Liberian Literary Magazine
Promoting Liberian Literature, Arts and Culture
Masters and Master Works:
On Black Male Poetics
the whole of human culture out of a spiritual
wellspring that moves out of an AfricanAmerican base to multiple cultural references in
multilingual expressions. If we pose the question
of what constitutes black male poetics, we might
also offer a circuitous response in quoting the
title by Wright, namely “What Is Beautiful.”
In the first volume of his seminal biography of
Hughes, Arnold Rampersad notes the poet’s
inability to express anger. Rather than do so,
Hughes internalized the emotion until he
became physically ill. That in conjunction with
the fact that no one knew Hughes as a person
speaks to the price of being an architect, a
denial of intimacy to one’s self for martyrdom in
poetics. Had it been Rilke or Neruda, or even
Stevens, we might have the poet’s work as a
suggested intimacy, but Hughes’ self-denial was
deeper. He opted to serve black folk and write
out of his imaginative and empathic force,
however accurate that might or might not have
been to the people he observed. The lyric
content he thus denied himself so he might
experience giving love to black folk and enjoying
whatever signs of adoration from reading
audiences, however imaginary it might have
been. It is too easy and simplistic to say that
racism denied him lyrical expression as we really
can only surmise what Hughes would have
written had the quotient of freedom in American
society during his lifetime been much higher
than it was. He may not have had that gift. His
gift instead might have been just what he gave
to African-Americans, a hero’s faith in all our
ability to be creative, which translates as an
enhancement of the will to live in a world that
all too often would have us die.
Hughes subjected himself to a rigorous
honesty as much as he could, and that challenge
is part of a poet’s life, no matter the race,
ethnicity, or gender. Those who would parade a
lack of talent as instead a self-chosen leadership
role have, I argue, failed the test of this
necessary and rigorous honesty, brutal as that
test may be.
Langston Hughes was not pretentious about
the tenor of his work. In choosing to be an
architect, he had to imagine his role. That
imagining is never accurate. All too often any
poet will simply not know who cares whether he
lifts pen to another page ever again in life. How
else was Hughes to be famous given the
exigencies of the blatant racial hatred during his
lifetime? What are the requirements for fame
today?
Monday, February 15, 2016
Afaa Michael Weaver
Credits: Academy of America Poets and Poetr.org
Black Male Poetics as a title begs and defies
definition. Langston Hughes set himself the task
of being the architect of a culture’s literature, a
culture that developed against the antagonism
of racism. In the Harlem Renaissance, some
black artists were achieving the unthinkable, but
on the whole, they were a curious subset in the
eyes of the dominant culture. So does black male
poetics suggest an examination of the obstacles
in a black male poet’s career? Perhaps. Does it
suggest there is still a choice to be made
regarding the role a black male poet should
choose? Perhaps, but that implies the ideal of
leadership, which is a problematic holdover from
centuries of male domination. The black poetic
tradition is defined, to a large extent, by the
accomplishments
of
black
women,
accomplishments that never came to black men.
Phyllis Wheatley published the first book.
Gwendolyn Brooks received the first Pulitzer.
Rita Dove became the first Poet Laureate of the
United States. Hughes might have been the
architect of the first half of the twentieth
century, but the first major award for poetry
went to Brooks at the end of those first fifty
years. Brooks was encouraged by Hughes during
a reception she attended with her mother as a
teenager. Brooks notes in her autobiography just
how significant that encouragement was to her.
So in a poetic tradition figured by raciallybased political oppression and distinguished by
the achievements made first by black women,
what is a black male poetic? I would like to
consider this question in terms of “Masters and
Master Works," alluding to the tradition
exemplified by Pound but referring to the black
male poets Langston Hughes, Robert Hayden,
and Jay Wright. Hughes believed in the necessity
of affecting the whole of African-American
culture in a manner echoing Joyce’s
annunciation in Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man. Hayden arrives as the craftsman more
concerned with his immediate and intimate
connections in lyrical expression, and Wright
resumes the role of speaker to a culture but to
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