Happy Birthday, Rhode Island’s first poet laureate, Michael Harper

“My poems are rhythmic rather than metric; the pulse is jazz; the tradition generally oral; my major influences musical; my debts, mostly to the musicians who taught me to see about experience, pain and love, and who made it artful and archetypal.” – Michael Harper

It’s Michael Harper’s birthday, Rhode Island’s first poet laureate 1988-1993! That link is to the obituary in The Providence Journal and it gives a wonderful portrait of the man, his status in Rhode Island, and what he was all about as a poet. Here’s the obituary in the New York Times as well. He won many awards in his lifetime, including the prestigious Frost Medal for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Society of America.. Read that Providence Journal piece too to get a sense of who he was as a teacher, the accolades pouring in from students who were lucky enough to study with him (the girl who wrote the poem about her grandfather’s suicide is especially touching). He was born in Brooklyn, went to college in California, got his MFA in Iowa, and ended up in Rhode Island. He traveled widely, in America and elsewhere, accumulating a wealth of knowledge and experience which broadened his perspective. His poetic rhythms were, famously, influenced by jazz.

He was deeply interested in history, and many of his poems feature real historical figures, like John Coltrane, Jackie Robinson, Frederick Douglass and Roger Williams (the founder of the State of Rhode Island …and Providence Plantations. Littlest state in the Union, longest name). He focused on “kinship”, the dovetailing of narratives crossing cultures.

Harper got his start by submitting a poem (“Dear John, Dear Coltraine” – listed below) to a contest judged by Robert Penn Warren, Denise Levertov and Gwendolyn Brooks. He didn’t win the prize, but Gwendolyn Brooks (my post about her here) was so impressed she helped arrange the publication of his first collection of his poetry, Dear John, Dear Coltrane in 1970. It was nominated for the National Book Award. In college, he studied poetry under Christopher Isherwood, and through Isherwood met Auden and Stephen Spender – the great trifecta of ex-pat poets at that time. Simultaneously, Harper’s deep immersion in Keats and the Romantics made him feel that poetry was a thing he could actually devote himself to. (Can you even BE a poet if you don’t go through a Keats phase? It seems required). He got his degree, got his MFA, and began a very successful teaching career – in many different universities before he ended up at Brown University in Providence, where he taught until his death.

Rhode Islanders are proud to claim him.

Here are three of his poems below, two to John Coltrane, and one to Roger Williams.

Dear John, Dear Coltrane

a love supreme, a love supreme
a love supreme, a love supreme

Sex fingers toes
in the marketplace
near your father’s church
in Hamlet, North Carolina—
witness to this love
in this calm fallow
of these minds,
there is no substitute for pain:
genitals gone or going,
seed burned out,
you tuck the roots in the earth,
turn back, and move
by river through the swamps,
singing: a love supreme, a love supreme;
what does it all mean?
Loss, so great each black
woman expects your failure
in mute change, the seed gone.
You plod up into the electric city—
your song now crystal and
the blues. You pick up the horn
with some will and blow
into the freezing night:
a love supreme, a love supreme—

Dawn comes and you cook
up the thick sin ‘tween
impotence and death, fuel
the tenor sax cannibal
heart, genitals, and sweat
that makes you clean—
a love supreme, a love supreme—

Why you so black?
cause I am
why you so funky?
cause I am
why you so black?
cause I am
why you so sweet?
cause I am
why you so black?
cause I am
a love supreme, a love supreme:

So sick
you couldn’t play Naima,
so flat we ached
for song you’d concealed
with your own blood,
your diseased liver gave
out its purity,
the inflated heart
pumps out, the tenor kiss,
tenor love:
a love supreme, a love supreme—
a love supreme, a love supreme—

Here Where Coltrane Is

Soul and race
are private dominions,
memories and modal
songs, a tenor blossoming,
which would paint suffering
a clear color but is not in
this Victorian house
without oil in zero degree
weather and a forty-mile-an-hour wind;
it is all a well-knit family:
a love supreme.
Oak leaves pile up on walkway
and steps, catholic as apples
in a special mist of clear white
children who love my children.
I play “Alabama”
on a warped record player
skipping the scratches
on your faces over the fibrous
conical hairs of plastic
under the wooden floors.

Dreaming on a train from New York
to Philly, you hand out six
notes which become an anthem
to our memories of you:
oak, birch, maple,
apple, cocoa, rubber.
For this reason Martin is dead;
for this reason Malcolm is dead;
for this reason Coltrane is dead;
in the eyes of my first son are the browns
of these men and their music.

History as Apple Tree

Cocumscussoc is my village,
the western arm of Narragansett
Bay; Canonicus chief sachem;
black men scape into his tribe.

How does patent not breed heresy?
Williams came to my chief
for his tract of land,
hunted by mad Puritans,
founded Providence Plantation;
Seekonk where he lost
first harvest, building, plant,
then the bay from these natives:
he set up trade.
With Winthrop he bought
an island, Prudence;
two others, Hope and Patience
he named, though small.
His trading post at the cove;
Smith’s at another close by.
We walk the Pequot trail
as artery or spring.

Wampanoags, Cowesets,
Nipmucks, Niantics
came by canoe for the games;
matted bats, a goal line,
a deerskin filled with moss:
lacrosse. They danced;
we are told they gambled their souls.

In your apple orchard
legend conjures Williams’ name;
he was an apple tree.
Buried on his own lot
off Benefit Street
a giant apple tree grew;
two hundred years later,
when the grave was opened,
dust and root grew
in his human skeleton:
bones became apple tree.

As black man I steal away
in the night to the apple tree,
place my arm in the rich grave,
black sachem on a family plot,
take up a chunk of apple foot,
let it become my skeleton,
become my own myth:
my arm the historical branch,
my name the bruised fruit,
Black human photograph: apple tree.

QUOTES:

Michael Harper:

“[My travels] to Mexico and Europe where those landscapes broadened my scope and interest in poetry and culture of other countries while I searched my own family and racial history for folklore, history, and myth for themes that would give my writing the tradition and context where I could find my own voice. My travels made me look closely at the wealth of human materials in my own life, its ethnic richness, complexity of language and stylization, the tension between stated moral idealism and brutal historical realities, and I investigated the inner reality of those struggles to find the lyrical expression of their secrets in my own voice.”

Keith Leonard:

“[Harper’s] best poems about personal pain, about historical figures like Frederick Douglass, or about musicians and writers and, therefore, about artistry, his chiseled, forbidding poetics effectively suggest the harrowing unity between vision and memory, Western and non-Western, pain and beauty, by which Harper defines black identity and resists literary convention.”

Don Share, editor of Poetry magazine:

“He brought voices, traditions, and convictions into poetry that hadn’t been part of it before. His vast experience expanded American literature, and though he will be missed, his words will carry on resoundingly.”

Scholar Michael G. Cooke elaborated on Harper’s use of “kinship”:

Kinship means social bonding, a recognition of likeness in context, concern, need, liability, value. It is humanistic, a cross between consanguinity and technical organization… [Harper’s] approach to kinship is a radiant one, reaching out across time, across space, even across race.

Michael Harper, 1978, interview with The Washington Post:

“I’ve been called a black poet, revolutionary poet, a black aesthetic poet, an academic poet, an ameliorating poet — you name it. I’ve never made any attempt to qualify out the black content in my poetry. I’ve written poems about a good many things. I’ve tried to keep my range of experience as wide as possible.”

 
 
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