The Undaunted Pursuit of Fury

. . . We want poems

like fists beating niggers out of Jocks

or dagger poems in the slimy bellies

of the owner-Jews . . .

. . . We want "poems that kill."

--LeRoi Jones ("Black Art")

For a white man to read LeRoi Jones or almost any other black poet is like being held in a dark room while listening to an angry voice threaten him in a language he is not expected to appreciate or understand. The angry voices belong to poetry guerrilla fighters who talk "Black English" and ignore accepted aesthetics. They neglect the usual critical dictums. Most black poets are revolutionaries, or try to be. Sometimes they mouth propaganda, but they are also creating a powerful record of their people's anguish and accompanying rage.

Part of the rage must come from the fact that, for over two hundred years of slavery, the black man was usually forbidden to write, publish or even learn to read. Despite this prohibition, there were still about 100 Negro poets of varying significance before the Civil War, many of whom managed to publish their poems in church manuscripts or under white patronage. The best known was the Revolutionary poet Phillis Wheatley (who coined the phrase "first in peace" to describe George Washington and wrote heroic couplets in the style of Alexander Pope).

After the Civil War came a new wave of Negro poets that included Paul Laurence Dunbar, who wrote in the Negro folk dialect of the rural South as well as standard English. The 1920s produced the movement known as the Harlem Renaissance, when Negro poetry began to turn from the classic Eng lish lyric verse of Countee Cullen to the rhythmic, blues-style poetry of Langston Hughes. Later, came Pulitzer Prize-winning Gwendolyn Brooks, Jazz Poet Ted Joans and Margaret Walker, whom some call the mother of the black poets of the '60s. These new poets began to look on themselves not as Negro but as black. Writing primarily for a black audience, they turned their eyes toward Africa and a new-found reverence for black culture.

"Black is a burden bravely chanted," James Emanuel proclaims in a poem called "Negritude."

Black cross of sweat for a nation's rise.

Black is a boy who knows his heroes:

Black the way a hero dies.

Like many black poets today, Emanuel reflects revolutionary attitudes most passionately expressed by Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael. The poets also developed their ideas from the writings of the late black psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. Basically, Fanon stated, Africa and the rest of the third world must be freed from the colonialism that developed color consciousness. Past humiliations can only be washed away through violence. Political freedom will bring about a rejoicing in a new black identity.

Prophets and Poets. Also from Africa came a tribal tradition of the poet as wiseman and prophet, interpreter of the past and seer of the future. According to Poet Nikki Giovanni: "There is no difference between the warrior, the poet, and the people. Like Stokely is a poet and so is Rap Brown."

And the poets are Rap Browns. The barbarity of what Jon Eckels stridently calls "Western Syphilization" in its attitude toward the black man is mockingly captured in a couplet from Some Changes by June Jordan: "George Washington he think he big/ he trade my father for a pig."

The mockery turns to bitterness in Gil Scott-Heron's forthcoming volume, Small Talk at 125th & Lenox:

A rat done bit my sister Nell, (with Whiter on the moon)

Her face and arms began to swell, (and Whitey's on the moon).

The rage becomes an outright call to arms in the work of Mae Jackson:

"the time has come"

to kill

white women and children

for Emmitt Till

and the children of Birmingham.

There is as much rage in the poetry of Don L. Lee, whose three books (Black Pride, Think Black!, Don't Cry, Scream), put out by the most active of the black poetry publishers, Detroit's Broadside Press, have sold some 80,000 copies. Writes Lee:

i ain't seen no poems stop a .38,

i ain't seen no stanzas brake a honkie's head . . .

& until my similes can protect me from a night stick

i guess i'll keep my razor

& buy me some more bullets.

A more sophisticated anger is found in the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks when she described the Chicago ghetto riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King.

A White Philosopher said

'It is better to light one candle/

than curse the darkness.'

These candles curse--

inverting the deeps of the darkness.

If there is rage and hate, there is also a defiant but touching pride in the new black awareness, reflected in Mari Evan's soon-to-be-published I Am a Black Woman:

am a black woman

tall as a cypress

strong

beyond all definition still

defying place

and time

and circumstance

assailed

impervious

indestructible

Look

on me and be

renewed

Although Nikki Giovanni is one of the foremost propagandists, she can also express concern with the blackness of love and take pride in the joy behind the anguish, as she reports in her best-known poem, "Nikki-Rosa":

. . . and I really hope no white person ever has cause to

write about me because they never understand Black love

is Black wealth and they'll probably talk about my hard

childhood and never understand that all the while I was

quite happy.

There seems to be little room for the self-mockery which has often characterized Negro humor or for the literary sense of irony that has dominated much of modern white poetry. But the black poets have a continuing oral tradition lacking in the more cerebral white English poetry. This tradition has been handed along from rural preachers to gospel singers to blues singers, to Langston Hughes, who dignified the street language of the blacks and read his poems wherever he could find an audience, even in bars. Today's black poets often chant their poetry in lofts, churches and schools, as if they were still tribal prophets. David Henderson's new book, De Mayor of Harlem, is full of the language of incantation, uniting fragments of history and contemporary impression as if in a visionary state of mind:

walk his city by sundown

witness

flamss upon rooftops

along the piers

palisades crumbling spires

organized amusement parks fright-death

upon roller coasters with one end only . . .

the weirdest

roller coaster through manhattan by underground express

iron cars trains of auschwitz

jangling metal grit subway air

Black Dialect and Rhythm. LeRoi Jones, a playwright and essayist, who has stood trial in New Jersey on charges related to his political activities, is perhaps the best known of the new black poets. "I make a poetry with what I feel is useful & can be saved out of all the garbage of our lives," he writes. "What I see, am touched by (CAN HEAR) . . . wives, gardens, jobs, cement yards where cats pee, all my interminable artifacts . . . ALL are a poetry, & nothing moves (with any grace) pried apart from these things. There cannot be closet poetry. Unless the closet be wide as God's eye."

Whether subtle or simplistic, black poetry often makes the poetry of the streets come alive. If four-letter words are used (and they appear often), it is because they are not only weapons to hack away protective layers of deadening sophistication, but they are also the words of the common people.

"Black English" is not an illiterate language, as many think, but remarkably rich in nuances. According to Toni Morrison, an editor at Random House, "many of these poets are turning to the grammar, the punctuation, the language through which subculture blacks in particular have resisted total Westernization. Black dialect--if you want to call it that--is probably more subtle and sophisticated than standard white English." In standard English, she says, "there are only two present tenses--I work, I am working. In English as spoken in white Appalachia, there are three --I work, I am working, I a' working. In black Appalachian dialect, there are five--I work, I am working, I be working, I a' working, I be a' working--and each has a different shade of meaning."

Funky, jive, dawn, high, the Man, hawk, cool, hot, copped-out, cats, caps, kicked, reefer, Johns, juke, ofay, goofed, wing, hip, dig, soul, honkies, splib (spook as in Negro), grass and skag are just a few of the words appearing in black poetry that often have multiple meanings elusive to the white reader. For example, in Etheridge Knight's Poems from Prison, he says,

You rocked too many boats, man.

Pulled too many coats, man.

Saw through the jive.

Jive here refers not only to the dance but also to a fake song-and-dance routine, a deceit, which is in contrast to the truth of soul.

Just as elusive are the rhythms drawn from city sounds, African drumbeats, church responses, and the jazz of Coleman, Coltrane and Charlie ("Bird") Parker. These can be heard in Michael S. Harper's book, Dear John, Dear Coltrane:

Bird, buttermilk bird&#

151;smack, booze and bitches

I am Bird

baddest nightdreamer

on sax in the ornithology-world

I can fly--higher, high, higher--

I'm a black man;

I am; I'm a black man--

The rhythm of the breath line, the breathing syncopation of speech and modern music--elements inherent in black poetry's relationship to the oral tradition--have been given new life and extensions in white poetry, particularly in the work of Charles Olson and the Black Mountain school, as well as Allen Ginsberg and the beat poets of the 1950s. As a result, whether in white poetry's revolt against academic aridity or in black poetry's political efforts to reunite the poet and the common people in a common cause, the breath line with its responsiveness to the gut rather than the brain has pumped a new emotional force into the poem. And, related to the re-emphasis on the spoken word, special black words and the Joycean play of black language have deeply influenced both American writing and speech.

Black poetry, therefore, has already demonstrated enormous vitality that may eventually achieve greatness. In the meantime, unless one is fervently devoted to the political cause, black poetry's message is a continuing shout that too often overwhelms the senses and allows too little room for a wider range of human response. Black poets themselves are becoming concerned with this, and already some, like Nikki Giovanni, are moving away from extreme political activism toward more compassionate and universal themes. Already Black Poet June Jordan is searching for "the turning point in what you could call my undaunted pursuit of fury." There cannot be, after all, a really accomplished street poetry unless the street (like LeRoi Jones' closet) is also as wide as God's eye.

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