{"id":152968,"date":"2026-03-18T08:00:21","date_gmt":"2026-03-18T12:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=152968"},"modified":"2026-03-18T08:20:52","modified_gmt":"2026-03-18T12:20:52","slug":"happy-birthday-poet-michael-harper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=152968","title":{"rendered":"“In the beginning I never found poems in the American literary pantheon about the things I knew best. I decided that I would at least do my part and try to put some of those poems in there.\u201d — Rhode Island’s first poet laureate, Michael Harper"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\n\u201cMy 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.\u201d – Michael Harper<\/big><\/p>\n

\nIt’s Michael Harper’s birthday, Rhode Island’s first poet laureate 1988-1993<\/a>! That link is to the obituary in The Providence Journal<\/i> 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<\/em><\/a> 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<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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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<\/a>) was so impressed she helped arrange the publication of his first collection of his poetry, Dear John, Dear Coltrane<\/em> 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. <\/p>\n

Rhode Islanders are proud to claim him. <\/p>\n

Here are three of his poems below, two to John Coltrane, and one to Roger Williams. <\/p>\n

Dear John, Dear Coltrane<\/strong><\/big><\/p>\n

a love supreme, a love supreme
\na love supreme, a love supreme<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sex fingers toes
\nin the marketplace
\nnear your father’s church
\nin Hamlet, North Carolina\u2014
\nwitness to this love
\nin this calm fallow
\nof these minds,
\nthere is no substitute for pain:
\ngenitals gone or going,
\nseed burned out,
\nyou tuck the roots in the earth,
\nturn back, and move
\nby river through the swamps,
\nsinging: a love supreme, a love supreme<\/em>;
\nwhat does it all mean?
\nLoss, so great each black
\nwoman expects your failure
\nin mute change, the seed gone.
\nYou plod up into the electric city\u2014
\nyour song now crystal and
\nthe blues. You pick up the horn
\nwith some will and blow
\ninto the freezing night:
\na love supreme, a love supreme<\/em>\u2014<\/p>\n

Dawn comes and you cook
\nup the thick sin ‘tween
\nimpotence and death, fuel
\nthe tenor sax cannibal
\nheart, genitals, and sweat
\nthat makes you clean\u2014
\na love supreme, a love supreme<\/em>\u2014<\/p>\n

Why you so black?
\ncause I am
\nwhy you so funky?
\ncause I am
\nwhy you so black?
\ncause I am
\nwhy you so sweet?
\ncause I am
\nwhy you so black?
\ncause I am
\na love supreme, a love supreme<\/em>:<\/p>\n

So sick
\nyou couldn’t play Naima<\/em>,
\nso flat we ached
\nfor song you’d concealed
\nwith your own blood,
\nyour diseased liver gave
\nout its purity,
\nthe inflated heart
\npumps out, the tenor kiss,
\ntenor love:
\na love supreme, a love supreme\u2014
\na love supreme, a love supreme<\/em>\u2014<\/p>\n

Here Where Coltrane Is<\/strong><\/big><\/p>\n

Soul and race
\nare private dominions,
\nmemories and modal
\nsongs, a tenor blossoming,
\nwhich would paint suffering
\na clear color but is not in
\nthis Victorian house
\nwithout oil in zero degree
\nweather and a forty-mile-an-hour wind;
\nit is all a well-knit family:
\na love supreme<\/em>.
\nOak leaves pile up on walkway
\nand steps, catholic as apples
\nin a special mist of clear white
\nchildren who love my children.
\nI play \u201cAlabama\u201d
\non a warped record player
\nskipping the scratches
\non your faces over the fibrous
\nconical hairs of plastic
\nunder the wooden floors.<\/p>\n

Dreaming on a train from New York
\nto Philly, you hand out six
\nnotes which become an anthem
\nto our memories of you:
\noak, birch, maple,
\napple, cocoa, rubber.
\nFor this reason Martin is dead;
\nfor this reason Malcolm is dead;
\nfor this reason Coltrane is dead;
\nin the eyes of my first son are the browns
\nof these men and their music.<\/p>\n

History as Apple Tree<\/strong><\/big><\/p>\n

Cocumscussoc is my village,
\nthe western arm of Narragansett
\nBay; Canonicus chief sachem;
\nblack men scape into his tribe.<\/p>\n

How does patent not breed heresy?
\nWilliams came to my chief
\nfor his tract of land,
\nhunted by mad Puritans,
\nfounded Providence Plantation;
\nSeekonk where he lost
\nfirst harvest, building, plant,
\nthen the bay from these natives:
\nhe set up trade.
\nWith Winthrop he bought
\nan island, Prudence;
\ntwo others, Hope and Patience
\nhe named, though small.
\nHis trading post at the cove;
\nSmith\u2019s at another close by.
\nWe walk the Pequot trail
\nas artery or spring.<\/p>\n

Wampanoags, Cowesets,
\nNipmucks, Niantics
\ncame by canoe for the games;
\nmatted bats, a goal line,
\na deerskin filled with moss:
\nlacrosse. They danced;
\nwe are told they gambled their souls.<\/p>\n

In your apple orchard
\nlegend conjures Williams\u2019 name;
\nhe was an apple tree.
\nBuried on his own lot
\noff Benefit Street
\na giant apple tree grew;
\ntwo hundred years later,
\nwhen the grave was opened,
\ndust and root grew
\nin his human skeleton:
\nbones became apple tree.<\/p>\n

As black man I steal away
\nin the night to the apple tree,
\nplace my arm in the rich grave,
\nblack sachem on a family plot,
\ntake up a chunk of apple foot,
\nlet it become my skeleton,
\nbecome my own myth:
\nmy arm the historical branch,
\nmy name the bruised fruit,
\nBlack human photograph: apple tree. <\/p>\n

QUOTES:<\/strong><\/big><\/p>\n

Michael Harper: <\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201c[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.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Keith Leonard:<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201c[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.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Don Share, editor of Poetry<\/em> magazine:<\/strong> <\/p>\n

\u201cHe brought voices, traditions, and convictions into poetry that hadn\u2019t been part of it before. His vast experience expanded American literature, and though he will be missed, his words will carry on resoundingly.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Scholar Michael G. Cooke elaborated on Harper\u2019s use of \u201ckinship\u201d: <\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Michael Harper, 1978, interview with The Washington Post<\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve been called a black poet, revolutionary poet, a black aesthetic poet, an academic poet, an ameliorating poet \u2014 you name it. I\u2019ve never made any attempt to qualify out the black content in my poetry. I\u2019ve written poems about a good many things. I\u2019ve tried to keep my range of experience as wide as possible.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cA poet has the most difficult task: to be functional in the long line of tradition, the long line of the continuum of human culture. It is through the poet that the spirit flows\u2026 . You have a job to do, a function, and you must live up to that function, and that has to do with serving, with making yourself available, so that you can do the kinds of cosmic duties, human relationships, that are in the cards that you do; and you\u2019d better do them.\u201d
\n— Michael Harper<\/big><\/p>\n

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\nThank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account<\/a>. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0<\/a>, if you’d like to subscribe.<\/em> <\/small><\/p>\n