Liberian Literary Magazine
February Issue 0215
the works of Jay Wright and Sharon Olds have
been my guides through my own project.
One of the few contemporary poets who still
subscribe to the ideal of masterworks, Wright’s
poetic project is conceived in total, which is to
say he moves along a path to the completion of
a work as a painter or sculptor or composer
might organize his various opuses around a core
piece or set of principles. This is in opposition to
the poem by poem investigations of confessional
and more solipsistic projects, or the silly mistake
of writing to trends and thus chasing stardom.
The masterworks ideal requires an envisioning or
omniscience that can consume a lesser poet.
For example, Wright explains his series
“Love’s Dozen” as the reconstitution of love in
the world, a global project. Wright’s graduate
preparation in comparative literature and his
facility in several languages secure the inner
structures of his works, and his grounding is
distinctly different from Jean Toomer’s.
Toomer’s Blue Meridian is more of an escape
from race than a conscious working through the
same.
In this comparison it is possible to glean also
an understanding of self as I attempt to use it
here in the context of selflessness.
For Toomer, the escape from race made it all
the more inescapable. His selflessness was
complicated by an obsession with wanting to be
free of self, and this is a comparable paradox to
that of revolutionary 60s’ poets whose
commitment to ideals of justice caught them in
the ironic mire of the time. Whatever they saw
as the achievement of selflessness through a
compassionate commitment to community
proved to be only a compounding of the same.
Selflessness could only have come in the
complete turning away from the traditional ways
of literary life, a more cruel fate and thus
impossible.
America’s northeastern cities were no place
to live a real revolutionary’s life. New York and
New Jersey were galaxies away from Cuba and
Angola. It was in those areas du ring the 60s that
Wright attended seminary and did graduate work
at Rutgers in comparative literature. His
understanding of charity was already profound.
In “What Is Beautiful” Wright names beauty as
the body of love, and love as the realization of
the divine.
He writes “Here, there is no form untuned by
eye, or voice/there is no body waiting for its
metaphor.”
Imagine this as the critical space that has
confounded those living in the stream of black
male poetics. Imagine it as the awesome weight
Hughes assumed, the painful and solitary path
Hayden chose, the tragic and ongoing loss
suffered by revolutionary poets. Imagine it as
those things, but see it as Jay Wright’s naming
of a place of genuine selflessness, a commitment
to language and learning with a willingness to
tackle the inhumanity of racism, to throw a
larger net over the thing, a net capable of
dissolving this social construction it catches, of
erasing the spaces where it might opt to live,
knowing the first space to be removed is that
inside one’s own heart and cranium.
Later in “What Is Beautiful," he writes ‘This is
the gift of being transformed/the emptiness that
calls compassion down.” The charity we see in
Hughes is deepened in Hayden and taken to
levels approaching the sublime in Wright.
Charity informed their choices as it did the
choices of Amiri Baraka, Haki R. Madhubuti and
Askia M. Toure. I see them all as noble.
However, the choice now for black male poets
is to embrace this space where they can ask
themselves this question of what constitutes
beauty and ask it in terms of their own lives, and
not those lives weighed by the suppositions of
group identity. Time has moved on, and if black
male poetics is to assume a more manifest place,
even as poetry itself is marginalized in
exponential leaps in every waking second, then
black male poets must explore the beauty of the
quality of being human. Assume that humanity
and not the task of proving the same. Black male
poetics must upend and suspend the idea of
race.
There is now no more greatness for a black
male poet to assume other than a commitment
to reality and the investigation of that reality
arising from a deeper self-awareness. Racism is
not dead, but we are now in a vortex of
confluences, where the black male poet can opt
to free himself from freeing the race. The first
person he can save is himself, perhaps the only
person. Another set of literary choices waits for
black male poets as a prize, not a predator in
the grass, if they can see the current vortex or
junction in time as an invitation to be free to be
poets and to have a greater freedom as human
beings.
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