Liberian Literary Magazine
February Issue 0215
If American society has progressed, it should
have done so such that fame has other
requirements and, concurrently, poets such as
Hayden who are more interested in simply being
poets have more space to be, although there is
no such thing as “simply” being a poet. Critical
specificity requires more. Hayden and Wright are
poets who write with less c oncern to the
complexities of race and racism, and some
consideration of this choice of theirs might
illumine this idea of black male poetics.
Conversely, there is the black constituency
that believes the urge to use one’s gifts with a
focus on craft is whiteness and cultural betrayal
to an ideal of blackness. This notion of betrayal
is nonsensical and steeped in a lingering anxiety
born in the space between black and white as
evidence shows that the desire to have fame and
greatness extend over the globe, even as they
manifest differently according to cultural
difference. The urge does live. The more
sensible line of questioning out of all of this, I
maintain, is whether we as citizens in an
increasingly smaller and complex world need
poets to continue with phallic notions of
conquest inherent in greatness or aspire to
newer notions of community, notions made
possible by concentrating on one’s own
development first, that kind of selflessness. The
desire to fame and greatness is exploration of
the opportunities to extend one’s self, which is
not ascension to the sublime. If we look at the
movement from Hughes to Hayden to Wright in
this way we might see a journey toward
selflessness in this thing we call black male
poetics, selflessness as opposed to the quest for
greatness that is more an earmark of patriarchy
than anything.
Of the central conceits in Hughes’ work, that
of the “genius child” is more useful to a
discussion of the poet’s need for an audience
and his desire for greatness in choosing such a
challenging leadership role. As much a grieving
over tragic failures in his relationships with his
parents, a father who disliked black people and
a mother who gave an envious rather than a
supportive love, Hughes’ was orphaned into the
vanguard of the black poetic tradition with an
undeniable literary gift in a society ripe with
blatant abuse and hatred of blacks and
blackness. A poet has no way of shaping and
shifting such tectonic plates surrounding his life,
and he can be so unlucky as to be helpless over
his own personality, that is personality and not
self. I take the two entities to be quite different.
In fact, I suppose personality to be an obstacle
to realization of self and that realization of self
prerequisite to a poet’s ascension to the
sublime.
Greatness can bloat and in that way enlarge
the personality, or it can lead to a distillation of
the same.
So Hughes’ petitioned America, his white
family, for membership in poems such as “I,
Too," where he writes “They’ll see how beautiful
I am/And be ashamed—.” Forty years later, the
strategy of shaming America would be
abandoned by many poets who saw it better to
arm the culture and engage in constructive
combat, however metaphorical, rather than
constructive conversation. The 60s afforded a
perverse path to fame, which is to say poets
were caught in the nuclear breaking open of over
three centuries of separation and cast into this
space of supposed opportunity that was as much
confusing as it was exciting. The shift in
generations is often full of the kind of anxiety
where the young people cannot readily assume
strategies set forth for them by their elders
because the elders could not see the societal
shifts in which they themselves were often
unconscious participants.
One of the pinnacles of Hughes’ work as a
leader, “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain," contains his prophesy of a selfconfident poet arising from the masses to be the
first manifestation of the great black poet.
However, Hughes could not foresee the birth of
an entire generation of poets from the working
classes as a result of opportunities afforded their
parents and thus themselves by the post-war
industrial boom of the 1940s, the tireless work
of A. Phillip Randolph and others, and, of course,
the Brown decision. Whereas postal workers had
been a solid line in the black middle class despite
working class appearances, the 1950s would see
the rise of the children of sharecroppers whose
families flooded America’s major cities as late
as the 1960s. All this was beyond Hughes’ vision,
and the inability of most people to fully
comprehend this at the time that it was
happening left black male poets to once again
consider leadership as greatness.
Considering the level of confusion at that time
in American history, leadership seemed the only
logical choice for several of the key players.
The word “perverse” might apply to the 60s
literary circumstance for black men as per
Hughes’ legacy. Societal pressures created such
an enormous anxiety that the composure needed
to maintain Hughes’ genteel positioning was nigh
impossible. In the wake of the illusory opening
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