Liberian Literary Magazine
Promoting Liberian literature, Arts and Culture
of the gates and the illusory “freeing” of black
people, such genteel demeanor looked too much
like whiteness. Poets moved to cradle the
culture in their arms. It was a time of actual
combat, the police and military in gun battles in
black neighborhoods, helicopters overhead,
black children shot dead in the streets,
underscored by Johnson’s deployment of a unit
of the U.S. Airborne soldiers to Detroit in 1967.
Poets born in the late nineteen sixties and
afterwards, who are now in their mid to late 30s
and early 40s can only imagine this history, and
that experiential gap makes for some of the
current anxiety.
The 60s contained a literary moment that
was perverse inasmuch as the choices made by
these revolutionary poets made them famous, a
fame that troubled and confused them more
than it excited and fulfilled them, a cruel fate.
Hayden made different choices. Born thirteen
years before the publication of The Weary Blues,
Hayden was approaching his sixties in the 1960s,
a poet with his feet firmly planted in the fields
of craft. If his work invoked shame in the
dominant culture’s literary community, it was
due more to the power of his craft, poems wellwrought, carefully conceived and painstakingly
revised. There is the classic photograph of
Hayden in his very thick eyeglasses as he
examines a poem during the time that he was
the first black consultant in poetry to the Library
of Congress, a position that later became U.S.
Poet Laureate, to be assumed by Rita Dove two
decades later.
In what seems to be a supreme understanding
of charity, Hayden constructed “Middle
Passage,"
the
African-American
epic
commemorating the African holocaust. With a
publication date of 1962, this towering poem is
the annunciation of a prophecy yet to be
fulfilled. Hayden approaches the subject with a
courageous forgiveness and a level of selfawareness not available to Hughes, whose
forgiveness was evident but troubled, mired in
the tragedy of his childhood. “Those Winter
Sundays” is a balm for Hughes’ terrible
wounding. As an adopted child, Hayden had a
more concrete break perhaps. Whatever the
interstices of his mind, it gave us “Middle
Passage.”
“You cannot stare that hatred down," he
writes. Hatred is a terrible and seductive force,
and the younger poets who surrounded Hayden
in the 60s had to hold this force in their hands,
as one would hold a fire. Earlier in that same
section of the poem Hayden writes, "…the dark
ships, the dark ships move/their bright ironical
names/like jests of kindness on a murderer’s
mouth.” The 60s was likewise a time where irony
was raised to exponential dimensions, and only
one gesture could have a predictable outcome.
Hatred brought more hatred, and the quality of
the writing was sacrificed as much as Hughes
sacrificed his chances for genuine love and
intimacy in his personal life.
Hayden had no pretensions to leadership. He
simply wanted to write, but there is never such
a thing as simply wanting to write, or simply
wanting to be a man. Hayden was crucified by
some of the younger revolutionaries, but to some
degree it was only in effigy as Hayden would
never be bound actually to anyone’s cross. As
much as some of these revolutionary poets
wanted a Cultural Revolution of their own, it was
not possible in America, another and completely
“other” country. Although Mao’s little red book
was popular in the sixties, the sixties’ activist
poets had little access to a realistic
understanding of Marxism, let alone China’s
specific and unique problems.
Despite their different choices, Hughes and
Hayden had one thing in common. They loved
living the life of the poet. No matter his political
consciousness, Hughes saw himself as a poet and
artist, and his life is a blessing still unattainable
to many living poets, namely enjoying a life
based on one’s writings, sans teaching with its
limitations and yet full of all the excitement and
indeed romance of that life, the travel, the joy
of being in the midst of exciting times. When it
comes to living in exciting times, we are all
bound to history’s roulette wheel of chance.
Jay Wright lives another life of the poet. In
the 20 years that I have had the privilege of
knowing him, I have made several meccas to his
private home, full as it is with books and all the
matter one would expect the most erudite living
African-American poet to possess, all in the most
overwhelming lack of pretension. Respectfully, I
refrain from any surmise about his inner life and
take minor liberties in discussing his work as it
pertains to my exploration of what this thing
might be, black male poetics.
In an early interview in Callaloo, Wright
commented that if black poets have any
“mission” it is a spiritual one. I offer that as
insight alongside what I know to be his aversion
to envisioning reality along the lines of race. It
is, therefore, a bit of an entanglement to include
his work in this essay, but I take the risk.
Wright’s opus has been my primary mentoring
light over these twenty years. My meditations on
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