Poets From The United States

"And still when the delicate and unconscious machinery of race relations slips, there will be murder again. How can law contradict the lives of millions of people and hope to be administered successfully?"

"And then, while writing, a new and thrilling relationship would spring up under the drive emotion, coalescing and telescoping alien facts into a known and felt truth. That was the deep fun of the job; to feel within my body that I was pushing out to new areas of feeling, strange landmarks of emotion, tramping upon foreign soil, compounding new relationships of perceptions, making new and - until that very split second of time! - unheard-of and unfelt effects with words."

""Injustice which lasts for three long centuries and which exists among millions of people over thousands of square miles of territory, is injustice no longer; it is an accomplished fact of life. Men adjust themselves to their land; they create their own laws of being; their notions of right and wrong."

"And in a boy like Bigger, young, unschooled, whose subjective life was clothed in the tattered rags of American "culture," this primitive fear and ecstasy were naked, exposed, unprotected by religion or a framework of government or a scheme of society whose final faiths would gain his love and trust; unprotected by trade or profession, faith or belief; opened to every trivial blast of daily or hourly circumstance."

"These were the rhythms of his life: indifference and violence; periods of abstract brooding and periods of intense desire; moments of silence and moments of anger- like water ebbing and flowing from the tug of a far-away, invisible force."

"They hate because they fear, and they fear because they feel that the deepest feelings of their lives are being assaulted and outraged. And they do not know why; they are powerless pawns in a blind play of social forces."

"I found that I had written a book which even bankers' daughters could read and weep over and feel good about. I swore to myself that if I every wrote another book, no one would weep over it; that it would be so hard and deep that they would have to face it without the consolation of tears."

"But the moment he makes the attempt his words falter, for he is confronted and defied by the inexplicable array of his own emotions. Emotions are subjective and he can communicate them only when he clothes them in objective guise; and how can he ever be so arrogant as to know when he is dressing up the right emotion in the right Sunday suit?"

"But, because the blacks were so close to the very civilization which sought to keep them out, because they could not help but react in some way to its incentives and prizes, and because the very tissue of their consciousness received its tone and timbre from the strivings of that dominant civilization, oppression spawned among them a myriad variety of reactions, reaching from outright blind rebellion to sweet, other-worldly submissiveness."

"The more closely the author thinks of why he wrote, the more he comes to regard his imagination as a kind of self-generating cement which glued his facts together, and his emotions as a kind of dark and obscure designer of those facts."

"I sensed, too, that the Southern scheme of oppression was but an appendage of a far vaster and in many respects more ruthless and impersonal commodity-profit machine."

"Well, I was ten and very much afraid. In my kind world the dead were out of range And I could not forgive the sad or strange In beast or man."

"Last night I saw the grass Slowly divide (it was the same scene But now it glowed a fierce and mortal green) And saw the dog emerging."

"It was this intolerable sense of feeling and understanding so much, and yet living on a plane of social reality where the look of a world which one did not make or own struck one with a blinding objectivity and tangibility, that made me grasp the revolutionary impulse in my life and the lives of those about me and far away."

"I started in to cry and call his name, Asking forgiveness of his tongueless head. ... I dreamt the past was never past redeeming: But whether this was false or honest dreaming I beg death's pardon now. And mourn the dead."

"The tall camels of the spirit Steer for their deserts, passing the last groves loud With the sawmill shrill of the locust, to the whole honey of the arid Sun. They are slow, proud, And move with a stilted stride To the land of sheer horizon..."

"O connoisseurs of thirst, Beasts of my soul who long to learn to drink Of pure mirage, those prosperous islands are accurst That shimmer on the brink Of absence; auras, lustres, And all shinings need to be shaped and borne."

"The soul descends once more in bitter love To accept the waking body"

"Wisely watch for the sight Of the supernova burgeoning over the barn, Lampshine blurred in the steam of beasts, the spirit's right Oasis, light incarnate."

"How long was this going to last? How long was I going to be beaten for trifles and less than trifles? I was already so conditioned toward my relatives that when I passed them I actually had a nervous tic in my muscles, and now I was going to be beaten by someone who did not like the tone of voice in which I spoke."

"My dog lay dead five days without a grave In the thick of summer, hid in a clump of pine And a jungle of grass and honey-suckle vine. I who had loved him while he kept alive Went only close enough to where he was To sniff the heavy honeysuckle-smell Twined with another odor heavier still And hear the flies' intolerable buzz."

"But he is product of a dislocated society; he is a dispossessed and disinherited man; he is all of this, and he lives amid the greatest possible plenty on earth and he is looking and feeling for a way out."

"Pity can purge us of hostility and arouse feelings of identification with the characters, but it can also be a consoling reassurance which leads us to believe that we have understood, and that, in pitying, we have even done something to right a wrong."

"It is true that the poet does not directly address his neighbors; but he does address a great congress of persons who dwell at the back of his mind, a congress of all those who have taught him and whom he has admired; that constitute his ideal audience and his better self. To this congress the poet speaks not of peculiar and personal things, but of what in himself is most common, most anonymous, most fundamental, most true of all men. And he speaks not in private grunts and mutterings but in the public language of the dictionary, of literary tradition, and of the street. Writing poetry is talking to oneself; yet it is a mode of talking to oneself in which the self disappears; and the products something that, though it may not be for everybody, is about everybody."

"Writing poetry, then, is an unsocial way of manufacturing a thoroughly social product. Because he must shield his poetry in its creation, the poet, more than other writers, will write without recognition. And because his product is not in great demand, he is likely to look on honors and distinctions with the feigned indifference of the wallflower. Yet of course he is pleased when recognition comes; for what better proof is there that for some people poetry is still a useful and necessary thing — like a shoe."

"When a poet is being a poet — that is, when he is writing or thinking about writing — he cannot be concerned with anything but the making of a poem. If the poem is to turn out well, the poet cannot have thought of whether it will be saleable, or of what its effect on the world should be; he cannot think of whether it will bring him honor, or advance a cause, or comfort someone in sorrow. All such considerations, whether silly or generous, would be merely intrusive; for, psychologically speaking, the end of writing is the poem itself."

"Founded on rock and facing the night-fouled sea A beacon blinks at its own brilliance, Over and over with cutlass gaze Solving the Gordian waters ..."

"In each art the difficulty of the form is a substitution for the difficulty of direct apprehension and expression of the object. The first difficulty may be more or less overcome, but the second is insuperable; thus every poem begins, or ought to, by a disorderly retreat to defensible positions. Or, rather, by a perception of the hopelessness of direct combat, and a resort to the warfare of spells, effigies, and prophecies. The relation between the artist and reality is an oblique one, and indeed there is no good art which is not consciously oblique. If you respect the reality of the world, you know that you can approach that reality only by indirect means."

"A thrush, because I'd been wrong, Burst rightly into song In a world not vague, not lonely, Not governed by me only."

"The beacon-blaze unsheathing turns The face of darkness pale And now with one grand chop gives clearance to Our human visions . . ."

"Your hands hold roses always in a way that says They are not only yours; the beautiful changes In such kind ways, Wishing ever to sunder Things and things' selves for a second finding, to lose For a moment all that it touches back to wonder."

"Hebetude. It is a graph of a theme that flings The dancer kneeling on nothing into the wings, And Nijinsky hadn't the words to make the laws For learning to loiter in air; he merely said, "I merely leap and pause.""

"Try to remember this: what you project Is what you will perceive; what you perceive With any passion, be it love or terror, May take on whims and powers of its own. Therefore a numb and grudging circumspection Will serve you best — unless you overdo it, Watching your step too narrowly, refusing To specify a world, shrinking your purview To a tight vision of your inching shoes, Which may, as soon as you come to think, be crossing An unseen gorge upon a rotten trestle."

"We milk the cow of the world, and as we do We whisper in her ear, "You are not true.""

"What you hope for Is that at some point of the pointless journey, Indoors or out, and when you least expect it, Right in the middle of your stride, like that, So neatly that you never feel a thing, The kind assassin Sleep will draw a bead And blow your brains out."

"What is the opposite of two? A lonely me, a lonely you."

"The eyes open to a cry of pulleys, And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple As false dawn. Outside the open window The morning air is all awash with angels."

"Now they are rising together in calm swells Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing..."

"My schoolmates could not understand why anyone would want to write a story; and, above all, they could not understand why I had called it The Voodoo of Hell’s Half-Acre. The mood out of which a story was written was the most alien thing conceivable to them."

"The soul shrinks From all that it is about to remember, From the punctual rape of every blessed day, And cries, "Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry, Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.""

"The southern whites would rather have had Negroes who stole, work for them than Negroes who knew, however dimly, the worth of their own humanity. Hence, whites placed a premium upon black deceit; they encouraged irresponsibility; and their rewards were bestowed upon us blacks in the degree that we could make them feel safe and superior."

"Often, when perplexed, I longed to be like the smiling, lazy, forgetful black boys in the noisy hotel locker rooms, with no torrential conflicts to resolve. Many times I grew weary of the secret burden I carried and longed to cast it down, either in action or in resignation. But I was not made to be a resigned man and I had only a limited choice of actions, and I was afraid of all of them."

"[T]he colored folks rolled in the aisles, laughin' and laughin'. And Brother Bootsie was right in there laughin' and gigglin' too... but he could never figure out why. And one night in the Harlem Moon over a few gins with gingerales Langston Hughes told Bootsie it was very simple. He was just laughin' to keep from cryin'."

"He came after me. At the time, I was not published at all, in '61, '62. I was not a popular Black poet, because some of the things I said ran very counter to a line that was the line in Black poetry at the time. And there was a lot of sexism involved too in those days-not that there isn't now, but it was particularly then...I wasn't aware of it at the time, but I think it had a lot to do with it, that he was closeted."

"I did not read any Langston Hughes until I was an adult, but I remember being carried away by him and Gwendolyn Brooks."

"(Strictly from the African American experience, in your opinion what language would be our mother tongue?) TCB: The language of Langston Hughes, the language of Grandma, the language of "mama say." Mama say don't let cha mouth get you into what, etc. etc."

"Every time I read Langston Hughes I am amazed all over again by his genuine gifts-and depressed that he has done so little with them…Hughes, in his sermons, blues and prayers, has working for him the power and the beat of Negro speech and Negro music. Negro speech is vivid largely because it is private. It is a kind of emotional shorthand-or sleight-of-hand-by means of which Negroes express, not only their relationship to each other, but their judgment of the white world. And, as the white world takes over this vocabulary-without the faintest notion of what it really means the vocabulary is forced to change. The same thing is true of Negro music, which has had to become more and more complex in order to continue to express any of the private or collective experience. Hughes knows the bitter truth behind these hieroglyphics: what they are designed to protect, what they are designed to convey. But he has not forced them into the realm of art where their meaning would become clear and overwhelming. "Hey, pop!/Re-bop!/Mop!" conveys much more on Lenox Avenue than it does in this book, which is not the way it ought to be. Hughes is an American Negro poet and has no choice but to be acutely aware of it. He is not the first American Negro to find the war between his social and artistic responsibilities all but irreconcilable."

"(At National Black Theater performance) I was in awe of the words I witnessed that day. It was the first time that I heard the works of writers like Gwendolyn Brooks, Nikki Giovanni, Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka. I heard poetry that was about me, that was very immediate. I connected to it in a visceral way. That experience moved me so profoundly that I went home and that night I wrote my first batch of poems. It was like the floodgates opened. That reading empowered me with a voice and gave me permission to express everything that had been festering in me for years. So I just started experimenting with language and writing all kinds of things."

"Langston Hughes' poem, "I've Known Rivers," became the rallying cry for black Americans to take pride in their color, the reverberations of that attitude reached the Africans in the then French and British colonies."

"[T]here have not been that many black artists that visible for black youth. There was Langston Hughes, but he was the only one and that was thirty-five to forty years ago. And men of the Negro Renaissance were not given to get outside of Harlem, really."