Meditation on a Black Male Poetic

In Afaa Weaver’s intriguing and spellbinding essay, “Masters and Masterworks: On Black Male Poetics,” he calls to mind the evolution of the black male voice in poetry, plotting a path from Langston Hughes to Robert Hayden, ending in the work of Jay Wright. Each poet assumes a stance toward their literary legacies that defines their historical period. He sees the progression of these poets’ works as a “journey toward selflessness in this thing we might call black male poetics, selflessness as opposed to the quest for greatness that is more an earmark of a patriarchy than anything.”

Weaver’s careful study of Hughes, Hayden and Wright provides us with a linear plot upon which to place these poets’ contributions. Hughes is an architect who laid a foundation of selfless charity, which Hayden deepened and Wright took to levels approaching the sublime. In my meditation on Weaver’s essay, I am reminded of an anecdote from a contemporary bluesman who, as the blues so often does, was able to capture so much with so few words.

Philadelphia Jerry Ricks, an accomplished blues guitarist who used to work in a coffee house that brought bluesmen in to play all the time, told of how he got a famous bluesman to come out for a gig:

When I went to pick up Lightnin’ Hopkins for his first gig, I went
to knock on his hotel room door. I said, “ Mr. Hopkins, I’m here
to pick you up.” He hollered back, he said, “Who the hell are
you?” So, I got a little confused, I said, “Well, uh, my name is
Jerry Ricks. I’m the boy to pick you up.” He wouldn’t answer.

So I said, “Listen River, open the door!” So he pulled the door
open real fast, he asked “Who told you that?”

‘Cause I called him River. Because they all called each other River,
for friendship. And I knew the old line that the bluesmen used
to call each other. And if they don’t call you River, that means
the river is dried up and the friendship is over.

Thus is the black male poetic. A river, a continuum of voices, flow of word and breath and ink that I wade in every time I pick up the pen, each time I turn the page. A current of voices, from Dubois to Langston to Mckay to Harper to Brown. Tides of Toomer and swirls of Jackson and Jeffers. Waves of Weaver and Hayden, with riptides of Baraka, Dumas and Madhubuti. Floatin’ in Etheridge and Ethelbert, bubbling into Troupe, washing into Eady and Lansana, roiling into Ellis, Gibson and Williams. Oh to be in that number. Oh to be under and within that spell. Oh to call and respond and holla holla back ya’ll, oh to wade in that river, to be blessed and baptized. This darkwater symphony river of verse, this current of call and response.

Weaver calls out to the black poet, The first person he can free is himself, perhaps the only person.

How much more free am I, after reading the verses of all the voices in that river? How much more of my own sky can I see after getting lifted to the rhythms of these voices? How many times have I drowned in these words, then woke up floating on top of them, fully and newly alive? And is this not a kind of freedom? A chorus of voices reaching through the prism of ink, parchment and time to show me a way? And were they only thinking of a way to free themselves, if only for a minute, on the page? Are these brothavoices not talking to each other, across space and time? Riffing off of each other, like bluesmen on the set – cuttin’ heads with wit and grace, signifyin’ and head noddin’ to each other across the bookshelves, into each other’s language, leaping off each
other’s tongues?

It is this conversation, this call and response across the centuries, this cipher of blued brown syncopation that we nod our heads to across the years that makes a black male poetic. Will there ever be a black male poet that is successful in addressing his world, himself, who does not engage the writings of other black male poets around him, and those who preceded him? I don’t think so.
As we work to, as Weaver says, “upend and suspend the idea of race,” I believe that we will inevitably work at the same time to deepen and animate the story of our race. We will become more rooted in the histories that have formed us as whole human beings beyond the stereotypes and shadows that the work of Dunbar, Toomer and Langston labor to dispel. Thus, we will indeed “uncover a reality arising from a deeper self-awareness,” by adroitly navigating the vortex of confluence that troubles the river of our verse and being.

Arguably, there has been no more productive a time in American history for Black poets, and particularly for the men of that group. When I look across the country, I can see blossoming of brotha talent in small and major presses, winning grants, fellowships, and awards, and teaching at universities. A very short list of a new crop of brothapoets who have not only published, but won significant awards includes A. Van Jordan, Thomas Ellis, Kevin Young, Kyle Dargan, Frank Walker, Quraysh Lansana, Terrance Hayes, Major Jackson, Kwame Dawes, Gary Lilley, and John Keene, Regie Gibson, Roger Bonair-Agard, Amaud Johnson, Ross Gay… the list goes on. We have opportunities today that did not exist twenty or even ten years ago – many of the men I named are either teaching at universities or are involved in some way in shaping the curriculum of students across the country. The same amount of black male poet-professors was, I believe, unimaginable twenty years ago. Today, there are more of us entering graduate programs, getting degrees, and teaching than ever before.

As a result, we also have challenges and problems to resolve, each in our own way, through our work on the page and in our communities. The startlingly high dropout rate at almost every level of scholarship, from grade school to graduate school; the prison industrial complex’s unsatiable hunger for black bodies that deprives our community of (mostly) men; the ever present need for self healing and realization in a society that, quite frankly, seems to be far more comfortable seeing us behind bars than behind lecterns in a classroom. Nevertheless, we also have the charge to reach deep back into that river of ourselves, the current of our collective voices, in order to find our own unique individual voice, and to share that honed and polished voice with our communities. We also have the charge to slowly but surely change the canons of our literature classes from a virtually all-white, all-male paradigm to a truly American curriculum, one that equally embraces the contributions of all the peoples of this country – all colors, genders, and sexual orientations. As we truly free ourselves through our words, we will inevitably free others.

A black male poetic will always exist as long as that river don’t run dry. I have no idea what the brothapoets of the twenty-first century will give us, but I know that they will wade in that river that we are deepening one poem at a time. Call me an optimist, call me a realist, but I am hoping that if you stop me on the street someday, you’ll be able to call me River.