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From SeeingBlack.com Letters Dear Friends & Colleagues,
The text of the interview is at http://www.npr.org/templates/rundowns/rundown.php?prgId=13&prgDate=17-May-06. Perhaps Collins and NPR need to hear from Hayden's nonexistent Black audience in reference to this egregiously myopic perspective. Chris and I hope that you will join us in protesting Collins’ remark about a very important contributor to African American literature to NPR at obudsman@npr.org, freshair@whyy.org, or visit their site’s contact page at: http://www.npr.org/contact. Hayden deserves no such defamation, and we, as students, writers and readers of Black poetry do not deserve such offhandedly impudent insult. Such a tragic and glaring instance of cultural genocide, even if by default, is beyond tolerance, if not beyond belief. [In] the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry (2nd edition), the biographical sketch that preceded the poems of his that were included stated, "Robert Hayden didn't subscribe to any esthetic of Black Poetry!"—Chris Hayden Collin’s reiteration of the Norton Anthology’s error is telling, and even the most magnanimous interpretation of his comment in the interview is rife with offense. The import is that Black readers embrace a monolithic standard of poetic achievement; conversely, that any mention of race/White supremacy/genocide is inconsistent with and/or obliterates the sublime in art. I shudder to think that Hayden’s work may be taught via this perspective in the academy, public or private schools. I shudder to think that any poet or writer would promulgate the silencing of other authors on any subject. I shudder to think that Collins is teaching anyone! Incredibly, Collins’ remark strongly suggests that he is entirely unfamiliar with Hayden’s work. Please note that Hayden’s poem, Middle Passage, begins with the first line: Jésus, Estrella, Esperanza, Mercy. These are names of slave ships. Duh-uh. The second and third stanzas of the poem are as follows: Sails flashing to the wind like weapons/sharks following the moans the fever and the dying; /horror the corposant and compass rose./ Middle Passage:/voyage through death/to life upon these shores. We know what we went (and are going) through. So did Robert Hayden.
In Hayden’s self-revelatory poem, Soledad, though not explicitly referencing Soledad Prison, notorious for, among other things the 1970 courtroom hostage-taking intended to free prisoner, revolutionary activist and Black Panther George Jackson led by his brother Jonathan (for which Angela Davis was indicted, tried, and found innocent of supplying guns) the prison is aptly contextualized as metaphor for Hayden’s own experience of drug addiction. Jackson’s book, Soledad Brother appeared in 1970. Hayden’s poem appeared in 1971. Coincidence? Robert Bly, poet, author of Iron John, and professor at the University of Michigan where Hayden studied, is highly critical of 75 percent of the poetry published in America, calling it pretty much complete crap. Significantly, in his essay, “Six Disciplines That Intensify Poetry,” and in other works, Bly cites favorably Hayden, Etheridge Knight, Sonia Sanchez, Lucille Clifton and Sterling Brown, all of whom are African American poet-warriors in the best sense. African American male poets Michael S. Harper and Afaa Michael Weaver have both dealt critically with Hayden in Masters and Master Works: On Black Male Poetics (Weaver) and The Metaphysics of American Journal (Harper). Both these discussions characterize Hayden’s oeuvre as culture-specific in major respects. Can some of our cousins ever just get over themselves? Can one perhaps find the universal in the particular? RIP, Katherine Dunham & John Hicks. Bravo, Toni Morrison!!! Thanks and best wishes, Ruth-Miriam Garnett Austin, Texas Author of Laelia (Simon & Schuster/Atria 2004), A Move Further South (Third World Press 1987) and Concerning Violence (Onegin 2006) © Copyright by SeeingBlack.com |
