f c.lt he b A.t.Co,,.,,_ po.nit,! by-3\,U~S l4e.rt1;#t~U. ~J ~ Ojenke has an unlimited range of intellectual and social concerns as he sculpts his poetry from the diverse ingredients that produced the Afro-American. 2_eflecting his ereat knowledge of Graeco-Roman classics, "Black Power" has the lyre of "IUacl~ Orpheus" pierce the dark solitude of a Iladean world: il\Ul IIe,\wanders into ancient Greece and Nigeria in the same poem. In "Watts" there is a commotion caused by lightning and famine, assassinating tin people and whole grass-blades? Later on Diogenes, Socrates _and the Oracle of Delphi enter the poem. But these characters only come to Watts to find people escaping into a " toxicant" and fleeing from some too-true truth .••• Ojenke also wrote an Introduction to Evans ' book The Love Poet (1971). Evans ' reading ability, Ojenke said: " Emmery is crying slyly into your ear." " Roaches" depicts a -familia~ s ~ to some: two roaches dance across the room to the tune of poverty; •.. About t, �Scott is one of the more well known of the Watts poets . In " The Fish Party ," he says The fish are gathering again tonight, ... And fish- watchers , ignorant of the world ' s problems, get their charges from trying t o guess what the fish will do. During the conversation, Scott talks par~ thetically about war and poverty, but all is exclamatorily interrupted: Hey, look? Just Goldie has ~eaten Jesus up! "Watts, 1966" is a poem millions heard on national theme of Black rage and white indifference . 1V . It has the familiar But Scott closes it on memorable lines : The man named Fear has inherited half an acre, and is angry. Watts poets deal with love, violence, contemplation of freedom and music . left Watts after the late sixties. Troupe went to Ohio University ( to L.;fe.r edit <;_£~f r2ntat~u) and~published Embryo (19 73) , Ash Doors and JuJu Guitars (1975 ) , and co-edited Giant Q to New York. Talk: Third World Yoic@& (1975), a f ter moving I ri 1-"f;I t tor ~evet-ttL Xtt,J,,t 4,-f - ~ Washingt n Lyle , who has not published a volu~, ., University in St. Louis , and recently returned to Los An geles. ,,.,..,"1're,, Jayne Corte~ went to New York where she has liv ed and, wc.s«. since the late sixties. three books are Pi s t a ined Stairs and the Monke and Funerals (1971) and Sca rifications (1973). gelebrations, and ~gl j t)ldg~ (1974). 1't:1 Her Man's Wares (19t>9 ) , Festiva ls She has also recorded an Lp, Her themes a nd sty les a re broad , but mo stly ~embrace music a s aspect and fo rm. Afr ica, a s struggle and s pirit, is a lso a dominant theme in her poetry. Pis~a ined is e spec ially rich in its inter weav i ngs of musi c and strug l e . "The Road" is "where another Hank moans" 0 and is �Stoney Lonesome "Lead" describes the kind of hard life that is "cracklin hot a sunrise." Lead, of course, is Lead Belly whom the "nigguhs " desperately want to hear spit the blues out. t"Mt--e. Thc.U'l Her struggles are .-.A.simple "contrivances" as they chronicle the hardships and good times of Dinah, Bird, Ornette, Coltrane, "Fats" Navarro, Clifford Brown and others--a verifiable poetic tapestry of Black expression in defiance of death, from one who would(f-h,n<J~Y Lo\l 11 ): .•• eat mud to touch the root of you .••. Among other Southern California poets are Robert Bowen (1936Boze (194~- ) , Kinamo Hodari 19~0- ) , Arthur ), Dee Dee McNeil \1943), Arrvl.o. ... Ws:Qs c,ou"-r.,....1 ,.. ""-• LM'f ~.ti -. ...~""-- , ... , .. oFIODl'i,~o"be .., . . . Bil Thompson, and Lance Williams. I\ S•v~ .. a.C. 'PS• rt /:lecTs~f v inTeret't,s Q db ck9t-o,mds Northern California ~ also · · · 4~~ w..·,,-, ..-s of Black poets and writers. Indeed a listing of poets,\_from the general . - . a-, ~•ed a national convention: Goncalves (1937- N~<A kti. S''1~e (!'N-,-.. ),.. ) (now at B~own), /\Co yus (19 42), Angelo Lewis (1950- ) ) , ' ), L.V. Mack (ec.i L Bt--owt"I,, (1940- (1947- ) , ~l .1uhaj ir (1944- , Joyce Carol Thomas (1938- (Marvin X), Leona Welch ricNair • • - • -• David Henderson, Jon Eckels t\'ln e<;."'t Go.t"e George Barlow (1948- ) ), Joseph , Glen Ifyles (1933- o/ ) ' ) , A_Herman Brown • • • • • (Huumba), Pat Parker • - • - - • De Leon Harrison (1941- ), Sarah Webster Fabio (1928- and Maya An~elou (1928- ). ) , William Anderson Bay area activity in the arts has been heightened and enhanceJ by the San Francisco Afro-American Historical and Cultural Society, bookstores such as Mere, Harcus and New Day (Goncalves), activities of Panthers and similar groups, the Rainbow Sign cultural center in Berkeley, �Nairobi College, and numerous other cul t ur al and literary projects . "t1'le.$.e by many"bards are i nclud ed in Hiller 's Dices ... oABl ack Poems Bones (1970), Journal of Black Poetry, Yardbird Reader (a semiannual edited by Reed, Young, Brown ~ and Myles), Umbra Blackworks (Henderson, all i ssues, especially 1970-71) , and othe r nationally distributed anthologies and periodicals .StA ,;.1t0.\'\te. '-nd o~\q',ntLwt-',tet-1 Reed),tia s publi shed three volumes: catechism of d neoamerican hoodoo church (1971), Con·ure: Fou" Selected Poems, 1963-1970 (1972), Chattanooga (1973), otc,,.,., ,,, p.&J;.y Utd,...•..• l•t.fll,e •~ f#""''"""'~.S. and as••ll!lltciLit novels. A His work has drawn a curious mi)tture of adJectives from c r itics: " brilliant, " " cute, " "j umbles and puz zles," "important, " "bad comics" and so on . Indeed Reed wri tes his poet r y into his novels and his novels i nto his po ems . In this service, he employs dialects, Voodoo, t he occult, whims i cality, wit, mys ticism, satire, which he obviously enjoys, all reinforced by assorted library information and street-instincts. He violates time barriers, plac ing an ancient Greek figure in a contemporary poem, or vice v e r sa. His verse form s are experimental, roughly recalling the Beats Bvt O..(.l.oScF ~tao(nA will. ~'10111 hi,Y\ itl tl\eTw,.cf.t1df\ Ot 1>un D0.11\J T"oome~ An TuL$t1t1 • and ot her recent or pas t s t y1istic irreverencies. A.There are no sacred cows f or Reed who sometimes lambasts Black nationalists and white liberals in the same poem. Generally, his techniques work (some are astonishing); but;he often spends t oo much time a t tacking real or created antagonists and having fun at the expens e of readers. His titles alone are enough to keep you slapping your thigh or scratching your head: " Report of the Reed Commission," "I am a cowboy i n the boat of Ra," " There 's a whale in my thigh, " "The feral pioneers," "The Black Cock," " Gr i s Gris, " "And the Devil Sent a Ford Pinto, which She also Routed ." In 1973 Reed became the fi rst Black writer to be nominated for a National Book Award in two catego r ies . 5-IJ:he works of many r.r> ..1'1tftll C<lt~Porn<A wh1ii',..s - cCLn also be found in a special "Arts & Literature" issu~of '.the Black Scholar, June, 197~. 5Lf( �Goncalves (Dingane), an occasional poet, is unique in his intellectualCol'\S"ft."<176,t typographical b.. t t11~o f ideas (see Black Fire), but his service to Black poetry has been more obvious i n his work as founder- ed itor of Journal of Black Poetry . He also served as poetry editor of Black Dialogue. A quiet, but steady, influence on the New Black Poetry, he has written some of the most informed criticism to come out of the period. Currently he runs/operates ew Day Bookstore ,in San Francisco, where The Journal and its press are headquartered. Among poets published by the press are foal and Welton Smith (Penet;rati~.ij,, 1971), a virtuoso poet who was born and raised in San Francisco. "Halcolm" ends discussing the kinds of tracks tears make and telling the reader that in my heart there are many unmarked graves. There are also word-gifts in "the danger zone , " "If I could hold You for Light," "for a sorceress" ("you keep changing me into air") and "Black Mo ther" ("an odd ecstasy moving"); these join blues , excursions through city streets, and thoughts on Africa. <,.~both"i~v~;, oest\leTr,,Uy tAl"lcl S1yt•ITi~4'-'f• Young and Harper both teach writing at Sxanford and Brown,\. Young has published Dancing (1969) and The Song Turning Back into Itself (1971) , as well as novels and articles. His poetry satirizes militants, salutes Lt h4v1~Ttl white and Third World poets, and incorporates legends into a broad"'iase • ....., t· g 1 3 lg . titles of his books. There is a consistency of interest as seen in the In "Erosong" he finds hims elf dancing "naked" though All my shores had been pulled up "Yes, the Secret Mind Whispe_r s," dedicated to Kaufman, calls po etry a "tree" forever at your door ••.. �Young ranges over the whole of the life experience , writing about s quirrels , ~Howe"e"'1 j azz musicians, Spain , Stockholm , night time and sorrow. )lis poetry is Sfy11sfit~l.ly 7 17; diff erent from that of Harper who lef t California in 1970. Harper's volumes are Dear J ohn, Dear Coltrane (197v), History is Your Own Heartbeat (1~71J, Photographs: Negatives: History as App le Tree (1972) , Song : I Want a Witness (1973,, Debridement O. .. 73) J, and Nightmare Begins Responsibility (1974). Praise for his poetry has come from a wide spectrum of eminent critics and poets, primarily academicians, i ncluding Gwendolyn Brooks and Hayden. Critic M.L. Rosenthal recently singled out Harper and Baraka as tau t examples of Black poets contributing to the new American poetry scene \The New York Times Magazine, November 2-;. , 197 -i J. Laurence Lieberman has also praised Harper who received nominations for the National Book Award as well as the Black Academy of Arts and Letters First Annual Poetry Award. has kept a consistency of tone which critics particularly Harper adfft•'N! 1 ;or,e-nd though his poetry sometimes lacks metaphorical tension ~funk? ) to ignite the important statements he makes about Black music , there is a f irm intelligence at work. His themes are illusion, pained creativity, war, racism, jazz , nature, history , death, and the my thological evolution of mankind. Much of his poetry is personal, confessional , and he interweaves a medical vocabulary into some of it. and musicians. He often includes chants , hums, and names of songs Hi s musico-poetic concerns can be seen in these lines f rom "Dear John, Dear Coltrane": Why you so bla ck? cause I am Why you so funky? cause I am �Why you so black? cause I am Why you so sweet? cause I am Why you so black? cause I am a love supreme, a love su')?rem1e: • • • \-\-o-v- f't-~J Reed, -Go.hie~ twid . young ~"'e. tr\c::lvdecl \"' 0 1 ~~1en's .J;'"n,e~v,~ws .. ~ (c. W W' ~ - iJi..,.S b 1 El Muhajir (Marvin X1 is Qn6ihe~~ ind of poet , Islam-influenced and adamantly Black: Fly to AllD,b (1969), Black Man Liste~ (19G9) , ~ - - l::1aLli., ~eQi. F,,tcpfil (19731., Each book salutes Allah and contains some occasionally well-turned poetry intermingled with proverbs, parables and songs. He ·p raises Elij ah Muhammad, Tommy Smith, and announces that "Bigger Thomas Lives!" In "The Origins of Blackne ss " he says Bl ack is not a color. but that All color$ come from Black Myles and Eckels are also at different ends of the poetic spectrum while HcNair is i n t he mi ddle. of his drawings and poems. 1yles published Down & Country in 1974 as a collage He surveys cont emporary life, his upbringing on "Bebop and blues in Phoenix," and his experiences as an artist and art s t udent. Eckels has moved from ~ poetry of _anger and protest tot "poetry written by a human being, for human beings ." His books include Black Dawn, This Time Tomorrow, Black Right On, Home is Where the Soul Is (1969), Our Business ~ in press . the Street~ (1970), and Fire Sign (1973), which gives its name to his - In his early phase Eckels wrote about "Black Is, " "Hell, Mary," �"In Memory of Marcus, " "A Responsible Neegrow Leader," and other poems...,also coining an interesting term: Western Syphilization Fire Sign " f or the free and will be," shows a thematic and cultural breadth / as he writes love poems and salutes freedom in general. McNair, a cosmic poet who bridges African spirituality and his own psychic revelations, has published Earthbook (1972) and Juba Girl (1973). Certainly the world will hear more from this gifted young writer. tht mvLt(.'f;./.enleJ Among northern California women poets,~aya Angelou is primarily a prose and script writer, but has published~i~ok of poems! •, • ~ Just Give He A Cool . , · ~ Oh &lAy at¥ Wt1>9.s Ane 6om?o. €1:f.M§. Welllll Drink of Wate~ ~.' Fore~ ~\~ (1971}Nht~was 1;om~n!1ted for the Pulitzer Prize}/\ He ~ 'PoeThr finl l'< /'I Of'lS ,tr -MOS.fCA.L °""d PoL~l.ow iT,c., \f'I Hvences ... Pat Parkers poetry can be found in an excellent little volume called Child of Hyself (1972) and Dices. J» She uses her ovm woman-feelings to assess Jw current upheaval. p st "Brother" reveals contradictions in the love-but-hurt approach some Black men take towards their women. The "system" she has just been struck with, she says, is called a fist. o~ her Other f\poems deal with humor and tragedy in husband-wife relations. In "A Moment Left behinµ" she asks ( Have you ev~r tried to catch a tear? "From Deep Within" says the way of a woman is turbulent with II).any forces and colors of feelings, but A woman ' s body must be taught to speak-- ••. Pat Parker's work searches behind the cosmetics and the vogue to the trutlfvl ?: ] ] 1 iisturbancek So does the work of Joyce Carol Thomas whose two books, �Bittersweet (1973) and Crystal Breezes (1974), were published by Fire Sign a:.}) BLe~s,h.f.\(itf15)1tvt4~~joe,q,~ PtJM. Presl\ ""Her poem? are about womens ~gds, church, Black music, children-. and love. There is a modern feel and texture in her lines which economize and without displaying abruptness or undecipherable code. Yet her strength is unmistakable as in "I Know a Lady": I know a lady A careful queen She bows to no one Her w'ill is a Fine thread of steel .••. In these poems, and the works of Pat Parker and Leona Welch, one sees a strong health and future in Bay area women poets. Welch's first book, was published in 1971. Black Gibraltar, Leona Here and there, one finds sub- dued rage and impatience before racism and ignorance; but her poetry also exalts the Black woman and speaks in low tones to men. from folk expressions to formal examinations of love. Her language ranges "Status Quo" is the study of a Black with "class" and dignity: Got my white poodle by the leash. Less able than the other women, her poetry salutes a number of heroines including women in her family and Nikki Giovanni) • Finally there is the much-traveled Sarah Fabio, instrumental in Black studies development in northern California, but who now lives in Iowa. published two volumes, A Yirror: She A Soul (1969) and Black Is a Panther Caged (1972), and then without notice, brought out seven volumes (!) all in 1973: Soul Is: Soul Ain't, Boss Soul (aiso the name of her Lp), Black Back: Back Black, Jujus & Jubilees, My Own Thing, Jujus/Alchemy of the Blues, �and ~ogether/to the Tune of Coltrane's Equinox. Her earlier poetry is more formal, reflecting her vast reading-thinking range; but the later work shows that she has joined the new poetry movement completely. Her most memorable poem is "Evil is Ho Black Thing" in which she converts all dark things traditionally associated with evil into ligp.ter colors or she allows them to be revealed in a broader context where they invariably become good. Her recent voluminous efforts deal with experimental blues poems, rap-styles, folk narratives, and attempt to reconstruct Black oral history. These things she does quite well on her albums and in live readings; but much of the work in the new books is excessively conversational loaded with contrived' hipness. Erzulie and Things(l975) is co-authored by poets Ntozake Shange and Thulani Nkabinde. And Ms. Thulani's work also appears in Jambalaya: Four Poets along with the poems of Lorenzo Thomas, Ibn Mukhtarr Mustapha(Sierra Leone) anfyn Zarco. Jambalaya is edited by Steve Cannon with an intro- duction by Cruz. Oruz writes poetry marked by brevity. Snaps{l969) and Mainland(l973) shows him relying on his Puerto Rican heritage, his relationships with other poets(often Black), New York Gity and other urban areas, and Spanish mythology. Now living in the bay area, Cruz often interpolates bi-lingual phrases into his poems. Barlow (Gabriel, 1974) has done impressive and promising work in the area of urban language and · Afro-American history. B. Rap published Revolution Is(l969) and Metamo;t-phosis of Supernigger(l973). Meanwhile, a young inmate at Vacaville Medical Facility, Herman Brown(Muumba) published Some Poems and Things(1971). Young Sacramento poet Clarence McKie Wigfall has sho-wn strengths in The Other Side(1970) and anothe~ Sacramentan, Wes Young brought out Life Today(l970) and Ramblins QL~O and 'l'hilil.gs ( 1972). 'Young Black poets . weref\..published in Gran:y High SchoolL• s Omnibus. Redmond, who has taught at California University, ~acramento, since 1970, conducts writing workshops on campus and community sites like the Oak Several poets are working and studying at Black Arts West in Seattle; and Park School of Afro-American Thought.,/\ poet Primus St . John teaches at u.,,._~~•"1"loi State University. ~ �Terms like "Armageddon," " chariots of fire," "smoking sixties," "get down on whitey" and "warrior priests" are often used by critics attempting to describe and "to be s CJt-6I ~vt ~h define the New Black poets. ■ I I J there wast,.verbal fire and brimstone·,Afew of the poets had time to stay "mounted in a chariot of fire," as Blyden Jackson has said of them. LAYl<l SC.(), pe. Indeed when the ~ i\1s viewed in its wholeness, one noTes C\t<tll that some who mounted "chariots" often were not ooet~ Even the most verbal and popular of the new poets--Nikki Giovanni, Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Madhubuti-denounced poetry as a luxury that could be ill-afforded durinp. a "Revolution," admitting in the meantime, perhaps, -that theirs was a particular brand of oratory not striving for poetry in a traditional sense. At the same time, the Black poetry tradition has these men and women, and others, to thank for snatching it from the brinks of obscurity and giving it a prominence which it had never before enjoyed. This chore alone has earned them an important "place" in the poetic scheme of 1 • • • "tL • l h£ a.~ w- ed ~y i3A,-,CA.~ 1 r Ctn tlun°B--albe1.t a "nlace" yet to be designated. 1n1S pla.c..e m~y <\ So ~ r ef\VVlC.t4'11011 of a ~,cc.w,~11dy f>o.n- A.~--,~1\1~1"' postmn Al'\d his eml,~dn o~ M~,.,~-c~spi'red 'scien1H'i SociaL,.Sj ftl a'.I y <1:'here are myriad problems and conflicts in the writings and lives of fruJ,7 YleuJ thel\?oets. Some, suffering from the "disfigurement of perceptio1'" do not always portray a correct sociological picture of Blacks, let alone a correct poetic one. Anxious to "saturate" themselves in the new Blackness, they disguise their own confusion in half-baked theories about Afro-American life; this results in ~ c:l. 4-h~t ll. ~oetry~ften ~ riddled with confusions, inaccuracies and oversimpli- fications of the Rlack Experience. A further result, and this is ghastly, is that star-makers view ·the poetry through an inverted lens so that a popular "latex brand" receives a final stamp of apnroval while the deeper, searc ing and more profound . poetry (Dumas, Patterson, Cornish, Cortez,, Jordan, Lorde, Rivers) is do,;,111played. - Such an inversion provides Black and white readers wit an extended "disfigurement," �muddying the already doubled vision rather tan clearing it up as Neal had predicted. Adding to this confusion is a cadre of Black critics who parade essentially political, parochial and ideological defenses under the banner of a Black Aesthetic. Both McKav and Rivers said "No white man can write my story," but during the contemporary --4~ neriod, some be-leaguered Black readers and teachers illlf1\asl "Where is the Black rriter who will write it?" 4 Contrary to nopular belief, it takes"'~l~ :rf"""'$ z phenomenon called the Black Experience. ll!tH•· to understand the complex And those few young writers (and spokesmen) who seemed to have mastered aspects of it often • . spen t,re&..tS \n . t ■--- •)..prison IQ (falcolm, Knight, Harold Carrington) which allowed them time ~reflect .._ , _ _...... develop- - . , and experiment Even Gwendolyn Brooks had "time" to work out ticklish questions in the area of art, politics and poetry. female poets, she did not . h er ear 1 y years. d uring Unlike Frances Harper, and other teach or go on a temperance leaeue lecture circuit That s h e cu1 tivate . d an d protecte d h er '1d istance . ,r is . evi. d ent in the super.ior quality of her work which does not shun the salient themes of the New Poetry: Black pride, Africa, Black music, self-love, Black heterosexuality, violence, mistrust of -whites, destruction of the Western world and self-determination . Yet those opposing the Black Aesthetic do not always have a clean slate, since they are often "shored up" by personal experience_s with whites. Among the opponents of the "separate" aesthetic for Blacks, Hayden and Redding are most vocal. However, both have maintained close associations with' academy-trained/oriented white critics and writers. Hayden must ask himself why Black poets should not subscribe to a Black Aesthetic if he subscribes to the aesthetic of the Baha'i Faith--"the only one," he has said, "to· which I willin~ly submit." • g] Black culture QrieTh~ possesses the possibilities and potentialities for a new feligio/A •~ould even ~e replace or modify~hristian•11•••t111•••~ force (mystique) behind Black �,s -t~d strivings and aspirations:Aa prospect which should not be too lightly dismissed. A.Yld ?.S'{C.I, <,LC1Jlllct L do That some new poets .._Awade into the intense intellectualArealm of ~lackness, however, is seen in a poem like Jayne Cortez' "Festiva.lS & Funerals." Musical, I daring, ambivalent, complex and technically dexterous, ~ t:te r I l!lftl summarizes the Like Hayden ' s "Zeus" and Gwendolyn Brooks' "Riot" uncertain world of Blac~ . ':ttif it fluently captures the suspense and hyperactivity of~ onternporary ol"ILJ The polarities--festivals and funerals--are archetypal and mythological since they at unexplored and state what is known. of the 1960s. n: The poem is also an emotional healthy ambivalence, couched in the "invisible" world and "cyclical nightmare" of the Black Experience, becomes allegorical as the poet celebrates heroes, sung and unsung, all of whom are dead in one way or another. They winged his spirit & wounded his ton~ue but deatl-t was slow coming The "slow" death is both the agony and the ecstasv, as it were, nestled somewhere between the dope needle ("rusty rims of a needle") an~"cultural vaginas" that "rushed" through streets urging men to die for shame 'T'he Doet has "lost a ,ood friend" whom she loved; but he has been shipped back '' c.o.D," to l-ter ,~wrth "thorns on his casket-J." ~ collect on death collect on death collect on death Tis "~riend" soon becomes the many dead Black spokesmen whose blood has been "consumed by vultures": Who killed Lumumba �Wha,ikilled 1-falcolm Qbo'fe. The•t\1- ines join other nuances of a frightening refrain which laments the loss of all friends; deat and dope and violence and consumption have devoured them: There are no tears we have no friends ~ is the word we are alone The world of "cadillacs and cocaine" is populated by festivals and funerals, poets that scream "kill run kill," "dashikis in the wind," "the flesh of Patrice" and "the blues. " the church. Blacks know ever~hoverinf death is as close as the juke joint or In the urban maze of mind and olace, the drivinv pace will perform its &&lt'Lb even when dope, false idol~• political oppression O-.nd ( 11 we. a.re a. LcH1 e Black girl, Black boy, aloni'\without friends in a hostile country or ecstatic operation jj ~o.i L1. ~ ,9 livin~ in one owned by foreigners. else L In Africa or America the fates of Blacks are dramatically similar: uJho dlled Lumumba uJh4t killed Malcolm It is a pressure-cooker without a backdoor or valve to let off steam. The rush of the poem's language complements the "rush" of Black life which is necessitated by OJ1 . "u'"M"'O~ onpression but which, in turn, results i l)\eriormously hig1)\~early deaths. 1,J2II per ' rJ; bat ±t d2£Uilfily fake§ ±a a great ekal of t\c BJac\ Bnpuh c: Sf •t itc. ~vS f ~fl.Sfrl)L c ~sq[ as :kagaag@ dlidAh,,Z ¼ iffiakhY tttdtk ..l!t as lam o s nd djiijaificant ?PlOPRs a It ts a 1lasl ,io1H itn ot5lk; tlrcr.tc mz,l: satjSJil hut H , ...l �£'.l nd. cu LTi:iv><l.L • a "" 2 ,• •J 8g,@E ±La.L/XJLSS& g e Or ~n c· S?: 1aaJ01 proportions . ii il~II Uixu . poe t r y s~acc the poet 1s tcthtiid! base :ts a p t1011 ht the stated etinm et2281 1 ipgpjstic OUfJSuE J of t he poem . Bat of all Ehl§ ',!.uprnot ed perf §Stjor " lrne :ua d§ the tlw Thao it enlarges die lcg&Cj e:i BJ blues . erotic lllipfovi sab .on coiii@§ die Ana lit ctt±s s@nse , clrc poet ltas navtgacetl st •n:3 and always dli f tcalt passage of tire r t clt a es t lt@LIE Wiilth trer tzaelitisn produced From among the many good poets of this era will emerge a few great ones, though ~~d such a prospect has been~retarded by the popular renunciation of "art" and "ideas . " L But it cannot be restrained too long because there is both urgency and breadth in much of the new thoueht and poetry . It is paradoxical to send Black students to ~o.1ir.hno~9y Western schools--to be trained on "heavy" philosoph~ •11d-r;;aeiuitew - -and t hen ask them to reduce '" all their knowledgel\to comp laints and focusless ra~tings. Po tr,.S.Black u"'c!4'J thought l('f and · r_ b e ca 11 e d on to f unction · · t1eAtra 1 l'il" d 1t1ona · · 1 capacit · ; 1 iterature ca1ui-ot in ~ ~.■ .-..--to train, develop and stimulate the faculties--then the "battle for the minds • h~~ of Black people" ~ beeh already A._won by the other side. ~ t:. T inally, t,hCt. X. Blacks as a people are pro f oundly tragic, comic or her~c , then their ideas and their poetry $~outd .g,._.,.,..,,aM -- ~--~""·,ro► we C:-.SC,ffllllflll5 have not always roamed Cr.df>tvt-Pt-ru; the "streets and alleys of other men ' s minds 'A and a true and honest Black poetry will ~ 1b not be afraid to be " great" al!MA stand alongside whatever else of greatness there is in this world. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Eugene B. Redmond Digital Collection Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document Text Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context EBRWritings_08_29to31 Title A name given to the resource First typed draft of Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry: A Critical History, Chapter VI. Festivals & Funerals, p. 406-552, typed with handwritten edits Relation A related resource Eugene B. Redmond Digital Collection Language A language of the resource English Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For digital rights and permissions, see <a href="https://www.siue.edu/lovejoy-library/about/policies.shtml">https://www.siue.edu/lovejoy-library/about/policies.shtml</a> or contact <a href="mailto:library@siue.edu">library@siue.edu</a> for direct inquiries. In copyright. <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/</a> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Redmond, Eugene B. https://digitallis.isg.siue.edu/files/original/7213c53cca72627b747aea55c327f6fd.pdf 368fa1d61a34137c6b572df783a53bc8 PDF Text Text CTHAPTER V A LONG WAYS FROM HOME: j f 10 - / f•O Sometimes I feel like a motherless child, A long ways from home; A long ways from home. --Afro-American Spiritual I OVERVIEW Tbe di srti t i on of c ro nol oGY chapter • 11 1. be~ ne •11•-•f•Pllill?YYlil?acaeai~f•r•1••:s•s•s-lllil T■ l6fas-' f •-• J.:Lvte v 1.· ae D t ·. n t 1. · s because poets of the same age do not always achieve recognition at the same time. We have looked at James Weldon Johnson, for example, but we mention him again ~i • tls is 11.qe:15 Si a In fact--for reasons to be shown--Johnson overshadows almost the whole of Black poetry. Melvin B. Tolson, born before Hughes and Cullen, will be viewed And after them in the so-called post-fenaissance period. ~,Zince the primary aim of this study is to "cite" the most significant · names and events in the development of th-e poetry, e1m arr• a criticism will remain minimal. (-eo.rly aotfl~) * From this point Aon, Blac_fr poe,ts--and BlackS on The l•ttgtlt !""f':"":: s,•,,,..,w, - -: Lo.."~vo...ge.. . bv ame1t,ca-n ,,.,t,,'l Regin being viewed,\alongside all other ~ of M, AC:r-o-A~ WtU\ ~ .praisals of~ t i tApoetry;: I J ■e-; become a bit more difficult since up until the second decade of the 2O,t h ab �v wer-e v,ewed ~ ... century, ,._ Black poets,_A_,..Aas somewhat of a novelty. a wt\'ltih.e fo~ a • x3ub jec't$ for "curious" whites or .,,. a few dedicated Blacks. osse.srerJ . ..-.. very little armament with which to fight critical or literary nlynchings." Their models were essentially white (some con- temporary Black poets continue this _practice) and so were their ~ critics. p.--o v:d.ed · In the 19201s they l!a11111i9AOne of many "exotic"•<•• &,n.,-.Sowie. dF-tti~ illibl\bored ~nd thrill-seeking whites, I•dhe1--.suin.1 I II 'I ztm In the post-Renaissance their skills were often directed tow~rds integration and various other social programs. ,The most incisive . and Ji;fizltF,~(..:f blow to,-._ Black poet, is a dis- respect and rejection that par_a llel the general treatment of Blacks. Criticism of Black poetry is invariably political and racial be. -just as most of the poetry is forced to (.l h4 'P.-,C'fis 1' Some poets lament~this because it implies that protest and anger are reserved for them. It also says that the whole range of human behavior is somehow placed off-limits to the Afro-American poet, criticized by whites for not being "unihi$ own pl.ti versaln and by eiiileliiliii:1iilB1.for not being "Blackn enough. Needless to say, _ it is a dilemma of some magnitude and no amount of words or lamentations will answer or solve it here. We do comment on these matters, though, because they begin to appear as serious--unavoidable--plagues to the Black poet from this period on in our study. �Many poets (Mari Evans, Lance Jeffers, James Emanuel, Ray Durem, Dudley Randall, Zack Gilbert, Bob Kaufman, Frank Horne, and ~k_o butdidn oT br-1·n~ov+v0Lomes un"!Q,,Thet,, L1'ke-w/se. poeuwhohad o t h e r ~ ' 1 n g in periodicals bef~. been publishing books during the years before 1960 (Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks, Conrad Kent Rivers, Hughes, and others) brought out new works sometimes reflecting different themes and attitudes. Poets who had been publishing substantially in periodicals or anthologies before 1960 will be noted in pa~ng. There will be no attempt to give individual attention to the scores of Black poets writing and publishing in the 1960•s and '70's. II Literary and Social Landscape Night is a curious child, wandering •••• --Frank Marshall Davis A. To 1930 I I n 1910 t e populat io n of Black America was 9s~B7;?•3~ Langston Hughes was a boy of ten and the NAA!?s one year old, By 1930, however, the Black population usn2 c3 ~"increased to 11,891,143 (or 9.7~);_.lJtjor migration of Blacks to northern wJ..J. industrial centers "WQaailaa hee•e"'-taken place; racial riots ~, .. scorched more than half a dozen American cities; the had country Wiel!Jitd ,u"'~ngaged in and ended its first national war, ) & .- 4(.,,.,.0,-r/e '"' f{a;,,,, �and lynchings '"i;i; continu~ to be among the most fearful prospects for Black men. Booker T. Washington had chronicled the hardships and bitter disappointments of Blacks in his Up From Slavery. The new "freedomn was short lived and illusive, Washington observed, because the ex-slave had no skill, no land and no place to go. 11 Emancipated" Blacks were not faring much better than their fore-parents. DuBois had be gun to raise some of the broader, global issues of Black oppression and place the Black Experience in its proper perspective in The Souls of Black Folks. During the second and third decades of the 20th century, Black scholars, activists and writers continued to record t he Black Experi ence with telling accuracy and drama. Additionally, a number of changes and developments in Black communities set off' a cha.in reaction of cross-examinat ions, intense debates, calls for changes and the chartingSof new directions. of lla.c. t.p,.,d_tf , Accordingly , the studentimust understand the mo oa of the times in terms of: l. The decline of Dunbar's inf'luence among poets. 2. Failing support of Booker T. Washington's 11 accom- adationist11 philosophy. 3. The continued disillusionment of survivors and heirs of the "Reconstruction. 4. 11 The development of white hate and intimidation gr oups (Ku Klux Klan, etc. ), �5. The I2 QI presentation of "stereotypes n of Blacks in the mass media and creative literature of the period. 6. The "Jim Crow" laws of the south; job discrimination and general segregation in the north. 7. The splits and confusion in the Black community due to the nnew'' middle-class; the appearance of West Indians in America and class alignment according to color stratification (i.e., lightskin, dark-skin, near-white, etc.). Much of the literature of the period deals with the theme of passing or miscegenation. 8. Race riots in various parts of the country between 1905 and 1917 • tl .:r11 s•• 22 2 America• • • • , science and industry were developing rapidly. Indications of this were the radio, wireless, technological warfare and the automobile. The "new Psychologyn was taking hold and the realism of the previous literature was bowing out to naturalism. This new mode is seen in the works of such writers as Theodore n '1!:J, er, Evelyn Scott and William Faunkner. Interest in local color and dialect, which had dominated the later portion of the 19th century., was also dying and the Black American was "re-discovered n by white writers as a subject for r.ealistic fiction, drama and poetry. White writers who published popular accounts of Black life included Dv3ose Hayward, Sherwood �Anderson and Carl Van Vechten. Revolts in interests and manners characterized American society. Black critic James A. Emanuel points out that during the/t/20~s, many wbi tes went to Harlem to "forget the war and engage their new Freudian awareness by escaping into exotic Q!~AIIS~ 111,q) , black cabaret life ~ Hughes records this exotic indulgence in \~o bis autobiography, The Big Sea (1940). 'I II )I ~~ J JI JS& S:v ~ IS o.L,o bT: it,\ "divers ioru, 11 A McKay in Y1~ A Long Way from Home andA ohnson in Along This WayA The Autobiography of An Ex-Coloured M.an.<//Dramo...of the period was dominated by Eugene O'neill who won Pulitzer and Nobel prizes. Two of 0'neill 1 s plays (The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape} symbolically dealt with the psychological involvement of Blacks and whites and suggested a transracial mixture of fear, hatred and admiration. is I & 7 ? g ; I t2Jkg4 ~ne of the ' -= vehicles for O'Heill's tbeo~es was a Black actor, Charles Gilpin, who starred in The Emperor Jones. • n 3 I I ~ Ceviews ....- i g(,3-ilpin' s performances ( "naked body ••• dark lyric of the flesh") typified preoccupation with the exotic savage--a trend that bad continued from Jack London (The Call of the Wild, The Sea-Wolf) and the white writers of local color: Page, Harris, Cable However, many 3 ii o writers, like O'Neill and Dreiser, had begun to shake �off the mystique of the American Dream and deal instead with /h-e "illusion." Such was Dreiser's theme in his novel, An American Tragedy (1925) .. The founding of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, by Harriet Monroe (1912) signaled the birth of the New Poetry movement in America. JJt Tl In 1915• the anthology, l I )( 2 1 Some Irnagist Poets, appeared to rival dissident factions which wanted to dispense with traditional forms. Imagism was in- fluenced by Ezra Pound's theories and French Symbolism as well as Oriental and ancient Greek poetry. Chief spokesman for the Imagist poets was Amy Lowell who was joined by John Gould Fletcher and Hilda Doolittle, among others. During the next two decades the group waged a successful battle against the dissidents; but they also re-worked traditional forms and cornered a new reading market for poetry in America and England. ~ Poet Vachfel Lindsay, an advocate of using rhythm and the ~ reading aloud of poetry, is credited with having "discovered" Langston Hughes. Black poets who participated in this "revival" of American poetry were the innovator Fenton Johnson and the anthologist William Stanley Braithwaite. The most signi.fican,t development of the period, however, was the Black cultural flowering, principally in Harlem, which has become known as the Harlem Renaissance, the Negro Awakening and the Negro Renaissance. Central to the ";enaissancen (critics differ over whether it should be called such) was the �migration of southern Blacks to northern urban centers. With the working-class Blacks also came (and grew) the Black intelligentsia, artists and activists. Current Black creativity or scholarship cannot be understood unless the Harlem Renaissance is placed in proper perspective because the Harlem period is the most important bridge existing between slavery and the modern and/or contemporary eras. Hence, it is necessary t h at we sketch out the important political and artistic developments which led up to (or happened during) the Renaissance. A partial listing of these developments must include: Founding of the Boston Guardian by Monroe Trotter (1901). Founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (1909) and establishment of The Crisis. Founding of the Urban League (1911). Founding of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History by Carter G. Woodson (1915). Establishment of The Journal of Ne@'o History by Woodson (1916). Black troops involvement in World War I. Great Migration of Blacks to northern urban center~ h~ 1916-1919;,.. the trendAcontinued through t h e middle of the centur] • The recording of Black achievements in all areas; Black scholarship is brilliant and sustained �throughout the entire period. The writings, especially, of W.E.B. DuBois, Charles s. Johnson, Alain Locke and James Weldon Johnson. The high point in the influence of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (Garvey, who came to the U.S. from Jamaica in 1916, preached a back-to-Africa movement. He was imprisoned in 1925 for mail fraud.) Founding of Opportunity, A Journal of Negro Life (1923; Opportunity and The Crisis published much of the new work of the Renaissance writers and offered annual prizes). The flourishing of Black Music and musical dramas (Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake do Shuffle Along, 1921; Louis Armstrong, with his own band, opens at the Sunset Club, Chicago, 1927; Duke Ellington opens at the Cotton Club, Harlem, the same year). The post-war Pan-African Congresses (Paris, 1919; London, 1921, 1923; New York, 1927; DuBois was primary organizer.) James Weldon Johnson edited the first 20th century American anthology of Black poetry, The Book of American Negro Poetry in 1922. Johnson's work was followed in quick succession by five other poetry anthologies~ 11..,'1-~ ( ~~ Negro Poets and Their Poems (Robert Thomas Kerlin, 19232_; 2fb �An Anthology of American Negro Verse (Newman Ivey White r and Walter Clinton Jackson, 1924l; '-:) An Anthology (Clement Wood, 1924 ~ '""Negro Songs: Caroling Dusk (Countee Cullen, 1927) ,,,,,,.,,,,.' (-or Four Negro Poets (Alain Locke, 1927) • note also was F.F. Calverton 1 s An Anthology of American Negro Literature (1929) which contained 60 pages of poetry. ·Cullen an Locke were two Ji lW !11ajor f g res of the Ii 3 & Renaissance along w· th Cla de Mc a-:.r, Johnson, H sl-ies ,- and Jean Toomer. Locke edited the anthology which heralded and chronicled the new Black mood and achievements: The New Negro: (t An Interpretation (1925); It - ~r emains a classic today. also He ?t-4dvc.ed s ba~the equally important A Decade of Negro Self Expression (1928). A Rhodes Scholar from Pennsylvania, Locke received a Ph.D. in 1918 from Harvard and is still considered (A. 11 bl •~fore- most interpreter of Black creativity of the Renaissance. Cullen published Color, his first book of poetry, when he was 22 and w~,; instantly recogni~ as one of the best young poets in America. McKayA Cullen Mhe.i,,eJ Tu of English poetry. t he a ft S~1c.'t 11t. 11 tradition Considered the best "formal" writer of the Renaissance period, Cullen was meticulous and careful in his o.,.J.: poetic workmanshipA a who CL im he~ 11 J{e .,:,,oifl ed • • • • i t'Athose The Dark Tower II to brood over bein g called "Negro" poets. In addition to Cullen, other ey poets of the Harle~ Awakening - - published i mp ortant volumes or anthologies and �i added to the creative and critical.tf l"t 0~. Johnson and h is brother, J. Rosamond, edited The Book of American Negro Spirituals (1925) and The Second Book of American Negro bo'fh Spirituals (1926). McKay published poetry inAEngland and America. Johnson said McKay belonged "to the post-war group and was its most powerful voice. poet of rebellion. 11 He was pre-eminently the Hughes and Cullen won national recognition (and poetry awards) at about the same time. the comparison ends. There, however, Hughes was one of the widest traveled of all the ienaissance writers. He was also the most prodigious and multi-talented, writing successfully in all genres. Hughes, who when he died in 1967 was the widest translated American author, is known as the international poet laureate of Black people. Johnson recorded much of this creative outpouring in various ways. As a scholar, he is known for his anthologies and his seminal interpretations of Black culture--music 1 and the Spirituals in particular. Of great importance was bis 1 1922 anthology wherj};n an illuminating Preface, be cited the four major Black artistic contributions to America: l. The Uncle Remus stories, collected by Joel Chandler Harris. 2. The Spirituals ("to which the Fisk Jubilee Singers made the public and the musicians of both the United States and Euro~ listen"). 3. The Cakewalk (a dance which Paris called the "poetry of motion 11 ) • �4. The Ragtime ("American musicrr :ror which the U.S. is known all over the world). Johnson is also noted f'or his work with the U.S. diplomatic corps, his pioneering f{§i!'n. Awith the NAACP and his brilliant ~ employ♦ment of' Black idioms and psychology in his poetry and ~ 11 discussions. Lif't Every Voice and Sing,n called the Black national anthem, was ~lt1e:.¼• by him in 1900. One of' the most unique voices o:r the Harlem Renaissance JJIIIIIIIP was Jean Toomer, who along with Hughes, Cullen and McKay make up Loc~s Four Negro Poets. A complex of' person- alities, talents and racial mixtures, Toomer was a constant enigma to critics and f'ellow writers. Although he admitted that he was of' seven racial strands, he acknowledged that "my growing need f'or artistic expression has pulled me deeper and deeper into the Negro group." was published. In 1924, Toomer•s Cane Set primarily in the deep south--in Georgia-- it also deals with the urban impact on migrating Blacks. Love, racial conf'lict, sex, violence, religion, nature and agrarian themes are all explored directly and allegorically. Race pride, the lower side o:r Black life, and a romantic engagement with Af'rica were the main thrusts of the «enaissance literature. activists. So too with the painters, musicians, scholars and Garvey had set up a regal court reminiscent of ancient Mrican Kingdoms and had inf'used his followers with visions of returning to the nhomeland. 11 His "court II was resplendent with hierarchical titles and lavish regalia for �~ parades. ships. Black Star Line was t h e name of h is fleet of The prevailing spirit of the day was one of Black indulgence and many whites sought for, and · got t heir share But of, it. if'ne Black Awakening was not the exclusive property of Harlem. Por as Kerlin points out (Preface, Negro Poets and Their Poems), t h e mood of change spread to other sections of the country. • bl published were A 11 g l ~ "-anth ologies The Q.u ill in Boston, Black Opals in Ph ila- delph ia and The Stylus in Wash ington, D.C. Important, too, were the collections and studies of folk songs. "Noteworthy " collections for tl:e period included: Negro Folk Rhymes (Thomas W. Talley, 1922) The Negro and is Songs (Ho ard W. Odum, 192.5 ) Negro Workaday Songs (Howard W. Odum, 1926) Rainbow Round My Sh oulder (Howard W. Odum, 1928 ) Wings on My Feet (Howard W. Odum, 1929) American Negro Folk Songs (Newman I vey Wbite, 1929) Other brilliant and exciting poets and writers shared t h e Renaissance scene--though they are normally over-sh adowed by Hughes, Toomer, McKay , Johnson and Cullen. Some of t h ese writers--most of whom did not publish volumes u ntil t he later period--were: Arna Bontemps, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Waring Cuney, Robert Hayde n , Gwendolyn Bennett, Sterling Brown, OWen Dodson and Melvin Tolson. Prose writers of t he period included Eric Walrond and Rudolph Fish er as well as Hugh es and Toomer. Bontemps, anthologist, critic, librarian, poet and novelist, �published in leading magazines of the period and won numerous awards for poetry. Brown pursued the fol~ tradition wh ile cultivating an ear and technique that rivaled some of the best modern poetry. His debt to folk idioms and characters is ob- vious in such poems as "¥:dyssey of Bib Boy, "Memphis Blues, 11 and "Long Gone." 11 11 S outhern Road," Brown contributed to peri- odicals of the period, wrote a regular column for Opportunity, and later published important critical studies. Dodson wrote verse plays and collaborated with Cullen on at least one writing project. and poetry. He too won numerous awards for h is plays Hayden and Tolson, both significant modern poets, were to be heard from in succeeding decades as critics and outstanding teachers. B. 1930 - 1960 \~nen the stock market crashed in 1929, white patronization of Black artists ended. Black creativity and scholarship, however, bad grown up during the f'fefi)st three decades of the century, and important writing and musical development continued. Migration of Blacks to northern urban centers was stepped up before and after World War II--with many Blacks being attracted by shipbuilding and other war-manufacturing industries. Afro- Americans have participated in every U.S. military conflict l. The wr i t i ng of poetry conti nued but publishing was slowed down. o. James (1973), notes that Young, in Black Writers of the Thirties 11 Black writers produced less than one • 1 �since Colonial days. During World War II and Korea , however, they were used almost exclusively as fighting troops (between 1943-45 Jim Crowfas abolished in the Armed Forces). Nevertheless, Black soldiers, returning home from European and Pacific war theaters, still faced unemployment and lynching; and in some southern citie~~re forbidden to appear on the streets in military uniforms. Baldwin is one of many perceptive American fftt- 0. writers to note that/\l31ack mftn, seeking the fruits and 111t realization of the American Dream, tried throughout history to adjust and 11 fi tu into American society. So, in face of official American contempt for his humanity and his welfare, the Black soldier marched also with an "equality" o:f death into the Korean War. 2 James Weldon Johnson had opened the dismal period of the Depression with Black Manhattan, a social history o:f Harlem. Black Manhattan was one of the dozens of studies on urban Black communities which had been begun by works such as DuBois' Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899). Like Johnson, many of the poets and artists turned their writing skills toward the recording of Black social problems and artistic achievements 12 L (iJohnson' s Black Ameri cans, What Now? and Charles S. Johnson's The Shadow of the Plantation, 4'Ji!Hlh :i11 1934). Some volume of poetry per year between 1929 and 1942.n 2. This turned out to be not so true in the Viet Nam war of the sixties when a dead Black veteran was refused burial in a white cemetary near his home in Georgia. �of the writers were subsidized by WPA grants while others sttw.. managed to obtain jobs as teachers and journalists. ~,01:;hers, o.UO like the common folk, 51troJ, ln soup lines. It was ~uring the period of 1930-60 that white schools of higher learning started accepting more Blacks, as students and teachers. Generally, America witnessed rapid advancements in science and industry. Radio drama became a cultural mainstay and the motion picture industry provided a new and exciting diversion. ':."'I Baseball continued as the "national pastl,.:tme" (for Blacks, it was the era of Jackie Robinson). Jack Johnson bad already (in the previous era) dazzled America with bis pugilistic skills. But it was the prize fighter Joe Louis ( the ''Brown Bomber 11 ) , however, who captured sports-minded America with one of the greatest records in the boxing history. Louis's defeat of German Max Schmeling (1938) came at a crucial time in U.S. history--when America's rising might among the world of nations was being challenged on the battlefield by Hitler. Two years earlier, a racist Hitler had refused to acknowledge the feats of America's Black Olympic track star Jesse, OWens. In prose and drama, white American writers continued to straddle a thematic patW:>etween realism and the American Dream. A distinctly rrpost-war" group · of writers emerged. Dominating the period were Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, Thomas Wolfe, 0 1 //eill, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Dos Passes, Katherine Anne Porter, Erskine Caldwell and Carson HcCullers. Using �symbolism and alle gory to attack war, decadence and t h e atomic bomb., American writers often took as models such Russian writers as Chekov., Dostoevski and Tolstoi. Many employed t .. e strea.a of consc · ousness tech nique--a sty e influenced 11 y t he new psychology " a nd Irish writer James Joyce--which allowed for uninterrupted explorations on the t h oughts of ch aracters who 11 streamed 11 their references. A similar mood pre vailed in the poetry--much of which dealt with social decadence, war and the mechanization of man. E.E. Cummings, known for h is typo- graphical trickery and general linguistic and syntactical experiments., was one of the most relentless critics of bureaucracy and war. Such themes had also concerned T.S. Eliot, considered one of the greatest modern poets, in such poems as " "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prj.frock" and The Waste Land. Tbe Irnagist poets p~rsued their development via such voices as "H.D • ., n Ezra Pound and Marianne Moore. Other modern poets CH·•-e. . _ Conrad Aiken, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Archibald McLeish, Hart Crane, John Crowe Ransom, Allan Tate, Richard Eberhart, Randall Jarrell, Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg. Crane, Eliot, Pound, W.H. Auden and Stevens have been called the ~jor voices of the modern American Poetry. Historically, Black Music bad been marked by white imitation and exploitation. There always existfthe need to create a "white" musical face that ~ b e digested .by Americans at large. From the minstrelsy of plantation days to the sophisticated operettas and musicals of the twenties, this pattern ran un- �broken. During the modern period, Be'lop became the musical heir to Ragtime, early (azz and Tin Pan Alley. While the big lef.O,K band~and ll&eW composers--Basie, Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, w.c. Handy, Eubie Blake, Noble Sissle, etc.--continued their important work, different kinds of experiments were going on among other musicians. From these new formations and probings came some of the giants of modern Black ;f'usic: Miles Davis, Charlie "Yard Bird II Parker, Lester "Prez'-' Young, Sonny Rollins, Gene Ammons, Art Blakey (who studied drums in Africa), Ornette Coleman (see Four Lives in the B0ob Business), Chano Pozo (Afro-Cuban), Dizzy Gillespie and Babs Gonzales (Bop poet and singer: I Paid My Dues, 1967). From the musicians and their supporters emerged an underground nhip 11 language. This tradition, of talking in metaphors and encoded cultural neologisms, had begun during the ienaissance. vocalists were featured with the musicians: oic2ll strsl is I Often, too, Black sa s sf th ass a Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn, Billie ~ Ho1J_iday and Bessie Smith--who died in 1937. The migration to cities also sa~ the continued rise of urban -0r big city p.ues. By 1960, however, the /1ues bad gone through several important periods of development. Some names associated with the modern period were Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, Cab Calloway, Bill Broonzy, Pops Foster, Eddie "Son'' House, Robert Johnson, Johnny Temple, Roosevelt Sykes, Elmo James, B.B. King, Leadbelly, Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters, Josh White, Sonny Boy Williams, Howlin" Wolf, John Lee Hooker, Ligthnin' Hopkins i'c,n',T'ed, and Big Joe Turner. These men inherited the flames ii QIJllj\bY • �Leroy Carr, Blind Lemon Jefferson and W.C. Handy. Several notable Black literary explosions occured during the period between 1930-60. Important were: the publication of Native Son (Richard Wright, 1940); the publication of For People (Margaret Walker, 1942); the appearance of Invisible My G""enJr,Lyn 81->t.i()~.s,' Man (Ralph El-l ison, 1952) and ilia~ wit'ming of the Pulitzer Prize ror poetry ID J 1 J ~ 950_, - J!nnie Allen). Native Son, a novel, featured a Black protagonist named Bigger Thomas who sym"1lized (and in many ways contained) the anger, rage and pressures felt by urban Blacks. The book was the first by a Black author to make the best seller list and was also a €ook of the Month 6lub choice. ~ ' i During the same period ' Wright, who died an expatriate in France in 1960, published several other novels, short stories, books of essays and miscellaneous prose. appeared. In 1945 Black Boy, his autobiography Wright is significant for many reasons, foremost among them being that he was the first Black writer to deal, accurately and on par with the best fiction writers of the day, with the philosophical and psychological complexity of the Black urbanite. In doing this, he opened a new range of possibilities and ~lped free Black fiction in many ways. There were other excellent fiction writers during this period: Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, SC J McKay, Hughes, • • • Bontemps, Ann Petry, DuBois, Frank Yerby, Eric Walrond, w,Uiq117 f)emb'/ Chester Hime,~and Sterling Brown. Wright, however, was the first to forge and sustain a major Black art piece out of mythical and racial materials. �Baldwin, whose reig~ succeeded Wright's, made his entry in 1953 with the publication of Go Tell It On the Mountain. i N\ff Nb.~"t His other baNLI PI•· work includes Notes of a Native Son (19.55) and Giovanni's Room (1956). A)~rq<A ~et who teaches litera- -~AWalker, ture at Jackson State College, was 22 years old when she wrote "For My People 11 --one of the most famous Black poems. Her book by the same name won the Yale Series of Younger Poets award in 1942. Rich in cultural folk references, Black phonology and social history, the slim book brilliantly traces the hope, humor, pathos, rage, stamina and iron dignity of the race. The winning of the Pulitzer Prize by Gwendolyn Brooks (and Ellison's accolades) told the world that Black writers 11 had mastered the ultimate" English literary crafts of poetry and fiction to a degree which no longer called their abilities into question. Many Black critics feel, however, that there were excellent volumes, before Annie Allen., which should have received the Pulitzer Prize. These critics say Black artists, like the Black Experience, come periodically into fashion (e.g., Harlem Renaissance)--to be tolerated at the whims of white literary bastions, despite their proven abilities. The GNtndoLy,, citation of - . . Brooks (who published A Street in Bronzeville, 4 1945) was a citation of the Black Experience, however--despite the fact that the prize was not a major announcement in the Black community. Blacks, caught up in the post-war mood, job' searching and a quest~or social equality, were not reading �much poetry.,Ellison, who has not published a novel since Invisible Man (1952) remains one of the most controversial figures in American Literature; much of the controversy arising from what he says outside of fiction (see Introduction). Communist-oriented papers generally condemned Invisible Man when it f'irst appeared. They held that it was a "dirt throwing" ritual for Ellison--who combines naturalism and complex symbolism in the book. Black novelist John Oliver Killens also gave it a negative review. Generally, however, the work is considered, by Black and white critics, to be a great novel-perhaps the greatest American novel. It won the National Book Award in 1952 and in a subsequent poll of 200 journalists and critics, it was judged the most distinguished single work of' f'iction since World War II. rAnflamed by the spirit and example of the Harlem Renaissance, Black poets of the pre- and post-war years continued exciting experiments. .from the 11 G"'endblvn 1lilllli~Brooks recalls that a brief encouragement great 11 James Weldon Johnson when she was a child spurred her on her way. Some of the poets of the Renaissance, however, quit writing altogether or began writing in -i'other $· genre~ . Johnson reported in 1931 that Fenton Johnson b ad been "silent" for ten years. Poet Bontemps also wrote novels--the most famous of them being Black Thunder (1939), an adaptation of the 1831 Nat Turner-led slave revolt. He edited and wrote, and sometimes collaborated with others -or_} anthologies and biographies for young readers. With Hughes, be edited The �Poetry of The Negro: 1764-1949, c onsider ed a breakJhrough in modern Black literary activity. One of the handful of Renais- sance Black writers to survive into the Seventies, Bontemps died in 1973. Some have called the period between 1930-54 the age of Lan ston Hug es in Black letters. remained Indeed, Hug 1es rominent and productive throughout the three periods-- . ~naissance, 1930-54, and the rontemporary era. During t e pre- and post-war periods, Hughes continued to turn out everything fron newspaper fiction columns (Jesse B. Simple) to juvenilia to plays. Hughes in poetry, like Wright, Ellison and Baldwin in ~ose, faithfully recorded the Blacr mood. l#t ~· =~the others, he also predicted the social violence of the sixties. Poets and other volumes of the period included! Sterling Brown, Southern Road (1932); Cullen, The Medea and Some Poems (1935); Hayden, Heart-Shape in the Dust (1940); Naomi Long Madgett, Songs to a Phantom Nightingale (1941) ; H. Bing~ DiJmond, We ~lho Would Die (1943); Tolson, Rendezvous With America (1944); Dodson, Powerful Long Ladder (1946); Cullen, On These I Stand (posthumously, 1947); Hayden, with Myroi 0' Higgins, The Lion and the Archer (1948); Tolson, Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (1953); Selected Poems of Claude McKay (posthumously, 1953); Ariel W. Holloway, Shape Them into Dreams (1955); John C. Morris, Cleopatra and Other Poems (1955); Alfred Q. Jarette, Black Man Speaks (1956); Beatrice Wright, Color Scheme (1957); Mary Miller, Into the Clearing (1959); Percy E. Johnston, Concerto for Girl and �Convertible (1960); Oliver Pitcher, Dust of Silence (1960);o-S)._ ean Eater ( 1960 )• i,J3rl Vs@ z en Gwendolyn Brooks , The Tb? * Also writing and/or translating during this period were Dudley Randall, Samuel Allen (Paul ().Od Vesey), Margaret DannerA Richard Wrigh t (wh o also wrote poetry). C J L 5 di ... A , Black and white poets exchanged ideas and socialized_ . . if Ir# I I sl I I r t at 1a as u2 ~ V1 d Po t't rMt:"' •·11sllit-.199-.is1!1!£-i-.t1tM11•f._.,.,o A. )(any of the I t 3 Il ia] 5 2 at gl SP .. r 11 isi J 13& were introduced to publishers and the reading public by well-known white poets or critics. Such a practice was to come under fire, during the latel'l6ots and/f?o'i's, by some Black poets and critics who judge~Black writing. reel that whites could not Reviews of the period were generally favorable to the Black writers who showed great finish in their work. Hayden, Walker, Brooks, Tolson and Dodson were among the poets who received high praise for their tech nical virtuosity. Stephen Vincent Ben~t wrote t he forward to lfi:: For My People, Allen Tate to W IL I Pu Libretto For the Republic ~Ji~YI r-e.(eiued 'A accolades r'ri """ of' Li ber ia and Hayden won Hopwood Awards twice. JJJ,,,,. Poetry: A Magazine of Verse--regarded as t he wh ite American olympus of poetry. One of the most important anthologies of t h e post-~naissance period was The Negro Caravan, (1941) edited by Brown, Arthur P. Davis and Ulysses Lee. The best inclusive anthology of Black literature, it remains today .are ef th ~ 210 tstanding textbook{ . <..!! �Brown also published two important works of criticism, The Negro in American Fiction and Negro Poetry and Drama, both in 1937. And J. Saunders Redding published his critical work, To Make a Poet Black, in 1939. Jn 1940 d · IA/ll,O e.s"twouc htd PhylonAwith the venerable W.E.B. DuBois as editorf~fn 1954, as American soldiers prepared to return from Korea and television glared to consume the world, the Supreme Court decision of May 15 closed the book on one era of Black American history and opened up Pandora's box on another. Wright's Black Power (1954), a commentary on bis experiences in Africa's Gold Coast, may have been more than c.,f just a hint "Ai;M.. what was to come. ~~~woul~ w~~s some, but not all, of the ingreAi;nts of Pandora's box• ~ when a Black woman in Montgomery refused to givi(her seat on a public bu5 to a white man, a new era of Black struggle was born. A successful boycott of buses was led by Martin Luther King, Jr., founder (in 1957) of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Like flesh-flames, hordes of young Blacks (and some whites) began sit-ins and various other "in's" as the Freedom cry reached a new pitch. This was the ges- tation period for the Congress of Racial Equality and the And o.U~~ wl,',Le. Studentll Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. A!hite youth took to television and swayed to the rhythms of Chubby Checker, the Chante ifs ~ and the Five Satins. But as America "twisted the night away" another and different mood, expressed through a 2")1 �difi'erent voice, was hugging t h e rim of the "dream." And we were not yet "Beyond the Blues." ,, THE III '\l()Jaieln - THE TOTEM Good mornin', blues, blues, bow do you do? -- Leadbelly A. The Coming Cadence: Pre-Renaissance Voices As the 20th century continued to open its bewilder ed (some. say "shocked 11 ) eyes, e:'il,:it. m1>-t-\'f & 02 not the least among t em in Blac bm ~ changes were occur ng-- poetry and the arts. vitb the increase int e num er of pub ications taking their work (due to the pioneering efforts of Dun ar, Carrothers, Camp ell, Cotter, Sr., and ot ers), Black poets could at least anticipate 1aving t eir ~~~~tf1pTJ read by white editors. Many of the poets writing in the first and second decades oft e century would never be eard from again; but a few wold become "mi nor " /\JJ.,"> 'tld o ve.r lights of the Harlem Renaissance. T e poets llif at i i m a surprising diversity of styles, linguistic-bents, t emes, temperaments and age categories, and came from practically every corner of the United States, the West I ndies and Sout America. Among the early poets were Kelly Hiller (1863-1939), Leslie Pinckney Hill (18 0-1960), Charles Bertram Johnson (1880- ) , Benjamin Brawley (1882-1939), Raymond Garfield �~ ~ Dandridge (18 2-1930), Otto LeA Bohan1n Edward Mee al 1 (l 80- ( , James ), Angelina Weld Grimk~ (l Jessie Redmond Fauset (1882-1961), Walter Everette awkins ( 1883- '( ) , Mrs. Sarah Lee (Brown) Fleming, Leon R. Harris (1 86- ), Effie Lee ewsome (1885- ), alter Adolphe Roberts (1886-1965), Eva Al erta Jessye (1897- ) , Georgia Douglas Johnson (18 6-1966), T eodore Henry Shackelford (1888-1923), Roscoe C. Jamison (1886-191 ), C1arles ( 18 5- ) , Mrs. Mae Smith Jo nson ( 1890- R.,a. za.fkeri Qf o (1 95- William Edgar ilson ) , Andrea ), Benjamin E enezer B rrell (1Q92- ai. e ·c ), ), Joseph Seamon Cotter, Jr. I'.:\ (1895-1919), Clarissa Scott Delany (1901-1927), and scores more. Major poetic contribut ons were made by James Weldon Johnson, Fenton Johnson, Cotter, Jr. (cut do n iiiiff h{t,:~Ltl develop his promise) and a few ot ers; yet s i mportant that we at least .@: ~ ~~ ome of the lesser lie; ts of t is period • •C•••••1 ic: 3 5 .g Brown and ~•=ii t Redding feel nothing of im- portance, beyond the Johnsons, occured i n the first two decades. But, for purposes of our study and continuity, we must note that t i s was not a period of inactivity among poets. nicall, there was some experimentation. Tech- Ho ever, most of the poets ether helped p ase out the dialect vogue or wrote harmless pieces on nature, love, gardens, death and ~uman sorrow. Others wrote ars ly and itterly of the war. Miller, mathematician and soc ologist, was a leading �Black spokesman of the day and only occasionally wrote poetry. His prose-poem nr See and Am Satisfied 11 provided fuel for further discussion of contemporary racial issues. Consisting 25 stanzas, it is reminiscent of Fentpn ~/ohn_son (ITTired 11 ) of 1-eSL,e Pi neY and Margaret v alker ( "For My People "). , ' (ill produced- i11any good students wile he was principal at C1eyney Training Sc ool for Teachers (later C eyney tate College). e attended arvard and taught at Tuskegee and his literary influences are Longfellow, Wordswort , Milt on and Burns. His pu lis:1ed works are The vings of Oppression (1922) and Toussaint L'Overture--A Dramatic liistoa (1920). il_, Roy L. oet and educator, is a proteg oft e senior Hill wbo feels t ~j)~-A merican "constrained oppression to give h i m wings 11 e,.hd I\ whose. poetry 11as a strenct. laced e tells witb lasbington-typc feelings a o trace relations. us that e will t'mourn t e travail of emorable, o ever, s of an actual lynching. ( a pamphlet, 1900), L,iy race." ?lost gripp · n 0 ly is nso Q,u i etly,n a poet c dist llati.on #c arles o nson pu lis ed isperinc;s :1e T-Tantle of D n ar and Ot er Poe.ns ( a pamo nson •as an edtcator and preac er in 1tlssouri and and serious. at ri , e lures t e read r into That appears to e then ta es some iron· s_ t~- · st or tt rn. of ease w1en 11 1i·r~ "' a ,., " ·...... ea II es71/A.._n occ-as1.ona_ • u l se d sonc'\,i\7t poe t , 11 bVL t\rld ~ ·!). For ,ra-11 ey attended More .ouse, Harvard a~ t e Universit~ of Ch caco, and for years ta col:!..ei:;es. i:;..,t in :Sn •l is1"' depart 1e:1ts at s011t er:1 Plac c Ie ·s pr mar "ly nown for ,.., · s io neer in ..J or ~n �li t orature an soc 5e: hort r-=i:istor:,. istory. (192:), Gor · s (1937 to t and !e 1i ders and ~eroes (10? ra•rlcy ' s stt.:d "es t"at we mt.st .;o for v tal e poetry. deve ii,Q I+- is 1for.,1at or. 01 ii!CBS 6661L, §& .I.. a Dandri dge ' s poetry is r c, and so,nt}times racial in concerns. " B1.4,k II bi,.o'1fl e.."'" "Ti.1e to De" adv_ses.c••~ to 0 ·ve t.,e r ife "f'or sO1n t 1,., i n::;. n • pparent':y e~tered '-~~ tbe aborted Reconstruction and contemporary violence against Blacks, he asks: Or can it be you fear the grave Enough to live and die a slave? 11 Zalka Peetruza II recalls McKay 1 s 11 Harlem Dancer II in that every part of the woman is dancing n--save her face. 11 A native of (.'\ Cinciit}i, Dandridge suffered a stroke when he was 30 years old which left his legs and right arm paralyzed. Thereafter writing most of bis poetry from bis bed, he published The Poet and Other Poems (1920) and Zalka Peetruza and Other Poems (1928). Dandridge also wrote competent poetry in dialect and ¢ 1 11 f 1 ll was a disciple of Dunbar.#Boban~n and McCall contributed poetry to various magazines. A teacher from Washington, D.C., Bohan~ did not publish a volume. Neither did McCall who became an editor of the Independent after J')EConMng . n • bec.t:cu!>e. o f::' blind A typhoid. Angelina Grink6 published a three-act play (Raebel) in 1921 but her poetry remains uncollected. Born in Boston, she was �educated in various schools, of several states, and later taught English for many years at Dunbar High School in Washington, Pi---es 0..41 'n ei_ Ii~" -~.,..,.._ D.c. More than slightly 17 I l!!ii,/\Gwendolyn Brooks ,A"" 1 ■ ,""'9GIP:vm poetry contains some of the most distilled language in modern ~~tlti'Uo.tiA~ American literature. pdi21 t, precise and poignant, she writes of love, seasons, darkness and high spirits during her maturing years--typified in the phrase "the New Negro." Although she had been publishing poetry in periodicals her first big break came when she was included in Cullen's anthology, Caroling Dusk (1927). how~el;, Not until the sixtie,~would such lines as the following take on their full political/cultural significance: Why, beautiful still finger, are you black? And why are you pointing upwards? In "The Want of You 11 even the moon and clouds join in "the crying want of you. 11 ANAe.Lei\o.. , Long overdue is a detailed study or·~,. Grimke.'111 But she is included in the best anthologies of AfroAmerican poetry and literature. Critical comments on her work can be found in the work of Kerlin,lKinnam~J~~~i, \vko c.\.to..~~t-,3ed h~,,., wo..-t.AS :..:J ' and Brown A"irony and quiet despair 11 • e.'#-cepf,ilnAL Ar,1 i iiiaHE student in college and for several years literary editor of the famous Crisis magazine, Jesse Fauset also served as an interpreter for the DuBois-inspired Second Pan-African Congress in London. A native of New Jersey, she attended Cornell (Phi Beta Kappa) and the University of Pennsylvania, and published four novels: There is Confusion (1924), Plum Bun (1929), The Chinaberry Tree (1931) and Comedy, American �Style (1933). Her poetry appeared in numerous periodicals during the twenties and thirties. "Oriflamme, 11 Her skill is evident in her most famous poem. Inspired by a quotation f'rom Sojourner Truth, the poem views the Black mother 1'seared with slavery's mortal scarsu but vows that her sons are Still visioning the stars! Black poets apparently spent time reflecting during the period between the beginning of the century and the Renaissance. So much of the poetry takes us into their private lives--sometimes into racial tones and sometimes not. Some of Jessie Fauset's verse, for example, mirrors her knowledge of French (she taught the language and translated into English several West Indian French-speaking poets). This is seen in the titles of some of-t't;e poems and in other places where she interpolates French words ""' het,.po ;TA-f l'S into the texts. Generally her tone is quietl\.neat and well written. Hawkins (a native of North Carolina) graduated from Kitrell College in 1901 and worked f'or many years in the railway mail service. In "Credo" he announced that I am an Iconoclast. With obvious irony, Hawkins goes on to claim he is "an Anarchist,n (see Brown) and 11 an Agnostic.n Additional irony and cynicism is seen in such poems as "A Spade is Just A Spade" and Death of Justice." 11 The In his rush of language and boldness or subject matter, Hawkins anticipates Tolson. His Chords and and Discords was published in 1909 and his work appears in �-The Poetry of Black America (l,J.off, 1973) and Kerlin's ~ anthology which includes critical notes. on Hawkins (a "foreshadow" of new 11 Brown also comments Negro Poetry"). fuO,. Harris, Mrs. Fleming, Mrs. Newsome, Roberts,~ Jessye, Shackelford., Jamison, Wilson, Hrs. Johnson, RazafieriA,ro, Burrell and Bailey were among other poets contributing to various periodicals of the day. Harris brought out The Steel Makers and Other War Poems in pamphlet form in 1918. He served as editor of the Richmond (Indiana) Blade and published shortstories in The Century. "The Steel Makersn is emotionally and technically akin to some of the work of, Wnitma.n \ Walt Sandburg. Jand co..~L It praises the steel workers--among whom Harris himself numbered at one time. In another place, Harris asks the white man to accept him since, despite color and feature differences, The Negro's the same as the rest. Harris' work can be found in Kerlin's book.r;~'II's. Fleming published Clouds and Sunshine (1920) in Boston at the inception of the Renaissance. Mrs. Newsome, who writes primarily for children, did not publish a volume of poems until 1940 (Gladiola Garden). Among the "earliest Negroes to employ free-verse with artistic effectiveness" were Razafkeriefo and Will Sexton. Sexton contributed to various periodicals as did Razafkeriefo whose work appeared in The Crusader and The Negro World. through the theme of the day, Sexton announced I am the New Negro. Carrying �Taken from 11 Tbe New Negrou, this line will be seen again in various places and temperaments including . ; Tolson' s Symphony. rt In 11 11 Dark The Bomb Thrower rr Sexton plays the role of "America ' s evil genius" and sardonically proposes a reversal of the ideals of Democracy. Razafkeriefo, born in Washington, D.C. to Afro-American and Madagascaran parents, only had an elementary education. He asks, in "The Negro Church," for "manly, thinking preachers n And not shouting money-makers, after declaring (in the manner of a Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X or Rapl Brown) that the church has great "power. he warns, should work to 11 11 Preachers, f'i t the Negro u For this world as well as heaven. In addition to anger and impatience, this poet also expresses race pride and praises 11 The Negro Woman. 11 If it were left up to him to pick a woman for "queen of the ball of fame," be would nselect the wonderful Negro woman. n ~urrell, who con- tributed poetry to magazines, echoes Razafkeriefo in "To A Negro Mother. 11 In :rour eight-line. stanzas (using iambic octa- meter) Burrell celebrates the ngrace and f'ortituden of the Black mother. Recalling that greatness of Black history, he asks earth mother to Create anew the captains of the past; (Build in your soul the Ethiopian power, The preceding two poems call to mind Hughes' Watkins t 'Ebon Maid and Girl of Mine, 1 n 11 ... Tbe Negro Motber,n :Hrs. Johnson's uTo My �Grandmother, 11 Dodson's "Black Mother Praying," and other moving tributes to the A.fro-American woman. <1/wilson' s body' s Child" is not good poetry but its subject is. 11 Some- He worked as a printer and theatrical performer and ser-ed time w'1e."'e. in t1:1e ~ussouri State Penitentiary · together a small book of l1is verses. of Canada ·who studied at a Philadelpb ia Art Museum. 1,.; e put Shackelford was a native industr5_a: training sc ool and t , e His book, Ny Country and Other Poems, was published in Philadelphia in 1918. Jamison published Negro Soldiers and Other Poems in South St. Josep:1, His souri, in 1918. Jamison writes about "Castles in the Air, "Hopelessness II and 11 The Negro Soldiers. rr 11 love, Th e latter poem bas something or the rlavor or Dunbar's "Colored Soldiers II and salutes the bravery and courage or Black troops whose "souls grandly rise.rr These troops, Jamison points out, rougbt for America instead or seeking "vengence ror their wrongs. " A native of Missouri, Bailey's only volume or poems (The Firstling) was released in 1914. "The Slump" makes a baseball (via Christian symbolism) game analogous to t h e hardships or Black life: Well, we're all at the and warns that the 11 at-- ball may be burled rr as a plea. "Hr. Self 11 is at the bat but There's the Beggar and Gate-and a whispering voice rrom above calls "Strike tbree. 11 9v0,.._ Jessye wrote moving poetry but is much better known �for her work in developing and leading professional choruses. Born in Kansas, she received musical training at Western University in Kansas and Langston University in Oklahoma. Moving to New York City in the twenties, she continued working with figures like Will Harion Cook, J. Rosamond Johnson, Hall Johnson and others. In her famous concerts around the world she has used work from Porgy and Bess, John Work 1 s compositions and that of the men listed above. Her published collections include My Spirituals (1927), The Life of Christ in Negro e,giritu~l~ (1931), Paradise Lost and Regained (Milton's work adapted to Black songs, 1934), and The Chronicle of Job (a folk .drama, 1936). I mportant for t , e same reaso ns noted i n our discussion of Alex Rogers, rJ-YfA'-Jessye successfully com- bined the poetic and the musical language (though they are so similar to start withJ). Her poem, 11 The Singerrr recalls t h e work of Corrothers, Dunbar, Johnson (James), and numerous other poets who have bridged the gap between the two art forms. One is reminded of Johnson 1 s "O Black and Unknown Bards" in ~\ltl. ~ Jessyefs statement that the singer's "speech was blunt and manner plain. 11 Like the "unknown bards,ll his unlettered song was "but the essence of the heart." Her poems, published in newspapers during the twenties, show a lightheartedness but a sincerity and sense of conviction. She writes about "spring" and the "Rosebud" and while she is not singularly distinguished as a poet, her life 1 s work is an indispensable float in the grand parade of ~lw'Afro-American creativity in �the arts. sh• In choral work, HioEJ diio••e•• is especially noted for her direction of the Original Dixie Jubilee Singers, later named the Eva Jessye Choir. of Jji;s s I C1111 t <y';ttre For a thorough discussion and works ( along with t h at of h er con- temporaries) see Eileen Southern's The Music of Blac k Americans. For poetry select io ns, see Kerlin. During t h e period of the Renaissance, poets such as Georgia Johnson, Jessie Fauset, Anne Spencer, Alice DunbarNelson, Hill, McKay, James Weldon Johnson, Dandridge and Cotter (Who had achieved recognition before 1923), continued t heir output either t hrough magazines or book-pub lication. Much of this work is recorded in Johnson's The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922, 1931); Kerlin's Negro Poets and Their Poems (1923, 1935) and Contemporary Poetry of t h e Ne gro (1921), a nd in ot er suc 1 compilati ons and peri odicals . Anne Spencer was born in West Vir ginia and studied at the Virginia Seminary in Ly nchbur g wh ere s h e h as spent most of her life. (She recently relocated in California~ 'hwt UM for a long tim~ltft~arian at Dunbar High Sch ool in Lynchbur g . This poet's work h ardly ever reflects racial or political concerns but she is one of t h e most tech nically-sure of all Black poets. She writes about women, love, carnivals and t he workings of the mind. In its brevity and conciseness, h er poetry anti- cipates t he work of Gwendolyn Brooks and is l oosely a kin to Angelina Grimki's (though t h e latter's work is racially-flavored). Her poetry also bears some ki nsh ip to t he "Ima.gist tr sch ool of �poets writing in the early years of tbe century. Elements of aLs.t, this particular technique and style canAbe 11 ( The Diver, n se~~~ nNight-Blooming Cereus.$, and others • A "At The Carnival 11 we smell sausage and garlic t bat Sent unholy incense skyward and are told (in an echo of the ro mantics) that Whatever is good is God. 11 Dunbar 11 laments 11 11 how poets sing and die! and places the eulogized Black poet in the same class with Chatterton, Shelley and Keats. 11 Hiaa OtJCHUOiH;rmost moving poem, it seems, is Translation" wherein two lovers naver speak But each knew all the other said. Calling her the nmost original of .all Negro women poets, 11 Brown advised, in 1937, that her ttsensitive, and keenly observantn work should be ncollected for a wider audience." But as of ,.:Sftti;:~ , 19~, no one had undertaken Brown's suggestion. . -A.nn-e Considering her span of years, ~~Spencer (somewhat like Hayden) has not been prolific. Her work can be found in several antho- logies and periodicals of the twenties. Critical assessments are given by Kerlin, Brown and Johnson. James Weldon Johnson, we noted earlier, published Fifty Years and Other Poems in 1917. 52SR JJ ~ Jr~ncluded dialect as well as conventional standard English commemorative pieces. Not highly original, the work was one more step in the long and fruitful development of perhaps t h e most important figure in the history of Black poetry. 21/-J It seems Johnson was involved �in as many things as could have been humanly possible. After ~voL.vemtnt his JI 1 Aon Broadway (with light operas), he worked for t he re-election of Theodore Roosevelt, served as United States Consul (a reward for his political work) in Nicaragua and Venezuela, published (anonymously) The Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man in 1912, wrote editorials (for more than 10 years) for the New York Age and became the NAACP's first secretary general--working in that post for deeply psychological work , Auto 14 years. y dealt with sue A an explosive contemporary topic--the theme of passing--that Johnson would not affix his own name to it until it was reissued during the Renaissance (1927) with an introduction by Carl Van Vechten. The conventional poetry of Fifty Years shows Johnson to be politically at the threshhold of the "awakening." Brown stated, incorrectly, that Johnson's "Brothers" was t he most "vigorous poem of protest fro m any Negro poet up to h is time." We know that Whitfield, Whitman, DuBois, Hawkins and others were just as strong and forceful. Fifty Years was highly praised by Braithwaite ("intellectual substance 11 ) , Brander Ma.thews (should be grouped with the noblest American commemorative poems) , and other influential critics. This first book shows a strength, nvirility" and robustness t hat would mark Johnson's future writings--especially God's Trombones (1927). The poems are patriotic ("Fifty Years" which commemorates t he fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation), nostalgic ( 11 0 Southland!"), descriptively amorous ("The Glory of . the Day was in Her Face"), strong and v~rile ("Th1 Young Wai{}or 11 ) , �race-proud (angry) and didactic ( "Brothers n )} and fundamental and religious ( "O Black and Unknown Bard n). The last poem, more important for what it records than how it is assembled, is an artistic tribute of the makers of the Spirituals. Using actual words and names from Spirituals, Johnson weaves in the strength and artistry characteristic of thew songs he loved-and to which he devoted so much research and listening time. Great ar,F, he says, is produced y These simple children of the sun and soil. Johnson knew, too, that these makers would not be 0 black slave singers, gone, forgot, unfamed, if work of the sort be was doing continued in the bands of those to whom be passed the torch. Although Fifty Years is strong, solid work, it is later that Jonson's comes into his own as experimentalist and pace-setter. Georgia Johnson also wrote race-conscious vii iii? themes are suggested in her titles: yrics. The Eea.rt of A ~ C,:>.f) Woman (1918), Bronze (1922) and An Autumn Love Cyc 1-"I\ and fluent," her poetry deals primarily wit - · t¼ e.r "Skillful loneliness, sorrow, seasons, unrequited love and is intellectually-based. The first Black woman after Frances Harper to achiev¾.,~lcognition as a poet, she is explicitly racial in Bronze although allusions to Sh~ Blackness sometime~appear in her other work. Yet~ seems to know something about the heart of all w·omen ( and men) when she says the singer's songs Are tones that repeat �The cry of the heart Till it ceases to beat . 0 "The Octi\roon n deals with a woman who is tainted because she is the victim of One drop of midnight in the dawn of life's pulsating stream but who finds hospitality in the Black community. 11 humble fold"--presumably the This poem recalls Cotter's "The Mulatto to His Criticsn which depicts the multi-racial predicament of one (probably Cotter himself) made up Of Red Man, Black Man, Briton, Celt, and Scot, but who loves the dark-skinned, . curly haired race that "puts sweet music in my soul.~~f~ohnson develops a similar To Jv.ry Son4 11 ,Jthe tosses and turns between advising her son that,... udusky pall or shadows screen the highway of tension in 11 sky" and encouraging him to "storm the sullen fortress 11 .founded on racism. In addition to writing such powerful and lasting Shi), poetry, Mt 11, IeJ decades. t mo was of service to young writers .for several A .female counter-part to Langston Hughes, she hosted regular and spontaneous writers meetings in her home in Washington, D.C., where she moved after receiving academic and musical training at Atlanta University and Oberlin College. A native of Georgia, she was employed in government service most of her adult life. For critically introduced selections of her work, see Barksdale and Kinnamon, Johnson and Kerlin. Brown also supplies a good �asse s s me nt. We s h ould note, i n pass i ng a nd by way of intr oduct i on to Fenton Johnson, H. Binge. Dismond (1891-1956) wh o did not publish a v olume of poetry until 1943 (We Wb o Woul d Die ). Dismond, like Johnson and Frank Mars all Davis was one of the many writers of the period who was not physically present in Iarlem during t e Renaissance. Dismond was born in Virginia and, a track star (as was Frank Horne), studied physical t erapy at Rush r1edical College after attending Howard University Academy and the University of Chicago. c ipation in the Renaissanc e has (The Midwest ' s parti- een dramatically underplayed.) Dismond , who wrote some crisp and poignant poetr:r of love and protest , is more important to us durinc tris period for his journalistic ork. Tit1 Johnson, e edited T e Champion Magazine (starting in 1916) for several yea.rs. They also co-edited The Favorite Mae;azine ( "The World 1 s Greatest Monthly") wh• G~ ttii;. t1219 7 1 iis publ i shed Apo ems and articles. Johnson had several of Pekin Theatre when i s plays performed in Chicago ' s e was nineteen and is generally seen as Otlt. O ~ t e most creative link~between the poets of Dun ar ' s era and t1e Harlem Renaiss a nce. Born in C icago of economically stale parents, be attended t e city ' s namesake university a nd taught school for a year in the Sout1. He privately pu lished three volumes of poetry, one (A Little Dreaming, 1917) in Chicago, and two (Visions of t1e Dusk, 1915; and Songs of the Soil, 1916) in Uew York where .1 e lived for a. s 1ort time. Harriet Monroe and( 11 T e New Poetryn group) bad establ s ed • �Poetry (1912) i n h is her. he. ome town and Jonson made contact with In 1920, t@ht a @R pu lisbed Ta es of Darkest America, sort stories. A participant in t1e "poetry revival" in America., Jonson 1ad h is work accepted for Poetr~, and t½e anthologies Ot ers (1916, 1917, 1920), Te Poetry and Lyric America, 1630-1930. An Anthology of American Poetry: In saying Jonson was ultimately t e poet of "despair" u.. and t at be was the only poet writing in sucbJ,,..vein (as Brown, Redding, Jo nson, Wagner, and ot ers _ ave done), critics onl:~ presented part oft e man. and Sand new in rg; He did this allowed orro from Iiasters , Lindsa:, t Ln to voice somet11· ng relativel:,- oPexperimenl.L e><ch«n-9 (" an avenue --~ be 11\'.te" ~ nd wJ;;r-c, A 1is lack,\contemporaries. lack poetry ·w ileh& ~provid •- But in poems such as "Tired, n "The Banjo Player, 11 "The Scarlet Woman" and "Rulers" he displays much more than "despair. 11 Reflecting., as Brown noted, the "two extremes of Negro poetry after 1914, 11 Johnson can deal with either the brawling urban blues or the down-home, "we shall overcome)' motifs. Because his work does not contain a consistent spirit of hope, ft, •s-a...-.to Weldon Johnson said his message mirrored ideas T'foreign to any philosophy of life the NegTo in America bad ever preached or practiced." Johnson thought this wa.s "sta.rtlingn despite the "birt~ about the same time as Fenton Johnson 1 s work, of the blues era--and the work of W.C. Handy (1873-1958) who is sometimes called its "father. 11 Fenton Johnson is "Tired II of a civilization which has given him "too many" children and �no chance for them to share in the American dream. Ho proposes t o his wife that they Throw the children into tbe river: and observes that • • • It is better tfdie than it is to grow up and find out that you are colored. Johnson writes about roustabouts, prostitutes, vagrants, laborer~ -1. strong will and is, as Jay Wright said of Henry Dumas, "the poet of the dispossessed. 11 He is also t h e poet of the blues . • and '1am 8xcsl!!!i:ss lilai 1.ur\rnd abe.lJ llbhc 7.:slacs are a .f1eeaor.I song: u, In breaking away from traditional Black poetic diction and form, Johnson not only received influence from the white experimenters lrM" of free verse k he borrowed heavily from the blues and, at this level, must share some of the accolades usually reserved almost solely f'or .;:;•~Hughes. It is now widely accepted that the blues do not simply preach resignation. To the contrary, the blues, telling about heart-ache and personal failures , carry hope in the singing and the going on. Margaret Walker is only one of the many poets whose work seems to reflect the influence of Johnson.A/Jo we really believe that Johnson meant for the children to be thrown in the river4jfnymore than we take the bl~es singer literally when be promises to 11 lay my head down on some railroad trackn? Johnson's "note of despair" is one more brilliant distillation of the strange ~Vc.hl(llo(lit (.. 'Li'd!5& ■ 1 a ll\web '511.l:Q a.1i!lie1t1i&> which produced the sorrow songs, the Spirituals , the ditties , jokes, rhymes and • �blues. At t h e time Joh nson wrote hi s poetry Ha ndy was com- posing some of his most famous blues songs ( 11St. Louis Blues," nThe Memph is Blues, 11 1"Yellow Dog Blues 11 ) and arranging traditional blues pieces like "Train' s A-Comin," C"~ "i' Travel1er, n '1Come on, Eph , 11 and 11 11 Juba. Let Us Ch eer t h e Weary 11 And in t h is list alone '---' is locked partial answers to much of t h e work of several Afro-American writers: Hu ghes, Walker, Tolson, Wrigh t, Brown, Jayne Cortez, Gil Scott-Heron and numberless oth ers. It is c,,i possible t h at critics looking at Joh nson were .-tAprepared for his irony and poetic assimilation of t hemes and feelings : i Ji h anesthetics. J In 7 11 11 \>~evtous.l~ 4 1\gloss~d over by Christianity and oth er Rulers" Johnson discusses a "monarch n on "Lombard Street in Ph iladelphia," wh o flwas seated on a t hrone of flour bags. 11 Near the "monarch 11 two y oung b oys with guitars played "ragtime tunes of t h e day . 11 Clearly t h is "monarch 11 ( a Black ula.borer 11 in reality) is being serenaded and saluted just as any oth er "ruler 11 would be. of the blues ( 11 aagtime 11 ) ! He presides as a prince Joh nson 1 s work is in most anth ologies of Afro-American poetry and critical assess ments of h i m h ave already been noted. For more t h orough discussions of t h e · poetry-blues concept see,.. Steph en Henderson 1 s Understanding o,.JJ~ • -tt,J "telt.t~ t h e New Black Poetry, JIPAb i bliograp'by ~ l::fl ;cl 1 ■ :Z:L At the dawn of the Harlem Renaissance t ere appeared a s l i m- volume of poetr y by Se amon Cotter, Jr. (1895-1919 ) , t e pr ecocious son of the Cotter already discussed. Young Cotter died a n early death whi ch cut s1ort the work of one of the �most promising figures in Af'ro-American poetry. Born in Kentucky and frail from childhood like Dunbar, Cotter had to end his college career at Fisk University when he developed tubercul0s\•i An innovator, as was his father, Cotter shows a sharp awareness (in The BA,nd of Gideon, 1918) of the plight of Blacks and an even sharper ability to express that plight He echoes much of along with other sentiments and feelings. ctnd.1 Black poetry's concerns in "And What Shall I Say"; }L).... f\. Rain Mfsic 11 eipt.rt'rne,,1.s anticipates \)'f.Y o:f Hughes 's pieces- irl i 91·1\ in The Weary Blues, 11 Jazzonia,n and so on--when he recalls the "dusty earth-drum 11 which hammers falling rain ~ Now a whispered murmur, Now a louder strain. Bearing the import of much of the "exotic" Black literature of the renaissance, Cotter nevertheless sees in the beat of· the Slender, silvery drumsticks a rejuvenation of life as ordered by God, "the Great Musician. Cotter began writing poems while a teenager. His tecbnique,~k~ ..... ' f!r1'toti .Jii!iliiil!~,.rohnson's, combines the best of traditional Western poetry with the new wave of free verse. His poems are about love, "Negro Soldiers, 11 religion, Blackness, justice and bis own illness. "Is It Because I Am Black 11 seems to .1ave l""l looking forward to a 19600s 11 een souln song of a similar title wherein the singer says Something is holding me Lawd, is it In 11 ack! ecause I'm Bl c? ~ , ~poem Cotter asks wl y w i tes a.re so amazed t ,at ' e can �"stand" in t~eir important meetings, look them straiGJ t in t 1e face, and "speak their tongue?" i Cotter; work appears in The Book of American Negro Poetry, Negro Caravan., Kerlin's study (!!The stamp of the African mind is upon" Cotter), and The Poetry of Black America. Although Kerlin submits brief critical comments., a study of this young poet's work is sorely needed. He{iert).. alsolseveral plays and unpublished sonnets. B. POETS AS PROlHETS: The Harlem Renaissance A wave of longing through my· body swept ·. -- Claude McKay The Harlem Renaissance (see section I of this chapter) is normally seen as a decade-length (1920-1930) out-pouring of cultural and artistic activity in what James Weldon Jo1nson called the Negro cultural capit~. There is harmless dis- agreement as to when the tnaissance actually began and how long it lasted. 1935. Some say it started in 1925 and ran until Others give the first time span mentioned above. Still others (including Wagner , Black Poets of the United States) designate t 1e period et1een t e two iorld 1ars (191 -1939). ~,oets of the flenaissance--which included dance, painting, sculpture., music , theater, literature, science and scholarship--knew and read each other's works. Ironically, however, only one of the leading figures is said to have been born in New York City: Countee Cullen (1903-1946) and ' �he w~s raised in the "conservative atmosphere of a Methodist n Hughes parsonage," the adopted son of a minister. (1902-1967) spent much of the decade of the twenties traveling 3 so did Claude McKay (1890-1948) who wandered over "Europe and Litoof.L>' North Africa 11 --in many instances 'r\"a long way from home. 11 Jean Toomer {1894-1967), disturbed and haunted by his complex ethnic background, was a mysterious figure who died the same year as Hughes in the anonymity of a Quaker commune in Philadelphia (obscure after having years before). given up writing several Often called nminor" writers of the Renaissance, neither sterling Brown (1901was born in New York. ) nor Arna Bontemps {1902-1973) And neither publish ed books during t h e twenties but they did have poems accepted by such magazines as The Crisis and Opportunity. McKay , l abeled t he rena i ssance ' s poet of a nger and: rebellion, Kt1fW is chieflyAfor his famous sonnet ("If We Must Die") wh ich winds down (up?) to the following couplet: Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack, Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back! ii'e•.,us~i &01-i.bblcel on bhe c.alls tt1 C9f· the Abbie& apr lslng Of 19?f, :lsRmabcr' McKay wrote it in 1919 shortly after a series that took hundreds of Black lives. as the beginni~g of the Many critics use the date Renaissance. But McKay had made �bis entry into the Harlem world of letters two years earlier {1917) with the publication of two poems ( 11Harlem Dancer 11 and "Invocationn) in Seven Arts Magazine. He came to America in 1912 from his native Jamaica, where he-~much European literature and philosophy, to study agriculture. Enrolling first at Tuskegee and later at Kansas state College, he finally went on to Harlem where he worked as a porter, waiter and restaurant pro~etor. Before leaving Jamaica, McKay had established his reputation as a poet of dialect poetry with his Songs of Jamaica {1912) and Constab Ballads (1912), the latter work reflecting his one-time employment as a policeman on the island. In New York, he gained quick entrance into literary and political circles, establishing a life-long friendship with Max Eastman {who wrote a biographical note for Selected Poems (1953). McKay counted among his friends some of the most in- fluential literary and political figures of the day: John Reed, Floyd Dell {The Masses ), Waldo Frank, Frank Harris (Pearson's Magazine ), Fiery and forceful, McKay was the subject of much attention and discussion. Although be never joined the Communist Party, be ~ . .,.,~ defended its stand in most of the publications/\he wrote. ttrr e Must Die 11 was read into the Congressional Record as an example of Black unrest and resentment. In the furry, McKay left the United States in 1919, returned for a brief period the following year, and left again to travel all over Europe and Northf Africa for 15 lears. He returned to America in 1934 �,f!t· ~·I Pd - BT remai~until bis death in 1948. McKay's other volumes of poetry include Spring in New Hampshire (1920, with a preface by the famous critic I.A. Richards); Harlem Shadows (1922) and The Dialect Poetry of Claude McKay (1972). -Songs of Jamaica was reissued in 1969 and a new volume of prose and poetry (The Passion of Claude McKay) was published in 1973. It contains published and un- published writings, 1912-1948. McKay died obscure and poor in Chicago where he had gone to teach in Catholic Schools. His lif'e, like that of so many Black artists (Dunbar, Charlie 1 1Yardbird" Parker, Sam Cooke, Leroy Carr, Blind Lemon Jefferson) . . <..o nit---.d.1~ was lived with consumate speed, fea~tbD tragedy. Though he lashed out at whites , his closest friends were white; while he wrote defiant , angry and militant verse, he denied that it was inspired by the I ;y , t-e61eo.1n e-.i';. tradictions and enigmas in his life. to unravel them here. There are other con- BlacksA But we make no attempt Keys to much of McKay's complexity, however, can be gained by reading bis autobiography (A Long Way from Home, 1937 , 1970), bis novels: Home to Harlem (1928), Banjo (1929) and Banana Bottom (1933), and his many articles and short stories, Gingertown (1932). entitled Harlem: He also wrote a study Negro Metropolis (1940). The best source for McKay's poetry is his Selected Poems. 'In many ways it is ironic that McKay is called the poet of anger ( Nathan Huggins/ Harlem Renaissance) calls him the j "black Prometheus, 1 since most of his poems deal with quiet �topics such as mothe~ature, nostalgia, loneliness, mental reflection, religion, world travel, and descriptions of city life. orftterally dozens of poems he published, only about ten can be called "angry. ' unrest (' 1/Jme.Wl4 11 tf) Of course there is often seething 1 IJ And I am sharp as steel with discontent ••• , in much of the poetry that is not overtly violent. true of everyday Black life. Such is And in this sense most Black Americans could be labeled "militant" or as it were, polarizing tensions ( 11 violent "--harboring, 11 Baptism 11 ) that make one defy all: ov1 I will comel\back to your world of tears, A stronger soul within a finer frame. Though one of the greatest influences on Black thought and art of his day, McKay perhaps did not know that his writings inspired various spokesmen for African nationalism: sldar Senghor, Ousmane Soce and Aimt clsaire. ,, Leopold And be is today seen as the major link between the lenaissance and the militant writings of the 1960's. Just as his dialect poems (such as "Two-an'-Si.x 11 ) bad charmed and entertained his fellow Jamaicans, the disciplined anger of his popular American poems incited and inspired Blacks, and titillated and fascinated whites. For during this period, whites around the world were indicating a new interestl in Blacks; and Blacks, inspired by the growing nationalist feelings in some European countries, found ready fuel and propaganda in their brothers of color returning home �from the war. Yet for all the anger, McKay never swerved from his use of conventional English verse. With Cullen--though not so religiously--he avoided experimentation. The folk materials of American Blacks, the examples of Fenton Johnson and others, none of these seems to have had much influence on McKay. But his English is designed to cage fury and passion in "sonnettragediesn as James Weldon Johnson called them. Above all he is a poet of passion, distrust, anger and hatred. We have seen some hatred before in Black poetry (DuBois, Gwendolyn Bennett) but not quite like we see it in McKay whom Wagner says "is par excellence the poet of hate. i;,&-, expressed" poems like After, 11 11 11 The White City , 0 Work I Lo"'le to Sing, is not always the hater. fl 11 11 11 Such feeling is Mulatto, and "Polarity. " fl none Year But McKay He examines bate in tbe hands of whites--or as a product of Western sickness and decadence, vented albeit on the Blacks. The nobility of the Black soul l'ii is to stand above this emotion and not"-.be destroyed by it. Other themes in tbe work of McKay are the importance of the earth (and t he countryside), disillusionment (see Dumas) with city life, race pride (celebrations of Blac r past and virtues, ~ "Harlem Dancer 11 ) , prin:itivism and romantic treatment of Africa, Harlem as a Pan-African crossroad, and spiritualism and religion. While McKay was not an experi- mentalist , be did make heretofore unnoticed modifications in the sonnet form. n,71,tt As the first Black poet to _..,.sustai ned use of the sonnet as a political/racial weapon, he must be �given credit (instead of being dispara.ged--c.f., Huggins) for 11 turning this race pride. sonnet to 11 white" form into a vehicle of protest, love and We observed that Lucian B. Watkins opened his The New Negro 11 with He thinks in black. But in no ot er quarter, before or since cKay, does a Black poet persist--infusing blues and tragic irony--with the sonnet. Gwendolyn Brooks will later invent her memorable "sonnet-ballad." And Cullen's sonnets certainly must be taken into account. HcKay, however, endures with an ironic inconclusiveness that verges on the 11 despair 11 critics seem to see in Fenton Johnson. For McKay the sonnet is a form of tberapy--allowing him to loose controlled anger. ( 11 His is the anger of a native Jamaican home boy 11 ) caught up in the strait-jacket of white literary amenities. He wants to be freed. poetry--principally the sonnet. seen in "The Negro's Tragedy, and "The Lynching!'n 11 And freedom comes through This open-endedness can be "The Negro's Friend, 11 "In Bondage, " As a correct and carefully nurtured darling of Western poetry, the sonnet had been in the annals of English b..i,.... literature for centuries when McKay ~siJ!9 it. Containing 14 lines (in various stanzaic patterns), it is designed to pose a problem, squirm in it for a while, and close in a neat answer which begins with line nine, or the sextet. Presto! solving a problem in mathematics or calculus. nrace problem, n however, is not quite so easy. cannot nsolven a lynching. Just like "Solving" the Hence McKay But he places it in the most awesome, �gruesome contexts by equating the lynching to the crucifixion of Christ (see Cullen's The Black Christ and 11 Colors"), and failing to resolve the white-man's moral and religious crisis. The blue-eyed women come to view the body, but show no sorrow And little lads, lynchers that were to b e, Danced round the dreadful t h ing in fiendish glee. Clearly this is not how Petrarch, Shakespeare, Spe4r, Milton, ~ Wordsworth, Arnold or Sanwana would have wanted the problem 11 solved. 11 There was no answer--except for Blacks "fighting back" here and there--so McKay modified t h e concept of t h e sonnet in order to deal with a real "problem." 'tnAost -«ii itPs critics of Black literature and culture h ave discussed McKay -t s work. His Selected Poems is available and he is now being represented e ven in white "prestige" anth olo gies (Norton, BrooksLewis-Warren, The United States in Literature and oth ers). The mos t ambitious study of McKay to dat e is by J e an Wa gner ( l ack Poets). Another recent study (which includes prose writi ngs) is Arthur P. Davis 1, From the Dark Tower: 1900 to 1960 (1974). Afro-American Writers, Also see appendixes to most anth ologies,t'M1 bibliography section of this work, and especially t h e listings in Black Writers of America (Barksdale and Kinnamon). Unl i ke t hat of t he 11 pure blooded " McKay , Jean Toomer•s body housed seve n racial strains and he looked wh ite. Evidence to support the fact that Toomer rejected h is Black b lood and "passed rr cannot be found in h is major work--Cane ( 1923). �Neit 1er is it i n 11 Tbe Bl ue Meridian," written in 1936 a nd sadly overlooked, in which he tries to unite the disparate elements of the American personality into one person. Apparently unhappy in childhood , Toomer never knew bis father who abandoned the boy's mother shortly after be was born in Washington, D.C. Toomer ' s possible claim to name and money bad been thwarted earlier when his mother, the daughter of P.B.S. Pinchback, an important Louisiana Reconstruction politician, had to reduce her social status and re-locate in the upper-class Black area of Washington. robustness: 11 It was here that Toomer found spirit and more emotion, more rhythm, more color, more (~J~)., . gaietyi tt A After attending local public schools (including Dunbar High) be enrolled in one colle ge after anoth er, never becoming a serious de gree candidate. From this latter type of life, be went through a series of jobs, finally getting into serious writing and putting poems and stories in several avant-garde little magazines. Toomer also formed close asso- ciations with New York intellectuals: Hart Crane, Waldo Frank (to whom he dedicated a section of Cane), Gorh a m P. Munson, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Rosenfeld, Kenneth Burke and others. Later, while working as superi ntendent (for four month s) of a small Black school in Sparta, Geor gia, h e gained much of t he material for the first and t h ird sections of Cane. After pub - lication of Cane , Toomer' s life returned to "psych ological disarray" and he turned to oth er sources in search of a selfunifying meth odology. With oth er intellectuals-associates, b e �delved into the philosophies of F. Matthias Alexander, P.D. Ouspensky, and, most importantly, George J. Gurdjieff--whose disciple he later became. Gurdjieff, a Russian, assimilated aspects of Yoga, religious mysticism and Freud, to produce s. what he called Unitism. won over converts. Toomer later e~poused the theory and For a short while he also lived in a heterosexual experimental commune. married two white women. In quick succession Toomer After his second marriage in the thirties, he quipped: "I do not know whether colored blood flows through my veins. 11 Earlier, however, be bad noted in a biographical sketch accompanying work be submitted to The · L berator, that I have lived equally among the two race groups. Now white, now colored. From my own point of view I am naturally an American. I have strived for a spiritual fusion analagous to the fact of racial intermingling. Without denying a single element in me, with no desire to subdue one to the other, I have sought to let them live in harmony. Within the last two or three years, however, my growing need for artistic expression bas pulled me deeper and deeper into the Negro group. And as powers of receptivity increased, I found myself loving it in a way that I could never love the other. Although James Weldon Johnson complained that Toomer refused �(allegedly out of contempt for racial categorizing) to be included in the second edition of The Book of American Negro Poetry, it was later brought out (conversation between Sterling Brown and Jean Wagner ) that ill-feelings existed between the two men. At any rate, Toomer•s poetry and prose appear in practically every subsequent anthology of Afro-American literature. In terms of influence, Toomer exerted more than any other Benaissance figure on the Black intellectuals of the era. i: - No other writer experimented with literature or depicted Blacks P~ll"'1nw,tQ..l r quite the way he did. ~ A influence seems to have occurfd between him and Hart cr·ane. And Robert Bone (Negro Novel in America) places Cane on par with the writings of some of the best American contemporaries: This is M Hemingway, Stein, Pound, Eliot. wJ,et1 o.;,c,,i-taltv pvbl;sl,ecl surprising since Cane ~ old !ess t'ban 500 copies. As a work of art, however, it reflects Toomer's efforts to achieve unity of both self and purpose. Called variously a novel, a collection of short stories/vignettes, a poetic drama, Cane defies labels. we. I n • classrooms" often refer to it as a Blues-Epic--conceptually-,similar to the great nationalistic sagas of the world: Beoi.ulf, Siegfried, The Song of Roland, Chaka, and others, r afvkelded by Black spirituality and the rhythms of Afro-American ritual. Cane has three basic movements-- Toomer bad been interested in both music composition and painting--whicb involve (l) Georgia and the South, (2) Chicago, Washington, D.C. and the North, and (3) Georgia again where i �,~\.. Toomer waxes autobiograph~. In the first part of Cane there are numerous pictures of women, many of them who, like Karintha, will be ripened "too soon . " In the second section, Toomer views northern urban decadence and corruption and their influence on Blacks. In the third movement, a naive northern Black educator goes South (Georeia) to find his African roots. He rather clumsily passes through a series of rites during which To~mer uses all:\::&~ symbolism to heighten the tonC"uo~ 4 11•-.. fear and ~ HtpJ]CJt Many of the stories are introduced by and interspersed with poetic sketches. final section, 11 man's The third, and Kabnis" , is similar to a play. Karintha ' s skin "is like dusk on the eastern" horizon and immediately , at the opening of Cane, we find significant symbols in tbe words "dusk" and "eastern. 11 Through")mt the a... book, Toomer A ssays the plight and joys of Blacks t roug and sometimes enigmatic poetry. Word meanings are given double, triple, and even more levels., as in the 11 Reapers 11 sharpening their scythes for farm chores but also, perhaps, for a massacre. Black beauty is sometimes surprising in the c ontext of w ite barrenness and brutality: Flower. n "~o ember Cotton "Face II is an old, tired Black woman in Georgia. "Cotton Song" celebrates the worksong, unity among field workers, and encodes revolutionary messaces: "We aint agwine -t wait until th Judgment Day!" The 11 Beehive 11 is a metap:ior for t e g_ otto, co,·1 pressed, car- doned off, i mpoveris 1~ed. The narrator wishes '1e could rest ' �"forever II in a flower on s o...e farm ( gai I n t he 11 oc tr: Toomer rural vs cit:,. life). r· te a a out sun and evening "songs, 11 Conversion" and nPortrait in Georgia," the electricity of a 't·Toman •s lips, "Harvest Song , needles. 11 and the cane scents and pine From the pen of t~e poet spill the lives-- roken, mended, some never be un--of tbe severely damaged men and 11 women 'tvho, with vestiges of pomp," carry their Race memories of king and caravan, and go singing through the "Georgia Dustt.11 Original, awesome and sustained in craftsmanship, Cane as poetry is. a classic of Afro-American literature. the book , 11 S or.a of the Son, 11 In the most important poem in Toomer encases both Jis superior techniques and the concept for Cane. Tle son s ngs : Pour O pour that parting soul in song, because he knows the tradition is in tact. Just "pour" the song, he asks, And let the valley carry it along. And let the valley carry it along. The songs of 11 slavery 11 will be transformed into ~ ; - dirges, compositions and epics (like Cane). And Toomer's was a fitting observation in the years preceding the birth of big Black jazz bands (Basie, Ellington) and following the blues (Handy and others). The plaintive soul will soon be gone, but it will leave An everlasting son, a singing tree •••• Likened by some to a series of artistic sketches, by others �to a symphonic composition, still by others to the syncopation and vocal blendings of Afro-American folk music, Cane--according to one critic--was at least two decades ahead of the era in which it was written. Less impressive as Black material, but brilliant as a general work of art, is :---. 11 ~ Blue Meridian . 11 H_eavily in:f'luenced by the modernist school of poetry (Pound, Crane, Eliot, etc.), 11 1?e.,ne1 Meridian n was overlooked for years and is finallyl\aflthologized{4tt- !C> Black Writers of America): Upwards of 700 lines, the poem makes use of vari ous rhyme schemes, stress formulas, linguistic and stylistic marriages. a lot to Walt Whitman in its sweep and intent. 11 muted shades of Sandburg. It owes And there are Meridian," seems to be Toomer's near-final effort to plr,suade the different elements of himself to 11 live in harmony ." ~ - Eliot had knelled the doom of Western civilization in 1922 (The Wasteland) and other poets bad echoed him. Fenton Johnson, of course, had preceded Eliot with this proclamation. Toomer had intimated the same thing in Cane (~"November Cotton Flower"). But it is in "Meridian" that he warns of the impending downf'a.11 of the West--noting that such fate might not be undeserved. The world is full of "crying men and hard women" and We're all niggers now--get me? Black niggers, white niggers,--take your choice. These omens of doom come in the first section of the poem. �But the second section heralds the coming of the new man (for Toomer, perhaps, an admixture of races and colors) who is spiritually and psychically elevated above race and oth er immaterial problems. The new man is a "blue" man, possibly a cross between a Black and a white man, and even sexual crosses are suggested. For we know all these things troubled Toomer. He was concerned as a teenager about bis "nascent sexuality." And he declared that be was above both sex and race if~i~eym~ or obstacles ,..._~defeat. It is a challenge to the more curious student, however, to unravel the life and works of one of the most complex geniuses in American letters. is an achiev~~~be Whatever the outcome, Toomer's reckoned .wi•h ► His work can be found in most anthologies of Afro-American literature. He also pub- lished Essentials-- 11definitions and aph orisms"--in 1931. Toomer wrote more things but most are uncollected and remain at Fisk University. An unpublished se gment of his autobiography, Earth-Being, appeared in the January, 1971, issue of The Black Sch olar. While Wagner's treatment of Toomer does not equal hi~ discussion of other poets of t h e ~enaissance, it is good. $ Brown., Redding, and numerous other critics discuss Toomer 1 s work in various places. nJean Toomer: Of special aid is John M. Reilly's An Annotated Checklist of Criticis m,n Resources for American Literary Study, Vol. IV, No. 1 (1974). See also Toomer listings in ~ ~ ~ a n e f i r ZF?lm!!! I tfl II Countee Cullen, anoth er brilliant-tragic fi gure in Black �poetry, spent most of his life trying to bridge the gap between a 11 Christian upbringingn and a npagan urge. n How can the educated Afro-American, Cullen seems to ask, remain true to bis native instincts and feelings while be WBars the mantle of European nRespectability"? This particular aspect of Cullenfs life and work is often taken too lightly by critics who view bis highly stylized poetry as intellectual (and hence not real) journeys into the awesome world of death, religion and color. Yet Cullen knew , as be said it in "The Shroud of Color,n that being Black in white America requires have. 11 11 courage more than angels History , of course, shows that so far Cullenfs name has withstood heat from the .furnace of "Baptism" just like many others before and after. And such figures as Gwendolyn Brooks, Carl Van Vechten and Eleanor RooseYeltl\\uded his passionately searching and skillful effort to avoid being devoured by the dragon of racism he tried to slay. However, Cullen did not consciously seek after the unity so desperately thirsted after by Toomer. On the one hand , Toomer felt free to explore all facets of the religious and mystical world; on the other be was committed to an intellectual and spiritual search of his African origins. Cullen embraced Christianity and developed the first major Black tragedy figure by reincarnating Christ into a Black man. The 11 pure" and no1ifY Black becomes the new "only begotten son 11 on a several-hundre~frch up Calvary. Here, of course, Cullen was close to McKay; but in sustaining such efforts, in making them allegorical, he surpassed McKay. Cullen's already complicated personal situations't411Wi!vl �aggravated by his reluctance to deal truthfully with the details of his early life. It is still unclear as to whether be was born in Baltimore, Maryland or Louisville, Kentucky, though he makes references to both ( "Incident" and 11 Tbe Ballad of A Brown Girln); or if be was raised by his mother or bis grandmother (up until the time of bis adoption by the Rev. Frederick Asbury Cullen). Johnson (The Book of American Negro Poetry) says Cullen was born in New York City (as do the editors of The Negro Caravan)--probably because this is what Cullen wanted readers to think. .~ Possibly, Wagner notes, he was an "illegiti- maten child and, out of fear of embarrassment, purposely confused the j$}!_~~. This mystery, coupled with Cullen's "'El=Cliiiiilli"M,1vf:,;J ~Li~ sexual,:J! t i\l tnW 1 :itr;::?;is desire to assume the persona of an ~ ~ bard English romantic poet, haunt:"1"1111ii@ precocious ~~throughout his lif e'fiiiii.. Cullen's initiation into poetics came, as with Dunbar and Hughes, in high school where he won poetry contests and published pieces in a student publication which be helped edit. By the time he had finished New York University (Phi Beta Kappa) he had won several awards (including the Witter Bynner award for excellence)·ror his poetry and received a contract from Harper 1 s and Brothers for publication of his first book (Color, 1925). This marked the first time, since Dunbar•s death, that a major publisher had brought out the work of a Black poet. It also marked the first time in almost 20 years that such a book had been published for a live Black poet. · The most skillful J �Black user of English verse forms, Cullen achieved almost instant success. Color sold over 2,000 copies during tbe first two years of publication. And be received bis M.A . from Howard during the same period. He generally sided witb McKay in not breaking away from traditional English poetry. e~pecially admired the poetry of Kea.ts and Shelley. 11 noting that He Johnson, he.might be called a younger brother of Housman,n said some critics argued that Cullen was not an ttautbentic Negro poet. n And Cullen, reminiscent of Toomer 1 s position, straddled the fence on the question of inspiration and themes for Black poets. On one occasion be acknowledged his debt to the Black tradition; but on another, complained that the Black poet ought to be able to spiritual or blues appears. 11 11 chant rr poetry 11 in which no His ~stbetics were stated more concisely in 1927, h owever , in the 1'e1m fl forward to Caroling Dusk (1927), an anthology of Afro-American poetry which he compiled. His comment was startling, especially at the height of the Harlem Renaissance and coming, as it were, from a New Negro: As heretical as it may sound, there is the probability that Negro poets, dependent as they are on the English languaGe, may have more to gain from. the ricb background of English and American poetry than from any nebulous atavistic yearnings towards an African inheritance. Consequently, Cullen called Caroling Dusk an anthology of 11 verse �by Negro poets rather than an ant ology of egro verse." But Cullen could not always subscribe to this particular~estbetic; for much of 1is own poetry can be la eled "a.ta istic yearnings towards an African inheritance." Examination wills ow that such poetry is found in his early volume (Colo:".') as well as in his later ·works: Girl; Copper Sun (1927), Tbe B llad of the Brown J.d Ballad Retold (1927), T!.1e Black C rist nnd Ot er Poems (1929), Te Medea and Some Poems (1935) and Lis selected poems , On These I Stand (1947). •1 -en also wrote ooks for children (T Je Lost Zoo, 1940; a.nd •Iy Lives and How I Lost T em, 1942). He translated Greek literature (The 1edea), wrote numerous lyrics for music and worked on a dramatic adaptation ( "Saint Louis Woman 11 ) of an Ar na Bontemps novel: Sunday. God Sends In 1932, seeking to renew his •iminishing creative powers, he published his only novel, One Wa._r to Heaven . ost of Cullen's poetry represents the vast influence of Christianity. He wrestles with the Lord or asks God why this event or that event occurs. Especially • is this seen in his poetry of racial conflict w.ere the co ntradictions of white Christianity are exposed over and over. "For a Lady I Know" depicts a white woman in heaven who thinks "black cherubs" (or servants) will do her "celestial chores ." nscotts oro, too, Is Worth Its Song" chides '¼merican poets,n outraged by the plights of Sacco and Vanzetti, for not defending Black boys kangaroo'd for "rape" in an Alabama Court. • says, is also "dt vinely spun." ThJdi) cause, Cullen In "Colors" the nswart" (i.e., �Black) man is hanged on a "newer Calvary. 11 Cullen's longest poem and treatment of this theme is The Black Christ (publis1ed in France). It deals allegorically with a lynching. A Black man, Jim, attacks and kills a white man who insults a white woman. Jim is lynched, as southern law requires. His state- ments leading up to the lynching, and the action of the poem, suggest the crucifixion. Redding called the poem mysticism of a bad dream." 11 The childish Indeed, despite the poem's evasive- ness and "mysticism," lynching is much worse than a 11 bad dream. 11 Finally (though the theme continues in countless other poems), there is the famous 'ty'et Do I Marvel. 11 Here Cullen applies the sonnet to the riddle of the Afro-American poet, concluding, after high praise of God, that: Yet do I marvel at this curious thing'"1f! To make a poet blacI_;,and bid him sing! Curious, indeed, was the Black poet--curious both for Cullen and the whites who lavished praise and gifts upon these New and Unusual Negroes. was also "curious." And Cullen's fame (recalling Dunbar's) Here was a poet making waves with old, outdated forms of English verse. 11 fresh beauty." Johnson said he gave them This is true but Cullen's white audience seems to have gotten special pleasur~out of bis ability to handle Black anger, Black grief and Black pathos in such amusingly antiquated poetic clothing. Prevalent themes in Cullen's poetry, then, are race pride, endurance, lynchings, cynicism and pessimism ("can death be worse?"), :Jf/f �a primitive or romantic view of Africa. ("Heritage" and many others), religious and psychological conflict, love and death, spiritual freedom, personal or racial inferiority, doubt and fear, the tensions created by being Black among whites, and Christ as a symbol of conflict and contradiction. Cullen saw the plight of t he Afro-Americans as true tragedy in a Christian land. This comes through in many of his poems, but poignantly in "Heritage": Father, Son, and Holy-Ghost, So I make an idle boast; Jesus of tbe twice-turned cheek, Lamb of God, although I speak With my mouth thus, in my heart Do I play a double part. For the Black American, trapped in Christian attire but longing deep inside for what Zack Gilbert calls "t .a.t all-Black Saturday night,u it is indeed a tragedy. to reconcile a 11 Toomer wanted to Cullen tried all of bis life Cbristian" education with a npagan urge.n 11 unite 11 his several parts. And McKay tried to find a "home 11 in the desolate and sometimes contemptuous place Elijah Muba.rama.d calls "the w1.lderness of Iforth America. McKay went all the way to Europe and North Africa. made annual treks to France for several years. Cullen Black literature abounds with the tragedies incurred when Black intellectuals relinquish their 11 dance II for a 11 book. 11 11 Earlier in "Heritage" Cullen admits this deep need, felt by Blacks caught in white �worlds everywhere, to "Strip!" and . 'Doff this new ex1Vberance. ~ Come and do the Lover's dance!' McKay 's "lynching' remains unsolved by t _e sonnet and Cullen is unable to make his "heart and head" know that They and I are civilized despite the meters. 11 unremittant beat" of his impressive iarnbic tetra- A classic statement on the inner-workings of the mind of a Black genius who must "twist and squirm" in an a.lien uHeritage 11 has yet to be seen on the many psychological • • Ott wht,tk t 1'J.,.,.a"' ;+ Ml ~'v-omM·TI'°\'cr" -l"Ktv~,,o, in"lo f'r\w.1 d imens ions ~1.\1 opera es.. ..,,.,., ,. .J . 1 it' {s AL~ a.-dQvttrta'ltng Svr9ic-cii.. e.'l.pto ... t).17M or- Tf\,. aiut ?SVCnt• This and related themes also pervade other poems by Cullen. world. "From the Dark Tower 11 is inspired by his column of a similar name in Opportunity. Although Black artists and thinkers "were not made eternally to weep, 11 they must either face destruction of their potential or wear the mask and "tend our agonizing seeds." Cullen also writes about timid lovers and Black pro- stitutes, about many., many 11 browntt girls (another favorite theme) and the ache of the human heart. He writes in the shadow of Keats and Shelley and pens epitaphs to them. His employment of traditional English verse forms is not as ~startling" as McKay 's. But he does bring a Black force and intellectual veracity to these devices and techniques whi ch bad long housed ttwhite" hopes and feelings. He took the best of Keats and Edna St. Vincent Hillay and made it work in a "marked technical skill." Brown identifies his "gifts 11 �as "rluency and brilliant imagery. 11 But be is likened by many critics to the standard English work or Braithwaite and Dunbar. Cullen cons ciously developed misery--apparently in an effort to 11 suffer II like tb e romantics, so he could know what real inner-strife was all about. He bad not seen the underside of Black life in the way that McKay (Banjo, Banana Bottom), Hughes (The Weary Blues), Fenton Johnson, and others had come to know and understand it. into a pristine verse. or 11 He subdued bis anger and violence Most critic\ allude to the woman-like prissy 11 nature of Cullen's work. Redding complained that he viewed "life through the eyes of a woman who is at once shrinking and bold , sweet and bitter," In Cullen's 11 a.tavistic 11 or "primitive 11 pieces one feels that be is not really there himself--much like one feels in reading white poet Vachel Lindsay's poems oq Af'rica and the "Congo. one of the 11 But Cullen remains epi1'!:t~~bmeteorites of Black poetry. His passion has yet to be surpassed, even among contemporary Afro-American poets. Though he does not convince the reader that be would actually "stripJ" and do the 11 Lover's dance!" he does distill an intellectual fury which chronicles the death-during-life vortex (Davis calls it "alien-and-exile") that so many Africans in America struggle against. Wagner's _Black Poets contains the most up to date and incisive critical assessment of Cullen. See, also, criticism by Redding, Brown, Johnson, Huggins (Harlem Renaissance), Bontemps (including Harlem Renaissance · Remembered), the listings in the Cullen section of Black Writers �,~.fterl• -,..\\.~ of America and r!lj' om .. · ,.t,y1 1.. 1 1.ograp Jr I:any of Cu 11 en f s unp lis .ed works are deposited in the library at Atlanta University. J'arnes Heldon J'o1nson, whom we ave cause to mention again, ranks today as one of tbe most distinguis ed men of Black American letters. eosrss, tis s tbs -, . 1 I I lt C lid! C 82i S&J.. rffss ss Sil srt PS ti& TI ilsdfib&b&Z a a sscrstFl t ,'WJJal11stisn sf bis 2rnrnJ T,,, /\, .... _, i s ~ :,!"9 co ntinued to combine America wit • owY1, carrr , J'o nson's ~name . l Il 3 I gt b ; 1 tniatl n al ,, g wsAuto iofrapbz. was re-issued in 1927, dropped, - LS& .AS ACi h Hi 1 SP; bl I L1 g .$ D J4£©"' 813 t . e earlier pseudonym During t e twenties J'o nson is keen social observations of Blac s poetic development a nd output. car SU s: £? alC Te Book of A,erican Negro Poetry (1922, 1931) was one of t e .ig points oft e D.enaissance. Important for more tan just the poets included, t e ant olomr represented t~e first sustained effort 11 t its t 1 egro II elements in poetry • of a 1 lack critic to identify ri tten since Dun a.r. It was also t1e first anthology of Afro-American poetry to e p "' is ed int e 20t1 cent ry and t e first ever to lis ed in Engl s . • e p One can safely say t at any ser ous st d:,r of has to e 0 in and Essay on it. ames 1 e ldon J'o .. ns on. is s lack critic ism l i tlo ( -1i th Tegro 's Creative Genius)suggested t .e d mens ions of J'o .. nson ' s concern n t e antlioloc~r. He ug~ identif · ed t e various influences on t e poets, noted d-tstinctions '--et een diff re r t kinds of dialects, and 6 a e assessnents of t 1~e �poetry. Discussing t1e pro lem of dialect o~~son declared t 1at it possessed on_y t o e 1otions-- 1umor and pat o • dill & (: ro•,m, reactinc; 15 years later, cop out.) m l • ed s c ~ a state, ent & as a. o nso~ a_so issued t e followins c~allence to Dlac~ oets: What the colored poet in the United States needs to do is somet ing like what Synge did for the Irish; he needs to find a form tat will express t:.1e racial spirit by symbols f'rom wi tl-1in rather t_an y sym ols from without, suc1 as t::ie nere :1utilation of Ene;lis ,. spellins and pronunciation. lie needs a form t. at is ~reer and larcer t 1an dialect, Jut wr1ic will still :1old tl1e racial flavor; a f'orm ex ressing the imacery, t e idioms, t e peculiar turns of thouG1t, and the distinctive humor and pathos, too, of t:.1e 1 ecro, t w ic ~ill a:so ~e ca a~~e of voicins the deepest and highest emotions and aspirations, and allow the widest range of subjects and tl-Je widest scope of treatment. It was a gigantic challenge. it? Has any succeeded? W~ Did any Black poet rise to meet ~4All.- • With bis brother, J. Rosamond, Johnson also co-ed ted The Book of American iegro Spirituals (1925) and The Second Book of .. erican :-:-e;;ro 1.. p ri t, a . . . s ( l926). cal arrangements by J. Rosa~d. Both volumes carried musi- Johnson lsimrszlf tried to meet �li<, # ' \M'~challenge with God's Trom½ones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927), a rendering or the works of the "old time 11 Black preac ers. His pamphlet , Native Ai'rican Races and Culture, was published in 1927. A study of Harlem, Black Hanhattan, came out in 1930. _ is auto iobrap y, Along Tis · ay, appeared in 1933. A~d a social/political commentary , Negro Americans, What Now? , was published the same year. His selected poems (St. Peter Relates an Incide nt oft e Resurrection Day) came out in 1930. Jo nson ht, 0- osta lished i mself as Aprolific and exemplary man , a co1-:J i- nation of :f'ormidable talents, by the time he was killed in an automobile accident in 1938. Aside from their literary and social value, the sermons w. in God 1 s Trombones have , in the years since th ir publication, "'711,tiv'lllu,rl Tl~ :s bro~ght delight and instruction to many ~ieilta•"A,various, .,...·-.--~ ~ , .which they have been presented. I°"-- st:g~or otherwise dramatically l>'t.,.N e.m classes we assign a sermon per-student and, allowing days for research and preparation, stage the works :f'or a larger campus or community audience. Just how much of his own challenge (see above) was attempted in Godfs Trombones is indicated by Johnson ' s Pref'ace It I whe.►.., R he brief'ly gives the history of Black preachers and explains why he chose the trombone as the central symbol in the work: He (the preacher) strode the pulpit up and down in what was actually a very rhythmic dance, and he brought into play the full gamut of his wonderf'ul voice, a .voice--what shall I say?--not of an organ or a trumpet, but rather of a �trombone, the instrument possessing above all others the power to express the wide and varied range of emotions encompassed by the human voi ce-and with greater amplitude. He intoned, be moaned , he pleaded--he bl ared, he crashed, he thundered. I sat fascinated; and more, I was, perhaps against my will, deeply moved; the emotional effect upon me was irresistible. This scene occured at a church Johnson attended in Kansas City. While the preacher was strutting and delivering, Johnson recalled that he njotted" down notes for 11 The Creation. 11 God's Trombones contains seve r. sermons and one prayer--"Listen, Lord. 11 The sermons, each taken from a text in the Bible, include nThe Creation," 11 The Prodigal Son, "Noah Built the Ark, and 11 n The Judgment Day. 11 11 "Go Down Death--A Funeral Sermon," Tbe Crucifixion, n "Let 1y People Gorr 11 Coming as it did at the high point oft e Renaissance-1927--God's Trombones was rather odd in that a less than ostensibly religious verse was being written by other poets. There were religious themes in mµch of the poetry--but none ~,i of the poets dipped into the same reservoir in the same manner as l\Johnson. Johnson was, however, able to fuse some of the ffieV jazz and blues patterns of the day into his work--though • ~not that noticeable. The sermons are not in Black dialect since Johnson said that the Afro-American poet must transcend that form. The language is generally that of any white �American or Englishman . What Johnson does is instill racial feeling and dramati c (ethni c) touches , a-+':rfa7h ng • • spon- t/().rfOOS ta.neity, hui?llii111!!1i.1t repetition_, and M1t_1loi§li2~,free verse forms. Margaret Walker, l1iM:g st ~ Hughes ,- and s-ee1 l i n1s Brown I IA~/" eLeme11t:s ~ place~all these It IA in a more secular context--altbough Brown - - - interp olatedtiil :a, religious expletives and ex- c lamations ~,~~some of bis work. Tbe double negative, which qi,,ui"' Johnson makes ~ se of, is not an exclusively Black product. But we do find him interspersing Black sayings, usages and ot½er idiomat i c spices into tbe tex~ of the sermons. It was the first time that a Black poet bad undertaken such a task solely for literary reasons. So this alone makes the work important-- not to mention its anthropo lOgical and sociological value.{ The over-riding achievement of the sermons is their graphic, full-blown images and their inferential "Blac kening" of God (see Cullen, Toomer and others) . • anal ogy is more obvious in Th 46 11 T. e Creation" where God Like a mammy bending over her baby, Kneeled down in the dust Toiling over a lump of clay Till " e shaped it in ll:is own imagej It seems only natural that Johnson would pay tbis tribute to tbe Blac k motber--most Black poets writing since , say , 1880, bad done so. And he had earlier complained of John Wesley Holloway ' s "Blac k Mammies" in dialect , saying: f' or better poetry than this.n "The blac k mammy is material Fr om Johnson ' s nmilk-wbite horse, 11 �through phrases like 11 0--Mary's Baby--, 11 "sinners in their head- long plunge," and "Blacker than a hundred midnights, n the power of the dramatic Black sermon can be seen. There are threats and warnings, adm\iisbments and pleas, fire and brimstones, force and even worse fury. "The Prodigal Son II is warned: Young man-Young man-Your arm's too short to box with God. The incremental lines, the spontaneity, the witty turns of phrases, the colorful and sometimes bombastic language--all give God's Trombones itiauthenticity. Johnson does use symbols that express from "within" rather than from nwithout" the Black experience. For ;as he noted in his Preface/ "The Negro today is, perhaps, the most priest-governed group in the country. 11 The old time preacher knew the "secrets 11 of ancestral oral and gestural power, Johnson says; they knew the 11 secret of oratory, II that at bottom of it is a progression of rhythmic words. _.._ • 1 II . 5 ? d The preachers had inherited "innate grandiloquence of their old Af'rican tongues.fl •1i19 Once in the pulpit, the minister fused these ntongues fl ~:/iblical language because this "gratified a highly developed sense of sound and rhythm in himself and his bearers. 11 These were the concepts and ideas under which Johnson labored in God's Trombones. Doubtlessly, the volume is one of the most precious in the annals of Afro-American writing. There is hardly a person who cannot "feel" these sermons--and yet their power and their intuitive �embracing of a world of emotions and temperaments make tbem lasting as classical literature of whatever definition and bue. Johnson's Saint Peter, following a tradition of Dunbar's 11 Tbe Haunted Oak, n I ug es' "Song for A Dark Girl, " Mc ay' s "The Lynch ng," and Cullen's T e is Worth Its Song", 11 lac { Christ and "Scotts oro, Too, attempts to fiace the desecration of Black humanity within its proper co ntradictory Christian context. . I n each of t e poems, t e 1 ync:1 i ng is connec t e d ,,.-., ¾lilt- to ah gher order--usually the Christian God. Using a "visionary type of imagination," Jo :rnson applies satire to t e segregation of Black and white mot ers of Gold Star-winning soldiers. Sending t 11e parents to visit t eir sons' graves, the Nar Department puts Black mothers on a foul, crowded boat (reminiscent of a slave sbip) and white mot ers on a modern liner. Jonson, int e poems , imagines that the Unknmn Soldier arrives in ,eaven ,..._, and is discovered to e lack. Various patriotic and terrforist organizations (t e G.A.R., t e D.A.R., the Legion, t e Klan, and ot ers) want him buried For more criticism of Jonson see Davis, agner, Bontemps (including note in American Negro Poetry), rown, Redding, Huggins and others. Langston Hug es was at t e oppos te end of tlie poetic spectrum from Cullen w en e wrote in "Mot er to on 11 : Well, son I'll tell you: Life for me ain't For while ot een no crystal stair. men ac ieved recognition a out t e same time, �Hughes was a folk trou ador with .is finger on t e "pulse of t e people . 11 He was also free from the restraints of con- vent onal Englis verse tat dominated practically all of Cullen's poetry . Born in Joplin, Hissouri, Hug es had pulsed more tan a dozen ooks of poetry, several volumes of prose and pla s, and seen h · s own dramas staged all overt e co ntry, ti e of is deat sance poets, unt 1 the Of t e quartet of first-line Harlem Renais- 1. U[;!.'"'es succum ed to wold e the only one to rema n active Arts Movement of t e 1 6 lac ig y t. e 'rs. IfoXa::- and C llen load pressure int e forties and Too~er, as we noted, died in t•1e o1)scuri tw,. of a Q a er comm n t:,.. whose maternal grandmot er five lacs 1~0 ad w"l-icre e finis 1cd ig ro n's raid o, :a.nsas, and, e -ent for- a b s fat er in ::cxico, ret rnin.:; to tl,e later and enrolling in ,.., • 0 arpcr's ater, to Cleve_a ,d sc ool and -ms elected class poet. com et i on of 1i.:;"b sc:1001, . ile to ni ted ol m ia Uni versity. tL.1e _1a ntin~ jazz spots an V llage, and dissatisfied r sc oo_ and rorked odd 20 n ·t J._;,re tates Tpon it'~ 15 .1ont s pendin3 most of an 0 ing o tin Green1 · ch Colu,.1, · a, efore siu _ n;: on as a .1em,e:::-- of t e crmr of a frei.:; t steamer. This al owed '- :i.m to visit t e Canar:; Islands, t11e Azores and t e Uest Coast of Africa. Re- turning for a w1ile to Wew rork; }~e left t 1e country ot" },is 22nd birt1day an es, een 1:1.arr ed to one of t"e partic pated in JoJn Ferrw, moved f rst to La rence, "P" .:: went to Paris, a ain working odd jo s, on �to Italy and Genoa, and after a number of varied experiences (see The Big Sea : and I Wonder as I h'ander), returned to. America. He then spent time in Washington, D. C. ~(where his mot er ad movea.j working i nt e office of Dr. Carter G. ~oodson, editor 1 or the Journal or Ne~ro History/and later,~busboy (see "Rrass Spittoons") at t e Har man Par-Rote_. At~ latter:i 11Pts,. he had a chance to show some of his poems to Vachel Lindsay--thus launching Hughes' "career II through the newspapers. His volumes of poetry include The Hear:::r lues (1926), Negro Mother and Other Drama.tic Recitations (1931), Scottsboro ! 6JiillitiiCI 9JB)J Limited (1932), The Dream Keeper and Other Poems (1932), ~Shakespeare in Harlem (1942), Freedom's Plow (a long poem, 1943), Jim Crow's Last Stand (1943), Fields of Wonder (1947), One-Way Ticket (1949), Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951), Ask Your Homa: for Jazz (1961) and The Panther and the Lash: Times (1967). 12 Moods Poems of Our Hug es also wrote sort stories and novels (including collected stories fro m the Jesse B. Simple series whic e originated). Prose works a.re Not Without La.ug_ter (1930), The Ways of White Folrn (1934)., Simple Speaks I is M nd (1950), Laughing to Keep from Crying (1952), Simple Takes A Jife (1953), Simple Stakes a Claim (1957), Tam ourines to Glory (1958), Somet ing in Common (1963) and Simple's Uncle a~ ~~:i~· Five 1 Plays y Langston Hug es ·was published in 1963. either vrote (or collaborated wit many ~ a l so-. others ~ usually Bontemps) oors for young readers as well as works of general and specific interest on Black culture. �In his early years, Hughes was influenced b and Dunbar. In r Walt W1..,i tman igb school, a teacher introduced 1im to the poetry of Amy Lowell, Lindsay, Masters and Sandbur 0 • le was especially indebted to Sandburg, of whom 1e would speak, in The Big Sea, as his nguiding star. the only poet up until 11 Fenton Johnson bad ughes to sustain sue poetry of Black folk life. een an energetic Hughes improved on what Johnson began , adding fres1 portraits--though not t.e ridicule sometimes appearing in Dun ar--and actually using musi c to inspire his writing or accompany his live readings. -He made recordings with Charlie riingus, among ot er jazz greats. And e is given credit for originating the practice of reading poetry to jazz. Interestingly enough, this interweaving of music and poetry (discussed in Chapter IV) architectonics. • ecomes av rtual ac{)one of Blacr Baldwin, for example, speaks of listening repeatedly to the records of Bessie Smit1 to 6 ain rbyt min bis prose. Certainly the same fusion of style and spirit can be found in Ellison, Wrig t, Tolson, Baraka and Crouc .. poet Greenlee, quoted earlier, noted in a Novelist- iograp ical note to his Blues for an African Princess, t1at My chief literary influences are C a.rlie Parker, Lester Young, Miles Davis and Billie Holiday. As a writer, I consider myself a jazz musician whose instrument is a typewriter. l'Ii chael S. Harper, a Black poet who ca,no to maturation in tlle sixties, also attri utes muc 1 of his st~rle an poetic p½iloso\\ ,, phy to jazz musicians w.o belped him understand pa.in and make �it "arc .et~~pal . 11 Part of HUG es' • poetry is documented i 1ard "Ir mpact on t · s area of ell temporary Afro-American Poetry. Roots of Con- as cally Hug1es' M poetry falls into tree stylistic cate gories: an ur an sort), lac r dialect (pri ,mril_ of is use of lues and traditionalNfree verse. d alect is seen in practically every ~ook e pu lished. is blues and free-verse forms are especially evident in Te Weary lue$. One of :1is most famous free-verse poems is "The Jegro Speaks of Rivers," written rig t after and pu lis 1ed in T1Je Crisis in 1921. e f nis1ed ig11 sc11oo T1, · s form, accor ing to ~ • • • • • Redding, ism b- more effective a ve.icle for H t ban dia ect or ~ es ug,es comest ro G , Reddi1g fees, lues . In "Rivers II in t e "purer verse forms. " t e deep deep well of uc1.,es reac. es into lack '"'istor:r and struggle, un tine; i n spirit t e glo al African: I've .nown ri vcr·s : I' ve kn~-n rivers anc ent as t e worl older than t e flo an of h -~~n Jlood in 1uman vein • s . . . . . . . . . . . . . non rivers: Ancie nt , d1s Tc . . . . . . . I' ve ~ ro;n deep li~e tbe rivers. M rivers. sou~ Jas gr o n dee se of words -like "soul" an t½ro .:;1 li~ the ri ers. "ri ver s"-- lac.r fo_ dore an. :iterat re, a, __ o, ic s r r n 1 · 1rn s . i nes l.'.: es to to-:. c., �t10 deepest loncinGs and spirit al 1e_l-springs of,, s peo le. In 11 vci ns, " 11 deep, 11 1 fl ow, 11 11 dus {'J, 11 11 anc ient II an t cata- :10 loging of act al place-names important to Blac rn, l1e esta lis 11es A similar t e longevity of life and str r·:::;1e .a11•1111s•Pii?•-• strengt and longevit:r is put into 11 Poem, 11 "Te ecro, 11 and numerous ot ers. Hug es' • dialect and lues-oriented poems were not 11 swc0t" tote ears of some Harlem Black intellectuals oft e tJenties, Just as ~ y of tbem bad soue; t to cens re C llen for not wri tin~ more latantly h out criticized side of lack str g~le (in u 11es for dealing ·wit lac{ idioms), the:r the "lower strata 11 or under- lack lif0. \1ne _.idden and robust ( 11 ta of Black life wore 17 11 ) 11 ~ riters. 11 Ru 11 i•Iulatto 11 Brown, ( And Hu,.,, es 11 11 A _ittle ;rello /:Jasta.rd Joy. was worth during ), Hughes worked t is medi is life time. r.1 t e two for muc, of w1at it These vario s for s also Hug1cs ' ' t emes and su jects. j ects. t1e second line repeats the first, and the third end-line rhymes wit preceding ones. 11 and more s c:1 expcr enc es or s1 T.e blues form calls for throe-linef stanzas: esta lis aspects row ng tendency in speaking frankly a out "S icide," nPo' Bo:r Blues, "Hard Daddv , 11 eginning to come to t1e fore in the works of Blacks (licKa:r) and white (Van. ec ten) joined t.is 00 elped Linguistic freedom allowed him to treat a theme wit c:rnicism, iron:r, pity, tragedy, violence or compassion. In many of is poems, Hucles is a le to develop a dialo; , etieen t e Blac underdo 0 and t~e white ruler. 1 mor, This occurs in "Brass Spittoons" ·where t:,e "'Usbo:r �interlaces a portrait of a common lack :vhythms of c urc , w -ii te men ' s orders, life and t e s 1iny spittoons or er it½ dazzling )lac r party and nL; t lacks must keep polisJ ed. \· e not racially, in "Jazzonia. 1' in see it tec1nica_ly, t t1e call-and-response pattern co pled it carefullJ rearranged chordal structures: 0. , silver tree! Oh, s'1-)inini:; rivers of t .e soul! T1ree stanzas later, t e same idea -.ppears in t11is forr.1: 0. , singing tree! 0 sh ning rivers oft e sol! And five stanzas later, it appears thusl~: Oh, s1ininc treel 01, silver rivers oft e sol! This rillia-n t use of t ~ me intricate call-and-response continues in 11 :~ attern of dialog .. and latte. n T e "Bastard is rejected first b_ t_ e w i te fat er and later by t e rot.er, ot i- o: 1 11 -ii te representing (t 1ro gh the interjection of dialoc) different · types and generations of white men--one o½jecting to t e existence of an "illegi timate" son and t' e ot er (t e former•s off-spring) refusin to extend a _and of _Iug ed t emes, w_ ic remained wit protest, racial f rot erly concern. 1im t ro g1 most of 1 ,is life 1 nit7, race \,_..,AJ. IUH_.,....,.,. /1 ride '!f,__ i\ Cullen or IIcKay ), lack wom . ( I lii"2ss 6eauty and t eir strenct ,s ), jazz, ~ aal religio s musi c, violence ai:;ainst 1-)1 es/ lac rn and integration. �Hughes, especially, was tbe spokesman of t1 f ~ClJ.~e'S.:~ And 10 la.c lj.. often rel is ed tbe common profundity of B a.cks a.t dance, play, wors 1ip or work. In 11 egro Dancers,'! be recalls J. Mord Allen's "The Squea r of the Fiddle n and James Edwin Campbell's 11 11 Ho il.e Buck. Allen hints that whites cannot dance. Q... And Campbell reproduces in poetr~ the rbyt ms ofl\contemporar: dance known as t 10 sation, claims that 11 uck. Hug 1es; showing off t1 re and . is a.by la.ck improvi- ave Two mo' ways to do de C arleston! --also a poplar contemporary dance. 11 Even if w1ites la.ug1 11 and "prayll Blacks can take satisfaction in t e knowledge t .1at they can ~ p t eir own reservoir of spontaneity and creativity when they want to side-step or annoy the mec1a.nical ut Hug_ es also wrote poetr:r a o t world. 11 nigbt II and afraid. T 1ere is c yni cis m an in t is poet w110 o served 11 einc- ,_ ite alo,1e II at sarcas:11 and tra.Ged::r is people t rougb a deep and creati e affection. Iughes ' f persona.l life, of cours e, was just as fasci- natin as .is poetry. Ie won numero s awards and wr · t nn- grants, b t was often introduced to audiences as .n t e poet Laureate of larlcm. I 11 fonder as I 1, antler), In 1-iis auto )iO[;rap ies (T .e writes a.')out~ 1 4itlliii■Rii?iili..__JWI••iliilj112-·-••• . 10-r lac • ...<'. .. e filled a car tr n -;: wit traveled t ro ,;; o t t . e So t at - ea an9 ·1 • ..:+ ')oo s and read inc >is poems and spea. · n..; c~ re es ad colloGon. ~e ru'½ed sbo _ders ran ing; r · ters and int l ect a_s of ~is da.:~ ith the t re,na.incd i_n �contact nit. t ,e µ:_ c 1;: masses . 1~ ters aidin~ 7o•n:er o~es G ~Leon Af'oot Damas, of Frencl, 1,e tradit on of senior as a_so • een traced to iana, ere its ,. L1 i t1-i est-,"' _ :::;_.,in:; Par-African l t re.r:.,. and artistic ties. one of the o_ or statesmen of .... ac also c i ted ant'Jo_o · es of . . . ac cu1 t rr 0 hes ·ms at the First ·!or'.:.d 11 0 f'rican prose an poetr:T. de __ i_ vored a man:.fes o as i1porta:1t as Jo1 nso~1fs c' ·-;_s :a:,, ro ct ' on, .le:1"-'e. Fe declare-:. t .at t:10 11.:-0 i1,ser 1: ee;ro artists' wo __ d ex ress .a- t eir "indivi •1 dark-s 1:inned sel"es. 11 ites ap roved or- dicapp:roved, it di ton-ton cr."os and t c;"l;es rece;i Te .0 i c; _ eddin_:;, al t½o G to .n-to~1:: :..a·: s. f6::t n 0 1 t:::11illx·~1 11 11 0xper nents II in verse, c 1es 'fl t e!l, h it he does not naivete. 11 It is true t .at An t~e thirt·es, s riters. e din.:; sa.i Spea~inc of " __ c fee_s in t~:.s is t e so rce of u__: cs .. a.i nte.L10d a ti\'h 11 docs not t~ .. ink" is 0 o ntr e. And to almost a 1 is iterary ',oi:::;1,ts, r ·L \ . r--Mtve_.,1 ,')'W"r~ys ~oues.sn.1 rn n\J r. "i(e ,,as intollcct--a cyr,mastic inte_lic;ence, and a fur o words. a,1 · as not of t•~e in- )rof'ile and did not aspire to lofty int13-~ c t.u~ t to sa~r >e "Th _a,cl:: critics Bro n tellectua . . . stature of ot.er tG naiGsanco n :ac s or not 1;1atter. praise fr~t1 ) ; ~cddinc; 111 If e ·tie::- 1s J a ~raindance po rnr it 1 s poetr~ pro cd to· e irresistible and inspiring alf--cent 1r~,. of conte r.1 orarics. The nex s of I c; ~es tW po ?' �seems to e a out a "Dream Def erred. in so tmch lac poetry. in t 1at part cular poem And_ e •1· 11 S:l"e dream, a__,ain, : ke as never more prop etic t~an ere 1e as ed, w· tbo t a.nswerine;, tl-ie question : · at ½appens to a dream deferred? "(l ..fj " 'ti!,, In ~"-.Poe m, ~ whic "-Lorraine Hans,"'Jerr:r t 1-ie name for J.~l~PO~Dtbe WD.J her fanous P-a~~ /tu g=.es also disp_a-:rs · is master:, o er tec 1-inical skill. Ie uses fie h i gJly effective similes 1 in an a;;sregate analog:~ t. at lenst .. ens to Or does it explode? And •. o lived to see tbe explosion in ~Jatts, ' and at.er places. writings are in all 2 t ant1ologies of Afro-American literature. studios of is work appear in Haener' s Fro. t e Dar { Tmver. Tewar c, Detroit 1 cent r7 Detailed criticalac r Poets and Davis' l o is also assessed in 1 orks 1-iv rown, \r'l Kerlin, Redd:i.ng., Jo nson and/\n- merous other studies and coi1pilations. James Timan el's • iography of hi~ (La □ Gston Hu3 es) was pu lis ed in 1967. Other important source items on Hughes are Francois Dodat's Langston Hughes (Paris, 1964), Raymond Quinot•s Langston Hughes (Brussels, 1964), Milton Meltzer•s Langston Hughes: Hughes: A Biography (1968), Elizabeth P. Meyers ' Lan gs ton Poet of His People (1970) and Charlemae Rollins' Blac~ Troubador: Langston Hughes (1970). Of the plethora of material steadily pouring out ~Hughes, a most valuable book is Langston Hughes: Black Genius: Therman B. O'Daniel. A Critical Evaluation (1971), ed ted by O'Daniel includes a selected classified bibliography detailing Hughes' lengthy career as writer in all genres, anthologist and criti~. Hughes inspired generations of ' Black Africans and Americans and also edited the following ~q()c_~ �anthologies: An African Treasury: Articles, Essays, Stories, Poems By Black Africans (1960); Poems from Black Africa (1963); New Negro Poets: U.S.A. (1964); and Voices: Poetry (Negro poets issue, winter, 1950). A Quarterly of �C. Minor or Second Echelon Poets of the Renaissance Dozens of poets helped to make up the variegated atmosphere of the New Negro Movement. And just as the New Black Poetry of ,r.\ the 1960ts cannot be characterized in terms of four or five individuals, so the Renaissance cannot be understood unless the Co rYt t.et'; poetry scene is examined. Many of the so-called minor or second echelon poets writing during the peak of the Renaissance had already established reputations before 1923. Principal among these were Arna Bontemps (1902-1973), Angelina Grimk~, Gwendolyn Bennett (1902- ), Anne Spencer, Clarissa Scott Delaney (1901-1927), Frank Horne (1899~,.,.., Georgia Douglas Johnson, George Leonard Allen (1905-1935), Donald Jeffrey Hayes (1904- ), Jonathan Henderson Brooks (1904-1945), Helene Johnson (1907- ), Waring Cuney (1906- ), Lewis Alexander (1900-1945), and Lucy Ariel Williams Holloway ( 1905- ). Other poets, to be mention·e d at the end of this unit, can be dispersed rather widely along a spectrum of relative significance. Many of them won prizes and places for their poems among the pages of The Crisis and Opportunity and then disappeared from t e scene. Others met untirnel. deaths--wh · le yet others chose different careers or leaped into the freedom fieht. Cullen's Caroling Dusk (1927) contains the best representation of AfroAmerican poetry written between 1910 and 1925. Jonson's The ook of American regro Poetry (1922) presents poets between Dun ar and t e time of its last edition (1931). 1~jor an minor poets are also to be found in Kerlin ' s Negro Poets and Their Poems (1923, 1935). �Hughes and Bontemps made many of these lyricists available.,. , . in The Poetry of the Negro (1949, 1970). At least half a dozen of the lesser known poets are included in Alain Locke ' s The New Negro (1925). Randall (The Black Poets, 1971) displays work by Horne and Bontemps; but only Bontemps is included in Randall's Black Poetry (1969). Henderson does not list one of these transitional figures in Understanding the New Black Poetry (1973). And only Cuney and Bont emps are included in Rosey Pool ' s Beyond the Blues (1962). RvT' ~ 1 ' _We the anthologies for content. are ltllllllr randomly sampling See the bibliograp y for more detailed listings. # The . best contemporary anthology of 20th Century Black poetry is Arnold Adoff's The Poetry of Black (lq1lJ Amerio ~ which lists more than 140 poets and practically all of the minor ones of the ~enaissance, although the omission \ !. ~ pnA. U. ,·nc: , of Cuney and Edward Silvera bs ;sgz J • 1 ;{ t 1 Ji~ Il I• Unfortunately, no Black anthology of the magnitude of the Norton series has appeared. ( The NeerP Qa:seva.r (Sterling Brown, et al), a comprehensive anthology published in 1941 and re-issued (unrevised) in 1970, contains nearly a dozen of' the minor voices. Horne and the Second Echelon Poets of the (The Harlem Renaissance Remembered, In "Frank arlem Renaissance 11 Bontemps, ◄ I 1972), Ronald Primeau launches an impressive and important discussion of these lesser known figures. While 1agner ( lack Poets of the United States, 1973) makes a partial effort to d scuss tPese poets, qvis.l\ seems generally to dismiss them as cli C\~ seekers after an African past. So at this writing, e rown's "Contemporary �Negro Poetry (1914-1936)," in his Negro Poetry and Drama (1937), rema ns t e est critical overviei oft ese poets. Bontemps is one oft ree important iena ssance figures (along wit up ug es and Brown) to survive nt 1 t e 1960fs. '1'agner calls f'klsi<A~yand creatively onter.1ps "one of t'""e most brill ant minor poets of' the Harl n Renaissance" and also as Jig rm n Po~1 pra se ~"' 1 s poetry and fiction. Davis . ) sees an "alien-and-exile" theme continuing from the major trunk of ~naissance poetry into the work of Bontemps. • With the notable exception of Georgia Douglas Johnson, the important minor ((enaissance figures did not publish books ,;. ~ of poetry until the 1960 , s. This fact alone tels us much about Bontemps' seeming poetic obscurity between 1930 and 1960. more But mportant, for the record, is the fact that Bontemps' fforts ere directed to ard fiction, drama, c ildren's liter - ture, .istory, c ronicl n~ the development o and ground- rea ing ibrar work. other a.ck poets orn in Alexandria, Louisiana, Bontemps family moved to California when he was still a cl1ild. He attended Pacif'ic Union College and the University of' Chicago. His diverse riting output, almost as prodigious as includes numerous books, pamphl ts and articles. ughes', His novels are God Sends Sunday (1931; dramatized as St. Louis Woman, 1946), Black Thunder (1936, about the Nat Turner- - revolt) and Drums at Dusk (1939 ) . Bontemps also co-edited with Hughes the very influential anthology The Poetry of the Negro (1949, 1970), and he brought out American Negro Poetry in 1963. Other anthologies �are Golden Slippers: An Anthology of Negro Poetry for Young Readers ( 1941), The Book of Negro Folklore ( 1958, wi tb Hughes), Great Slave Narratives (1969), Hold Fast to Dreams: Poems Old and New (1969) and Tbe Harlem Renaissance Remembered (1972, a collection of articles). Additionally Bontemps published more than 20 odd works of bibliography (usually on Black heroes), juvenilia, culture and history. He served as \lniversity l ibrarian 4!. ' at Fisk for more than 20 years and was a member of tbe faculties of tbe University of Illinois and Yale--where be was i n charge of Afro-American Studies.at the time of his deat. Between 1924 and 1931 Bontemps ' poems were published widely in various magazines and periodicals and -he won poetry prizes i'rom both The Crisis and Opportunity. His only published volume of poetry, Personals, did not come out until 196~. ..(,tX1~: ...ili:'l.il1Lil8~lilil~a~ (faul Breman). Personals as an idea-position sums up much of Bontemps ' poetry. 1 . For throughout the book there is t e use of ~e 11 or "Us." 11 1 11 or His poetry is personal, like Robert Hayden f s, Countee Culle n 's and Frank Horne 1 s. A comi'orta1Jleness also attends Bontemps' poetry--not a smug comfort, stability and careful workmanship. Jut tcomi'ort of He was among t,ose poets w00, unlike Dunbar, bad tbe security of college dec;rces and access to books unlimited! Consequentl: there is little oft e yearning for i nstant recognition or the frenz~ that t~e anticipation of fane creates. 1 Bontemps 1rites of love ("love's )rown arms"), the African past ( 11 T1"'e ;1cturn n and niroctur ne at . et rnsda fl), t. e Soutb ( nsout 11ern Nans io n n), 1lilllJc. defiance and �s t rcn.::;t . , ( 11 c:oae Your Eye::; 11 cone ud e s t h at t trad iti on of Black . a or a n 11 food on itter fruit. h anging in the Sout II Reni r.: _s cent of 'J1 oo·,,er 1 s n , apers, • l ab or ers' c,: ildr en /\LfLid on e Bil ie Holiday would lat e rJ'_iill and write 11 S tra nge Fruit. 11 II ; a And we recall t .at since James l itfield, Black poe ts h ave poi nt ed tote contradictions in .American Christianity and t be arren versus earing t h eme. Bontemps also followed t he lonaissance patter n of ro~anti~ cizing a pagan-like .Afro-American or African. \ ith t he taste of slavery and t e dialect tradition still bitter on t h eir tongues, these poets leaped backwards over slav ery to anoth er place a nd another clime. closely resembles Cullen ' s of "remembered rain, 11 11 11 The Returnn wh ich Heri tage II and some of t h e atav istic 11 pieces of L a E§.!I t • Hughes and Gtil>et "dance of rain , 11 Bontemps does just t h is in '1 :McKay. "the friendly ghost , jungle sky, n 11 11 Bontemps spea s 11 lost ni ghts, muffled drums, 11 11 and t h en suggests: Let us go back into t he dusk a gain, Dusk , ebony , jet, night, evenings, purple, blue , raven and other such synonyms for Blacks are frequently employed to great effect and power by Afro-American poets. Likewise, symbols or images of invisibility and blindness are also pre a.lent in Black writing . Bontemps employs and implies such states in several poems wh ere he achieves a surreal quality--a dream-like longing for anoth er time and another place (again, a pattern in t h e poetry of t h e period). If y ou "Close Your· Ey es, 11 Bontemps says, you can go �back to what you were, and maybe the sone;, as with Toomer, will "in time return to thee." Closing the eyes will also allow one to "walk bravely enough. 11 Away from the daily lime- light and without the constant pressure (c.f., Cullen) to succeed and bold up the light of the race, Bontemps developed strong statements using convention:~oetic patterns with occasional free-verse experimentation. Personal and powerful, Bontemps' poetry looks ahead to a similar stamina (this ti me in a new dialect) exclaimed by Sterling Brown in Southern Road. For even though Bontemps tells us in "Golgotha is A Mountain", tha.t One day I will crumble we know tba.t the dust will fossilize and "make a mountain": I think it will be Golgotha. There bas been very little critical assessment of Bontemps' poetry. But brief reactions to his work can be found in The Harlem Renaissance Remem ered (whic'li he edited),~- w Brown's study, Ba.rksdale~and Kannamon's anthology, Robert Kerlin's critical-anthology, .Jitilii••~ Davis' f' From the Dark Tower, a r;d The Negro Caravan. For a near complete listing of Bontemps' published works see Black Uorld, XX (Septem er 1971), 78-79. Along wit ~ I Angelina Grimke, Lewis Alexander, Anne Spencer, Bontemps, Georgia. Douglas Jo nson, and I elene Jo 1nson, 1 Gwendolyn Bennett helped to fill out t e list of lesser known enaissance poets who appeared in T1e New Nec;ro (see 196" edition ~ith a prefa ce by Ro ert Hayden ). Unfort natel:r, ,...,owever, 1 f~ ennett's best foot was not put forward in the "Song" which �Alain Locke accepted for publication in the above named anthology. 11 Song 11 is not representative of Hfi P TNihJJeiitile it. generally high craftmanship; it is flawed by imbalance and an 'foO attempt to saylmany things in one poem. poetry of tbe period, 11 Characteristic of the Song" reaches back to "forgotten banjo songs" and but !fl -AIA... m• Clinking chains and minstrelsy =t' interpolation of dialect lines does not come off with the ease and power of Brown's similar efforts. On the other hand, her sharp crisp and precise imagery employed in poems which appeared in magazines and other a.nt"liologies show her as a poet with many gifts and resources. Gwendolyn Bennett was born in Giddings, Texas, to professional parents. After graduation from the Girls' High School in Brooklyn, New York, she attended Teachers College, Colu~iliia University, for two years and studied in the Fine Arts Department--thereafter establishing a dual career as poet and artist. She later attended Pratt Institute, taught in the Fine Arts Department at Howard University, and then received the Thousand Dollar Foreign Scholarship of the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, which enabled her to go to Europe where she studied for a year f f f in Paris at the Academie Julian and the Ecole Pantheon. She returned to New York at tbe height of the §enaissance and for a while was a member of the editorial staff oi' Opportunity where several of her poems appeared. 1h(L In reading her i'inest poems, one recalls ~depth of Black womanhood revealed in the poetry oi' �. kt Frances Harper , Georgia Johnson and Ange 1.ina Grime. 11 To A Dark Girl 11 is a r.ieditation on the sisterhood which retains 11 aspects of old forgotten queens . " We recall the word n.ror- gotten II from "Song"; but it a.bounds in the poetry of tbis period. 11 He" lfl:1111••••9!~ "brown girl II f.MalMWM {9ullen!) is sorrow ' s ma.tell but i.f she forgets her slave background she 11 can still laugh at Fate!" "Nocturne" distills ,,, 11 distant laughter" and "Sonnet--2 11 recalls nuegroes bu ·ng melodies." 11 Heri tage II is alt1ost iden- tical , in theme and tone , to Countee Cullen ' s poem of t1e same name. 11 Just as Cullen laments the disparity heart and head, 11 etween his this poet sees the same duality in her "sad people ' s soul 11 Hidden by a minstrel-smile. Finally , "Hatred II is sharp and stinging Like a dart of singing steel and we are reminded of the poems of the same theme: "The Riddle of the Spbinx. and 11 The White House. 11 DuBois' and McKay's "To the White Fiends" 11 For Clarissa Scott Delaney, 11 Joy" seems to contain the emotional intensity that "Hatred II holds for Gwendolyn Bennett. The daughter of Emmett J . Scott, the "distinguished secretary to Booker T. \lashington, 11 Ers. Delaney lived a tragically short life and died at the peak of the Renaissance. "Joy II is �what she vows to "abandon" herself to in an effort to avoid the troubling 11 maze it of life. Her poetry is quietly power- ful and seems to compl t ment that o f ~ Bontemps since it is deep and flows from tradition, stamina and endurance. Born in Tuskegee Institute, Alabama, she attended Bradford Academy in New England and then Wellesley College, after which sbe taught three years at the famous Dunbar High School in Washington, D. C. ,1.. .,.;ss.,_ ""' According to • • • Kerlin, 'ilii4-Tielan y also "Studied V delinquency and neglect among Negro children in New York City." Her poetry reflects a perceptive and analytical mind . Initially, she appears detached and metalli c--deceptively , like Gwendol;n Brooks, but the poem usually winds down to a gripping mes sage on pretense, loneliness, joy or despair. The night in "Interiri 11 is a "gracious cloak" used to conceal tbe defeat of the soul. "The Mask" immediately brings to mind Dunbar's Hask. 11 11 We Wear the Except for the differences in persona. and dramatic affects, t he two poems are quite similar. Re-reading 11 The I1ask, 11 .Sota~, 11 one is reminded of Smokey Bill Robinson's recently popular ~ Tbe Tears of A Clown"--which carries the theme of duality and schizophrenia so often found in Black thought and writing,> G vfoile all Black artists do n~t displ;y this "twoness n with the intensity of a ~8111111_ _. Cullen or always present in their works. Ellison, it is almost Especially is this true of the Black American writer, forced to use the communi catio n tools of the over-seers to speak about that whic is closest to im. �This particular aspect of Black poetry gives rise to much speculation since poems devoid of racial or ethnic flavor take on added significance when we know their authors are Such is the case with Gwendolyn Bennett's "Hatred 11 Black. (where 11 you" could be whites) and W.E .B. DuBois' "Tbe Riddle of the Sphinx" (where "them" probably means whites). '//Fra nk Horne, who won a poetry contest in The Crisis in 1925 but did not publish a book (Haverstraw) until 1963, fits into this context. Horne was born in New York City where be attended public schools. As a student at the College of the City of New York, be won varsity letters in track and wrote poetry. He later graduated from the Northern Illinois College of Ophthalmology with a degree of Doctor of Optometry. Horne worked in Chicago, New York, tauc;ht in Fort Valley Georgia and was for some time employed by the United Stat~Housing Authority. ~ Aul~ ~lliH\Nl"'IP"'tllfl"li.l. d-o Jq ?',I. Horne "possesses the authentic g ift of poetry," according to James Weldon Johnson,-; fnd ~t 1;'.J( '!& Brown mentions "intellectual irony. 11 ' Indeed Horne is cyni cnl, skeptical , re- served and almost bare in his short lines and econonic language. Tbe corpus of bis early poetr~ revolves around "Letters found near a suicide II for w ich e won The Crisis award. Host of t e poems are addressed to individual y-named persons and recall sor:~e point of co·1tact (contention?) between tl1e al lee;ed su · c ide victim and t 11e person addressed. As notec ear ier, poems __ a\~c to be placed i·, t 1 1e context of :1a.t :r of t 1 e Bla.c 1:" po tr:r if 11 �the shortness of if'e, contra.dictio s n c_ risti 1i t:r, endurance, love, atrcd, surviva_ of tbe spirit o "er p1:"'sica_ deat , r1usic, scientific inqu · r:r adapted to t :e racial injt:stice, and victory as fact or idea. ctra:"a.~, oet ' s q1.estio 1in,.c,, Horne's verse is sanguine but , forte most pa.rt, avoids t.e romantic treat- 4th tY' pc, /) fl lbi . fe naissanc ~ ment of Africa found in ~rsetieRJl p all~pe,e* His "Nizger (A c_ant for Children ) " catalogs Black ,eroes: Hannibal, Othello , Crispus Attucks, Toussaint L 'O ~erture, and adds Jesus near the end. SI Ac ora iteration, anticipating i-r a i ·41g Brown and compl~menting Hughes, N- nclu es: !!Nigger .•• nigger .•• nigger 11 " To the Poets If recalls Cullen ' s "Scottsboro·, Too, Is Worth Its Song" ; both oems chide other poets for singinc: songs o er wrong causes. yelling got Horne "yelled im nowhere . osannas n into t e emptiness, 1,ut (Neither did yelling move mountains for Baldwin who, as a boy-preacher, quickly saw t e contradi c tion in singing ''You can have all dis world but give me Jesus. Horne ' s know edge of science is put to good use in sue as "To Henry" and "Q,.E.D. 11 11 ) poeris And his skepticism continually surf ac es as in "To You t1 1here he examines t e road to salvation, which is through ''Your t1 ( or Christ ' s) body. But later he is involved in a worldly experience with "ber II and w en to the altar to eat and drink of "only of her. e returns 11 Your" splendors be can think 11 Much of Horne ' s poetry employs t1e symbolism and vocabulary of athletic contests--principally football and track. JOf �ot -\1\e He also uses language associated withtplayingAmusic or singing. "To Caroline" and "To CatalinJ;' merge melody, harmonies, pain and ecstasy. "Caroline" plays~ "skin" as well as the piano. "Catalina" is warned (and ,cx.k.e) that the piano will give,1j oy and hurt. "To Chick" reca~u.e§.,he days of the "Terrible Two" on the football field. The "signal"R-n football is analagous to the "signal" called in real life. In both instances the poet crossej the victory line, "fighting and squirming." "To one who called me 'nigger'" is a comment on the white man's ability to do everything but face America's race problems. Continuing his theme of skepticism, Horne presents a "Toast" to eyes, lips, heart and l:Q>dy, even though the person addressed has an "unborn" soul. His poetry is solely in free-verse and, though sparse, his language invariablf operates on multiple levels. "To A Persistent Phantom" is an excellent example of Horne "complicating" the l meaning of words through the use of repetition, e*pses, and the strategic use of words like "tears," "tangled," "deeper," "charms" and "buried." If the language and action of athletic competition influenced Horne, it was melody that captured George Leonard Allen, a poet who lived only 30 years. Allen achieved wide recognition before his death, however, for his "To Melody" won first prize in a 1927 state-wide poetry contest sponsored by the North Carolina Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. His poems also appeared in Opportunity, American Life, The Southern Christian Advocate, The Lyric West and Caroling Dusk. "Pilate in Modern America" employs what is, by Allen's time, a traditional theme in Black poetry: equating Black suffering to the crucifixion of Christ. The "Pilate" of America pleads with God for redemption, claiming that "one man's voice" �(pf dissent) could not be heard in the din of the lynch mob. But God's voice (the white man's conscience) tells "Pilate" that his guilt is as great as the crowd's. "To Melody" has no racial import. It simply praises song and is imitative, in language and theme, of early 19th century English poetry. As a sonnet, it only remotely suggests the work of McKay and Cullen. "Pilate" is well handled in iambic pentameter. Allen was born in Lumberton, North Carolina where he attended public schools--later completing his studies at Johnson C. smith University. His book-learning is evident in his poetry which is competent but conventional. A certain formalism also marks the work of Donald Jeffrey Hayes. Hayes was born in Raleigh, North Carolina; his education, which was quite extensive, was gained primarily through private study where he pursued his interests in singing, directing and writing. During the twenties and thirties, Hayes appeared in several Broadway productions as a member of a singing chorus. His poetry, much of which reflects his interest in music, was published in Harper's Bazaar, Good Housekeeping and This Week. 11 Appoggiatura 11 --a musical term--draws sustained comparisons between a woman's movements and sounds of water. and watering flow. h1dj11 one It is a towering poem full of surreal image,a.l mysticism Ultimately the woman seems to become a mermaid. He heari the "indistinguishable sound of water silence" and then the woman disappear~ : "Sea-Woman--slim-fingered-water-thing II This theme of having lost something or someone pervades Hayes' poetry. And while he never mentions Africa or the lost Black purity lamented by other A -t/.Gse hilft d "Benediction" ~naissance poets, it is possible that he had strilmr1•1srm2 tn 4 :. 30'3 �is for the departed rather than a prayer to end a religious service. pursues Horne's theme of life's briefness. the poet's "kiss was sweet." for time before death. "Poet" A eulogy, the poem notes that "Prescience" depicts the poet trying to stall His concern is not for his own physical and emotional well-being, but for the "you" addressed in the poem. The speaker cannot bear the thought of his loved one being alone after his death. "Haven" death haunts all of Hayes' anthologized poetry. and conventional forms. Except for He writes in free-verse "Poet" and "Prescience" make the most of careful meter and rhyming couplets. elR,- Another poet, Jonathan Henderson Brooks, writes with allegorical quence. His work is deeply religious; but it is not a canned religiousness. He takes Chris.tian symbolism and makes it work for the Black cause. , Metlttates I L ~lack suffering to the sufferings of Christ. And like Phillis Wheatley, he ensconces his deep and troubled feelings in religious fervor. "The Resurrection" is a poetic narrative--employing dialog where racial concerns can only be inferred. doubt as to its intent. But "My Angel" leaves little Freighted with both hope and doubt, with "Despair and my disgrace", the poem depicts "my angel" attempting to lift the burden from the shoulders of Black Americans. But the angel, who struggled "All night," is unable to lift The heaviest load since Lucifer .••• Carefully and startlingly, Brooks weaves in the relatively new Black poetic On be.~o.\.~ o.P theme of indifference towards (and distrust of) Christianity."- "Black necessit)f but after the all night struggle, the angel intervenesj he wearily flies off "To angels' resting place. JOtf �Thus leaving the narrator with his despair and disgrace. It is a chilling I)(' I poem, one which blatantly carries a doubt more subdued in other1'!3rooks pieces. Alternating between iambic tetrameter and 1· trimeter, and using six-lin~ stanzas, he presents an exciting technical achievement with an ab c b db rhyme scheme. Brooks was born in Mississippi, on a farm "twelve miles southwest of Lexington." After his parents separated, he stayed with his mother until he was 14 when he went to Jackson College for four months on money his mother had saved. - At Jackson he won a prize for a short-story and later completed his high schooling at Lincoln University (Missouri). at Tougaloo, Mississippi. He then wentAto college Though religion is the outstanding influence on his poetry, he is nevertheless unconventional in his use of it and his poetry is always well-crafted. His over-riding achievement appears to be "She Said .•• " a poem dedicated to the memory of the first Black soldier from Alcorn County, Mississippi, to be "killed in action in the invasion of Normandy." Again using Christian symbolism and terms, he imagines the response of the soldier's mother who wonders if her son screamed when he was shot, if "unhurrying Death" was called, and if he died in sunshine, rain, or night. The mother finally equates herself to "Mary of Galilee" and notes that the two women must have felt the same emotion. This is an irresistible idea and theme in Black poetry. The searchingl,,skillful contemporary poet, Raymond Patterson, presented a similar situation in his elegy on the death of Mrs. Martin Luther King, Sr. ("All Things Abide," Black World, September, 1974). Patterson echoes Wheatley, DuBois, McKay, Hughes, Cullen and Dunbar when he asks who in our presence can say how Jesus' mother perished: --Jesus, crucified? �The question mark aids in calling up all the gore and grief and passion and terror that engulf and interlace Black existence as it is infused by Christianity, Africanisms and the Amreican experience of slavery. there again. Was Jesus really crucified? Skepticism and cynicism are In his poem, Brooks achieves a haunting, yet immediate, requiem by tieing the soldier's death to the cosmos-anticipating ~ Dodson's "Lament"--and relating place-names of importance. He establishes other associations: the stars and stripes (of the flag) are connected to the "sun's shining," the sunlight and moonglow are associated with the "stars forever," bullet and death and days and hours and sunshine and night and rain and battleground--all set the stage for Mary and the "Garden" and the suggestion of a rising. -flie.. ~ns o~ LastlyJ\the narration · d {4'1(!, #;().t OC.CV Ir- I'r1-ffi l IY!tn Brooks is set off in Jtalic~ certainly worth much more study. Helene Johnson's small output should be collected and published in bookform . mihcr because she is an importantN:oet. Born in Boston, where she attended local :L S.h t. . d in . New y ork in . pu bl ic sch oo 1 s an d Boston Un i vers i ty, ~n~e~z•@•1~a...i•--~rrive T • 1926 to do additional study at the Extension Division of Columbia University ~ and to become one of the important "younger" figures of the Pl 7 Renaissance. Her poems were published in Opportunity, Vanity Fair and several other periodicals and anthologies. and language. Her poetry is terse, emphatic and diverse in form, style She is at home with the sonnet, free-verse, conventional rhyme pieces, or with what James Weldon Johnson calls "colloquial style--a style which numberless poets of this new age (1910-1930) have assumed to be easy," (Johnson sounds as if he -, age" 1960-1974!). onfc2.•b.tT.ho is(tc?ZBe lib some of the poets of the current "new And Johnson is right about Helene Johnson when he says that she is aware that a poem written in dialect, colloquial or street language ..Job �"demands as much work and workmanship as a well-wrought sonnet." Helene Johnson's dominant themes are cultural reclamation (the African heritage), the ludicrous (sometimes peacockish) dress and mannerisms of Black men, Black beauty and love. Almost always she expresses longing, either for personal love or a return to pre-slavery Africa. In "Summer Matures," "Fu1fwment" and "Magalu" she invites lovers both literally and metaphorically. "Magal~ iike "Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem," "The Road," "Poem," and "Bottled," suggests that the Black American is better than he thinks he is; that examination of his African past and his innate rhythmic richness will allow him to maintain both his past glory and his present sanity. The hint that whites are crass, immobile and inhibited ( a theme recurring in Black thought and writing) also creeps through these poems. "Magalu" is told to ignore the teachings of the man in a "white collar" who carries a rble. Poetry, or ancestral and cultural worship, is better than Christianity, the poet says. Here, of course, she advances an answer to the riddle of fiun•i» Cullen, who appears to have wanted to "dance" but could not throw off the cloak of Western education, sentimentality and respectability. Helene Johnson asks Magalu: Would you sell the colors of your sunset and the fragrance Of your flowers, and the passionate wonder of your forest For a creed that will not let you dance? Continuing this theme in "Sonnet to A Negro in Harlem" (and recalling McKay's "Harlem Dancer" Harlem ..\ol!:;~~ as •• well ea i~s'it"t~oem1j· she depicts the d~e t8t being psychologically and religiouslylf/!!I ■ rt I I r. ;;; T"'\"'Otn~e. �environment in which he or she lives. Somehow, the Black American has remained untainted by crass, Western ways and inflexible thought. this is embodied symbolically in the Harlem Black who, in his All • d ♦vine bar- barism, stylistic richness and refusal to imitate those "whom you despise," is "too splendid for this city street." Helene Johnson seems to direct her poetry at Cullen and others who are unaQ.e to ,litoAM+~hcmsslea ,...._. the clash of - "Christian" training and ,._ is the answer an easy one. "pagan urge." ~ For despite all the~naissance proposals calling for spiritual or physical return to the essences of the African self, the writers had no concrete suggestionjto offer. Except for DuBois, Garvey and a few others, they simply explored romantic declarations and yearnings. This mood is evident also in Helene Johnson's "Poem" where the "Slim, dark, big-eyed" boy becomes a prince like the "monarch" laborer in Fenton Johnson's "Rulers." Yet there is important immediate social commentary in the same type of poem~ "Bottled," which ridicules a superfly-type character of the ....... 1920#s. Her "Negro dressed fit to kill" refused to dance the Charleston or the Black Bottom since he is too "dignified." Instead of a cane, she says, he should be "carrying a spear with a sharp fine point." spear should be dipped in poison. The tip of the And the rest, of course, is obvious. Finally, the poem laments the apparent internal turmoil of a Black man who is "all glass" ("plastic" in today's language). "Bottled" is typical of much of the thematic focus of Black writing in all genres of the period. It also anticipated the continuing satire that would be found in the writings u of Frank Marshall Davis, George Scn,7ler, Hughes, and others. A young con- temporary woman poet, Barbara McHone (Black World, August, 1974) assesses a character similar to Helene Johnson's in "A Sea of Brown Boys. " --=;,,I . �e;:t, (L 113 Lara Hell •••,\_chides the boys for wearing high heel shoes, purses, and patterning their lives after Shaft, Superfly and Sweetback. After stating the urgent needs of the times and implying that Black masculinity is being undermined, she asks: where did our love go? Helene Johnson seems to make her most cogent statement, however, in "The Road" where she links into a theme long-associated with Black struggle: on moving." fight. "Keep "The Road" encourages Blacks to see their beauty as well as their "Trodden beauty," is still "trodden pride." Reminiscent of Johnson's "Lift Every Voice and Sing" and Fenton Johnson's "Children of the Sun," she advises her people to Rise to one brimming golden, spilling 1 cry! Perhaps not coincidentally, Helene Johnson's work is similar, in language and . w:LLi~rn ALL-In IJiLl theme, to the poetry of Waring Cuney who (along with Hughe?f,nd Edward Silvera) belongs to the group sometimes called the Lincoln University poets.3 Cuney was A. born one huihf c fAtwinl in Washington, D.C. where he attended public schools and later studied music (after Howard and Lincoln Universities) at the Boston Conservatory of Music and in Rome. The twins had similar interests: singing and his brother's the piano. Waring's being After his poem "No Images" won an Opportunity prize, James Weldon Johnson stated that Cuney's work held "exceptional promise." However Cuney never became a prolific writer of literary poetry. Instead he divided his time between writing lyrics for songs and his other numerous chores. His protest lyrics were set to music and sung by Josh White on the album Southern Exposure. And his poetry was not published in book form until 1960 when the 3. See Four Lincoln University Poets (Hughes, 1931) and Lincoln University Poets (Cuney, Hughes, and Bruce McM. Wright, 1954). Hughes called Lincoln University (Pennsylvania) "a place of -beauty and the ideal colLege for a poet." His assessment seems to have been correct. Raymond Patterson, Larry Neal and �bibliophile society in the Netherlands brought out Puzzles. free-verse and maintains "great economy of phrase." He usually writes in His poetry surveys the whole of the human experience but most of it carries either a racial or a folksy note. There is also cynicism and skepticism of the sort found in Fenton Johnson, McKay, Cullen and Hl=fi;ie. Heavily influenced by Hughes, Cuney's early work depicts frank pictures of Black and general life and often uses the plain, direct folk speech as a major vehicle. This trend is seen in poems like "Hard Times Blues," "Cruci- fixion," "Troubled Jesus," and "Burial of the Young Love." Though his poems were published in several magazines and anthologies of the era, his "No Images"--which won the Opportunity prize--ties in with a general poetic theme of the eenaissance: ~ that Black beauty and creativity are too good to flourish in the decadence of Western civilization. The Black woman in Cuney's poem is similar to the Harlem Negro of Helene Johnson's poem, the dancer of McKay's "Harlem Dancer," the ravished and tormented narrator in Cullen's "Heritage," and the split personality in Toomer's "Kabnis" (Cane): they all seek to be whole in a world that denies and carica- tures their humanity. Cuney's woman figure • • • thinks her brown body Has no glory. But if she had an opportunity to dance as her natural self--"naked" perhaps--in her natural habitat--Africa--where her "image would be reflected by the river, then she would "know" how beautiful she is. But civilization corrodes the idea of trees and naturalness and, consequently, deprives Blacks of their own beauty and their healthy self-image: And dishwater gives back no images. Dishwater is a . kind of death--a spiritual and moral death--for Cuney whose work Gil Scott-Heron are only three of the neler poetic talents nurtured at Lincoln. '1ol.son <AL.so A11erided Unto\..n, �shows him to be preoccupied with death. Several of his poems ("Threnody," "The Death Bed," "Crucifixion," "Burial of the Young," "Finis" and "Dust") react to, anticipate or contemplate death. For Cuney, who seems to place a strong trust in the folkways, there is an irony in the fact that the God who protects the oppressors is also expected to protect the oppressed. This particular brand of Black cyni- cism makes it~most dramatic debut with Dunbar and remains a dominant theme in Black poetry up until this very day. In "The Death Bed" the dying man sends all the praying "kin-folk" away from his bed. The praying ones, of course, think this is strange and continue praying against his will in a room accross the hall. Failing in an attempt to sing a final song, the dying man lapses back and, knowing (I'\ death is i~nent, wonders What it was they cound be saying. "Hard Times Blues" is a protest song-poem which talks about drought, hunger, depression and general bad times in the South. The refrain contains this paradoxical plea-assertion: Great-God-Amighty Folks feeling bad, Lost all they ever had. The indirect association of God with the misery/coupled with an oblique prayer for help/is different indeed--though its antecedents can clearly be seen in the coded Spirituals, blues, jokes, and oral epics of the folk. A similar paradox and irony is contained in "My Lord, What a Morning" where the speaker is ecstatic over "black" Jack Johnson's defeat of "white" Jim Jeffries. Admitting to the "Lord" that "Fighting is wrong," the speaker nevertheless exclaims: But what an uppercut. Making God a colloquial person--Black, that is--in several of his poems, Cuney �recalls Johnson's feat in tGod 's TrombpJle.§, ,where God is likened to a ' 1mammy." Another important later achievement of Cuney's is "Charles Parker, 1925-1955." The legendary jazz musician is given credit for reshaping the blues idiom in music--and hence revitalizing the Black aesthetic. The poem is made up of lines 10 of one~three words and includes phonetic renderings of saxophone sounds. And throughout the piece, the reader is advised to "listen." Lewis Alexander apparently also wants us to "listen" to his "Enchantment" which embodies, again, the theme of the exotic and beautiful African. the "body smiling with black beauty" is wearing "African moonlight." divides his poem into two sections: the "Medicine Dance." This time Alexander "Part I" which is "Night" and "Part II," Part one gives the setting, moonlight in Africa, juice gushing from over-ripe fruit, palm trees, silence. ~ In /art lJ,1 the medicine dancer is placed in relief against the "grotesque hyena-faced monster" who (seeming to represent whites) is driven back into the "wilderness" by his own fear and the spell cast on him by the medicine dancer. The poem is in free-verse and features several exclamation marks and single-word lines. Typographically, the poem works well with its depiction of dancing, mystery, suspense, fright and anticipation. There is a quickening here, a stalking there, finally a resolution and the black body now dances with "delight" as Terror reigns like a new crowned queen. Alexander was born in Washington, D.C., educated in public schools, including the celebrated Dunbar High, and attended Howard University. His interests somewhat paralleled those of Cuney and Donald Jeffrey Hayes and he acted in the Ethiopian Art Theatre Company; for a while he was a member of the Playwriters' Circle and the Ira Aldridge Piayers. Many of the major themes and experimental techniques of the ~naissance can be found in Alexander's poetry) ftt'pm~ation of the Black �anatomy to nature. Hughes says the faces, eyes and souls of "my people" are beautiful like the night, stars and sun. Alexander finds, on the other hand, that the heavy hanging sky, the curved scars of the moon, the twinkl,~f stars and the trembling earth, all parallel the burdensome hair, wrinkled brow, tears flowing Mam~'an aging hurt.,:~-- e y ~ J v , e,tjpg and cupping ~t-0W01i"t\r> tearsA For Hughes nature is a partner to Black beauty; for Alexander it is a companion to agony, suffering and historical pain. possibilities of color and shade symbolism. when night falls black." Alexander also probes the "Dream Song" advises one to "dream In "Nocturne Varial" shadow (Blacks) becomes light (beautiful, aware) and the deeper the Blackness gets (spreads its influence) the more changes (the greater the impact) will occur among whites. In the deepest core of the night, "Each note is a star" but the light emitted from that darkness is not blinding. Then, after this searching contrast and overlay of what painters call chiaroscuro, we are told that: I came as a shadow, To dazzle your night. The idea of transfiguration and change weighs heavily upon Alexander's poetry. Significant changes occur in "Negro Woman," "Enchantment," "Nocturne Varial" and "Transformation." After having arrived as a "shadow" in "Nocturne Varial" the poet (or the persona "I") decides to "return" a bitterness that has gone through the wash of tears. through the years." The bitterness becomes "loveliness" which has been "garnished Announcing that the bitterness has been worn from the taste of the past, Alexander implies here, as he does in other poems, that he is a forgiving person. Indeed he may be saying that Blacks will hold no hatred (for whites) or desire for retribution. Alexander's poetry is concise and neat, mostly �in free-verse and conventional language. Neat also is the only anthologized poem by Lucy Ariel Williams Holloway. Found in Caroling Dusk (Cullen), The Poetry of The Negro (Hughes and Bontemps) and Johnson's The Book of American Negro Poetry, "Northboun'" garnered the coveted Opportunity poetry prize in 1926. We mention it because it shows great talent and feel in the employment of Black southern speech and it embodies not only ~/~but historical concerns of Blacks. The world is neither flat nor round, the poet tells us: H'it's one long strip Hangin' up an' down-and there's only "Souf an' Norf." The foregoing is part of the chorus in this song-poem which comically predicts how people "all 'ud fall" if the world "wuz jes' a ball." For those who brag about the city seen by Saint John, Lucy Holloway challenges them to see Saginaw. Opportunities for Blacks are good in Saginaw (heaven) and pretty women are _plentiful. The poem restates the belief (developed during slavery and abolition efforts) that the North is heaven compared to the South (hell). Lucy Holloway emotionally chronicles the feelings, anticipations and oral narratives connected with "moving north." Such a preoccupation can be seen throughout the literature of the period, in the stories, the poems, the plays, the novels, the articles and the songs. Finally, 'if n~?-'- g /\tells us what Hughes, Ellison, Baldwin, Claude Brown and Sterling Plumpp would refute: Since Norf is up, An' Souf is down, An' Hebben is up, I'm upward boun'. �Lucy Holloway's poem is interesting for another reaso~: coming, as it did, at the thrust of the lenaissance, it represented a throwback to the dialect and min1. strel traditions which most of the New Negro writers were trying to break. And although Johnson (James) and Hughes worked in dialect, their major efforts were decidedly different from those of the Dunbar school. Reading ~Holloway's poem, however, one is immediately reminded of Dunbar, Campbell, Carrothers and IlnM l 111811 , Davis. Yet, a final reason for using the example of Lucy Holloway is to lead into at least a partial listing of the poets who published in magazines, regional anthologies and newspapers during the Harlem Renaissance and afterwards. among the dozens of lesser and unknown poets we mention the following: From Gladys May Casely Hayford (born in West Africa), Allison Davis, Esther Popel Shaw, J. Mason Brewer Eleanor Graham Nichols, Corrinne E. Lewis, Mary Effie Lee, Edward Garnett Riley, Albert Rice (a member of Georgia Douglas Johnson's writing workshop), Carrie W. Clifford (The Widening Light, 1922), Marcus B. Christian, Winston Allen, Mae V. Cowdery, Tilford Jones, Adeline Carter Watson, Will Sexton and Edward Silvera. Some of these occasional and newspaper poets made temporary "splashes" and moved on. Mae V. Cowdery won a Crisis poetry prize in 1927 and published a volume of her poetry in the thirties. and Silvera are the most important. ~~ Of this group of poets, however, Christian Christian (1900-) was born in Houma, Louisiana, and~primarily self-educated. For a while he served as supervisor of the Dillard University Negro History Unit of the Federal Writers' Project. He later re...,ceived a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship to complete an historical study begun on the project before going to work in the Dillard Library. His poems �appeared in various anthologies and magazines. And his available work has both general and racial flavor and shows him to be a skilled word-handler. Craftsman" is about artistic excellence. The artist--presumably the poet--must work with "consummate care" and be "free of flaws." above everything else. ever. "The This is so because art is The poet knows that if he writes well, he "lives" for- Christian employs a form--the sonnet--that is consistent with his high calling. Another sonnet, "McDonogh Day in New Orleans," is a celebration of the beauty of Blackness. Detailing the difficulty a poor Black girl has in trying to get the kind of clothes she needs, Christian finally has her attired "Like some dark princess" wearing "blue larkspur" coupled with "yellow marigold." True, she looks good going to school But few would know--or even guess this fact: How dear comes beauty when a skin is black. 11-silvera (1906-1937) lived a productive, if tragically short, life. He was born in Jacksonville, Florida, attended local public schools an~duated from Orange High; he then went to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania where he participated in sports and wrote poetry, some of which was included in Four Lincoln Poets . His poetry also appeared in magazines and anthologies. Much of Silvera's poetry is quiet and sparse--reminiscent of Cuney, his friend, Horne, and many of the introspective poets of the period. But his work does carry the prevailing themes of Renaissance poetry. "Jungle Taste," for example, celebrates the Africa of old-~ dcn4.-emm Africa before the appearance of the "civilization" Fenton Johnson · • The "Coarseness" in the "songs of black men" does not sound "strange" to Silvera. Neither does the "beauty" in the "faces of black women" seem unusual. men alone can "see" this "dark hidden beauty." Yet Black In "Forgotten Dreams" only a "heap" of entangled thread now lies where once a beautiful dream had been spun. Here, �Silvera seems to be lamenting the loss of something--maybe viewing his approaching death. Likewise, in another poem, "On the Death of A Child," he again uses the "spun" image. The child comes without a "voice" to announce its arrival. lark sings, but "shadows" have already "foretold" that death is near. had been "spun" and the end comes. Hughes and Bontemps anthologies. The The "shroud" Silvera's and Christian's works appear in the Silvera's poetry also appears in Kerlin's Negro Poets and Their Poems. The dominant themes in poetry of the Harlem Renaissance--cultural reclamation, stylistic experimentation, romantic engagement with Africa, a presentation of the rawness of Black life--can also be found in the fiction, drama, painting, music, criticism, and belles lettres of the period. is Locke's The New Negro. Due we I prose (fiction and non-fiction) • The best documentation of these items - sht to wentia~ S ome of the major names in 5 1 also wrote poetr1; Jean Toomer, Eric Walrond, Jessie Redmond Fauset, Rudolph Fisher, Nella Larson, Zora Neale Hurston, McKay, Hughes, Cullen, Walter White,+ t DuBois, Charles S. Johnson, Carter G. Woodson, Bruce Nugent, John Matheus, Cecil Blue, Montgomery Gregory, Arthur Huff Fauset, James Weldon Johnson, E. Franklin Frazier and Arthur A. Schomburg. D. Renaissance Fallout: Negritude Poets and Pan-African Writing Claude McKay's influence, as a novelist (Banjo), on leaders of African nationalism has already been noted. kind, nor the last. But McKay's impact was not the first of its During the 18th and 19th centuries, Africans in the Western Hemisphere had exchanged ideas and made pacts with each other and with their fellows of color in Africa. In Chapter III we noted this pervasive influence as seen in documents, the establishment of African societies and the African Methodist Episcopal ( I 3f,t/ �Church, the founding of Liberia, and the daring and courageous example of the West African Cinque. We also noted the arrival in the United States of a number of West Indian, Caribbean and South American Blacks--a flow that has remained unabated up until this very day. We call immediately to mind such names as J1111t Russwurm, ?lauoas Garvey, McKay, and Stokely Carmichael. The poet John Boyd, dis- cussed in Chapter III, was a Bahamian. ':t however, that the Pan-African flavor was most It was during the 19201s, dramatically and thoroughly demonstrated. Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association which claimed thousands of followers and members, was in. full swing by the time of the 11tiiii'i"1 Renaissance. DuBois was the driving force behind four Pan-African Congresses which met successively between 1919 and 1927 (in Paris, London and New York). And the predominant themes in ~naissance literature were reclamation of the African heritage and celebration of the beauties and talents of African peoples. Consistent with our study, however, is a consideration of one of the most f rtttt,Sf.Ch a~CA.$-4 5 important spin-outs from the Harlem Renaissance: the Negritude school o f ~ - uJ!lldi• Martinique, Capetown, Paris, Dakar and Algiers. As natives of French- controlled colonies, these young Black students and intellectuals were trained in French schools and shared dual citizenships. (This practice represents a throwback to the Creole poets, many of whom were educated in France.) the Negritude poets' activities here. I But we only summarize Chief among them are Aim~ C~saire (1913-) • I I of Martinique, Leon Damas (1912-) of French Guiana, and Leopold Sedar Senghor (1906-) of Senegal. More information, including examples of Negritude poetry, can be found in Jean-Paul Sart's "Orphee Neir" ("Black Orpheus") which prefaced I I Leopold Sedar Senghor's anthology of African and West Indian poets: ~ JlOJ.rlelle , p..o,,~u~. .17:~.8£~ !:.~ ~al&ach&,,\1£.l~ m & . a ~ (Paris, Anthologie de 1948). Although �the important preface has appeared in various hard-to-get translations, it appeared in book form for the first time in C.W.E. Bigsby's The Black American Writer, Volume II: Poetry and Drama (1971). For further study see the works of Franz Fanon, writings of Senghor (see also, L~opold S~dar Senghor and the Politics of Negritude, Irving L. Markovitz, 1969), and the numerous anthologies MG\V'te Coil,"51 of African poetry by Langston Hughes,,\Keorapetse Kgositsile, Wilfred Cartey, Rainer Schulte and Quincy Troupe, and Mercer Cook and Stephen Henderson's The Militant Black Writer in Africa and the United States (1969) .fllft.JJ ~,t Is m,,f'exl,11usfr11e • Negritude has been eloquently and illustratively defined by Scfre, Senghor, Cook, Paul Vesey (Samuel Allen) and others. The term (roughly corresponding to Black American Soul) refers to the mystique of Blackness which pervades the thought, actions, creativity and general life-style of some Africans. Senghor calls it a philosophy of humanism; Vesey finds elements of it in the Afro-American church and in the works of artists such as Baldwin and Ellison; Sartre notes that "From Haiti to Cayenne, there is a single idea: ''reveal the black soul. is evangelic, it announces good news: Black poetry Blackness has been rediscovered." The first creative work to emerge from this French-speaking sector of ~naissance inI fluence was Leon Damas' Pigments (1937). Like the other works that followed, Pigments extolled Black beauty and lamented Black suffering. r urra The influence of Hughes is more evident in Damas than in other Negritude poets. Damas, freely admits in conversation that he (and his compatriots) owes much to Hughes who offered prizes to African writers and helped expose African literature to the world. Pigments heralded the arrival of Negritude. Its style, reminiscent of Hughes, is "sharp, slangy, tense and fast-moving" and was revolutionary to French poetry when it appeared. I I Cesaire published Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Return to My Native Land) in 1938. Senghor has published Chants d'ombres (Song �of Shadows, 1949), Hosties Noires (Black Victims, 1948), Chants pour Naett (Songs fot ' Both Cesaire and • ~eett. 1949), Ethiopiques (1959) and Nocturnes (1961). -tf\f R~riO.I~ n nC' ... • Senghor have been heavily influenced by jazz, blues and poetry of"HarlemA Exposed to these forms in the salons of Madamoiselle Nardal between 1929 and 1934, they found Afro-American expression liberating and "fertilizing." Rene' Maran afforded them similar exposure after 1935.) (The salons of Also contributing to this convergence were the efforts of Mercer Cook who, as statesman and scholar, played an important part in bringing the works of Black Americans to their African and Caribbean contemporaries.</'senghor's great poem about New York has immediate ties to both the ienaissance and the impact of Harlem on him. As in many of his poems, Senghor designates the instrument(s) to accompany the piece. he chooses "Jazz Orchestra: solo trumpet." For "New York" New York's beauty at first "confused" Senghor, but after a couple of weeks in that city one grows accustomed to buying "artificial hearts." He is ecstatic about Harlem Harlem! I have seen Harlem Harlem! ••• Senghor writes of the African landscape, warriors, love and his admiration for Black women. As president of Senegal, he presided over the First World Festival of Negro Aj..ts, held in Dakar in 1966.,Damas deals with problems of color and class in his poetry and defines Negritude in a series of rolling, vigorous stanzas in free-verse. His other collections of poems include Poemes ' negres ' sur des airs africains (1948), Graffiti (1952), Black-Label (1956) and Nevralgies (1965?). ~tl6.Ae$esped,-llf Like other Negritude poets, Damas read the poetry of _thel\... mU:e£)foaat -:r~.., (critics seem to agree, however, that the Africans and Caribbean poets surpassed their American brothers and sisters) Damas' cynicism and irony can be detected in the . following titles: "Almost White." "Enough," "S.O.S.," "Position," "Good Breeding," and Damas satirizes the Black middle-class and the Black habit of �straightening hair and using bleaching creams .'/similar themes can be found in ' . who also employs free-verse and makes great use of irony. the poetry of Cesaire Return to My Native Land catalogs all the scientific things that Blacks have not -th€ Y'd.l.e invented, but later gives them credit for being the backbone of/\.buman,\e.,;mt ee. ' Cesaire has served as mayor of Fort de France and a deputy to the French National Assembly, representing the independent revolutionary party of Martinique. He quit the French Communist Party in the 1950~ and has since been active in African nationalism. His other collections of poetry are Les Armes miraculeuses (1946), • Sole,:1-l cou coupe' (1948), Corps perdu (1_9 50) and Ferrements (1960). I I Cesaire, Damas and Senghor have also written drama (mostly about Black historical figures) and essays on Negritude and Pan-African liberation. I Damas is currently living in Washington , D.C. where he teaches literature at Howard University and Federal City College. The Negritude Movement in poetry--best recorded in Sai=re'5 articles and in Norman S. Shapiro's Negritude: Black Poetry from Africa and The Caribbean (1970)--encompas sed several other important Black areas and figures: Ernest Alima (Cameroon), Joseph Miezan Bognini and Bernard Dadi~ (Ivory Coast), Jean-Fernand Brierre arid lle»e' Depestre (Haiti), Siriman Cissoko (Mali), David Diop (Senegal, a , great poet killed in an airplane crash in 1956), Jocelyne Etienne and Guy Tirolien (Guadeloupe), Camara Laye (Guinea) and Emile-Desire Ologoudou (Dahomey), to name just a few. In other Black French-speaking t e rritories, the Negritude 1 concept took hold under different ham.es. In Haiti it was called Indigenism. The Harlem Renaissance and the subsequent concept of Negritude influenced these poets in various ways and to greater or lesser degrees. &n ifiem s s But the influence is there. ~-..e.ve.y; 31 5 , emotio~ and politicA9'i~the poets bear greater resemblance to71ie,JJ\ 1 tAvnfe.t1ptt-1? ~ Afro-Americanj\than in a.N:". styles and technj.ques. This interchange among writers H and thinkers of the Black world has~ tide (more on this in Chapter VI). s eLLed. /\to its current rich and important �THE EXTENDED RENAISSANCE: • Some c r itics ~ --="' ~ 301 s, 40 s, 50 s ~the Harlem Renaissance f as simply the peak of nearly a century-long Afro-American push in art, belles lettres and consciousness-raising. And, as observed earlier , there is also divergent opinion over whether an actual "Renaissance" occurred . But, arguments aside, the stock market crash of 1929 is PeNN as'ff\e generally ~ • d as the official end of the«1esignate~Renaissance--since white ~uuJ,c. patronage ended and the~writers had not developed followings among the f grass roots. C' critics Important here also are positions ~aken by two ot,.who of the era~ Sterling Brown and J. Saunders Redding/ ,)!oth,\feel the ~ , _ . was primarily a fad; Brown •■•-addt\to Harlem as a "show-window" and Redding claimed the writers mistook Harlem for real Black life: First of all, Negro writers, both poets and novelists, centered their attentions so exclusively upon life in the great urban centers that the city, especially Harlem, became an obsession with them . Now Harlem life is far from typical of Negro life; indeed, life there is lived on a theatrical plane that is as far from true of Negro life elsewhere as life in the Latin Quarter is from the truth of life in Picardy. The Negro writers' mistake lay in the assumption that what they saw was Negro life, when in reality it was just Harlem life . . ~-.L.-·- •..-,.::.::-... ...,_ -~ .. • I,;,- ·~,tir....W,-~• • -~··:..-,__.,..,.._ __.... __ _: - - L L ..-' • -•--' ' • "" (To Make A Poet Black) By way of parallel, it is instructive to note that a leading contemporary Black I~ critic, Addison Gayle, Jr., accuses Black writers of the 1960s and Jf=D of being similarly remiss. In the September, 1974, issue of Black World, Gayle discuss ~ �"The Black Aesthetic: 10 Years Later" and attemptfto lay out a blue-print for "Reclaiming the Southern Experience." l-\1s llttl 5 claim that hardly any of the new Black literature is rooted in the South shows him to be less familiar with recent Black writing than he should be. (See, for example, the works of Dumas, Alice Walker, Pinkie Lane, Arthenia Bates, Alvin Aubert, and others.) But, generally, his thesis, derived from John Oliver Killens's statement, "We are a Southern people," is solid and well-taken. Gayle's and Redding• s comments ought to be measured against Donald Gibson I s vie~of the "New'•poetry as an ''urban'' product The works of Black poets in the three decades following the 1920s .._..._... ou • 66.,.r'O r«ervofl"i i Pl ~ and rich. iJ ~"o~ · Q,. t-lc.,~ · ' C.rO>S•Uc.Tion o~ · · · The Great Depression was felt world-widep t!l technical and thematic by m4nBlacks, whites, poor The droughts, referred to in Cuney's "Hard Time Blues," the ravages workers'p~ of the Boll Weevil, the plight of the sharecroppers, the wwMai••:f:>.~;'nionization, and the attraction of the Communist Party (with its cieo of racial unity and equality), all inspired and informed Afro-American poetry of the thirties, forties and fifties. So did lynching, unemployment, Black history 'cultural reclamation and protest; but the tendency, in general, was to seek the deliverance of "all men." McKay, Hughes and others (in the twenties fL,~1ld wi~ Communism. Desperately the~liei!l•-•·21Woin~g throes of racis~ikc1:=Pml!!!f:!s~~ Afro-American I""':"' 0,. ~o.i;;;it.t,te!: artists, intellectuals and writers not only becf\me Communists, but,au f bairn ts, integrationists, Pan-Africanists • seekers of the American Drea~- ) civil servants or model citizens. Few of the writers, however, followed the example of Richard Wright or W.E.B. DuBois who~T~:~!t the Party. -l~t ::tt}~.. the Depression in the thirties, the stances cast against -.n .. u.Wo.~ll,_,Ain the forties, and Korea and McCarthyism in the fifties. Compared to the first three decades of the century, relatively little Black 4see his Modern Black Poets ( ] I "Introduction."). • �poetry was published in book form between 1930 and 1960. In a 1935 article in Opportunity Alain Locke lamented the low quality and quantity of post-Renaissance poetry. "'-"~"' With the exception of Hughes and Cullen, most of th ~ pens were silent during the thirties. Several ~ ,;:nr □ s o ~N'oets, however, made their debuts. Frank ) made major lMpaO"i ) and Sterling A. Brown (1901-h-Oh? l • ~ ...-r.ls: <1.nd '811.•w wa..s n ·ae,ii..citeal!llfWM.,.,...,.._..+.!IM!l'lll'lilM!ffll!•rill~liliil!lil!L /\ Robert Hayden (1913-all Davis (1905-- ~w~'c\ in~e.l ) also made first Melvin B. Tolson (1900-1966) and Margaret Walker (1915-- appearances in the thirties but they sustained lengthy and productive careers. Fiction writer Richard Wright (1908-1960) was an occasional poet who joined the thirties group. A second wave of poets, some occasional and all "transitional," appeared in the forties, fifties and early sixties: Dudley Randall (1914-(1915-- Long Madgett (1923-Lance Jeffers (1919-(1929-- ) , Ray Durem ), Gloria C. Oden (1923-- ) , Naomi ), May Miller, Helen Johnson Collins (1918-), Russell Atkins (1926-- ), James C. Morriss (1920-- ) ' ), Raymond Patterson ), Oliver Pitcher (1923-- ,I Sarah E. Wright (1929-- ), Myron ), Bruce McM. Wright (1918-- ), Samuel Allen (also Paul Vesey, 1917-- (1915-fqli,3), M. Carl Holman (1919- ), ), Margaret Danner ), Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-- ), Pauli Murray (1910-- O'Higgins (1918-- Owen Dodson (1914-- ) 4 and /Mt"1btl-.i ). • • • • • •7fMos~of this transitional group did ~ not get a real hearing until the sixties;~hey will be looked at as a group in Chapter VI. of- Dozens,\others published or wrote occasionally. Of the poets writing in the thirties, Brown separates them into "new realists" and "romantics." The word "romantic" seems to be analagous to "library;" and both are used to speak somewhat disparagingly of poets thus categorized. The "realists" and writers of protest included Welborn Victor Jenkins (Trumpet in the New Moon, 1934), Frank Awtonj Marshall Davis and Wright. ~ose concerned with "romantic escapes" were �Alpheus Butler (Make Way for Happiness, 1932), J. Harvey L. Baxter (That Which Concerneth Me, 1934; Sonnets for the Ethiopians and Other Poems, 1936), Eve Lynn (No Alabaster Box), Marion Cuthbert (April Grasses, 1936) and Mae Cowdery (Lift Our Voices) . The romantics wrote about nature, delicacy, love, quaintness and their work reflects # more 11 booka . 11 learning than anything else. Brown said that Jenkins' work deserved "an original place in Negro poetry" but Trumpet in The New Moon is out of print; and Jenkins' poetry is absent from every anthology of Afro-American poetry. His poetic sketches of the Black life encompass prac- tically every important facet. Though owing much to Whitman and Sandburg, Jenkins' work is still important enough to be reissued as well as anthologized. Wright, often called the father of the modern Black novel, was a poet in r.) his own right. and difficult. No other American writer's personal od4yssey has been so bleak V' From poverty, orphanhood, educational deprivation and racism, he emerged as one of the most influential and dominant forces in American literature. Not only did a so-called "Wright School" of ~ riters result from his efforts, but countless white writers also imitatedAU-~• ~· most discussed novel, Native Son (1940), eas a Pack of ♦ hi U11 His •I ssl:nti@11nu 1t • summed up the emotional and psychological history of Black urban America over the preceding 20 years. e► w,tifi/16' ~ ch;ol:iclel the hopes (and - disillusionments) of Blacks "Northboun'" to seek the Promised Land. As a poet Wright deserves more than • passing interest. the Communist Party in the thirties and remained a member until 1944. He joined His poetry, protest coupled with calls for unity among Blacks and whites, was �published in various journals and news organs of the period: Literature, New Masses, Anvil, Midland, and Left. Much of International 1a1■·-11111-..;J~~s quoted in Dan McCall's The Example of Richard Wright (1969) and his poems appear in The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry (Ellman and O'Clair), The Negro Caravan, The Poetry of Black America, American Negro Poetry and other anthologies. ii lg] t ,....iorn near Natchez, Mississippi, and experien~an erratic educational and ' w~ home-life pattern/ ~tij7ffb~illillill■t~j~5~9..lb~slilliE•••~Jlll!l!f•••t•a~12~2!1111•l■E,;•t••t•1•1•1••1-1• nnrlu z dnn Hffsrent ~~ l(ederal Writers' Project during the Depression (becoming a friend to Davis, Margaret Walker and others). 1 Ia He died in 1960 in Paris where he had settled (at the suggestion of Gertrude Stein) and joined the Existentialist group of writers led by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. His poetry is in free verse and the Japanese haiku form--which he discovered late in his life. His haikus are harmless ellip- 0F~t1 tical statements, as haikus~re. ~eJ/ Aare be . rarely racial in flavor. a poet But his protest poetry of the thirties showfhim to of unmistakable talent and sensitivity. "I Have Seen Black Hands" owes debts to the American school of poetry developed by Whitman, Fenton Johnson, Masters, Sandburg, Hughes and others. ~4 poiem In •AWright catalogs the services rendered and corresponding disservices received by Blacks. He announces that I am black and I have seen black hands, millions and millions of them-and that these "hands" have reached naively, creatively, harmlessly, softly and with strength, out to each other and to do the white man's bidding. Despite their stamina, vigilance and dependability, these same hands are the last put to �work and the first idled. They held the "dreaded lay-off slip." They suffered from "unemployment and starvation." And they grew nervous and sweaty, and opened and shut in anguish and doubt and hesitation _. and irresolution ..• Wright continues, as in his prose works, to develop a psychological portrait of the abused and dehumanized Blacks. There is a drive and an incremental swell, reminiscent of Margaret Walker's "For My People," as he recalls having seen "black hands" grip prison bars, knotted and claw-like under the lynch rope, or "beat fearfully at tall flames." But Black hands and white hands will someday merge as "fists of revolt" and create a new "horizon." Here, of course, 19 Wright Blacks and whites to become Communists. "Between the World and Me," however, sustains a different angle of the theme begun in "I Have Seen Black Hands . " A Black man has been lured into a wooded area and seduced by a white prostitute; the narrator becomes the lynched body whose remains are • . . dry bones ••. and a stony skull staring in yellow surprise at the sun •••• Making use of awesome, horrorfying images and clashing, brilliant colors and ~ t-HJflncft"9-' sounds, the poem recounts the most insignificant details of the events andA of the lynching: And the sooty details of the scent rose, thrusting themselves between the world and me . . . . There was a design of white bones slumbering forgottenly upon a cushion of ashes. There was a charred stump of sapling pointing a blunt finger accusingly at the sky. �There were torn tree limbs, tiny veins of burnt leaves, and scorched coil of greasy hemp; And upon the trampled grass were buttons, dead matches, butt-ends of cigars and cigarettes, peanut shells, a drained gin-flask, and a whore's lipstick; Scattered traces of tar, restless arrays of feathers, and the lingering smell of gasoline. The poem continues, as the narrator, who "stumbled suddenly upon the thing," becomes one with the victim. technique. It is a fascinating and highly appropriate poetic Owing much to the psychological school of writing, but indicting the cosmos (as Dunbar does in "The Haunted Oak"), "Between the World and Me" states that the lynch victim is every Black. And the world (through the recitation of usually passive components of the natural landscape) shares in the guilt, the revulsion and the horror of the act . Before God and the world, the victim ..• clutched childlike, clutched to the hot sides of death. In Black on White (1966) David Littlejohn calls Wright's poem and Robert Hayden's "Middle Passage" "the two finest poems by Negroes." Sterling Brown's poetry also falls into the category of realism though not in the political sense with with which it is applied to other writers of the era. Like Cuney, Wright, Davis, Hughes and others, Brown in Southern Road (1932) depicts the harshness and starkness of Black misery but his poetry is "chiefly sov~~ an attempt at folk portraiture of Snaff f!t] •~characters." A highly respected critic and scholar of Black folk literature, Brown approached his "portraits" as a student of the linguistic and thematic materials with which he worked. He was born and �reared in Washington, D.C. At Williams College, he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in 1921 and in 1923 received an H.A. from Harvard. Since that time Brown, the son of educator-parents, has had a long and distinguished career as writer, editor, teacher, and professor of English at Howard University. He has also taught at New York University, Vassar College and Atlanta University. 1939 he was Editor off Negro From 1926- Affairs for the Federal Writers' Project, and in 1939 he was a staff member of the famous Carnegie-Myrdal Study of the Negro. The recipient of numerous awar<ls, Brown is the author of The Negro in American Fiction (1937) and Negro Poetry and Drama (1937). In 1941, he served as senior editor of The Negro Caravan (with Arthur P . Davis and Ulysses P. Lee), probably the most influential and definitive anthology of Afro-American literature ever published. In the twenties Brown began an unbroken tradition of publishing articles, reviews and criticism in various journals, newspapers and periodicals. Perceptive, relentless and seemingly alwars in focus, Brown performed important surgery on Black folk culture and its manifestations in the poetry, music and language. His findings were published in Negro Poetry and Drama, where he also concluded that the New Negro Movement (1914-1936) produced the following five "major concerns" among the poets: (1) j( rediscovery of Africa as a source for race pride; (2) /use of Negro heroes and heroic episodes from American history · J (3) P"ropaganda of protest; (4) -ktreatment of the Negro masses (frequently of the folk, less often of the workers) with more understanding and less apology/• (5) _,knd franker and deeper self revelation , Brown's own poetry revived interest in Black dialect from a vigorously different angle than before. Cullen (Caroling Dusk) and Johnson (The Book of American Negro �Poetry) had forecast the doom of dialect poetry. and Johnson reduced it to two stops: Cullen said its day was over humor and pathos. (Interestingly, Arthur P. Davis, in From tbe •.JJA.t~ IQ.ltU, repeats Johnson's position ! ) took the However, Brown ~r,~d1,that dialect has limitless possibilities if poets and writers only have the courage and the ingenuity to work with it. Of the debate and con- flict over dialect poetry, he said: Dialect, or the speech of the people, is capable of expressing whatever the people are. And the folk Negro is a great deal more than a buffoon or a plaintive minstrel. Poets more intent upon learning the ways of the folk, their speech, and their character, that is to say better poets, could have smashed the -r,iey mold. But first they would have had to believe in whatA_were doing. And this was difficult in a period of conciliation and middle class striving for recognition and respectability. Brown himself used his knowledge of folk culture to interpret the people through poetry. And he considered this approach "one of the important tasks of Negro poetry." Some observj\rS see a contradiction in Brown's dazzling academic achieve- e ments and his poetic work in the folk materials. But current young scholars and poets could learn much from Brown's example. Wagner (Black Poets of the United States) points to the irony and humor in Brown asking Johnson to write the ~ ntroduction to Southern Road. For, in doing so, Johnson was literally forced to take back much of his own criticism of dialect poetry. Indeed Johnson had to admit to Brown's formidable achievement with the folk forms. Before Southern Road, in The Book of American Negro Poetry, the elder poet and critic acknowledged that Brown was "one of the outstanding poets �of the younger group"; for the "best work" Brown "dug his raw material from the great mine of Negro folk poetry," thus expressing the folk idiom with "artistry and magnified power." Kerlin (Negro Poets and Their Poems) ranked Southern Road as a first volume with Cullen's Color and Hughes' The Weary Blues. j Even from-aE au11 J •• Senegal, Africa, ~as comefp"raise -~Brown in the form of ;;;;;;a;, Senghor's assertion that Hughes and Brown are "the most Negro" of Black American poets. There is always the temptation to compare the two poets but, as Wagner suggests, Brown is the "antithesis of Langston Hughes" since Hughes is the poet of the city and Brown the bard of the soil. In his closeness to the soil and his serious studies of Black folk culture, Brown has been compared to Johnson and Zora Neale Hurston (see Jonah's Gourd Vine and Mules and Men). The folk idiom, coupled with drama and word-portraits, provides the meat of Brown's work; though it must be mentioned that he also writes in conventional English--with marked success. His poetic universe is generally drab--with occasional flashes of wry humor. His is the poetry of hard times and suffering. He expresses skepticism in face of religion and God; and ironically there is no reference to Africa as is the case (almost thematically) with most poetrtof the period. ·,r-. 4me~tC'-..J Brown seems to be saying the fight is her7' not in an Africa of mind or fact, and that the Black man is pitted against forces of nature which alternately work for and against him. Writing during thek)epression years, Brown was concerned with the deadly cholera, the boll weevil, the ravages of the flooding Missouri river, the plight of the sharecropper and tenant farmer, and white racism. It is clear that, for Brown, the hope (if it is there) for the Black man lies in his own stamina, his own historical endurance and strengths. the poet infuses h Consequently, J strength.sand defianceswith folk rhythms--especially the dramatic narrative and the contrapuntal pattern which incorporates italics 331' �for emphasis and the various sounds of men at work, play, prayer, dance or battle. "Strong Men" is perhaps the best example of Brown's style. Using a line from Sandburg-- "The strong men keep coming on"--he actually borrows exact phrasings, aphorisms, bits of parables and parts of secular and religious songs from the folk culture. The formal English narrative is set in dramatic and musical relief through the use of the technique described above. Steeped in a tradition that spans Whitman, Fenton Johnson, Masters and Eliot, Brown catalogs the numerous injustices Blacks have suffered; he interjects "The strong men keep a-comin' on" or "keep a-inchin' along" or "Walk togedder chillen." Even though Blacks were "dragged" from their native land and degraded in every possible way, they kept "Gittin' stronge~ ~e.I r •a ]. Ii t\1Wle -v>. "After winter" "Southern same message t-..1.n "Strange Legacies" , '!' ' Road" (a near-paraphrase of a work song), "Ma Rainey," and the six-part sequence "When De Saints Go Ma'ching Home." is what Brown gives his characters. to "stagger" but none to halt! What DuBois called the "dogged strength" As Margaret Walker suggests, there is room Reminiscent of "The Weary Blues," "When De Saints" depicts the "Trouble, Trouble" deep down in the "soul" of a Black singer. But that trouble, like the "weariness" of Hughes, is a collective trouble--the weight, the fatigue, the burden of the folk. We hear it everywhere in Black expression, from Bessie Smith to Marii Anderson, from Paul Laurence Dunbar to Paul Robeson, from Fenton Johnson to Harvin Gaye (Trouble Man), from the "sad" and "sorrow" songs of the slaves to the blues singers of the river towns and Depression years. After the singer in Brown's poem had played his various sad and sin songs, he alw~ys played one in which he stepped out of the role of "entertainer." would then give forth his "chant of saints." He Anticipating his arrival in heaven and others who would be there, he carefully describes what each of the entrants �will be wearing. It is a gala affair--initiation into heaven--and most of the arrivals come in the clothes they wore in life on earth. are not allowed in heaven. The sinners, of course, They include Sportin' Legs, lucky Sam, Smitty, Hambone, Hardrock Gene and others. Brown also wrote in the ballad form ("He was a Man"), conventional verse ("Effie" and "Salutamus"--a sonnet) and the blues form popularized by Hughes in The Weary Blues. His Black men are on the run (from a mob or police), in trouble with whites as a result of an arrogant act or response , getting killed, trying to figure out how to feed the household, or being assaulted by natural disasters. In a large number of these poems there is sorrow, devastation, catastrophe, violence, death, tragedy, social disruption, chaos, ruin, need, pain, skepticism and the paranoia inherent in Black life. "He was a Man" depicts how a Black man beat a white man (who drew first) to the draw but was lynched in the tradition of handling Blacks. Despite the fact that "strong men" keep coming, "Strong Men" is a poem replete with negatives. "Sister Lou" is a longing for heaven as a respite from the hardships and racial injustices suffered here on earth. "After Winter" is the portrait of a Black man "ragged" as "an old scarecrow" whose "swift thoughts" are about the food, drink and space he must obtain for his family. "Ma Raine1 " ("Mother of the Blues") is therap~tic in her words and her delivery. ~~ 1- 1~~ Fenton But she i@acJ• merchandise. Johnson's ivmonarch" who presides over sacks of The people come to Ma Rainey to "keep us strong." and feel sad when she sings. But they cry And on goes the Southern Road with the exception of the Slim Greer story-poems and the lover-man themes which nevertheless feature men who must either love quick and run o~ those reminiscing about their loves while they swing the hammer on the chain gang. predicaments. Slim Greer finds himself in various Most memorable are his visits to heaven and hell ("Slim in Hell"), �his absurd effort to pass for white though he is dark "as midnight" ( 11 Slim Greer") and his bout with the Atlanta law that requires Blacks to laugh only in a "telefoam booth" ("Slim in Atlanta"). Brown's really great achievement, however, is seen in the brilliant "Memphis Blues." Here the poet asks what difference is it to Blacks whether Memphis is destroyed by "Flood or Flame." Memphis, Babylon and Nineveh are all the same: De win' sing sperrichals Through deir dus'. Forecasts of doom can be seen in much American literature--but Black writers have 1h°TT11:Sai--u carved out a special place for thernselverThis allows them to place their racial predicament in relief against Christianity or Christianization. that this concern runs like a spine through Black poetry: Cullen, McKay, Hughes an'Jl certainly Brown~ and white. ~~ ; or 8u And here, of course, is the contradictio~ We have observed Dunbar, Fenton Johnson, God is alternately Black ,iecause the God of the 4 whites (the oppressoi;J cannot be truste~ and the Black God seems somewhat help,, less against a white power structure, of which Brown says~ J Ola Le 1f t, M • They don't com~ 9v ooe~ - But the Having published only one book which is just being reissued (1974, with~ew Introduction by Sterling Stuckey), places Brown in a rather difficult and sometimes t naccessible position. appraisals of his work . ~ But there 1 - ~been good, if few, ~ Jean Wagner takes a long look at D (Black Poets of the United States); Brown takes a short, but helpful, look at himself in Negro Poetry. So does Redding in To Make a Poet Black. Also helpful is Stephen Henderson's "A Strong Man Called Sterling Brown," Black World, XIX �' (September 1970), 5-12. Benjt'mAn Brawley (The Negro Genius) assesses Brown as poet and critic as does Blyden Jackson in Black Poetry in America. Charles Rowell, a young critic-teacher at Southern University, Baton Rouge, has prepared a yet unpublished criticism of Brown's poetry. (Barfsdale and Kinnamon). See also Black Writers of America Brown's work appears in most anthologies of Black literature and poetry. One characteristic of Black poetry of the thirties was a cry for unionization of Blacks and whites. Brown's "When De Saints Go Ma'ching Home" allows room in heaven for a handful of whites who befriended Blacks. According to the Marxist/ Communist-influenced thinking of the times, downtrodden peoples--of whatever color--were in the same boat. . ~ Their struggles were.._ the same. One finds this feeling in Frank Marshall Davis' tt "Snapshots of the Cotton South" which pain~a rather pathetic and depressing picture of voteless Blacks who "lack the guts" and 11 po 111 whites who "have not the bra;i.ns" to fight the rich plantation owners and the police. The poems also reek with irony and satire--a Davis trademark. Even "':'\ though racial "intermingling" is "unthinkable," syphiJlis is passed from the u.,.. "shiftless son" of a plantation owner (a lynch-mob leader) to a washerwoman who gives it to the chief of police who gi ves it to a young mulatto cook who gave~it to the mayor of "Mobtown" who gaves it to his wife. Currently living in Hawaii where he is a salesman, Davis was born in Arkansas City, Kansas, attended local public schools and studied journalism at Kansas State College where he was the first recipient of the Sigma Delta Chi Perpetual Scholarship. He later left school for Chicago to do newspaper work. In 1931 Davis went to Atlanta to help establish the Atlanta Daily World. Re- turning to Chicago, he worked with the Associated Negro Press until the late 1940s when he moved to Hawaii. In 1937 he received a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship �to write poetry. -He has published four volumes of poetry: Black Man's Verse (1935), I Am the American Negro (1937), Through Sepia Eyes (1938), and 47th Street (1948). Davis established himself early as a socially-minded poet who combined his journalistic training with an innovative free-verse form to create interesting lyrics. (Gwendolyn Brooks later developed a form known as verse-journalism.) Stephen Henderson (Understanding the New Black Poetry) notes the similarities between Davis'.poetry and that currently being written by Chicago-area poets. The influence of Masters and Sandburg can be seen in much of Davis'# work; but his poetry is highly flavored with Black themes and (sometimes) idioms. Hughes he is the poet of the city. Like But he renders believable pictures of Black "society" and the hard times of southern living. In "Snapshots" he warns whites that. death~e boll weevil do.-.'not n i b b l e ~ 'nigger cotton." Ironically placing the "Democracy" of death and natural disasters alongside a hollow American "Democracy," Davis is able to turn the poem into a piercing sword of social criticism. Ironies also spine poems like "Robert Whitmore," "Arthur Ridgewood, M.D.," and "Giles Johnson, Ph.D."--bourgeois Blacks destroyed by status-climbing. ·whitmore, having reached the peak of social and business success, dies when he is mistaken for a waiter. Dr. Ridgewood, forced to choose between the life of a poet and a doctor, dies from a nerve disruption caused by worry over rejection slips and money problems. do labor; he dies of starvation. Dr. Johnson will not teach and cannot The great tragedy, in this stream of poetic ~ ideas,~the story of the poet• "Roosevelt Smith." Smith could be Davis himself or possibly Countee Cullen or Melvin Tolson--or any number of Black poets who wrote as they were dir~cted only to end up having "contributed" nothing to "his nation's literature." Smith's first book is attacked by white critics for imitating Sandburg, Masters and Lindsay. His second book, written after he had done first-hand �study in the South, is criticized by Blacks for being too sordid. Critics dis- missed his third book, an experimental effort, as not being consistent with the depth and breadth of the philosophical material treated by Stein and Eliot. A Black man has no business imitating the "classic" works of Keats, Browning and Shakespeare, they said of his fourth book. background. He ought to use his rich African Of his fifth book, critics were suspicious: since it contained no traces of anything done previously by a white poet, then it must be "just a new kind of prose." The poet then became a mail carrier where he had time to read in the papers that Black Wt'iters had contributed so "little" to American literature. Davis also wrote free-verse utilizing themes of love, night, and the stark life of Blacks in Southside Chicago. sculpted . Brown. His poems about love are quiet and well- They are placed in the category of "mystic e~capist" by tkL 3I g In his first volume, Davis strikes vivid picture~.:.,e );i; i L9'1t in pieces like "Chicago's Congo," "Jazz Band," "Mojo Mike's Beer Garden," "Cabaret," ' "Lynched," and "Georgia's Atlanta." In "Jazz Band" he anticipates the work of literally dozens of poets of the sixties (Neal, Crouch, Cortez, Lee, Baraka, Harper, the Last Poets, Carolyn Rodgers). And certainly one recalls Hughes' • "Jazzonia" and "Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret" when one hears a line like Play that thing you jazz mad fools! and the steady hammerfng of Plink plank plunk a plunk. Everybody and every place has th~ blues since Blacks brought the sound to town: Chopin, Wagner, London, Moscow, Paris, Hongkong, Cairo, Dios, Jehovah, Gott, �Allah, Buddh~so on. Everyone can partake of the happy-sad sound being Puke Fl liagcotr would 1 tor cal J birnseJ f av "ecurnsaj ral played by the "black boy . " Apd Davis seews to hr '9,it " 1. aadczstcsd thl!! ■ 2r?2pt close study of his work has yet to be done. for his work: rre] 1 . Unfortunately, a But Davis had many things in mind one poem is designed to be read aloud by eight voices. There is a brief, but good, assessment of him in Wagner's book; Sterling Brown sets forth poiqt\lll.... f.:,_ I crisp and ~ / \ friticism. Benj ~m~n Brawley discusses Davis's poetry (Negro Genius); but he appears all too infrequently in anthologies. For a current look at Davis see Dudley Randall's interview with him in IUad ~ ' XXIV (January 1974)} 31-1./f, Robert Hayden has one of the longest poetry writing (and publishing) records of any living American poet. His poems have appeared in numerous anthologies, newspapers, periodicals, books and pamphlets since 1940. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Hayden attended local schools and Wayne State University, and in 1936 "graduated to the Federal Writers ' ProjecS:' heading research into local Afro-American history and folklore. He resumed his training in 1938 when he enrolled at the University of Michigan, where he received a teaching assistantship, and did advanced work in play production, creative writing and English. taught English at Michigan for two years. poetry in 1938 and 1942 and during this Hayden received an M.A. and t!Jo..r--neNI 2h the Hopwood award for He -+ ui time • had an opportunity to study with W.H. Auden, whose poetry his own sometimes reflects. In 1940 his first book of t.,.J poetry, Heart-Shape in the Dust, was published. t\)fe joined the faculty of Fisk University in 1946 , al!B 1 E2 Ci &LIS ;~ring the sixties he became involved in a series .,o . f "meaningful encounters with proponents of a black literary ~ sthetic" (Barksdale and Kinnamon) which resulted in his leaving Fisk and joining the faculty of the University of Michigan (1969). Hayden has received Rosenwald �and Ford grants and in 1966 his Bal,lad 9f Remepibra~<;.~ (1962,\ Paul Bremen;} was awarded the Grand Prize in the English poetry category at the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal. In presenting Hayden with the award, the festival committee cited him as a remarkable craftsman, an outstanding singer of words, I a striking thinker, a poete pur sang. He gives glory and dig- nity to America through deep attachment to the past, present and future of his race. Africa is in his soul, the world at large in his mind and heart. In 1948 Hayden collaborated with Myron O'Higgins in publication of The Lion and the Archer. His Figure of Time: Poems appeared in 1955 and Selected Poems was published in 1966. Words in the Mourning Time, with its portraits of violence ,T and destruction, came out in 1970\ .-.~was nominated for a National Book Award (1972). ' - The Night-Blooming Cereus, showing Hayden as a reflective lover of nature and a de eply religious poet, was published in 1972 by Bremen. He has also written and produced plays (Go Down Moses) and during the forties he was drama and music critic for the Michigan Chronicle. Hayden's work appears in practically every anthology of Afro-American literature or poetry published since The Negro Caravan. His editorship of anthologies includes Kaleidoscope: Poems by American Negro Poets (1967), Afro-American Literature: An Introduction (1971, with Burroughs and Lapides), and The United States in Literature (1973, with Hiller and O'Neal). The latter work contains many of Hayden's seminal ideas as well as brilliant crystalizations of Black and general poetry movements in the United States. His individual poems have appeared in Opportunity, Poetry and ~tlantic Monthly. Order. Curr~ntly, he is poetry editor of the Baha'i magazine, World �Although, as a poet, Hayden has maintained a steady balance between racial concerns and the modern poetic tradition, he is what Sterling Brown would call a library poet. Classical allusions, obscurantism, surrealism, and complicated syntax go hand in hand with experimental blues poetry and muted anger. ~ Bontemps said that the term "Negro poet" was particularly "displeasing" to Countee Cullen; and Hayden (a Cullen admirer), in Kaleidoscope, rejected being judged "by standards different from those applied to the work of other poets." The Black poet should not be limited to a racial utterance, Hayden believes. ( Ironically, a poll of Black poets today might easily show that a great many of I/. ,, them feel the same way--even though such is not suggested by the popular image of the contemporary Black poet :'\ , ;/ \ t> , s. , .. o 1->rue.n Speaking of his"influences in Interviews with Black Writers, When I was in college I loved Countee Cullen, Jean Too~er, Elinor Wylie, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sara Teasdale, Langston Hughes, Carl Sandburg, Hart Crane. I read all the poetry I could get a hold of, and I read without discrimination. became a favorite. his style. Cullen I felt an affinity and wanted to write in I remember that I wrote a longish poem about Africa, imitating his "Heritage." was pretty imitative. All through my undergraduate years I As I discovered poets new to me, I studied their work and tried to write as they did. young poets do this. I suppose all It's certainly one method of learning something about poetry. I reached the point, inevitably, where I didn't want to be influenced by anyone else. my own voice, my own way of seeing. J Hayden notec, i I tried to find I studied with W.R. Auden �in graduate school, a strategic experience in my life. I think he showed me my strengths and weaknesses as a poet in ways no one else before had done. Hayden thus establishes himself as a poet of the book as opposed to the raw experience--vis a vis a a Hughes , TI Brown, k g I f l JJ Davis, is.aa?~~ soLute. o..rid Margaret Walker, and numerous others, although such a division-~t many variables. .....~cording to = H- Davis, in From the Dark Tower, S6maf P. ,i' · if s I\.• blatant protest and 1n ~lven~ Hayden has repudiated his early poetry-- •• btf •f lt\<L foll IC liJ..1- 71. consider e:tfh,'_$ ■1i9 31 I ~ poetry shows Hayden asAtmitator of the older Harlem Renaissance poets and under the influence of the CommunistSocialist thought of the 1930s and 1940s. In "Prophecy" he depicts destruction and tbe people returning to the "ruined city" to rebuild a new society. .-..e• •L+-L~':i;: •rec:o.U.s: "Gabriel" i"~••••r. 1, a..J/.colloquialisms (like cL~th drama of Gabriel's k••' · Sterling ~the f:Ln~l moments in :the ;"Ue o· Qabt'1:"el,t "Black Gabriel" .._~hanged for leading slaves From forgotten graves, •••• italicS Brown), Hayden recreates the terror and s_ Black and golden in the air, Gabriel dangles from a noose above Black men who Never, never rest "Speech" is just that--an harangue calling Black and white "brothers" to fight the common oppressor, presumably totalitarianism, fascism and greedy over-seers. "Obituary" is a sensitive and pained reflection of a "father" who lived Prepared for wings. Among these early pieces (found in Caravan and Hayden's first volumes), "Bacchanal" is especially interesting--for it collects the new dialect into the kind of social statement S:torlh@ Brown~erfected. There is irony in using "bacchanal" to ea �describe a Black factory worker getting High's a Georgia pine to forget that the factory closed "this mawnin." can never rest, is seeking real "joy" on earth. The Black man who, in "Gabriel" But, minus money and woman, his ,"bacchanal" becomes a weighty blues statement--not the revelry of ancient Greek or Roman party life. One finds none of these tJff'~in S~lected f.'2.em~- Instead there is the polished Hayden of "The Diver," "A Ballad of Remembrance," "Sub Specie Aeternitatis," In the Mourning Time. Hayden has obviously elevated his protest themes . To be sure, ~ JIIJ&-!\does make_ his social comment, as does Cullen. t.o..r..,,e5 none o ~ the Vt"geney o P (Mourning) t{_ C But his "Zeus Over Re~yen f D" Hughes ' "Dream Deferred" or "Ask Your Momma." ~ "Runagate" and "Middle Passage" address with subtlty and allusion the concerns of -.e. Dodson ("Lament"), Margaret Walker ("Since 1619") and Frank Marshall Davis ("Snapshots of the Cotton South") .\ fr'!den brings a fine and intense intellect to his poetry--regardless of subject matter. His output has been relatively small, considering his long career, but Words in the Mourning Time proves that his intensity has not lessened. And he must be admired for sticking to his W id, lu.v aesthetic convictions and his unswerving devotion to poetic craftsmanshipl\ yand in hand with and general . •••••••••••1!1111• his enduring interest in history, racial His manuscript of poems dealing with slavery and the Civil War, The Black Spear , won him the second Hopwood award. The idea for a book-length series of narrative poems on Black history--"from the black man ' s point of view"-- ' came to Hayden after he read Stephen Vincent Benet's long narrative poem, John Brown's Body (1927). The Black Spear never emerged as a book, but remnants of �it can be found in section five of Selected Poems. list ;,_q I Il 11 • 8 ruiH'~lack history, Hayden champions such persons as Nat Turner, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Cinquez, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. shared the burden of the Black struggle: He also includes whites who William Lloyd Garrison, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, John Brown, John and Robert Kennedy, and others. Hayden's history poems, however, reflect the complexity and disturbances inherent in man's continuing struggle. In a non-racial poem like "The Diver" there can be floating, plunging, piercing, blurring, disillusionment, wreckage, drunken tilting, "numbing/kisses," and other suggestions of dramatic tension between the real and assumed, between the shadow and the substance. same "feeling" . come$through in poems of racial flavor. But the "Middle Passage" certainly bears this out, as Blyden Jackson notes in "From One 'New Negro' to Another" (Black Poetry in America,, Jackson and Rubin, 1974). Situated, as it were, "in the rocking loom of history," "Middle Passage" is at once Hayden's and Black America '.r achievement. &Mil i r , Tj i\19 ipening with the names of slave ships-- Jesus, Estrella, Esperanza, Mercy--the poem criss-crosses the vast geographical, chronological and spiritual web of racial horror since slavery. o.n,..s,ir,vtl&n_eAN~tJ the ships ejg · . ~ --=l!~i!ffllneM&t!e- c!ontradic ~ ht£ l.!t!!&iM)pj reminiscent of the expletive "Jesus, have mercy•' 4nd daily in Black communities. 1721 and The names of"'- C • 33 ~e.t"Ve.$' I~ I 31 and....., ~£~) But this Jesus will have no Mercy-- · Ima nf Cl ; as the albatross around the neck of Christian slavers. Any middle passage is exciting as well a~ dangerous--since it represents -U4Jdl(tS the peak and the unfinished quest. Henc~~~~middlJ'passage suggests both the horrible and brutalizing experience of slaves aboard ships crossing the Atlantic and the incompleted "adventure" of Blacks in America. The poem also �satisfies much.of the demands of modernist l poetry, "Middle t's ~LA'1id ~ " in fact i JilP ( s 1t5tylistically ~ ~~uch poems as Eliot's The Wasteland, Pound's Cantos, Crane's The Bridge and YUi I J II 3 4 Williams' Patterson. Especially is it akin to The Wasteland in its use of allusion, fragments of obscure information (old documents, letters, conversation, etc.), typographical vari~\SfnetLwt11 atio~ and th~ (lHoC. I Cf~ nS., H.1..viilt BEens foeMJ atr~fter its 'tll 111 sharp and arresting opening, weaves together objective narration, notes from a slave ship's log, sections from a ship officer's diary, testimony at a court of inquiry (into a ji:"1839), the tale of an old sailor melted from the &own/'- ~ paraphrasings Q? • i!ie. /ible J illlk revolt aboard the Cuban slaver Amis tad/ ~ose bo.,es•&a.•iia&B ,1.ae &&PIH)& of a Shakesperean text and familiar expressions and live religious services. imaginable disaster and conflict: a. u7 oHcaoaa,lit 1uao .. ■ a "fever The poem depicts every storms, re·b ellions, suicides, a plague that causes blindness ("opthalmalia"), the lusty crew members sexual exploitation of female slaves, the "nigger kings" who sold the Africans into slavery, descriptions of the smel:band sounds of dying, and the hatred/respect the slave shiW surviving spokesman has for rebellion-leader Cinque/. Gimost 100 years before "Middle Passage," James M. Whitfie'id had honored this same revolutionary in "To Cinque.J The idea of . the r1_1ade man, a "voyage" which takes one "through death" into "life," recurs in Hayden's poem: here, again, the sense of one meandering through a "wasteland" in search of the right society, the sane environment. Indeed in much Black American writing, mirroring sometimes the literature of larger America, there is the assertion that the new man arrives only after paying the dues of being brutalized and oppressed. Even in everyday life, Blacks are often intolerant of others who have not "gone ·through" the fire and brimstone of depravity and �alienation. Thus, for Hayden, the "middle passage" is both spiritually and physically a "voyage" through death in order to achieve life. In the middle passage the slaves are half way between their African homeland and America. They will not be returning to Africa and yet they know nothing of the life "upon these shores." Too, the middle passage symbolizes the initiation of everyman into the awesome awareness and responsibility of adulthood--and his own mortality. The middle passage is where we all triumph or perish, just as in the wasteland one must create a new world or drift with the debris. However, the caretakers of slaveships crossing the middle passage are as acutely aware of their mission as are the reflective slaves (and poets). death. They are also bringing life through They bear black gold, black ivory, black seed. ' and Mercy All this occurs against the pervasive irony of the ship names Jesus and the double . irony of slaver's spokesman who renounces Cinquez for rebelling against the crew: ... true Christians all, ..•. While the "Middle Passage" places Blacks somewhere in the middle of things, "Runagate Runagate" continues the irony of moving through death to life. There is little to be envied in the "life" of the runaway slave depicted in this poem. The hound dogs, the slave-trackers, the auction blocks, the "wanted" signs, the I brandings on the cheeks, the driver's lash--all re-live the terror, the nightmarish nature of Black "life" after the middle passage. _ For Blacks, then, the initiation continues beyond the first death (the enslavement). The anxiety and "never, never rest" life of the slave is dramatically captured by Hayden who employj ~-:ich 1)-:t..D.i.D~..e tapestry of language, syntax, color, imagery, narration, anJf'7v;jGz., alongside the symbolism and "sweep" akin to modern poetry; added to this is the dramatic �use of italics. The poem celebrates the courage and endurance of escaping slaves and honors Black and white abolitionist leaders. Hayden allows the reader to re-live the experience of the runaway slave and the accompanying tension-filled hide-and-seek drama. We hear and see the runaway in the opening line. By a~ing the use of punctuational breaks, Hayden achieves a "rush'·' of language very similar to the relentless "drive" of Black oral expression and to the "never, never rest" feeling he established in "Gabriel." The runaway Runs falls rises stumbles on from darkness into darkness and the hunt is on, as the escapee reflects on the "many thousands" already channeled through the Underground ltilroad. We see and hear the mixed jubilance and fear of the slave who vows that he will never return to the auction block and the driver's lash: And before I'll be a slave I'll be buried in my grave Keeping with the trend of modern poetry, Hayden introduces incidental notices and data: an announcement describing runaways (including age, dress, brandings, and a suspicion that they can turn themselves into quicksand, whirlpools or scorpions), wanted posters, and names of prominent abolitionists of the day. Typographically and syntactically, the poem is designed to be read without significant pauses) so that the non-stop hurtle of the slave toward freedom actually occurs in the text; it is, Blyden Jackson suggests (thoughf of "Middle Passage") "as if it repeats history." Especially notable is Hayden's treatment of Harriet Tubman, the greatest of \l:iderground Railroad leaders, who was wanted "Dead or Alive" and who was known to level a pistol at a doubting runaway: �Dead folks can't jaybird-talk, she says; You keep on going now or die, she says •.•. "Middle Passage" and "Runagate Runagate" are only two of Hayden's magnificent poems. Other poems in the historical vein are "Frederick Douglass" (an ex- perimenta l sonnet without rhyme), "The Ballad of Nat Turner" ("The fearful splendor of that warring."), "O Daedalus, Fly Away Home" ("Night is juba, night is conjo."), and "A Ballad of Remembrance" (a surrealistic, complex and erudite poem). Hayden poems (prior to Words) capture supernaturalism ("Witch Doctor"), folk life ("Homage to the Empress of the Blues," "The Burly Fading One," "Incense of the Lucky Virgin, 11 and "Mourning Poem for the Queen of Sunday• ? and folk reminiscences ("Summertime and the Living .•. ," "The Whipping," "Those Winter Days"). Words in the Mourning Time, which we will return to briefly in Chapter VI, reflects Hayden's general and specific concerns as a poet. Again, he judiciously handles the spectrum of themes, subjects and styles that assures him a place in the world of western as well as Afro-American poetry. Poems like '·' 'Mystery Boy' Looks for Kin in Nashville," "Soledad," "Aunt Jemima of the Ocean Waves," (,Ji.w 1'1 and "El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz," ....... Hayden . in touch with the times and willing to share his poetic vision with revolutionaries, pacifists, cultural nationalists and Black pride advocates. On the other hand he is at home with poems such as "Locus," "Zeus Over Redeye, 11 and "Lear is Gay"--which mirror his reading, travels, broad concerns and personal friendships. Qf tOPiGS is also s]earlu tb@FC • in the 196Os jolted him. Hayden admits that the battle over aesthetics And while it is clear that the fight took place more �outside of poetry than in (see Chapter VI), Hayden has not recanted in his position that the Black poet not be limited to racial utterance. course, has his right to his own opinion. Hayden, of But, like John Ciardi, Richard Wilbur, and Robert Lowell, and other poets of the academy, his trek has not been easy or devoid of controversy. And despite statements Hayden makes out- side of his poetry, poems like "Middle Passage" and "Runagate Runagate" stamp $i t he. , s. .,.. AP-t'o-itw1e"'rCA~ pos) him as a gifted handler of Black themes and materials. that he will be known• J n, 1 '/\ -u- fs not likely for work that lies drastically outside the passage, pace or plight of Black Americans. - Much needed critical attention is just beginning to come to Hayden. is treated in Davis',f From the Dark Tower, He Gibson's Modern Black Poets ("Robert Hayden's Use of History," Charles T. Davis), Jackson and Rubin's I. Black Poetry in America, O'Brien's Interview with Black Writers, Barksdale!and Kinnamon's Black Writers of America, and How I Write/I JI Phillips/s:llli Lawson Carter ~ 1972). 1 g 6!,_ayden, Judson See also Rasey Pool's "Robert Hayden, Poet Laureate," Negro Digest (Black World), XV (June, 1966), 39-43; D. Caller's "Three Recent Volumes," Poetry, CX (1967), 268, and Julius Lester's review of Words in the Mourning Time in The New York Times Book Review, January 24, 1971, p.4. Dudley Randall displays good insights into Hayden in "The Black Aesthetic in the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties" (Modern Black Poets). And there is a sensitive treatment of the poet in James O. Young's Black Writers of the Thirties. Having helped make the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes continued his vast and imaginative poetic output into the thirties, forties, fifties and si(ties. He published four books of poetry in the 1930s, three in the 1940s, _ . two in the 1950s, and two i$6os, in addition to dozens of short stories, �essays, novels, plays and autobiographical writings. These things he accomplished along with his travels and his dedicated work on behalf of Blacks. But it would be "much too casual," notes Hughes' • friend~ Bontemps, simply to dismiss him as "prolific." For Hughes was a "minstrel and a troubador in the classic sense." (Langston Hughes, Donald C. Dickinson, 1972) Hughes worked rapidly, turning out prodigious amounts of writing, a fact, Blyden Jackson reminds u5;which caused some to deny him a place alongside "serious" Black writers like Ellison, Wright and Baldwin. Hughes always involved himself in "contemporary affairs"--even during the Renaissance when Cullen, McKay and other~ roamed the Elysian fields of Africa '1'Jl1~ /el'1dencf WQS 'PA.1'>7 of-the f"ed~Oh W"Y. or pined away in the "dark" tower. il\aj, --••••--~Redding (To Make A Poet Black) .-111111:• poetry but little invrtiPov,mLy qoo"; w;t itqpened 1mpc,;,lantnew ~oo.ds. complained that Hughes employed rhythms in his "tr,ueJ ht'i ea.1-1 Ly woi,.t_ ,.,, e-,_pe.y,imenT<.tL tellect. A, C>-.V\~fldt Ar1 d ,,.....,the thirties and forties--with their step up in leftist everi and radical activities--placed Hughes in the position of having to forge{\newe~ protest weapons from his "weary blues." noted: illses.l\!lsdJ:wghasd.• • + •no James 0. Young "His poetry was popular because it could be read easily by people of all ages and backgrounds." new Black poets: In the sixties, similar comments would be made of the Haki R. Madhubuti (Don L. Lee), Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, David Nelson, Arthur Pfister, &i I I w?,TQv-.s Clnd. Othe.tiJJ 7verri'o>'U O ~ Cl.e~iheT,c.! o...side C.oN~(bvTe.J im menset.y, LH::e t\ u9tie.s d~ ~ A>reTuem 1~--Hi Q popv(a.J"131/\.9 of ,sua.d: poe:Tiiy • ,thete... )In J\IS early ye.a.'r'-Sj 1/J however, Hughes 'f poetry was considered "decadent" s(,'Pf and "unacceptable" to Communist critics who. ·wanted him to MMlef\from strict . o.nd racial themes • l fhampion the fights of proletarians everywhere . Hughes made wo fiK.!. /.Jk.,e ,./Jt~1 the switch-over andAScottsboro Limited (1932) show. the impact Communist 'I thought on him . The pamphlet was dedicated to Black youths on trial for allegedly raping two white prostitutes in Scottsboro, Alabama . Hughes places the boys alongside such revolutionary saints as John Brown, Lenin and Nat Turner. The �effect--resembling aborted efforts of some martyr-making poets of the 1960s-was to make the boys, "ignorant pawns" though they were, "militant proletarian heroes . " The poem-play "Scottsboro Limited" shows "Red Voices" convincing Black youths that the Communists are on the side of Not just black--but black and white . 1uughes published widely during the thirties in Party presses. In Good Morning Revolution (1973, forward by Saunders Redding), Faith Berry has compiled his "uncollected writings of social protest." They give many clues to Hughes ' social concerns during the three decades following the Harlem Renaissance. He callA6 for a union of "workers" in Germany, China, Africa, Poland, Italy, and America-through the pages of New Masses, The Negro Worker, The Crisis, Opportunity, International Literature, Contempo, _A_f_r_i_c_a_S_o_u_t_l_1, The Workers Monthly, New Theatre-., and American S,.pectator. he In "Good Morning, Revolution," Tl Qf tells personified revolution that We gonna pal around together from now on. Section titles of Good Morning Revolution show Hughes .to be acutely attuned to the problems and needs of oppressed peoples--long before Franz Fanon, Stokely Carmichael and Eldridge Cleaver--and in sympathy with Third World struggle: Section I, Revolution; Section 2, Memo to Non-White Peoples; Section 3, The Rich and The Poor; Section 4, War and Peace: Section 5, Goodbye Christ; Section 6, The Sa i l or and The Steward; Section 7, The Meaning of Scottsboro; Section 8, Cowards from the Colleagues; Section 9, Portrait Against Background; Section 10, Darkness in Spain; Section 11, China; Section 12, The American Writers Congress, and Section 13, Retrospective (including "My Adventures as a Social Poet 11 ) . Iconoclastic and sacrilf gous, Hughes incurred the wrath of many Black leaders �with his poem "Goodfbye Christ" published in the Baltimore Afro-American in v 1932. Addressing Christ, Hughes noted that You did alright in your day, I reckon-But that day's gone now. And "Christ Jesus Lord God Jehovah" is told to "make way" for a new deity, who has no religion, and whose name is Marx Communist Lenin Peasant Stalin, Worker, ME-Religious leaders especially condemned Hughes's "blatant atheism." But Melvin Tolson, coming to Hughes' 4 aid, said that the young poet was simply showing that the Christian offering of a better world after death had little meaning for the world's suffering millions. Hughes was never a member of the, Communist Party, but oF lt,ic.,,.,_ many other Black writen~: his wot-It~ S4t111e,l l,,f.OV'/ pa-ol.eT• Tolson, Wright, Hayden, Frank Marshall Davis, Margaret Walker, Ellison . While his poetry and other writings of communist-oriented social protest were appearing in radical publit,,1 j(e cations, Hughes continued/~ Sterling Bro~developing and experimenting with Black folk materials. He painstakingly pointed up the contradictions in the promises and realities of American Democracy, assailed social inequality, lamented Black and white poverty, ~ailed against double standards, attacked racial segregation, satirized the Black bourgeosie, and immortalized the beauty of everyday Blacks. So much of Hughes' f fight is caught up in "Let America Be America Again," first published in 1936 in Esquire, and included in A New Song (1938). It is immediately reminiscent of Walt Whitman--in its sweep--and recites, in the manner of Hayden's "Speech" and Tolson's "Rendezvous with America," the multiple ills and ingredients of America. Throughout the poem, as he catalogs the various ethnic stocks and *j\Qfvolt'\ contributions, he interpolates the haunw t'America never was America to me. "J... �1/,B:-~~14'::f;-e;,s interest in Black music and folk materials was being worked more artfully into his work. He carried his interest in Blues to his work in jazz taiTe ► l(ecording his poetry with Charlie Mingus and others) and the B{3iop era is strongly reflected in his poetry and his writings (see the Simple stories). Especially is music evident in Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951) where, according to . . . . Wagner, "jazz has strongly influenced the tone and structure of these poems." It was from this volume, too, that Lorraine Hansberry would get the title for her prize-winning play: Raisin in the Sun. The most famous poem in the volume is "Harlem," in which the Black American is likened to a "dream deferred." Five precise similes help Hughes draw explicit comparisons between e ",e_r, raisins, sores, rotten meat, syrupy sweets, heavy loads, and the ,a.-present "dream." Perhaps, Hughes notes at the end, the dream will "explode." Hughes was not "perfect," II but he remained an experiment,r throughout his writing career. Ask Your Mama--Twelve Moods for Jazz (1961) was published after 40 years of experimentation in verse forms. synthesis we referred to earlier: and themes. It is indeed the attempt at the that of jazz, blues and related folk idioms Contemporary white poets, E.E. Cummings and Kenneth Rexroth, had chosen to place all letters in lower case and Hughes did just the opposite, capitalizing everything. Dedicated to Louis Armstrong--"the greatest hortn blower of them all"--the volume is an extension of ideas attempted in The Weary Blues, Shakespeare in Harlem, and Montage of a Dream Deferred. The driving social protest is there, but the indignation is muted as in his earlier work. A recession in larger America If IS COLORED FOLKS' DEPRESSION. The work is punctuated by the line~IN THE QUARTER OF THE NEGROES"and Hughes continues �the Black poet's concern with history: honoring Black heroes and race leaders, displaying the beauty of Blackness and recalling the rights of passage. ~~ M oJ.so \l'\C:.lvcie~ e-,.Ttk\n've ~ oTes on s~11~ dnd Mllsc'ccil.. «.uompa.nlwieJftpor t"h-e l)oernl. Politician, organizer of sharecroppers, poet, dramatist, teacher and raconteur, Melvin Beaunorus Tolson was born in Moberly, Missouri, to the Reverend Mr. and Hrs. Alonzo Tolson. Tolson lived his young life in various Missouri towns, publishing his first poem at the age of 12 in the "Poet's Corner" of the Oskaloosa newspaper. He graduated from Kansas City's Lincoln High School (1918) where he had been class poet, director and actor in Greek Club's Little Theater and captain of the football team. Throughout his adult life, Tolson maintained an active interest in sports, dramatics and debate clubs. He attended Fisk and Lincoln Universities--graduating from Lincoln with honors and winning awards in speech, debate, dramatics and Classical literatures. also captained the football team o.:fJinc..olh He • In 1924 Tolson, continuing a rich and varied career, began teaching English and speech at Wiley College, in Marshall, Texas. There he wrote prose and poetry, and directed drama and debate groups which established a 10-year winning streak. Tolson interrupted his work at Wiley to pursue 1FJ•l Ill. al'\ . in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia Universit~where he -- ,, • , '.' 'h•• •" -- 'TA e met V.F. Calverton, editor ofAModern Quarterly. Later, in 1935 at Wiley, Tolson ' s ~<l, career as a debate coach peaked when his team defeatedAnational champions, University of Southern California, before 1100 people. And in 1947, the same year Tolson was appointed poet laureate of Liberia by President V.S. Tubman, he became English and drama professor at Langston University, Langston, Oklahoma where he also served as mayor for four terms. At Langston he directed the Dust Bowl Players and dramatized novels by Walter White and George Schuyler . A revered and feared teacher and organizer, Tolson became a legend in his own time . Hardly �MY a student at ~ deep-south Black college had not heard of Tolson's work as poet, dramatist, debate coach and educator. His column, "cob~<t, u and Caviar," was a regular in the Washington Tribune during the thirties. Tolson published three volumes of poetry: Rendezvous with America (1944), Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (1953), 111111 Harlem Gallery, Book I: The wi--oTe A-n'1rnber oPUl'\PUbL\sheJ 'MveLs~~ PLA.yJ. Curator (1965) /\ His work . . . appeared in The Modern Quarterly, Atlantic Monthly, Glho Comma~ Groun9, ~oetry ~ and other periodicals. He won numerous awards and citations, among them first place (1939) in~:ational Poetry Contest sponsored by the American Negro Exposition in Chicago (for "Dark Symphony"); the Omega Psi Phi Award for Creative Literature (1945); Poetry magazine's Bess Hokim Award for long psychological poem, "E. & o,.r~ O.E." (1947); honorary Doctor of Letters, Lincoln Universit~ wa l-.a&e permanent Bread Loaf Fellow in poetry and drama (1954); District of <L"f ,,,, Columbia Citation and Award for Cultural Achievement in Fine ArtA . . . first appointee to the Avalon Chair in Humanities at Tuskegee Institute (1965); and-tht.. annual poetry award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters including a grant of $2,500 (1966), the same year he died following three operations for abdominal cancer. ~otl-i As a Black poet and intellectual in the mid • s t · • the many-pronged mant@ of his .I and "q1 century, Tolson wore century predecessors (Prince Hall, Benjamin Banneker, James Whitfield, Alexander Crummell, Frances w~ E. ~ Harper and others) who served as teachers, abolitionists, revolutionists, defenders of what they believed to be decent in the promise of America, and character models for Black communities. Tolson's predecessors fought for the right to be called humans; he fought the battle of integration. As Tolson lay dying, other, younger poets were fighting the battle of self-determination-albeit using the same tools employed by poets and intellectuals of the past two centuries. So, it is indeed ironic (and sad!) when a young writer like Haki R. �Madhubuti (Don L. Lee) complains that Tolson is not accessible to the everyday reader--see review of Kaleidoscope: ~ 9f , Jfl 94. Negro Digest JSifJ J (January, 1968) , But Joy Flasch points out -(Melvin B. Tolson) 1972) that Tolson was aware that he was not writing for the "average" reader but for the "vertical" audience. tl~Tt·st In "Omega" of Harlem Gallery, Tolson asks if a serious~ ·•P should "skim the milk of culture" and give those demanding immediacy and relevancy a popular latex brand? Tolson did not live, as did Hayden, f L !1 g Brown, ii aaniu1, Redding, and others, to make Dodge City contact with proponents of the "Black Aesthetic" of the 1960s. But some opponents have continued to rake him over the coals of responsibility. 1966 Black poet Sarah Webster Fabio (Negro Digest, December I ; 1i '.; H), challenged Karl Shapiro's statement (Introduction ~ Harlem Gallery) that Tolson "writes in Negro." His poetic language is "most certainly not 'Negro,'" " she averd, noting that it is "a bizarre, pseudo-literary diction" taken from stilted "American mainstream" poetry "where it rightfully and wrongmindedly belonged." White critics and writers joining in the assault on Tolson included Laurence Lieberman and Englishman Paul Bremen (of the Heritage Seriei. Lieberman takes exception to Shapiro's statement, saying that he teaches Black students from all over the world, who are steeped in Black language, but who do not understand Tolson (review of Harlem Gallery ) · Au:umn, 1965) The Hudson Review, Yet Tolson's publishers had high hopes that he might get Wt~ the Pulitzer Prize for Libretto ian wet\dol~n 8Nok.s.,who ~ileA 1n1'\,i~ (t.Tt lqC,Os f~p o.-ren.T~ oF~• IL.Ad~. aefttie1il, 1h~1'hotJqht JLarlw ,a,ll.f.rY sl\o"U h,11e t'«.elved-ih-e o..~o.N:l, Re-writing and re-thinking his poetry over a period of decades, Tolson 1o.\'• became more difficult as he made adjustments to fit modernist trends in poetry. The starSof English poetry were Eliot, Pound, Yeats, Crane, and Stevens, and Tolson admired and patterned his work after them. Yet throughout his poetic life, �he maintained an "enormous love for people'.' which was reflected in his everyday 1",e. work as well as in his poetry. Rendezvous with America as Tolson's commitment to love and do battle with America. f\ title indicates America has cancer and promise and Tolson performed operations while he feasted on his nation's delights. His title poem, "Rendezvous with America," reflects the Whitman influence and Tolson's awesome word skills, technical virtuosity and musical ear. He enumerates the races and types of people who also must rendezvous with America. He sees how Time unhinged the gates to allow the beginning of America, noting such landmarks as Plymouth Rock, Jamestown, and Ellis Island, which he juxtaposes with ancient sites like Sodom, Gomorrah, Cathay, Cipango and El Dorado. The "searchers" came to America which is the Black Man's country, The Red Man's, the Yellow Man's, . The Brown Man's, the White Man's. America flows, Tolson believes/ is An international river with a legion of tributaries! t') A magnificent cosmorama with myriad patte1is of colors! A giant forest with loin-roots in a hundred lands! A cosmopolitan orchestra with a thousand instruments playing America! His manipulation of traditional form, coupled with what he called the three S's-"biology, psychology .•• sociology," or the synchronizing of sight and sound and ~ in a poem--yielded much poetic fruit in his long years of writing and re-writing his poetry. Rendezvous with America is not a great first book but it marked him as an able handler of unique verse forms. His major themes (history, �Black presence in the world , religion, hatred for class structures, and the plight of the underdog) areJIL jJ:"a'~n a variety of forms: sonnets, rhymed quatrains, ballads, free verse forms, and special two-syllable lines . Known as the iconocalst, Tolson used his poetry to di -stool pomposity and those who manipulated everyman's sufferings from behind a cloak of high office . Music and art inform much of his poetry--another reason why his allusory writing has been criticized--as in "Rendezvous" and "Dark Symphony," the most popular poem in his first book. In "Rendezvous," in addition to his musical structures, he lists America's melodies by associating factories, express trains, power dams, river boats, coal mines, and lumber camps with musical terminology: "allegro," "blues rhapsody," " bass crescendo," "diatonic picks," and "belting harmonics." "Dark Symphony," immediately musical and racial in its title, is separated into parts along musical lines and terminology: Part I: Allegro Moderato; Part II , Lento Grave; Part III, Andante Sostenuto; Part IV, Tempo Primo; and Part V, Larghetto. "Rendezvous" and "Dark Symphony" are patterned after the ode form (which Tolson would expand on in Libre~ and Harlem Gallery) . "Dark Symphony" carries the same theme as "Rendezvous"--people pitted against their injustices--but the latter poem is more racial in flavor and subject matter. Located , temporally and spiritually, between the concerns of Whitman (the "sweep") and John Steinbeck (Grapes of Wrath), "Dark Symphony" opens by reminding Americans that "Black Crispus Attucks"(<Hed for them\_:Boston Comroo~ Before white Patrick Henry ' s bugle breath asked for liberty over death . A strongly masculine poem (as is so much of Tolson ' s work), it moves robustly to recite the deeds of "Men black and strong." Part II tells of the "slaves singing" in the "torture tombs" of ships in the middle passage, the swamps, the " cabins of <lea th~ and "canebrakes . " In the remaining �parts, the Black American, speaking through the collective "we," vows not to f;.od "forget" that "Golgotha" has been,\-=-ii or that "The Bill of Rights is burned." The New Negro wears "seven-league" boots and springs from a tradition that produced Nat Turner, Joseph Cinquez ("Black Hoses of the Amistad Mutiny"), Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman ("Saint Bernard of the Underground Railroad"). Grapes of Wrath and Native Son are invoked as indices to the suffering and the breeding of slums. And, finally, the historical concerns of the Black poet: Out of abysses of Illiteracy, Through labyrinths of ties, Across waste lands of Disease We advance! Brilliant, esoteric, complex, innovative, and able to span the world of Black /olk idiom and academic intellectualism, Tolson always punctuates his undaunted ~ lyricism with ribald humor and thigh-slapping uproar}usness. However, Paul Bremen desparagingly referred to Tolson as posturing "for a white audience with an ill-conceived grin and a wicked sense of humor ..• an entertaining darky using almost comically big words as the best wasp tradition demands of its educated house-niggers." Englishman Bremen.) s~-'t (Maybe, one might,r-4-, Tolson was "even" too deep for the Nevertheless, the poets of the academy apparently loved Tolson and more than one of them tried to get him deserved recognition before he died. W,lt,amJ William CarlosAsaluted Tolson in his fourth book of Patterson; Allen Tate wrote a now famous~. bPt5:Alcf-il\ to Libretto; Shapiro introduced Harlem Gallery,"i\k seven ·r launching Tolson into the same curious fame that Howells brought to DunbarA.• years before; Robert Frost, Stanley Edgar Hyman, Selden Rodman, John Ciardi, and Theodore Raethke, all tried to "bring Tolson to the general literary consciousness, but with little success" (Shapiro). �Tolson's severest critics usually have in mind Libretto or Harlem Gallery . Rendezvous has been out of print for several years and many of the younger Black poets and scholars have not read it--as is the case with Road (1932) which has just been reprinted. Brown's Southern But, any casual look at Tolson ' s work will confirm reports that he is not digestible in a single reading. Even before the erudition of Libretto and Harlem Gallery, Tolson accustomed himself to the allusion. Indeed, his strongest weapon is the literary or historical reference--the mark of the library poet, the learned person. In "An Ex-Judge at ct,J- .)&til'iieo.se.s the Bar" Tolson is at his finest as he •@wbz ego humor, allusionA 1.ronyt with philosophy and social commentary. bar. This ex-judge is at a "drinking" And rich in oral power, like most of Tolson's poetry, the poem surveys the history of a white man who, after serving in the war and returning home to become a judge, is guilt-ridden in a tavern where he discusses his life with the bartender. The opening couplet: Bartender, make it straight and make it two-One for the you in me and the me in you • • •. reflects the Black American's dexterousness with oral language and Tolson's rich background as storyteller and debate coach. The couplet contains the kind of musical, seemingly non-sensical statement that Black men love to exchange during fierce verbal sparring matches--even though the judge is presumably white . Drunk, the judge re-lives his war experiences and, in a vision, sees the "Goddess Justice" l""~i:u,w'1 ;1~ whom someone "blindfolds/• . .,\the lawyers lie and railroad defendents before him. But Justice "unbandaged" her eyes and accused the judge of lynching a Black man to "gain the judge's seat," even though, ironically, he fought in the last war to "make the world safe for Democracy." The judge, seeking consolation and implying that no one is perfect, is finally moved to self-evaluation, repents and orders �another round of drinks: Bartender, make it straight and make it three-One for the Negro ... one for you and me. "An Ex-Judge at the Bar"--with its ironies and double entemlres in the very title--is a poem that slips away from the reader. never sure, that one has the meaning under control. One thinks, though one is The poem refers to Ceasar, Pontius Pilate, the Koran, the Sahara, "September Morn" (a painting by Paul Chabos), -French language words, Flanders field, and Macduff in Shakespeare's Macbeth. Certainly these are not the ideal ingredients for a poem directed to the "people." On the other hand, for the reader ready to do battle with history and world knowledge, Tolson proves quite rewarding. Dudley Randall ("The Black Aesthetic in Thirties, Forties, and Fifties"--Modern Black Poets) states, with a strained air of seriousness, that: "If the reader has a well-stored mind, or is willing to use dictionaries, encylopedias, atlases, and other reference books," Tolson's work "should present no great difficulty." Randall had in mind, specifically, Libretto, a section of which appeared in Poetry along with the book's preface. In this long poem--constructed loosely around the ode form--Tolson celebrates Liberia's centennial. "Tolson used all the devices dear to the New Criticism: According to Randall, recondite allusions, scraps of foreign languages, African proverbs, symbolism, objective correlatives. Many parts of the poem are obscure, not through some private symbolism of the author, but because of the unusual words, foreign phrases, and learned allusions." Randall goes on to point out that reading Libretto is like reading other "learned poets, such as Milton and T.S. Eliot." However, reading Tolson is not exactly like reading other learned poets, for he places Black information in front of the reader. Ile bends the ode into a~ �' Af"~·Arnq_r-1~&0 ~musical structure and celebrates the Black past. Continuing a pattern set in poems like "Rendezvous with America" and "Dark Symphony," Tolson separates Libretto along lines of theVestern musical scale: Do. Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Ti, Specifically, Libretto acknowledges the 100th birthday of Liberia, founded in 1847 by the American Colonization Society for free men of color. "Rooted in the Liberian mentality as fact and symbol," Libretto traverses the kaleidoscopic range of African history: the magnificent ancient and Medieval kingdoms, European exploitation, various theories as to the reason for the question-mark-shape of Africa, the origins of Black stereotypes, Africa's contributions to the world, the impact of Christianity, Islam and other religions. All this Tolson does with what Allen Tate calls "a great gift of language, a profound historical sense, a first-rate intelligence." Tate also pondered, as did Emanuel and Gross (Dark Symphony, 1968), "what influence this work will have upon Negro poetry in the United States." More than slightly recalling Howells, in his endorsement of Dunbar, Tate says "For the first time, it seems to me, a Negro poet has assimilated completely the full poetic language of his time and, by implication, the language of the Anglo-American tradition." Relentlessly posing the one-word question "Liberia?" and reinforcing the nation's existence in "fact and symbol," Tolson opens Libretto with lofty erudition and color. The fifth stanza of Do, after the initial "Liberia?" and accompanying recitation of ·what the nation is not, addresses its citizens thusly: ~are Black Lazarus risen from the White Man's grave, .,_Without a road to Downing Street, Without a hemidemisemiquaver in an Oxfordftave! Later in - - sectio,Tolson excerpts a chant from "The Good Gray Bard of �Timbuktu": "Wanawake wanazaa ovyo! Kazi Yenu Wanzungu!" IljlJJQI Hayden has been called one of the most skilled craftsmen since Countee Cullen; but Tolson without a doubt has sustained the most powerful poetry which adheres rigorously to the tenets of the modernists. His Libretto is the drama of "The Desert Fox" and the German "goosestep" across Africa (Mi); of the snake, "eyeless, yet with eyes" (Fa); of "White Pilgrims" and "Black Pilgrims" who sing "O Christ" that the wors'f will "pass!" (Sol); of "Leopard, elephant, ape" and "A white man spined with dreams" (La); of a "Calendar of the Country" to "red-letter the Republic's birth!" (Ti); and of ."a professor of metaphysicotheologicocosmonigology" who is also a tooth puller a pataphysicist in a cloaca of error a belly's wolf a skull's tabernacle a f/13 with stars t-a muses' darling a busie bee de sac et de corde f-a neighbor's bed-shaker a walking hospital on the walk)•.. (;,,,.J. ~,2) The symbols, the syntax, the grammar and the language tumble on placing /-Quai d'Orsay, White House, f-Kremlin, Downing Street. in the catalog• while Again black Aethiop reaches at the sun, 0 Greek. (Ti) The history of world wars, the gossip in high circles ("Il Duce's Whore"), the concoction of enumerable languages and book-buried erudition, reveal Tolson as a complex and difficult modern poet. The tragedy, Randall and others have �pointed out, is that as Tolson wrote Libretto and Harlem Gallery, white scions of the modern verse were turning their backs on erudition for a more common, everyday language in poetry. Trapped in the middle (he held on to Harlem Gallery for more than 30 years), Tolson continued to labor in the best tradition of the modern poetry to the disbelief of contemporaries--who, like Cummings, Rexroth, and Hughes, were influenced by Bfi','op and a freer language structure. Tolson's sustained scholarship and complex allusions are reinforced by the addition of scores of footnotes which cite the works of such as Dryden, Shakespeare, Emerson, Tennyson, Lorenzo Dow Turner (Africanisms in the Gullah Dialects), J.A. Rogers (Sex and Race), V. Firdo~si, Gunnar Myrdal, Aeschylus, Bocca~o, Baudelaire~ and hundreds of others. The work ends (Do) in a use of mystical and technological symbols which examine "Futurafrique" and "tomorrow .•. 0 ... Tomorrow." Tolson's career is a terrifying example of the confusion that can occur in the Black literary artist. When he first sent the manuscript of Libretto to Tate (who was across town at Vanderbilt with the "Fugitive" poets while Tolson was #e while poet at Fis k) , • ,rejected it saying he was not interested in "propanganda from a Negro poet. "1Flasch), 1 E 1 Ji) Tolson then dill igently re-wrote the manuscript . ~u'3(A._.rt to subscribe to the ~~intellectual, technical, and scholarly demands of the modern poets (Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Eliot, Pound, Robert Penn Warren, Donald Davidson, and others). it. He sent the manuscript back to Tate who agreed to endorse In 1920, Tolson had stumbled upon a copy of Sandburg's "Chicago" but was warned by a professor to "leave that stuff alone" (Flasch). His maturation as a poet, then, was stunted--causing him to spend 30 years searching for his own voice. Harlem Gallery (the first of a planned five-volume epic) provides another example of the chaos in Tolson's poetic life. In 1932, he completed a 340-page manuscript called "A Gallery of Harlem Portraits" which was turned down by �publishers. When the derivative ode, Harlem Gallery was finally brought out in Rendezvous and Libretto. 1966, Tolson had published two newer manuscripts: , -th-t poe.-t'l Harlem Gallery had been placed in~ l I 11 ''trunk' for 20 years--a period during which he switched from the Romantics and Victorians (and Masters after whose Spoon River Anthology "Portraits" was modelled) to the Moderns. Tolson said he1!:~ead and absorbed the techniques of Eliot, Pound, Yeats, Baudelaire, Pasternak and, i believe, all the great moderns. God only knows how many " little magazines" I studied, and how much textual analysis (sic) of the New Critics." A staggering poem, Harlem Gallery "is a work of art, a sociological commentary, an intellectual triple somersault." (Flasch) It meets the vigorous intellectual, scholarly, and stylistic whims of modern poetry, but at the same time is "impossible to describe." Yet it is Tolson's crowning achievement in more ways than one. First it continues his fascination with Black and general history. Second, it pursues Tolson's intense interest in both the psycho-dynamics of the Afro-American character and the artist; he is particularly concerned with the plight of the ~ol\ -wieati@ta. century Black artist (hence Book I, The Curator). Third, it provides one of the most powerful and authentic links between the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The very title of Harlem Gallery gives it a Black setting; and the fact of it ' s being conceived and initially drafted during the Renaissance indicates that Tolson labored over the years (from the stand point of memory, technique and subject matter) in the after-glow of the literary f lowering watered by McKay, Cullen, Toomer, Hughes, Fisher, Johnson, and Locke. Fina~ly, the characters in Harlem Gallery are Black: the Curator, Doctor Nkomo (Bantu expatriate and Africanist), Mr. Guy Delaporte (president of Bola Bola Enterprises), Black Orchid (blues-singer and mistress to Delaporte), the �half-blind Harlem artist John Laugart, Black Diamond (ghetto-promoter of the Lenox policy racket), and Hideho Heights (the light-skinned poet of Lenox Avenue). The Curator of the Harlem Gallery is an admixture (continuing concer~begun in Rendezvous) of races ("Afroirishjewish"), an octoroon who passes for Black in New York and white in Mississippi. He is a digestion of the humor and pathos Blacks see in those of their race who attempt .to "pass." Tolson noted that since thousands of light-skinned Blacks passed over, there is a standing joke among Blacks which asks "What white man is white?" Harlem Gallery, then, is designed to parade the Black "types" (ultimately everyman types) through the gallery of life as it is shaped by the view of the literary genius: Tolson. Specifically, the book is a hu~ answer to Gertrude Stein's charge that the "Negro suffers from nothingness." Black history. All of his poetic life, Tolson worked to reconstruct Now, in Harlem Gallery, he was coming with speed and poetic pre- cision from his corner of the syntactical and semantical ring to do battle with Stein's charge. In the Introduction to Harlem Gallery, Shapiro explains in part the reason why Gertrude Stein would herself be so ignorant. Whites do not get a chance to read about Black achievement since "Poetry as we know it remains the most lily-white of the arts." Libretto may have pulled "the rug out from under the poetry of the Academy" but "Harlem Gallery pulls the house down around their ears." Assailing Eliot and others for "purifying the language," Shapiro praised Tolson for "complicating it, giving it the gift of tongues." Tolson certainly gave Harlem Gallery the "gift of tongues." He uses tidbits from the range of world languages; but his work is more sustained and coherent than in Libretto. Both story-line and language are more accessible in Gallery-- with its interpolation of rich Black speech and musical terminology into stilted academic language and form. Set up musically, with each section bearing the �Le1Ti oflh~ name of a~Greek /lphabet, Gallery shows Tolson again displaying his amazing technical virtuosity and his merger of the ode form with related Black orally-derived structures: blues, jazz, Spirituals, folk epics and oral narratives esatchmo" in Lambda / ,..,, "The Birth of John Henry" in XI). The verse pattern in Gallery owes some debt to Do in Libretto with its tapered typography and irregular line organization which either forces the reader to speed up or slow down to catch the rhyme. Alpha opens describing the spice of Harlem as "an Afric pepper bird" before the Curator tells us that I travel, from oasis to oasis, man's Saharic up-and-down. The grand sweep and intellectual storage of Tolson are gathered f~om line to line, between lines, in the margins, around and throughout the poem. Recalling the verbal jousting in "An Ex-Judge at the Bar," the Curator assesses his "I-ness," his "humanness" and his "Negroness" and this recipe mixes with the pepper bird's reveille in my brain where the plain is twilled and twilled iA plain. The academic stilts are shortened for the sake of understanding (Beta): one needs the clarity the comma gives the eye, not the head of the hawk 's4wollen with rye. Like Hayden's "Middle Passage," Gallery views the physical and spiritual predicament of the Black man: what has he gone through, how much more can/will he li,w long? The answer is that man may have to endure suffering take, how long? forever--but if he is doomed to suffer, he is likewise "doomed" to survive. The �Curator is told that others have suffered and survived. the artist create in their suffering. ~ mmo.) Cur~ t ells him that: The Afro-American and So the "Afroirishjewish Grandpa" of the UBetween the dead sea Hitherto l-and the promised land Hence looms the wilderness Now: although his confidence is often a boar bailed up on a ridge, somehow, the Attic salt in man survives the blow of Attila, Croesus, Iscariot, t-and the 'lli.tches Sabbath in the Catacombs of ~ Bosio. ✓, ertainly this survival theme is close to the heart of the Afro-American and the artist. Artists are often among the first to ple~ for clemency, for free expression, for truth. The Spirituals and the vast body of ~ folk expression reaffirm the Afro-American's faith in man and the quest for survival. Acknowledging this aspect of Black expression and strength, Tolson (and Hayden: "Mean mean mean to be free.") incorporates the rich blast of ~ folk materials. In heaven (Lambda), Gabriel announces that " I ' d be the greatest trumpeter in the Universe, if old Satchmo had never been born! " And the birth of John Henry is an epic birth--akin to that of Jesus, Buddah, Mdhammed, and others . The night John Henry is born an ax of lightning splits the sky, and a hammer of thunder pounds the earth, �and the eagles and panthers cry! Reciting a soul-food menu at birth, John Henry 1' I want some ham hocks, ribs, and jowls, a ot of cabba some hoecakes, jam, and butter milk, a platter of pork and beans!' ' (!!) Tolson remains at home in synchronizing the Afro-American and Western heritages. In Gallery his forte is still the literary allusion juxtaposed with history or religion (as in Libretto); but he loves to ascend the stu~ Fy mountain of academia 1n,11u and then suddenly drop into the midst of ghetto-'i'rury,_w ii. ~~(Zeta) from thoughts that tilt like "long Napalese eyes" to a "catacomb Harlem flat" (grotesquely vivisected like microscoped maggots) /o the "Elite Chitterling Shop" (Eta) which contains the "variegated dinoceras of a jukebox" (singing the "ambivalence of classical blues"). Meanwhile, Doctor Obi Nkomo, "the alter ego" of the gallery, speaks Across an alp of chitterlings, pungent as epigrams, The Doctor returns to the theme of survival and free expression: d The lie of the artist is the only lie for which a mortal or a god should die. " ever-present need to synthesize (and yet separate) the three ingredients of man {biology, sociology and psychology--extending into the three S's--sight, sound and sense) recur in the poem (Eta) as the artists paint the seven panels of man's trid t' mensionality f--in variforms and varicolors-since virtue has no Kelvin scale l----since a mother breeds J-no twins alike, .•• �and since no man who is 1$!.._judged by his biosocial identity ~to a Kiefekil or a f artufe, an Iscariot or an Iago." tHence Tolson extends, sometimes in camouflf ge, his ideas about man's similarities and differences. different: To be sure, he is saying that Black men and white men are but that the differences are not significant enough to keep them from working together for the mutual good. This particular stand, which laces the work of Hayden, Tolson, Hughes and early Gwendolyn Brooks, is not one that will remain popular among poets who subscribe to the Black Aesthetic of the 1960s. N~vertheless Tolson dug underneath the hysteria and the ideological neatness to probe the time-honored questions about man. Gallery) finds Psi (a much-anthologized section of b ~~ doing battle with anthropologists, the D.A.R., the F.F.V. (First Families of Virginia), Uncle Tom, the Jim Crow Sign, the Great White World, and Kant, in an attempt to answer the question "Who is a Negro?" and "Who is a White?" '/lrolson ' s work contains great satire; and great wisdom in the satire. To be misled by his incredible and dazzling wor{ play is to miss the essential Tolson who warned the coming generation that, although Uncle Tom was "dead," they should beware of his son--"Dr. Thomas." Suspicious of fame and wealth and desiring to see no ~f4)laced over another (in, privileb;e), Tolson remarked after John Laugart's murde1{ that among those things remaining Clad infamy, the ~iamese twin -- o f fame. �Are we priviledged, here, to see a sneak (30-year~ ) preview of Watergate? We do not know what would have been Tolson ' s fate as a poet had he come to his own comfortable style as a young man in the Harlem Renaissance. nearly fifty when he sent Tate the manuscript for Libretto. , He was fty oll is quite an Aage for a poet to be still at odds with his craft--or to have _.. f(.l~wj,n-' work over-seen by aAcritic. tt Nevertheless Tolson, not admitted (as Shapiro noted of Black poets), to the "polite company of the anthology, " had to get his voice imtttEt:il4tt ~,:idnt>.et4l~nl em'ifidnal (JfJJ,;, "together" without the/'.aid available to the "Fugitives" or those in/\molding ofjh~ Few Black poets at the time were attempting Tolson ' s I 1n GIt (t in pt1J;y BlacksA-had J 1 12214 declined during the forties centers , , . modern poetry . feat l9f!••t•2•;•1111■--.:g •·-•*-•--•L and fifties--and there is much evidence that Tolson generally intimidated other Black scholars and intellectuals with his vast knowledge and great talents . Like poets of other generations, he was a part-time poet, expending much of his energies on students and school-related work. Randall has pointed out that unless Black poets imitate Tolson--and thus keep him apparent and interesting--he will not exert a major influence on Afro-American poetry . But, as Barksdale and Kinnamon note, a poet of Tolson ' s range and power ca0ot go unnoticed for long . Criticism of Tolson is sparse . Tw V f United States Authors Series, Joy Flasch's Melvin B. Tolson, in the offers good insights into Tolson ' s techniques. Barksdale and Kinnamon give brief criticism in Black Writers of America . Randall appraises him in the article on Black poets of three decades following the ..... onteur," Renaissance in his "Portrait of the Poet as Rai (January, 1966) 54-57. Negro Digest, XV, 3 See also "A Poet ' s Odyssey," an interview with Tolson (conducted by M. W. King) in Anger, and Beyond (1966) ~ j\tviews Lte.be . . mo..~) f: ~Lee,. EQT _8sue rsl 1usss; Margaret Walker ' s poetry and life provide a rich and J,y rewarding jolt in the writing activity of this period: her For My People (1942) i blo �was the first book of poetry by a Black woman since Georgia Douglas l Johnson's volumes of the twenties; the poetry departed in theme and technique from the prevailing mood of poetry by Black women; and she had the rare opportunity to imo~o"A~ le, t-A1it-fli1e cfuring her most -f ~ rcirf years, with such Chicago-based writers as Wright, Davis, Fenton Johnson, and T: g tn u Hughes. Like other writers of the era, her experiences included the Depression, World War II and McCarthyism--along with various racial and politically radical perspectives on contemporary life. Margaret Walker was born in Birmingham, Alabama, the daughter of a Methodist minister father and a school teacher mother, both university graduates. She attended church schools in Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisian1;,eaie•• receiving her B.A. from Northwestern University in 1935. m1@i wlitsn going }41w1111<e.• ts wrJ ~ 1e • next four~ years as a typist, newspaper reporter, editor of a short-lived magazine, . fM'\Q WAi4ht and with the Federal Writers' Project (like Hayde~ in Chicago. In 1939 she entered the University of Iowa (after short stints as a social worker in Chicago and New Orleans) where she received an .LA . in 1940, her thesis being a collection of poems. ~ She jjaall, obiained ~ / \Ph.D. in creative writing from Iowa in 1965 a., after submitting Jubilee, a novel, in lieu of ...,.Adissertation. Jubilee received the Houghton Mifflin Literary Award in 1966 and has been translated into several languages. 8,c~ I qc.,.o ~ I '- t'" - Margaret Walker (Mrs. Firnist· ~ James Alexander and the mother of four children) was~ professor of English at Livingston College in North Carolina, received the Yale Younger Poets award in 1942 (For My People), was awarded a Rosenwald Fellowship for Creative Writing (1944), served as visiting professor at Northwestern University, and became a member of the English faculty at Jackson State College where she is currently director of the Institute for the Study of History, Life, and Culture of Black �People (since 1969). Arthur P. Davis says that "Miss Walker is a better poet than she is a novelist," and one can hardly quarrel with him . . . h. quality of poetry in In addition to For My People, she has sustained a I Prophets for a New Day (1970) and October Journey (1973)--both published by 4 Randall's ~ Broadside Press in Detroit . 3 Although some of the poems in Prophets for a New Day were begun in the thirties and forties, "most of them," according to the poet, were written during the sixties. them in Chapter VI. SY Srief comment will be made on f "For My People," the title poem of her first book, first Told by Owen Dodson at a College Language Association meeting (Howard University, in 1942) that she was winning the Yale Younger Poets Award, . . he~ ' 7Fio..i s"1-e that she "had not even submitted11..;;"--manuscript 'and ~ ~ · \,,.er,-.\.IOLv,.,..e. Ila ghe had won and · • ' she recalls ' thought he was crazy." . t(included a sensitive Forward by Stephen Vincent Ben~t who praised her "Straight-forwardness, directness, reality," and noted that such qualities are "good things to find in a young poet." ' Benet also observed that: It is rarer to find them combined with a controlled intensity of emotion and a language that, at times, even when it is most modern, has something of the surge of biblical poetry. And it is obvious that Miss Walker uses that language because it comes naturally to her and is a part of her inheritance. Indeed "inheritance" is the key word to unlocking the fruits and juices of Margaret Walker ' s poetic storeroom. Her own experiences, as the daughter of religious parents , of growing up in the South, of being nurtured on the oral tradition, of developing a careful and sympathetic ear for the folk expressions, are all served up again through the poet's "honesty," "sincerity," "candor " and �tremendous technical abilities . Margaret Walker ' s verse does not employ the ().., oblique , ~btruse, and learned scalings sometimes evident in Hayden and Tolson . And she is quite at the oppo s ite end of t he spectrum from the lady- like lyrics of her predecessors: and Ann}Sp encer, Gwendolyn Bennett/\ Alic e Dunbar Nelson. . . Indeed when· ·measured against the tradition establ ished by most of · She :.. certainly her female prede-cesso~s, her work is startling. ,\ · bears some kinship to her forer unners-sisters--especially to Frances Harpe r, in theme and usage- - but her language, lines, and narration are more .related to the work of Black poets Fenton Johnson, Wright, James Weldon Johnson, H ghes and Davis, and white r poets Masters, Linds~t and Sandburg. During an exchange with Nikki Giovanni (A Poetic Equation: Between Nikki Giovanni and Mar garet Wal ker, 1974) 'V~a.ttet alker But to get back to this business of language . Convers ations sai d : In the twenties and thirties, for the firs t time we had the use of black speech from the streets . We were responsible for that particular urban idiom going int o the American language. ~ /\. ; i"kk.i G.iovanni. answere d wit . h '!- perceptive . . ,L se.rvr1ii6,,,• ••111&~!E!lc•••--••iw..t•Or.> • It was the first time because we were becoming urban . I think one of the things we forget when we start out critiques is that we could not have had a street language earlier . been plantation and southern and rural . Speech had And as we move to the cities during the ~igration period , we developed a street language . M,i~tre t "I think that ' s an important .point , " 'iiiiihAYlalker noted, moving on to indebt herself and the whole modern Black poetic folk tradition to Hughes . So it is clear that Margaret Walker, the southerner , gleaned from Blacks "up" South. (North) the kinds of rich linguistic complements needed to draw the magnificent portraits in �For Ny People. The title poem sets the tone of the book and establishes the poet's intellectual, aesthetical, philosophical and historical considerations: the acquisition and employment of knowledge of her past; the exhortation of her people ("The Struggle Staggers Us" but "Out of this blackness we must struggle forth"); the celebration, specifically, of the Black folk heritage and language; esteem for her religious (especially supernatural) and spiritual needs. Revealing in both its style and its content, "For My People" is a majestic poem containing "'"tol.soniA.I) P the now-famous Whitman sweep of words and ideas with aa4ordering JA the disorder: For my people everywhere singing their slave songs repeaf~ their dirges and their ditties and their blues anaJjubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an unknown/god, bending their knees humbly to an unseen power; Continuing from this first stanza (note the similarity to Fenton Johnson's) the poem views "my people" adding their "strength" to the "gone years" and the "now years." It sees them, as it traverses the physical and spiritual history of Blacks, as "playmates" in Alabama "clay and dust;" as "black and poor and small and differentl5') as youths who "grew" to "marry their playmates" and "die of consumption~ as "thronging 47th Street in Chicago and Lenox Avenue in New York and Rampart Street in New Or leans\)') as),"walking blind 1y spreading j oy" ; as blundering and groping and floundering{_;," as "preyed on by facile force of state and fad and/novelty, by false prophet and holy believer\J)and "as all the adams and eves." Finally, in the last stanza, she gives this ringing cry for a more aggressive Black push: �Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. a bloody/peace be written in the sky. Let Let a second generation/full of courage issue forth; let a people loving free7dom come to growth. ' Let a beauty full of healing/and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing in/our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs be/written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now rise and take controL For My People is a small book (only 26 poems) but it is one of the most influential by a Black poet .,"Dark Blood" follows the opening poem, reaffirming Margaret Walker's belief in the "forms of things unknown"--as Wright it. "Bizarre beginnings in old lands" constituted the "making of me." succulent imagery unfolds: putS Giliiill• Luscious, "sugar sands," "fern and pearl," "Palm jungles," "wooing nights,' in contrast to the "one-room shacks of my old poverty." But the "blazing suns" of the poet's conjured up birthplace will help reconcile the pride and pain in me. Strongly reminiscent of the Renaissance poets' infatuation with Africa, but ending on the realistic note of the poet's localized "poverty," "D..:trk Blood" I certainly meets with Ben~t's notion of "reality." The skepticism, the doubt, the scent of sacrilige--found from Dunbar forward-bring tension to "We Have Been Believers": ••• believing in our burdens and our demigods too long . And now (recalling Dunbar's "Sympathy"), the "fists" of the believers "bleed" against the bars with a strange insistency. The str engt h , begun in the first poem, is carried through "Southern Song" and �"Sorrow Home." With incantation and incremental refrain "Delta" tells of the collective "struggle." Strains of "Believers" course through "Since 1619" where the poet again re-traces the Black odyssey: How long have I been hated and hating? The speaker, longing to see the rich "color" of a "brother's face," assails racism, poverty, i gnorance, violence, and laments spiritual desolation. War, poverty, disease and other heirs of the Depression are the themes of "Today" which speaks of "children scarred by bombs," "lynching," and "pellagra and silicosis." A different "stride" of this poet is seen in the second section of For My People. "Molly Means," "Bad-Man Stagolee," "Poppa Chicken," "Kissie Lee," "i alluh Hammuh," "Two-Gun Buster and .Trigger Slim," "Teacher," "Gus, the Lineman," "Long John Nelson and Sweetie Pie," and "John Henry" are fresh treatments of authentic stories from Black communities in· America. "A hag and a witch," Molly Means had seven husbands and Some say she was born with a veil -on her face .••. The incremental refrain ("Old Molly, Molly, Molly," etc.) gives dramatic and psychological power to the poem as Holly's work with the "black-hand arts and her evil powers" are catalogued. Stagolee, apparently "an all-right lad," Till he killed that cop and turned out bad, quite possibly had killed "mor'n one" white man. The "bad nigger" type found in all Black communities is the portrait drawn of Stagolee: Wid dat blade he wore unnerneaf his shirt •••• Stagolee mysteriously disappe:@, though his "ghost still" stalks the shore of the Mississippi River. Poppa Chicken was a pimp who, in the American tradition of Black-on-Black crime, "got off light" for killing a man, and Bought his pardon in a year; •.• �Also a Black prototype, he had plenty women ("gals for miles around"), expensive rings and watches, fancy clothes , displayed a coolness ("Treat 'em rough"), and when he walked the streets The Gals cried Lawdy! Lawd! Kissie Lee is a throw back to Ha-rd Hearted Hannah (who would "pour water on a drowning man,"): She could shoot glass doors offa the hinges, .•. f,u. luh Hammuh recalls Dolemite , Shine and others. He was so "bad" that He killed his Maw of fright •••• The cultural folk types parade before our eyes, much after the fashion of "Slim" and other characters in Sterling Brown's Southern Road. Margaret Walker ' s con- tribution, as does Brown ' s, lies also in the area of history and linguistics: for both are chroniclers of such. But ■ II 45'4~ I for the verse forms to convey Black folklife. 'P•"'i~1Ql 0~ WU't'\e,v. IV\ ~~p,ems. 11 " surpasses Brown in her search A-. ll ~-er-o I lr-QntC(l Yf Y~ 1,ri \.- ,s Little. um«.llJflf;, Big John Henry tales can be found in practically every American community. Margaret Walker places her man in Mississippi where he feasted on "buttermilk and sorghum. 11 As a Big Boy type (Wright, Hughes and others), he assaults the world through physical prowess. He is the best cotton picker, stronger than a "team of oxen," the champion boxer; he can anchor down a steam boat with "one hand," is taught by the "witches" how to "cunjer," and is undaunted until a "ten-poun ' hammer" split "him open . " The ballad, appropriately, is the primary form of the poems in this section. The third section of the book contains six sonnets, capturing remembrances and vignettes. The poet brings her own rhyme scheme, stanzaic pattern and line-stress variations to these pieces. "Childhood" recalls that of all the many human and natural pestilences that invaded the lives of the poor, including �the "hatred" that "still held sway," •.• only bitter land was washed away. "Whores" are told that their labors are ~ndignified and warned (a dash of deep-woman concern •.• feminism?) that as they grow older they will find that their bodies, in this world of turbulence, will neither give "peace" to men nor "leave them satisfied." Ending, rightly it seems, with "Struggle Staggers Us," For My People reminds Blacks that there is room to "stagger" but none to halt: Strugglr between the morning and night. This marks our years; this settles, too, our plight. There are few volumes of poetry published since For My People that can be con- o.r-1 sidered • e.r Blac\~-in the complex sense of the word. From the red clay of the children's playgrounds to the teeming treachery of urban fusilages; from the quiet fear to the piercing cry of the hungry; from the deeply (unquestioning) religious to the iconoclastic and the heretic; from the healthy racial to the good dose of modesty and naivete--it is all here. A wonderful sensitivity and a rich bank of poetry for all times. A link to the writers of the Renaissance, Margaret Walker has had contact with the twenties poets like Hughes, Bontemps, Fenton Johnson and Gwendolyn Bennett, as well as with later bards: Danner, Margaret Burroughs and Tolson. Dodson, Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret For My People, in the end, stands as the rich digestion (synthesis) of the main currents of the Renaissance and the aesthetic considerations being debated by Locke, Cullen, Johnson, Brown and Redding. wd-ker. Margaret~may have produced the volume of poetry many of the older writers wanted to write. Without being self-effacing or "unrealistic" about her plight as an Afro-American, she poetically reconstructed one of the most balanced pictures �of ~ Black humanity without lessening or profaning her obvious self-love . ~~A\V\~ J Brodn, in Southern Road, avoided even mentioning Africa--perhaps f\ the romantic escapades of some Renaissance poets . -1h1on1' 11 /l,,J b-e CA.u~e he.. Wlt.4 ,wew--.r O s• PUS Op i~u $ Pfat.loJ.. However, he deserves no/\.praise ,,,,.,, "' for that aspect of his ~ - I\Tolson and Haydent (both~~d:11-11111!1'4: poets) we.re oPterl poised in the wings which often required a signal from the academy before they could "slip the eagle ' s claw. " Hore critical assessment of Margaret Walker ' s work is needed. and KiHnamon make important comments in their anthology . Barksdale A Poetic Equation (Giovanni and Walker, 1974) is extremely helpful in getting to the grit of the poet's ideas. There are seminal comments in Paula Giddings ' "A Shoulder Hunched Against a Sharp Concern ' : Some Themes in the Poetry of Hargaret Walker," Black World, XXI (~ecember, 1971), 20-25 . _Liter atµ+:~, See also Whitlow's Black American Young's Black Writers of the Thirties, essay in Black Poetry in America, Jackson's •!J!J!I• Gibson's Hodern · Black Poets, and Gross'• Dark Symphony, Negro Caravan, Redmond's "The Black American Epic: Emmanuel's Davis '• From the Dark Tower, Its Roots and Its Writers/' Contemporary Black Thought (Chrisman and Hare), 9t ti a1 Henderson ' s Understanding the New Black Poetry, and Gayle's Black Expression and The Black AesthetLc. the most celebrated Black poet of all times, 1 Gwendolyn Brooks~ continues to make her home in Chicago where she presides as ~Ldt"' Sfll-ff$UifOMM of the New Black Poetry. She joins Tolson, Hayden, Randall, Margaret Walker and others as poets of "transition"--those who helped continue the literary light of the Renaissance into and through t he Depression, World War II, Civil Rights and Black Powerism . Born the daughter of laboring-class parents in Topeka, Kansas, Gwendolyn Brooks was reared in Chicago where she attended public schools, f �graduat i ng from Englewood High School in 19 34 and Wilson Junior College i n 1936 . Wilson represented the final step in her f ormal educa t ion and in 1939 she married Henry Blakely • i ur ,Pt -wen&> off S S he had a son and a daughter . • i, .·lft-too ~ be9CA.tt wtsi 11111 ,oe1t.y ttt#ae "'JfAand by the time she was in her late teens she had published two mimeographed community newspapers-one being the Champlain Weekly . numerous publications : Since the early 1940s her poetry has appeared in Poetry, Black World, Common Ground, Saturday Review of Literature , Negro Story, Atlantic ~1onthly, and countless others. jolted tbe Jiterani and i.a P a tbs 1 OS Os lat ¢ 6£22 lilbid II :: 1111 i ,is dnatcs when sl ,"" b dag & t Ia ■ a r r1 moo€ ii bill HJ£ Ph Jiid llOii 00111 be S&1d abb&C Eli@§@ llidCC@IS Iii caapca I igaif · l!S Dks l i .,;<c • t shifts Rrndcid "'; 61.• Her first book of poetry , A Street in Bronzeville (1945), won the Merit Award of Madamoiselle magazine and her second volume , Annie Allen (1949~ garnered for her the coveted Pulitzer Prize (1950) as well as Poetry's Eunice Tietjens Memorial Award . The recipient of a $1 , 000 award from the Academy of Arts and Letters and two Guggenheim fellowships for study (1946 and 1947), Gwendolyn Brooks' f list of awards and citations is so long it would take s.everal p.ages to list; them all. She has received over a dozen honorary doctorate degrees , served on special arts and cultural councils, been listed among the most influential and important Americans in numberless compilations , regional, and national acknowledgements. FIi i . She has won the Poetry Workshop Award, given by the Midwestern Writers' Conference (three times: 1943-45), the Friends Literature Award for Poetry (1964), the Thormond Monsen Award for Literature (1964) . --..ln1969 sbe announced that she would award two prizes of $250 each to the best poem and best short story published each year by a Black writer in Negro Digest (now Black World). Institutions where she has taught �include Columbia, Elmhurst, and Northeastern Illinois State College, all in Chicago; the University of Wisconsin, the College of the City of New York, and many other public and private schools. For some, however, her crowning achieve- ment was her selection in 1968 as Poet Laureate of the state of Illinois (succeeding Carl Sandburg). Other volumes of poetry are The Bean Eaters (1960), Selected Poems (1963), In the Mecca (1968), Riot (1969), Family Pictures (1970), Aloneness (1971) and The World of Gwendolyn Brooks (1971, poetry and prose) . include A Portion of the Field: and For Illinois, (1968). Special publications the Centennial of the Burial of Lincoln (1967) The poet has also written some much-praised poetic Maud Martha, ..a,~ (1953) and Bronzeville Boys and Girls (1956). fiction: Her work as an editor has been equally impressive: and Jump Bad: A New Chicago Anthology (1971). A Broadside Treasury (1971) Her pre-Black Movement poetry is most readily accessible in Selected Poems which contains her three earlier books and a~~ section. Selected Poems shows 8 2 1&1511 Pr~ brooking the stream between the integrationist-plea-bound writers and the firm, acrid, and adamant voices of the 1960s. Sometimes called the "most careful craftsman since Countee Cullen," she was (and to some extent remains) greatly indebted to the modernist school of America n poetry: Eliot, Pound, Crane, Ransom, Joyce (influenced, as she says, by The Dubliners), Stevens, Frost, and Auden. Reading these poets and the Black « 1hl ones (Dunbar, "a family favorite," Hughes, Cullen, Johnson, and othe~Renaissance) fAI ..JII) f r ~ 1 I d her w·.-....,.•·• -••11t ~"ovioed development and ~igti i f ic ant choices. results were a bewildering array of technical proficiencies for the thematic and psychological_. l~v-i,Ls tin her poetry. u.y which'(: , d l The a base Usually working with what George Kent calls appropriate "distance," this poet carefully sculpts �poetic gems from the granite and the cheap rock of urban Black America's experience: tenement housing, returning unsung war heroes, joblessness, con- sumption, murder, endless poverty, love, man-woman relationships, womanhood and motherhood (especially), nobility of the economically-pressed and deep religious devotion. fuw&iJ.t/.(~ Commenting on the effect of the distance and what ~/(Brooks was able to perceive and achieve with it, Kent says (Blackness and the Adventure of Western Culture) she mastered .•. such modernist techniques as irony; unusual conjunctions of words to evoke a complex sense of reality (Satin Legs Smith rising "in a clear delirium"); squeezing the utmost from an image ... , agility with mind-bending figurative language, sensitivity to the music of the phrase, instead of imprisonment in traditional line beats and meter; experimentation with the possibilities of free verse and various devices for sudden emphasis and verbal surprise; and authoritative management of tone and wide-ranging lyricism. And one is struck, in reading, watching, or talking with the poet, by her intense, yet relaxed love-affair with words. Her prose is poetic; her manner is poetic. 1/.rn Report from Part One, her autobiography, she discusses her life as poet, mother, wife and traveler. There are valuable insights into the woman who shifted from "Negro" to "Black" in 196 7. a dozen poems. Report also pr/\vides her own explication of at least About poetry writing she says: So much is involved in the writing of poetry--and sometimes, although I don't like suggesting it is a magic process, it seems you really have to go into a bit of a trance, self-cast trance, because "brainwork" seems unable to do it all, to do the whole job. The self-cast trance is possible when you are �importantly excited about an idea, or sumise, or emotion. Certainly the "trance" quality is found in the early and later Gwendolyn Brooks. One has only to compare a poem like "the preacher: ruminates behind the sermon" (A Street in Bronzeville) to "Malcolm X" (In the Mecca) to see the staying power of the mystic, the seer and the entrancer. vibrant yet static poetic sculpture. Bronzeville is a It came in 1945 under the influence of _;:Fm the poet's wide reading and experimenc'"8. James Weldon Johnson had helpfully critiqued her work and the results, she acknowleges, were that she became a surer, more precise poet and critic. The couple in the "kitchenette building" are products of "dry hours and the involuntary plan" who smell "yesterday's garbage" in the hall. After the fifth child has finally emerged from the bathroom We think of lukewarm water, hope to get it. The memorable poems in Bronzeville are "the mother," "the preacher," "of De Witt Williams on his way to Lincoln Cemetery," "The Sundays Of Satin-Legs Smith," "the ballad of choco late Mabbie," and selections from a series of sonnets called GAY CHAPS AT THE BAR. The mother recalls abortions: You remember the children you got that you did not get, and pledges her love to the dead children. she "loved" them "all." Even though she knew them "faintly" Taken from their "unfinished reach," the aborted lives "never giggled or planned or cried." Ruminating "behind the sermon" the preacher--revealing deepening levels of concern and psychic distress--wonders how it feels "to be God." The god of the world the preacher discusses from the pulpit is perhaps not the god of the "real" �world. Consequently the preacher "ruminates" on whether anyone will Buy Hirn a Coca-Cola or a beer, Pooh-pooh His politics, call Him a fool? Being god has to be lonely, "Without a hand to hold." ~e Witt Williams is carried to the cemetery behind the refrain: Swing low swing low sweet sweet chariot. Nothing but a plain black boy. li!f.: W e know ; he may have been anything other than plain. But if he were just "a plain black boy" we will celebrate the places where he hung out (pool hall, show, dance halls, whiskey stores) and was known (47th street, under the "L"). De Witt's journey is the Black American (south to north) ody ssey depicted by it ~ Wright, Baldwin, Claude Brown, and company: Born in Alabama. Bred in Illinois. Ile was nothing but a Plain black boy. Satin Legs Smith is another cut off the block of the Black Experience. In immortalizing him, CJ 8e.sfkie,~oins a host of Black bards, known and "unknown," who have acknowledged the importance and influence of folk culture. Probably like De Witt Williams, Smith comes from a "heritage of capbage and pigtails." He is reminiscent - t:oppa Chicken (of ~ Hargare~lker~} . ag s The analogy, in the opening lines, is to a cat who is "tawney, reluctant, royal." Rising in the morning Satin Legf s relfes himself of "shabby days" when he "sheds" his pajamas. He bathes, puts on the best body scents, and goes to a wardrobe that, when listed, sounds like a replay of the whole era of the zoot-suiter and the Be-boppers: diamonds, pearls, suits of yellow, wine, "Sarcastic green," �I) and "zebra-stripfed cobalt,"; wide shoulder padding, ballooning trousers that ....;,,,/ taper, hats that resemble umbrellas, and "hysterical ties." He is enmeshed in his image and blots out the reminders of poverty and ugliness. does not hear"; "sees and does not see." He "hears and Loving his music and his lady, he takes his date to "Joe's Eats" after which he retires (at home) to her body-"new brown bread ... soft, and absolute." It is a mosaic-like study complete with the down-home versus Promised Land theme. t< The Negro Hero/( ("to suggest Dorie Miller": a World War II Navy cook turned hero) "had to kick" white men's "law into their teeth" before he could "save them." Being Black, it was not safe, even in the thick and thin of battle when the ship was going down, to come up from the galley and save the white sailors. Instead of jumping over-board and leaving them to their fate, like Shine, this hero invoked their "white-gowned democracy" and fought at their side despite ~ 1:S 4 rfe-he-:,hte.d. •~statement by a southern white man:fia' Indeed, I'd rather be dead; Indeed, I'd rather be shot in the head Or ridden to waste on the back of a flood Than saved by the drop of a black man's blood. "Negro Hero" symbolically reflects the Black American doing his duty, believing in Christianity and Democracy, to the best of his American self. As a theme, the idea was lofsing ground among Black writers; but it would be some years before ~ resentment of such "heroics" would be blatantly expressed. Experimental "soldier sonnets" appear in the final section of Bronzeville (GAY CHAPS AT THE BAR). In "gay chaps at the bar" the soldiers' training does not prepare them to repel air attacks, e- To holler down the lions in th~ air • . �In "the progress" the phrase is questionable when the soldiers hear the march Of iron feet again. The Pulitzer Prize-winning Anni~ . Alleu shows Gwendolyn Brooks sustaining her balance between the modernist influences and her own intuitional phrasings and interest. Some might call it the least Black of her volumes especially since it contains the enigmatic and diffusive "The Anniad." And while her "children of the poor" series re-states the plight of the "unheroic," she is nevertheless generally more withdrawn than in Bronzeville. Yet the titles of both volumes signal her continuing interest in, and empathy with, "every day people." In her first volume, she had written extensively about women ("the mother," "choce late ~bbie," "the hunchback") and she opens Annie Allen ~ with NOTES FROM THE CHILDHOOD AND THE GIRLHOOD. deal with a neat life in "the parents: Her neat words and stanzas people like our marriage." "white Venetia tl blind" sits "pleasant custards." Behind a "Sunday Chicken" is a humorous comparison between carnivores who eat human flesh and those who eat chicken. Iler excavating of poetic jewels from non-hero types takes her through the death of an "old relative," and "the ballad of late Annie," too "proud" to find a man good enough to marry. The reader is encouraged to avoid easy solutions in "do not be afraid of no": It is brave to be involved, To be not fearful to be unresolved. And condescending people in high stations are brought low in "pygmies are pygmies still, though percht on Alps." · The high and mighty sometimes feel they are better than others, and ~--=•-- Pity the giants wallowing on the plain. But unbeknowing to the "percht" individuals "'e. "no alps to reach." �~"THE ANNIAD" contains 43 seven-line stanzas, adapted, so Miss Brooks says, from the Chaucerian Rhyme Royal. As a modern poem, it places the author in the 111t1,.y middle of the modernist tradition with other Black poets: • M1U.ea. Hayden, Dodso~,cnd ,u,l"IOWUJ O'fhfN. Tolson~ .. At l east on· e level o f comp 1 en· t y is · revea1 ed in the app earance of '" words and phrases like: "paradisaical," "thaumaturgic lass," "theopathy," and references to "Prophesying hecatombs," "Hyacinthine devils sing," /\Plato," "Aeschylus," "Seneca," "Mimnerrnus," "Plin'f' and "Dionysus ." the poet ' s own admission, "THE ANNIAD" is " labored, a poem that ' s very interested in the mysteries and magic of technique . " With Hayden ' s "The Diver," the poem carries you deeper and deeper into the underbrush . . of self and psyche. Annie becomes Anniad, the poet ' s way of giving another unheroic character id the stature of the heroic--this time the Iliad. ¥ When you think of Annie (Anniad) you are told to Think of sweet and choco late, .•. The blurred imagery and perceptions of Hayden's diver is again anticipated in the line What is ever and is not . (Remember Satin Legs hearing and not hearing, seeing and not seeing?) Full of magic, history, lore, mythology, supernaturalism, "THE ANNIAD" plunges through the mental and spiritual spheres, and "crescendo-comes," Surrealist and cynical . Anniad is needed, hungry, courted, and won, as she descends and ascends the "demi-gloom" of life, of now and then . Just as you were to Think of sweet and choco late at the beginning of the poem, you are to Think of almost thoroughly Derelict and dim and done. �as the poem closes. And, perhaps it was all--after all--a dream as Anniad stands Kissing in her kitchenette t The minuets of memory. APPENDIX TO THE ANNIAD includes the now-famous invention, "the sonnet-ballad," in title and in type. The traditional sonnet is enlivened--given a ballad stance and temperament; the young woman whose soldier-boyfriend is dead wonders what she can use "an empty heart-cup for:J CThe achievement of Annie Allen, however, is THE WOHANHOOD and especially the five sonnets on "the children of the poor." Childless people "can be hard" since they will not, like those with children, Hesitate in the hurricane to guard. In number two, a mother as ks what she can give to poor children. The fourth sonnet, seeking perhaps to resolve the surreal dream, advises the poor to "First fight. Then fiddle." There is nothing wrong with rising "bloody," For having first to civilize a space Wherein to play your violin with grace. It is t he same unmuted call to militancy rendered by Margaret Walker in the final stanza of "For My People. ,ff'i/Beverly HillS, Chicago" takes an interesting look, through Black and poor eyes, at the people who "live till they have white hair." To say Beverly Hills anywhere is to evoke images of splendor and richness, of glitter and high life. The denizens of Chicago's Beverly Hills "walk their golden gardens" as the poor sight-seers drive through the neighborhood. the "ripeness rots" though "not raggedly." Decadence is neat, says the poet: •.. Not that anybody is saying that these people have no trouble. Herely that it is trouble with a gold-flecked beautiful banner. Here �The poem's theme is one that is dear to Blacks in their daily conversations: that whites, especially rich whites, do not really live; that they are mannikins, (/Jlt/,.Q fif.'s" for the well-landscaped life; that they are inhibited and not free in their expressions. These people, the poet reminds us, also "cease to be," and sometimes Their passings are even more painful than ours. But they often live "till their hair is white." They also make "excellent corpses," as it were, "among the expensive flowers." Nevertheless the poor sight-seers have been changed, noticeably, by what they have seen, and the change t}\e- is noted in~'little gruff" tone5 of their voices as they "drive on." The Bean Eaters finds the poet leaping back into the transitional breach where sh:'fo':s battle with problems and enemies of the unheroic. She gathers up the pride, passion, despair, disillusionment, joy and anguish of "bean eaters" and related gourmets. The book opens with an elegy to her father ("In Honor of WAik,,. l.4M$T.,, David Anderson Brooks, Hy Father") and, reflecting debts to Margare, . \Huglfes, /ivil fights, Black music, and the Beat Hovement, moves through a tumultuous spectrum of vignettes and perceptio~s: "My Little 'Bout-Town Gal," "Strong Men, Riding Horses," "We Real Cool," "A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi." "Meanwhile, A Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon, " "The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till," "The Chicago Defender Sends a Han to Little Rock," "The Crazy Woman," and the powerful saga "The Ballad of Rudolph Reed." The death of David Henderson Brooks has left A dryness upon the house •••. Absence of the man, who "loved and tended," gives the poet pause, makes her recall how he translated "private charity" of the old time religion into "public love." �The narrator's "'bout-town gal" gallavants with "powder and blue dye" while he waits with the moon. Watching the western movies, the speaker in "Strong Men, Riding" (not reminiscent of Brown's poem) realizes that the westerns are products of Hollywood, that the strong men are "Too saddled." Meanwhile the speaker has to deal with real life--the fears, the dark, and is "not brave at all." The irony, of course, is that the viewer is often braver. Eating beans "mostly," the "old yellow pair" in "The Bean Eaters" putter around their apartment, recalling their lives "with twinklings and twinges." Desolation and tragedy of another kind comes to the dramatis person{of "We Real Cool" in which the poet employs a Hughesian jazz pattern with jagged rhythms reminiscent of Beat poetry, Babs Gonzales and King Pleasure. The poem recites the "live-fast-die young" pattern of many urban Black youths: We real cool. Left school. Lurk late. We We We Strike straight. Sing sin. We Thin gin. We Jazz June. We We Die soon. The longest poem in The Bean Eaters ("A Bronzeville Mother Loiters In Mississippi. Meanwhile, A Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon.") is a collage of journalism, day-dreams, fairy-tale history, and racial horror. The mother of slain 14-year old Ennnett Till (lynched in 1955 in Mississippi after allegedly �making "passes" at a white housewife) toys over the remains of her son and her damaged faith; at the same time a white "mOther" (victim) muses over the "crime" and recollects childhood fairytales of the "Dark Villain" pursuing the "milk-white maid" (rescued by the "Fine Prince"). The white mother 11•111•••••-•• dares to doubt the need to lynch young Emmett as she imagines she is sexually assaulted by the "Dark Villian." The poem9 includes news reports of the crime, the lynching, as well as accounts of the tr~l and the "acquittal." In "The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till" Emmett's mother "kisses her killed boy" while sitting in "a red room" and "drinking black coffee." mother's grief, the poet gathers Unable to describe the the blurring pain into a metaphor: Chaos in windy grays through a red prairie. In Again combfng journalism, history and mythology with "contemporary fact," Gwendolyn Brooks portrays one of the high points of the fivil ;{ights era in "The Chicago Defender Sends a Nan to Little Rock" (1957). People in Little Rock, the poet tells us in the opening lines, have babies, comb their hair, and read the papers like other Americans. She then etches out the contradictions and ironies in the "Soft women softly" who "are hurling spittle, rock." These "bright madonnas," like those with "eyes of steely blue" in McKay's "The Lynching," become "a coiling storm a-writhe." The last line of the poem, e . The loveliest lynche~• was our Lord. e toet1now s nkts has since been repudiatedjlllllJIWIII• "~ r slavery and dehumanizF feels that the greatest tragedy, of Blacks, makes for more important and urgent "news" than the crucifixion of a white Jesus. ~ ..I-the book Later, in ~he~sectli1)f' a woman who refuses to sing in May because she feels A May song should be gay. �D is admonished, after she ch'}fes to sing a "gray" song in November. her "The Crazy Woman. •1one Critics call of the more well known poems in Bean Eaters is "The Ballad of Rudolph Reed" who, along with his wife, son and "two good girls," was "oaken." Rudolph Reed, seeking the Promised Land in the , orth and riding on the crest of the new push for integration, buys a home in a white neighborhood because he wants to avoid falling plaster and the (ghetto) roaches Falling like fat rain . But the times are not quite right for integrated housing and the Reed family experiences violence when they move, in: the first two nights. rocks are thrown through their windows The repetition and incrementatipn are almost ironic in the ballad as Reed, filled with grief and anger when one of his daughters is finally hit with a rock, goes to the door with a thirty-four and a beastly buw er knife. He attacks four white men before he is finally slain and kicked by neighbors who It is an unpleasant story; but as a chronicle of the themes and consciousness of a poet, it places Gwendolyn Brooks on the threshhold of the new militancy, some of which is unveiled in the New Poems section of Selected Poems . like "Riders to the Blood-Red Wrath" and "Langston Hughes" show her with struggle and the spiralf ing fury of social unrest. . Poems concerned At the same time, she ~ salutes a white poet, as in "Of Robert Frost," and continues her practice of &,ve,-se , & mining the unheroic for poetry in a section oft(II A Catch of Shy Fish . S stylistic efforts like The "ride!~ (perhaps a parody of the purple sage riders) lurch into the breach of human struggle and social chaos. They are the freedom �riders--seeking what is "reliably right"--conducting sit-ins, wade-ins, lie-ins, sing-ins, pray-ins and voter registration drives. called them "shock troops" of the My scream! RJ !ff "revolution." Carmichael has oP-therll OneAstates: unedited, unfrivolous. My laboring unlatched braid of heat and frost. I hurt. I keep that scream at what pain: At what repeal of salvage and eclipse. Army unhonored, meriting the gold, I Have sewn my guns inside my burning lips. And he goes on to remember kings. A blossoming palace. Silver , Ivory. The conventional wealth of stalking Africa. This rider recalls his past, projects his future, and surveys the state of the world, from China to Israel. He is going to make the "bloody peace" asked by 1N6lker Margare\ Democracy and Christianity Recommence with me. And I ride ride I ride on to the end-Where glowers my continuing Calvary. With his "fellows," he intends to see the battle through, To fail, to flourish, to wither or to win. We lurch, distribute, we extend, begin. "To Be In Love" is also to extend and "fall" along a golden column Into the commonest ash. Diverse, explicit and splendid, the poems in this section achieve balance as 39 3 / �salutes two senior bards--Frost and Hughes. Frost has Iron at the mouth. And With a place to stand. he has much more than immediate physical space, but a permanent position on the world's poetry totem. As "merry glory," Hughes Yet grips his right of twisting free. His "long reach" encompasses "speech," "fears," "tears" and "sudden death." Hughes' f job is not done, and as a "headlight" he must press on, Till the air is cured of its fever. fJ.L(.O The poet~ returns to her garden of non-heroes in poems about garbage men, the sick, old people, stern women, and "Big Bessie" who "throws her son into the street." Sculpture, precision, explicitness and terseness are key words to remember when approaching the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks. Not primarily of the academy, but often sharing some of its virtues and faults, she has been free to deal primarily with pictures swirling around her during childhood and adulthood in Chicago. Sometimes her poetry about night life and the South carries a forced ,#- feeling, since these are not things she is in intimate contact with, but ~~is always skillful and economic. Her world has not been "wide" in the way that Tolson and Hayden have been "wide." But it has been deep and multi-layered, complex and womanly, tragic and profound. Her poetry has not, at this writing, inspired a book-length study but she has been the subject of much critical treatment. here since bibliographies are widely available. Selected studies will be listed For example, CLA Journal, XVII �(September 1973) ~ (a special issue on Brooks, Hayden and Baraka), lists a 12-page 1 bibliography. She is represented in every anthology of Afro-American poetry, beginning with Poetry of the Negro (1949 ed.) and in many general American anthologies of poetry and literature. Helpful are '=IIIIP Kent ' s "The Poetry ~ of Gwendolyn Brooks" (Black".Aand the Adventure of Western Culture, 1972); the critical entries in E Davis ' . From the Dark Tower; (1974); essays in - ck Writers of America (Barksdale and Kinnamon); Jackson ' s essay in Black Poetry in America ex) Gibson ' s Modern Black Poets ;AReport from Part One, ..._ autobiography th'( /)11 t-"fi (19 7 2) ♦ Owen Dodson ' s first volume of poetry, Powerful Long Ladder (1946), was one ~ of the casualties of the diillnterest in Black poetry during the post-Renaissance and war years . The book did not go entirely unnoticed, however, for Time magazine described it as standing " peer to Frost and Sandburg and other white American poets who are constantly recited in our schools . " Powerful Long Ladder appeared in the midst of Dodson ' s busy (and successful) career as dramatist and teacher . His interest in writing and drama began in his youth in Brooklyn, New York, where he was born and attended public schools, He went to Bates College, obtaining a B. A. , and Yale where he was awarded the M.A. in drama. While a ~ student at Yale two of his plays--Divine Comedy and Garden of Time--were produced. Since those years Dodson's work in drama and writing has been prodigous . He taught drama at Spelman College in Atlanta and was commissioned to write a play on the Amistad mutiny for Talladega College . He directed summer theatre at Ham~ton Institute, the Theatre Lobby Washington, and at Lincoln University . Dodson fina lly settled at Howard University as drama instructor, later becoming head of the department and remaining the1_until 1969 • . �In 1949, he took the Howard University Players on a successful State Department- • sponsored tour of Scand, navia and Germany. His novel, Boy at the Window, was published in 1950, and his short story, "The Su!Ilmer Fire," won a Paris Review prize (1961) and appeared in the Best Short Stories f~om that publication. received many other awards and forms of recognition: He a Rosenwald fellowship, a General Education Board Fellowship; a Guggenheim grant to study and travel in . Cl Italy (1953), and a Maxwell Anderson Prize for"-.verse play. libretto for Mark Fax's opera. He also wrote the He has completed a number of manuscripts in poetry and prose which have never been published. One of his most recent exciting works was The Dream Awake (1969), a cultural history of Black Americans, released by Spoken Arts, and consisting of color films, records, textbooks, illustrations, and other materials which show the range of Dodson's talents and interest. 1970, his second volume of verse, The Confession Stone: In Song Cycles, was published; but the poems were written before 1960. About his work as a poet, Dodson reports with some dispirit in Interviews I have written three books of poetry. The first was--I would say--somewhat propaganda, but the third was filled with stories, diaries, and remembrances of Jesus. They are really framed in diaries by Mary, Martha, Joseph, Judas, Jesus, even God. This, I believe, is my most dedicated work .... I have written and fought somehow in my writing, but I know now that the courage and forthrightness of writers and poets will change something a little in our dilapidation. "l,.Pt>rre_f(o That "first" voiiJmeN-s obviously Rq__werful Long Ladder; but Dodson does not have �to depreciate the work since it will hold him in good stead as a poet. There is not one poem in the book which cannot be aesthetically or stylistically called "poetry." And this is not a claim that many poets can make. influences can c tot, be traced to the American modernists. Dodson's stylistic And there is no doubt that, in his recurring despair, he shares sentiments with Eliot, Pound, Auden and Yeats. Yet, in his lilt and his language, he also pays his debts to Hughes, Dunbar, Cullen (whom he eulogizes), James Weldon Johnson and the whole web of Black folk and spiritual life. Dodson's note of despair, which pervades the book, is sounded in the opening poem ("Lament") where the lynched boy is addressed: Wake up, boy, and tell me how you died: What sense was alert last, .•• Relying heavily on his experiences and interests in drama, Dodson carefully underscores the repulsive act and the guilt. In an italicized section he gives details that recall other poems on the theme: the Mississippi drank itself one night, the bridge from which you hung threw it~ arms up, folded into mud like an old obscene accordion, the crowd dispersed counted on its fingers one by one •.•. The invisible Black viewer of the lynching, going beyond the actual act to the nature of death itself, gets curious about the last moments, and questions the dead boy: Tell me what road you took, What hour in the day is luckiest? The narrator wants a sign ("the acrostic, the cross, the crown or the fire"), �something to make his own way easier, bearable: O, wake up, wake! f-we said several strains of Black and modern poetry can be seen in Dodson's work, not the least among them being the folk idiom. Sterling Brown. In "Guitar" he reminds us of The six-string guitar has a "lonesome" wail and cannot "hold its own" against the howl of a Georgia hound. And the guitarist-singer Ain't had nobody To call me home From the electric cities Where I roam. An adaptation of the blues motif in style and theme, it employs incremental refrain and the ambivalent drive-sulk of This somber tone of Dodson's persists in_poems like "Sorrow is the only Faithful One" ("I am less, unmagic, black"), "Black Mother Praying" ("black and burnin in these burnin times"), "The Signifying Darkness," and there are tinges of it even in celebratory poems such as "Pearl Primus" and "Poem for Pearl's Dancers." But the grand statement of poetry is always lurking or leading ("Pearl Primus"): "the sun is like a shawl on their backs," and "pistoning her feet in the air." In "Someday We're Gonna Tear Them Pillars Down" a woman complains: They took ma strong-muscle John and cut his manhood off •••. The Blacks in "Rag Doll and Summer Birds" sit in their cabin (like "The Bean Eaters") "waiting for God." The fire in the stove goes out, the newspapered walls, "telling of crimes," curl up and In the Blackness stars are not enough! ~Included in Powerful Long Ladder are three verse choruses from Divine Comedy. �Dodson was the first Black dramatist to exploit the meaning of the Father Dt•vine movement in verse drama. When a cult leader is gone, the drama contends, the people are forced inward to find a replacement. Divine Comedy is bizarre, with shifting uncertainties, horror, violence, religious extremism and racial intensity. The first chorus asks (in a refrain): Cancel us. Let doomsday come down Like the foot of God on us. A character called "One" notes that We are clear and confused on many issues: ... A "Girl" says I dance without legs. "One" reminds us that War, war will bomb your eyes open. In the Star Chorus, a "Blind Man" beseeches the others: Don't leave the blind to wander Where the wind is a wall! Cullen, one of Dodson's heroes, had suggested that Blacks were not made "eternally to weep" ("From the Dark Tower") and Dodson has a "Young Man" say This shall not be forever. In the section called Poems for My Brother Kenneth, Dodson delicately recalls remembrances of his dead brother. The somber tone and weightiness return as the poet, addressing his brother, asks for some answer to the "long tanks" that "creep" and the "dark body of the ruined dark boy." There was no reply: But: �You gave me a smile and returned to the grave. In Interviews with Black Writers Dodson claims that Cullen did not die from disease but "was pushed into death" by "us because we did not recognize the universal quality of what he wanted to say." (ill In his eulogy, "Countee Cullen," t ~ Review section) Dodson bids farewell to his friend who died in 1946 by likening his plight to that of Socrates' f : We hear all mankind yearning For a new year without hemlock in our glasses. Later)t,I "t)runken Loverj' we find that this is "the stagnant hour." interest in o •••• jlob¾ihl\is {w,es seen f◄ i8 And Dodson's in "Jonathan's Song": Jew is ndt a race Any longer--but a condition. Finally, Dodson closes the volume appropriately with "Open Letter" wherein he asks for tolerance and understanding in a time of war, hatred, domestic violence and racism. 8 JJ -fhitpoe:/ "[onathan's Song" i.. alignedl\l · ff with the jews being massacred -;.. in Germany: I am~art of this: .•. ~ "Open Letter" calls on the universal brotherhood: /\. Brothers, let us discover our hearts again, Permitting the regular strong beat of humanity there To propel the likelihood of other terror to an exit. (}.A_ The war is almost over, he says,/\'planes stab over us." The word "hallelujah" can be understood in the language of All the mourning children and The torn souls and broken bodies will be restored . \ �when war has ceased forever . Signaling his non-black "brothers," a tone and posture quickly fading from Black ,,....._ poetry, Dodson challenges theml : Brothers, let us enter that portal for good When peace surrounds us like a credible universe . Bury that agony, bury this hate, take our black hands in yours. It was the "We Shall Overcome" call that would die in the mid- sixties, though a few (Hayden, Hughes and others) would continue to walk the difficult tight-rope of universal brotherhood. poetry. l There are fine rhythms and keen perceptions in Dodson's °'"e,11:6111 brltei-~ t<viowyt • His technical skill surpasses many Black and white poets who1 ~ &llt, The Confession Stone: Songs Cycles, though published in 1970, cont'ains work done in the forties and fifties. Dodson has described it as being "filled with stories, diaries, and remembrances of Jesus . " It is a strange "cycle," which moves among "The land of the living and the land of the risen dead." The groupings (many written to be sung) are "The Confession Stone," "Mary Passed this Morning," "Journals of the Magd ~ ene," "Your Servant: Know You're Lonely," "Dear, My Son," and "Oh l1y Boy, Jesus." Judas," "Father, I The cycles recast fiblical stories surrounding Jesus Christ and the crucifixion, updating them by adding contemporary language (Black idiom at times) and technology. In poem.!_ of "Confession Stone," Jesus is quieted with the words \)t N V~III shushhh, you need the rest. ~ if he knows "Lazarus is back?" In V Jesus' .,- mother vows to save him from the cold and icy Jerusalem ground: Let me rock him again in my trembling arms. 0( �"Mary Passed '[his Morning" contains "letters from Joseph to Martha." Number I is a poetic telegram: Martha Mary passed this morning funeral this evening stop Near six o'clock tell the others stop Raising bus fare for you stop '(/:rt signed Joseph is clear after a while that Dodson is reliving the life and times of Jesus ttlso through Black characters; he~ses the old search for the Promised Land motif l:l't!it (Eright, Ellison, Baldwin, Brown). In number I of "Journals of the Magd~ene" 'if> e. p~oTttgonls-t 1f gi 3 (\vows even to "crucify myself" in order to be with him. Amen. Writing a letter to Jesus in number I of "Your Servant: Judas," Judas says Dear Jesus, I killed myself last night. The "cycle" is completed as Dodson ends the small volume with the opening poem: "Oh My Boy: Jesus" Johnson's "Creation": and the mother saying, in the maimer of the preacher in "rest on my breast." Of Dodson's frequently anthologized poems, "Yardbird's Skull" (a tribute to sax9phone player, Charles "Yardbird" Parker) is one of the most enduring and ti IIJ, powerful. writers: Parker (1920-1955) is also saluted by other poets and Cuney and John A. Williams, to name just two. He is a major figure in the development of jazz, American music and contemporary jazz literature. In statement and style, "Yardbird's Skull" ele~! cally captures the psychic and �rhythmic layerings and wanderings of "Bird's" horn . When "the bird" died, Dodson thinks, so did "all the music" and "whole sunsets" were deprived of t his great musician ' s voice. A skull becomes the metaphor for the historical corridors of music and Dodson's fingering of the skull, like Yorick of Hamlet, allows him to retrace Bird's journey to greatness: to air, to brotherhood which sired the music, to soaring birds, to Atlantis, even, and to Places of dreaming, swimming lemmings. There has been only slight criticism of Dodson ' s poetry. Barksdale and Kinnamon write briefly of him. ~ ~ is in most anthologies of Black poetry beginning with Kerlin's Negro Poets and Their Poems. Gwendolyn Brooks 'j winning of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1950 momentarily brought new attention to the poetic activities of Afro-Americans. But, though her name hung like anticipation over the decade of the fifties, the period in fact was dominated by fiction writers: "specially the articulate expatriate Richard Wright, Ralph EllisonJ and James Baidwin. Wright had es- tablished a tradition, and many were attempting to follow in his footsteps-including John Oliver Killens, William Attaway• and Chester Himesp."7Barksdale and Kinnamon). The works of the fiction writers, and their accompanying dialogue with Black and white critics and each other, helped develop "a national, almost global conce r n for the identity problems of American Blacks. Fiction writers also wrote in a diversity of styles , from nwright 1 s 11 school to Demby 1s "consciousnes However . e t s were wr .... ting awl publis ting, in variou s places, during the fifties, but most of their activities were part of the ground swell that would reach a crescendo in the sixties and seventies. Many of ~-t.::: pr1•8 can be found in such anthologies as Negro Caravan (1941), The Poetry of the Negro (1949), American Literature by Negro Authors (1950), Lincoln University Poets (1954), Beyond the Blues (1962), Sixes and Sevens (1962), Burning Spear: An Anthology ~ le �of Afro-Saxon Poetry (1963), and Soon One Morning: 1940-1962 (1963). New Writing by American Negroes, As individuals and groups, the poets continued to make their work available either to each other or to the small of the period (colleges, schools, churches). iiiiiik poetry reading audiences Hughes, Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks and others, who had established reputations in the forties, continued writing• 0..+.t And the younger or lesser known poets of this/\transitional stage (Wright, r<'\ Danner, O'Higgins, Allen--Vesey, Randall, Dure'/\, Holman, Jeffers, Patterson, Atkins, Evans, and others) either published \'If\ little magazines or won various regional and national writing contests--primarily through schools and colleges. Opportunity, The Crisis, The Negro Story, Negro History Bulletin, Phylon and numerous college periodicals, continued to provide forums. Some of the poets who appeared in The Crisis during the thirtie.s and forties, for example, ~~ Grace E. Barr, Edna Barrett, Milton Brighte, Sophy Nae Bryson, Clarissa Bucklin, Lillian Byrnes, Polly Nae Hall, Alice Ward Smith, Paul A. Wren, Walter Adams, Ethel Collins, Edith M. Durham, and Max Reynolds. ,-.. Others - pub- lished in regional magazines or brought out collections of their own works .... : NoY Joseph Dickerson (A Scrap Book, 1931), Thomas A/kins (The Eagle, 1936), Leslie M. Collins (Exile, A Book of Verse, 1938), William Walker (who published 11 volumes between 1936 and 1943), Olive Lewis Handy, Claude T. Eastman, Nick Aaron Ford (Songs From the Dark, 1940), Haurice Fields (The Collected Poems of l:!sturice Fields, 1940), R.F . Boyd (Holiday Stanzas, 1940), folklorist J. Mason Brewer ( four books of poems), William Holmes Borderx (Thunderbolts, 1942), Anita Turpeau Anderson (Pinpoints: Group of Poems and Prose Writings, 1943), Aloise Barbour Epperson (The Hills of Yesterday and Other Poems, 1944), Mary Albert �Bacon (Poems of Color, 1948), Harrison Edward Lee (Poems for the Day, 1954), Willie Ennis (Poetically Speaking, 1957), Paul Vesey (Ivory Tusks, 1956), and Arthur Wesley Reason (Poems of Inspiration for Better Living, 1959). Q.rnt Stm'ltBL.tu,k) -the., " /J tu, Among white~poets, the fifties were aglow with the fervor ofABeat movement.JiP4',_d Kenneth Rexroth, E.E. Cunnnings, Lawrence F$"linghetti and Alan Gin~berg. Hughes, and Bob Kaufman especially, played a great part in introducing the Beats to the poetic lyrics of jazz and the jagged-lined interpretation of post-war blues of the "lost generation." Another influence on the beats was Russell Atkins who, with Helen Johnson Collins, founded Free Lance in Cleveland,, a.. a (l959). An avant-garde "little" magazine, it played an uns~ng part in the development of ideas and techniques of the New American Poetry. the "style" At the dawn of the sixties, c)Pe. of Black~ also figured prominently/ as - . ilways/lllllllh in the pacing of the literary and cultural concerns. The Be-Bop poet Babs Gonzales, . Lr' t-e d1ndt along with jazz-poetry narrators like King Pleasure, influenced theA~ of-' ~ Poet.Y. signaled a call for re-examination of I'\ the "ear" traditionally used in the silent writing of a poem. As the fifties closed, the precise passion of Gwendolyn Brooks and the troubador's gait~ ~1illv of Hughes hurled a dual, ifjf a 4a unified, challenge at Black poets. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Eugene B. 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In copyright. <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/</a> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Redmond, Eugene B. https://digitallis.isg.siue.edu/files/original/63d7077aaa8e029be4617eddda10b479.pdf 3f17f4269d9a8d5f28cabec659ed24c2 PDF Text Text CHAPTER IV JUBILEES, JUJU'S AND JUSTICES: 1865 - 1910 We have .fashioned laughter Out or tears and pain, But the moment a.fter-Pain and tears again. --Charles Bertram Johnson I Overview This "transitional" period is normally viewed by critics as the gestation o.f pre-revolutionary Black writing. We have seen, however, that some o.f the most politically-conscious activists, thinkers and poets wrote be.fore the Civil War. Frantz Fanon (1924-1961), the Martinique-born psychiatrist, for established three phases the,\1-iterature of oppressed peoples: (1) assimilationist, (2) pre-revolutionary and (3) Critics generally agree with Fanon. revolutionary. So, following his reasoning, the period of 1865-1910 (and the previous era) would fall under number one. Number two coincides roughly with the Harlem Renais- sance (1920-1930). number three . And the 1960'-'s (Black Arts era) comes under One should exercise caution, however, in placing categories and labels on any artists--especially ones so diverse and complex as Black poets. For while it is true that there are general trends in the evolution of the poetry, little said �by the so-called "armageddon" writers of the l96if's and 1970'-'s can be a nymore "revolutionary" than Walker, Whitfield or ":) Albery Whitman who favored the murder of Black traitors ( ''Uncle Toms II and "Topsies ") to the cause of freedom. On the other hand, as in the past, some contemporary Black writers avoid politics like the plague (see Introduction). Also the alternatives and options facing Blacks nowadays--resignation, emigration, assimilation, despair, segregation, desecration and so on--have always been there. During the 17th and 18th centuries, Black poets and activists vigorously pursued these choices, som~times participating (Whitfield-Douglass) in fiery debates. A ••dn 1.i111 16 the& 'Fx,eceding chapters dation for • e\"tiblhhe~ : foun- Black poetry that, only recently, has become popular and accessible. Therefore, critical comments and background materials will be less extensive from this point on. Certainly, as Robinson suggests, more careful study of the poets of the Harlem Renaissance is needed. His observation that "Afro-American •soul' bas never received the elaborate philosophical, poetic, and even political explication that }lesri t1:,~ has II - ~ . -~ is also well taken S5 (although there is some attempt to ai~ess "soul" in The Hilitant Black vriter in Africa and the United States, Cook and Henderson). Understanda le, too/ is a comment by Sterling Stucke (Ideological Origins of Black Nationalism) that "Had a nationalist of antebellum America real zed t e enormous importance of 9lack l3f �culture••• that awareness, articulated into theory, would have been as revolutionary a development as calling for a massive slave-uprising." Of course we know, looking back at the last hundred years, that Stuckey's assessment does not take in all the facts. Early Black Americans identified with their cul- tural roots more blatantly than do even some Blacks of today. But the undermining inf'luences of lynchings and the practice of stereotyping corroded much initial race pride and sell-interest. Again we note that chronological boundaries are arbitrary ~...llf"\Ce S and that we could just as well have studied ....,_,.parper in the 1865-1910 period (since her Sketches of Southern Life was published in 1873 and her Poems ran through several editions until 1874) just as we could have placed Benjamin Clark ("What is A Slave?n) and James Madison Bell in the last chapter . It is not always easy to determine where a poet who writes early or late in life fits in the chronology; but if pursuit of the poetry becomes a labor of love, boundaries and categories cease to exist . ,,,,,.,,..- II / ' Forgive thine erring people, Lord, Who lynch at home and love abroad -....... ----...... """"'· ,. -~, ~----~;:. ..,-Qharles R. Dinkins Literary and Social Landscape ' -------------.,.,-.......~...~.,,,•If" ) Between 1865 and 1961 America played out a dra.mE\. of contradictions, swelling and receding expectations, continued progress and experimentation in science and the arts, and �important beginnings. It was a period of painful adjustment that has continued to echo. -.,P lt .a. On the white literary scene 'Whitman ( the "American poet"), Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, .James Russell Lowell, Henry .James, Stephen Crane, .Jack London, Emily Dickinson, .Joel Cha~dler Harris and Irwi~ Russetwere the writers of importance. Harris gained popularity for himself and Black folklore when he published the Uncle Remus tales in 1879. Eut while romanticism and local color dominated the last two decades of the 19th century, both began to fade with the approach of the new century--whose early years saw experimentation, especially in verse, and the beginnings of naturalistic writings. On the political and economic fronts the efforts at solidifying gains, and retrieving losses, were stepped up among Blacks. The NAACP was founded in 1909; but,ajor vehicles for protest and change were those used during the earlier years: the church, seli'-help societies, free schools, scholarly research and writing on.., Blacks, and debates over courses and choices. Important new names in literature, art, science and politics came to the forefront. However, many of the writers, activists and educators from the previous period continued their various programs. • Of the new ~Ot"C.e'J , several should be noted: Booker T. Washington (Up From Slavery, 1900), v .E.B. DuBois (The Suppression of the African Slave Trade, 1896; The Philadelphia Negro, 1899; The Souls of Black Folk, 1903), Charles Chestnutt (writer of fiction), Dunbar, .James leldon .Johnson, �~Lo:,r1 loe,t:e, > Fenton Johnson, James D. Corrothers,AWilliam Grant Still (The Underground Railroad, 1872), Alexamder Crummell (founder of American Negro Academy), Albert!,. Whitman, Benjamin Brawley . \Y (The Negro in Literature and Art in the United States, 1910), Kelley Miller (Race Adjustment, 1909), William Stanley Braithwaite and Alice Dunbar-Nelson (Violets and other Tales, 1895). Black America witnessed a major step in the development of its stage ·productions (many designed to destroy "stereotypes n fostered by white minstrels and dialect writers) with Bob Cole's A Trip to Coonto~~the first musical produced and managed by Blacks, Will Marion Cook and Dunbar followed with Clorindy;Yn 1898; and Cole returnedJthis time with James veldon Johnson, to write and play i~ed Mo~~The maturation of essays, journalism and autobiography also continued. Elizabeth Keckley, friend to presidents and statesmen, wrote Behind the Scenes in 1868; Douglass founded the New National Era (1869-1872) and published his Life and Times in 1881. at Hampton Institute in 1872. Southern Workmen was established T. Thomas Fortune founded The Rumor in 1879 and edited the New York Age in 1887. year The Washington Bee came into being. In the same Others included Penn's The Afro-American Press (1891), John H. Murphy's Baltimore Afro-American (1892), The Chicago Defender (1900) and Monroe Trotter's Boston Guardian (1901). vnsrtsnt BJ acir ?ft usau rswes fer , Pi from tbs r t1 @s: sa at tm 11su1aa I B ssk&S ± J �Dunbar, 1fhitman, Fenton Johnson, Corrothers and Braithwaite, are the poets of interestl during this period. James Weldon Johnson wrote "Lift Every Voice and Sing" in 1900 but is usually identified with the Harlem Renaissance writers. (llo.it1 And~Locke, intellectual and scholar, was one of the important chroniclers and interpreters of tb•era. DuBois, sociologist and editor, is chiefly known as a poet for bis "Song of the Smoke" and "Litany at Atlanta," written after the 1906 cJ!•l"leS race riot. "-Chestnutt was the first important Black writer of fiction. Both he and Dunbar were endorsed by Howells, who •;<- presided as { czar over American literary criticism 1 during the last quarter of the 19th century. Howells also helped laund\ the careers of Henry James .t\ went ss · z s i JtiGOLHCS 5&05 J LBEL 33$6 _££3. and Walt Whitman. Generally, with the exception of Braithwaite, Fenton Johnson, M~1 11g Whitman and a few others, Black poets followed the dialect tradition of the day. Robinson (Early Black American Poets) notes that The vogue was established among white southern writers (who failed to appreciate their own amusing dialects) with Irwin Russell (185379) whose popular pieces were collected and published posthumously as Poems by Irwin Russell (1888) with a loving preface by Joel �Chandler Harris, also popular for bis Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit prose tales in Negro dialect. The major Black dialect poets "'e~ --~Dunbar, Daniel Webster Davis, .James Edwin Campbell, Elliot B. Henderson a nd .J. Mord Allen;· \.u..;t·· ~ pI I I 211 .James Weldon .Johnson Awrote LAU ,, &!! 6ii@ dlai@CS I J■ BI 1'hc. l J in •• oW.~ '1i idiom. ta Dunbar surpassed alli\writers--Black and white, including Russell after whom he patterned his efforts. ~ 9JM.b ,1 or P"-~ct~yme"f, His ability to empathizei\rather than simply "report'/\'] Id & C.ou,-1..e.A Ii] s:•...,with his "perfect" ear for speech, make him more authentic. uAit s-t.nJ~~t:•· VerSe.Pofor.vh' wota~ I I iii • Dunbar also wrot w o be rernemberer3 t 7 was his dialect poetry ("a jingle in a broken tongue") that gained him notoriety. The biggest contradiction of the era was that "Reconstruction" occurred in name only. The growth of white hate and intimidation groups (2,500 Blacks were lynched between . 1885 and 1900), the development of a nee-slavery, the paradoxical plight of the "freedman" (see Washington's Up From Slavery), the general disappointments in social "paper" programs and the disillusionment on the parts of Blacks who fought in the Civil War--all influenced and helped direct the contemporary Black mood. Coupled with this was the eginnings of the Great Migration of southern Blacks to northern urban centers. While dialect poetry emerged as the most popular form in poetry and prose, .James Weldon .Johnson later observed (American Negro Poetry)t at it would not encase the manifold 13h �nature of the lack Experience; white writers had initiated it a nd Blacks could only "caricature the caricatures." Caught up for a while in the potentials of the Emancipation Proclamation and "Reconstruction", many Black poets also couched their lines in patriotism and sentimentalit r (see .Johnson's "Fifty Years"). During this period, t e first of a series of Black manual arts colleges was established. Hampton Institute, Fisk Uni- versity, Howard University, Horehouse College and .Johnson Smith College were among the early ones. c. In 1871, the year of .James ' Oldon .Johnson's birth, the Fisk .Jubilee Singers made tkt their first concert tour with~pirituals. The tour was epoch- making for it marked the f rst time a Black indigenous American art form had been given such worldwide exposure. e period was crucial, too, for all Black folk art because the burgeoning new Black I n t e l l i ~ anxi: ~ of slavery, 4!:111! 1 ... ~to of their ante-bellum past. d\'91 to remove the ln itter taste themselves of all relics The Spirituals, the rich cadences of folk sreech and the freedom n dance, among other aspects, were given back seat in an attempt to Westernize or "civilize" newly emancipated Blacks The Civil War, Emancipation Proclamation and the stationing of occupation troops in the south, had also left a bitter taste on the tongues o:rrsoutt~;~:~::e.~~~~~~~ whites. The attempt to "colonize" the south, as some saw it, was dramatized by the �arrival of "carpetbaggersn--white northerners preaching Black freedom or exploiting southern industry. The results were the elaborate and ruthless rise of white secret societies and the ridicule of Blacks in newspapers and magazines. Many • Black poets unwittingly participated in this ridtcule through their own dialect and sentimental verse. Others went to the extreme to prove their "goodness" and "Godliness~ as : g HJ ?Ci &sltsat. In the shadows of all thes: ~radoxes, Black minstrels and musicians gained prominence.~Ragtimen heralded an era ultimately to be called the Jazz Age. Meanwhile more serious debate over the fate of Blacks was taking place among men such as Douglass, Washington and DuBois. In 1895, at the International Atlanta Exposition, Washington delivered his famous "Compromise" speech which encouraged Blacks and whites to work as close as the fingers of the hand in matters needing mutual concern; but advised that, in all social respects, the fingers of the hand should be separate • . This was seen as a conciliatory and unprogressive posture by many integration-minded leaders. Washington, who founded Tuskegee Institute in 1881, played down civil concerns and integration, and urged Blacks to seek practical skills. DuBois encouraged Blacks to seek knowledge of the arts and sciences and predicted that a "Talented Tenth" would emerge to lead them. In The Souls of Black Folks, DuBois critiqued Washington's position. The controversy between the two men is now famous as is Dudley Randall's poem ''Booker T. and W.E.B." in which the ideologies of both men are placed against �the mood of the times. In an incremental development of both dialogue and rhyme-refrain, Randall frames his important statements in iambic tetrameter. The use of an imaginary conversation between "\WO "opponents" also allowed the poet to comment on two significant 11 poles 11 in the continuing BJack push for freedom and self-detenni- nation. The DuBois-Washington controversy created reverberations that are still being heard around the Black world. DuBois was, ultimately, to rise as the towering and defiant figure of the period(especi,a lly among Afro-American intelligentsia) while Washington was reduced to a negative and sometimes obscene symbol. A recent book -which deals ~some'What indirectly ' with ' th~se matters is Booker T 1 s Child(l974) by poet Roy L. Hill,see Hill' bibliography). See also Up From Slavery(Washington, 1901), From Slave to College President Godfrey Pike, 1902), The Life and Times of Booker T. Washington Benjamin Riley, 1916) and Booker T. Washington and His Critics tHugh Hawkins, ed., 1962). For a recent informative biography of DuBois see His Day is Marching 0n(Shirley Graham DuBois, 1971). J I �SIBJi&b cl (£01 mo1 e ca 1311:1!6; s so iii.Is fN 1.tFJ I Ho; !s: H!Ol:l) • ];;lespit,o the '•"i@~ii' OllS ;1 ih Kill J 1'00Lst • debates t :i..a sGloia J e6l1Eililg,,of.a0e iLn: M.16 poet::13 (teehn:!:calls mia t iuuallj I hifr ti/ ii I II u see Q§ 1'!i0fli# AP€!X Ufitii Che socoael dcudh w£ , :fi:la e C©bh e onl:·wy u • III ~Cunja man, de Cunja man, \. O chillen, run, de Cunjah mans ~.............____, The Vo\ c.es b Y1 -th e --..Tames Edwin Camp ell ~~:_~_...) Although poets of the previous period placed their verses and polemics in various political and news organs, it was d ring the 1856-1910 era that such a practice reached new levels of importance . Poets had acce ss to numerous regional and national publications, contests, political platforms and educational programs through which they could either read or publish their poems. Robert Thomas Kerlin, for example (Negro Poets and Their Poems, 1923), collected literally dozens of poems from newspapers, church bulletins, privately printed pamphlets and magazines--many of them no longer available. Some indication of the politica l nature of both the people and the poetry of the post-Civil War era is seen in this stanza from "The Song of the Black Republicans" (which appeared in The Black Republican of New Orleans, April 29, 1856): �I Now rally, Black Republicans, Wherever you may be, ...-:.... Brave soldier__!y on the battlefield, And sailors on the sea. Now rally, Black Republicans-Aye, rally% we are ~reel We've waited long long To sing the song-The song of liberty. Continuing for six stanzas, th~• poem is obviously aimed at a public listening and reading audience. It praises "colortt which comes "from the Lord" and reminds Black voters that Abraham Lincoln ( "beneath the Flag of all 11) ''flung us Freedom through its stars. '' Somewhat of a different vein is the work of Benjamin Cutler Clark (1805? - ?) of whom we know very little. A fugitive slave, he attended the 1835 Annual Convention .o f Free People of Color (held in Philadelphia) from his adopted hometown of York, Pennsylvania, where he had moved af'ter leaving the slave state in which he was born. Mostly self-taught, Clark married in Yor~ and raised a large family--writing poetry and prose in his spare moments .. He was politically active and opposed colonization of' Blacks, believing that it was viduals II who emigrated and "not nations. . 11 .,.. 11 indi- The Past, The - Present and the Future (Toronto, 1867) includes prose reflections on the state of race relations and 65 poems. He is primarily �concerned, in poetry and prose, with the issues of slavery and racial injustice, although much of his work deals with domestic life. Infsentiment,) language,J style and influence, Clark bears resemblence to the poets af the period just covered. And although his work was not published until 1867, he wrote poems earlier as indicated, for example, in his 1'What Is a Slave 11 and rrRequiescat in Pace,'' an elegy on the 1857 death of' a woman associate. Clark is quite ef'fective as a poet and, sometimes, even gripping in his ability to make the poem assume the dimensions of the event it relates. in detailing details of' slavery. Like Mrs. Harper, he is graphic And, like Frederick Douglass, (see Narrative) he is tragic-comic in suggesting that those nat home" (in slavery, that is) may Me? 11 miss me." "Do They Miss A Parody" opens each of its four-lined stanzas with Do they miss me at home--do they miss me? and alternates a iambic pentameter and • • (with an ab c b rhyme scheme). tetrameter HU Clark describes an unusual kind of nh ome 11 : "Do they miss me at home--do they miss me? By light, as the horn echoes loud, And the slaves are marched off to the corn f'ield, I'm missed from the half-naked crowd. Using a break (or caesura) reminiscent of the blues, at the third f'oot (the bl!ues breaks at the second), Clark dramatizes slavery and pokes fun at those men who run the · "peculiar I �institution. n He makes similar use of the dash in "What Is a Slave" where he achieves incremental power through repetition and syntactical variance: A slave is--what? A thing that's got Nothing, and that aloneJ His time--his wife-And e'en his life, He dare not call bis own. Employing expletives, spontaneity and suspense, Clark shows himself to be a skilled craftsman (all things considered) for his time and training. His rhyme scheme is a ab cc b with an off-rhyme in the first couplet of each six-line stanza. Under the persistent question 'twhat Is a Slave?" we feel not only t he indictment against slave-owners and racist policies-but some key to the early realizations of Black thinkers that the race was being disrobed physically and psychologically. As with Vassa, Reason and others, the hurt is hidden and defies both definition and visual contact: A slave is--what? I pray do not Insist; I cannot know, To words i m art, Or, pai nt er' s art, Describ e a slave--a, noS Though trapped in the forms of European model-builders, Clark shows bis own ingenuity and or i ginality. By varyi n bis r :1e �sc emes and meter, and using dashes and expletives, be rings emotional power interlaced with an ironically detached n- tellectual assessment of the slave's plight. He is similarly powerf:tl in a poem like "The Seminole 11 where be (continuing a. long-line of Black salutory verse) praises Oceoll, Seminole chief arrl hero of Seminole wars in Florida in the earl century. In this, of Florida). 19t e also anticipates 'Jbitman's work (Rape For selections of Clark's works and brief criti- cism see Robinson's antbolo . See also Joan R.. berms.n's Invisi le Poets If Clark's strength lay in bis assault against racial injustices, James Madison Bell's (1826-1902) lay in bis npleas 11 and "hope. fl 11 Fortunate n enough to w tness tbe Civil far, Emancipation and Reconstruction, Bell railed against injustices but primarily expressed hope in bis 40 years of observing the Black struggle. Bell spent most of bis adult life delivering eloquent and weighty poetic elocutions on freedom, hope and liberty. He was born in Gallipolis, Ohio, wbic be left at age 16 to pursue the trade of plasterer and the avocation of orator-poet. A wanderer, Bell played his part in the over- throw of slavery--soliciting funds and recruiting Blacks for John Brown's a orted 1859 raid at Harper's Ferry. Before the raid, Bell had moved to Canada where he continued his friendship with Brown and :fathered a large family. He later traveled to California, back to Canada, to various cities in Ohio and Michigan, and, finally, spent time in Toledo. During this �odyssey Bell appeared at concert halls, churches and various public gatherings to read his poetry in some political or commemorative event. He also took advantage of books and gained considerable understanding of history and literature. His major themes are devotion, inspiration, love, unity, collective strength and political change. Achieving "something of Byronic power in the roll of his verse," (Kerlin) Bell's 0 poems are often too long, too ted:t,ps am lacking in interest. Robinson notes that Not to mitigate his obvious technical flaws, it is helpful to remember that Bell is best appreciated as something of an actor, his poems regarded as scripts. Unashamedly chronicling his journeys, Bell included the following as a full title of Triumph of Liberty (1870): A Poem,/ Entitled the/ Triumph of Liberty./ Delivered April 7, 1870,/ Detroit Opera House,/ On the Occasion of/ The Grand Celebration of the f inal Ratification/ of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Con-/ stitution of the United States. Consisting of 902 lines, the poem erupts through the use of all the nflourishes and vocal modulations at his experienced command." According to Redding (To Make A Poet Black), Bell "unblushingly" claimed the titles of "Bard of Maumee" and nPoet of Hope." Typical of Bell's style is bis tribute to his friend John Brown (from The Triumph of Liberty): Although like Samson he was ta'en, �And by the base Philistines slain, Yet 1e in death accomplished more Than e 1 er he had in life before. His noble heart, which ne'er had failed, Proved firm, and e 1 en in death prevailed; And many a teardrop dimmed the eye Of e 1 en his foes who saw him die-And none who witnessed that foul act ill e'er in life forget the fact. ' Approaching something of the stature of Vashon' s "Vincent Oge 11 and Whitfield's "Cinque," Bell's tribute has all the ring of indebtedness to Scott, Byron, Pope, Tennyson and other English popular masters with whom he was familiar- However imitative and derivative, though, Bell seemed never to be at a loss for exalting, exhortatory poetical flourishes. In "Song for the first of August" he sings a song for "proud Freedom's dayn: Of every clime, of every hue, Of every tongue, of every race, 1 Neath heaven's broad ethereal blue; Ohl let thy radiant smiles embrace, Till neither slave nor one oppressed Remain tbro~ghout creation's span, By thee unpitied and unblest, Of all the progen of man. One of Bell's most ambitious works is h is "Hodern Hoses , or 1 Hy Policy' fa.n II in whic --in scaliing satire--he assesses the �administration of president Andrew Jonson. Johnson (l 05- 1875), who succeeded the assassinated Lincoln in l 65, was born poor and learned to write and figure from his wife. His ~a ·,ti. he,~""' presidency {iA J Ai n a showdown between a progressive Republican Congress and Johnson, a reactionary Democrat. Once in office Johnson began reversing his harsh criticisms of the South, giving former rebels a rat er free hand at things and vetoing several bills aimed at giving Blacks a better share of things. Upset by the whole thing, Bell iirOte a blistering satire--which w'h ~r-e.t~ often collapses as such--• nrhao~, with couplet-fury, he observes that: And crowns there are, and not a few, And royal robes and sceptres, too, That have, in every age and land, Been at the option and command Of men as much unfit to rule, As apes and monkeys are for school. Following poets like Clark and Whitfield, and anticipating 11 signifying 11 poets of the 196Ofs and 7O's (such as Baraka, Crouch, Toure, Ec,iels: "Western Syphillization, n and others) Bell com- pares Johnson to all manner of evils. Johnson is also contrasted to "good 11 or liberal whites such as Congressmen Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens and abolitionist Wendell Phillips. Cyn- ically calling Johnson "Modern Moses", Bell also uses the derisive "Mose 11 --which appears to be a way of reducing him to the level of the stereotype whites reserve for Blacks (see, L· for example, such statements as the one by Don r,.Lee: • 11 styron/ �& bis momma toon). One must chuckle somewhat at Bell's claim that Johnson cursed in the "'1ii tehouse: :: But choose we rather to discant, On one whose swaggish boast and rant, And vulgar jest, and pot-house slang, Has grown the pest of every gang Of debauchees wherever found, From Baffin's Bay to Puget Sound. Only recently have we heard echoes of Bell from journalists, congressmen and old ladies astonished at "Wh itehouse tapes ~ showing that ex-president Richard Nixon cursed in the gval §oom. We have observed, then, tbat Bell, though a ted*s and harfuing poet, is important as a continuing chronicle of the mind and creative development of tbe Afro-American poet. Bell's works also include The Day and The War (1864), dedicated to the memory of Brown; The Progress of Liberty (1870), a recollection of the war , praise for Lincoln and Black troops, and a jubilant greeting of enfranchisement; and The Poetical Works of James Madison Bell (1901), including a preface by his personal friend, Bishop B.W. Arnett. Even though Bishop Arnett claimed that Bell's nlogic was irresistible, like a legion of cavalry led by Sheridan,n the poet recognized his own limitations when he said (Progress of Liberty): 11 The poet laments the discord of his harp, and its disuse, until answering Freedom's call he again essays it harmony." �For other samples and appraisals of Bell's work see Robinson, • • $hewnOJt Brawley, Kerlin, Redding, Brow~~nd Mays (The Negro's God, 1938). Anticipating Melvin B. Tolson of the 20th century (who wrote a book-length answer--Harlem Gallery, 1965-- to Gertrude Stein's statement that nThe Negro suffers from nothingness), Francis A. Boyd (1844-?) penned his only volume in partial response to Rev. Henry Ward Beecher's concern for nthe injured and oppressed sons am. daughters of Africa." Boyd's volume, published in 1870, is entitled Columbiana;/or,/The North Star,/ Complete in one Volume. Boyd explains in the preface that he was born free to Samuel and Nancy Boyd in Lexington, Kentucky, and met hardships trying to acquire an education. Columbiana, the author notes in the preface, comes from nr, a scion of that ancient racen who takes "pleasure in dedicating the following lines" to the Rev. Beecher. Hade up of five cantos (major breaks in a long poem), Columbiana is a poetic narrative on the plight of the Black man in slave-founded America. The cantos contain various structurol.and rhyme schemes--most of which reflect Boyd's knowledge of the classics, neoclassical and romantic traditions in poetry, and the history of events leading up to the Civil War. In the poem, Freedom (personified) travels., like some classical deity, on a winged chariot from Egypt, across Israel, Greece and America. In America, Freedom meets all sorts of evils, like t e protagonist in John Boyd's "vision," among them Secessia, the arch-enemy of Blacks and freedom. Secessia, outherners who seceeded from the union, �is assessed from all sides during -.. assault. In "def ance oyd s iam c tetrametric ade to Union laws,n tbe out "Ignored" truth and rightness And To o_dly drew her litt•ring ampcr down tbe shudd ' r ng slave. ut t e sons and da ghters of A:frica, must have a sa ... so in w at • • • on thy soi ... t Blacks rll) o o •m a part of Secessia, Freedom (cont·nuin tells nsecessia II tl at e Et½"or dwells =' fo l slave-cellsj . .. , lorious triumph o ' or t l"'y ave t .eir eye on t e Nort pa.per) su •1 appens to '1-:Jer .. "The Soliloquy" :from "Canto I In laive tar (also name of Do g:assr ests the narrator in "The Dream" from Canto V" and Be:fore we quench t e 1allowed fire, Once more we strike t e sacred lyre. The Tortb Star lingers int e sky, Enc rcled y a snovry dove. Sun, moon and stars confo nded lie, The ~orth Star outshines all a ove, 'Ts s ning here, ands nin t ere, Forever ruling ever -~here .. The forth Star as remained until this very day i nporta.nt in Black literature. I Robert Hayden is only one contemporary poet ( "Runagate R nagato n) making use or it. bis meter and Confusing bot is rhyme pattern without hints that e is in- tentional or experimenting, Boyd sometimes loses the reader n is la yrinth ne deluge. B t, considering b s station in l.50 �life and the obstacles be worked against, his work is one more notable step in the development of Afro-American poetry. For selections from and assessments of Boyd, see Robinson. Henrietta Cordelia Ray (1850-1916) was among the handfull of Black poets of the 19th century (including Daniel Payne and Ann Plato) who avoided racial themes. Miss Ray, however, seems to be one of the first to try a wide variety of forms. In sonnets such as "To My Father.," rrRobert G. Shaw.," "Milton" and others, she shows skill at writing this difficult form. And in works like "Antigone and Oedipus.," "The Dawn of Love, rr ''Noontide 11 and "The Months n she proves her linguist.i c de:x:terity and poetic virtuosity. Even though 1l1i - Sn~ ifll:&JAavoided outright racial themes.,in her poetry she implicitly commits herself in a poem like "Robert G. Shaw" dedicated to the white Colonel Shaw (1837-1863) of Boston who led the 54th Massachusetts volunteers (all Black) into the Civil War. Killed leading his troops on an assault on Fort Wagner, South Carolina, Shaw is eulogized: O Friendl O heroJ thou who yielded breath That others might share Freedom's priceless gains, In rev'rent love we guard thy memory. Co~ e.L., (). Dunbar., a younger contemporary of i811BARay's, would also prai.se Shaw who, like Lincoln, became one of the important white heroes to post--.war Black Americans. t,Klello. ~"-Ray, however, was not un- aware of the plight of her brothers and sisters of color in her everyday life. Born one of two daughters to the Rev. 151 �Charles B. Ray (of Falmouth, Massachusetts) distinguished minister and "tireless abolitionist, 11 (JJ I she_ l a./\was very early made aware of slavery and racial injustices. After a rather protected upbringing, which included good traditional training, she went on to New York University where she finished in Pedagogy and to Sauveuer School of Languages 'Mi:t az w ■b~master• Greek, Latin, French, German and the English classics. For a while she taught school, but, finding it boring, preferred to attend her invalid sister Florence (with whom she maintained a life-long friendship), traveling throughout New England and giving moral support to the antislavery work of her father. Her poem~ deal primarily with love, scholarship, intellectual theme8; praise of great literary/ iiii~political figures and seasons. She loved to do settings, descriptions, impressions and cycles in her poetry. For example there is a cycle ("Idyl") which goes through "Sunrise," "Noontide," "Sunset," and "Midnight." Another cycle, "The Months," consists of 12 poems, five of them in eigbt-linef stanzas, five in six-line' stanzas and two in seven-linef stanzas. She generally varies her meter and rhyme schemes; but the ballad form predominates in "The Months" while a two-stanza, six-linef form (rhyme scheme: a ab cc b) heralds the four major segments of the day in "Idyl. II ~eo . .cltL.ia.. Ray, as we have noted, is not an original or innovative poet. But her work does mark a new level of sophistication--despite her imitation of the models followed by most Black poets of her time. Her published poems included Sonnets ( ew York, 1893), and Poems ( ew York, 1887). She also published Commemoration �Ode or Lincoln/ written for the occasion of the/ unveiling of the Freedman ' s monument/ in Memory of Abraham Lincoln/ j.pril- ,1k., ~ - She co-authored., wit her sister., Sketch of the Life of the Rev . Charles B. Ray (New York., 1887). all•I -•• ■ IQ! ,,/dVtR7 0r k For selections of see Robi nson ' s Ear 1y Bl ac k Amer i can Poe t s and and Kerlin's Negro Poets and The r Poems. Ro inson includes . tlA-'. ~ ~fa. ,~ cri tica.1 comments ,, 0 a,t • it Sherman 1111\:Invisible Poets. Declar ng that "I was born in bondage,--I was never a I:) slave.,--" Albe'ty Allson Wh i tman (l 51-1902) thus introduced himself' and his poetry to the 1orld. A complex and rilliant poet (Wagner refers to him as a "brilliant" imitator)., he must have been anticipated by his contemporary Cordelia Ray in the experiments with various verse forms. Whitman was born a slave in or near Munfordsville., Hart County., Kentucky (in Green River country). wdirtilll•:-•a•u•ue~&Pll@~a~1~2~1~1g~p!!ll"'t~h~@•t•n■z■ t"'J••V•1ii•••i•t•s---•-li■ t1~••"L~ muLt:1.Tto) AJ/e was orphaned at an early age and received only bits and pieces of formal training--a glaring 1l'l"Ti'l~Cen1u'"ty irony against his achievement., the most important ~until Dunbar. Though it is widely believed that Whitman wrote the longest poem (over 5,000 lines) by a Black American., we now know that at least two other Black poets wrote longer poems: the Rev. Robert E. Ford's Brown Chapel., a Story in Verse (n.d • ., n.p. ; Preface dated 1903) contained at least 8.,600 lines in 307 pages; Maurice Corbett's Harp of Ethiopia (Hashville., 1914) contained over 7,500 lines in 273 pages. Rev. Ford's work is broken up into ca ntos utilizing ten-linef stanzas while Corbett ' s �epic is divided up into eight-lined stanzas. Wh tman utilized a half dozen or so metrical and stanzaic forms and numerous other rhyme schemes. ottava rima, dialect verse, the His forms include the penserian stanza, blank verse, iambic trochaic and anapest lines in three to five feet f (including stress unrhymed lines), and the various stanzaic and metrical fusions he developed from imitating such writers as Byron, Pope, Whittier, Longfellow, Milton and Scott. The poet developed his technical facilities while he worked, primarily as a pastor of an African Methodist Episcopal Church in Springfield, Ohio, and financial agent for Wilberforce University (where he had studied under Daniel Payne), to support himself and promote race progress. A fiery speaker, lecturer one. e and reader of his poetry, Whitman was f 11 not Ato bitl\ his tongue. In declaring that he "was never a slave" he went on to say--at 40 years of age--"The time has come when all 1 Uncle Toms' and 'Topsies 1 ought to die" The tii 1e of Whitman's first work, Not a Man and Yet a Man (1877) is important both literally and implicitly. For one only has to go a few more steps to place it alongside similar contemporary titles: Soul on Ice, Nobody Knows My Name, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Manchild in the Promise& ~ , Invisible Man, and scores of other volumes of essays, novels, poems and autobiographies. The titles are slightly different but the cry and the passion and aim are the same. Not a Man and Yet a Man, for Whitman, ensconces the dilemma �of the Black man. A mulatto slave, Rodney, saves the life of the daughter of his master during an Indian raid, and afterwards falls in love with her. Going against bis promise to offer his daughter in marriage to the man who saves her, the master instead sells Rodney to a Deep South planter. In his new habitat, Rodney falls in love with a slave girl, Leona and, after being separated from her for a while, spends a beautiful life with her in Canada. The over-simplified theme of the "tragic mulatton comes through in much of Whitman's work which never features the problems or lives of dark-skinned Blacks. Whitman possesses a brilliant gift of descriptive prosaic poetry as in these lines from Not a Man: The tall forests swim in a crimson sea, Out of whose bright depths rising silently, Great golden spires shoot into the skies, Among the isles of cloudland high, that rise, Float, scatter, burst, drift off, and slowly fade, Deep in the twilight, shade succeeding shade. Somewhat reminiscent of the brilliant and anonymous John Boyd, Whitman is competent and relentless when placed against any other romantics of his day. where in Echoing Poe and Lopgfellow, else- ot a ¥.ta.n, Whitman reacts to the t emporary separation of Rodney and Leeona: A true heroine of the cypress gloom, �Now there to lie, the Creole saw her doom-In The Rape of Florida (St. Louis, 1884), revised and repu lished the folloNing year as T~asinta's Seminoles, or Rape of Florida), Whitman engages bis readers in another romantic tale. Under truce, eminole Indians, w o have fought bravely, are fired on, captured, and taken off to Texas where they are re-located. Here, in another antici ation, of "relocation" (see Etheridge Knight rs see presages 1e elly Song) that will come in the works of contemporary writers 1·ke Baraka, ·illiams (The IT.an Who Cried I Am), Baldwin (_ obody Knows !Ty Name) , Greenlee The Spook ,Jho Sat by the Door), Crouch (Ain't Yo A~bulances for no Niggubs Tonite), the Last Poets, Gil Scof Heron (Fre e Will, Sma numerous others. Talk at 125t Street and Lenox) and v itman, at any rate, laments the treatment of the Indians w o extended a brotherly hand to slaves. In a note to the ~ork, •!bitman ment ions tat 1e met relatives of one eminole chief. Atlassa., 11 Rape contains 257 Spenserian stanzas. an eminent Seminole chieftan," was hero-born" ~ 11 Free as the air within bis palr,1y shade, The nobler traits that dote man adorn, In him were native: fot the music made In t ampa's forests or t e everglade ·Jas fitter than in this young Seminole Was the proud spirit which did life pervade, And glow and tremble in bis ardent soul-- �fuich, l this nmost-sel:f, and spurned all mean control. 11 itman's last volume was An Idyl of the South, An Epic Poem n Two Parts { ew York, 1901). 11 Again { 11 The Octoroon" and The Sout land's Charm and Freedom's Magnitude"), ·v hi tman explores the problems of mulattoes. Here, in chronology and subject matter, he parallels Charles Chestnutt, the Black fiction wr ter who also exploited the theme of the mulatto and npassing. 11 A new edition of Rape (1890) also included Drifted Leaves.. vJhi tman rs l orld 's Fair Poem: The Freedman's Triumphant Song, along w th "The Veteran" {Atlanta, l 93), were read imself and Mrs . itman respectively at the Chicago World's Fair, attended by Dunbar and t e venerable Douglass. but Like Dun ar, vJhitman became addicted to alcohol, e managed to maintain his popularity as a bard church- worker, freedom-fighter atrl poet in Drifted Leaves . He also published sermons An edition of "Whitman's complete works, long overdue, is currently being prepared. For selections of his writings see Negro Caravan, Robinson's anthology, Kerlin's book and other anthologies. Sometimes grouped with Phill s 'Wheatl~y in the umocking-bird school of poets, 11 'Whitman is assessed by Wagner, Brown, Brawley, Robinson, Kerlin, Jahn {Neo-African Literature, 1968), Loggins and Sherman. Making only oblique references to racial pressures, George Marion McClellan (1860-1934) is reminiscent of Francis Boyd, and calls to mind Tolson, in his effort to prove Blacks �capable of intellectual and literary competence. However, McClellan still does not deserv~ the abrupt dismissal given ( ~o~otlt"r,_y ~ • him by Sterling Brown~ McClellan writes harmlessly of flowers, trees, birds and love (things Baraka and others have, of late, claimed a Black poet should not waste his time on). But he s competent and technically dexterous so as not to bore. Happily, some of the longer pieces are interpolated with shorter ones and this makes McClellan more readable. After his birth in Belfast, Tennessee, McClellan lived in an economically stable family and later had a good, solid education at Fisk (B.A., 1885, and M.A ., 1890) and the Hartford (Connecticut) Theological Seminary (B.D., 1886). Con- stantly on the go, like Bell, and a f'und-raiser, like Whitman, f'or Fisk University, he spent much of' his time on the eastern seaboard executing his important duties. and taught in several cities: McClellan pastored Normal (Alabama), Memphis, Louisville (Kentucky) and Los Angeles, where he finally went in hopes of finding a cure for his tubercular son. His last years were devoted to soliciting funds for an anti-tubercular sanitorium for Blacks. Among McClellan's published works are Poems (Nashville, 1895), Book of Poems and Short Stories (Nashville, 1895), Old Greenbottom Inn (1896), Songs of a Southerner (Boston, 1896) and Path of Dreams (Louisville, 1916). As a poet, McClellan is sharp, crisp and musical in his use of language and images. 11 The Color Bane" pulls us somewhat forward to Fenton Johnson's 11 The Scarlet Woman" since the �nproblem" of having a beautiful but Black face in the theme of both. Even though HcClellan's woman possesses "inex- pressible grace n For all her wealth and gifts of grace Could not appease the sham Of justice that discriminates Against the blood of Ham. And there is more than a hint in the title of his final volume, Path of Dreams; for, as many observers of Black writing have noted, the "dream II is a central theme ( see Hughes, a den, Nat Turner , Cor;ot er~, Dunbar) • • • • • • • • • • • Yet on t e surface, J,: cClella n i s deli cate and unoffensive . ~1rt.ted11\ verse sonnets, sing-song quasi-ballads, ¥ He ·writes rem niscent of Byron, Scott and H lton, and formal ballads and praises as in "The Feet of .Judas." ymn-inspired Varying meter, stanza and rhyme scheme, HcClellan nevertheless refused to write in d alect--t e vogue or h s day. time, 11 Iviaking it analagous to 11 rag- he coiplained that it was "considered quite the proper dressin for Negro distinction int e poetic art." For ample se ect ions or HcClellan's writings see Kerlints critical antholo w, Robinson's book and .Jo. nson's American Fegro Poetry. Ro ins on., I erlin and Brown also give critical views of licClellan's work. See also Sherman's Invisible Poets. "Rag-picker, to acco steamer, brickyard hand, distiller, teamster and p~ize-f'ighter, 11 J"osep ihiske Seamon Cotter .t~. (1 61-19:,i9) was also one oft e most gifted and prolific �writers of his era. Cotter was born to a Black mother and mite father in Nelson County, Kentucky. The kinds of work cited above characterized h s life when he was forced, at an early age, to interrupt his schooling. school at age Re-entering night 24, he studied to become a teacher and admin- istrator, chores w ich e eventually assumed at the Colored fa.rd School in Louisville. Cotter also taught English lit- erature and composition and contributed poems, stories and L,11/H·,Lt.e articles to local newspapers including tbeACourier-Journal (one of America's outstanding newspapers). In his life and work., Cotter looks for "1ard to Blacks like DuBois, James Weldon Johnson, Mar McLeod Bethune and Langston Hughes. In his writings, he anticipates the variety and virtuosity of a Dunbar. For, in the ords of one critic of the period, "he makes poems and invents and discovers stories, and bardlike, recites them to whatever audience may caJ.l for them-(_ker-Lt n ). n schools, in churches, at firesides," i\Brilliant, precocious and enduring, Cotter pursued the complex side of l fe, dar ng to examine the often over-simplified phenomenon of race relations in America. Kerlin said of his work: "Some are tragedies and some are comedies and some are tragi-comedies of everyday life among the Negroes." Cotter (Brown says he has "both point and pi th"), it must be said, was among the first Black poets to represent, without shame and minstrelsy, authentic Black folk life. He wrote in formal--academic, bookish--forms; but he also wrote ' �explicitly in dialect and standard English, of common life and common problems. He achieves "rushing rhythms and ingenious rhymes 11 when he is at bis best; and a quiet, reflective perserverence, when he writes introspectively. A disciple of Dunbar, Cotter is able to capture vividly the tbeme of traveling and weariness that pervades so much Black literature and song (see "The Way-Side Well" and . . repetitions ;J 7 1 that es- tablish the drudgery and the momentum to carry on). He can be satirical and admonishing in dialect as in nThe Don't-Care Negro": Neber min' your manhood's risin' So you babe a way to stay it. Neber min' folks' good opinion So you have a way to slay it. In "The Negro Cbildn Cotter tells the youth to let nlessons of stern yesterdaysn ••• be your food, your drink your rest, and in the same poem he strikes a pose similar to that of Booker T. Washington's when he advises the child to Go train your head and hands to do, Your head and heart to dare. Cotter's verses also exalt Black and liberal white heroes ( "Frederick Douglass,'' "Emerson," "The Race Welcomes Dr. W.E.B. DuBois as I ts Leader," "Oliver Wendell Holmes") and relish such experiences as reading or listening to Dunbar ( 11Answer to Dunbar's 'After a Visit" and "Answer to Dunbar's 'A Choice'") and Riley ( 11 0n Hearing James Whitcomb Riley Read"). He vigorously searches �the human heart--and the intangibles of lying, hating, and self-denying--in poems like "Contradiction" and "The Poet." nMy Poverty and Wealth" recalls Corrothers' "Compensationtt since the richness and strength of com.mo ~ss, charity and honesty triumph over money and a high social station. A prolific writer, Cotter published several volumes including: A Rhyming (1895); Links of Friendship (1898, with a preface by Courier-Journal editor Thomas Natkins); Negro Tales (1902); a four-act play in blank verse, Caleb, the Degenerate (1903); and A White Song and A Black One (1909). A good biographical- critical study of Cotter is long overdue. For selections and critical appraisals see Robinson and Kerlin. See also Countee Cullen's Caroling Dus1( (1927) and Sherman. Judging from much of the critical reception of Daniel Webster Davis (1862-1913) the prevailing feeling is that he should just disappear. Of all t e critics assessing im (Wagner, Brown..,Redding, Brawley, Sberman, Jonson and others), only two, Redding and S erman, seem to feel that Davis bas any "sincer tyn in h s efforts to portray Blacks in dialect. Reddingts posit on is ironic, indeed, since, in To Make a Poet lack, e does not discuss t~e folk tradition in Black l "tera- ture. Davis (vho operated on t e theory tat t e most effective writer tt • s the one n demand t1) is deri vat ve of t . e white writers of dialect, as --1ere most of the Black dialect -:riters, and seeus only to transcend the m n t e fact of his ein • a Black man and a preacber--w o could deliver the verses with t . e vlliebB!Jf!llet~t'~ �im act irn ossi le of !I'homas .C. Gordon, white 11 ia."'ect writers. scholar of dialect" ~mc.u,.t\ periencos .ai-N3Tac s. 1 edd "n t e also a. serious n first hand ex- In introd ct ons to his hooks et een e dra s -a.ck and J.ite so t1ern im--for is exaggerated estion that plantat on 11 eddin ,e!i~~:::g- of Blac rs darkiesn were content to 11 ve out their liv s eating ' og meat, stea in • 01 'H3.S praises Davis for the same reasons tat ot er criti.cs dismiss and hiss :Javis ho •.-r.rote from bis comparisons and contrasts speech. elson Pao, Irwin Russell and 11 'ttfaderrnill ijs" and believes tat Davis 'f poetr "re resents ighest imag no.t ve power of the plantat on :regro, t e prodi al richness of is imager~r, and . is happy po rer to resolve all difficulties and m.yster es a c ild." Reddin 's comment, not so t a.rs t e reasoning of as t might seem, is nevertheless only partially--if that muc .--true. For how does one account for the ingenu ty of the work songs, t e Spirituals, the d "tties and jingles and t e earl;.r lues? D d not the same "child" create them also? Brown, on the other and, refers to Davis as t e " egro Thomas Nelson Page 11 --quite a nasty "put-do.Jn 11 , to use contemporary parlance .. lacks in And Davis does seem to iving his poems sue Down Souf," ttBakin ant Greens, titles as: tt and "De Bigges' Piece ub Pie." e making f'un of "og Meat," "''e "Is Dar Wadermi lluns on Hi ? 11 But he is bent on meeting the needs of people wbo want to be "instructed and entertained." And it will be observed that in some parts of' the South, the dipt on t. is dropped f'rom its ending position in f'avor off • tb3 �• and one certainly find.Sevidence of Blacks speaking like the characters in v ebster 's poetry. But another answer might e in a comparison between Flip Wilson (Rev. LeRoy) and Rev. Daniel Webster Davis who achieved great popularity wen he turned his pulpit into a stage from which to unload his own brand of "saving souls'' and making the "word" come alive. As Rev. Davis, the dialect poet was not unlike such men as John Jasper ii and "other egro preachers II of his day who •were so well known. g r 1 1 rJ rrl, Black Billy Sunday, Brother Easter, Davis,, two collections, primarily in dialect, are Idle Moments (1895) and Weh Down Sou:t' (1897). 1 lished prose. He also left much unpub- Most of his work deals with joviality, gluttony, flamboyant sermons, happiness, the "contented" slave and mis-:--. chievjousness--the stereotypical behavior which white minstrelsy \:., has fostered on the Blac~~ux rr:,,... Davis is derivative, as we noticed, to the point of copying whole lines and phrases as in "Hog Heat II where he takes the words I men the frost is on the Punkin" from James Whitcomb Riley and changes them thusly: When de fros' is on de pun'kin an' de sno'-flakes in de a'r, ••• The poem also closely resembles Dunbar's ''\men De Co'n Pone's Hot." (Although Wagner and other critics claim that Davis did not borrow from Dunbar but worked ndirectly from the models provided by the minstrels and the southern poets.") < !i4 Davis~v1~e.d i.:3;r first-hand experience of the Black folk predicament., �first as a child in North Carolina and, after the Civil War, in Richmond, Virginia, where he attended school. Finishing high school with good marks, he began to teach in the Black schools of Richmond. His popularity was wide among "the less literate of his own race,n according to James Weldon Johnson, which may be a partial reason for Davis' ' continual production of his particular brand of "poetry. . 11 . Known f'or reading his verses with rrcomical unctuousness before convulsed audiences," his work, when placed beside Dunbar's, is unfinished . In style and workmanship, however, it should be noted that Davis is not unlike some of the bombastic Black poets of taday. For when the complete story is told, many "popular 11 contemporary poets--speaking and writing a 11 dialect 11 and titillating ncon- vulsed" audiences--may very well meet the rate reserved for Davis. (Instead of becoming a "prelude to a kissn they may end up a f'ootnote to a joke~) In his few standard English pieces, Davis also preaches a conciliatory attitude, as in nEmancipation 11 where he claims the Af'rican "roamed the savage wild n Untamed his passions; half' a man and half' a savage child, until God "saw fit 11 to teach the Black man of "Him and Jesus Christ . " It could be that there is more to Davis than has met the eye; at any rate, a complete study of his life and works await some serious student or Black poetry. For assess- ments of and selections from Davis's writings see Brown, Sherman, Wagner, Robinson, Redding and Johnson. �Our study makes no claim that every poet briefly considered is any sort of giant. In fact, except when such a title or label is obviously warranted, there is an effort to steer clear of such qualitative evaluations., This is true in view of our stated goal: to place into the hands of students and lay per- sons a handy ref'erence to) and~verview of)Black poetry. So Jean 1 agner 's claim that "it would have required a great deal of indulgence to welcome" the poetry of John Wesley Holloway (1865-1935) into "the literary domain" can not find credence or reinforcement in this book. I ss I& • Wagner also includes Cotter, Corrothers and lftlll&iii 5 saa3atJlft Braithwaite in his list of poets non grata. Holloway, like his contemporaries Davis and Corrothers, was a "preacher-poet." His poetry is in both standard Englis form and dialect, which, according to Johnson, is his "best work." In The Negro's God, Benjamin Mays classes Holloway with the writers and thinkers who take a conciliatory and compen- satory approach to the deity- despite oppression, slavery or whatever. In one poem, Holloway is 1tWai ting on the Lord"; and even Though hosts of sin may hedge me round, 1'!4 llllliii7 1 he will nevertheless wait 11 j patientlyn for help from God. James Baldwin, and other Black writers of the 20th century (getting a first start from Dunbar), call such advice ndishonest." Baldwin, a child-preacher., saw a contradiction in the preacher's �resignation and tbe rat-infested tenement buildings against whose owners tbe preachers refused to lead a rent strike. Yet, as a preacher, Holloway exhibits a classic devotion and tbe ability (see Preface to Johnson's God's Trombones) to aid in tbe welding of tbe disparate Black masses-• sMU!.Js'Ml!S never 1 - , an easy task. A disciple of Dunbar, Holloway was born in Merriweather County, Georgia. His father, one of tbe first Black teachers in tbe state, bad learned to read and write as a slave and sent bis son to Clark (Atlanta) and Fisk Universities. For a period, young Holloway was a member of tbe famous Fisk Jubilee singers. As a poet of dialect, Holloway is both musi- cal and humorous as in "Miss Merlerlee 11 wbo has Sof' brown cheek, an' smilin' face and Perly teef, an' sbinin' hair An' silky arm so plump an' bareJ Reflecting a growing practice of tbe transitional poets, Holloway makes an honest effort to portray deep Black emotions and feelings. His descriptions of Black women (especially) and men signal a new and vibrant aspect of Black poetry--tbe merger of the sexual/sensual levels with tbe racial flavor of post-bellum Black America. Linguistically, Holloway approaches tbe sounds and idioms of tbe Gullah which will be seen more definitiyely in James Edwin Campbell. in th Since the Gullah dialect is spoken areas off the shores of Georgia and the Carolinas, it is possible that Holloway picked up accents and expressions as �a child. (1919). His books include Bandannas (n.d.) and From the Desert Especially humorous is his "Calling the Doctor" which is an important cataloging of folk medicinal remedies including Blue-mass, laud-num, liver pills, "Sixty-six, i'o' i'ever an 1 chills," Ready Relief, an' A. B. c. , An' half a bottle of X. Y. Z Holloway ~ialect poet•) · joined Dunbar., Corr others., J. Mord Allen and Ray Dandridge, in being published for the first time (during the first two decades of the 20th century) in previously "off-limits" white periodicals. For selections from and criticism of Holloway's work see Johnson's American Negro Poetry and Mays' The Negro's God. See also, for criticism, Brown's Negro Poetry and Drama. Yet another dialect 'Writer., Elliot Baine Henderson., on whom we have little information, was another disciple of Dunbar. A "prolific writer,n he published some eight volumes of' verse., all in dialect. In much of his writings., as with Holloway and Campbell, be utilizes the phonetics and idioms of the Gullah--akin to the West Indian brand of folk English. Henderson is sometimes concerned with folk beliefs and the supernatural and Black religious themes and songs ("Git on Board., Chillen'.'). His dialect is inconsistent, a problem with most dialect writers (including Dunbar), and while he tries to achieve a phonetic transcription of what he hears, he spells (in the same title) "Board" :tn a standard English way and attempts to place words �like uGitn and "Chillun" in dialect. His volumes include Plantation Ee oes (Columbus, Ohio, 1904), Darky Meditations (Springfield, Ohio, 1910), Uneddykated Folks (Aut1or, 1911) and Darky Ditties (Columbus, 1915). James Edwin Campbell (1867-1895), unlike his contemporary DunbQ;r, "owes almost nothing to the plantation oets." Camp ell seems to have listened car fully to and applied t e Black folk speech around him whereas Dunbar took is initial cues from the plantation school, c ief proponent of which was Ir i n Russell. Born in Pomeroy, Ohio, Campbell graduated from the Pomeroy Academy and for a while taught school near Gallipol s. He gained more teaching and administrative experience at the Langston School in Virginia. and the West Virgin a Colored Instit te (now West V rginia State College) were opposition to h · s administrative policies forced T e re, Campbell i m to leave for C1ica o. as a member of the staff of the C icago Times lieralc;l for t e rest of bis life. Li e is contemporar ies, Cotter and Dunbar (and others), Camp ell's early verses were publish ed in various newspapers. His first vol me of po ms (Driftings and Gleanings, 1887) contains poems in standard En lish and two essa s. His second volume, solely poetry, was pu lished in 1 95 under the title of Echoes from t e Cabin and Elsew ere. • Campbell is quite competent in dialect; and wile some of oth standard En l sh and s sentiments are well-handled in the standard En lish poems, it is int e dialect pieces tat • �sho s his power, complexit and or important t emes are intorrac al lov ina i t . Amon is (one of the first Black writers--see , itman and others--to deal wit this "touchyn ject), the mulatto, satire (see, especially, "01 1 Doc' s Hyarn) Black pride (though muffled), and realistic presentat ons of Black "social realities, religious formalism, and folk values." although a It is important to mention ore in-depth study is still to Dunbar, who seemed to striv is brand of dialect, e done. Unlike for a univ rsal an licized po- rwnd netic, Campbell (traces are also~n Holloway and Henderson) recorded the speech patterns closely related to Gullah,•• f Pl I P u tlal Such usage is seen in em- t ploying the subjective an:l objective prone ns in the nominative position ("Me see, n "Him hab, 11 etc). !: as in "Uncle Eph's Banjo Songn: the ~ 11 ( as in "bawnjer") for the .£• There is use of the road awnjer" and ndawnce" and The ver al copula to e eY\ is usually omitted (assumed?) and there is a normal lengt~ng of an e or 1 sound in words like "Beeg ", "j eeg 11 , The v often becomes band t sometimes becomes k. of course, other great differences. "La igs. " There are, For more on such lin- guistic aspects see works by Lorenzo Dow Turner, Herman Blake, ·Robert D. T1:Viggs am others. Campbell has a more authentic ring than Dunbar and one gets the impression that he is seriously involved in feeling as well as representing what Hughes called "the pulse of the people." But Campbell and Dunbar are also similar in many ways. 170 �In "Negro Serenade" (compare to Dunbar's "A Negro Love Song") Campbell captures a sharp human-social need. In ''De Cunjab .Man" he achieves a strong musical ring (with the help of a ring-a-round-the-circle sort of chant) and dabbles in the supernatural--suggesting, as Chestnutt {fdd, that perhaps the Black folk tradition holds keys to the "ultimate mysteries of the universe." The recurring refrain of De Cunjah man, de Cunjah man, 0 chillen run, de Cunjab manJ will be ramified and made more dexterous by Hughes, Toomer and Hayden, as they experiment with these exciting oral folk forms. Campbell attempted to capture the cadences and gestural complexities of a contemporary dance, the "buck", in bis poem "Mobile Buck. n He stated that he sought the "shuffling, jerky rhythm of the famous Negro dance" which be bad seen performed by Black longshoremen on the Ohio or the Mississippi. type of word-movement marriage ¼s1 SJ usual in Black poetry. today. JI TEI r is This not un- Numerous examples of such pairings abound Lastly, we should note that Campbell's near-Gullah dialect would later be revived (in the thirties and forties) by writers like Ambrose Gonzales and .Julia Peterkin. McKay, we have said, employed a similar dialect in bis .Jamaican poems. Actor-singer ~~rkf Belafonte, son of West Indians, would popularize this same dialect in the 1950"is andl16o?s ( ''Daylight come and me.ta go home 11 ) . I ts w&~l\(A.. More salient contemporary examples of this idiom -tk-e. (and its cadences) can be found in the lyrics of,-._West IndiatJt ii: .SI 1 lil music known as the "ReggaJ~--an island version of .f 7t �Afro-American "soul 11 music. One of the first Black poets to write in dialect, Campbell deserves much more attention than he has thus far received. At this writing, the most exhaustive studies of him appear in fagner's Black Poets and Sherman's Invisible Poets. Thoug e was a close friend of Dunbar's, his major works in dialect preceded Dunbar's books. In addition to his poetry he was also a member of a group that edited the Four O'Clock Hagazine which was published for several years in Chicago. One or# occasion, Campbell is known to have spent time talking to BI.ack men, pleading with them to spend their time more drinking and gam ling. sely than in For selections of his work see .Johnson, Robinson and Negro Caravan. For critical evaluations see Brovn, .Johnson, Redding ("Camp ell's ear alone dictated his language.") and Carter G. ?oodson's "J".E. Campbell: Letter," Negro History Bulletin, Nove A For otten Man of er, 1938, p. 11. In 1937, Sterling Brown said "Eloquent and militant" were the "words most descript ve 11 of the poetry of , 111 am Edward urghardt DuBois (1868-1963). Bron, w o also termed DuBois "t e leading intellectual infl ence of his generation,n was only tro years ahead of as milar accolade frora .J. Saunders Redding: "T ey (poems) r pr sent t e as an inspirationa _ force." reatness of Dr. DuBois I n the history of Black poetry, however, DuBo · s does not deserve as la.re a. portion of the limelight as is nor1 all accorded bis -mrk as historian, social critic, journalist, novelist, Africanist, organizer of important Wd1ne~ �Pan~Af'rican Congresses in the 1920 s, editor of the Crisis, (3LA-tt. pathfinder-scholar of the Black Experience, precursl r ofAmilitancy and the "New egro. 11 Kerlin (Negro In 1923, Poets) said DuBois was "celebrated in the Five Continents and the Seven Seas. n As a poet, however, DuBois is important for bis work in the prose-poem {ii ii J A?,t("proem 11 ) forml and f'or asserting a militance., a defiance and • 1 exclaiming._ a hatred of' racism and oppression that bad not been heard since James lfuitfield. Like molten lava, the disgust and \r)ger spill from DuBois's pen as in "Hymn of Hate fl: I hate them, Ob! I bate them well, I hate them, ChristJ As I bate hellJ Ironically, though, in his hatred DuBois always managed to re-establish his faith and trust in some higher order--in God. Most of his poems bad been published in various periodicals (the Independent., Atlantic Monthly and Crisis) efore several of them were interspersed among the essays in Darkwater (1919). DuBois bad, by that time, already gained recognition for bis individualized use of poetic prose--wbich fused J1iblical language and imagery with his classical education and the expressions from the Souls of Black Folks (1903). But in "A Litany of Atlanta, written after the racial hola caust that took several Black lives, be assails all fundamentals--including the existence of God. _,_:µ, God does exist., in f'ace of such violence and savagery, fl �Surely Thou too art not white, 0 Lord, a pale, bloodless, heartless thing? DuBois also takes the occasion to cite his arch-enemy (Booker T. Washington) : They told him: 1 erk and Rise. A seeker ai'ter universal suffrage and brotherhood, DuBois employed much of his poetry in the service of the political ideologies that be e~poused. Thus in nA Hymn to the Peoples 11 he unites socialism and the Christian God under one banner, viewing "the primal meeting of the Sens of Man 11 as Foreshadowing the union of the worldJ Other poems in Darkwater include nThe Riddle of the Spbinxn and 11 The Prayers of God,." His 11 S ong of' the Smoke 11 (written in 1899) makes the American Black the "Smoke King. 11 Listing achievements and misuses of Blacks (a favorite habit of Black poets), DuBois at one point asks for acceptance of the Black man on equal terms with the white: Souls unto me are as mists in the night, I whiten my blackmen, I beckon my w te, What's the hue of a bide to a man in bis mightJ But, DuBois does not silence bis pen without some appeal to God: Sweet Christ, pity toiling landsJ Hail to the smoke king, Hail to the blackJ For selections from and comment on Dubois's poetry see Kerlin, �Brown, Redding, Freedomways (Winter, 1965), Johnson (American Negro Poetry). For assessments sJ:'Jahn, Barksdale and K~nnamon, Wagner, Mays and Chapman (Black Voices, 1968) who rightly calls DuBois "the intellectual father of modern Negro scholarship, modern Negro militancy and self-consciousness, and modern Negro cultural development." DuBois I Selected Poems have just been published (1973) by Ghana Universities Press and is available in the United States from Panther House, Ltd. James David Corrothers (1869-1919) acknowledged his debts to Shelley, Keats ( "Dream and the Song") and Dunbar ( nPaul Laurence Dunbar n) after whom much of his dialect poetry is modeled. But Corrothers, a minister, displays neither the range (in subject matter) nor the skill of Dunbar. died at his birth in Cass County, Michigan, and apparently gave him little care. His mother is father In Michigan, he worked as a youth in the sawmills and lumber camps, as a sailor on the Great Lakes, and later eeked out a living as janitor, coachman and bootblack in a barbershop. Encouraged by associates to continue his education, he studied for t h e mi nstry and remained in t h at profession (pastoring in Heth odist, Baptist and Presbyterian churches) all bis life. His first publ s ~ing oppor- tunity callle through Century ma azine; this ~ h im a Nide reading audie nce because of the resemblence of that of Dunbar's. Corrothers' first volum was published in 1907 a nd is work to (Selected Poems) is second collection (Te Drea a a nd e ~as n Ch icago d r ng the same �period that Campbell lived there and he also worked for various o met and socialized with Camp...,ell a . d da ily ne spapers . Dun ar~ F1,om newspap r articles and unpublis ed poems together Black Cat Cl h (1907) and e put is auto½iograp y, In p te published in 1916. of 11 Corrotbers' At t 1e Closed Gate of Justice" apparently has b on mis-read by a num er of cr · t cs (Johnson incl ded) 1t, knorled e t at as adv sin resi nation and conciliation. Corrothers as a minister, should shed more light on and implicat · ons. the fourth Eac s sasos one of t 10 fou r stanzas (except for ich ends '' ' Ierely a Je ,rd--in a day l1ke t isl") egins and ends wit: To be a Negro in a day like this. As a sermon on t e surfac , t e poen appears to tell Blacks 1 to :1avc " atience" and Tlforgiveness,u and so on. readin will reveal a strong adjective leading every virtue. So t e groupin s look like this: "strange loyalt ff But a closer nto almost "rare patience, ff and "utter da.rkness"--all of whic su gest tat, in the code of the proac er, it just might be too nrare" or nstrange'1 or 11 utter, n During the delivery or a sermon, or . «<.Tt\tt'fy similar verbal "-" t UF-, Blacks are ace stomed to searc ing for meani ng--shifts and levels vocal modulations~ n encoding" ased on tonal variet and ot er So, we see yet one more example or a possible , See, tl.o.pif.t0:IQLO J.. II) in what ttseemstt to be, of messages • at best, harmless deliveries atd, at orst, conciliatory. "Paul Laurence Dunbar" anticipates the Harlem Renaissance �and tho " ew egro II in having the "Dark melod st" venture to the citadels of vestern culture--using "Apollo's Fire" and ' ,('~ visit'"-"Helicon 11 , the home of the muses. Even more latant, however, is Corrothers' brilliant sonnet "The Negro Singer, 11 in which he carries out a major theme of the Harlem Renaissance-reclamation of Black cultural values and the Black past. The "Singer , " tired arrl f'rustrated from trying to write (and act) white, finally decides that ut I shall dig me deeper to the gold; and Fetc water dripping, over desert miles, so that at least some of his original virtue and ancestr~l strength can be exploited in the iestern world. Such a course is the only way for the Black poet, Corrothers says, the only way for "men II to: •• • know, and remember long, Nor my dark face dishonor any song. The same theme (slightly altered) is picked up in "Te Road to the Bow" where the singer again knows that I hold my head as proudly high As any man. Tension develops between the Black and white men "In the Matter of' Two Men" and 11 An Indignation Di.nner" features a dialect presentation of the popular plantation/minstrelsy theme about Blacks stealing chick~ and turkeys. A social lesson occurs in the poem, however , for "old Pappy Simmons ristr and explained .t '17 �to those facing a food-less Christmas that nothing but "wintry wind" (hot air) is "a-sighing th'ough/de street. 11 He tells the persons at the meeting that be has seen plenty food on a 11 certain gemmun' s/f ahm" and that "All we need is a committee fob to tote the goodies here." Earlier in the poem, Blacks protest their treatment at the hands of whites; and in a 17-part series called "Sweeten 'Tatahs, 11 one annoyed Black complains that 11 Evahthaing is 1 dulterated By de white folks, nowadays-Even chime bones, when you buys 'em De ain't worf de cash you pays. In one poem, Blacks complain of small wages; in another they protest high prices--familiar stories in the Afro-American corru.nunities. They dispel ignorant statements (like agner 1 s) that Corrothers is "lacking in personality" and that bis works do not belong in "the literary domain. 11 And, they cancel in part, Brown's allegation that Corrot ers follows a "typical dialect pattern." For selections of Corrot ers' works see Johnson, Hughes and Bontemps, and Robinson. For critical appraisals see Brown, Johnson and Braley. James veldon Johnson (1871-1938), fo"" mportant in his own right as a poet andwis immense "service to other Negro poets, is looked at in passing here. 11 He will be seen again in Chapter Vin connection with the Harlem Renaissance--where he is normally placed even though he was in bis fifties when t e leading lights 17f �--tw-.d°' €Nl of ,._wi: ii i •• 1 &11--Cullen, Hughes, McKay, Toomer and others-- first started to publish their works. Johnson, considered here a s a writer of d alect poetry, was born in Jacksonville, Florida, to middle-class Black parents, and attended Stanton Central Grammar Sc ool (all Black) where his mother taught. He entered a preparatory program at Atlanta University, later graduating and returning to assume principals ip of Stanton wher~ uring an eight year period--he upgraded the school to secondary status . Considered a "Renaissance" man (int e European sens ~/ i$;ii: at Johnson founded a local newspaper I• (The Daily American, 1894), studied :for th Florida ar nh t €t,dmitted in 1897), wr ote dialect poems (modeled after Dunbar ' s), a nd finally made his way to Broadway n _ ew York where he c olla orated with his brother, composer J. Rosamond, and Bo Cole in light operas. Sterl ng Brown said Johnson recognized the "triteness" of his early dialect poems (many pu. 1 s _ed in Fift Years and Ot er Poems, 1917), to music y bis ut several of them--put rot er and Cole--became popular favorites . The Century acce ted "Sence you W'ent Away" for pu lication. And the rot rs composed "Lift Every oi ce and Sing" (lyrics y James) for the Fe ruary 12, 1900, anniversary of Lincoln's irth- This poem is generally regarded as t e "National nthem" of Black America . I;Tardl y Qta OiC;p 2 OmliiP ioata ll QB t2ob Jonson s dialect poe s, listed in bis and Croons, 11 leave much to e desired t71 ook under "Jingles n t e area of originality. �Per aps is own experiments int at :form are what led him to state so emphatically that dialect and pathos." as but ntwo stops"--" 1umor .Johnson was not totally right, as we shall see later (Brown takes up this issue in The egro in Poetry and Drama). 11 However, Kerl n (whom '1agner says shows a sense 11 ) ca led .Johnson's -rnrk 11 some o:r the in the whole range o:r Tegro literature. cellence is here." def'iciency in critical est dialect writing Every qua.lit Technically, .Johnson was quite capa le in handling dialect ( ?3 $$ ) But brings noting new to Black poetry (unlike Sterlin and his themes have been pretty much he reaches print. Dunbar s o:r ex- is dialect Brown' sj -••ilil..,8ly the "Hy Lady's Lips Am Like de time oney 11 recalls 11 A Megro Love Song," Corrothers' nuegro Serenade," and other such pieces • o:r Dunbar's "Song. 11 .John~ontpoem carries none o:r the power And his su title ( "Negro Love ongfl) shows that he is working in the stock trade f'or the period. The lover :finally gets to the point where he Felt her kinder squeeze mah ban', 'Nuf'f' to make me undorstan. 1 t sence ou Went Away" is one of the real touch ng statements in ".Jingles and Croons 11 and shows .Johnson blues and Spiritual styles. ridging It has an authentic (t oug the quietly turbulent) ring in its simplicity--moving and lingering in its spell wrought by seeing the loss of a lover as a cause for disorder in the cosmos. Glimpses of , "~ me1~ctre1' w11.Lke"" umor comet rough in a :re o:r the poems but generally the dialect is used f'or ridicule--albe t �11 unwittingly--and deals with the easy" life oft e plantation, the stealing of turkeys and ••• eatin 1 watermelon, an' a layin' in de shade. e will meet Johnson again, as critic, different poe~ {)Jf' user of a different 11dialect. 11 ) -poullot1,11enc.t. t)uW\b~ Ul12-190" 'J I\ 2'he towering figure of Black American literature until ~ the Renaissance of the 192O l s, r B ■&2!1Bl160 naatar (l@iff l986!>' lived a complex, tragic, ambiguous and short life. Dayton, Ohio, to former slaves, Dun ar completed Born in is formal training at that city's only high school--graduating with good marks and as the only Black in his class. He was ,J wJ..eh he wASf ~ yeers 01.U sickly at an early age but became the man of the ' ho se1,.after his father I s death,. •i1'1@taz he ems !M!. J oar a 17 io Completing hig school, but being financially unable to pursue bis interests in law and journalism, Dunbar began work as an elevator boy, maintaining his voracious reading habits. He was fond of Tennyson, Shelley (whom he took as a model for bis poems in standard English), James Russell Lowell ( whose ~ork, along with Riley, Eugene Field and Ella Wheeler Wilcox, be found in The Century), and others. Much of Dunbar's poetry bears striking ~ resembl~nce to the ~orks of poets he admired, especially Shelley, Tennyson and Riley whose ndevices II Dunbar uindustriously: 11 set . ~ bsli..1"1.1.. "'"' --• ~ , ,.·,nkil. WO.~ ••((~\ol•e.cS~• ·~•Twh~t'\ .,._~ ,o,'t ~I\ oul; to "dismantle 1 and master. ~ oFC:it,o.1..(o.,,m-t,no.,.ant,,c f.'ta'"p b,,...,n!) hc.1 R p1\.Tu.,.« 4n ltf lS-. His volumes of verse include Oak and Ivy (1893), privately "t\·,t•• o,,,,e '~"" printed; Hajors and Minors (1895), also privately printed, with �the aid of patrons; Lyrics of Lowly Life {1896, with a preface by William Dean Howells) which, representing a major break.. through for a Black author, was published by Dof Mead and Company. ti-10 This third volume included the best poems from the previous volumes and some that bad not before. een pu lished Dunbar, now almost instantly famous, continued to write and pu lish both verse and fiction. His later books of poems included Lyrics of the Heartbside {1899), Lyrics of Love and Laughter {1903) and Lyrics of Suns ine and Shadow (1905), the year in 1913 .. efore bis deat. Interspersed among these of short stories and four novels~ Complete Poems as pu lis1ed ooks of poetry ·were volumes Na ~£ •~ The Unca led (), (1898), The Love of Landry (1900), The FAnatics (1901) and • The port of the Gods {1902). His s1ort stores incl ded Folks from Dixie (1 98), T e Strength of Gideon (1900), In Old Plantation Days (1903) and The Dun ar as prol r·c eart of Hap y Hollov (1904). almost rig t up w ich be knew was approac ing .. e nti~ the time of ad n:arried Al ce Rut'h M~tE-) a promising author from Tev Orleans, in l 9; and years is deat. -- ere an effort to .eal both failing .ealt is last and a failin marriage. As a poet, Dun a.r's ork falls into t10 div sions: lect and standard (some say e attempt nts and t n torary 11 or "class c H) Eng,1.isb. ere to present some of .0 and co , plex to cs. o;iun ar s f l f d n- C is poetic concerns, ac ·eve- arrl mr rs are too far-reac 1 • e assessed co.. i.p _etel;r · n t is t pe of surve:r. ng �~ en sa "d a out DmL&! ~ seemin ina '"'5.liti: or 1 muill n 0 ness to artic late in verse the .i:ts reE1t, 1ent of his 1 pcop_e. 1, .et1 or tbis was of his choosing, as a rnan or as a art· st, has :,rot to "be tJ.. oroughly ascertained., t 1e ans1 er see 1s to 1 :2aunched into czar, 11 o locked _. n "his o n c 1r · o 1 s II ri t n s. D n ar 1,•as ne 27, ~996, '½en l terary on e.i::10 1- owe:'.. ls, p b is ed a favora le f 11- age rev -w of i~jors and I1inors · n er ' s owells' influence is indicated y an Wyck Broo s: -1as per aps t e onl~.r literary critic l "te at re no as omc indication of Jee ly. n the nHo ells istory of A nor can een a _e to create rep tations hy as nble t, as Barksdale rev ewn ( rooks, P-,le Conf det,l;t,.IeA.;§., 1952). and Kinnamon note, HoweL.. s 1 rev c c1 was more of a social cornmen- tary (liberal, t1at is) tan literary critic sm. singled o t the dialect poems for special pra se. said, nwas the only man of pure African Howells D n ar, e lood and of Amer can civil zation to feel negro life aestheticall~r and expr ss t lyrically~ n D n ar, later realizing Howells' praise as a c rse in disguise, struggled forte rest of h s 1 fe to remove t½e dialect stigma . t e pu lie onl He complained to james vanted to read the pressure to be an s dialect pieces. ntelligent nsambo , plained of havi ng to play t 1e Dunbar's resentment of' t e 11 eldon jo nson that 11 And feeling be elsewhere com- part of a n lack w te man. la el" of d alect poet when 11 e felt he had more profound and cor.1plex things to say is capsuled in �th soften-quoted stanza from "The oet": e sang of love wl:1en earth •ras young, And love, itself, was in his lays. But ah, the world, it turned to pra se A jingle in a roken tongue. Earlier in the poem Dun ar refers to a ttdeeper noten which he preferred to sing. But w:1 le poems like "Sympathy," "The aunted Oak," "The Debt," and ''Ere Sleep Comes Down to Soothe the 1 eary Eyes," do have deep and complicated meanings, one searches in vain for Dunbar t e man in them. In the dialect pieces, Dunbar was able to capture the rhyt ms, phonetics and idioms of lack speech. But it is generally agreed that, es- pecially since be used ridicule-directed w ite models, e saw the Black man as a su ject for either humor or pity. The South's revenge for the Civil ,Jar bad come in part through its philosophers and writers who reflected nostalgically about the "peace and tranquility" of plantation life. This was political chicanery at its worst, but several Black poets, Dunbar included, followed the white originators of the minstrel and plantation school of_ poets. (Whites did not origi- nate minstrelsy--but they did corrupt it; see Loften Hitcbell's Black Drama.) As a result, Dunbar's treatment of Blacks in . . ••stock•• ••"""_. .O\a e.-.~L for the era: his dialect poems is singing, grinning, obsequious, head-scratching, master-loving, waterP>i elfon-eating, dancing, banjo-picking, darkies. (!/' Certainly Dunbar comes through realistically as in "A Tegro Love Song" �(a written account of a song sung by Blaci{he bad worked with), 11 Little Brown Baby," "When De Co'n Pone's Hot," (the good-eating theme), "The Party, 11 11 How Lucy Backslid, 11 "The Rivals II and others. He also achieves subtlety and irony in others. 'rfuen Malindy sings" is by all accounts his important linguistic-cultural contri ution. Yet Dunbar seemed to reserve the "serious" sub- jects for standard English--for which Black critics will not forgive im--and even in this seriousness he speaks of people lai Hi l!S- behind lonely. 11 masks" or WMg "caged 11 or udreamingn or•• • In these standard pieces, Dunbar treats unrequited love and goes on lofty flights as a knig tor wanderer or theologian; or he is resigned as in "Resignation 11 where he invites God to "crush me for Thy use" if need be. Yet accusations that Dunbar was completely torn from the real world of Blackness are not true. In "The Haunted Oak," for xample, he indicts the judge, the minister ar.d the doctor, for the lynching of a Black man. He also brooded over his dark skin, feeling that, during a time of preference for l ght-skin and the habit of "passing," his color held him back. But some of his poetry anticipates Garvey's call for "ethnic purity. 11 He praises the brown skin of l!andy Lou in 'tnreamin' Town" and he loves "Delyn for being ,,. • • • brown ez brown can be1 r ,, '· ••• She ain't no mullater; She pure cullud,--don't you see •• . �k=,--Datts de why I love hu so, :a D' ain't no mix a out huh. A similar theme pervades "Song, Dough 11 ( 11 ( "African maid") ''I)ina Kneading ''Brown arms buried elbow-deep 11 ) and "A Plantation Por- trait!' ("Browner den de Frush 1 s Wing"). In his dial ct poems, Dunbar reveals a love for spirit and revelry and good times. But nowhere is there an indication oft e enormous suff ring and violence inherited y ost-war Afro-Americans. The lynchings, the patt -rollers s,rooping down on defenseless ex-slaves, the nig t-rides of the the hars u Klux Ilan and · ite Citizens organizat ons, and debilitating econon c situation of lacks in general--none of t ese things find t eir •ray into Dun arts poetry. All this., of course, is ironic against Dun arts great admiration for sue ;:}.,n as Frederick Douglass, Alexander Crumr.iell, ookcr T .. · as. ingtonA "Black Sampson of he imraorta_ized in (notwit stan o-etry.. rand 1inc "--all of w o Instead., in is "deep.or note" Dun _o.r ng t e exa ples of Whitfield, 1· it ..,1an, D and ot;hers) spo ce of e rtbreak, probed his own pessimism and religio s dou t and seer,1ed l terally to ine away. lect poen., ho 10ver, 11 Hue ois, e advised lacks to ~eep Pl ggin 1 Along.") of t1 s enigma of D n ar seems to poem'~ Choice" (general overlooced quote from "The Poet") in w ic (In one dia- e explained in his y critics w o r.ionotonously he complains of pro lens and stresses: ut in a poefu let mes p, lots mples brewed to cure or ease eing tired of �~unanity rs confessed disease, Buttes rt- ine of a singinc line, Or a dew-dro in a ~oney c. 1 On more t 11an one occasion, Dunbar int· mated to associates tQat nc 1as all ut fed up wit t1at Black- · te relations wore at least one reason w1y T.ere are poets, f - racial ag tation--a parentl_ feeling el t e same 1 a:r • eyond repair. ~nis cold e c 11 -ms ed .is 1ands" of invol ement. int e middle of the 2 t . cent ry, ~o ~ . , lt'tciwU~lltfLY ~, • ever-c 1eless D n ar s req est/\lM& aas::u ed a conte~11porar:r, Cotter., Sr., w o in his !!Answer to D ·1 ar • s ' AC oice, 1" said by suift T1at poets should Put back t e frail, deerees ring fort . t e strons, And 1ed stern facts to sober song. Dun ar eitler did not . ecd/hear or was not aware oft is nanswer n; would kno t if ~1e had taken Cotter f s advice perhaps t 11e world 1 ~f a different poe~ reader of bis poetry--often A ove all, D nbar was a sk " llful ring · ng audiences tot eir feet for standing orations and pleas for encores. His dexterousness in the use of language and sty e ·was ad~nired :r rations of se eral gene- lack colle ge poets and la~r writers w. o imitated I n al:nost every su . stantial Black community t ere is some p lie facility named after D nbar. prevailing style--the techniques rre wrote in al : nost every reatest exploiter of etween 1, itman and Cullen. nglis poetic Sonnet, :71adrigal, couplet, ballad , Spiritual, pre- lues, soncs (including use �of musical notation in some instances), 1111•--•••• Dun ar em <.L• seems to 1ave tried Dunbar 1 s poer.1s can e found in Complete Poems, the text used for tbe discussion 1ere. For critical- iographical writing on D n ar see Wa ner ' s Black Poets of t . e United States (t e r,iost am itious study to date), Brawle., of His People, 1-rnrrn ts Paul Laurence Dunhar: Poet y Brm·m, Redding, Victor La~ son's D n1Jar £ri tic ally Exaljlip~, Virginia C nningham f s Pa 1 Lat re nee Duni• ar and is Song, an Jean Gould's Tat Dunbar Boy: America 1 s Famous Negro Poet. Ot ers 1 ,. o The Story of ave written on D n1')ar include _ouston Baker, Darwin T rner, Benjamin Mays, James /-le,,,be,-.-r Ma.i,:1J,.. Jeldon Jo nson, /\Nie~ Aarot Ford and Addiso n Gay e, Jr., w o recently pu lis ed a Dunbar Junius Hordecai A_len (l litt e, is an important figure int is transit onal p ase of Black poetry ,......-;;; ' i-111ic 1 w tnessed t 11 passing of t . e plantation tradition in poetry and the wilting of fas in 6 ton's inf'luence on Black t inkers and activists, Allen was orn in J'.-fontgomery, Ala Jama, and moved with ,is family to Tope a, Ka.ns a#_ ·w en years old. wrote £'011 Except for a t ree-year period, d ring and traveled wit e was seven ,._,ic 1e a t eatrical grou , 1e spent most His only vo ume is_ .,mes, Tales an bymed Tales (Tope~a, 1906). �I,..ostly dialect, R mes contains "great felicit~ of c.arac11 terization, surpris in 6 turns of wit II and quaint p ilosophyJ 11 uu'N#lllw• Tbe book appeared the year of Dun ,ar • s dea.t 1, and Kerl n places Allen on par wit Dun ar--somew at of an exa.~ration. Allen is deep and profound in ( e includes two int e otb _o · e- er, is standard ~n 0 lis. pieces 11 ook) and dialect. C ount nG O t II s a rat.er lg t recollection of c ild.ood games s c Out, 11 11 Hide-and-seek, 11 and "I spy. 11 The poem, wit its re- curring "Ec;.1y meeny L iny mo 11 gives cl es to the psyc.o ogical, 1·ne development of sic and gest ra lac-:: yo ngsters (w1ic . is c .arLningl:r s fficient). Allon also ,mm s t e consequences of "getting ca n g ,t or in a_ien terr tory amon 6 vicio s, lync ,-prone 11:1i tes. t II o t at ate-,.1oncer ;.1 6 and The gai1es re no v •· i t 1 L.ere 1 s g1 consequences fra s' lac: dissrace in 1,ein t; cau 17 0 t. Deat1 as a general realit~ is also ass med: For c.:cat. 11:1 soon co nt do n t e row, 11 Eeny ;.11eer:;- rn n: 11 Tre Psa:., o. n of Up:!.ift II raises q ·cstio 1s an do t •e pess:k: · st:c strain of t e poe,n above (a1., n>ar). Fe asks if one s otl ts, revea_ n tl at fo :: 0 in str.°v- Till s nset of etern t~, and w ether t e victori s Jon are wor~ o"!: co 1 r::rn, are ecl1 oes of t e str g _e. is con'!::o porar:· :::"enton 0 nere, o',nson l- 1 1 0 �-,1 .... 1 a.ls o q ·st · on ; ~1ct'"er, for t e _ .... ac;;: nan , str1 _;._;le · n Amer i ca i s valid or fr' itf 1 . Critics ~ave notea t a t J~·nson 13 t s A:len as rn is not tota_:y tr e. 1c.; 1 f Oi;e 11 enver s ot. la 11-ere where ~ s no retreat II simp:..:~ To win one stride fro m sh eer defeat; To die--but gain an inch. His remained silent after his first book. And one wonders inclination (in view of the ti mes) and simply gave up. His dialect poems carry, on t h e surface, the spirit of t h e "dialect tradition. " But Allen is a bi ting satirist of middle-class Blacks (Wagner attributes this to an "inferiority complex") an❖okes fun at whites. Temptation over~takes tbe preacher who tries to nresist" in "The Devil and Sis Viney" but• "Sh ine On, Mr. Suny,n and "The Squak of the Fiddle" show bis close observation of(and take-it-or-leave-it attitude toward) whites. His satire of the Black middle-class is reminiscent of the i mpatience suggested in statements by Whitman and anticipates the works, especially, of Frank Marshall Davis and Melvin Tolson. Allen is also important as a stylistic innovator. In "A Victim of Microbes," he again casts aspersions on whites and spoofs stereotypes of Blacks as field workers and laborers. But he couches his narrative in an exciting new literary form which allows for an alternation between 1tloosely rhymed eight-lin stanzas and four-linef stanzas of blank verse in �which repetition of the sort found in the blues of Spirituals occurs: I done byeabed de doctor say it--de doctor bisse'f said it-- •••• Brown was right when be said Allen's work was "unpretentious" and contained "pleasant humor." poetry see Kerlin's work; For selections of Allen's '-ii, for criticism,~own and Wagner. Primarily important as a writer of prose, journalist and an inspiration to other writers, Alice Nelson Dunbar, (1B75-l935) was born and ~eceived her public education in New Orleans. 11ed rrnarriofPaul Laurene e Dunb~: l 89 8I\ further study at Cornell and Columbia Universities and the University of Penn?Nlvania. She authored volumes of prose; iolets and Other Tales, 1894; The Goodness of St. Tocque, 189~) and edited Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence, 1913, and The Dunbar Speaker, 1920, in which appears some of her poetry. Hibl LE I a If i □ ~noted i: 1 1u J 17 · tt a journalist • and lecturer, for a whi e she served as managing edftor of The 1 Advocate and.., contributed to numerous magazines. • 12 Her poetry, yeC UtibO'l:l:cvl;aa, has little racial flavor; but she does pro- test World War I and her often-anthologized\'-~onnet"represents her technical abilities in that form. In "I Sit and Sew 1' she laments t hat, as a woman, she can do little else to hasten the end to war. "The Lights At Carney's Point 0 contains nfine symmetry, highly poetic diction and great allusive meaning•" (K-tY-Lin) . An easy-flowing poem in four-lined stanzas of iambic tetrameter/ at W ~ nLightn allows the poet (as with many romantic writers) �to stream associations from a central theme--the lights. But wet\'I fNOA something •Nost when the lights •/\.'gray in tbe ash of day" And the sun laughed high in the inf'inite sky, And the lights were forgot in the sweet, sane calm. Studies of Mrs. Dunbar-Nelson's poetry are ~=~,ra::,. :,!r collected poems have yet to be published. "The Sonnetu is printed in several anthologies and three of her poems appear in Kerlin's book. Kerlin also advances brief criticism • ....., Although Sterling Brown says that Joshua Henry Jones (1876-?) "gives little besides banal jingling" we mention him briefly as part of our effort to survey rt I f the poetic t-1-nte.I', jiflt~t of the period. \._For more listings of lesser-known poets see the end of the chapter) Jones was born in OrangiJ:urg , South, Carolina, and, after completing high school, attended Ohio State University, Yale and Brown. He served on the editorial staffs of several newspapers, was secretary to the mayor of Boston for four years, and published two books of poems (The Heart of the World and Other Poems, Boston, 1919, and Poems of the Four Seas, Boston, 1921) and e.. novel (By Sanction of Law, Boston, 1924). Jones' poetry treats nature, nostalgia, race struggle (as in nBrothers") and sentimental love ("A Southern - Love Songn), themes which Kerlin has compared to Johnson's "Love Song. " nality. Though grim, "'110 A Skull," does show origi- �Noted more for walking all the way from his home in the South to Harvard University, where he camped overnight and was arrested on a charge of vagrancy, Edward Smyth Jones (18?-?) published The Szlvan Cabin in 1911. Called npompously literary" by Brown who adds that his verses are less interesting t h an his "biography, n Jones wrote "Harvard Square" while he was in jail. The poem brought him immediate attention and helped speed up his release. European • •• t 37'"'-is a hodge-podge of imitations of various models. •lli••llllii•• He recites the names of Dante, -#he t.k Byron, Keats, Shelley, Burns, and~SIIDim!m!!ti•IPlllil•, in a bombast of stanzas. 11 - A long of Thanks, sensitivity and deeper feeling. 11 however, shows more While it leaves a· lot to be desired, one can certainly feel the power growing throu gh the fhe~N>--~~ ~ "" ~''" p et.edes repetition ( in several dozen lines) of "-"For the ",Asun, flowers, rippling streams, and other faces of nature. Alex Rogers (1876-1930) is one of the several dozen or so "minorn writers of dialect during this period. As we stated earlier, poets published pamphlets themselves, secured places for their work in newspapers and magazines, and traveled on pt.v- fi,"' rt\ (l'\q a regular reading circuit~n1••~••~ their poems and ditties, often to the accompaniment of bands or single musical instruments. This practice would continue up until this very day ~ when many CII A he poets, if not beard live, loj,e their significance and dramatic flavor. Such was the case with Rogers who "wrote lyrics for most of the songs in the musical comedies in which Williams and Walker appeared." Rogers was born in �Nashville, Tennessee, educated in the schools of that city, and finally worked his way north where he wrote some of the most popular songs of his day; he made a number of performers famous, including white entertainers looking for "Negro stuff. satire, humor and some slap-stick. some clue to his intentions: II JNJite em,t.vs His titles give ''Why Adam Sinned, n "The Rain Song" (a Flip Wilson-type conversation between "Bro. Wilson" and ''Bro. Simmons"), "The Jonah Man," and "Bon Bon Buddy, the Chocolate Drop." Rogers' significance, however, lies in his work in the theater and his ground-breaking efforts to change the popular (ministrel-inspired) image of Blacks. Dunbar had co-authored lyrics ~-C~l~o~r~indy--Origin of the Cake Walk (1898 ) and In Dahomey (1903). •---~as part of a groundswell that ~7-& J~~~~ to)Loften Mitchell (Blac k Drama): In the latter part of the nineteenth century a group of Negro theatrical pioneers sat down and plotted the deliberate destruction of the minstrel pattern. These men were Sam T. Jack, Bert Willian~, George Walker, Jesse Shipp, Alex Bogers, S.H. Dudley, Bob Cole, J. Rosamond Johnson and John W. Isham. And in destroying the minstrel pattern, these men were to help pave the way for the million-dollar musical pattern which today dominates the American theatre. Mitchell's observation sheds great light on the importance of many Black "poets rr who, however dismally they may fare on paper, �are of major importance to the aggregate ritual and musical sense/life of on-going Black society. Today we see a similar pattern, with radical variati ons, of course--growing from the work of James Weld on Johnson and others--in Gil Scott-Heron, The Last Poets , the poets who are writing for the ritual theater, and in the efforts of dramatists like Melvin Van Peebles (Ain't ~ ' Supposed to Die A Natural{J Paul Carter _arriso n (The Great NcDaddy ), Imamu Amiri Baraka (Slave Ship), the work of Barbara Teer, Clay Goss (Andrew and Home-Cooking), Eugene.,. Redmond (The Face of the Deep, 9 Poets with the Blues John Henry Was Born) and the experimental productions of Michael Gates (The Black Coffin, There's a Wiretap in My Soup: or Quit Bugging Me and Will I Still Be Here Tomorrow). Tb is pattern, practically perfected by Langston Hughes, can also be seen in outstanding performing-cultural centers conducted by Katherine Dunham in East St. Louis, Val Uray Ward in Chicago, and atilma Lewis's Center for Afro-American Cultural and Performing Arts in Boston. Sterling Brown{· other nminor writers of dialectrr ~ includef Sterling Means (The Deserted Cabin and Other Poems), S. Tutt Whitney, Waverly Turner Carmichael, and just about anybody else who wrote dialect at the time. Means also wrote in conventional English forms. For evaluations of Rogers and other similar writers see Mitchell 's Black Drama, Johnson's American Negro Poetry and Black Manhatta and Brown. / �Oh oF °""e. ---;tream or Black "immigrants .,,,11 mrta:il :ir hls:i?a 0013 Ja~ George Reginald Margetson (1877-?), was born in St. Kitts (British West Indies) and came to the United States when he was 20-years-old. Margetson, a wholly original poet, got a good solid grounding in literature in his childhood and produced rour volumes of poetry: England in the West Indies (1906), Ethiopia's ~light (1907), Songs of Lire (1910) and The Fledgling Bard and the Poetry ~oci~ty (1916). His achievement can be seen in the last book w1ich consists of one 100-page poem. A setire, owing debt to Byron and other English inf'luences, the poem represents one or the most important technical undertakingtby a Black poet since Whitman's Rape or Florida. Marcets on uses mostly seven-line♦ stanzas of five-feet meter with the seventh line lengthening to an Alexandrine. His rhyme scheme is ab ab b cc and he ex ibits . a wacky, uproaikus use of both rhyme and humor. The basic stanzaic pattern is interspersed with shifting meters and schemes which appear as four-line4 stanzas in an ab ab movement or an a a ab context. The poem begins in a search for t he Poetry Society (reminiscent or several European poets) 0. and Margetson ,ssays an old theme: that of poetry being mechano~t~ ,r ical and .,._. success depending';en school or dress as opposed to ffO talent•. During this nquest II Mar gets on "digresses 11 to discuss and explore practically every maj or current theme in society: social conditions, World War I, politics, religion, literature, the Black problem, and he even pokes fun at President �Woodrow Wilson: Come, Woody, quit your honeymooning! In this important poem, Ma.rgetson is scathing, sustained and brilliant. He views the many currents running through the Black community and satirically sums up all the confusion: Some look to Booker Washington to lead them, Some yell for Trotter, some for Kelly Miller, Some want DuBois with fat ideas to feed them, Some want Jack Johnson, the big white hope killer. Perhaps some want carranza, some want villa, I guess they want social equality, To marry and to mix in white society. Other, later, satirists whom Margetson's work calls to mind are Tolson (and his incomparable Harlem Gallery), Frank Marshall Davis, Dudley Randall, George S. Schuyler (Black No More), William Melvin Kelley and Ishmael Reed. In his other poetry, Margetson is strong and competent--he reflects his immense reading background, 11 Spenser to Byron"--but none of his earlier work matches up to Fledgeling Bard. For samples and criticism of Margetson•s writing see Johnson and Kerlin. Brown also makes a brief critical observation. In many ways the poetry of William Stanley Braithwaite or (1878-1962) has suffered the fate of that "!~Phillis Wheatley, Dunbar and others somehow deemed "not Black enough" for inclusion in some Afro-American poetic-cultural circles. The Frenchman �Jean Wagner said that a study of Braithwaite does not belong among those of oth er ''Black poets.n A mulatto, Braithwaite was born in Boston to West Indian parents and was mainly seli'-educated. He is considered a major influence on "th e new poetry revival" in America and counted among b is friends such white literary figures as Vachel Lindsay, Carl Sandburg , Edgar Lee Masters, Amy Lowell and Edwin Arlingto n Rob inson. His career as a poet began with t h e 1904 publication of Lyrics of Life and Love and his second volume (House of t h e Falling Leaves) was published in 1908. His Selected Poems was published in 1948 by Coward-Mccann, Inc • . Best known for his Anthologies of Magazine Verse, publish ed from 1913 until 1929, Braithwaite was for many years a literary critic with t h e Boston Transcript. His other anthologies include Tbe Book of Elizebethan Verse (l906i Tbe Book of Georgian Vers~ (1908 ) and Tbe Book of Restoration Verse (1909). F or is efforts Braithwaite received the NAACP•s coveted Springarn medal in 1918 for high achievement by an Afro-American. Tbe same year he received honorary degrees from two Black universities and later became professor of creative literature at Atlanta University, a position be held until b e retired in 1945. raithwaite's poetry, Sterling Brown said: Tbe result is the usual one: the lines are graceful; at their best, exquisite, and not at their best, secondhand; but the substance is t h in. Even t h e fugitive poetry of some ,,, Of �of Braithwaite's masters had greater human sympathies. Brown is implying, of course, that some of the white "models" that Braithwaite used could b1.~eiheu~,··w,;o .. k. ti'\ A ~ec.09t11J4'lt. even if the Black poet could not. Jrt-td;-fy Brown is essentially correct: we S have tested the thesis in classrooms and the best students appear dumbfounded upon confronting Braithwaite after leaving other Black poets. And Braithwaite's problem is not the same sort of "problem" presented by a, say, Tolson--whose work is difficult and complex but not "ldy on repeated readings ~ (,._. Tolsonts work is#.•Sfflm'-'!P.l!'!.y Black-based). Braithwaite seems to be reaching for a higher science in his words; but he does not chart his path so we can follow. Brown said his ~/\e,tclt writing resembled"-npoetry of the twilight 11 - - just as you think you have his meaning, it slips away. This is especially true of poems like "Turn Me to My Yellow Leaves" (about a death-wish?), r'J)el Cascar, "Ironic: n LL.D 11 (about the waste-land, c.f., T.S. Eliot, and history?), "Scintilla," and "Sic Vita." "Rhapsody" is one of Braithwaite's most attainable poems, but the message is nebulous. 11 He expresses thanks to the supreme being for the gif't of song" and is replenished in the knowledge that "world-end things" that dangle on the "edge of tomorrown can be obliterated by dreams. In his critical introduction to Braithwaite, Johnson (American Negro Poetry) apologizes for the poet's lack of sensitivity to mistreatment of Blacks and explains his �t)l,'l t" o..du.L (x)t\c-e. " failure to dip into the Black folk-b~ -- This has not been a matter of intention on his part; it is simply that race bas not impinged upon him as it bas upon other Negro poets. In fact, his work is so detached from race that for many years he had been a figure in the American literary world before it was known generally that he is a man of color. Certainly .Johnson meant no harm in using the word "color" but it tempts one to punning. Braithwaite, as Brown and others have noted, rejected having his work indiscriminately called "Negro" poetry. This issue continues to raise its head with, first, Cullen and, later, Hayden (including many other lesser-known poets in between). And there are other poets of the 20th century who have written (or write) Braithwaite's type of poetry. Some, of course, are experimenting and searching for new forms. See for example some of the work of Cullen, Hayden, Randall (More to :Remember) Russell Atkins, Bob Kaufman, Tolson, Gwendolyn Brooks, Michael S. Harper (especially History as and others. The debate over how much of ( or when) pple Tree), poet's work is or should be nracialn is a continuing one and is not likely-given the diversity of the poets--to be settled in the very near future.~In1't.J••esf.-n~Ly1 , with the exception of Claude McKay, no other poet bas as many (or more) poems as Braithwaite in .Johnson's 1922 (1931) anthology. Whether .Johnson did this out of debt or respect is not known. Braithwaite, we know, had praised Johnson �(Fifty Years) :for bringing "the first intellectual substance to the content" of Afro-American poetry. But J. Saunders Redding called Braithwaite "the most outstanding example of perverted energy~' that was produced in a 14-year period of Black poetry. At Atlanta University, Braithwaite rubbed shoulders with DuBois, Mercer Cook, Rayford Logan and others, which apparently helped him doff some of his Bostonian snobbish ness. His poetry in general reflects t he influence of Keats arrl the pre-romantic British poets. He loves to speak of dreams, trances, impending doom, silence and the prospect of touching other worlds. For selections of his work see most anthologies of Afro-American literature. Brown, Redding and Brawley. He is critically assessed by Oth er evaluations are primarily concerned with Braithwaite•s work as anthologist and critic. Barksdale and Kinnamon give a good overall assessment of iu;s W6JK.. Braithwaite did include some Black poets in his magazine anthologies and he stands at an important threshhold of the Afro-American's entry into the era of modern poetry. Records show that literally hundreds of poets, inspared by the brilliant example of Dunbar and comp ny, took part of this exciting pre-Renaissance of Black American culture and arts. For more on these poets, students should go to such publications as '.fhe Century, the Independent, The Chi cago Defender, and the numerous other art:-and-poetry-conscious publications of the day. Yet it is in some wa~s appropri te t hat we approach our close to t h is ch apter wit. Lucien B. Watkins 2Pf �(1879-1921), first teacher arrl t~'1en soldier, who was called "the poet laureate of tbe New Hegro. 11 llat ~ins pu lisbed one volume of poetry in 1907 (Voices of So itude) his second book (W'i.1ispering Winds, n. d. ) was brought out by friends shortly after bis untimely death. Watkins is ch iefly noted for his militancy of tone as typified in his sonnet 11 Tbe New Negro" which opens ·with the words He thinks in black and goes on to describe a god with African features. Watkins also wrote bis own eulogy a few weeks before he died. In the µyran -inspired form be is grippingly aware of his approaching death as shown in these lines: My summer bloomed for winter's frost: Alas, I 1 ve lived and loved and lost! "A Nessage to the Modern Pbaroe.hs 11 is inspired (introduced) by a passage from John 11.44 in the him! 11 f ible. The i1terations "Loose and nLet him go!' frame each of the six four-linef stanzas. Taking the militant stand characteristic of bis work, Watkins tells the Pbaroabs to let the Black man go because he "has bis part tl<b play" In Life's Great Drama, day by day,-adding that freeing the Af'ro-American will "be the saving " of whitest "soul." In many ways a precurser of the Harlem Renaissance, Watkins conducted experiments in verse ("A Prayer of t h e Race that God Made Black") and expressed pride in his African heritage ( "Star of' Ethiopian). He was born in Chesterfield, Virginia, �educated at Virginia Normal and Industrial Institute, and was active as a teacher before be served overseas in World War I which "wrecked his health.n Perhaps Watkins' feelings are best expressed in these lines (reminiscent of Margetsonts: "The white man's heaven is the black man's hell. n): God! save us in Thy Heaven, where all is well! We come slow-struggling up the Hills of Hell! .J ~A Pv-o..ye~ o rihe ~ace "tht.ft ~od Mcc.oe n, .. , f:-'') \;)'-"I.',. For additional comment on Watkins see Brawley' s Negro Genius, Kerlin 1 s study (which includes more selections) and Johnson's American Negro Poetry (selections also). During tis very important period of transition, apq ~=~/1(MJC. there were~~r~poets writing. ~ ' We ought to site T. Thomas Fortune (1856-1928 )~wrote journalism and important political studies of Blacks. 11 calls him one of And although Brawley the most intelligent and versatile Negroes of tbe era,n his collection of poems, Dreams of Life: cellaneous Poems (1905), shows no marked distinction it ey 11 Mis11 CL 1 F (though he implies a desire to return to Africa in The Clime of My Birth"). A preacher-poet, George C. Rowe (1853-1903), published Thoughts in Verse (1 887) and Our Heroes (1890). The first book contains sermons in verse and the second is aimed at "the elevation of the race. 11 Rowe, a pastor of the Plymouth Congregational Church of Charleston, South Carolina, also published 11 A Noble Life, 11 a poem in memory of Joseph C. Price, first president of Livingston College. Known for her �now famous Journal, Charlotte L. Forten Grimk~ (1 837-1914) is considered to have "possessed sensitivity and creative skills (?~er-m-.ru beyond the ordinary"Ain the few poems s he wrote. Uncollected, they are scattered throughout her notes and various periodicals published between the 1850's and t h e turn of the century. Islay Walden (1847?-1884) published Miscellaneous Poems in Wash ingto n, D.C., in 1873. There is an i mmaturity in Walden's style, owing, according to Jahn, to t he fact t hat his enrollment a t Howard University 11 destroyed h is natural tale nt. u Th e Nation's Loss: A Poem on the Life and Death of t he Hon. Abraham Lincoln, by Jacob Rhodes (1835?-?), was published in 1866. Summer, John Willis Menard (1838-1893), t h e In Lays of first ✓elected Black congressmen in the United States, makes women h is central theme--calling t h em by name as h e praises t h eir nhair" and "lips." For racial reasons, he was de nied h is uearned" term in the House of Representatives. James Ephriam McGist (1874-1930) brought out Avenging the Maine (Raleigh , North Carolina, 1899), Some Simple Songs and A Few More Ambitious Attempts (Ph iladelph ia, 1901 ) and For Your Sweet Sake (P 1ila.delp'1ia, 1 06). Charles Douglas Clem published Rhymes of a Rhymster (Edmond! Oklah oma , 1896) and A Little Souvenir (n.p., 1908 ). Sam Lucas (1845?-?) contributed to t he post-war transitional sh aping with Careful Man Songster (Ch ica go, 1881). i mpression that Lucas was a troubador of sorts. One gets t be Bisb op He nr y McNeal Turner, well known among his contemporaries, publish ed meditation and exhortatory verse in The Conflict for Civil Ri ghts (Washington, D.C., 1881). Revels of Wancy (Boston, 1892) �reflected the thoughts of William J. Candyne. Prose was in- cluded by Frank Barbour Coffin (1870?-1951) in Coffin's Poems with Ajax ' Ordeals (Little Rock, 1892). James Thomas Franklin published one volume of poetry (Jo+,mine/Poems, Memphis, 1900) and one of prose and poetry (Mid-Day Geanings, A Book for Home and Holiday Reading (Memphis, 1893). not extant. Jessamine apparently is Poems of To-Day or Some From the Everglades ( Q inc!, Florida, l 93) was pu _ s ed 'y C pid Aleyts P1itf "eld. Joshua Mccarter Simpson (1820?-1876) released The Emancipation Car (Zanesville, Ohio,) in 1874. called Simpson included a prose satire 11 A Consistent Slaveholder's Sermon. 11 The Open Door (1895) was published in Winfield, Kansas, by F.S. Alwe11(/Aaron Belf'ord Thompson (1883-1929) was a member of a family that consisted of a trio of poets. Thompson and his sisters, Pr\tilla and Clara, brought out seven volumes of poetry between 1899 and 1926--the middle of the Harlem Renaissance. Priscilla Thompson published Ethiope Lays (1900) and Gleanings of Quiet Hours (1907). Clara Thompson released Songs from the Wayside (1908) and A Garland of Poen1s (Bos ton, 1926). Aaron Thompson published Morning Son€/s (1899), Echoes of Spring (1901)--both dictated to his sisters and brother--and Harvest of Thoughts (1907). Echoes, in its second edition of 1907, bore a handwritten complementary introduction by James Whitcomb Riley. Their subjects are the conventional ones of the 19th century. Charles Henry Shoeman published A Dream and Other Poems in Ai_Arbor in 1899. Magnolia Leaves was published by Mary Weston Fordham in Charleston, �South Carolina, in 1897. Straddling similar fields of expression, as did Alex Rogers, James Weldon Johnson, Nathaniel Dett and others , George Hannibal Temple (a musician) brought out The Epic of Columbus' Bell and Other Poems in 1900. enjamin Wheeler followed him in 1907 with Culling from Zion's Poets (Mobile, Alabama). _ Several dozen other Afro-Americans wrote poetry during the later part of the 19th and early 20th centuries. (JSss--'l) Among them were Robert Benja.minl\(Poetic Gems, 1883), Lorenzo Oen-!) (l1S1-iq,dJ Ctlff-,q~) Dow Blaclrso"tt, Walter Henders on Brooir~ John Edward Brue~, 1 Qf(,l-fl?) Alexander Duman Delaney, Josephine Delphine Heard., Joseph ~a-Hl'1) .If Cephas HollyN A.J. Jackson (A Vision of Life, 1869), Henry QJ10t..:'1) (tQo-1) Allen Laine1 '(Footprints), Mary Eliza Lamber1;r Lewis Howard tl!'ll-1121> Latime~ Grace Mapps , Journalist William H.A. Moore, Gertrude (12~-1) Mossel~, "James Robert Walker (Poetical Diets). Other occasional poets who were ·q uite popular among their contemporaries included Solomon G. Bvown, William Wells Brown, Katie D. Chapman, W.H. Crogman, Frederick Douglass, Leland M. Fisher, Nathaniel Dett, and Virgie Whitsett. Some notable turn-of-the-century poets, a few of which will be heard from later were, Benjamin Brawley (critic and social historian), Charles Roundtree Dinkins, David Bryant Fulton, Gilmore F. Grant, M.N. Rayson, H.T. Johnson , Jefferso n King, J.W. Palsey, Otis M. Shackelford, Walter E. Todd, Richard E.S. Toomey, Irvine W. Underhill, Julius C. Wright and others. ~or more on these poets, including delightful pictures of some, see �Brawley's The Negro Genius (and other works), Sherman's . Invisible Poets ,and Kerlin 1 s Negro Poets and Their Poems. Kelly Miller ' s Race Adjustment appeared in 1909 as a partial answer to some of the evils and ills plaguing Blacks. 0 ' But against the hr.locaustal "panorama of violence ,r and 'bloods ied, the title of Hiller's book seemed al most hollow. T1e N"AACP was born in 1909 and a year later DuBois was t the 1elm of its publicit ut de)artment and m de editor of Crisis. Echoes from the 1906 Atlanta riots, in w1ich 30 Blacrs were . '~utchered could still be Blac ~ eard reverberatin '0 in speeches and fear-seized hearts. (For more on this senseless and sadistic murder of Blacks . see John Hope ·Franklin 1 s From Slavery to Freedom Ralph Ginzberg's 100 Years of Lynching.) nd On t.e lecture-circuit rampage, DuBois heatedly criticized President T1e odore Roosevelt who bad declared t at "Rape is the greatest cause of lynching. The nation was trying to turn back the clock, as evidenced y the nostalgic minstrelsy, and was conducting a good nsabote.ge 11 of the Reconstruction • .And .Blacks were .feverously mobilizing to keep from being sold "back into a new form of sl very. 11 11 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Eugene B. Redmond Digital Collection Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document Text Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context EBRWritings_08_24_25 Title A name given to the resource First typed draft of Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry: A Critical History, Chapter IV. Jubilees, Jujus and Justices, p. 130-207, typed with handwritten edits Relation A related resource Eugene B. Redmond Digital Collection Language A language of the resource English Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For digital rights and permissions, see <a href="https://www.siue.edu/lovejoy-library/about/policies.shtml">https://www.siue.edu/lovejoy-library/about/policies.shtml</a> or contact <a href="mailto:library@siue.edu">library@siue.edu</a> for direct inquiries. In copyright. <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/</a> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Redmond, Eugene B. https://digitallis.isg.siue.edu/files/original/ef6cda4a87f7eef43d4b05d4690f40e3.pdf 4f19363ad31ffa169d31dc4cd12b8409 PDF Text Text CHAPTER III AFRICAN VOICE IN ECLIPSE: IMITATION & AGITATION 1746 - 1865 I Slaves, though we be enroll'd Minds are never to be sold --from David Ruggles' Appeals, 1835 · I Overview As we embark on a survey of the chronological development of Black written poetry, it is important to remember that any study of such literature concerns that which is "written" and "available. tr The fact that one writer has made more works accessible to the public than another writer does not make him/her the "greatest" or even "greater." In every era, quiet and important writers have been passed over in favor of literature that is more "timely , " 'flamboyant" and "relevant ~' CD 991:i; lead IUtiblP\21 a; a s I lffl! L ill@ Jal 25 Ji g ■e la f I & J --•--••..-lf!'II•.,-. 5o) while t-e.p.,.estn1i,1"i,~ &1..mpL1nqs o ~ Po~y ~~~~:.\oilt±t~t7llzrJ;:~~•!IIP-l!... this t¥ certainly is not an anthology, /\ · are VS'ed ~o reinf'orce comments on styles, themes, subjects, language ~rt1pl,,1¥ 1 we fee L, <l.rt po."'~"Lu-l'} iMpo~tut"tfh o.n vnde"ffi. di'h9 0Pth 1~ eo.a-1.y po~'/. and other aspects,. ., 11 r r: I\ The poems included, it is ~ -----* hoped, will allow thf reader and. teacher immediate t> t-efl.d'1hs access to comparisons, contrasto/~nd tentative analyses. also is no ove~ iding effort to explain the works in a '-"""' 1!J There �poem-by-poem breakdown. However, eo.<:..h' d -,o..~\€...Y' wLlL bv\\J o\r\ an historical "running" analysis of several poems with emphasis faffii ,... on how the poems can be read silently and aloud. n · rh~s • · · u ,.,r.oJ duJ.y ti ,t.;; )X; II Literary and Social Landscape Blacks have been in the Western Hemisphere almost as long as whites. After 1501, most of the Spanish expeditions to the SC),) New World included Black explorers.~ the time the 20 slavesto-be were brought on a Dutch vessel to Jamestown in 1619, the presence of Blacks had been felt for at least 100 years (see Bennett, Franklin). Crucial to an understanding of early Black poetry are the circumstances surrounding slavery and the political and religious moods of both England and Colonial-Revolutionary America. British America did not follow the Greco-Roman tra- dition of the well informed slave. It was quite unlikely, then, that a "revolutionary" Black poet would emerge from a social and literary landscape so charged with self-righteousness and;(eoclassicism (or from the;(omanticism of the 1800'""s). Lucy Terry's "Bars Fight 11 (written in 1746 and published in 1895) could hardly be called "protest"; neither could the work of Phillis Wheatley, considered the finest Black talent of the colonial era, caught between contrivances of the Age of Enlight- ~ enment and the approaching grip of the romantics. The neoclassical �tradition that reached its height in the poetry of England's Alexander Pope, had already begun to die out with the death oi' Pope ain111ai' in 1744. All over Colonial America, however, white poets were imitating the stii'i'-collared conventionality oi' that period. The moral issues considered by most • ill - poets (Black and white)--universal brotherhood of man, quest i'or reason and order, the Jeffersonian ideals oi' freedom, liberty and representative government--were removed from the everyday brutality of slavery. Some of the most liberal men oi' the day (Jei'i'erson, Washington, Hume) implicitly justii'ied slavery by suggesting that Blacks were in some ways inferior. Despite Jefi'erson's pontii'ications on humanitarianism, he was unable to reconcile the disparity between his public stands and his failure to manumit his own slaves. Although Jefi'erson carried on a written correspondence with Black astronomer and mathematician, Benjamin Banneker, he considered Phillis Wheatley's pt>-e.t'~y "beneath criticism. 11 On the general American scene, tbe Revolution behind, a national literature had begun to emerge. Fascinated with American employment of new technology (Franklin's lightning experiments, printing presses, etc.) and the prospects oi' unexplored regions oi' the New World, writers started recording travels and observing the mixture of races and religions. Although religious fervor was still high it: J I I sni dsism bsd a Ii s sssL J:Isz?r ; I political problems dominated. Between 1790 and 1832 the new American government was being consolidated and the writings of men like William Bradford, �John Winthrop, Cotton Mather, Thomas Shephard, Roger Williams , Edward Taylor and Jonathan Edwards were succeeded by the embryonic nationalistic works of Franklin, Jefferson, William Byrd, William Cullen Bryant, Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, William Gilmore Simms am James Fenimore Cooper. Irving, Cooper and Bryant were to become the early writers most taught to American school children. .Often called the "New England Renaissance,'' the early decades of the 19th Century saw increasing tension between New England puritanism and Southern aristocracy over the question of slavery. over slavery Debates continued up to the beginning of the Civil War . The early part of the century also saw the birth of many of tile devel.oprnenToP white America's greatest writers along withAromanticism and rugged individualism. Mystified by the noble savage (Indians and sometimes Blacks) and challenged by the "new frontier,rr Americans began to romanticize their situation and especially that of explorers who became the first original folk heroes. White writers who dominated the period from 1826-1865 included Edgar Allan Poe (poet and short story writer, credited with creating the first detective in American fiction), Nathaniel Hawthorne (considered the first great American novelist--Tbe Scarlet Letter), John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russel Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Harriet Beecher Stowe (one of the first w ite American novelists to feature a Black protagonist in fiction--Uncle Tom's Cabin), Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, 73 �Herman Melville (considered to have written one of the handful of "great 11 American novels--Moby Dick), Walt Whitman (termed the "greatest" American poet--Leaves of Grass). Other writers, primarily political activists or abolitionists, included John G. Calhoun, William Lloyd Garrison, and Abraham Lincoln. Using their own and Black material, a number of white composers immortalized the era in songs--many of them nationalistic. It was during t'hi~ period that Francis Scott Key wrote 1,,d Star Spangled Banner." ~Step1en Foster bas since 11 The een accused of merely putting to music the songs that were sung by slaves. There was no general encouragement, however, for Blacks to learn to read; but many slave owners indulged their chattel in writing exercises as personal pas ti'!':.1.mes and bobbies. So \,J many of the early Black poets J I L grew up in relative security. To be totally free, David Walker observed in bis Appeal (1829) was to be economically insecure, socially ostracized and psychologically oppressed. Consequently, those slaves priviledged to read and write invariably took European literary models. Poets, of course, were not the only ones writing. In addition to abolitionists-essayists, like Walker and Frederick Douglass, this period of Black literary activity was highlighted by exciting slave narratives • ;jJ I fii 2 s? nns 4 j]Jtsb1 5tli!I 113 5 z 1 2 z 1 1 urts of @§£ @P@d The most popular of these, and one of the first recorded, was Tte Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789). Arna Bontemps includes it in his Great Slave Narratives (1969). �' . ~,t, ''°' \.\,~o<.s.l• . Vassa, who also included • • - some notable verse~ co~structed a story pattern that was to become familiar to readers •~arly America: that of the escaped, freed or run away slave wbo reported his or her hardships and struggles. Vassa describes his life in Africa up until the time of his kidnapping. With vivid memory and detail, he establishes the original bases for what we have come to call the nAfrican Continuum" in America. It is not just mere coincidence that this statement from 1789 m~,t fits~parts of Black America of today. We are almost a nation of dancers, musicians , and poets. Thus every great event ••• is celebrated in public dances which are accompanied with songs and music suited to the occasions. Vassa's debut into this literary genre was followed by hundreds of other narratives, many of them fakes. Early Negro Writing: Dorothy Porter, in 1760-1837 (1971), has discussed the problem of determining authenticity of the narratives. -eme►iT-,1 Mrs . Porter is librarianJ\of the Moorland Foundation at Howard University--which houses an outstanding collection on the Black past. eook sh~ lncluded tn\, ~ 6--h, "lfn her µQ. constitutions and laws of beneficial societies; speeches before mutual aid and educational societies; the report of the earliest annual convention for the improvement of free people of color; arguments for and against colonization; printed letters, sermons, petitions, orations, lectures, essays, religious and j 75 0 �moral treatises, and such creative manifestations as poems, prose narratives, and short essays. . Mrs. Porter thus sums up the intellectual and literary output ' • I h Ame f'I/C.£, of' the ft r $T Af'rican~. The word "African," was used generously by most writers and speakers of the era. not emplij<?- it was tte.~lo..ced. ~Y sy"onyrn..s "" Sv d-, When "African" was <U "Coloured," "Black, ""- "an Ethiopian Princess:' •••••■ Placed against the sometimes sophomoric and heretical accusations of some of today's Black critics, these early displays of pride in the African heritage makes one want to sent m;_ny Uninfo~meo 'e~,e~t1~ back to school! In addition to the plethora of pamphlets, broadsides, books and news orga1that emerged from Black individuals and institutions during the period up to t h e end of the Civil War, there was also much political-social consciousness raising through oration. In the early years great religious and political leaders such as Richard Allen, Peter Williams, Absalom Jones, Prince Hall (founder of Black Masonry), Paul Cuffee and Daniel Coker, took up projects of "mutual aid" for Africans. Their work set the stage for missionary, abolitionist and self-help programs undertaken later by people like Jarena Lee, Frederick Douglass, R. Martin Delaney, Sojourner Truth and Alexander Crummell, 4s•t••- -•sMID~I~lJ""'•'•t•·•tl.,f(!illllllilill•:•e The intellectual, religious and moral work of Blacks in the North was paralleled by the development of folk materials �(the songs and stories) of Blacks on Southern plantations. In general few states, North or South, allowed educational or vocational opportunities for Blacks. Thus the energies of early Black writers and intellectuals _. Nrs Pawt11 and Uii:i:i: a:1i1 n I ; were Co ttn M jfteJ 'lo .---..... various "African" D 1 l societies and free schools, and the promotion of literacy and self-betterment among newly freed slaves. "'i ""' bl ?I111Jh ISO 11 JI 5 3£ Jail J etw Un a z y\R-f¥l The Rev. Allen, popular religious crusader and founder of tre Bethel African Methodist Episcop&b Church, seems to have been referring to the same Black "sensibility" described by Vassa when he said (in 1793) that be was confident that there was no religious sect or denomination that would suit the capacity of the colored people as well as the Methodist; ••• Sure I am that reading sermons will never prove so beneficial to the colored people as spiritual or extempore preaching •••• Much evidence exists, then, of Blacks banding together for "mutual" concerns in the early days of America. The horrors of slavery, the psychological pressures of Northern "freedom," white reprisals in wake of slave revolts (such as those led by Gabriel Prosser in 1800, Denmark Vesey in 1822 and Nat Turner in 1831), made for a most unsettling atmosphere (see Walker 's �Appeal). Reporting on white America's "needn to vent its fears and hatreds on Blacks., Winthrop Jordan (White Over Black, 1968) noted that whites initially feared tbree things: loss of identity., lack of self-control and sexual license. In an effort toe.scape the nanimal within himself the white man debased the Negro., surely, but at the same time he debased himself.n And a young Frenchman., Alexis de Tocqueville, visiting America in 1831., said racial prejudice was nstronger in the states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists.n Needless to say, creative literature of the "arty" sort (though much of it was being done at the time) was not the number one priority for Blacks, jft•iifiailll!J•Jiiai?liii•?•-•llilll•••••11s•s•r Nevertheless a literary tradition did develop and flourish in Black America. The example of the narratives (including those by }larrant., Douglass and Truth) led to publications by the first Black novelist and playwright, William Wells Brown. novel was Clotel: Brown's or The President's Daughter (1853) and his play was called Escape: Or A Leap to Freedom (1857). The second novel by a Black American was The Garies and their Friends (1857) by Frank J. Webb. Delaney published the third novel, Black, or the Huts of America, in 1859. Webb were both published in England. The works by Brown and Brown also worked• in the cause of abolition and other social reform programs. His Anti-Slavery Harp (1848) contained songs and poems whose themes are implied in the book's title. The pattern of the Black educator., intellectual or artisan carrying on the dual role of creator and activist, characterizes the history of Black ' �creativity in America. Yet many critics, Black and white, unaware of the stresses and demands on Black artists do not approach their sub jects with <An.understanding or +hl's. F-o..<.-t-. J Political journalism (see Dann's The Black Press, 1827-1890), als~ was a strong vein in the development of Black American writing. Beginning with John Russwurm (the second Black college graduate and first Black newspaper editor, Freedom's Journal, 1827-29), and evolving through Ruggles' Mirror for Liberty (first Black magazine, 1838), Douglass' Monthly 1844) and North ~ (1847), to Hamilton's Anglo-African Magazine (1 859), t h e tradition of Black journalism and research on the African experience was firmly established. Much of the journalistic writing (like the poetry) took pros or cons on tbe question to of i~gration, colonization or the elevation of t he Black man's plight in America. During the early and middle years of the 19th Century, white travelers through the South collected and compiled slave songsASeculars and Spirituals. the v,eU.. spri"' tor-- These songs g; 1111 later ~1-oJt d e d much of the Black and white writing the mes. On the eve of the Civil War, the Dred Scott decision (a blow :to to slaves and abolitionists) hel~tep up the demands for t h e abolishment of slavery. Brown's The Black Man (1863) was a capsule of one era which closed on the blasts of cannon and another that opened on the sound of jubilant sh outs. �III THE VOICES ON THE TOTEM "Mean mean mean to e free" --Robert Hayden Against the foregoing background, t b e poets of ColonialRevolutionary-Slavery America appear curious, tearful, exciting, paradoxical, frightening and puzzling. Biblical imagery, classical allusions and themes, hatred of slavery and ambiguous praise for slave-masters, recollections of Africa, appeals and condemnations , all become enmeshed in the intricate linguistic and psychological webbing of this early poetry. In 1770, at 17 years of age, the privileged slave girl Phillis Wheatley became the .first Black "exception to t1e rule" in English and American poetry. And for decades students of American poetry bad gone about their recitations and researc_1 as though nothing or no one of importance happened and Dunbar'~ loefwee.V\ he1- fiint It was not until 1893 that Lucy Terry 's "Bar• s Fight "--the account of a l 7L~6 Indian massacre in Deerfield, Nassachuse tts--came to public lig~~t. And readers had yet anothe r 27 :rears to 11ai t before Oscar Hegel in j_n 1915 discovered Jupiter Hammon's 11 An Evening Thought, Salvation by C r1st, With Penitential Cries" (1761) in the New York Historical Society, thus establishing Hammon as the first published African poet in America. �lt h<A.s bee.,, ,~ ,u1 ~ht.,'R~ /\ mentioned~earlier1'that many ant ologies omit "Bar's Fight." This is understanda le since Hiss Terry (1730-1831) never wrote, or at least presented, anymore literary works • .America's 11 f'irst 1-egro poet," then, is important primarily for being just tbat--first. Like ph;Uis • eatley, Vassa and ot1er L.w.y r New England slaves, ~ was kidnapped as a child and rougbt re.... to New England (Rhode Island). She witnessed t1e Indian rad w.h'l'-". sh ow!. • • reported in her 2 8-line doggerel••• ■ F"-a flair for storytelling. Hence despite the poem's "obviously weak literary merit, 11 tis Black writer performed one of the earliest services of the poet--that of a singer of history-- in recording actual names and places in her narrative. Since she was 16r,rears/old and a servant girl, writing was surely not her pr mar&«y respon"'-"' sibility. Yet "Bar's Fight, 11 ac ieves some success when seen against the oral tradition in poetry: Listen my children and you shall hear Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere. or Now, children, I'm going to tell you the story about raw-head and bloody-bones! and There was an old woman who lived in a shoe She bad so many children she didn't know what to do. Compare the foregoing lines to August 'twas, the twenty-fifth, Seventeen hundred forty six, 8J �The Indians did in ambush lay, Some very valient men to slay, The names of whom I'll not leave out: Samuel Allen like a hero fout, and the elemental connections will readily be seen. One bas only to read this poem aloud to get both the effects and taiD Terry's apparent intentions. Ill L a Lvcy When she wrote "Bar's Figh't;," s ke worked for an Ebenezer Wells of Deerfield, Massachu- setts'; given ~ freedom ten years later . . . she 1 married a free Black man, Abijah Prince, by whom she bad six children. Prince later became the owner of considerable land and was one of the founders of Sunderland, Vermont. t~~V Robinson (Early Black American Poets) lists the "orator II poets and rightly so. William Terry with Other details about an j] h4i-- , . . . and the Princes can be obtained from George Sheldon's A History of Deerfield, Massachusetts, 1895. See o...Lso £il~eK Socniernl 't!J_e M..v.1!.' C l ~ ftmeto•c.~nJ'. -s-Iave poet and i nteTlectual, .Jupiter Hammon (1720?-1800?), "f- provides yet another look into the capabilities, mind-sets and limitations of Africans in Colonial America. Hammon is generally not regarded as an "important" Black writer--but is distinguished for being the first African in America to publish his verses. This he did in 1761 ( "An Evening Thought, 11 composed in December of 1760); 1778 (nAn Address to Miss Phillis vfueatley"); 1782 ( 11 A Poem for Children"); and in the mid-1780-""s ("An Evening's Improvement 11 ) . In his "Address to the Negroes of the State of New York 1' (written in 1786 and published in 1806) Hammon •)ou-,ect ••••s•••·••·•taa., a tradition that included pamphleteers like �Quinn, Walker, Ruggles and others of the period. Hammonts "Address" sought freedom for younger Blacks, claiming that 11 f'or my own part I do not wish to be free." This statement appears, on the surface, to be the ultimate in self-debasement and self-denial; but one has to view it in the context of statements by de Tocqueville, Walker, and others, along with the circumstances of the aging and religious Hammon. That Hammon himself was deeply religious is reflected ·in his poetry--as with many Black poets, e.g., Hayden today-and he obviously labored under the influence of Methodism and the Wesleyan Revival (see Early Negro Writing) . In the poem \)h,Llts to . . . W11eatley, he notes that it was through that 11 God 1 s tender mercy" that she was kidnapped from Africa and bro.ught to America as a slave. '"'· And Hammon seemed, generally, to reflect ..-.Aprevailing white attitude toward the "darkn continent: one engulfed in ignorance, barbarism and evil. ~~\LL\.J Obviously not as well read as JiMll(Wheatley , 'Hammon was unable $\J'.i[\'n to"' levels. It I 1 universal and intellectual 8orn a slav~~- belonged to the influential f'amily of Lloyd's Neck on Long Island and was encouraged by his masters to write and publish poetry. There is not a great deal of information ava'ilable on the life of Hammon; but it is difficult to understand why an intelligent Black man, who lived such a long life, mirrored almost complete ignorance of the horrors of slavery--despite the 3 • daily local newspaper and verbal accounts and discussions of the �"peculiar institution. 11 ~-Iammon's literary modei[-0,.$ ; ; f 1· the conventional material of hymns of the period. q.4Q Col orj al :Sworn trm: Thought, 11 ◊irnrf LS as as;;r? a ,. tttmts l.ta 2 11 J J• •:R••·J•2•·----• lgilBSIG 36!£ s tits o!#fli! t J i;Jp l gs "An Evening which f!t>~YPorter tells us was probably "chanted during the delivery of a sermon," begins: Salvation comes by Christ alone The only Son of God; Redemption now to every one, That love bis only word. Dear Jesus we would fly to thee, And leave off every Sin, Thy tender Mercy well agree; Salvation fro m our king; Like li,<...1 Terry, Hammon was not primarily a poet. And hence, unlike approaching Phillis Wheatley, one should not spend too much time or be too harsh in criticizing (or complaining about) him. The basic structure of the English hymn--which merged with the Spiritual--as Hammon interprets it, is an alternation of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter combined with a rather clumsy ab ab rhyme scheme. Compared to other hymns, it is no worse and is better than many. Despite the times, pressures and censures, however, one is bari,.ressed to accept Hammon's assurance to the slave1 In Christian faith thou bast a share, Worth all the gold of Spain. �(JJti Hammon' s works,\ 1 n:: J 1 3 8 critic ally introduced in Robinson's anthology, in Stanley Ransom's America's First Negro Poet, the Complete Works of Jupiter Hammon of Long Island (1970) 9.nd in Barksdale's and Kinnamon•s Black Writers of America( 1972); a.LSD a.ppe(l,t,S critical-biographical attention ill"-in Vernon Loggins• The Negro Author (1931) ...._ J. Saunders Redding's To Make A Poet Black (1939) ., ~ 1ee iCAm1n '.l?>htwLty~ "'e Nee"-o G-tnWj,(jq'31), Tberuhas been substantial critical-biographical 1153(-411'1-) treatment of Miss 4£iji7;11 eatle1t -&re go ettom'9il ,rill ']•iz;::;;r -- ,m 1 lih £&11 UdtiS !de 11abiS1h 1 .. I By far the most gifted and com~ plex poet until Dunbar, Phillis Wheatley was also privileJ ged '-' as a young child and allowed access to the Boston library of ~ John Wheatll:r)~ to whom she was sold after being brought from Senegal when she was six or seven years old , ul!!er 1 11l!u I rad • r; J, e HJUJ.ed lt ■ SLI •ls By the time •Aner teens she had learned to speak and write English, and acquired a New England education which put great emphasis on the fible and the classics. ~\lim•••••• reflects · deep r Her poetry,~L~o interest in and knowledge of religion; but it is also steeped in classical allusions and conventions of tbe neoclassical writing school. Critical attention to Miss Wheatley (who, like Dunbar, lived a short life) has been both raving and unkind. Benjamin Brawley (The Negro Genius) reports that Jefferson viewed her as beneath the dignity of criticism. Yet, other great personalities of the day generously praised and received her work. George �Washington, so moved by her poetic tribute ("To His Excellency General Washington"), invited the young poet to visit him at bis camp at Cambridge, Massachusetts--an invitation which she later accepted atrl was treated as royalty. p)ulf.j) y Wheatley's earliest verses were penned during--. ;auf her adolescence. Whitefield: "On the Death of the Rev. George or 1770,n reflects the elegaic tbeme/\..wi.e@ much of her poetry. @0011pi<ils Manumitted and sent with other members of tbe Wheatley family to London in 1772, because of frailness 5 and poor health, itas received like a visiting dignitary in London's literary circles and hailed as the "Sable Muse .ti The next year ( 1773), while in London, she became (at 2¥year;fold) the first African, atrl the second woman from America, to publish a book of poems: Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, by Phillis 1rJheatley, Negro Servant to Mr. Wheatley of Boston. The volume, the only one she ever published, became an immediate success in both England and America and won her an everlasting place in bath C '-ll1~1ts the history of' English poetry in :A!1 rn 1 ,r Upon her return to America, J«:J:Wll17 I 7 J 1 ~isfortunes seemed to come in such lightning succession that one wonders bow she withstood adversity as long as she did. First, there was the death of Mrs. fueatley and then, during the 1770 1 s, the deaths of the remaining Wheatleys. The poet then married e. JotnPeters, who "proved to be both ambitious and irresponsible,n for whom she bore three cbildren--all of whom died in infancy. �Add i t i onally , the Peters family lived in s qualor a nd poverty, lJn d~..,1hese.C.&l"CV"" tr"-"Lts1pl.;t.Lts '/,fa.Lili" wh~h h~J beeti foohFo11 v-111os, l'i.,Ltd ltt,- (:?,MU.yin \"1 like so many New England Blacks ·A Commenting o~ the circumstances surrounding her death , Barksdale and Kt nnamon (Black Writers of Ameri ca ) observe wit_ stomac -curdling accuracy t1at: Her early death provides a commentary on the desperate marginality of life among free Blacks at that time . oston ' s To Phillis '1eatley, at one time a privileged servant who enjoyed an extrei,:ely benign master-servant relationship , freedom's uncertainities and i ns ecurities were overwh elmi ng . Certainly, b ad she been initially free in Boston, she would probably never have bad the time, the opportunity , or the peace of mind to write poetry. For the state of freedom for t h e Black man in the 1780 1 s--even in godly, liberty-loving Boston--was indeed precarious. The preceding explanation, coupled again with the observations of Walker, de Tocqueville and others, make Hammon's statement about preferring not "to be free" somewhat more tolerable if not plausable. We noted that Phillis Wheatley has been praised as well as condemned. Some critics denounce her for not being inventive and original enough, claiming that she simply followed t he conventions and themes associated with neoclassicism: Salvation, Mercy and Goodness. Truth , Some resent her so-called "pious I"f ftO 't ~ . �sentimentality" and accuse her of calling on Christ when she should be calling for the abolishment of slavery. Still others, during the current period, have accused her of not wi11t 1,.; Lit~H.ley being "Black enough. 11 Considered j\l the Alandscape of the times, however, L 'J,(!, ~em~u as a genius--wi th hardly an equal among pt.ck or white contemporaries. James Weldon Johnson, during a comparison of Miss Wheat1ey's "Imagination" to Anne Bradstreet's "Contemplation," said ''We do not think the black woman suffers by comparison with the white n etry) • During her life time ~eatley published some 50 poems, almost half of them elegies, five or six political and patriottpieces ("General Washingtonn and "Liberty and Peace"), and the remainder consumed by religious and moral subjects--as she states in her title. Though she never deals with the question of slavery--and makes only tentative reference to her own predicament--her work sustains a high level of emotional, linguistic, religious and general poetic force. Since her greatest models were Pope, Dryden, Milton and the earlier classical writers, one must examine these sources to uncover some keys to her techniques am allusions. But one only has to read (aloud) the following passage from "Rev. George Whitef'ieldrr to feel impact: "Take him, ye wretched, for your only good, "Take him, ye starving sinners, f'or your food. "Ye thrifty, come to this life-giving stream, �"Ye preachers, take him for your joyful theme; "Take him, my dear Americans, he said, 11 Be your complaints on his kind bosom laid; nTake him, ye Africans, he longs for you, '~mpartial Savior is his title due; "Washed in the fountain of redeeming blood, 1 ~ou shall be sons and kings, and priests to God." , . ''(c:,twtni1'on"; M1'.. [ttl ~~<nLyihe~e Ltnes. Conlo.tn, l~~mtni}vL. 'PCiwe.i,.sitio.it1ft.i\-Scetldt, Awe should state that some of the previously harsh critic ism of ,m z -ttie P~i LLts Wheatley bas been tempered in ligbt of~increasing feminism and, especially, efforts by Black women writers, scholars and intellectuals to reevaluate her uio~1'J ru>ltoF wr..· is done in the heroic couplet which dominated the period.. ti .,;w;ae:=iiil'!!fl tt, 11! g Tbese pentameter couplets (which would be popularized in the 20th Century as "unrhymed iambic pentameter" by Robert Frost) call for end-line rhymes to appear in twos, with 10 syllables per line. Literature) complains that Roger Whitlow (Black American ~b }L<~ ~Wheatley rrfalls short in what Pope called the 'correctness' of diction and meter, that near-perfect choice of word and measurement and weighing of syllable. · n One could agree, if were simply to imitate. 17 g he ••Joie aim But there is a great evidence that ,nt,.h'f she--likel\Black poets s?neps s 3 i 11~--was trying to o.n C\V~H~Ly achieve "readable poem without losing the essence of the couplet. After all, as Stephen Henderson (Understanding the New Black Poetry) bas suggested, many Black poets have their ears and thought-rhythms attuned to the spiritual and phonological • �demands of the audience that loves "extempore" delivery, even when the written lines are strict and tight. Also, in placing "Their colour is a diabolic dye" in quotations ( "On Being Brought from Africa to America"), Viliilil'f-P'',Ll\.~ Wheatley suggests that others deem her color negative but that she may not. This remains a possibility despite her closing couplet: Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain, May be refined, and join the angelic train. Yet there is firm evidence that Hfl JIM tI □ ShQ c was not insen- OWr'\ sitive, at least to her •~redicament as a slave without a fundamental and geneological identity. Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth," In nTo The Right she says Should you, my lord, while you peruse my song, Wonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung, Whence flow these wishes for the common good, By feeling hearts alone best understood, I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate Was snatch'd from Africts fancy'd happy seat: What pangs excruciating must molest, What sorrows labour in rrry parent's breast? Steel'd was that soul and by no misery mov'd That from a father seiz'd his babe belov'd: Such, such my case. And can I then but pray Others may never feel tyrannic sway? The capital "F" in "Freedom," the phrase "cruel fate," the sorrow felt for her parents and the reinforcement of the agony �via repetition ("such, such"; see Margaret Walker's lines "How Longin), place her alongside other Black voices that searched for answers to the pall of racial insanity that enshrouded them. Phillis Wheatley also experiments with the hymn for:iji. In "A Farewell To America" and "An Hymn To Humanity" one bounces along with her alternating lines and rhythms. Perhaps the capstone of the critical 11 shift 11 in viewing Phillis Wheatley 1 s work was the Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival, held in November, 1973, at Jackson State State College, Miss·issippi, to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the publication of Poems. At th.at festival writer Luci Horton noted that recently there has been more respect for the nslave girl who, under unspeakable circumstances, was able to write poetry or any literature at all. 11 Ebony magazine (March, 1974) featured a five-page picture essay on the festival, organized and hosted by Margaret Walker, poetnovelist and Director of Jackson State's Institute for the Study 4 of History, Life and Culture of Black People. According to Ebony "eighteen Black women poets converged" on the Black college campus to salute Phillis Wheatley, read their own poems and discuss poetry and life. Other :poets partioi,pating in the festival included: Naomi Long Madgett, Margaret c. Burroughs, Marion Alexander, Margaret Esse Danner, Linda Brown Bragg, Mari Evans, Carole Gregory Clemmons, Lucille Clifton, Sarah Webster Fabio, Nikki Giovanni, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Gloria c. Oden, Paula Giddings, Sonia Sanchez, Alice Walker, Malaika Ayo Wangara (Joyce Whitsitt Lawrence) and Carolyn �• •=•9't4l~8-WNIIIIMSII&- The festival was also the subject of a six-page picture essay by Carole Parks in Black World ( 'file br ;y et, ry, 1974). _-.J IIPll! !@J_ .112-•·•·11112,-.w"t~S!Jll9- ·ii:••■ -f..-lbllll!IIII _ t~ tl!PIS!!II B!!J1191Bll!J... iili a most revealing comment appeared shortly after -th~ pestb.,e..C..,, in M.A. Richmond•s Bid The Vassal Soar: Interpretive ~ssays on the Life and Poetry of Phillis Wheatley and aeorge Moses Hortontl974). Reacting to the adverse criticism whe~ of~h,LU~ ilil•81-.•••llii!!III•••••, Richmond states: These poems are vicarious in theme and imitative in style. In the circumstances it hardly could have been different. ~he was permitted to cultivate her intelligence, to develop her feeling for language and her facility in its use, but one thing she was not permitted to develop: the sense of her own distinct identity as a black poet. And without this there could be no personal distinction in style or the choice of themes that make for great poetry The barter of her soul, as it were, was no con- scious contract. Enclosed by a cloying embrace of slavery . at a tender age, alternatives did not first intrude, and later, when she might have chosen one, she was drained of the will and pe rception to do so. M,A ,R,dn-ltM.Q has Pt"ovi.<ie.c! what appears to be a balanc ed answer to the protestat i ons of' Redding, Brown, Brawley ("no racial �value") and others. It remains to e seen as to whether current and future generations of Black and white students ;1-~~ will keep ~ . Nfbeatley a "statul~e in the park" or bring her ;.:;..., (<Ly 1"-0t.y Io~) to the table and "examine her blood and heart. " ACritical treatment of th i s first Black woman of letters eJ~eod¥ has been extensive: Julian Mason ' s The Poems of P illis Nheatley {1966); Barksdale's and Kinnamon's critical introduction; ~~~---v, Robert C. Kunc o's "Some Unpublished Poems of Phillis Wheatley" XLIII, June, 1970, 287-2°7) ; Loggins' The ~egro Author (1931); Brawley's The Negro Genius; Redding's To Make A Poet Black; Shirley Graham's The Story of.' Phillis Wheatley (1949); and Jerry Ward's and Charles 'A.o well's article Freedomways { Sv!V\t't'\•t" 1 M7f). in \fer JiNro e J r eedy muii:i 1 1riT Gustavus Vass a {1745-1801), one of the most interesting of the early writers ,,,_ii.4!1l!'~l'!'elllf!'!ill..,...._i!ia!!9 ~ ,u11.S-r1, ~~ ~f::r,c,.~ ~ · · r orn the seventh and youngest son of A chieftan {in Essake, now Eastern Nigeria) _ Vassa {Africa n name: Olaudah Equiano) was first sold to a Virgi nia plantation owner. His journeys later took him on several Atlantic voyages and then to the Medi terranea n where be served in the Seven Years War. Vassa held technical jobs on ships as a result of his adeptness at the English language and bis mastery of basic mathematics. He became a tireless worker for the abolition of slavery and worked, briefly, in behalf of efforts to colonize ~ poor blacks of England in SierrA Leone . Vass a is chiefly known for his Narrative (1789) which was a best-seller among abo- �litionists in England and America. Slave narratives, we have -t,;o., observed, were a part of a branch of Black writing wkl9ilAgave rise to the more sophisticated autobiographies (that stretch from Douglass through Baldwin and Cleaver) which in turn laid some of the foundation for American fiction. Vassa was not the f irst writer of a slave narrative, as is popularly thought. Briton Hammon {no relation to Jupiter) published in London A Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings and Surprising Deliverance of Briton Hammon, A Negro Man (1760) and John Marrant published (also in London) A Narrative of the Lord's Wonderful Dealings with J. Marrant, A Black (1785). Vassa, who we turn to briefly for his efforts in poetry, included "Miscellaneous Verses" in his Narrative. His verse is interesting because it helps to establish ·the portrait of a complex and many-sided man; it also provides further insight into the workings of the African mind making contact with white culture and especially Christianity. While in his prose and speech-making Vassa was firm in his attacks on slavery, he proves in the end to be a believer in some ultimate force of "deliverance." In the last line of the last stanza of his "Verses" he reminds us that "Salvation is by Christ aloneJ" }4dhich is, of course, reminiscent of Hammon's opening line: Salvation come by Christ alone Nevertheless Vassats language is less saturated in/iblical terms than Hammon•s. of And the former, as verse writer, has a better control e.~he language. In the "Verses" he applies a �with an a ab b rhyme scheme: driving iambic tetrameter Those who beheld my downcast mien Could not guess at my woes unseen: They by appearance could not know The troubles I have waded through. Lust, anger, blasphemy, and pride, With legions of such ills beside, Troubled my thoughts while doubts and fears Clouded and darken'd most my years. In the first stanz4 q I i Vassa presages the duality and mental pressures that more skilled writers would describe,. \Ii :r et 4iP1!1 as . jt Implying that the job of the oppressed Black is to keep his head lt~e.l and up, Vassa says even those who see him in his sorriest state cannot envision the sufferings he has enMo"t1J:iQn tA..C.e KTCftY u:fe,,. l>""h,.,.. dured. /\ say, the same thing in a different way in ''We Wear the M.a.s kV'tJ And Countee Cullen would state it more than 130 years later in yet a different way. This apparent ability of Blacks to "keep cool" and adapt (see Johnson's The Autobiography of An Ex-Coloured M.a.n) under the most trying circumstances has been promoted, nurtured and praised by leaders of the race. Vassa, then, is important as an early writer, not only because of his skill, but for the insight and understanding he brings to the social and religious pressures, demands and choices around him. There is a releasing therapy in Vassa's work which acts as only one of numerous �"rat.t/ conduits for Black anguish and outrage when the ,-.o ~tions were slavery or death. Vassa's Narrative is most accessible in Bontemps' Great Slave Narratives (1969) . In 1967 Paul Edwards published an edition of the Narrative including a comprehensive introduction . Edwards also did a two-volume facsimile reprint of the first edition (1969). See also Africa Remembered: Narratives by West Africans from the Era of the Slave Trade, edited by Phillip D. Curtin (1967). Loggins assesses the Narrative and Robinson provides a handy biographical-critical introduction. More on Vassa can be found in Marion L. Starkey's· Striving to Make It My Home: The Story of American~from Africa (1964) and in Whitlow's Black American Literature. 'Iha iWIMHI! 1t tr2 a l:9~, iila1eeia ::ewa01 coadaobua a g±adaabo and ,u1b @&daabo somltra1 ca 81&00 1ia11arbi:c:!I aii Ji111a 8tate 1Uutec1s1bJ• l'1-ame ho a11eets the eenboz f &i f2t 1s ArH11~21r C12 Jfnra • The early and middle years of the 19th century witnessed the maturation of Black autobiography, political journalism and abolitionist activities. George Moses Horton was 34 years old when William Lloyd Garrison founded The Liberator (1831), the most influential and famous of the abolitionist newspapers. And by 1830 there were more than SO Black antislavery societies in America. Blacks in the United States bad been sti~d by l~ 'the. vM 'tt.4 s:r&, slave rebellions both 1 Carribean and Trinidad. ~and in places like Haiti, the ' .Is. w;,lf►.s OAcl o.c.T.v1s7j Especially inspirr ng'-during this period was the 1839 revolt of slaves aboard the Spanish schooner L'Amistad . Led by Joseph Cinque, a Mendi-speaking �prince, the f'ifty slaves%'~ed the captain, set the crew adrift and demanded that ship owners steer the ship to Africa. Apprehended, the Africans were escorted by a United States brig to New Haven where the would-be slaves faced murder and other charges. Ex-President John Quincy Adams defended the Africans' right to return to their homeland and in 1842 they ~ sailed to Sierr~ Leone. Ironically, neither the international press nor most Blacks knew of the connection between Cinque of the Symbionese Liberation Front, apparently headquartered in northern California during 1973~4, and the Cinque of the L'Amistad revolt. In light of the growing consciousness among Blacks, it was to be expected thatf George Moses Horton (1797-1883) would appear to inveigh against tyranny and slavery. Born a slave near Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Horton is considered to be the first Black to employ protest themes in a volume of verse. His Hope of Liberty (1829) ranged over the whole area of general and personal protest. The poet was first owned by a pla nter named Horton who later rented him in the service of a janitor to the University of North Carolina. Horton exploited the academic environment by reading the English classics and composing poems. Often called the first professional Black writer, Horton hired his poetic skill out to students who paid him rather handsomely f'or composing "personal" poems. His second book of poems, Poetical Works of George M. Horton, the Colored Bard of' North Carolina, was published in 1845. �Horton's hopes that he would gain enough money from the sale of his books to secure his freedom were never realized; and he was not freed until Union soldiers arrived in 1865 when his last volume, Naked Genius, was published. Horton's themes are not devoted exclusively to protest and he has been criticized, along with Phillis Wheatley, Hammon and Vassa, for writing such lines as those that appear in "On Hearing of the Intention of a Gentleman to Purchase the Poet's Freedom 11 : When on life's ocean first I spread my sail, I then implored a mild auspicious gale; And from the slippery strand I took my flight, And sought the peaceful heaven of delight. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • e • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Hard was the race to reach the distant goal, The needle oft was shaken from the pole; In such distress who could forbear to weep? Toss'd by the headlong billows of the deepJ Horton goes on to say that "Eternal Providence II saved him when he was on the "dusky verge of deep despair" and when "the last beam of hope was almost gone. 11 Yet Horton writes bitterly of slavery as well as lightly of love and humorously of life in general. Influences on bis poetry are Byron, Wesleyan Hymnal stanzas, and other sources from books that be bad read. In the poem from which the stanzas above were taken he pursues a --:--, rather monotonous iambic tetrameter •at • • But in a poem like "Slavery" (published in The Liberator, March 29, 1834), he can vary the hymn pattern in the way that Phillis vlheatley does in �her hymn-inspired works. The effect is almost ballad-like: When first my bosom glowed with hope, I gazed as from a mountain top On some delightful plain; But ohJ bow transient was the scene-It fled as though it had not been And all my hopes were vain. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Is it because my skin is black, That thou should'st be so dull and slack, And scorn to set me free? Then let me hasten to the grave, The only refu e for the slave, Hbo mourns for libert1r. Also e.f.fective and sustaining in po"Ner is "The Slave's Complaint" whkh .features seven three-line stanzas with a final indented one- word refrain) 11 Forevern which is followed by either question I mark, colon or exclamation mark. Horton handles well some of bis love poems and in nThe Lover's Farewell" is able to touch base with that broad and painful understanding of what it means to say goodbye: I leave my -parents here behind, And all my friends--to love resigned-'Tis grief to go, but death to stay: Farewell--I'm gone with love away! In this and other pieces Horton makes ~eud• use of dashes--which allow him to develop suspense and render his statements more �dramatic. Because of its various uses, the dash has arrived as an important ingredient of modern and contemporary Black poetry. Contrary to many of his learned contemporaries and predecessors, Horton apparently consciously thought of, and worked toward, his freedom. This fact is reflected both in his life's work and his poetry. His own position, coupled with his sanguine delivery of folk wit and emphasis, can be seen in the following stanza from "The Slave": Because the brood-sows left side pigs were black, Whorsable tincture was by nature struck, Were you by justice bound to pull them back And leave the sandy-colored pigs to suck? For appraisals and selections of Horton's works see Robinson's anthology, Collier Cobb's An American Man of Letters--George Moses Horton (1886), comments by Barksdale and Kinnamon, Whitlow's study, Brawley's Negro Genius, Loggins' work, Redding's study, Richard Walser's The Black Poet (1967), Brown's assessmen~ Jean Wagner's Black Poets of the United States (1973) ~{d,mono~ ~.J'h&-\41,MAL ~011~ (tq '"') .a:;;:g: 50AI'\ <hel\rnOJ'l 'S ..J:n V cs,~1.e aim i M ...o-A:Je.-, tC(u\l Q €th f rimrt'frlib Horton, of course, trails and precedes a long line of t:en'ivl'\'IK¾7t orators and poets, many of whom we know very little about today. . . In fact, comparatively _s peaking, there is a wide disparity between the readily available insignificant information on white writers of the period and the lack of vital data on Blacks. We do know that the early decades of the 19th century witnessed a developing Christian and political consciousness among Blacks 100 �. and that most northern Black writers, intellectuals and educators turned their attention to the educational, physical em6troll<lL andM._ 2 I 1 uiill needs of free and enslaved Blacks. t)o►,,,...,,_, Of these and other matters, ~~ f'orter provides ample proof and discussion in Early Negro Writin~.1/-ocoasional verse was also somewhat of a tradition among many learned Blacks as was the practice of writing hymns, psalms and other spiritual songs. One such recorded item is "Spiritual Song" by Rev~ chard Allen, probably nchanted or sung during the delivery of a sermon." Rev. Allen employs internal rhyme by repeating similar sounds in the middle and at the end of lines. Varying his meter and using an irregular end-line rhyme scheme, he expresses the religious fervor that consumed many Blacks of the period: Our time is a-flying, our moments a-dying, We are led to improve them atrl quickly appear, For the bless'd hour when Jesus in power, In glory shall come is now drawing near, Me thinks there will be shouting, and I'm not doubting, But crying and screaming for mercy in vain: �Therefore my dear Brother, let's now pray together, That your precious soul may be fill'd with flame. Another such example is a "New Year's Anthem" written by Michael Fortune and "sung in the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas" on .January 1, 1808. Fortune's anthem is tra- ditional in its use of materials from Methodist hymns. He tells the congregation to "Lift up your souls to God on high" d Who, with a tender father's eye Looked down on Afric's helpless racel //RobeffY. Sidney composed two anthems ''For the National Jubilee of the Abolition of the Slave Trade, .January 1st, 1809." "Anthem I" begins: DRY your tears, ye sons of Afric, God has shown his gracious power; He has stopt the horrid traffic, That your country's bosom tore. See through clouds he smiles benignant, See your nation's glory rise; Though your foes may from indignant, All their wrath you may despise. This stanza is .followed by a "Chorus, n "Solen and "Recitative. 11 In ."Anthem IIn an abbreviate form is employed and Sidney drops the solo and recitative--keeping only the chorus: Chorus. Rejoice that you were born to see, �This glorious day, your jubilee. Sidney also wrote a hymn which Mrs. Porter includes along with hymns by religious leaders Peter Williams Jr., and Williams Hamilton. Both men, using the English forms, celebrate freedom, call for mutual aid among Blacks and preach the virtues of the Christian God. Williams praises the "eloquence/Of Wilberforce" after whom a predominantly Black university was named in Ohio. For detailed information on sources for these and similar writings see Mrs. Porter's Early Negro Writing: 1760-1873. The collection includes two very touching examples of writings non Slavery" and "On Freedom" by 12-year-old boys from the . . New York Af'rican Free School established in 1786. In reading into the life and works of Daniel A. Payne (1811-1893), one is immediately struck by his dedication to the task of upgrading Blacks. Educator, university president, missionary and poet, Payne was born in Charleston, South Carolina of free parents. He was orphaned at 10-years-old, apprenticed to a carpenter and then to a tailor. Later trained in classical education at the local Minorts Moralist Society's school, he taught free Black students for a fee and slaves free of charge at night. Payne's travels took him to various places (New Orleans, Baltimore, Canada and twice to England) where he helped expand the programs of the African Methodist Church. Trained in the Lutheran Seminary in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, he was ordained in 1839: after preaching for several years, he was made an A.M.E. Bishop in 1852. In the political and educational spheres he helped urge Lincoln �{on April J.4, 1862) to sign the bill to emancipate slaves in the District of Columbia, and spearheaded the purchase of Wilberforce University--serving as its president for 16 years. Payne devoted most of his life to the cause of free and enslaved Blacks and to writing poetry and religious history. His Pleasures and Other Miscellaneous Poems was published in Baltimore in 1850. He also wrote books on the history and mission of the A.M.E. Church. Especially valued for its social and intellectual insight into 19th century Blacks is Payne's Recollections of Seventy Years)published in Nashville in 1888. As a poet Payne is erudite and imitative. Robinson 4a•s-. . a•t~l3,- observes that a major problem with the poetry is nthe repetition of end stopped lines, and his diction, a hybrid of classical and Biblica.l vocabularies, can prove distracting to many readers. tt Nuch of this we can forgive, however, when we understand Henry Dumas' remark that "a Black poet is a preacher." Certainly a preacher--in fact or as poet--knows very well the meaning of and need for repetition. convince us of his seriousness. Yet Payne never fails to So hurt was he th-e n~wake of the 1834 South Carolina law that, effective in 1835, made Black literacy illegal, Payne wrote nThe Mournful Lute of the Preceptor's Farewell. n We find his 4'bossed concern for students in these lines: Ye lads, whom I have taught with sacred zeal, For your hard fate I pangs of sorrow feel; Oh, who shall now your rising talents guide, ere virtues reign and sacred truths preside? • �Payne is a handler of the language, observing that "tro revolving moons shall light the shores" after the dread law "shut the doors II on educatlon for South Carolina Blacks. En ulfed in the religious and moral fervor of many Black ministers of the period, the poet and orator reflects age-old concerns about deceit and mistrust in such pieces as "The Pleasures." He complains that Men talk of Lovet But fe do ever feel The speechless raptures uhich its joys reveal. Men rrmistake love,n Payne notes, For grovelling lust, that vile, that filthy dame, Whose bosom ne'er ever felt the sacred flame For insight into Payne's life and works one could go to any one of his "considerable number" of writings. Among others, they •include The Semi-Centenary and the Retrospection of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (Baltimore, 1866) and The History of the A.M.E. Church (Nashville, 1866). Josephus R. Ooam 1 s 1935 (Phild.delphia) biography: See also Daniel Alexander Payne, Ch~istian Educator, Robinson's comments and Brawley 1 s Negro Genius. Unfortunately too little is known of romantic poet John ~B~~:k-~~.~ 11,,...~--An~, Boyd, "-especially since .'his ·work reflects genuine gifts and talents. Boyd's poetic images are brilliant, sustained, searing and generally accurate even if they are not always �connected in a way that makes them readily a~ssible. The only record of Boyd is made available by C.R. Nesbitt, Esq., Deputy Secretary and Registrar of the Government of the Bahamas. Nesbitt must have recognized the talent and the promise and he aided Boyd 1 s poetry through publication in London in 1834. Boyd, it seems, was self-taught on New Pro~ idence Island where he remained all his life. His poem "Vanity of Life" was published in the February 16, 1833, issue of the Boston-based Liberator. His 1834 volume is entitled The Vision/ and other/ Poems,/ in Blank Verse/ by John Boyd/ a man of Colour/. Practically unedited, the manuscript is what Robinson calls a "publishing scramble." Like most of the poets of the period Boyd's work owes debt to Milton, the /ible and classical influences. "The Vision/ a Poem in Blank Verse" is immediately reminiscent of Milton's Paradise Lost. Boyd skirts a rhyme scheme but employs a fairly regular iambic pentamete~ ~• w, All things considered, his work partially cancels the criticism by Sterling Brown that Black poets lag in their stylistic awareness. opens brilliantly with: Me thought the Moon, pale regent of the sky, Crested, arxl filled with lucid radiance, Flung her bright gleams across my lowly couch; "Visionn �And all of heaven's fair starry firmament Delightful shone in hues of glittering light, Reflecting, like to fleecy gold, the dewy air. In his "Vision tt Boyd encounters characters of both the heavens and the hells. When the narrator, "dreamer" joined the train Fervent hosannas struck the astonish1d ear, As when in the midhour of calmest night, Stillness pervadeth the awakened wave, Roused by the secret power that moves the deep, It heaves its loud surge on the sounding shore; The ttvision" is also peopled by ngrim death and ghastly Sin" who "lay coiled, like snakes in one huge scaly fold,n and consider their "inexpiable doom--." Boyd's tones are sacred and surreal and he assembles harmlessly complex subordinate clauses that help build an exciting linguistic cr~endo as in "Ocean": When the fiat of the most High, Thy fountains burst, ar;copiously �Thy secret springs, with ample store, Pour 1 d forth their waves from shore to shore Wide as the waters roll, oh, wave. Boyd's work has yet to be appraised in terms its importance. ~w~ comrrk ea with Robinson makes brief but significant comments on his poetry •. Ann Plato, another romantic poet, is also one for whom there exists little ·• I L important factual data. This second Black American female to publish a book almost skirts the racial theme completely. Her Essays:/ Including/ Biographies and Miscellaneous Pieces,/in/ Prose and Poetry was published in Hartford in 1841. What little is known of her comes by Wf.l'{ by Rev. J. W. C. of an introduction to her book Pennington, pastor of the Colored Congregational Church in Hartford, of which she was a member. Except for her "To the First of August.," written in celebration of the 1833 abolition of slavery in the British West Indies, there are only allusions to slavery. Her book also contains essays on religion, mod- eration, conduct and other conventional themes. Th~~ame themes are pretty much paralleled by the 20 poem~in her book, which deal with home life, deaths of acquaintances and moral issues. "Reflections, Written on Visiting the Grave of a Venerated Friend" begins: Deep in this grave her bones remain, She's sleeping on, bereft of pain; �The language and the subject matter are stock but "Forget Me Not," each stanza of which ends with the title, is well handled and bas flashes of the preachment of self-control that Vassa alluded to in his verses: When bird does wait thy absence long, Nor tend unto its morning song; Wbile thou art searching stoic page, Or listening to an ancient sage, Whose spirit curbs a mournful rage, Forget Me Not. Her interest in oral literature and the storytelling tradition is apparent in "The Natives of America" where she asks: "Tell me a story, father, please," And then I sat upon bis knees. Again, as in her contemporaries, we find the inf~uences of English writers of a preceding generation or so, the debt to lblical learning and much imitation. For brief critical not~s on Miss Plato see Robinson• s Early Black American Poets. SJ..-e. IS. a.Ls~ b.,.1·E ~lt n-u.Ted ivi .Shal'-f"'IIV\'' ~11,uhl • ~ waA Another abolitionist-minister and orator-poet~Elymas Payson Rogers (1814?-1861) who, after teaching public schools in Rochester, New York, took up pastoring in Newark, New Jersey. One of Rogers' students was Jerimiah w. Loguen who later become an important social-religious leader and a Bishop of the A.M.E. Church. Fugitive slave Loguen's bio- graphy (see Negro Caravan) appeared in 1859, in Syracuse, under the title, The Reverend J.W. Loguen, As a Slave and as 1oq �a Freeman. Known, as were many of the orator-poets, for reciting his poems orally, Rogers• themes are unashamedly abolition, Black betterment arrl political hypocrisy. Working politically on behalf of Blacks, Rogers apparently designed The Fugitive Slave Law (Newark, 1855) and Repeal of Missouri Compromise Considered (Newark, 1856) to be read aloud from platform~ Like, James W. Wbi tfield, who came later, Rogers gave up hope in America's ever giving Blacks a fair deal and tM~ 1\fever a sailed for Africa where he died few days after ht arrivoL,Ytoae, His incisive no-holds-barred approach to the political climate and conditions of the time is seen in "On the Fugitiv.e Slave Law": Lawl What is Law? The wise and sage, Of every clime and every age, In this most cordially unite, That 'tis a rule for doing right. And the ringing cry of the elocutionist can be heard later in the poem when, Ill discussing the fugitive bill, he asks and answers: That Bill a law? the South says so, But Northern freeman answer, Nol Anticipating the fiery and torrential Whitfield (and 20th century "angry voices n) Rogers continues: That bill is law, dougbfaces say; But black men every-where cry nNay: We'll never yield to its control Wbile life shall animate one soul. �0 At times biting and overf bearingly harsh as a poet, Rogers ..:,,,,' resounds in 11 The Repeal of the Missouri Compromise Considered" with these words: "I want the land., 11 was Feedom's cry; And Slavery answered., "So Do I J By all that's sacred., I declare I'll have rrr.y just and lawful share. The Northern cheek should glow with shame To think to rob me of my claim." With built-in drama and careful cuts., Rogers assessed the state of the nation during his time. In a line like nLawJ What Law?" he purposely begs the question in order to wring the emotional and rhetorical power from the words and to evoke responses from audiences. References to Rogers can also be found in Robinson's Early Black American Poets;z,,,J)_.$he"'m,-.t'\S £n\Jt~cbLe f4its•. Mathematician., poet, educator and Black community worker, Charles L. Reason (1818-1898) was born in New York City of Haitian parents. He attended the New York African Free School where he later returned as a member of the all-Black faculty. Seeking the ministry., Reason was., for racial reasons, forbidden full time attendance at the Theological Seminary of the Protestant Episcopal Church. Eventually., however, he ecame eligible for a professorship in Mathematics and Belle Lettres (1849) at the New York Central College in McGrawville, Courtlandt County. William G. Allen and George B. Vashon were also on the faculty there. He held various educational jobs includin palship of the Institute for Colored Yout tll- a princ - in Philadelphia �poe.-r and grammar shcool No. 80 in New York City w_ile~ . Cordelia Ray was a teacher there. Reason was an intellectual and a scholar but was not blind to the practical needs of AfroAmoricans . He opposed plans to colonize Blacks, claiming ·" instead that they neej,9-ed to pursue vocational car~ers. here in America. Again, not primarily a poet, Reason is competent vet-S(~{e~ as aN 11 in The Spirit Voice n which opens with: Comel rouse ye brothers, rouse! a peal now breaks From lowest sland to our gallant lakes: 'Tis summoning you, vho in bonds have lain, To stand up manful on the battle plain, and urges Blacks to fight for freedom and opportunity. The poem (whose complete title is "The Spirit Voice or, Liberty Call to the Disfranchisedtr) is indebted to the rhyming couplet so famous during the era and whic skill by Phillis Wheatley. had been used with great It appears in William Simmons' Men of Mark (Cleveland, 1887). Like that of other orator-poets, Reason's work is designed to be read aloud in order to stir and move poeple to action. Therefore he exhorts, reinforces, demands, warns, admonishes and issues veiled threats. His "spirit voiceu (see the idea of African Spirit Force) longs for the time when freedom's mellow light �Shall break, and usher in the endless day, That from Orleans to Pass'maquoddy Bay, Despots no more may earthly homage claim, No slaves exist, to soil Columbia's name. The poem was ·written in 1841 and shows Reason's poetic abilities etched out under the strain of racism and the countless chores demanded of an educated Black of the period. Elsewhere ( "Freedom") he gave this familiar cry: 0 FreedomJ FreedomJ Oh, how oft Thy loving children call on TbeeJ In wailings loud and breathings s!,oft, - Beseeching God, tr:jy, face to see. How reminiscent of and "not unlike" the Spirituals this burst isJ Certainly the stud~nt of this pe~ od of Black poetry will ~LS() want to keep his rhythmic lyres attuned to the fiblical and innovative cadences of those t'Black and unknown bards. n t),et-m().t> assessments of Reason see Robinson, Brawle~~and Kerlin. For More of Reason's work appears in A Eulogy on the Life and Character of Thomas Clarkson (1847) and in Autographs for Freedom (1854). Anticipating the Afro-American poignancy and humor in this line by Langston Hughes; America never was America to me 11 3 �and this one by Lance Jeffers: to make me more American than America) James M. Whitfield {1823-1878) voiced some of the most powerful and angry protest yet heard in Black American poetry wben he published Americ3 apd Otber*_ ;eQem,s n Buffalo in 1853. Barber, worker for Black colonization, poet and pioneer journalist, Whitfield had earlier authored various types of writings: Poems in 1846; "How Long?" (published in Julia Griffith's Autographs for Freedom in Rochester, 1853); "Self-Reliance., Delusive Hope., and Ode for the Fourth of July" (in The Liberator, November 18., 1853); "Lines--Addressed to Mr • .and Mrs. J .T. Holly, on the Death of Their Two Infant Daughters n (In Frederick Douglass' Paper., February 29, 1856); and Emancipation Oration {San Francisco, 1867). Whitfield is known chiefly for America which was received so favorably that he was . able to leave his barber shop and devote full time to making speeches for the abolitionist cause, working for colonization programs and general Black development. He had personal contact with both Douglass and novelist :Martin Delaney who called the 1854 National Emigration Convention of Colored Men which Whitfield attended. respected and admired Whitfield. Douglass apparently But the two men differed on the question of colonization and participated in a lively debate. Pursuing his own position with vigor., Whitfield established the African-American Respository, in 1858., as a pro-colonization propaganda organ. Though born in Exeter., New Hampshire Whitfield �spent most of his life in Buffalo where he barbered and conducted£ td his colonization efforts. He apparently died on his way to look into the possibilities of colonizing Black Americans in Central America. Delaney had changed his mind and the emigration scheme was never realized. Like most of the orator-poets, 1fuitfield is writing to be heard, listened to and read aloud. Consequently much of his poetry (though not lacking in religious fervor) reinforces his ideology and negative views of America. America, the Sweet land of liberty becomes for Whitfield, "America" '} Thou boasted land of liberty,-and To thee I sing becomes It is to thee I raise my song, Thou land of blood, and crime, and wrong. Like Rogers, Whitfield did not believe America was capable of redemption; and, again like his predecessor, he died on a journe1 to find something better. The idea of "giving"· up on America would appear thematically in the poetry of later writers l)c,11 t • like Fenton Johnson~ Lee, Baraka and some of the Muslim poets. It would also be implicit in th~tftriation C writers and artists such as Paul Robeson, Wright, Baldwin, Chester Himes and Katherine Dunham. In a driving iambic pentameter l SI (in couplets), whith has all the openings for spontaneous interjections and expletives, Whitfield in "America," accuses �the United States of killing the Black sons who fought for her and of general hypocrisy. Here one can see Whitfield a. anticipatingt._,_current slogan, which Hayden makes use of in 11 w·ords in the Mourning Time": Killing people to save, to free them? Though more general, Whitfield continues a similar assault (stating life s hel~) in "The Misanthropis-t;'' but tones down Ir\ . to a reverent salute,t\'To Cinque 11 : - . All haill thou. truly noble chief, Who scorned to live a cowering slave; Thy name shall stand on history's leaf, Amid the mighty anl the brave: ••• Whitfield praises the revolutionary Cinque who "in freedom's might" Shall beard the robber in his den; and ••• fire anew each freeman's heart. Since Whitfield's primary goal is to get a political "message" over, his poetry, as art, leaves some things to be desired. Robinson points out that 'Whitfield nis genuinely angry" (despite the influence of Byron) and that the bitterness and force in his work is not to be mistaken for romantic or linguistic cosmetics. Lastly, we must note that Whitfield expressed concern for global oppression; quite modern in this, he served, more or less, as a chronicler of world turbulence and a harbinger of the direct and emphatic assaults that today's Black poets heap upon tyranny. He viewed the "Russian Bear" (reflecting �on European despotism or the mid l80cr's) in his poem "How Long?": I see the rrRugged Russian Bear" Lead rorth his slavish hordes, to war Upon the right or every State Its own af'fairs to regulate; To help each despot behind the chain Upon the people's rights again, And crush beneath his ponderous paw All constitutions, rights ar:d law. Selections of Whitrield's poetry can be round in the Robinson anthology, in Negro Caravan (1941), and in the Barksdale and Kinnamon text. ~ Whitlow discusses i!!il [ 51 5 7 ••Apoetry and im- pact as does Loggins, Brown, Brawley, Wagner, and Ruth (Black American Literature, l97l)f Miller ~ g~ . The most popular Black 19th century poet berore Dunbar was Frances E.W. Harper (1825-1911), the rirst Black American to publish a short story ( "The Two Ofrers," 1859). Born free in Baltimore as Frances Ellen Watkins, she was educated in Pennsylvania and Ohio, and spent most or her adult life in the cause or antislavery and other types of social rerorm. She worked in turn for the abolition movement, the Underground Railroad, the A.M.E. Church and the Women's Christian Temperance ;eague. According to Dunn (The Black Press) she contributed to news and propaganda publications. Her reform work was slackened by her marriage to Fenton Harper in Cincinnati in 1860. But af'ter bis early death in 1864 she resumed her efforts, lecturing in all but two southern states and promoting Black �sel:r-help programs. Her fame rested primarily on her Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects published in 1854 in Philadelphia. A very popular volume, it went through twenty editions by 1874 (William Still's Underground Railroad, 1872). Her literary activity was stepped up after the Civil War and included Moses, A Story of the Nile which went through three editions by 1870; a volume entitled Poems came out in 1870 followed by a second edition in 1900; and attempts at prose fiction including Southern Sketches (1872, enlarged in 1896) and a novel, Iola LeRoy~ published in 1892. has not been located. Her first work, Forest Leave~, Critics generally agree that Mrs. Harper's poetry is not original or brilliant. But she is exciting and comes through with powerful flashes of imagery and statement. Her models are Mrs. Hemans, Whittier and Longfellow, and so we find an overwhelming influence from the ballad. In reading her poetry in public, Hrs. Harper was · able to appeal to what Johnson (Q:94-!._s_~~I.l~til) called a "highly developed sense of sound" in Afro-Americans (see, again, statements by Rev. Allen and Vassa). She apparently knew her limitations, for Robinson tells us that her popularity ••• was not due to the conventional notion of poetic excellence, Mrs. Harper was fully aware of her limitations in that kind of poetry, it was due more to the sentimenta_, emotionfreighted popularity w;;, she had given the lines with her disarmingly dramatic voice and gestures and sighs and tears. �Up until the Civil ,, ar, :Mrs. Harper's .favorite themes were . slavery, its harshness, and the hypocri~es of America. She is careful to place graphic details where they will get the greatest result, especially when the poems are read aloud. An example of this is .found in "The Slave J:.Iotber": He is not hers, for cruel Pands :Iay rudely tear a.part The only wreath of household love That binds ber breaki n.• heart. A. sir:iilar play on the emotions is seen in poer,1s like "Bury He in a Free Land, n "Songs :for the People, 1t "Double Standardn (with its stirrings o.f feminism) and 11 The Slave Auction.tr A woman is not solely responsible for her nfall,n she suggests in 1tA Dou le Standard/ adding; '4illlli' And what is wrong in a. woman's life In man's cannot be ri ht. Highly reada le and less academic in her use o:r poetic tee niques and vocabularies, ~s. Harper is nevertheless quite indebted to the /1-ble for much of her imagery a nd moral message. And she is able to merge and modify the folk and religious forms in a poem like "Truth" where she opens with a debt to the Spirituals: A rock, for ages, stern and high, Stood frowning tgainst the earth and sky, , And never bowed his haughty crest When angry storms around him prest. Morn, springing from the arms of nig t, �Had orten bathed his brow with light, And kissed the shadows from his face With tender love and gentl-~ grace. Several religious songs are suggested here; but she also loves to return to the theme of women as she does in rrA Doub le Standard 11 and "The Slave Mother. u In the ballad rrvashti rr she tells of the heroine who dared to disobey her dictator-husband. The strength and determination or womanhood is expressed in the last two stanzas: She heard again the King's command, And left her high estate; Strong in her earnest womanhood, She calmly met her fate, And left the palace of the King Proud of her spotless name-A woman who could bend to grief But would not bow to shame. Certainly a comprehensive biographical-critical study of Jllfrs. Harper is long over due. Selections of her work can be round in: Kerlin 1 s critical anthology, llt Negro Caravan, • book, • Miller's anthology, 1 Robinson ' s 1 Barksdale and Kinnamon and in numerous other recent anthologies. f'f&ipc1 1 e works are critically examined by Loggins, Wagner, Whitlow, Brawley, Brown a nd Sherman. ,pena• ears /l. -A ..17 ?OP 2 ...-----~-- -~-::-- - -· ,_..... __ - ' iS lilil I i • r 5J Like other writers, educators and activists of his day, �George B. Vashon (1822-1878) contributed to the influential Anglo-Af'rican }Tagazine which was published intermittently between 1859 until the end of the Civil War. Vashon had a good solid education--in classics and history--at Oberlin College where he received his A.B. in 1844 and M.A. in 1849. tie.•1\. ,s~~hiAf:f'llvl :nn ____ o w n ~ for his "Vincent Oge," which Sterling Brown tells us., "is the first narrative poem of any length by a Negro poet. tt jsslr n MiUWnJt lat htE Ir as a tba lj;ijfP udli\SPPill□ s tr 1 : a 11 , ..... taught school in Pittsburg; J t He~acticed law in Syracuse, served on the faculties of College Faustin in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, New York Central College (where he was a colleague of Reason and Allen) and Howard \Al 41htt\tTo il,; University inf',..D.O. where he was a ]aw professor. Much of Vashon's poetry reflects debts to his strong education and the influence of Scott and Byron. All are seen in nvincent Oge.,u inspired by the courageous (but foolish) eff~rts of Vincent ogi, a Haitian mulatto who was "entrusted with the message of enfranchisement to the people of mixed blood on the island." The order had come down from the Con- vention in France, of which Ha ti was a colony. Internal disruption in France (due to the Revolution, 1789-1799) had r echoed to its colonies in the Caribbean where Oge led a short-lived armed uprising that cost him his life when he was refused asylum n Spanish Santo Domingo and remanded to the French authorities in Haiti. As punishment and a warning to others, the French had Og~ tortured on the wheel and severed his body into four parts ..,._,.e....,.e which__. hung up in the four �leading cities of the island. ' Oge's followers were either put to death or imprisoned and their properties confiscated. I Vashon was as moved by Ogets example as was Whitfield by f Cinque•s. In the lengthy poem, "Vincent Oge," Vashon immor- ' talizes Oge in an admixture of classical and fiblical language, fbMpl...1.11t.i':1 'f1 "U\ using a pleasant iambic tetrameter G7277 and iP P a sf dissonance in his rhyme scheme which features an alternating ab ab/ a a bb. The style is somewhat reminiscent of ~lhitfield who breaks his rhyme scheme (see "American) after each group of eight or nine lines. ''Vincent Ogt II and · "A Life-Day" were both printed in Autographs for Freedom for 1853. For Vashon, the struggle is very much alive~ f And Oge stands mid this array Of matchless beauty, but his brow Is brightened not by pleasure's play; He stands unmoved--nay, saddened not, As doth the lorn and mateless bird f and Oge, dedicated to struggle, presses on. Vashon carefully weaves the graphic details of his protagonist's execution into the narrative and anticipates the more fire-tipped pens of later Black (lync~~theme) poets such as Johnson, McKay, Hughes, Brown and Dodsen: Frowning they stand, and in their cold, Silent solemnity, unfold The strong one's triumph o'er the weak-The awful groan--the anguished shriek-The unconscious mutterings of despair-- �The strained eyeball's idiot stare-The hopeless clench--the quivering frame-The martyr's death--the despot's shame. The rack--the tyrant--victim,--all Are gathered in that Judgment Hall. Draw we a veil, for 'tis a sight But fiends can gaze on with delight. Freighted with emotion and terror like much of the work of~~nGt) Harper, and setting the stage for such awesome poeril} as Wright's "Between the World and Me, n :McKay's "The Lynching, n Dunbar's "The Haunted Oak" and Dodson's uLament," Vashon•s relentless . . narrative signals a new and sustaining power in the work of ' Black poets. Compare, for example, the last two lines of the stanza above to McKay's couplet in his sonnet nThe Lynching": And little lads, lynchers that were to be, Danced round the dr~ul thing in fiendish glee. Unlike McKay, however, Vashon cheers up at the end: Thy coming fame, Ogel is sure; Thy name with that of L'fOverture, And all the noble souls that stood With both of you, in times of blood, Will live to be the tyrant's fear-- .. ,. Compare this ending, if you will, to the ending salute to "General Washingtonn by ~~LL~~fueatley. "A Life-Day" is a f shorter poem, in three parts, and, like "Vincent Oge, is founded �.-.... on a factual event f-the love-arfair and eventual marriage of I,.., a young white man and a light-skinned Black. For selections of Vashon•s works see Autographs for Freedom and Robinson's anthology. For critical discussions see the works of Brown) .a B r a w l e y ~ ~ ~ . As we prepare to move to the next phase in the development of Black poetry, it is important that we tarry long enough to pay brief attention to some_of the Creole poets. We select Pierre Dalcour, Armand Lanusse (1812-1867), Victor Sejour (1817- 1874), Nelson Debrosses a nd Nicol Riquet. Somewhat of an anomaly in Afro-American literature and poetry, these Creole poets are nevertheless important if the complete portrait of this many-sided and complex tradition is to be understqod. There is nothing typically American in their poetry--not even in terms of American imitators of English forms--and they rarely display any racial consciousness or concern for slavery and general injustice. Most were fluent in speaking and writing French and from that influence their work derives a ir. spicy melody and an u~ibited treatment of romantic love and revelry. Much of the work is also intimat~and sophisticated in its use of conventions and materials gained from French educations. The Creole poets• works appeared as "the first published anthology of Ne~o v9rse in .America" in a volume ~ f!:gf.i_ GCJ:Nt:; called Les Cenelles wrew Orleans, 1845). In addition to French, the Creole poets also wrote in Spanish, Latin and Greek and were generally from the wealthy land-owner class �I /YI q..~y o~ Wh or,,1 h ~d j;: bvroMJ °'9 l e~ (el\ e.LLet, fr1C.l..'6dfJd I?d' Ht es(; P, 0 e'li ' u., -:-::;:;~•''"'"'1.""•.Z:"',-,,• 4 ~ "-, f 't i'l p t,1:111,,UtJt• ,., !I'\~ 1UWil -~ and owned slaves . ~ ' 1"~ :, t,:At.b11Ml;;1Tt,o• •.-~. - , .. ., , , About Dalcour little is kno1n except tat he was born of' wea lthy parents who sent him to France in the early 1800's to receive a good education. Returning to New Orleans after his schooling, he was una le to accept the racial temper and again took up residency in France. While in Mew Orleans, however., he wrote a number of' poems, one of' Written int e Albur.i of' Hadamoiselle. relives the 11 vaul ted skies" and fl 11 ch was "Verse The poen touchingly gentle f'l9ishes II whic , to the poet, are "less lovely" when seen against the lady 's ey es Beneath their brown l ashes. Lanusse, Le1aenelles editor, contributed to New Orleans Creole newspapers, L 'Union and La Tribune, served as a con0 scripted Confederate soldier in the Civil 1 arl\. :fe'nt some time as principal of' the Catholic School f'or Indi ent Orp ans of' Color. He also encouraged literary and other artistic expression among f'ellow artists and sol cited work f'or Les Cenelles. He eulogized is brother, Numa., in the poem "Un f ' Frere/ Au Tombeau de Son Frere , death has cut you down." 11 recalling that "unfeeling Elsewhere Lanusse ref'ers to deat as "some other hand shutting your eyelids., 11 Somew at naughtier and more poignant in "Epigram.," Lanusse gives the account of' a "wor:ian of evi l n who ·wants to urenounce the devil n but, asks Bef'ore pure grace takes me in hand, Shouldn ' t I show my daughter bo-1 to get a man ? " �sijour lived most of his life in France and only returned to New Orleans for brief visits to his mother. Son of a wealthy family, he wrote several plays, 21 of which were staged in France and three in Hew Orleans in the 18.50~. S~jour•s literary abilities were praised by Tapoleon III and he rubbed shoulders with major French literary personalities of his day. His scope is wider than some of the other Creole poets. ;a. ' "Le Retour de Napoleon tt ( "The Return of Tapoleon") is an elegy f and a celebration all in one. While eulogizing Napoleon, Sejour praises both his and France's triumphs and glories. poem of flowing., graphic exaltation. It is a Opening on the scene of a "sea II that "groans under the burning sun., n he narrates the growth and collapse of France as a world power: And on and on she swept., an unleashed tempest wild., and France moved on ahead. No more. ••• Yet., hail., o, All is over. captainl Hail my consul of proud bearing. Admonishing France to ''t.veep, France., weep., 11 sJjour reminds the . . country that "death has lightning struck the people ts giant." Little is known about the personal life of Debrosses which., according to Robinson., "seems in keeping with his Haitian gained experience in Voodoo., aspects of which he practised in New Orleans. 11 In Debrosses' "Le Retour .a u Village aux Perles" ("Return to the Village of Pearls")., be seems to anticipate what Waring Cuney sees through the 11 dishwatertt in his poem �"Images." Th.e Creole poet returns to the village to find that Her spirit dances here and there in these enchanting places and to locate --that flower-bosomed grove again, the witness of our secret passion, and too, the cherished brook to which my soul would on this day confide its happy memory. A cigar-maker by trade, Riquet lived all of his life in New Orleans where he pursued a vigrous avocation of writing light verses. His "Rondeau Redouble/ Aux Franc Amis" ("Double Rondeau/To Candid Friends") leaves no doubt that Riquet saw himself as at least serious in his avocation. A rondeau is a French-originated lyrical poem of 13, or sometimes 10 lines. There are two rhymes throughout the poem and the opening phrase is repeated twice as a refrain. The form is remotely reminiscent of the blues atrl Spiritual forms of Afro-American poetry. says that since his 11 Riquet candid friends are calling for a rondeaul" he and his "Muse .... must work a wonder." ,=...-- ~ ...-_........._--...__......._ Other Creole poets included Michel Saint-Pierre (18? - 1866), Camille Threrry (1814-1875), Joanni Questi (18? - l86 tompiled 1 an Almanac~ of Laughter) and T.A. Desdunes whom Jahn says "is reminiscent of the Senegalese poet Birago Dio .. " poet is to 11 rhyme in an uncommon way" or h e will name of poetaster--from our candid friends." - - - - - - -- - - - - - - -- - - - �The Creole poets are examined and represented by selections in E. Ma.ceo Coleman's Creole Voices (Washington, D.C., 1945) and in Robinson's anthology. See also Charles Rousseve's The Negro and Louisiana (Xavier University Press, 1937), and the ~>h~-Y\• critical selection by Jahn~ Lanusse and Lecour also appear in Hughes' and Bontemps' The Poetry of the Negro (1949, 1970). There wer~ther poets writing and publishing during this . . hNii"~h-+ov'tsame period. Many - - - 1111itlartua~~heir works in single editions, and copies of some are no longer extant. Brawley refers to a poet known as "Caesar n who allegedly wrote but whose poetry is not available. are: Other poe~ and their collections Maria and Harriet Falconar, Poems on Slavery (London, 1788}; James Montgomery, James Graham, E. Benger, Poems on the Abolition of the Slave Trade (London, 1809); Anonymous, The 1est Indies and Other Poems (1811); John Bull, The Slave and Other Poems (London, 1824); Rev. Noah c. Cannon, The Rock of Wisdom ••• To Which Are Added Several Interesting Hymns (New York,? 1833); Anonymous, "The Commemorative freath: In Celebration of the Extinction of Negro Slavery in the British Dominions~(London, 1835); Anonymous, Anti-Slavery Helodies (Hingham, Massachusetts, 1834); George Whitfield Clark, compiler, The Liberty Mi nstrel (New York, 1844); William Wells Brown, Anti-Slavery Harp (Boston, 1849); "A West Indian," Charleston, South Carolina: a satiric poem showing that slavery still exis•ts in the country which boasts, above all others, of being the seat of liberty. (London, 1851); Sam-----------------Darkness Brought to light (Derry, �New Hampshire.,? 1855); George '1. Clark., The Harp of Freedom (New York., 1856); and Abel Charles Thomas., The Gospel of Slavery (New York., 1864). In 1860 Blacks represented J.4.1% of the United States population and were 4.,441.,830 strong. The sour tastes left by the worst internal social inflagration until the 19601's and17o'rs., the problems of caring for and protecting the soon-to-be-released slaves., the need to develop and staff ... educational facilities for Blacks., all engulfed Afro-Americans in a deluge of horror and hope. Although it is clear that the works of many poets leap the arbitrarily-imposed chronological '<J., boundaries., the tempe~ents, themes., dictional preferences and limitations discussed generally hold for most of the poetry of the period. Despite the surprising successes., and the flashes of brilliance intertwined with mediocrity and comedy., the Black poet would labor long to remove rrthe image of a .face II that., in the words of Corrothers., "Lieth, like shadow on the wild swe·e t flowers. 1zi I fqJ? 'iii ,,. ,.. "''' al 3 t iiili~ililijjii Ill~ I II 13 Si@ iWiiil lncludai 1!!!1 iUlllllllii' • 2 t"I\? •• Iii lli ■ll1 ■ U1 • � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Eugene B. Redmond Digital Collection Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document Text Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context EBRWritings_08_22_23 Title A name given to the resource First typed draft of Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry: A Critical History, Chapter III. African Voices in Eclipse: Imitation & Agitation, p. 70-129, typed with handwritten edits Relation A related resource Eugene B. Redmond Digital Collection Language A language of the resource English Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For digital rights and permissions, see <a href="https://www.siue.edu/lovejoy-library/about/policies.shtml">https://www.siue.edu/lovejoy-library/about/policies.shtml</a> or contact <a href="mailto:library@siue.edu">library@siue.edu</a> for direct inquiries. In copyright. <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/</a> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Redmond, Eugene B. https://digitallis.isg.siue.edu/files/original/09392e375ba5f4f645b77a25a688eecf.pdf 28ba1292716a8624dac071b7f842193c PDF Text Text CHAPTER II THE BLACK AND UNKNOWN BARDS 0 black and unknown bards of long ago, How came your lips to touch the sacred fire? -- James Weldon Johnson I Origins of Black Expression In this chapter, as in subsequent ones, 9\-ew·u,g \3 LClc • empha.~1/s WtLL foe Orl ? ~~"tf..y ----. within the spirit and letter of the African-American cultural ;radition. Unfortunately, many early scholars either played down or ignored African influences. ~--,. . -....,. -Hic,u f.t Jliiillll!IIZ"Clllll!!IICll!ll&IJl&iilll!IIIIJ-&IIS•I• • • •· , ~'ls was certainly not true of all 0~11\ert\. For while some gloated over the nfindings n of "Southern white s 11 --pur porting to prove that the Spirituals were derived solely from English (Hymns and Psalms) sources-,q~t, ..T,, Johnson (Book of American Negro Spirituals, 192~, . . . . .iiliw:weslr Work (Folk Song of the American Negro, 1915), and others, displayed faultless proof of Africanisms existing in practically all Black American folk materials. 'ttlef'\). . ~o\~ '!11is chapteJ~ill e)(a..rn ,ne the Aphilosophical (' updating some of the thinking on traditional African found views and mannerisms~in Black America. 'i!iJ:aw. Srief consideration 'i will be given the major trunks of the folk poetry: • Spirituals and the Seculars (or religious folk poetry and everyday work, , -r LS and-play folk poetry). ~+ncludedA fair representation of the original folk poetry. 27 �Host anth ologies . . . . . .ll!!l!'!IIIWR!ll!J•••ll[III•..- omit Jvm ,-t b(t-t these i tems• · · · · •"wi thout a knowledge of isdtf'r,,gLt eiVte..i'he,(., devslo,omewf c,.,.. :t to understand,\tbe Black poet's iehe r o.. L.. use o t f'(tf. k cvi:. 4/ ~t, II I aI I ( see Dunbar, Johnson, Brown, Hugh es, Hayden, Walker and others). However, before discussing the ori gins of Black /Yt.01e r1, e. .,.ou. o F expression, we should •■••••••••••••A-- grioi}societies. or story tellel{--in pre-industrial African e110L11es The Black poet, as creator and chronicler, • • •Afrom t h e=;P oWJ.l ,1\qs --human~record~ 8f family and national • artisans lore. I · git ??w t rained to recite--without flaw--the geneI ologies, eulogies, victories and calamities of the folk, . . , griots (like f It J lead singers of Spirituals) bad to spice and with drama.- ~excitement . few -=- gr.w up (even in recent times) with out Ame~,, p.,..o,,., tfl ,' ncu,r ffion Blac\rAyoungsters .,,Jan ••••aAa sort of sister, motber1 • hus11e_,.1 The job of the ~ , in anden-t- Af:'f'(con socii't. ,, griot (uncle, grandmother, bi g brother) father, preacher, etc). --- · 411!1!' was so important t h at could cost him bis life. m o~f:A"l'>Jt griot be gan at a very early afOg~ ~n is~ • - information. ma~~ The technique and Like the~drummer, he understudied an elder statesman of the trade. His training demanded a certain psychological adjustment to the signi~icance of h is job-c.v,n,.,.4.(., which was to contain (and give advice on) t he,tbeirlooms" of the community. As years and centuries passed, t h is "f'actua1 11 information was r-'ituo__U 3ed into a lore, myt h ology, cosmology and legend; it became a part of the vast web of racial consc i ous- 28 �ness and memory. It became the legacy with which every new born child entered the world. Clearly, then, the myth-and legend-building Black poet has a past into which to dip and a future to predict, project and protect. And any violation of the past, present or future constitutes a serious crime against one's ancestors--against one's parents, against one's blood, against one's god. So it follows that the poet--griot-- is not some haphazlardly arrived~hipster or slick-talker i;,,.;.- simply mouthing tired old phrases. Am~lco.n To the BlackAgriot-singer- poet the job of unraveling the complex network of bis past and present-future worlds is a painful but rewarding labor of love. We can say, then, that the Black Experience in the United States continues via the African Continuum: a complex of mythical (see Jahn), linguistic (see Twiggs), gestural (see Emery, Black Dance), psychological, sexual, musical, physical and religious forms. This complex is evidenced in the day-to-day attitudes and activities of Blacks: their sacred and secular (organized and random) expressions, their physical appearances, their dress patterns and their family life. Not only in the United States, but in the Caribbean, in the West Indies, in Latin America, in all areas of the world where Blacks live in substantial numbers--they exhibit characteristics peculiar to the nature and culture of indigenous Africans. Naturally, general Black expression evolves from the myriad components of Black culture; and the artistic (song, poetry) expression--traditi~nal Black (African) 29 �communities did not separate life from art--is a more sophisticated f~m boned from the general "storehouse. 11 # No one has yet - i di nn~ied time c..., he"" t he first African sounds or movements were incorporated into ''1-1hi te II or Western frames of references or vice versa; but we do know that it did happen . Unf'ortunately, inept reporting on the Black Experience bas muddied the waters so • le.eo_J ~ .. " by1'1te • much that one is . OF, 1ie:t, S' ntc. Aobservations and Md.KV conclusions of" r I Jiimsl1 11Ali , 1 · bs "researchers. 11 In an unflinchingly brilliant analysis of Black African Oral Literature, presented at the First World Festival of Negro Arts (1966) in Dakar, Senegal, Basile-Juleat Fouda, noting that "oral literature is as old as creation, phrase ttArchival Literature of Gesture. important revelations, Fouda said: n 11 coined the Concluding his "Thus in the Black Africa of tradition, literary art is an anonymous art because it is a social art; it is a social art because it is a functional art; and it is func tional because it is humanist." research is not bounded by color . Good Black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier (Black Bourgeosit ) ( ~ t b a t there were no significant carryovers (cultural transplants) from Africa to the United States. (Slavery , Frazier said, "strippedn the African of his culture and 11 destroyed II bis personality. ) 'White anthropologist Melville Herskovits (The Myth of the Negro Past) proved without a doubt that there were African operating daily in Black American- culture. 30 (For 11 survivalisms 11 fv~~, ~e\~~ �~"""' ~e on this see Jahn•s Muntu,l\:iork•s findings, , memoirs of Katherine ~~ Dunham, works of Lorenzo Dow TurnerANegro Folk Music of Africa and America (Folkways, Lp). Rudimentary Black expression and the numerous folk forms it produced (field hollers, vendors' shouts, chants, worksongs, Spirituals, blues, Gospels, jazz, rhythm &:ldblues, soul music) form the linguistic and modal bases for most Black poetry. The early song and chant forms were almost always accompanied by what we have come to call "dramatic ideograms 11 --or dances. pance became one of the three basic artistic modes encapsulated by folk expression. The other two are/-ong and/4r~. Aside from being the first means of communicating over distances, the drum also played a major role in the social lives of traditional African people·s . The career drummer, like the Black American musician today, went through years of grueling practice and preparation--learning not only drumming techniques but the legends, the myths, the meanings and symbols of which the drum was derivative. Dance always accompanied song--Fouda refers to the "acoustical phonetic alphabet"--so that the complex web of oral nuances was illustrated vividly and graphical:.?7· Obviously, when teaching or entertaining, the artist/teacher bad to present bis material in interesting and exciting ways so as not to bore the audience. Thus repetition became a backbone of Black expression--a flexible, buoyant, repetition that was designed to reinforce and increase group participation. The three essential modes--drum, song and dance--heightened 31 �the immediate experience, which was ecstatic, therapeutic, spiritual, visceral and revelatory. Added to these intricate and varying modal patterns were the colorful costumes, make-up, props and important subject matter. The achievement was not -+"e..-t o F just ~the vicarious experience but one of the act and symbol being actualized together} While such a prospect boggles the mind, a serious study of these forms and the general tradition will prove eye-opening for many a disbeliever. Ohe. '<'e.e.d onLy he.c.owne.. enm~he.d \I'\ Ah'f 4S.p«:t O I- Bl4tk "'tue..~ LJ p, fi Kn• I.!!. AAd flAd«.-~:r.-~ 1tl1s. ,otnt • Early Black American oral and gestural art forms inherited the qualities described thus far. In language, in dance~ and, more importantly, in points of view {attitudes) toward time, life and death, the cosmology of Africa "continued" {with some modifications) in the Black culture of the Western Hemisphere. Specifically, information was conveyed by way of aphorisms, riddles, parables, tales, enigmatic dances and sounds (tonal scales)~ jokes and poetry. pblique and cryptic utterances, puzzles, The pattern remains irCtact today. II One For a brilliant and cogent statement on t h is aspect of (P~l v~sey) Black expression see Samuel Allen's /'The African Heritage II in (Ja.~.,,,1t1'1t) Black Worl~ Allen..-ll!l:=!!1111••--1. -- -- . _is an acknowledged authority on both African and Afro-American culture. In the article, he finds African "carryovers 11 in the Black American church (Baldwin), literature (Sterling Brown, Cleaver) and secular life. 32 • �find.Sthe tradition in Black poets, in the sermons of Black ministers and in family and other social gatherings. me.Lvth Tbe scintillating Black poetf¢olson operates in the old enigmatic (word-fencing) frame when in "An Ex-Judge at the Bar" he says: Bartender, make it straight and make it twoOne for tbe you in me and one for the me in you. Tolson (known to carry this Black nature into his teaching at Langston University where he reportedly gave a student an "F" to tbe 20th power) ends the poem with an equally enigmatic mock: Bartender, make it straight and make it threeOne for the Negro ••• one for you and me. In -the ASpirituals one finds similar debts to tbe African tradition of f-.ong, 1-fance and }'.!rum. So too in the shouts and hollers where actual African words and phrases were often used. 2 Hence we can say that 9a traditional African phonology and ritual, modified on tbe anvil of slavery, were operating and continue to be represented in different forms of Black American expression. Tbe African slave, forced to acquire functional use of English and to reject surface aspects of his religion., went "underground" so to speak and became bi-lingual and bi-physical. 2. Hence, while much of the Raymond Patterson (26 Ways of Looking at a Black Man) is currently assembling a book listing several hundred African words that are used daily in the American 33 �thematic material of the Black folk tradition is taken from the harsh difficulties the slave encountered in America, the form, spirit and phonology were essentially African. The use of poly-rhythms 3 and the introduction of syncopation, the reliance on various rhythmic instruments {drum-related and sometimes invented) , the adherence to a non-European tonal scale and the employment of the blue tone, the development of a distinct body of folklore and a rich language to convey the lore--all represent the African's resourcefulness. Cross-cultural inputs are also evident..i••-'111111•••=-• • 1)1 the Spirituals which, in many cases, were influenced by the English Hymn and the Psalm. Other considerations inO.t,,i o.,c.et-~ Tb J)Kawau elude the slave's use of~European instruments (I3araka out, in Black Music, that the piano was the last instrument to be mastered by the Black musician.4)i:=F~UMlf!a.ualll!l!!i!M;,,-iil~ 1 &:; house, 11 ·• ~ Black adaptation of songs heard in the "big the continual re-styling of American fads and the vocabulary. See bibliography for more on 1h11 little known area of scholarship. 3. l composer-band director in Isaac Faggett, a young $ . "''c,.. Sacramento, Califr: has said that the word 11 poly-rbythmtt (i.e., many rhythms overlapping each other) should perhaps be replaced by or alternated with the words 4. 11 poly-meter 11 or "poly-metrics." Eileen Southern, in The Music of Black Americans, sets forth a thorough and accurate discussion of these points. 34 She �employment of Biblical imagery and language in songs and sermons. Langston Hughes noted that the jlues usually dealt with the theme of the rejected lover and personal depression. Hughes' first volume of poems, in fact, was entitled The Weary Blues. However, the/lues, like the Spirituals, do not simp11" preach resignation or submissiveness. _!D '"Munl!L Rather, as Jau,r~~andHoward Thurman (The Negro Spiritual Speaks of Life and Death) note, underneath the complaint is a "plaint": or change ! things must get better For as the slave said: Freedom, oh Freedom, how I love thee! Freedom, oh Freedom, how I love thee! And before I'll be a slave I'll be buried in my grave And go home to my Maker and be Free! II Black Folk Roots in America nGet it together or leave it alone" --Jackson Five Black poets have been writing in the English literary tradition since the middle of the eighteenth century. But notes with some detail how the Africans (made slaves) had to learn to use the instruments of the New World. Professor Southern also relates bow Black music inf'luenced whites in the early days of America. 35 �it is the folk literature--those productions of the everyday people--wbich must be examined before a literary or poetic tradition can be viewed in its entirety. Tbere are few persons in the United States who have not been touched or influenced (in one way or another) by the folk expression of Black America. Wbite Americans began collecting Black folk lyrics and stories in the early ~ars of t h e nineteenth century (see bibliography). In the same century, this aspect of Black culture reached wide audiences via at least three major vehicles. Tbe first was the abolitionist movement which featured Black poets (Francis E.W. Harper, James Wbitfield, Benjamin Clark, and others), orators and prose writers (David a ), Walker, Frederick Douglas:: Ji ii Russwurm ). and journalists ( John Tbe second vehicle was the national and European tours (in the 1870 1 s) of student choirs from Hampton Institute and Fisk r Jubilee Singer~ University '~_JThe abolitionist movement popularized anti-slavery and freedom songs and the college choirs gave wide exposure to the Spirituals, considered by most scbolars (of Black culture) to be the first authentic poetry of Black America. The third major vehicle was the publication (in the late nineteenth century) of Brer Rabbit tales by Joel Chandler Harris. In studies and writings, Harris recognized the mythi c worth in Black folktales and exposed readers to such characters as Brer Terrapin, Brer Bear, Brer Fox, Brer ·vrolf and others. Many of these tales and characters have African counterparts. 36 �III Spirituals: 11 Use of the word 11 Tryin I to get home 11 spiritual 11 to describe or identify Black religious or church life is, in many ways, a corruption of the modal adaptations of African life in the United States. Learned interpretations, outlined against new information and empirical tenacity, reveal the entire Black world as "spiritual": i.e., informed by and responsible to a "higher order"--the order of God or the "gods." This spiri tua l ity drapes the interdependence and integration of various modes and points of view flowing through and evolving from the community Such a 11 feel 11 and 11 sense 11 is wit- nessed in 11'1 ~ exuberance, spontaneity, ecstasy, trance, tonguetalking, racial flavor and flair in dress(church or nightclub), and songified communications systems which are the backbone of Afro-American life. Work describes this phenomena as "this difference and this oneness. " of\~ - Robert Hayden epiploys an understanding =-when, in a poem to Malcolm X, he exclaims the "blazing oneness II of Allah. Further proof' of this fusion is seen in the emotional abandonment of church folk during picnics, socials and other events of merriment. Listening to Aretha Franklin immediately recalls the Gospel-blues alternation in the unity of expression.b And it is found, without a doubt, in the works of ---------------.;::,- 6. Let observe that the most brilliant and influential vnderS1ifJd Black poets have intimately~this aspect of the culture. Almost without exception (and Kerlin, Brown and - - - - - - - - - - - 37 q �the Staplet Singers, the Edwin Hawkins Singers and in a more vulgarized manner in Flip WilsodS Rev. Leroy. or one brother, 11 In the words the preacher and the pimp style out heavy." Still, it is important that we orrer the traditional portrait and break-down or Black fo~k expression•~••:•1•1••••t•s11111e~s~t~H~&•s~o~ The Spirituals have been the source of continuing debate among scholars: Are they completely African in origin? Are o-rlve oP -----. they primarilyAEnglish (Methodist, Wesleyan• • · ) Sovv-ce{. b-4.~•" f Or do they represent the co-joining of African/European themes and rel.igiosity? ~n-iei (Nel.do"''fl<.Jt±tsa !l:t1t! t'.te1.J!!be s ana 1 e1111 iii eieae Jus i ens of tihu iar eun. I\ Johnson · and his brother, J. Rosamond put together the best known collection or these songs in The Book of American Negro Spirituals (1925), and The Second Book of American Negro Spirituals (1926). The Spirituals usually deal with physical or figurative contact between the singer or congregation · and God. (Early Afro-Americans often used the words God, Jesus, Savior, and Lord interchangeably. For a more thorough discussion of this see Benjamin Mayst The Negrots God.) The songs also deal with others warn young Black writers to follow example) Black poets since the Civil War have availed themselves of integral folk rudiments--even when they did not use them in poetry. It is still a fact that Black culture (despite the racist and techno- 38 �a longing for rest and the overcoming of formidable obstacles or adversaries. Work's 1915 study was seminal and remains a landfol\(. mark re¢e-l"et"lcewo~IC,,o~ African and Black American~songs. His work provides many answers to questions a_nd issues that had been (and continue to be) muddied by the waters of insensi■II•• "Undertaken for tivity and careless research. :tlte~dy - Ji f J song. His main tf')ie,t1eS'T is the love of our fathers' songs,"A.gives clear connections between the African and Afro-American • In religious songs--altbougb bis comments on form and style are of general value: In America we hear it (the song) and see it acted in the barn dance, on the stage, in the streets among the children; in fact, many an occasion is enlivened by this species of music, the interest in which is intensified by the rhythmical patting of bands and feet. This rhythm is most strikingly and accurately brought out in their work songs. Citing the emotionalism and songified intensity of the Black American, Professor Work says "He worships not so much because he ought, as because be loves to worship." This "worship," of course, is the kind we referred to earlier: the integration logical barrages of the West) still remains more consciously "integrated" than other cultural unit in America. 39 �of sensuality and ecstasy into the sweeping ritual of live and immediate dram4. Such musical activity is "as natural to the American Negro as his breath 11 : Indeed, it is a portrayal of his soul, and is as characteristic as are his physical features. Hear bim sing in bis church, bear bim preach, moan, and give 'gravery' in h is sermon, hear t h e wash erwoman singing over her tub, hear the laborer singing his accompaninent to his toil, hear the child babbling an extemporaneous tune ••• Even those Negroes who have been educated and wh o have been influenced by long study, find it difficult to express their musical selves in any other way. Black song, as is readily observable, possesses both pure song (the verse and chorus plan) and chant (use of interjections and expletives) qualities: Poor man Laz'rus, poor as I, Don't you see? Poor man Laz'rus, poor as I, Don't you see? When he died he found a home on h i gh, He had a home in dat rock, Don't you see? Alluding to the deeper, more psychological, meaning of these songs, Professor Work says "there are closer relations b etween 40 �be.e"' the soul and musical expressions than have~satisfactorily explained. These relations can be felt, but any accurate description seems beyond the grasp of man 1 s mind. n Never- theless this i mportant study goes on to classify and number these songs of Joy, Sorrow, Sorrow with Note of Joy, Faith, Hope, Love, Determination, Adoration, Patience, Courage and Humility. Like most scholars of the Spirituals, this one points out that there is no bate, resentment or vindictiveness in them. t-\owo."'Cl However, ~ Thurman, theologian and philosopher, has excavated underpinnings of turbulence. Spiritual, ~ In The Negro Thurman tells us death was i mmediate and ever-present for the slave. In such an atmosphere of anxiety and fear, the slave developed a rather stoic attitude in which be saw death as inescapable arrl as, possibly, the only remaining vehicle for mediation with the plantation lords. The slave could take his own life, if he wanted to--as h e did many times in preference to slavery or separation fro n family and/or loved ones. :a.. Thurman's brilliant analysis must be read by any serious student of Black thought and culture. Johnson (who also classified the songs) 7said a hierarchy of poets for the Spirituals included the song-maker (writer) and the song-leader. '1/,. The leader had to remember leading lines, Johnson, Brown, Kerlin and Ills Thurman also give con- sideration to the rtpoetic" content of the Spirituals. and ? 3 Joh nson Work discuss the preservation and promotion of 41 �pitch tunes true and possess a powerful voice. Johnson, wh o (like Professor Work) believes the earliest Black American songs were built on the common African form, says the Spirituals were written by individuals and set to tre moods of groups. Like the blues, their secular and structural cousins, the Spirituals incorporated antiphony or call-and-response which allowed for audience (congregation) participation (either by alternating, or intermingling, with the leader): Leader: Oh, de Ribber of Jordan is deep and wide, Congregation: One mo' ribber to cross. Leader: I don't know bow to get on de other side, Congregation: One mo' ribber to cross. Heavily influenced by Christian imagery and mythology, the creators of the Spirituals often chose the most militant of biblical personalities as their heroes. This aspect of these "poems" opens up an entire area of questions and research for and the student seeking to compare,efcontrast biblical themes and characters to the Spirituals. Certainly there is need to ex- amine the English Hymns and Psalms in the framework of such a study. and The Spirituals should also be compared~contrasted to the Black literary verse of the period during which they these songs through archival holdings, choir concert tours and the attention paid to them by composers. �were forged--especially tbe work of .Jupiter Hammon, Phillis Wheatley and George Moses Horton. IV Folk Seculars Don wid massa ' s bollerin'; Don wid massa's bollerin'; Don wid massa ' s bollerin• Roll .Jordan roll. We observed that tbere is a thin line between religious and secular worlds. Black Tbis is true for many reasons-- some of them stemming from the African tradition of i nterrelating all aspects of life. As .John M'Biti (African Religions and Pbilosophies), Gabriel Bannerman-Richter and others point out, the African takes bis religion (h is beliefs) with him whereever he goes. Means Lue t @ t h ■ l labn, @1§3£3 eh& bfbdtbt,4!he.7 also remind us that most Af'rican languages have no word for religion or art. The two are inseparable. Again the ways of Af'rican peoples (see Mphahlele's Whirlwind) are expressed in uintegrated" terms. True., in Black America there is some tension between secular and religious communities--but so o:f'ten ( and most Blacks understand ·this well though they do ndt always admit it) they are the same: wearing dif:f'erent hats ~ on different occasions. Study., af ain, the case of a Rev~ .Jesse ew-en' .Jackson or a ReJf Ike or a Ref ~dam Clayton Powell"1 t,. ~ h\Al'Tl~G,~ We have also observed that many motifs and components of Black expression are interchangeable. 43 That is, songs and ab }1 �speeches designed for church or other religious activity are "' often re-cut (modified) for a secular-lsocial af'fair. - are numerous examples of t h :l.s practice. There During the fti vil ,Rights era, we would sing: ~l I woke up this mornin' with my mind stayed on freedom Ir ) though we were fully aware that church folk were used to singing it this way: 11 H I woke up this mormin' with my mind stayed on .Jesus •••• v- eLo"'c\,"C\ M.fst-Comporei-- Nany ofACurfls Hayfield's (and the I mpressions•) songs rely strongly on the material of songs sung in Black churches. Even Mayfield's more recent tunes (see "If There's A Hell Below") carry the Black church flavor--with their warnings, admonishments, threats of societal destruction, and pleas for love e (&11111Palso Marvin Gay~s pieces like "Save The Children"). Some works by the Temptations ( uRun Away Child Running Wild") reflect the historical theme of "searching" found in Black religious songs. This same group's "Poppa Was A Rolling Stone" describes poppa 1'stealing in the name of the Lord. n B.B. King rs ''Woke Up This Mernin" is a blues treatment of the idea expressed above in the Spiritual: we. "I Woke Up This Mernin. n When~neard the old Supremes singing "Stop in the Name of Loven we IC4i22£2 to replace nlove" with "God." ~1ed. Often the songs contain exchangeable and interchangeable words such as "Lord" and "Mother 11 ; ''Bapy 11 and "God"; "Sweet thing" and "Sweet .Jesus"; . . "Captain" and ttMa.ker rr; and "God" and "Man". The reasons for such usages, as we have stated, a.re deeply enmeshed in the 44 �mythos of Blacks. Richard Wright's "Bright and Morning Star" (in the /ible, a metaphor for Jesus) becomes the son of old Aunt Sue in the short story by that name. The hero of John A. Williams' novel, The Nan Wbo Cried I Am, says "thank you manrr to God after a sex act. When we hear a tune like War's "Slipping into Darkness" ("when I beard my mother say") we must understand tl:ehistorical significance and function of social (therapeutic) art--just as we must understand the function of the mother-like voice that admonishes Isaac Hayes to "shet yo mouf" in "Shaft." When conservative Black Christians complained of Duke Ellington's use of religious themes in jazz, he replied "I'm just a ecumenical cat"--meaning he avoided fine distinctions in where or to whom he played. The church bas been the training ground (academy, if you will; see Frazier's The Negro Church in America) for most of the big (vocal) names in Black popular music as well as for important orators, race leaders and community businessmen. l>r-e v ( o os Against the ~• as· ur~iscussion we can view the Folk Seculars in their right perspective as a vital part of the rich storehouse of Black folklore. (my own grandmother: Through songs, aphorisms ''You don't believe fat meat's greasy! 11 and "If you ain't gon' do nothing get off the pot!"), fables (see Aesop), jokes ( minstrelsy and the Black comedy tra- dition), blues and o~her enduring forms)Blacks capture severe hardships and tribulations, folk wisdom, joys and tragedies, and ~ longings and hopes of BJ 45 during s ftertl•_.· �/, The Seculars, mor£_.,SO than the Spirituals, give important clues to the inner-workings of tbe common Black mind. And a closer look at the total folk tradition will reveal the structure and principles of folk psychology. It is, after Si bq these folk materials tbat researchers all, • a ,~vesTi~~-re will have t i if they are serious about delineating the feelings, emotions and thought patterns of Blacks. The Seculars are surer indices to the workings of tbe folk mind because they are not as limited as the Spirituals. Though most Blacks in the United States are aware of and have beard 19' Spirituals, an even larger number have bad sustained exposure (directly or indirectly) to the secular vocalizations and gestures of Black culture. Contemporary Black popular music and culture con- tinue to be informed by 4llllt street and home utterances. An exciting reciprocity allows entertainers to borrow freely from what they hear while the folks "run and tell that" once it's recorded. Some examples of songs, titles and other epithets borrowed directly from the people are: New Bag, 11 James Brown's ''Brand "Licking Stick" (see nboney stick" in McKay 's story uTruantn), "Give It Up or Turn It Loose," "The Payback" and "It's Hell"; Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On" and it On"; Curtis M.ayfield 's 11 Let's Get 11 Superfly 11 ; the Jackson Five's "Get It Together or Leave It Alone 11 ; Flip Wilson's ''Wbat You See is What You Get" (and the Dramatics' tune by the same name); Aretha Franklin's "Respect" and "Run and Tell That"; and Jean Knight• s "Mr. Big Stuff "--to name just a few. 46 �As with the Spirituals, whites (primarily abolitionists) were among the first to collect Seculars of whatever type. William Wells Brown, the first published Black novelist and playwright, collected "anti-slavery" songs. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, writer and abolitionist who led a Black regiment in the Civil War, collected songs he beard among his men around campfires and during marches . Though primarily con- cerned with religious songs, he also described some of the Properties of general Black song delivery. One of the most important collections of these seculars was put together by Thomas w. I Talley of Fisk University, (l. <oLLe.~ve o; ~~htt <.vo~ k Talley did pioneering work in the identification and classification of Negro Folk Rhymes. s I ];17 sazss; sa s I & as ht& 5 £ I i . of g J it.~~ Fisk scholar collected well over 300 examples. important examples and discussions of the artistic products secular folk life can be found in the works of Hughes and Bontemps, Brewer, Spalding, Dodson, Chapman, Brown (Negro Poetri), Abrahams (Deep Down in The Jungle) and Bell (The Folk Roots of Contemporary Afro-American Poetry). ( work -t:ece:;!f 1 ii it Bell's i is somewhat vague in perspective as a result of an imposed ("foreign") construct. Also valuable to an examination of the Seculars are regional works (such as Abrahams') including Drums and Shadows (Georgia and South Carolina), Goldstein's - 47 Black Life 4 �and Culture in the United States, Lorenzo Dow Turner's work in tbe Gullah culture, Dorson•s Negro Folktales in Hicbigan, and others (see bibliography). By far the most faithful representation of secular or religious folk materials in the written poetry is in the work of Sterling Brown (see his Southern Road, especially Johnson's introduction, and bis critical comments in Negro Poetry). Brown takes exception to Johnson's comment that dialect poetry bas only two stops-11humor and pathos"--and implies that Black poets up until bis time had been remiss (or lazy) in not developing broader uses and deepening the meaning of Black life through the use of folk materials. The tradition of "tall 11 tale-telling is, of course, submerged in the American mytbos. So the Black narrator found a flexible atmosphere into which be could introduce his own manner of storytelling and bis own tradition of song. As he had done in the Spirituals, he gained a resourcefulness in the use of language, acquired instruments to accompany the song or story, and de_veloped an ability to seize upon a good or amenable context in which to tell or sing his story; be also made use of themes and ideas from tbe vast ethnic potpourri of America. the Spirituals. The Seculars grew up side-by-side with The Spirituals emerged from the attempt of the slave to web together bis disparate (yet mutual) wounds. Spirituals represent the slave's perserverence and (in many instances) his hope and faith in mankind. 48 The Seculars, also �developing in the shadows of the 11 big house," reflect the social life of the Black American on the plantation and later. In songs and ditties, the Black American couched his longings and bitternesses, but voiced his hopes and cynicisms through the oblique, eliptical and encoded words and seemingly unintelligible phonetic symbols. These African forms (see Rappin' and Stylin' Out, Kochman) have continued up to the present. Few Black youngsters are able to side-step the rigorous (and sometimes painful) verbal C,~CLL deX~erity demanded by playmates during n that inevitably take place. )q) sparring matches The forms of such behavior were in tact during slavery--when a slave might be discussing a mast er's "moma" or rrold lady" during a rather harmless "rap" (rhapsoC,\j? rapport?) with bis fellow field workers. Frederick I It\ his CMJTobi o q.,. • plu'c. a l Douglass reports l\._Narra£ive that slave over-seers thought slaves sang bec ause they were happy. We know that such was not the case (s<(DuBois' Souls of Black Folks) and that such refrains as "st,e aling away" implied a lot more than wanting u.;k~te. · to reach the arms of ,;,£fesus on the cross. similar codes in his stories and poems. Henry Dumas chronicles And Mel Watkins (Amistad 2) discussed an updated version of at least part of this pJ,e,nomenon in his article on folk singer-hero James Brown. Though be is discussing a secular character, Watkins' revelations are similar to ~ Thurman's: that in the absurd context of being owned by someone else, it is not life or death that loom so importantly. One lives, Ellison suggests (Invisible Man), the day-to-day 49 �absurdity in a sort of comic-tragic vi ~e. Watkins says: James Brown's initial acceptance by a black audience is fixed in this crucial factor. From the moment he slides onto the stage, whether unconsciously or intentionally, his gestures, his facial expressions and even the sequential arrangement of his materials are external affirmations of a shared acceptance of the absurd or, more ingenously, of jiving. The impe4bly tailored suits, which he brandishes at the outset, become meaningless accoutrements as bis act progresses and, sweating and straining, he gets down, literally down on the floor, to wring the last drop of emotion from a song. Watkins is incorrect about the dress becoming nmeaningless" to a Black audience, but his general thesis is on target. Elsewhere Watkins, firmly understanding the importance of verbal agility among Blacks, says "it is com.men to hear black women discussing a man 's 'rap' or 'program' on the same level -ttJc 1 · ..;.they discuss his bank account. 11 Blacks generally withhold their judgment on (or acceptance) of a speaker or entertainer until be exhibits, in _1is dress-cesture-rap, that he understands t'~e wellspring that produced the bards. 11 Black and unknown 11 Returning briefly, to our historical assessment, we can now see hoH the folk strain in Black written art evolved. 50 �From this 11 song" recorded in t1e 1850's by Douglass, Dey gib us de liquor, And say datts good enough for the nigger. 11 to the fear of de Cun jab Han II captured in "Gullah II y Campbell in the latter part of the 190Drs, De Cunjab man, de Cunjah man, 0 chillen run, de Cunjab man! the deceptively 11 simple 11 employment of folk expressions bave prevailed as an important antidote for the social male.dies inherited by Blacks in the Western Hemisphere. ttDe Cunjah !-lan" is, of course, equivalent to the "things that go umpint.; in the night" in Ireland--and thus bas ties to general folk superstitions and mythology . But there was also the "uggab- man" (Dun arts "Little Brown Baby"), the "rag man", "peg-leg, "raw-bead and bloody bones" and (in "obeah man .n 1"'1~ We<.at Jnd(e.S 11 ) the Most of these supernatural characters are throw backs to various African religious and ritual practices. Of' the new generation of' poets, Ishmael Reed (Catechism of a neoamerican hoodoo church) is the innovator in the use of' C.ht.l~,-te~!. supernatural themes1 f\and vocabulary. Tbe theme of the 2nd Annual .John Henry Memoria} .Authentic Blues and Gospel .Jubilee i ··••ccliff Top, /f r VI\~ ~o.\w\'"' · ·q :I g JlJ Ssntsrbsr rt 1974) was nTryin' to Get Home." How stead- fastly the folk tradition runs like a vein through Black history. In the Seculars (and the Spirituals) we repeatedly hear something similar to the last stanza of "Rainbow Roun Mah Shoulder": 51 �I'm gonna break right, break right pas that shooter, I'm goin ome, Lawd, I 1 m goin home. Again the use of the word "Lawd II in a "secular" song further aw.ks bears out the communal integration of the folk;::J_ression. ~• \"eqvlo..Y•Ly .-....... interject or exclaim "Lord" •t\ nLawd II in everyday discussions . It is next to impossible to list all (or each type) of the Seculars. We have mentioned Professor Talley's pioneering efforts at classifying them. But many obstacles lay in the way of recorders of secular folk life. of censuresbip of language. One problem was that Such censuring marked all types of Black creativity, from the slave narratives to religious songs. Hence the more "protesting" aspects of the works were deleted as were "offensive words." Anyone who bas h eard "authentic 11 Black folk songs knows that they reflect t he convergence of madness, absurdity and hope in the Black body. Subsequently what are known as "curse" or "obscene" words are sprinkled throughout much of.' the nsecular" lore. Brown dis- cusses the "realism II in the folk rhymes along with an attempt to &las sify at least some of them ("fiddle-sings," "corn-songs," 11 jig-tunes,n "upstart crows"): Ballads: Negro Heroes, John Henry (folkified in song), Work Songs, The Blues, Irony and Protest. Irony and protest, of course, run through Black folk and literary poetry from the earliest days (Whitfield, Harper, anti-slavery songs) to the most recent times (Josh White, �. Leon Thomas, Don L. Lee, John Ec~els, Johnt~ Scott). Some observers have pointed to the silliness of many researchers who, white as ever, appeared in person to ask Black folk song writers at:d singers if they endorsed "protest, away satisfied with a "no" answer. 11 then went Given the nature and history of race relations one can understand the reluctance 11 on the parts of Blacks to tell whites the truth about let alone about such a sensitive area as nprotest." anything 11 Yet in the dog-eat-dog world of survival, the folk person knows that "If he dies, I'll eat his co'n; An' if be lives, I'll ride 'im on." In summary we can say that unlike other ethnic immigrant groups ( the Afro-American was not a willing immigrant!), the Black American did not simply transplant bis stories--keeping them in their exact same form. He found American or European language counterparts for his themes and vocabularies. But bis phonology, style and spirit were informed by tbe African tradition. The student of Black folk poetry will want to compare and contrast the Seculars to other ethnic stories and songs. Boasting or "lying, 11 for example, is one ingredient of the "tall" tale. "Shine, 11 11 How does the Black song or story (i.e., S ignifying Monkey , etc.) fit this motif? 11 11 Dolemi te, u "Frankie and Johnnie, How does it conceal deeper meanings on the issues of slavery, inhuman work conditions, or contradictions in Christianity? What a.re the similarities between the Seculars and the Spirituals? 53 Between the Seculars and 11 �the literary poetry? These and other questions (on Black heroes, cultural motifs, blues themes, language and endurance) will lead one through exciting corridors of Black folk creativity and thought. SPIRITUALS GO DOWN, MOSES Go de¼, Moses, Way down in Egyptland Tell old Pharaoh To let my people go. When Israel was in Egyptland Let my people go Oppressed so hard they could not stand Let my people go. Go down, Moses, Way down in Egyptland Tell old Pharaoh "Let my people go." "Thus saith the Lord,u bold Moses said, "Let my people: If not I'll smite your first-born dead Let my people go.tr 54 �11 No more shall they in bondage toil, Let my people go; Let them come out with Egypt's spoil, Let my people go. " The Lord told Moses what to do Let my people go; To lead the children of Israel through, Let my people go. Go down, Moses, Way down in Egyptland, Tell old Pharaoh, "Let my people go! 11 SLAVERY CHAIN Slavery chain done broke at last, broke at last, broke at last, Slavery chain done broke at last, Going to praise God till I die. Way down in-a dat valley, Praying on my knees; Told God about my troubles, And to help me ef-a He please. I did tell him how I suffer, In de dungeon and de chain, And de days I went with head bowed down, And my broken flesh and pain. 55 �SPIRITUALS (cont'd) Slavery chain done broke at last, broke at last, broke at last, Slavery chain done broke at last, Going to praise God till I die. I did know my Jesus heard me, 'Cause de spirit spoke to me, And said, "Rise my child, your chillun, And you too shall be free. "I done 'p'int one mighty captain For to marshall all my hosts, And to bring my bleeding ones to me, And not one shall be lost." Slavery chain done broke at last, broke at last, broke at last, Slavery chain done broke at last, Going to praise God till I die. NO MORE AUCTION BLOCK No more auction block for me, No more, no more, No more auction block for me, Many thousand gone. No more peck of corn for me, No more, no more, 56 �SPIRITUALS (cont'd) No more peck of corn for me, Many thousand gone. No more pint of sal·t for me, No more, no more, No more pint of salt for me, Many thousand gone. No more driver's lash for me, No more, no more, No more driver's lash for me, Many thousand gone. SHOUT ALONG, CHILLEN Shout along, chillen! Shout along, chillen! Hear the dying Lamb: Oh! take your nets and follow me For I died for you upon the tree! Shout along, chillen! Shout along, chillen! Hear the dying Lamb! SWING LOW, SWEET CHARIOT Swing low, sweet chariot, Coming for to carry me home, Swing low, sweet chariot, Coming for to carry me home. 57 �SPIRITUALS (cont'd) I looked over Jordan and what did I see Coming for to carry me home, A band of angels, coming after me, Coming for to carry me home. If you get there before I do, Coming for to carry me home, Tell all my friends I'm coming too, Coming for to carry me home. Swing low, sweet chariot, Coming for to carry me home, Swing low, sweet chariot, Coming for to carry me home. STEAL AWAY Steal away, steal away, steal away to Jesus, Steal away, steal away home, I ain't got long to stay here. My Lord, He calls me, He calls me by the thunder, The trumpet sounds within-a my soul, I ain't got long to stay here. Steal away, steal away, steal away to Jesus, Steal away, steal away home, I ain't got long to stay here. 58 �SPIRITUALS {cont'd) Green trees a-bending, Po' sinner stands a-trembling The trumpet sounds within-a my soul, I ain't got long to stay here. DEEP RIVER Deep river, my home is over Jordan, Deep river, Lord; I want to cross over into camp ground. 0 children, O, don't you want to go to that gospel feast, That promised land, that land, where all is peace? Deep river, my home is over Jordan, Deep river, Lord; I want to cross over into camp ground. got a borne in you see? I ant sky, Th ough t I You got cry, in dat rock, Don't y u see? Poor an Laz'rus, ~ or as I, Do •t you see? Boo~ ma n Laz'rus, poor as I, 59 �SPIRITUALS (cont'd) f'air, e my wings and cleave de got , don•t you One of' o'clock, Dis ole rock, \ \ Pharaoh's mother wants to stay hertfuh, Dis ole world tt been no friend to huh , Pharaoh ts arm Oh }'.fary, Oh Mary , you don't you moan , Oh Mary, you you moan, army got you weep. VI FOLK SECULARS HE IS MY HORSE One day as I wus a-ridin' by, Said dey: "Ole man, yo' boss will die." "If' he dies, he is my loss; And if' he lives, he is my boss ." �FOLK SECULARS (cont'd) Nex• day w1 en I come a'ridin' by, Dey said: "Ole man, yo' boss may die. " "If he dies, I'll tan 'is skin; An' if he lives, I'll ride 'im ag'in." Den ag'in w1 en I come a-ridinf by , Said dey: nole man, yo f boss mougbt die. n "If be dies, I'll eat bis co 1 n; An' if be lives, I'll ride 'im on.n DID YOU FEED MY COW? 11 Did yer feed my cow?" "Will yer tell me bow?" ''Yes, Mam!n "Yes, Mam!" "Ob, w'at did yer give 'er? 11 11 "Oh, w'at did yer give 'er? 11 "Cawn an bay. 'Yes, }:Iam!" Did yer do lak yer should? 11 11 0h, bow did yer milk 'er?" Swish! nYes, Mam!" nswisb! Swish! 11 "Did dat cow git sick?n "Yes, Ham!" ''t1us sbe kivered wid tick?n "Yes, Mam!n "Oh, bow wus she sick?" "All bloated up. II 11 11 " 0h, how wus she sick?" ft 1 "Did yer milk 'er good?" 11 Cawn an bay. " .All bloated up. �FOLK SECULARS (cont'd) SONG (From Frederick Douglass, J\1y Bondage and Hy Freedom, 1853) We raise de wheat, Dey gib us de corn: He bake de bread, Dey gib us de crust; We sif de meal , Dey gib us de buss; He peel de meat , Dey gib us de skin; And dat's de way Dey take us in; ·le skim de pot, Dey gib us de liquor, And say dat•s good enough for nigger. SONG (From Hartin R. DelanY, 11Blake; or, merica , 11 in The An o-Africa.n 1aga.zine, June 1059) The rethren, While the take a rest, and clear; , Old And lias gone Old master's d lying in his grave; And our to flow; He will neck of the slave, For he ' s g o! �FOLK SECULARS (cont'd) on the utha sho. MANY A THOUSAND DIE No more driver call for me, No more driver call; No more driver call for me, Many a thousand die; No more peck of corn for me, No more peck of corn; No more peck o:f corn for me, J".1any a thousand die! No more hundred lash for me., No more hundred lash; No more hundred lash for me, Many a thousand die! FREEDOM Abe Lincoln freed the nigger, Wid da gun and wid da trigger, An I ain't ginna git whipped no mo. Ah got mah ticket Out of dis heab thicket, An I'm headin for da golden sbo. 0 freedom, 0 freedom, �FOLK SECULARS (conttd) 0 freedom after a while, And before I'd be a slave, I'd be buried in my grave, And go home to my Lord and be free. Tberefll be no more moaning, no more moaning, No more moaning after a while, And before I'd be a slave, I'd be buried in my grave, And go home to my Lord and be free. No more weeping, no more crying, No more weeping after a while, And before I'd be a slave, I'd be buried in my grave, And go home to my Lord and be free. There'll be no more kneeling, no more bowing, No more kneeling after a while, And before I 1 d be a slave, I'd be buried in my grave, And go home to my Lord and be free. There'll be shouting, there'll be shouting, There'll be shouting after a while, And before I'd be a slave, I'd be buried in my grave, And go home to my Lord and be free. E FREE We'll sooq be free, �FOLK SECULARS (cont'd) RAINBOW ROUN MAH SHOUI.DER Evahwbuh I, -hub I look dis mawnin, Looks lak rain, looks lak rain. I gotta rainbow, tied all roun mah shoulder, Ain gonna rain, ain gonna rain. I don walk till, walk till mah feets gone to rollin, Jes lak a wheel, jes lak a sbeel. Evab mailday, I gets a letter, ":My son come home, my son come home. u Dat ol letter read about dyin, Mab tears run down, mah tears run down. I 1 m gonna break right, break right pas dat shooter, I 1 m goin home, Lawd, I 1 m goin home. ah sboly Stan on da gon. Ab Ef Square, ketch you �FOLK SECULARS (cont'd) Lawdy, For Nobody For JOHN HENRY HAMMER SONG Dis is de hammer Killt John Henry, Twon't kill me, baby, Twon't kill me. Take dis hammer , Carry it to de captain Tell him I'm gone, baby, Tell him I'm gone. Ef be axe you, Was I running Tell him how fast, baby, Tell him bow fast. Ef he axe you Any mo' questions, Tell him you don't know, baby, You don't know. Every ma il day, Gits a letter, �FOLK SECULARS (cont'd) 11 S on, come bome, baby, Son come bome. 11 Been all night long Backing up timber, Want to go borne, baby, Want to go bome. Jes• wait till I make Dese few days I started I'm going home, baby, I'm going home. Everywhere I Look dis morning Look lak rain, baby, Look lak rain. I got a rainbow Tied •round my shoulder, Ain't gonna rain, baby, Ain't gonna rain. Dis ole hammer Ring lak silver, Shine lak gold. Take dis hammer �FOLK SECULARS (cont'd) Throw it in de river, It'll ring right on, baby, Ring right on. Captain, did you hear All yo' men gonna leave you, Next pay day, baby, Next pay day? SHINE AND THE TITANIC 1912 when the awful e great Titanic was Shine ck, told the Captain, "Please, The water i oom is up to my knees." Captain said, black self on back down there' I got a hundred- keep the boiler room clear." Shine went back shovelling coal, Singing, "Lord, my soul!" mped across the boiler room deck. Shine yelled to the Captaf, "The water's round my neck% Captain said, 'Go back! Neit~er fear nor doubt! I got more pumps to water out." "Your words But this is ne time, Cap, your wo 61 s won't do. 11 �FOLK SECULARS (cont'd) fip&:\; in Che middle, ~ from side BACEDOOR BLUES my baby standin in the back door cryin' Yes, I left rrry baby standin in the back door cryin' She said, baby , you gotta home jus as long as I got mine. A BIG FAT MAMA I'm a big fat mama, got the meat shakin on mah ones, I'm a big fat mama, got the meat shakin on mah bones, And every time I shakes, some skinny girl loses huh home. HOW LONG BLUES How long, how long, hast at evening train How long, how long, baby, how long? Had a gal lived up on the hill If she's there, she loves me still Baby, bow long, how long, how long? Standin at the station, watch my baby go Feel dis gusted , blue, mean an low How long, how long, aby, how long? in gone? � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Eugene B. Redmond Digital Collection Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document Text Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context EBRWritings_08_21 Title A name given to the resource First typed draft of Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry: A Critical History, Chapter II. The Black and Unknown Bards, p. 27-69, typed with handwritten edits Relation A related resource Eugene B. Redmond Digital Collection Language A language of the resource English Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For digital rights and permissions, see <a href="https://www.siue.edu/lovejoy-library/about/policies.shtml">https://www.siue.edu/lovejoy-library/about/policies.shtml</a> or contact <a href="mailto:library@siue.edu">library@siue.edu</a> for direct inquiries. In copyright. <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/</a> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Redmond, Eugene B. https://digitallis.isg.siue.edu/files/original/765d1a96fc45f6e496c65ea345a6fb4a.pdf 667aefd9aa03a6c16f629f8ba060408e PDF Text Text INTRODUCTION: CHAPTER I-BLACK POETRY: 11 ••• VIEWS, VISIONS, CONFLICTS the double obligation of being both Negro and American is not so unified as we are often led to believe." -- Countee Cullen In recent years, Black American poetry has emerged from what appears to have been its assigned position as an illegitimate--sometimes embarrassing--child of American literature into an official flower in the garden of world writing. Everywhere Afro-American poetry is being vigorously read, listened to and imitated. Disc jockeys on Black-oriented radio stations quip: "Often imitated but never duplicated 11 --assuring their listeners that the ttsouln or 11 heirloom 11 of their tradition is alive, well, and locked in ancestral safe~deposit boxes. However a silent reading of the DJ•s casually delivered quip belies the charismatic power and verbal dexterousness in "how" it is said. But, in Black poetry-, · the "how" is always important and will be one of the cornerstones of the discussions in this book. To say that Black poetry is read or heard all over the world is not to say that it is studied in equitable proportion to other poetry. Indeed the recent rash of anthologies and individual collections, and the re-issuing gf previously published volumes, suggest that a vast literary vacuum has existed. The flood of publications, coupled with the appearance of new Black and other ethnic publishing houses, makes this vacuum glarin~ly, paradox1 �ically obvious. The absence of Black poetry (or Black literature) courses from English departments and at predominantly white colleges and public schools is ignominiously aided and abetted by the culpable negligence at many predominantly Black learning centers-where, for example, students are exposed to Walt Whitman, W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Marianne Moore ~ and Edith Sitwell;but they receive no instructi. ons in the works of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Jean Toomer, Melvin B. Tolson, Owen Dod- son, Robert Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks and Margaret Walker. One could go on, of course, reciting the cultural and literary negligence so officially a part of the academic and grants-in-aid patterns. However, the purpose here is to explore the vast richness of Black poetical and mythical life. II Black poetry presents many frustrations, challenges and problems. Instructors preparing to teach the subject must be aware of the many pitfalls, not the least among them the tendency of teacher and student alike to stray from the "study" of the poetry into political and rhetorical catharses. "Black" is a political word and to study or teach any aspect of the come embroiled in 2 Black Experience is to be- �es controversy and burdened with sociopolitical stressK That thin line between the ideological implications of a poem and those ntrial. scenes n :ti2 ~hich individuals(particulariy· in classrooms) find ---.-. Atbemselves victim is a line walked by all teachers and students of the Black Experience. In approaching Black poetry, then, one must nset" the atmosphere by dealing, from the outset, with substantive background materials~ the deepest philosophical, religious, ethical, artistic and aesthetic tenets of' Black life and expression. a purpose intent of this text Thus/the is to examine the scope and range of Black poetry via folk origins, methods of delivery, language, phonology, religiosity, racial character, recurring themes, individual and group identity, and poetic devices as they are developed indigenously or borrowed from other poetic traditions. III Like all bodies of writing, Black literature stems from a folkloristic trunk, making the job of teacher or student twofold: one) to deal with the great and complex storehouse of folk materials and themes; and two) to explore the chronological development of Black poetry--from about 1746 to the ClPopi,i 10n . differences;;. among scholars RblJ{,l t begin~ where,....,.----._ the study of Black written poetry/\ For present. There are m 1nor' example, in The Poetry of the Negro, Hughes and Bontemps begin with Lucy Terry's nBars Fight,n the account of an Indian massacre o..t.hV$elli in Deerfield, MassA' in 1746. The Negro Caravan ( 2:en :tnolJLaes,e 3_ �edited by Brown, Davis and Lee) omits tbe Terry poem. Caravan was f'irst issued in 1941 while 1h:e. l?-.Q.etry a P Poe~y sec.Ttbn 1b._Qfl~~~ was published in 1949. CGtY"0-\/0..Y{s ~-A begins :: ,_ witb Phillis Wheatley who f'irst published poetry in 1770. Also omitted f'rom Caravan is the work of' Jupiter Hammon whose poetry was published in broadside in 1760. In Calvacade (Negro American Writing from 1160 to the f;c~seq,~), published in 1970 and edited by Davis. and Redding, neither Terry nor Hammon appear and the poetry section begins with Phillis Wheatley. Early Black American Poets (Robinson) acknowledges Terry but Johnson's The Book of American Negro ~~vl l.A.v~r,c.e Poetry opens with~Dunbar. Kerlin's Negro Poets and their Poems (1923) makes no mention of either "Bar's Fight" or its author; but Dudley Randall's The Black Poets {1971) r\owe.veV\ include~ the poem. ,v~\.s tw :11:e, a random survey from the dozens /Vici 1f4.1e of general and specialized anthologies S, " that "-\ many teachers of Black poetry begin with Phillis Wheatley despite the fact that at least two Black poets were writing before her • L ' . - . . - . • 4 . r �usn••• :wop 11 JP IJ ;ggp 91111 P 15Hd5¥5sr ¥a b:eak LE c kizba2toal Js:stcpss s en IC J &l El 73 1/@ne of the main f'ea.'tv""es - of this 3I 8 ts I &i.: PII• i J a.yi(k.Ly sis Will be the study of related and integral forms of expression such as folksongs, spirituals, blues, jazz, rhythm & blues and what is known today as soul music.J ......--------------_,, tiowever, the Black Experience is complex ~ and frustrating. 1 ~ At each juncture in the study of the poetry, wad1n~ o.nd i+i"'t for example, oneAtegching it will meet difficulties ?111S1at1•~may • Ml I b seem insurmountable. Some of these difficulties will be presented in familiar questions: Is a poet considered Black if be writes consistently--or temporarily--out of the "white" experience? l. Can a Black poet really record Black experiences Most attempts to define the Black Experience have failed. When one considers the cross-fertilization of folk and literary culture in this country, together with the existence of hybrid cultures all over Latin America and other parts of the world, the term "Black Experience" does indeed d!.e(::y hooT definitio{. It is hoped, however, that through~continual return to the idea of the Black Experience (and discussion of Black life), the complexity and range of the term can be appreciated (also see bibliography}. 5 �and .feelings in English? Can a white poet write a Black poem (like the white musician who has developed a 11 .feel" for Black music and has learned to master the technical vocabulary o.f that music)? Can white people "understand" Black poetry? Should white critics o.f Black poetry be taken seriously? 2 Black poetry primarily emotion and lacking in intellect? there a Black Aesthetic? poetry? Is Is Can a white pro.fessor teach Black How does Black Language di.f.fer .from white language or English? And does Black poetry express the universal human --- condition? ask these questions 45. An indicatlo11 that they want more realistic and direct answers to some o.f the •1•1 t •• issues which have consumed Black activists, artists, academicians, and white scholars o.f the Black Experience. ~ who cL"e es ~eachersf on.fronting & racially-mixed clasW ._ all-Black classe~ ~ or • ~ all white clas ~, will sometimes 11 ~o~e aon!f'2 ssd; a distressing · panorama o.f anger, rejection, .fear, condescension, accusation, anti-intellectualism, intellectual snobbishness, racism, dis' T.'.' trust--and any number o.f other combtn¢11on1 of the contemporary student personality. (i.i kc. o't\-le.r poets) The Black poets do not Les.sen £be.::r=et\,,o,u '"' ii,i.1 1-.l'le~ ·~ since,\they, critically and thematically, are dispersed along a boundless spectrum of opinions, attitudes, creative 2. For a balanced discussion o.f this and related subjects, see Mphahlele' s Voices in the WhirlwindQ11~). 6 �approaches, ideologies, techniques and literary ph i losophies. ~ ;-~ teacher or student preparing for ei tber a semester or year-long course (or for a nBlackn unit to be integrated into a Humanities course, an American literature course, or a Black interdisciplinary project) should 1'e4d ~ the literature and lore of the Black past in order to give tentative answers and carry on adequate discussions when questions such as those above arise. After h aving been exposed to Black poets of national statut'e--via television programs such as Soul and Black Journal, at campus readings and conferences, Black Arts festivals and communi t y book parties--many students (es pec i ally Black students) may be informed, at the popular level, ab out the opinions and reading styles of the poets. However, neith er s tudent nor teacher must--and this point b as to be stressed a.gain and again--succumb to the temptation to up until 1965. 11 skip all poetry 11 IV True, there is great ,a nd growing interest in the Black poetry .produced out of what has been variously called the Black Consciousness/Black Power/Black Nationalist/Black Arts/Neo-PanAfrican Movement. <JoC?SClqp.{~ Yet one who ,II! Ci 3"--_the Black ( or any) tradition will find himself engulfed in a maelstrom of conjecture and ideological hysteria; and the class, whose posture will be anti-historical, will be riddled with soap opera-type rhetoric about revolution and liberation. nn astf f bil&CGB lfiir 1 i 5 I Mtlld@lij 3 ; d Harold Cruse (The Crisis of the Negro 7 �Intellectual) points out that each generation of Black artists and activists suffers from a lack of historical/cultural con- tinuity. the That is, they fail to study or are unaware of mistakes and the pitfalls of past struggles and consequently find themselves in predicaments not dissimilar to those of their predecessors. Needless to say, such "cultural amnesia" is not the state from which one approaches the study of Black poetry. As observed earlier, the poets are not in agreement concerning what Black poetry is supposed to do, why it is written or whether whites can (or should) write or criticize it. 3 Reasons for the diverse beliefs and positions are numerous: the situation attending the birth and upbringing of the poet (note, for example, the distinctions between Claude McKay and Countee Cullen); his religious affiliation (Robert Hayden is of the f Baha'i faith; Askia Muhammad Toure is a Sunni Muslim; El-Muhajir 3. An important point at this juncture of Black poetry. For there is growing feeling among some poets and writers (many of who will not express themselves in public) that there are concerted attempts to muzzle, circumvent or circumscribe some authors because of their personal political view points or their brand of writing. For further allusion to this, see back issues of the Journal of Black Poetry, Black World, and other periodicals dealing with the contemporary Black Arts scene. 8 �(Marvin X) is a member of the Nation of Isla~ Eis eu K. Curtis Lyle was raised ,_c a 2Lp_eual 2n Jr a __ s a• 7.... -~------ ..... --- ' ii J Catholic); (J.... -;---•- l ---- I bis political leaning (which, in the case of many writers, is also religious); his preparation for poetr1/ ~ Un 4' z t : ;; I if 22 rntr· arl i ; tr ■ ! be] e t? ~~.:i=,..-~ 111- -- • - - -~ - - 7 I ]j ■ bis associations with o:t;her poets (many Black poets, for example,associ~Aand this is tl,;c o.v1',,. historically true}\ with writers of other races;"~'j\met one Black poet in 1970 who bad two masters' degrees but had not heard of Melvin Beaunorus Tolson!' ' , . ~ his current personal situation (does he live in the inner city? teach? time? play a musical instrument? write full write in other genres? read primarily Black poets?), and his feelings on the question: '~r~ you a poet first and then Black; or are .you Black first and then a poet?" a.~ Harmless as it may seem, that rhetorical utter~has entrapped scores of Black writers in ideological ar.rl political prisons-from which some would like to extricate themselves by asking simply: For '\That difference does it make?" many poets, however, it matters a great deal and they have written profusely on the implications of this question and the several others listed earlier. The teacher or discussion leader must sample opinions of writers and students, sharing the diversity of opinions with the same vigor and thoroughness that 9 �the di verse po~y is · ~ shared. Such parity allows for a continual balance in criticism, social undercurrents and the poems themselves. I pg z■ .2 zs hss zr Novelist Ralph Ellison bas suggested that be is a writer first and that his racial identity is subordinate to that fact. Poet Robert Hayden has taken a similar stand (see introduction to Kaleidoscope, Poems by American Negro Poets, 1967) . The same position had been taken several decades earlier by poet Countee Cullen. In his critical- biographical introduction to Cullen's poetry (The Book of American Negro Poetry, 1922), James Weldon Johnson observed that: Some critics have ventured to state that Cullen is not an authentic Negro poet. This statement, of necessity, involves a definition of "a Negro poet" and of "Negro Poetry." There might be several definitions framed, but the question raised is pure irrelevance. Also there is in it a faint flare-up of the old taboo which would object to the use of 11 white" material by the Negro artist, or at least regard it with indulgent condescension. Cullen himself has declared that, in the sense of wishing for consideration or allowances on account of race or of recognizing for himself any limitation to "racial" themes and forms, be has no desire 10 �or intention of being a Negro poet. In this he is not onl:[ within his right; he is right. (italics mine} Johnson went on to note that because Cullen "revolts againstn racial enclosures, the "best of his poetry is motivated by race." One could make a similar comment today about Ellison or Hayden. The works for which both are internationally acclaimed delve into the deepest regions of psyche and feeling. Black Meanwhile some younger poets--those who ~ gained exposure in the 1960 s--and several poets and critics who straddle both generations lash out, sometimes not so diplomatically, at what they see as compensatory actions and unnecessary self-deprecation by the older poets. Pulitzer Prize winner Gwendolyn Brooks said in a preface to Poems From Prison that Etheridge Knight was not the "stifled artiste." The comment represented an implied rebuttal to Black and white "academic II poets. 11 Elsewhere ,- -- r;,J, e... -... referred to the inelegancen of some Black poetry as being consistent with the bleak, drab landscape of hopelessness and despair . . oP fil II I ta inner-city dwellers. (Other critics, however, support the position of poet-critic Larry Neal that the Black Experience should not be defined in terms of "negatives.") Gu.,tndt\t..y r) I\ · Brooks became a kind of late Sixties, During t he f':_ 1!/ blo'Ute~~vt-e f{ the New Black Poetry Movement (at least in Chicago), ceased publishing with Harper and Row, and began to release h er writings t ~rough Broadside Press--a ~ Detroit-based Black publishing 11 �house under the supervision of' Dudley Randall• :al t I it; • new con- t4e1--- ~ sciousness, she declares, came about as a result of' having attended a Black writers conf'erence 11W (1967) at Fisk University f>6."'T1t.1p~T~cl \ ~ «hsc u1.11·o~s where she heard and · f\ _ with poets Imamu Amiri Baraka. (LeRoi Jones), Don L. Lee, ·Nikki Giovanni, novelist John Oliver Killens, and rn.o.'ff\.y other writers, activists and artists. The violent social explosions in the cities, the Vietnam war that took • • • • Black lives and crippled g the persistent emergence of' Africa--all, I'-· SJ, )JI --- aided in the development of' her new consciousness. written that it 11 t r others, said, She has f'rightens 11 her to think that if she had died before she reached fifty, "I would have died a 'Negro' f'raction." Hayden, disclaiming the Gwendolyn Brooks position, assumes he has been 'Black' all along and continues to reject any singular, unarguable position on the Black Aesthetic, or the poet-first, Black-second/Black-f'irst, poet-second controversy. Assessing Baraka, Hayden admits that he recognizes the younger poet's power but deplores "his Black nazism. 11 J. Saunders Redding, a dean of' the Black critical establishment, feels there is no such thing as a nBlack Aesth etic"; Poet Paul Vesey @amuel Allen) calls it "a voyage of' discovery--I think it will yield return not as greatly as in music, perhaps, where t h e b lack aesthetic dominates an entire cultural area of' the west "'t ottiev- poets and critics, �however, ignore questions dealing with aesthetics, the level of Blackness in their work, their primary audience, and the mood or spirit that influences their writing . At the same time there are trends, some regional and some national, that can be identified. Identifying and exploring these trends can be immensely rewarding. Some prerequisites to an understanding of trends and attitudes that stem from the on-going creative process are: a study of slavery, as it was instituted by Europe and refined in the United States; an examination of Black social history, and a scrutiny of West African and Afro-American folklore. The thorough student of Black poetry will steep ' hi~self in the history of Western Civilizationj he will: also , develop an appreciation for the complex web of Black-white inter-relationAll this is necessary in ships in America . ·/\ preparing to participate fully and knowledgeably in the often tense-filled readings and discussions stimulated by the works of Black poets and writers . V Much of the subject matter of Black poetry is unpleasant , since it is pervaded with the weighty memory and impact of slavery. And if slavery is among the lesser pleasant items ,to be discussed, $ 11Kce.. lynching becomes even more repugnant--especially/\.so much• such activity occurred "after" slavery was officially ended. But one the soon sees that practically every poet since ;!,_,he -end of Civil War has written a poem about lynching . The poets who do not deal with actual lynchings, as we have come to know or interpret them, write about half-lynchings, character or cultural defilement and the 13 �mental and physical destruction of Black humanity. If a discussion of slavery is unpleasant, then, a consideration of lynching is horri:f'ying. However, skilled di SC. \J ~~a.: if'i will maneuver judiciously through the rough waters of such sessions--keeping emotional deluges to a minimum by admitting :facts and clear interpretations. During such occasions, everyone must be on guard less the classroom becomes a courtroom. At the same time, a convener who cannot preside over vigorous and thorough discussions of these painful events ~ - and details may find himself, C later ~ •n111.1•• trying to bridge even wider gulfs of doubt, frustration, mistrust and alienation. Again, the -------.. study~ of Black poetry (or any aspect o:f' . . . Black wliv~) assumes the complexities of the Black Experience itself. Suc h Nevertheless, A study is infinitely rewarding because it is a vehicle which distills the particular insights and perspectives of Black Americans into concise and authentic forms: merging the rich rural-Biblical-urban idioms with colorfully luscious imagery and (in many cases) peerless technical proficiency in the use of literary English and Western poetic forms. .Fo"" UClmpLe.J W~et\ students are confronted with the various poems on lync_b ings, E!i n , , ult&; study can be underscored by an examination of language, form, posture, poetic toolery and overall achieve- r. mentor effe'xveness of the poems. "Between the World and Me II the - I n Richard Wright's poet becomes the persona; the oak tree narrates the lynching in Dunbar ' s "The Haunted Oak. 14 11 �Coo't'\ie-e.. ACullen speaks as "I" in "Scottsboro, Too, Is Worth Its Song" which admonishes white American poets for remaining silent over unjust treatment of Black men while they sing: ... sharp and pretty Tunes for Sacco and Vanzetti,~•• ........ , CltA.\de InAMcKay's "The Lynching" the killing of the Black man is made analagous to - the crucifixion; a sonnet, and awesome throughout, the poem descends to its rhyming couplet with a final ghel.Stly irony: And little lads, lynchers that were to be, Danced round the dredful thing in fiendish glee. Certainly in these poems--and the dozens of others that employ the lynching _theme--there is much t')'ldTe"°\a..-l tot' Pu"''tt,~t1 ~lidy discussion . In the four poems mentioned, ~"'etoy 7' a:, such the poets tind diverse forms as the sonnet, the ballad (Dunbar) and free verse (Wright). hislowla.L be the additionalAinquiry Helpful in this area will -- -- - -- - ' into the development of white hate groups such as the Ku Klux Ia.an 1.5 �and the history of race riots in America. Riots in at least a dozen American communities in 1919, for example, helped spur McKay to write ttif We Must Dien, a poignant sonnet with its even more poignant and popular ending couplet-Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack, Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back! --a poem which Winston Churchill read before the House of Commons, during World War II, to spark bis countrymen in the dim hoursJ ) during the 1972 prison rebellion in Attica 'J • f ~ournalists found the poem scribbled on the wall of a cell and the national press attributed it to a prisoner! Of great assistance, too is a knowledge of tre history of slave revolts (many Black poets write about them) and the patterns of violence in America. Attuned teachers and students will want to consult sources such as 100 Years of Lynching (Ginzberg), back issues of Black and liberal white news journals and papers and especially past tbeNAJK.P.. issues of The Crisis, the official news and opinion arm of W.E.B. DuBois, ~cans fue first Blacks- to re- ceive a Ph.D., edited The Crisis for over 20. years from its beginning in 1910. For further readings, the teacher can refer t.o ·.thc. extensive bibliography plus appropriate sections h, anthologies, textbooks and t,Hle f. -~ · sources . VI •· a rs I\ JPIM st 16 €DJ'(.. �VI The ~cJcn-r. o( Blac.k.. ~ should arm himself to the best of his ability with the tools of criticism and a knowledge of Black culture. He must cmders-landtke - · ., part nduality" plays in the lives of Blacks and how sucb "twoness" is manifest in The poetry; he should recognize the key issues being raised W and debated among Black artists, scholars and 17 �activists--and have some feel for the historical circumstances out~ihich these issues and debates grew; he ought to under'-vh'llt rneAM~ his standABaraka ~ reference to some Black poets as "integrationists" 'r\ and "arty poets 11 ; be will have to know ·what many of the Hew V ?IU: poets mean wh en they say t h ey reject Western trrorms '' and refuse to be judged oy wh ite standards (Baraka, for exampl e, talks about post-American forms); he will also want to recognize Black in-house humor and intracommunal disparagement in 11 words and phrases like "nigger, . 11 oreo, 11 "colored, a nut , " . . 11 11 11 11 tbe man , " brother , n 11 crumbcrushers, 11 nmain squeeze," and • "Mr. Cbarlte. 11 11 "negro," ''Uncle Tom, dicty," 11 bad mouth, tt "bust (For further indication of this dictional and phonological richness and the breadth of Black Language, see The Dictionary of American Slang, Hajor•s Dictionary of Afro-American Slang, the uGlossory of Selected Terms" in The Psychology of Black Language (Haskins and Butts), Abraham's Deep Down in the Jungle, Andrews' and Owens' Black Language, Claerb~ut ' s Black Jargon in White America, Twiggs• Pan-African Language in the Western Hemisphere, Welmers ' African Language Structures, Kochman's Rappin' and Stylin' Out, and Dillard's Black English. Additionally the-:~eo,qr, - ·. the motivations of some of the poets. -.._, will want to know All poets, for example, do not rate being called "poets" in the traditional (white or Black) sense . Redding, in a recent Muhammad Speaks interview, accused some of the new Black writers of lacking 'moral and 18 �them 'literary hustlersf 0 Observing that Baraka recently signed a 10-year contract with Random House, Redding said such an act is inconsistent with the poet's nationalistic assertions and positions. In a ~ recent ~laQk liorJD article, novelist- poet Ishmael Reed spoke disparagingly of some of the new Blac_k critics ( "Blackopaths n) and poets ("nationtime poets," was the reference). -Ho.~, \. IV\odhubu1, (Oor,L,Le~.) Poet-essayis~fx.c has chided poet Nikki Giovanni for being an nindi vidual n who lacks technical abilities; and in w1111 n ~ issue of .Jet magazine a reader irately asked if M"Ms, Giovanni deserved respect after accepting a Woman-of-the-Year award from a national white women's organization. Bo#r Slrt:e - and Reed were nominated ~or Pulitzer Prizes in 1973. Hayden, a member of the older group of poets, wh o was only 17 years old when the Harlem Renaissance burned out, feels that (praised by Gwendolyn Brooks, Hoyt Fuller of Black World, Randall and Baraka) has potential as a poet but lacks discipline and seems unable to separate poetic technique from ideological ranting. On the other band, Stephen Henderson, ;r1 g, author-editor of UnderstandA'!he New Black Poetry praises -.1"~yov~~pot.:t' 1 relentlessly and says his popularity is "tantamount to stardow.fin Henderson, who holds a Ph.D., is currently chairman Mod of the new Humanities division at Howard University where...-...~ is a writer-in-residence. - G\AJehdoLitl A..Brooks gives . .Introduction to The Poetry of Black America , for spawning much of the contemporary Black consciousness literature. 19 , krw,1 credit tillll- \t) n el-°' �(/4.ny serious(ldhw~~·,o\"\ oF the development of Black poetry must we and positions. Con 1 iJer ail these intense feelings One must also organize orderly discussions or readings around the divergent views~►oug I, Whtc."- . arw ap ; 217 7 I 7s LE b BSCSM8 LfolSSB Uszc1. participants CG..'1 Vfl.~t- of 3 1 th'Ct ivu:.L~ " poetry/\....,_ the political, social and historical tensions out dev Lop a complete picture of tbeArichness of which'""" 'i't' •·-~·-·- is generated.<//Robert Hayden, for one, un- derstands · this confluence ·or _issues an d temperments a s wit n es sed by hi s· eom:ment s on t h e New Black ·Poetry --with appropri ate historical footnotes: r The emergence of a so-called school of Black Poetry in America has been one of the significant literary developments of the modern period. Although the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920fs brought certain Afro-American poets into prominence, it was not until the intensification of the civil rights struggle during the 1960 1 s that a separate group of black poets began to take shape. Avowedly nationalistic ( that- is, racially proud) and scornf'ul of western aesthetics, these poets continued the protest tradition, historically associated with Negro writers. But they were more radical in outlook than their predecessors. Unlike the Harlem group, they rejected entry into the mainstream of American literature as a desirable goal. They insisted that their poetry 20 �could not be judged by white standards, urging its importance as an expression of black consciousness. LeRoi Jones--the most inf'luential of the young activist poets--Don L. Lee, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Mari Evans, Etheridge Knight, and David Henderson attune their lyres to the 'black esthetic.• Not yet satisfactorily defined, this term, originating in the sixties, may .be interpreted as a sense of the spiritual and artistic values of blackness . t gi p511i&PB , & l id bt .C AMO! !Odd I &G!&l &I I 1dt 2 ·, p 9 ff Y t f j;' sf 7 J t sant1fn2 • T?sss l 5 Ii I b@&I J ii I § 7 Fi 7 3 Ii a i 772 e31 I II 1 I @if P tl i tt j 1. f f7 I I 7 r£t ii s? 1 Ji : rm ni sad lsiF ifi?s a a? bts ssaospt i 'DJs al D s· 7 I 3 t 41Ubis&l&b& !ts sl 1iP:rsnt t ll!d&I f u" · • 1 ti Juda Ur•@ 1st Hs?h 'f;j PEON sf S D Ji: l pjqg 2 a i n :as · DJ a l 1 3 rr Brsslzc, 3 Q(Q 6Ji~umted sTet,1eS m .L:.Te~o.Jote,....Mi\\Er-1H~pen; O'Neo.L 1\q73) 21 �Hayden's opening comments, then, corroborate the opening sentence to this introduction--that Black poetry is one of the most important movements on the literary scene today. Yet, while it is exciting to study this "poetry in process" (if you please), the enthusiast must be on guard not to skip the tradition (the folk ,u,o UO.\ot\ali'ons precedents)Ain favor of plunging into a Black poem that heaps wrath on Watergate conspirators, or urban policemen who shoot rioters and looters. •.-.::• ~ · ~aa.t■ r•@•••-llllii••·•J1111l~k•2~s~ag,1~1-B0~B~Olllllfllii~L~c~l~o~ VII Many of the "literary hustlers" to whom Redding refers have capitalized on the topical and episodic issues--witb little or no training in the Black tradition or writing. '"".,. Hence, the student mustAassume that just because a statement is "relevant," it is poetry! The Black or white researcher will "dig ••• deeper to the gold"--in the words of .James David Corruthers-- and "establish" a sound tradition against which to measure the Black poetry of today. If the Black poet in question fails, he fails because he collapses from the weight of the past--instead of being buoyed up by it. -----.... 0 this sound tradition, ..--- e., In establishing must realize, first, that the Black Experience is not monolithic--although 22 �recurring trends and broad i mplications do exist in the areas of language, religion, humor, dance, music and general life there is often more consistency th o..n ,'n wh o;t°1t\ey tc.v,o w,ca.bei,+1+-teMs:twu in 'lllllllt Blacks' 1'.ll'VewL?~-e of popular nAmerican n cul tur ~ · Ther~ are several reasons for such a paradoxical i mbalance and lack of focus--many of them locked in the enigmatic see-saw of Black history. Ellison observed in the 1940s _that if Black leaders ever unraveled the puzzle of the zoot suit and the dark glasses (meaning the secret of Black urban "styling" habits), they could, perhaps, take the political and psychological reigns of Black masses from whites. observation was accurate. Ellison's James Baldwin has written that, in Europe, he looked at the great Renaissance masterpieces and felt ashamed that his race had not produced such work • . Baldwin · did \'\OT ~t\ow· that the great Spo..rnsk painter, Pablo Picasso, had borrowed heavily from African motifs, . . architect Lee-Corbousier was or t h at influenced by Att-i<.o.n thatched-roof huts • Tbe implications of this part offhe discussion are many and far reaching. •w•--••• Ellison's, 5. For an exciting recitation and indictment via a "cultural quiz", listen to poet-critic Stanley Crouch 's Ain't No Ambulances for no Nig t ---------------..::.:..:,+-----man). 23 (Flying Dutch- �Crouch's and Baldwin's observations are ti mely and i mportant. ~o..~-tbo They suggest • • • t ~at~ma ny - • • • • • • of t h e students who are in Blac k poetry (Black Studies) classes do not ha ve a working knowledge of the tradition out of wh ich t b e poetry grew.Y:tt has become popular, in some quarters, to i gnore th is fact.. 1:t1111iaailllliiiililllllillli111111111m11111il•wwP M~=eie="1!fl~~......llllrl ----- - p,o#gr enilg zspress:w1 . .... -~.., .._ - . Th·e impo:rtanc'e of a knowl edge of the Black literary tradition ~ is a · . · ·_ ·. ~ m.t pointAcannot be stressed too often or too emphatically. Interestingly the majority of t be persons wh o 1 want to know something about Black poetry are not preoccupied with the craft of poetry--- - - the hows and whys of poetry • .Li~o.o) .-.it students and casual reader~ J &SH aui seem to be more interested in the sociological (some "pathological") aspects o-:f the poetry. say The situation varies, of course, fro m campus to campus, and from Blac k to white to interracial settings . the enthusiast ShtwL~ \, suit of the ·wont.. 11 t Iii! 11 1f "vt- C keep the per- ti ghtn in terms of t h e discipline demanded by the p oetry itself. Another problem -~~~ S~io\J, ~~~": ~ $1 ettt organize segments when lflllI 1111 I I 1 I sought. by is how to ppreciation''of the material is -rv<..h. a..n , - ---:-~ approach could be - . dtc:T~led one's initial conception of the poetry or �by the level of interest and preparation. A casual reader, for example, would not study the same poems with the same intensity as would a senior or graduate literature major. Nevertheless, teachers, students and poetry lovers must bear in mind that they are looking into Black poetry and not merely some fair-to-middling imitation of traditional Western poetry--even though the two often converge on many points. Moreover, the differences are not always easy to identify; but on:'::ssimilates the Afro-American world-view into his study of the poetry will have lees problems recognizing the differences than those who read the poetry"cold." Black and wite poets select the same words but for different reasons. There are many variables and one has to be cautious about hard-fast judgements. But we can say that the Afro-American poet is almost always its apt to select a word for typographical, phonological and political dimensions. Word selection among European and American poets, on the other hand, is more often made for allusory and intellectual reasoni. This is not to say that Black poets are not intellectual or that Euro-American poets are not musical. Exceptions to the foregoing groupings are legend. But it is important to identify music (songified language) as a dominant influence on the AfroAmerican poet--not just in an aesthetical or inspirational sense, but in terms of architectonics, in terms of basic (original) structures. Again we are treading on sensitive ground, because in the context of racial and intellectual mixtures, a curious melting pot in likely to boil. Example: white students, well-grounded in their own literary tradition but having a skeletal knowledge of Black Culture may want to speed up the treatment of the poetry. Failing to recognize that many students def not know the name& 25 �and meanings of simple poetic devices(metaphors, similes, alliteration, onomatopoeia), insensitive teachers and aggressive students often cause premature destruction of group interests. Such situations do occur. Even the best literature teachers sometime assume students have been drilled in the use of figur?,tive language. Ironically, most students have been "drilled" in the figures; but the holes from the drillings allows information to go in one ear and out the other! Many students, in the whir of words, will not aclmowledge their ignorance of the language of poetic criticism and analysis, especially if they happen to be Black students and think the instructor expects them to be "experts" on the Black Experience. On the other hand, the intellectual snobbery often accompanying the student 11 clicks 11 should not be tolerated in a discussion of Black poetry. Luckily, however, the curves, crests and peaks of Black poetry keep bringing all aspects of human nature full circle. Many of the ideas, theses, axioms and broad statements made thus · far will be re-examined on a continuing basis throughout the remainder o f this book. Within the running history of Afro-American poetry; we will identify the poets' preference for lexical and phonological items; their reliance on major and minor archetypes (as they are derived from the larger as well as the Black mythic tablets); their fetish for themes and positions(as these strains ertne... OCl0.5iontH. becomel\clusterec:l 0r I\. . ) ; their relationships to each o.tp.er and 11 " ( school 11 ) the folk and/or literary roots; and their individual and/0-r group achievements. Obviously, the folk influences are not a~ easy to place within the chronology as a r e the Clc:ttv"t ti e.s, dat~ literary of the poets. So the reader should think o f the folk world as one which constantly hovers over the whole of Afro-Ame ri can literary and cultural life-sometimes calling it to its t~~s, other times providing it with just the needed lift and magic. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Eugene B. Redmond Digital Collection Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document Text Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context EBRWritings_08_20 Title A name given to the resource First typed draft of Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry: A Critical History, Introduction: Chapter I. Black Poetry: Views, Visions, Conflicts, p. 1-26, typed with handwritten edits Relation A related resource Eugene B. Redmond Digital Collection Language A language of the resource English Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For digital rights and permissions, see <a href="https://www.siue.edu/lovejoy-library/about/policies.shtml">https://www.siue.edu/lovejoy-library/about/policies.shtml</a> or contact <a href="mailto:library@siue.edu">library@siue.edu</a> for direct inquiries. In copyright. <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/</a> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Redmond, Eugene B. https://digitallis.isg.siue.edu/files/original/66d193593a066368d6a70174e1dee101.pdf 6576a25fba3c250e52dca291818e3051 PDF Text Text J:'REFAC.1:£ At this perilous juncture in Black history, on the eve of America's Bi-Centennial and amidst a new wave of Third World Humanism, Drumvoices comes as a partial rebuttal to those who say poetry's impact on mankindrs consciousness has been insignificant. The thesis is simple: that God 1 s Black trombones have historically blared through or soothed the harsh and stark realities of the Afro-American ~xperience; and that the sources(records) of these blarings and soothsayings, locked in cultural safe-deposit boxes . of drums and the intricate acoustics of the folk, ~emain accessible to anyone desiring to tap them. Such source.-spir·i ts ("roots") are what the author has tried to conjure up in Drumvoices, Gtiiiiiii~z-• which owes great debts to a lengthening line of marvelous visionaries, "known and unknown." As a reference work, this text makes a modest attempt to follow in the tradition of Vernon Logginst The Negro Author in America, Benjamin Brawley •s ·arly Negro American riters and The Negro Genius, Sterling A. Brown;s Negro Poetry and Drama . and J. Saunders hedding•s 'l'o Make A Poet BJ.ack .. We have_..also profi'bted immensely from- related' works by George Washington Williams, Benjamin E. Mays, W.E.B. DuBois, John Hope Franklin, Franz Fanon, Loften Mitchell and Dorothy Porter. Of the liter~ry histori ans and critics, only Brown is concerned exclusively with poets--though Mrs. Porter's many offerings also include a checklist of Black poets. Loggins ' study views :liilllll Black authotup until 1900; and Redding, Brown and Brawley examine them through the mid 1930s. Drumvoices combines all previous ventures in the area of the poetry--giving new interpretations and updating an exciting history which began with Lucy Terry who wrote a poem 229 years ago .. �Initially conceived as a monologue and later enlarged to its present size, Drumvoices is aimed at students and teachers of Black poetry, literature, history and culture However, the author hopes that all who read from these pages will benefit. The very general thesis stated above is consistently implied in the book 1 s approach. And unlike some recent works, this one does not present a consciously labored construct or aesthetical matrix, i e., Black Nationalism, 0~ Pan-Africanism, the Black Aesthetic/\ Alienation, though none of these alternatives has been overlooked whenever and wherever poets or critics have dealt significantly with them Occasionally chronology is violated since any time barrier is, by definition, arbitrary. (Jt was impossible to find birth or death dates for some of the early poets } Also arbitrary is the authors selection of poets and emphasis on various styles, techniques, themes or periods. Yet the organization of' the text is somewhat original since, at the time h as of this writing, no single work~discussed Black poetry from its beginnings into t h e 1960s and 1970s. As a history, Drumvoices includes six chapters: I, Introduction--Black Poetry: Views, Visions, Conflicts; II, The Black and Unknown Bards: Folk Roots; III, African Voice in EclipS?: Imit a tion and gitation(l746-1865); IV, Jubilees, Jujus and Justices(l 8 65-1910); V, A Long Ways From Home{l910-1960); Vi, Festivals an cf VI!, C.onc.i"~ion; A-Frer-Thoug,h{:t. and Funerals: Black fo etry of the L960s and 1970~AFinally there is a Bibliographical index. The historical aspect of this two-pronged study(critical and historical) dominates: the rationale being tha t ~~text which chronicles the development of the poetry is a prerequi s ite to sound critical assessment. Alsoi the author was not unmindful of the fact that most anthologies or studies of recent Black po e try are generally "loaded" and top-heatv-y with household names; hut none of them has extended their vision to include a :rt �representative( 11 complete 11 is out of the question) look at the numerous important centers where this poetry is being created. It seemed a worthwhile task, then, simply to suggest the demographic range of the l"hAd• new poetry. Such is the attempt ~in Chapter VIifhere the author has purposely decentralized a star-dominated pattern in the new poetry ~C.C,\.Wd~ in favor of a more truthful and historicalVJPicture of its development. One can pick up a journal or book in practically any library and read glowing praise of the new poetry; hence the author has simply referred readers to these comments instead of re-hashing them here. unfortunately, significant studies of 1eth and 19th century Black poetry were not available to the author while chapters on these areas were being written . But Jean Shermants Invisible Poets: Afro-Americans of the 19th Century and M.A. Richmond•s Bid the Vassal Soar: Interpretive Essays on the Life and Poetry of Phillis Wheatley and George Moses Horton, when finally received, provided additional insight and caused some slight reshuffling of this text. Of great service, however, was Early Black American Poets, William Robinson's important anthology(with notes); at this writing, it remains the bestts'burce for the period. The author is also indebted to a number of important works on 20th century Black poetry: Jean Wagner 's Black Poets of the United States; Frgm ~aul t.Q, Lang.stQn Hughes, Arthur P. Davis' Laurence Dunba_.: ~rn..w...l1.a~~..-Afx:o-:-8meri CWl Wrjters, ]900-]960, Donald Gibson's Ma.sl~rn, l3J.a.c.k.~ , Blyden Jackson's and Louis Rubin's ~la~ I!RJ<:t:cx,J..:. Am,~;I;,:;i,Ca .• George P. Kent Is Blackness ®4.. the.,.A,giz;euture ..,Q,t West,e;i;:n CuJ.ture and Joy Flasch I s I~in ,I?,. T,QlsQn, A book does not just happen and the fuel for this one has been pouring in over a number of years and from a great many sources. Germinating ideas came from various quarters: students, friends, teachers, and most importantly, from colleagues at Southern Illinois University's ~xperiment in Higher Education in East St . Louis . The �literally hundreds of poets., writers and thinkers {in Watts, New York, Chicago, New Orleans, Atlanta, Detroit, Cleveland, et~.)/ with whom tht. Cllf~O.. ha.$ t\ met and talked through nights and days, now stand faceless and nameless, but they are as much a part of this book as the author himself. Of special significance were the critical re a dings of sections ~r-,end an<! of this text by Ted Hornback, C1yde Taylor who 'ft- 0 "former teacherj i&lii 9 · ;!1~udl r~"thn,k'mg tlnd.\''f--W~~"Jjand £El;J' critic Charles Rowell who should have been commissioned to write the chapter on folklore. Likewise, for their patience, assistance and great stores of information, de.b+ tS Owed to librarians at California State University , (Sacramento) ., the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture obe""L in Colleg (whkhhasa. MIJqy, ({JUe,7idn e,/'taP~tJ-/!rn~Nc4nA.) (New York Public Library), A.t he r oorland-Spingarn riesearch Genter at Howard University, Oberlin College, and Southern University in Baton Rouge. While a book does not just happen in the mind, neither rloes it miraculously appe a r on the page. Hours of meticulous and relentless work wa s invested by my graduate assistant Julie Blattler who worked with bibliographical and textual problems. Younger to /It$, 8Latf1e,. and n1ysel.F assistants A:tr lhcso 1:mbtn• included Keith Jefferson a nd Ronald Tibbs. However, a lion's share of producing this book was assumed by Marie Collins, supervisor of Sac ramento 1 s Oak Park School of (sevt~(A.l 1ter.s,ons t;J Afro-American Thought, who typedA criticized and otherwise committed q),,a_11 /r.s. ~,-e fJ.UO dve. herself to the project. ~Beverley Williams, CSUS English secretary, also shared a portion of the typing load. Finally, my gracious editor, Marie Brown, deserves a huga salute for her encouragement, concern, and continued support of the writing-research through to the end. Onward,Btha EO ETS! "F'ugene • rtea.mona. March 5, 1975 Sacramento, California � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Eugene B. Redmond Digital Collection Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document Text Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context EBRWritings_08_19 Title A name given to the resource First typed draft of Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry: A Critical History, Preface, p. I-IV, typed with handwritten edits Relation A related resource Eugene B. Redmond Digital Collection Language A language of the resource English Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For digital rights and permissions, see <a href="https://www.siue.edu/lovejoy-library/about/policies.shtml">https://www.siue.edu/lovejoy-library/about/policies.shtml</a> or contact <a href="mailto:library@siue.edu">library@siue.edu</a> for direct inquiries. In copyright. <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/</a> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Redmond, Eugene B. https://digitallis.isg.siue.edu/files/original/d16e873c1e5f8d7f808e86ac3ca84b98.pdf a530f7010f710bc7cb91e984f092a56c PDF Text Text , DRUMVOICES: THE MISSION OF AFRO-AMERICAN POETRY A Critical History by Eugene B. Redmond �DRUMVOICES: THE MISSION OF AFRO--AMERICAN POETRY Table of Contents Pt-e. f;""c.e. ::r. CHAPTER I : , Introductio~ '13lack Poetry: Views , Visions, Conflicts CHAPTER II : The Black and Unknown Bards: Folk Roots 1: Origins •· of Black Expression :u: r:o: Black Folk Roots in Am0rica 1> 4) 0 eculars -sr fti~thology 7 71 Spirituals !lT Folk 2 (56.mf le.) ~ection s-'-1 Spirituals 5 Go Down, Moses I.( Slavery Chain No More Auction Block Sr;,. 5 1 Chcu,,,01"" Shout Along, Chi l len Sw~~~ \..cw, Swee-t S"'i Ste al Away ~ 7 57 Deep River Jss 'ilo b a Eon, int iiab Root;: I Boon ilit1hula i and I 1!leen ico1118'6. Dsy Qle Sbeap D15 Uno:: iJo !Wa"e. tni>s Bsmmer Keeps iliti1 etug H@ 'l•H : 10 s s elhf ±a :?:obs dy Irnc iii!! Pe Blind Msr ziij;e, Nt j 6£ !Jct Ti &bblo I s•••i rm Pe Beed Said .rgshJrn Fi t n, Ob - $ a H&ilib&llng 7Ji6Rl i 8!"0 i l Usnw Per I t XPP 8 11 f Jui S!ffl Weep Folk ~eculars He Is My Horse Did You Feed My Cow~( Song &1-. S 11 ..f «7 �(contens, contd) Many a Thousand Die Ct, 1 Freedom Rainbo'W: Roun Mah Shoulder l, ~ John Henry Hammer ::.;ong ~ fo ~ 1 >'lgtilly±iig hoilkGj - Jns:'i 1Haca ~ii: r iii 110IIIWI ~acJr Dsn Panes A Big Fat M(J.IJJa ~ How Long Blues b1 4 CHAPTER III: African Voice in Eclipse: Imitation and Agitation(l746-le65) 70 I Overview II Literary an d ~ocial Landscape III The l/okes on the Totem io 11 CHAPTER IV: Jubile e s , Jujus and Justic es (1865-1910) I Overview /30 II Literary and III The \fo\<,~ on 0 ocial Landscape the Totem \ 4O \ ) 2- /3 (.) 70 �(contents, contd) ~ "'i CHAPTER V: A Le>ng Ways From Home (1910-1960) 208 I Overview II Literary and Social Landscape -< A. To 1930 ~ l?) /0 :2.2 1 J3. ·1930-1960 • III The "-/Olce$ on the 'Potem ---~3:l_ A. The Coming Cadence: Pre-Renaissance Voices -- .,..,., ~ W.J ~l'.'Pi:1Wk""'1E ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ . . . . . , . '2S'2.... B. poets as Prophets: The Harlem Renaissance - - - - - .... -------- ~.,..__, • c. Mino:r .2£. Second Echelon Poets of D. ~~~ \ ----:.:-w -:...--- ' ') 3 '2... 1i - ~ i~ B_en!:_i.!..,8ance :; q I ......... ~ ~ E. ~ Extended_Renai~~~anc~: 30s, t_t:6s, ~ ~~ .)i~ CHAP'l'ER VI: Festivals and Funerals: Black Poetry of the 1';160s and 1970s I Overview II Literary and Social Landscape III The "0\Ce5 on the '.t' otem A. B. c_h_o.ple~"lZJI BIBLIOGRAPHICA~ l/O'f. One MQrnjng ': 't_hreshhold of the New Bl ack Poetrz Soon 1 Griefs Qf Jo1 1 :_ tbe Poetry C. Reflec . . of Wings he New Black Poetry "'~;~ ~lOY\ '. ~rre~""°th.ou8 Lt.s !5!fJ .5(go I General Research Aids II Periodicals III Anthologies IV Literary History and Criticism _$'~'-{ 5~1 A. General Bs Poetry l./,Ob ~ ;{(o I Nnff 317 Fallout: Negritude Poets and Pan-African Writing ---.....;.. 5q,\,, V Folklore and Language Vi Discography and Tape Index A. Collections(Phonograph) G~ $'"~~ . .. 1. Single Poets (Phnnograpll) '4,t)~ B. Single Poets(Tape) (pt>\o L/J..b � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Eugene B. Redmond Digital Collection Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document Text Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context EBRWritings_08_18 Title A name given to the resource First typed draft of Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry: A Critical History, Title Page and Table of Contents with handwritten edits Relation A related resource Eugene B. Redmond Digital Collection Language A language of the resource English Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For digital rights and permissions, see <a href="https://www.siue.edu/lovejoy-library/about/policies.shtml">https://www.siue.edu/lovejoy-library/about/policies.shtml</a> or contact <a href="mailto:library@siue.edu">library@siue.edu</a> for direct inquiries. In copyright. <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/</a> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Redmond, Eugene B.