In her foreword to the now classic poetry anthology, I Am the Darker Brother (1968), edited by Arnold Adoff, Charlemae Rollins commented on the difference between prose and poetic forms of writing, explaining the unique influence poetry can bring to bear on the human heart and spirit:
"Prose can expand and explain, but poetry must be felt. It is through feeling that the reader finds the meanings and emotions the poet has expressed in concise, compressed, symbolic, and figurative language. From such literature, as the Greeks discovered long ago, we find catharsis—the ridding ourselves of the emotions of hate and envy, and even of the will to murder and destroy."
Rollins, a Chicago children’s librarian and editor of several children’s literature collections, continued to observe that poets demonstrate what is most hopeful, and also most tragic, in our society, and therefore serve as educators of society. Adoff, in his preface to the book, says that the “poems stand as statements that should live in print because their authors have put a part of life into music and language.”
Having taught in New York City schools in the Sixties, Adoff had noticed the “nearly total lack of inclusion of Negro American poets” in textbooks. He hoped his anthology would give visibility to Black poetry, which in his view satisfied the need for Black people “to know of and experience through the eyes of other Negroes how it has been and how it is to be a Negro in America, and for whites to become familiar with this part of their American heritage….”
I Am the Darker Brother provided in one collection a new visibility to the depth and breadth of Black artists and their poetry from the beginning of the 20th century through about 1968, poems whose perspectives on Black life were as varied as Fenton Johnson’s despairing and fatalistic lines in “Tired”: I am tired of work; I am tired of building up somebody else’s civilization; Countee Cullen’s “Incident”: Now I was eight and very small, / And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, “Nigger."
or, in lines that highlight an ardent and innate optimism of the soul, though overwhelmed with pain, such as in Paul Laurence Dunbar’s, “Sympathy”: I know why the caged bird sings, ah me, / When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore, / When he beats his bars and would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core,
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings—
I know why the caged bird sings!
Some poems express deeply felt resistance to social inequality, broadly shared among Black America, such as the poem from which the book draws its title, Langston Hughes’s “I, Too, Sing America”: They send me to eat in the kitchen / When company comes /… Tomorrow, / I’ll be at the table /… Nobody’ll dare / Say to me, / “Eat in the kitchen,”/ Then.
Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—
Mari Evans’s “Status Symbol” represents one of the younger poetic voices in the book. In the poem, she captures the perspective of a new generation whose cynicism mocked the “progress” of integration: “today / They hired me / it / is a status / job…
along
with my papers
They
gave me my
Status Symbol
the
key
to the
White…Locked…
John.
A classic poem in the anthology that superbly records the destabilizing moods and ambitions of Black America, struggling for centuries to advance against distraction and white resistance, is Margaret Walker Alexander’s tour de force, “For My People:
For the cramped bewildered years we went to school to learn to know the reasons why and the answers to and the people who and the places where and the days when, in memory of the bitter hour when we discovered we were black and poor and small and different and nobody wondered and nobody understood;
. . .
For my people blundering and groping and floundering in the dark of churches and schools and clubs and societies, associations and councils and committees and conventions, distressed and disturbed and deceived and devoured by money-hungry glory-craving leeches…
. . .
Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second generation full of courage issue forth, let a people loving freedom come to growth… Let the martial songs be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now rise and take control.
Adoff correctly judged the canon of modern Black poetry: it is a poetry that lives still in print, and to paraphrase Rollins, must be read. If we continue to read it, speak it, share it, the healing power of Black poetry will live on in the hearts of new generations to come. They will need its catharsis and inspiration. All of America will need its testimony of her heritage.
Additional sources for review: Book of American Negro Poetry by James Weldon Johnson, New Black Voices, ed. Abraham Chapman, The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry, ed. Arnold Rampersad, Voice of Black America: Historical Recordings of Speeches, Poetry, Humor & Drama (CD), www.cavecanempoets.org
Lisa A. Monroe is publisher of Devotion Journal. Contact her at lmonroe@devotionreader.com.
A poetry that lives and must be read
By Lisa A. Monroe