My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 48

of captivity and emancipation, war
(the Civil War and the Vietnam War),
poetry, dreaming, love. And though
we’re talking about a very different kind
of freedom, a very different context,
perhaps the intellectual and thematic
and musical concerns of Komunyakaa’s
work are similar to Horton’s.
“George Moses Horton, Myself ” reads:

In The Black Bard of North Carolina,
Horton is described as “the first
American slave to protest his bondage
in written verse; the first African
American to publish a book in the
South… and the only person known
to publish two volumes of poetry
while in bondage and another shortly
after emancipation.”

I feel myself in need
Of the inspiring strains of ancient lore,
My heart to lift, my empty mind to feed,
And all the world explore.

I begin here because, in his Helen
Edison lecture, Yusef Komunyakaa
reads this poet’s “George Moses
Horton, Myself ” and talks, through
silence and speech, about how Horton’s
writing “had to do with the fact that
he had this wish to buy himself, to buy
his freedom.” The seriousness and
awe with which Komunyakaa responds
to the work of Horton provides us
with a glimpse into the world of what
moves Komunyakaa. Arguably,
Komunyakaa’s response to Horton
helps us to better read and understand
Komunyakaa’s considerations of
language and possibility and, more
specifically, a poetics with deep regard
for liberation, emancipation,
transcendence. And, not only this, but
a poetics that moves towards these states.
Consider what these men share, each
of them shaped by The South, its
lands and waters and laws, a history

I feel resolved to try,
My wish to prove, my calling to pursue,
Or mount up from the earth into the sky,
To show what heaven can do.

I know that I am old
And never can recover what is past,
But for the future may some light unfold
And soar from ages blast.

My genius from a boy,
Has fluttered like a bird within my heart;
But could not thus confined her powers employ,
Impatient to depart.

BLACK RENAISSANCE NOIRE

She like a restless bird,
Would spread her wing, her power to be unfurl’d,
And let her songs be loudly heard,
And dart from world to world.

47

Unsurprisingly, despite this dream,
Horton was not emancipated until
1865, around the age of 67. There are
many other parts of his story and
legend that are remarkable, one of
which is speculated to include his
participation in a back to Africa
movement which moved him to
Liberia where some historians think
he lived and died, but I will stick to
writing about his poetry here.