The American Century: Literature since 1945 649using an African rhythmic structure to imitate the voice of an African drum.
The titles of several of Harper’s collections betray his own, similar allegiances: Dear
John Coltrane (1970), Song: I Want a Witness (1972), Healing Song for the Inner Ear
(1985), Songlines in Michaeltree (2000). Exploring his connection to jazz artists like
Coltrane and Charlie Parker, insisting on human and cultural continuity (“A man is
another man’s face,” he has written), his work is oriented to performance: “blacks
have to testify,” he proclaims in “Song: I Want a Witness,” “ / and testify and testify.”
For Harper, however, the violence he records is a matter of family loss and racial
history: the death of an infant son (“Nightmare Begins Responsibility” (1975)) or a
brother (“Camp Story” (1985)), the suffering inflicted upon Native Americans by
“mad Puritans” (“History as Apple Tree” (1977)), the assassinations of Malcolm X
and Martin Luther King (“Here Where Coltrane Is” (1977)). For Knight, the violence
was closer to the bone. “I died in Korea from a shrapnel wound and narcotics
resurrected me,” he once confessed. “I died in 1960 from a prison sentence and
poetry brought me back to life.” Many of Knight’s poems were written in prison –
his first collection was in fact simply called Poems from Prison (1968) – and they
detail the loneliness, the bitter frustration of prison life. They work through a
violence of language and verve of movement learned from the black oral tradition:
“the brown / hills and red gullies of mississippi send out their electric / messages,
galvanizing my genes,” he declares, characteristically, in “The Idea of Ancestry”
(1968). But they also work through the way Knight links himself, in his isolation and
pain, to others in his family, his race, and the American underclass, to a communality
of suffering. And they work, not least, through their resilience, their refusal to let any
violence cow or corrupt the spirit. “Going back to Mississippi,” “A Poem for Myself ”
concludes, “ / This time for good – / Gonna be free in Mississippi / Or dead in the
Mississippi mud.”
Violence, though, is no more the single defining feature of recent African-
American poetry than is any specific definition of race – of what it means to be an
African-American. What is remarkable about so much of this work, in fact, is the
multiple forms in which African-Americanism can enter into this poetry. With Rita
Dove (1952–), for instance, there is a marked inclination toward multiculturalism.
The settings of her spare, enigmatic poems range from Ohio to Germany to Israel;
and in just one volume slaves, mythological and biblical characters, and the ancestors
and immediate family of the poet all jostle side by side. “I am profoundly fascinated
by the ways in which language can change our perceptions,” she has said. Some of
her work addresses that subject head on, by exploring how a single word or image
can permit a voyage into strange seas of thought (“Ö” (1980)) or how a poem can
provide “a little room for thinking,” a chance and space to dream (“Daystar” (1986)).
Some of it approaches the liberating potential of language in a sidewise fashion by
considering, perhaps, how earlier generations of African-Americans nurtured the
“crazy feeling” that they could change their lives in the words they spoke, the songs
they sang (“Kentucky, 1833” (1980)). Dove is continually trying to speak the
unspoken, to give voice to the voiceless. That includes those dimensions of experience
and history that have been suppressed, or sidelined, most often for reasons of genderGGray_c05.indd 649ray_c 05 .indd 649 8 8/1/2011 7:31:36 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 36 PM