New to this homepage? Read An introduction to africanamericanliterature.net on how to use this page and what you can expect to find, and something about the editor and how to contact him.
READ INTRODUCTION“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.
Sometime in 1925 two young Black poets met by chance in Washington, D.C. One was Waring Cuney, the other one Langston Hughes who wrote about the meeting in his 1940 autobiography, The Big Sea: “One day on a streetcar in Washington, I first met Waring Cuney. He had a Chicago Defender, oldest American Negro newspaper, in his hand, and my picture was in the Defender with the announcement of the forthcoming publication of The Weary Blues. Cuney looked from the picture to me, then asked if I were one and the same. I said yes. Then he said he wrote poetry, too.”
Hughes and Cuney would become life-long friends. Langston Hughes (1901-1967) would go on to become a star of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, The Weary Blues (Knopf, 1926) the first of his numerous books of poetry, fiction, drama, non-fiction, autobiography, and anthologies.
Waring Cuney (1906-1976) has been almost forgotten. His first book of poetry, Puzzles, came out in 1960 in a very limited edition, published in Utrecht, Holland, for a Dutch bibliophile society. The second, Storefront Church, a chapbook of eighteen poems, was published in London in 1973.
“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).