David Grundy and Lauri Scheyer, editors: Selected Poems of Calvin C. Hernton (Wesleyan University Press,2023)

“I do not mean to downplay the role of racism in the making of my sense of who I am. But consciousness of myself as an African American is not all that constitutes my identity … my identity is an ever-expanding process of discovering and becoming” – Calvin C. Hernton 

Calvin C. Hernton (1932-2001) owes his existence as a poet on paper largely to fellow poet and publisher Ishmael Reed (see Index) who also wrote the foreword to these Selected Poems.

In 1976, Reed, Cannon & Johnson published Medicine Man, a collection of poems mainly from the 1960s, followed by The Red Crab Gang and Black River Poems (Ishmael Reed Publishing, 1999), Hernton’s third and final volume. The Red Crab Gang is a long poem on Hernton’s battle with a cancer that would take his life in 2001, a poem that Reed first heard when Calvin read it from manuscript at New York University around 1998-99: “I told him that I would publish the book.”

Calvin Hernton’s first book, The Coming of Chronos to the House of Nightsong, originally subtitled An epical narrative of the south, was published in 1964 by Interim Books – a book-length poem in three parts on the momentous changes in the Old South and in the life of the poem’s narrator, Eleanor Nightsong, a white southern matriarch, looking back as she nears her 100-year birthday.

And now we have the Selected Poems of Calvin C. Hernton, reprinting poems from all three volumes of poetry that Hernton managed to publish during his lifetime, with previously uncollected and unpublished poems, edited by David Grundy and Lauri Scheyer (formerly Lauri Ramey).

Umbra and the Lower East Side. Aside from the Introduction, a chronology, notes on publication history, a selected bibliography, etc. by the editors, they have divided the poems into nine sections:

South to North: Early Work; The Lower East Side and Umbra; The Coming of Chronos to the House of Nightsong; Medicine Man; Riots and Revolutions; London Poems; Oberlin, Ohio: Later Work; The Red Crab Gang and Black River Poems; and Previously Unpublished Poems.

Both Hernton and Reed were born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and in his 1996 essay Chattanooga Black Boy – from which I take the epigraph above – Hernton writes about growing up in the segregated South. Their friendship, however, began in New York in the early 1960s. In his Introduction Reed writes: “Calvin and I were close. We used to hang out a lot.” And he will tell you  a number of amusing anecdotes about what happened when they were ‘hanging out’ together.

In Umbra: A Personal Recounting, a major historical and personal essay first published in African American Review in 1993 and reprinted here in full, Hernton writes about a group of mostly Black poets and artists that aside from Reed included Hernton, Tom Dent and David Henderson, the last three editors of the Umbra magazine, all among the founding members of the Society of Umbra.

“Physically,” Hernton writes about Umbra that started in 1962 in Tom Dent’s apartment, “as a cohesive, functioning group, Umbra existed only a couple of years. But in terms of its impact on my work and my life, the two years of Umbra’s physical existence constituted a lifetime,” remembering outlandish parties, writing workshop sessions, poetry readings, and the friendships and camaraderie.

“Young Negro Poet.” This early, playful poem begins: “Young Negro poet/ came from ‘way down South,/ Tennessee, to be exact, // thought he had some verse,/ thought that he could write,/ real well/ as a matter of fact.// Young Negro Poet/ came from ‘way down South,/ up North, New York City,// couldn’t write so well,/ folks back home had lied – / what a pity, what a pity .// Young Negro poet/ came from ‘way down South/ just to sleep on the cold ground,/ Central Park,/ to be exact …//...”

On the front cover of Selected Poems there is a photograph of Calvin Hernton at Oberlin College. Just behind his left shoulder there appears another face, a picture of Langston Hughes, the unofficial ‘poet laureate’ of Black America known for his generosity towards younger colleagues. And Hernton remembers Sundays when the destitute young poet from Central Park would ‘drop in’ on Langston Hughes at his home in Harlem for conversations, encouragement – and a free meal!

Around 1957 he met Raymond R. Patterson, best known for his 1969 volume 26 Ways of Looking at a Black Man. It was his very first deep friendship with another poet, a “kindred soul.” Meeting Patterson and the Umbra poets, Hernton discovered something about himself: “I would rather be around artists – poets, writers, painters, actors, musicians – then any other people I know.”

Most important was his ‘running buddy’, the young poet David Henderson perhaps best known for ‘Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky on the life of Jimi Hendrix, first published in 1978, the first person with whom he discussed the idea for what would become his 1965 bestseller Sex and Racism in America. Successful … and highly controversial. Hernton had to flee the country and go into exile in London, see the poem An Unexpurgated Communique to David Henderson – London 1966.

Long form poets. Henderson and Hernton were both ‘long form’ poets. In the essay Les Deux Megots Mon Amour from 1985 – named after the East Village coffeehouse that in the early 1960s had poetry readings, Hernton and Henderson occasionally among the readers – Hernton writes: 

“I was a long form poet. We all write short ones every now and then, what David Henderson called “left hand hooks.” But our main menu consists of long poems, poems that you can get around inside of, sit down in, lie down in, walk and sleep and wake up in, make love in, and figure out what life is about in.” Hernton had found a style of his own, his own realm of symbolism and material.

Both poets were also known as readers of their poetry, readings at coffeehouses and other venues on the Lower East Side and Manhattan in a way even more important to them than publishing. In his essay on Umbra Hernton writes that poems like Elements of Grammar, The Gift Outraged – a poem that turns Robert Frost’s poem The Gift Outright, a poem that Frost had read at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961, on its head with its focus on the ‘down and outers’ in Tompkins Square Park –, and Jitterbugging in the Streets, on the 1960s urban rebellions, made Umbra Poets “celebrities.”

Other memorable long poems include Medicine Man, described by the editors as “a spiritual journey drenched in the vocabulary of conjure, hoodoo and other diasporic African derived religious practices,” and A Ballad of the Life and Times of Joe Louis, The Great Brown Bomber.

Legacy of the House. In the essay Les Deux Megots Mon Amour, mentioned above, Hernton writes on how the poem The Coming of Chronos to the House of Nightsong came to be:

“One night in my small, tub-in-kitchen apartment … I experienced a terrible depression, a terrible restlessness, and I could not figure out what was the matter. Then suddenly, as if possessed, which indeed I was, I sat down, grabbed a pencil and began to write …– “My name is Eleanor Nightsong,” was the first line I wrote.” When he finished, he had written what was to become The Legacy of the House, the first part of his poem. He ran straight to the Les Deux Megots where a reading was in progress. “When my turn came (to read), without any explanation, I read what I had written.” 

The House refers to Eleanor Nightsong’s southern mansion, and by extension to Eleanor’s beloved southland with its tragic legacy of racism, segregation, and obsession with matters of race and sex.

Hernton dedicated The Coming of Chronos – reprinted here in full for the first time since Interim Books’ first printing of 300 copies in 1964 – to two “great southern ladies,” Lillian Smith, author of the controversial novel Strange Fruit from 1944, and his beloved grandmother, Ella Estell. 

(Years later, his appreciation of and respect for women would result in the second of his non-fictive classics, The Sexual Mountain and Black Women Writers (Anchor/Doubleday, 1987), its title a tribute to Langston Hughes and his 1926 manifesto, The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain).

Oberlin, Ohio: Later Work. Originally studying to become a sociologist in the tradition of the great W.E.B. Dubois (The Souls of Black Folk, 1903), before his ‘exile’ in London Hernton had  taught social science at mostly HBCUs/Historically Black Colleges and Universities. After his return (Ishmael Reed quips: “I ran into him once when he came home. He was referring to bars as “pubs” and spoke with an accent.”), he was hired as a writer-in-residence at Oberlin College in Ohio, soon promoted to associate professor at the newly established Black Studies Department, eventually to be named professor of African American Studies and Creative Writing in1980.

He would teach at Oberlin College, the first in the nation to admit both women and Blacks, for three decades, from 1971 till his retirement in 1999, revered by his students who called him ‘Socrates’.

Hernton loved to teach, he loved his adopted home state and the small town of Oberlin, where the college was situated. Publications became more sporadic. But Ohio and Oberlin, the place and the people, inspired Hernton to write some of his finest poems, and some of my own favorites:

Oberlin, Ohio, a portrait of the town and its history (“Greetings/  My name is Oberlin Ohio/ …”); The Tap House, South Main Street, Oberlin Ohio, a “railroad box car” with a “sucker-size pool table” and its majesty Tanya, “older than girl younger than/ Woman” – “May the Lord bless her soul./ …”; and Ohio Listening: “It’s autumn in Ohio/Things to be done / .../ Before leaves fall.”

And then there is The Red Crab Gang, his final long, metaphysical poem dedicated to Groesbeck Parham, the MD who treated him during his final days of battle with cancer. Grundy and Scheyer reprint only excerpts from a poem that you need to read in full – there is more to the color red than “Monsieur Le/ Rouge … Red spider crab (that) crawls/ In and out of hospital rooms/ …”

SHORTLY BEFORE he passed away, in 2000 Hernton visited Cuba to read his poems. In a letter home to his old friend Raymond R. Patterson, looking at both the past and the present, he wrote:

“… hanging out with Cubans in working class … places of music and song … walking the night streets for a while,” he recalled “the hope, aspiration, and political conscious euphoria of the 1960s,” as he reflected on “Cuba, the revolution, the 35 years of American ‘Embargo’ against these people … the vultures (‘adventure global capitalists’) circling the air overhead, biding their time.”

A Canticle for the 1960s. At his death Calvin C. Hernton left a number of unpublished, often unfinished and undated poems from the 1960s and 1970s. With the permission of Hernton’s son, Antone Hernton, the editors have prepared these poems for publication from typescript – from multiple drafts, often with extensive handwritten revisions – in the spirit of ‘works-in-progress’.

The editors print seventeen previously unpublished poems, but here I want to focus on A Canticle for the 1960s, a poem that he wrote for his old friend, the Italian American poet Ree Dragonette, following her death in 1987. As “denizens of the city streets, (who) lived day and night in the cafes, restaurants, bars, coffeehouses and nightclubs of one of the greatest and most horrible cities in the world,” Hernton recalled, “we ran together, and as the saying goes, were thicker than thieves.”

While the poem A Ballad of the Life and Times of Joe Louis, The Great Brown Bomber, mentioned above, can be seen as a chronicle of Black America and the events that made Joe Louis a hero and icon for Black Americans, Hernton included, A Canticle for the 1960s is a sweeping chronicle in Black and white of the tumultuous 1960s “brimming with oral force and associative power.”

 “Joy you gonna see/ Joy you gonna see/ Joy for the dead/ And joy for the living// …// Said, rise upon your feet and sing …// …// Sing a song of praise, and do not mourn.”

UFI // 10 February 2026

A Note on the editors. David Grundy, borrowing his title from a poem by Calvin C. Hernton, is the author of A Black Arts Poetry Machine: Amiri Baraka and the Umbra Poets (Bloomsbury, 2019).

Among Lauri Scheyer’s many books are A History of African American Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2021), that she published as Lauri Ramey. She is the editor of Between the Night and Its Music: New and Selected Poems, by A.B. Spellman (Wesleyan University Press, 2024).

The editors hope to see the present volume of Selected Poems followed by a Selected Prose, a collection that will have to include Dynamite Growing out of Their Skulls, a long political essay that Hernton wrote for Black Fire, the seminal Black Arts anthology edited by Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) and Larry Neal and first published by William Morrow in 1968.