ences and allusion to writer from Shakespeare and
Machiavelli to T. S. Eliot.
We move thru rooms & down the middle of
freeways,
myself & I.
I am neither prince nor citizen
but I do know what is noble in me
& what is usefully vulgar.
It is from this point that the real radiates.
(Heaven, 39)Dance and music dominate “The Song Turn-
ing Back into Itself ”: “This music is real / Feel the
rhythm” (Heaven, 73).
Young’s interest in “essence” and that which is
noble rather than solely in racial consciousness
and the construction of a black nation place him
on the opposite end of the spectrum from many
of his contemporaries who were engaged in the
BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT led by AMIRI BARAKA and
HAKI MADHUBUTI, who called for a more politi-
cally liberating and functional art. Young rejects
this perspective outright in “A Dance for Militant
Dilettantes,” in which he ridicules the advice of a
more revolutionary black writer for whom West-
ern aesthetics has little or no value: “these honkies
man that put out / these books & things /... they
want them a militant nigger” (Heaven, 13).
The ultimate quest for spiritual wholeness cen-
ters Young’s life and work. Resonant with Whitman
in “Song of Myself,” Young’s speaker in “When I
am Real” declares, “Love of life is love of God / sus-
taining all life” (Heaven, 23–24). The poet, Young
has said, “is something of a magician or shaman”
(O’Brien, 264). His poetry shows him trying to live
up to this description.
Young uses his novel Snakes (1970), a bildungs-
roman, to explore the central place of music—
BLUES, jazz, gospel, pop—in African-American
life and culture. Yet, as critics have pointed out,
in his first novel Young wanted to celebrate black
culture rather than make his work solely a novel
about life in the black ghetto. In fact, several pub-
lishers, thinking the novel was not black enough,
rejected Snakes. Young describes his novel as a text
that explores “what happens to [the central char-
acters] under the influence of... localized suc-
cess” (O’Brien, 267). Snakes is about the friendship
among four teenagers and specifically about MC’s
quest for success through his band. MC, Jimmy,
Shakes, and Billy achieve success, but it is ephem-
eral. In the end the band breaks up, and the mem-
bers take different paths to their future lives. But
Snakes is also about the love MC shares with his
grandmother and about the richness of black lan-
guage, whose complexity Young celebrates through
his characters’, particularly Shakes’s (short for
Shakespeare), use of black urban language. Wil-
liam J. Harris notes that “Al Young has captured
much of the beauty and complexity of black life
and black speech in his impressive and extensive
oeuvre” (306).
Young’s talents were recognized and rewarded
early in his career. He has received a Guggenheim
Fellowship, a Wallace Stegner Writing Fellowship,
a Fulbright National Endowment for the Arts Fel-
lowship, the PEN-Library of Congress Award for
Short Fiction, the PEN-USA Award for Non-Fic-
tion, two American Book Awards, the Pushcart
Prize, and two New York Times Notable Book of
the Year citations. From 1969 to 1976 Young was
the Edward B. Jones Lecturer in Creative Writing
at Stanford University. He continues to teach as a
distinguished writer and guest lecturer at major
universities across the country.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Harris, William. “Al Young.” In Dictionary of Literary
Biography. Vol. 33: Afro-American Fiction Writers
after 1955, edited by Trudier Harris and Thadious
M. Davis, 300–306. Detroit: Gale Research Com-
pany. 1984.
Miller, Adam David, ed. Dices or Black Bones: Black
Voices of the Seventies. Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1970.
O’Brien, John, ed. “Al Young.” Interviews with Black
Writers. New York: Liveright, 1973.
Young, Al. Heaven: Collected Poems 1956–1990. Berke-
ley: Creative Arts Books Company, 1992.Wilfred D. SamuelsYoung, Al 573