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READ INTRODUCTION“The New Negro artistic and literary community … was never either exclusively Black nor American” – Denise Murrell, curator, in her long opening essay, The New Negro Artist and the Modern Black Subject
MET, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, from February 25 to July 28, 2024, put on what they have called a “once-in-a-generation” exhibition: The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism, featuring more than 160 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, and photographs.
The concept of a ‘New Negro’ has a long history in African American intellectual life and history. But in terms of the Harlem Renaissance – also known as The New Negro Movement – we associate it with the Rhodes Scholar and professor of philosophy at Howard University in Washington, D.C., Alain LeRoy Locke (1885-1954), and The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925), an anthology of fiction, poetry, essays, drama and art that he edited – a manifesto and a key text of The Harlem Renaissance.
“Now whether it is right, and lawful, in the sight of God, for them to make slave of us or not, I am certain that while we are slaves, it is our duty to obey our masters, in all their lawful commands, and mind them unless we are bid to do that which we know to be sin, or forbidden in God’s word.” – Jupiter Hammon
It is perhaps easy enough to become famous if you are the first, like the first black poet in America. But it is not easy to be the first. Whose shoulders are you to stand on? Who are your literary ancestors? Where are your forerunners, describing your time and circumstance in poetry and prose?
Jupiter Hammon (1711-c.1800) was born into slavery as the property of Henry Lloyd, a wealthy New England merchant and plantation owner on the isolated island community of Long Island, and all of his poems and essays are followed by a statement that reads something like this: “Composed by Jupiter Hammon, A Negro (Man) belonging to Mr. Lloyd of Queen’s Village, on Long Island.”
There is something noble in the poetic voice of this first New Bedford Poet Laureate (1994-98) and professor emeritus of nearby University of Massachusetts Dartmouth where he taught for thirty years until his retirement in 2003. I use the word noble as defined by the online Oxford Languages dictionary, meaning of ‘high moral principles’ or ‘having or showing fine personal qualities’. This is important to me in ways I will return to and explain toward the end of this article.
Three years ago, in 2022 Everett Hoagland had self-published a volume of contemplative poems, The Ways, written – or assembled – during the covid-19 pandemic. I had begun a Random Notes article tentatively titled Poems of Affirmation, Remembrance, Reflection, Wonder – and Struggle; or, The Many Ways of Everett Hoagland.
But the publication of The Music: New and Selected Poems, 1973-2023 in the Willow Books Master Series made me change the title and the focus of this article.
“If poets can be said to operate within a social context – we, the editors, must surely think they can – then no group of poets is so conscious of context as are black Americans” – Michael S. Harper & Anthony Walton
In their Introduction to Every Shut Eye Ain’t Asleep: An Anthology of Poetry by African Americans Since 1945 (Little, Brown and Company, 1994), poets Harper and Walton write:
“Gloria Oden, who, forty years early, had exhibited some of the talents and ambitions of Rita Dove, … had been caught in a sort of no-man’s land between standard black practice at the time and the closed white literary world.” High praise, since Rita Dove (see Index), Pulitzer Prize winner and US Poet Laureate from 1993 to 1995 and included in their anthology, was already recognized as a major American poet of the twentieth century at the time Harper and Walton wrote the introduction.
“nothing but chops/ baby, yes, chops/ nothing but chops/ yes, yes, yes/ chops, nothing but/ chops, baby, yes” – Interlude, a poem from Lenard D. Moore’s The Geography of Jazz (Blair, 2020)
Three things would seem to define Lenard D. Moore as a poet: North Carolina, jazz, and haiku and other forms of traditional Japanese poetry. And in an interview with Moore, Jazz Poetry as a Message of African American Culture (Mississippi Quarterly 75.1, 2022), John Zheng, poet and professor of English since 1996 at Mississippi Valley State University, will focus on Moore’s jazz poems in The Geography of Jazz (originally published by Mountains and Rivers Press, 2018).
To Moore, jazz is part of the fabric and part of the quilt of America: “As an expressive form it is so important that it emerges in the way we talk and walk.” A celebration of African American life and culture, it is appreciated all over the world: “Jazz has a way of bringing everyone together.”
Poetry, the Chicago-based magazine founded by poet and critic Harriet Monroe in 1912, in Volume 221, Number 1, October 2022, features a 34-page special section: “What Beauty We Now Have,” on the poetry of the late Chicago poet Carolyn Marie Rodgers (1940-2010) published by her own imprint, Eden Press, on what section editor Andrew Peart calls “a largely unseen body of work.”
But why did Rodgers choose to self-publish her poetry? After all, publishing regularly from the late 1960s in John H. Johnson’s Negro Digest/Black World, edited by Hoyt W. Fuller, she quickly became a rising star in the Black Arts Movement. She was a co-founder in 1967 of Don L. Lee/Haki R. Madhubuti’s Third World Press (now in its 56th year), the publisher of her first two volumes of poetry, Paper Soul (1968) and Songs of a Black Bird (1969), a founding member of Chicago’s OBAC/Organization of Black American Culture’s Writers’ Workshop, as Andrew Peart writes, and the author of one of BAM’s most influential critical essays, Black Poetry – Where It’s At (1969).