"Something patterned, wild, and free": Robert Hayden's angles of descent and the democratic unconscious.

[Interviewer] it is nearly a cliche to say that Robert Hayden has the best underground reputation of any poet in America. How do you respond to that?

[Hayden] (Laughs.) I say Hear! Hear! (Hayden, Collected Prose 203)

The diver had to admit that he couldn't surface again alone, without help. Certainly, for me, an admission of almost complete defeat.... Well, this sounds like melodrama, sure enough, but it's ice cold reality of which I speak. (Hayden, in a letter to Michael Harper [Nicholas 997])

Poetry is really distilled empathy. (Yusef Komunyakaa, Blue Notes 126)

In "Answering 'The Waste Land': Robert Hayden and the Rise of the African American Poetic Sequence," Brian Coniff shows how Hayden's historical poems alter assumptions about the intersection of history and modernist poetics. Coniff terms modernist poetics such as Hayden's "post-traditional." He explains that the "post-traditional poet is certainly conscious--in fact, often intensely conscious--of tradition. At the same time, though, he or she manages, in one way or another, to view any distinctly literary tradition as historically contingent....Most often...to address some perceived historical crisis" (489). He follows with brilliant readings which show how Hayden's historical vision goes beyond the mainstream modernist grounding in "private neurosis [that] Eliot's poetry had helped make fashionable" (496). Coniff supplies crucial insights into how African-American approaches to modernism emerge from the distinctive features of black encounters with the history of modernity. Like all modernisms, African-Ameri can modernisms have one foot in the "historical" past, one in the "cultural" present. While they've attracted almost no critical attention at all, Hayden's poems set in his cultural present contribute to this cultural axis of black modernism.

Like all notable African-American modernist artists, Hayden understood that confrontations with modernity are historically contingent. Indeed, nearly all of the scholarship devoted to Hayden concerns his treatment of nineteenth-century subject matter in poems such as "Middle Passage," "Runagate Runagate," "The Ballad of Nat Turner," and "Frederick Douglass." Very little has been written about Hayden's nuanced appreciation of how modernist poetics are culturally contingent. For all the histrionics surrounding Hayden's "universalism" and his refusal join the Black Arts Movement in the late 1960s, Hayden's poems are replete with deeply resonant images of immediate black cultural reality through which he explores the complex interactions between psychological depth and cultural tradition.

Hayden's poetry consistently demonstrates the ability to excavate the interlocking historical and cultural contingencies and freedoms of black subjectivity while eluding the oppositional politics which confined the political and cultural era in which he lived. In these poems he explores the classic modernist intersections between objectivity and subjectivity, intimacy and abstraction. He combines the oppositional poles to achieve points of view and review impossible from one or the other. In the present essay, using "The Diver" as the methodological paradigm, I show how Hayden's artistic vision achieves a depth of perception from which the divisions that inform oppostional politics become unstable. Far from a naive universalism, as "The Diver" images and the epigram above confirms, the pressure of that depth perception was as dangerous for Hayden as it was necessary to the (post) tradition of black modernism.

The result is Hayden's complex poetic vision of the strife and possibility embedded in America's fragmented intra-and inter-racial/cultural landscape. In his best work, Hayden derives, sustains, and refines this vision in relation to his excavation of what I'll call the democratic unconscious. In this space, Hayden explores the ever-shifting, non-rational nature of the unconscious to create montages of democratic exchange. Hayden's approach can be understood in relation to Freud's assertion that, because "urges with contrary aims exist side by side in the unconscious," its structure "embraces mutually incompatible details" (44). For many modernists, this structure threatened to unleash dangerously anti-social and irrational impulses which might destroy the rational structures of Western civilization. For Hayden and others confined by segregation, the threats can be understood as potentially liberating cultural/political advances. The relationship between images within and between Hayden's poems invokes the fluid structure of psychic depth to re-see the world and meditate on the limitations of, and possibilities beyond, racial, cultural, and existential oppositions in American life.

The sources of Hayden's vision are unusually complex. In From the Auroral Darkness: The Life and Poetry of Robert Hayden, John Hatcher suggests that Hayden's modernism has three principal ingredients: W. H. Auden's modernist technique, the Baha'i religion's approach to modernity, and Hayden's own intimately distant creative approach. In his "Introduction" to Hayden's Collected Poems, Arnold Rampersad notes that Auden saw "Marxism and ultranationalism as, in different ways, inimical to the flourishing of art.... [thus, he] proposed a modernist poetry of technical and meditative complexity, in which judicious erudition and imagination... were vital elements" (xviii). In "A 'Romantic Realist,"' Hayden cryptically described his graduate study with Auden as "a strategic experience in my life" (118). Hayden's non-ideological, or anti-dogmatic, approach to composition was not solely the result of Auden's influence. Recalling experiences before he'd met Auden in his third-person autobiographical sketch "From The Life ," Hayden writes that, before he went to graduate school, "venturing to read his poems for the members of the [Detroit] John Reed Club, he was scathingly criticized for his lack of political awareness. And he was often accused of being too much the individualist and not willing to submit to ideology" (25). As Hatcher notes, in classes, speeches, and interviews, Hayden often repeated "Auden's notion of poetry as a process of solving for the unknown.... 'In poetry you are really solving x, looking for the unknown quantity. You are trying to say what cannot be said any other way--and, in some poems, you are trying to say what cannot be said at all'" (70). While saying the impossible implies an improvisational approach to composition, Hayden was a relentless and meticulous reviser. Hatcher quotes a 1976 interview in which Hayden shows his unapologetic attitude toward the rigors of poetic craft:" 'If I have a missionary zeal about anything, it is this. Technique is very important to me. I've not spent my life as a poet just to put words together any old way' (89).

Although some critics look at Hayden's cultural (black), religious (Baha'i), and artistic (modernist) moorings as incompatible, in his best poems the elements converge and confirm each other. The power and beauty of Hayden's Afro-Modernism emanates from his ability to merge the streams and to discipline the tumult which resulted from the intensity of a vision which speaks to the most disruptive voices of the modernist tradition.

In his essay "The Five Major Rubrics of Nietzsche's Thought," Martin Heidegger explains Nietzsche's insight into the twentieth century as an "era whose upheavals could not be compared to anything previously known" (5). According to Heidegger, the key to Nietzsche's insight is that these upheavals will be newly ambiguous processes with unprecedented potential for liberation and destruction. He summarizes Nietzsche's vision of the eroding possibilities for withdrawal from and resistence to accelerating modem change which is "no longer experienced as sheer annihilation and deplored as wasteful and wrong, but is rather greeted as a liberation, touted as an irrevocable gain and perceived as fulfillment" (5). Hayden certainly shared Heidegger's sense that the basic impulses of literary modernism have to do with meditation upon and response to the inescapable, accelerating changes brought on by modernity.

Similarly, from their beginnings, most articulations of African-American modernism--such as the pragmatism of Du Bois and Alain Locke--have embraced the anti-romantic push toward the future. Black Americans' experiences of slavery and segregation clearly belied romantic images of an idyllic and pastoral past on the old plantation. In Just Above My Head, James Baldwin quotes the lyrics from a spiritual to underscore the ways psychological and historical realities inform the urge to push forward. Meditating on the elusiveness of personal memory and the realities of historical suffering, Baldwin writes: "You cannot see when you look back: too dark behind me. And the song says, merely, with a stunning matter-of-factness, 'There's a light before me. I'm on my way'" (60). Black American history offered scant opportunity for romantic nostalgia. Like Baldwin in Harlem, when Hayden was growing up in one of the harshest Detroit ghettoes prior to World War II, the imperatives for historical progress were clear and prese nt.

The Baha'i faith approaches history as a progressive and cyclical test of mankind's ability to change and evolve in ways deeply compatible with the African-American and Nietzschean embrace of personal and historical change, innovation, and upheaval. While Baha'i believe in the necessity of each historical epoch and the contributions of each of the major prophets (Abraham, Moses, Christ, Muhammad), they consider the modem to be the most important era in the history of humanity. Therefore, Baha'i is a quintessentially modem faith which teaches that any "religious" belief that doesn't maintain reasoned accord with scientific pursuits amounts to empty superstition. Hatcher notes that, "according to Baha'i Writings, the transition which mankind is currently experiencing is the most significant transformation he will ever undergo.... This transition ...necessarily involves the abandonment of archaic systems and attitudes, the attendant loss of identity, and the acquisition of insecurity and trepidation, even though the outcome of that trepidation will be a radically advanced, refined and fulfilled organism" (160). Without question, Hayden's faith encouraged him to confront the modern upheavals described by Shoghi Effendi in terms that recall Heidegger's comments on Nietzsche. In The Promised Day Is Come, Effendi writes:

A tempest, unprecedented in its violence, unpredictable in its course, catastrophic in its immediate effects, unimaginably glorious in its ultimate consequences, is at present sweeping the face of the earth. Its driving power is remorselessly gaining in range and momentum. Its cleansing force, however much undetected, is in-creasing with every passing day. Humanity, gripped in the clutches of its devastating power, is smitten by the evidence of its resistless fury. It can neither perceive its origin, nor probe its significance, nor discern its outcome. (3)

In "A Certain Vision," Hayden explains how his Baha'i beliefs sustained him in the maelstrom of the wasteland and underwrote his world view and his unique approach to the craft of poetry:

I think that today when so often one gets the feeling that everything is going downhill, that we're really on the brink of the abyss and what good is anything, I find myself sustained in my attempts to be a poet and my endeavor to write because I have the assurance of my faith that this is of spiritual value and it is a way of performing some kind of service. Indeed, I feel that very deeply now--I'm not praising my own poetry; I don't mean that I think my poetry is of all that great consequence to the world--but what I do mean to say is that there is a certain vision of the world that I have. I believe in the essential oneness of all people and I believe in the basic unity of all religions. I don't believe that races are important; I think that people are important. I'm very suspicious of any form of ethnicity or nationalism; I think that these things are very crippling and are very divisive. These are all Baha'i points of view, and my work grows out of this vision. (111)

Beyond these general moorings, Hayden's specific approach to writing is succinctly set forth in his "Counterpoise Manifesto," published in 1948 as a leaflet announcing his co-authored volume The Lion and the

Archer. Almost a prose poem itself, the manifesto asserts Hayden's effort to fully engage the modem social and political tempest with aesthetic innovation and artistic rigor. Making it plain that he will defer his creative impulses and craft to no political platform or subordinate his politics to aesthetic constraints, Hayden's manifesto deserves quotation in full:

we are unalterably opposed to the chauvinistic, the cultish, to special pleading, to all that seeks to limit and restrict creative expression

we believe experimentation to be an absolute necessity in keeping the arts vital and significant in contemporary life; therefore we support and encourage the experimental and the unconventional in writing, music and the graphic arts, though we do not consider our own work avant-garde in the accepted sense of the term

as writers who belong to a so-called minority we are violently opposed to having our work viewed, as the custom is, entirely in the light of sociology and politics

to having it overpraised on the one hand by those with an axe to grind or with a conscience to salve

to having it misrepresented on the other hand by coterie editors, reviewers, anthologists who refuse us encouragement or critical guidance because we deal with realities we find it neither possible nor desirable to ignore

as poets we naturally believe that it is more profitable for our generation to read good poetry than it is to listen to soap opera, since poetry has humanistic and spiritual values not to be ignored with impunity we believe in the oneness of mankind and the importance of the arts in the struggle for peace and unity. (Hayden, "Counterpoise" 41-42)

Announcing the era of his mature writings, Hayden's tract counters the obstacles which threaten all artistic autonomy, but which have afflicted African-American writing with particular tenacity. Having secured the perimeter, Hayden is poised to employ his skills as a poet to solve for the "x" in the modern self and in its relationship to history. Hayden's characteristically restrained claim that "poetry has humanistic and spiritual values not to be ignored with impunity" anticipates William Carlos Williams more emphatic lines from his 1955 "Asphodel, that Greeny Flower":

        It is difficult
  to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
           for lack
 of what is found there. (318)

Like Ellison's Invisible Man, the personae that comprise Hayden's Afro-Modernism continually seek visions of unity through departure. Hayden attempted to protect his creative process from the entropic energy leaks which occur in relationships framed by the institutions of what Max Weber called the "disenchanted world" (301). Hatcher records methodological notes Hayden jotted down during the early 1950s. Together they comprise a major statement of Afro-Modernist poetic sensibility. I refer to his statement as the "diver's manifesto." Guarding against any unnecessary social exchanges--as well as a few that in retrospect may have been necessary--Hayden challenges himself to:

1. Refrain from criticism of others. A poet should be above this.

2. No longer share what is most personal with anyone--neither wife, friend, nor child. Express it only in poetry and in an indirect or objective way.

3. No longer discuss my writing or my hopes for it with anyone. It is too special and sacred to me; no one should be expected to understand how I feel about it.

4. Seek solitude and stand alone.

5. Do not let fatigue, disappointment, professional routine and academic trivia betray finer instincts.

6. Cease complaining. And do not any longer make excuses or explanations to anyone.

7. Read and think more and talk less. Or not at all, unless in a fairly objective and impersonal way. (25)

Hayden's poetry, then, is firmly grounded in his faith in the paradoxical Afro-Modernist notion of a deeper engagement with experience through withdrawal. His ability to put descendental processes in service of his deeply democratic, redemptive artistic vision re-connects Afro-Modernism with the Whitmanian impetus which, as the essays which comprise the collection Walt Whitman & the World demonstrate, played an important role in early modernisms throughout the world.

When considering Hayden's Afro-Modernist method and vision, the key poem is "The Diver." Hayden's conspicuous placement of "The Diver" in his evolving corpus signals its importance. Although first published in 1962, the poem was omitted from the original published version of A Ballad of Remembrance. Instead, it first appeared in Rosey Pool's collection of African-American poets Beyond the Blues, published in England. Nonetheless, in the 1966 Selected Poems, the 1975 Angle of Ascent, and the 1985 Collected Poems, "The Diver" is placed at the beginning of each collection or as the first poem in the Ballad of Remembrance section. If the "Counterpoise Manifesto" signals the beginning of Hayden's mature writings, "The Diver" is the poetic preface to his best work, from "A Ballad of Remembrance" to "American Journal."

The vertical emphasis of "The Diver" is clear in the narrow, single stanza which cuts a path down the page. Immediately, the reader enters a world in which the rational distinctions, or identities, which organize and separate phenomena fail to apply. To dive into Hayden's Afro-Modernism is to enter a poetic world of tremendous precision in which would-be stable distinctions become elusive and transitional. The title-line sits above the stanza like a diver on the edge of the dock or boat. The title both is and isn't part of the opening sentence:

The Diver


Sank through easeful
azure.

While the pull of the syntax suggests the plunge, the capitalized S in "Sank" frustrates the continuity of identity between "The Diver" above the surface and "[that which] Sank through easeful / azure" (3). Most of the actions which occur on the dive have at least dual significance. The action takes place in overlapping, yet distinct, realms. The suggestion of 'sky-blue' in the word azure complicates the unidirectional nature of the diver's descent. On the way down, the diver attains both greater heights and depths.

The poem's structure troubles the distinctions that provide the foundations for modern social and psychological order. In Figures of Division, James Snead discusses how stable social and psychological frameworks depend on clearly demarcated categories of space and experience. Indeed, he argues that separation is one of the founding paradigms of Western thought.... It seems [that like societies] the mind uses various figures of division to defend itself against chaos" (7). Snead suggests that figures of division represent devices that suggest stable distinctions to efface the multi-leveled realities of connection, inter-dependence, and flux. As Du Bois noted, and as Ellison shows in his essay "What America Would Be Like Without Blacks," American culture is essentially interracial, a reality that casts the social divisions that uphold its order into doubt. As Snead argues, in order to efface uncomfortable realities of connection, rhetorical figures of division can, especially in cases of "economic and other kin ds of duress, [be taken to] a pathological limit" (14). Yet, from Whitman to the present, democratically inclined poets have sought to span the regional and racial divisions which order and threaten the nation. This spanning might well be the "thesis" image of Leaves of Grass, as it appeared on the first page of the first edition in 1855:

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, sprouting alike in broad
 zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among
 white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman,
 Cuff, I give them the same, I receive
 them the same. (31)

Hayden's Afro-Modernism responds to Whitman's call by searching out levels of experience and modes of perception in which figures of division cannot operate. It charts regions of dangerous possibility and seeks a vision which obeys the laws of a democratic unconscious. In "The Poet and His Art: A Conversation," Hayden describes "The Diver" as one of his most "deeply personal" poems, which he "consciously made rather obscure" (161). He explains that "the act of diving and the temptation the diver feels to really let go, to yield to death, really represent, are symbolic of something very personal. The entire poem is actually a metaphor" (161-62). Certainly, the romance of death might recall Keats, even Dickinson, but by the time he wrote "The Diver" Hayden was some twenty years beyond what he'd termed his "Keats period" (132). Instead, "The Diver" points toward a level of experience beyond rational compartmentalization. As Freud's view of the unconscious suggests, distinct but interrelated spheres of reality or experience obey different, even incompatible, structures. All movement between them involves transitions which warp data and frames of reference. In his posthumously published essay "Dream Work and Interpretation," Freud writes that the "governing rules of logic carry no weight in the unconscious; it might be called the Realm of the Illogical. Urges with contrary aims exist side by side in the unconscious without any need arising for an adjustment between them" (44).

Hayden seeks to establish and redeem connections by embracing a similar vision. In "The Diver," "lost images I fadingly remembered" continually invoke the failure of figures of division by joining rationally incompatible terms. Yet many of Hayden's critics attempt to re-inscribe the division: Hatcher, Wilburn Williams, and Maurice O'Sullivan all identify death with depth, and pit descent against life and the "measured rise" which begins on the final line of the poem. But Hayden's systematically irrational twinning of terms frustrates such decisions even as it recognizes the associated risks. Snead discusses how "the escape from division can take dangerous forms: madness.. . social exclusion ... or even death" (15). The descendental twinning of rationally incompatible qualities such as freedom and danger recalls Federico Garcia Lorca's notion of a non-rational, dangerously, even perilously free spirit, duende, at the core of the creative process.

In "The Poet and His Art," Hayden, a Spanish major at Detroit City College, claimed Garcia Lorca as an influence picked up along with Rukeyser, Auden, and others at an important stage in his development in the early 1940s (134). In his lecture "Theory and Function of the Duende," Garcia Lorca associates duende with depth, with the sound that "surges up from the soles of the feet," and with the sound of the "Delba, a variant of the Andalusian cante jondo (deep song)" (91-92). He continues: "These 'dark sounds' are the mystery, the roots thrusting into the fertile loam known to all of us, ignored by all of us, but from which we get what is real in art" (91). For Garcia Lorca, duende is the ever-changing essence of the creative impulse, "not the forms ... but the marrow of forms" (92). Emphasizing the ungraspable and improvisational nature of duende, he writes that it "is a power and not a behavior, it is a struggle and not a concept" by which to "help us seek .... there is neither map nor discipline" (92-93). I t "breaks with all styles, rejects all the sweet geometry one has learned," and "always presupposes a radical change of all forms based on old structures" (93, 95). In addition to its destabilizing qualities, Garcia Lorca associates duende with ever-present danger, death, and renewal:

As soon as the muse is aware of death, she shuts her door .... The duende, on the other hand, does not appear if it sees no possibility of death. If it does not know that it will haunt death's house, if it is not certain that it can move those branches we carry, which neither enjoy nor ever will enjoy any solace .... The duende wounds, and in the healing of this wound which never closes is the prodigious, the original work in man .... whoever beholds it is baptized with dark water ... and this struggle for expression and for the communication of expression reaches, at times, in poetry, the character of a tight to the death. (99-100).

In conclusion, Garcia Lorca writes: "The duende--where is the duende? Through the empty arch comes an air of the mind that blows insistently over the heads of the dead, in search of new landscapes and unsuspecting accents; an air smelling of a child's saliva, of pounded grass, and medusa veil announcing the constant baptism of newly created things" (103). Hayden's Afro-Modernist quest to "experiment with forms and techniques I have not used before--to arrive at something patterned, wild, and free" echoes Garcia Lorca's artistic engagement with duende (75).

In "The Diver," the images combine the risk of descendental movement with the forces of beauty and renewal which Garcia Lorca describes as the "constant baptism" in "dark water." The irrational combinations abound: "freefalling, weightless / as in dreams of wingless flight," the "dead ship, / carcass that swarmed with / voracious life," "drowned instruments / of buoyancy," "in languid / frenzy strove / as one freezing fights off / sleep desiring sleep," "fled the numbing / kisses that I craved." Every physical and psychological force vies with and accompanies its counter-force, resulting in the poem's shifting "dance of gilded / chairs" and its "eldritch hide and / seek of laughing / faces."

The images recall Hayden's diver's manifesto, especially those of withdrawal from entropic exchanges which, as Hatcher notes, went contrary to Hayden's social impulses. The Eliotic images of a social and cultural wasteland in "The Diver" become clear when read with awareness of Hayden's personal ambivalence about social and professional interaction: "Do not let . . . professional routine and academic trivia betray finer instinct. / Read and think more and talk less. Or not at all." The diver is drawn toward the enthralling dance of the dead. In ways that recall and invert Prufrock's impotence, Hayden's diver navigates the throes of sensuality, even necrophilia, as he "explored her . . . entered / the wreck, awed by her silence, / feeling more keenly the iron cold . . . probing."

In "The Diver," Hayden signals his simultaneous awareness of the need to embark and the pitfalls which occur on the internal quest. Yet his poetry never accepted a stable division between the personal/psychological and the political/historical. In a letter written to Hayden and dated May 6, 1975, Michael Harper voices his frustration with the tendencies of poets and readers to insist on the rationalized separations which Hayden's work disturbs. Confident that Hayden will understand his feelings, Harper describes his travels through the South, where he encountered "some mindless performances by our people, the students who don't read or think, but 'politic'--questions from the gallery about how poems relate to the people, and faculty catering to this nonsense, an attack on May Miller . . . [poets claiming they] could only write the political poem--consciousness is political!" (995). Hayden certainly agreed with Harper that "consciousness is political." But his poetry explores (as does Harper's) the modernist complexities which frustrate all such identities. The crossroads between public politics and the excavation of consciousness is a shifting and treacherous site of awareness and action.

A central image of mediation between black consciousness and American politics of any color is the mask, and the most famous articulation of the politics of the mask is Paul Laurence Dunbar's "We Wear the Mask." In this poem Dunbar excavates terrible pressure and pain that is part and parcel of masking. Contemporary criticism tends to convert Dunbar's poem into a tactical agenda in which the (would-be political) "grins and lies" of masking can be separated from the (personal/cultural) excavation of the self. Hayden knew that these binary divisions, which imply a fully knowable self forced into deception by racist oppression, were not possible in his creative quest. Rather than an "authentic sell" pitted against an outside threat and masked by a "tactical self," Hayden imagined a labyrinth of selves all of which wear-even exchange-masks. As he was aware, this internal complexity does not negate exterior forces of confinement. But he viewed them in a specifically modernist manner. In "A 'Romantic Realist,'" he reiterates Eliot's notion of depersonalization. Hayden writes: "I resist whatever would force me into a role as a politician, sociologist, or yeasayer to current ideologies. . . . Frequently, I'm writing about myself but speaking through a mask, a persona. . . . Reticence has its aesthetic values too you know" (120). Failing to recognize the validity of Hayden's perspective generates impasses in the understanding of Afro-Modernist processes.

In "Adorno, Ellison, and the Critique of Jazz, "James Harding points out the "idealistic conception of the self" in Stepto's From Behind the Veil and Baker's Blues, Ideology and Afro-American Literature. Building on Stepto's notion that Invisible Man shows that "there is a self and form to be discovered beyond the lockstep of linear movement within imposed definitions of reality," Baker develops a cultural theory in which "the private session of jazz and blues singers -- when the white oppressor is absent--is where the real playing occurs" (168). These formulations of a "real" self/culture protected by a "masked," tactical self/performance neglect the areas of overlap, both social and metaphorical, which Du Bois describes in his formulation of double-consciousness. The unrecognized idealism of such approaches has spawned a host of "post-colonial" theories of cultural "safe-spaces" where the authentic life of what William James would call "The Self and Its Selves" happens. Despite critical simplifications suc h as Farah Griffin's image of blues clubs as safe spaces, the work of August Wilson, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Gayl Jones, Yusef Komunyakaa, and others recovers the danger of the cultural "safe-spaces" as they sound the fissures and excavate missing spots in the faces behind the mask.

These issues are not solely of historical interest. In a brief 1996 essay written in response to a photo exhibition featuring portraits of "High Risk" students in the Indianapolis Public Schools, Yusef Komunyakaa, from his own diver's angle of vision, observes that the students "throw back frightened reality" and wear "masks... invented to intimidate because the wearers don't feel safe." Troubling the relationship between the face and the mask, he speculates that "many of the faces cannot even guess when the masks were created." Komunyakaa emphasizes the multiple dangers of unreflective masking. Unable to perform the type of resistance Hayden intimates, Komunyakaa wonders if "these 'high risk' students [are] surprised to find themselves wearing masks that society created for them, to find their features have hardened into caricatures of their real selves." However necessary the performances might be, he suggests that the masks project images which have no pasts, parents, or interior lives. Instead of a prism at the crossroads of the self and the world, the mask becomes a "psychological caul." The result is a kind of alienation in which "their survival masks are devouring them" (60).

Hayden's Afro-Modernism focuses precisely on the anguish created by simplistic conceptions of stable divisions among self, mask, and world. Published in American Journal, Hayden's elegiac poem "Paul Laurence Dunbar" mourns as it honors the painfully split dimensions of Dunbar's experience:

  Poet of our youth--
his'cri du coeur' our own,
his verses 'in a broken tongue'

  beguiling as an elder
brother's antic lore. (15)

In "The Diver," Hayden enters the non-resolving interaction between the alternate spheres of experience. The contradictory impulses descend into and express the multiplicities of the self in a way that reverberates with Yeats's "The Mask":

I would but find what's there to find,
Love or deceit.
It was the mask engaged your mind,
And after set your heart to beat,
Not what's behind (263)

Preserving Yeats's sense of contradictory couplings, Hayden links the interior quest with a critique of Afro-Modernism's inward-looking self-indulgence:

I yearned to
find those hidden
ones, to fling aside
the mask and call to them,
yield to rapturous
whisperings, have
done with self and
every dinning
vain complexity. (4)

As Yeats implies, safe spaces in which to "fling aside the mask" are difficult to find, and may not exist at all. Hayden makes the oxymoron clear: There are no one-way mirrors, no safe revelations. Further, the vertical impulses behind Hayden's notion that poems "say what cannot be said any other way--and, in some poems, you are trying to say what cannot be said at all"--emphasize the improvisational risk of excavation. Beyond idealized divisions and ideological stabilities, one continually sounds the valences of consciousness which echo, unsettle, and renew (unmask) readily available phrasings. Yet Hayden's process does not surrender entirely to secluded indeterminacy. Hayden's poems seek to share the deeply sought. His is a solitary poetics of communion. Harper, whose own poetry echoes Hayden's impulses, is right: Such a poetics "is political." Just as surely, it can never fully emerge into the public sphere, certainly not as it exists in the modem era.

Hayden excavated cultural traditions as he attempted to adhere to his diver's manifesto of creative seclusion. The poems that follow "The Diver" in Selected Poems sift together and order these impulses as Hayden turns the diver's terribly beautiful depth perception from the purposes of the interior to those of social excavation. The concluding image of the poem, the "measured rise," does not take place in "The Diver." Instead, it happens in the poems which follow. "Veracruz" reiterates the diver's manifesto to observe the intersection of consciousness and experience:

Leap now
and cease from error.
Escape. Or shoreward turn,
accepting all --
the losses and farewells,
the long warfare with self,
with God. (30)

Hayden's Afro-Modernism employs metaphorically Freudian depths of veiled and unresolvable realities and sifts Whitman's democratic connections out of modern figures of division. He uncovers the metaphysical heartbeat of Weber's pneuma and Garcia Lorca's duende pulsing beneath Jim Crows disenchanted wasteland. In part II of "Veracruz," Hayden images what he called a "romantic realist" sphere of experience in ways that speak to the core of Afro-Modernism (121):

Thus reality
  bedizened in the warring colors
     of a dream
parades through these
  arcades ornate with music and
     the sea.

Thus reality
  become unbearably a dream
     beckons
out of reach in flyblown streets
  of lapsing rose and purple, dying
     blue.

Thus marimba'd night
  And multifoliate sea become
     phantasmal
space, and there,
  light-years away, one farewell image
     Burns and fades and burns. (30)

In Selected Poems, the two poems that follow "The Diver" image the relationship of cultural tradition (stories, lore, and religious faith) to the forces of modern rationalization and disenchantment. Hayden dedicated "Electrical Storm" to his friends and neighbors in Nashville, the devout Seventh Day Adventists Arna and Alberta Bontemps, who appear as lifesavers in the poem. The poem tests the relationship among (scientific) understanding, (religious) belief, and cultural practice as they contend with the intensities and contingencies of modem experience. This first stanza describes the God-fearing elders' beliefs as they cower from a thunderstorm in a Fated universe:

He don't like ugly.
Have mercy. Lord, they prayed.
seeing the lightning's
Mene Mene Tekel
hearing the preaching thunder's deep
Upharsin. (13)

Hayden's use of Old Testament imagery recalls James Weldon Johnson's expansion of "dialect" into the prophetic tongues of God's Trombones.

The call-and-response rhythms are interrupted by the wrath/lightning. Hayden's concision sheers, "He don't like ugly," from its flip-side response (in my experience, something like, and He ain't too particular about pretty!), allowing him to cut to the quick. At the ambiguous center of the first stanza is the ethos of inadequacy and unworthiness which Hayden images in the Old Testament verse. In "The Poet and His Art," he explained his use of the refrain from the story of Belshazzar: "Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin--these were the words that God wrote on King Belshazzar's palace wall, meaning 'thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting"' (148). Embedded in the scene, Hayden's Old Testament imagery connects with a black cultural vocabulary and conserves the ambiguities of the diver's Afro-Modernist vision. The tension between would-be "folk" superstition (or even colonized internalization of shame) and the improvised confrontation with the reality of the human condition it invokes is unresolved. No matter how the tension plays out, the self-scrutiny mitigates against hubris and pride in ways which provide a foundation for communal and universal tolerance and forgiveness. Despite or because of the irresolution, the poem clearly redeems the deep implications of this particular feature of Old Testament poetics and the sensibility of cultural elders.

Hayden shifts perspective to emphasize the rational and scientific nature of modem subjectivity. In the second stanza, the persona is grown, "colleged (as they said)." He understands the scientific explanations of "pressure systems,/colliding massive energies/that make a storm" (13). The third stanza puts the intellectual progress to the test of experience. Much like Flannery O'Connor's hyper-rationalist "schoolteacher" in The Violent Bear It Away, the persona in "Electrical Storm" is comfortable with the peace/piece of mind offered by his scientific understanding. As he drives through a storm, the energy of the scene begins to outstrip the understanding of the persona. The pure science of the storm becomes "warring weather./Wind and lightning havocked/berserked in wires, trees." The intensity of sensation and random danger of the storm force the persona to recall "Jehovah's oldtime wrath." The final image in the stanza recalls a dangerous event in Hayden's life, transformed in the poem through what he terme d his "detachment and philosophical calm" (148). Returned home to find the house intact, a message from on High confronts the persona's understanding:

Fallen lines we could not see at first
lay in the yard when we reached home.
The hedge was burning in the rain. (13)

Hayden leaves the persona in a quandary. Repeating the baffled question--"Who knows?"--which has muted his scientific knowledge, he wonders if there's a difference between "heavenly design" and "chance." In "The Poet and His Art," Hayden recalls spending the night of this particular storm sleepless, thinking about "Human vulnerability--what is chance, what is accident?" (148). He concludes with a blues image of the ultimate failure (or at least incompleteness) of rational knowledge. Like the speaker in Frost's "Design," Hayden's persona remains at a loss to explain what "brought us and our neighbors through--/though others died--/the archetypal dangers of the night?" Hayden's line recalls the stormy scene and title of Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and Bessie Smith's "Backwater Blues." Hayden distills the "archetypal" blues he recalled hearing Bessie sing "at the old Koppin Theater one night-a Detroit movie and vaudeville house patronized largely by us ghetto folks" (144). The poem's coda reinforces the unique power of belief to order experience. Although Hayden doesn't name it, he implies that by Grace alone does one come through archetypal dangers of the night. His persona answers his own question from what he knows and says nothing of what he believes:

I know what those
cowering true believers would have
  said. (15)

The poem begins with the believers cowering in fear. It ends with the "colleged" persona at a loss to respond to his experience. In the coda, Hayden removes the opposition. Now all that the persona has learned is reduced to what he knows the "true believers" believe. He intimates the lasting power of the "folk elements in 'Electrical Storm' [that] are there because they are still a part of me, even though I've been 'colleged' and know that dogs and cats don't 'draw' lightning" (149).

Many of the poems in Selected Poems are arranged in pairs which offer alternate takes on shared themes. "Full Moon," images the interaction between myth and science in unmistakably political and, nearly overt, racial terms. Hayden's persona opens with an image of the full moon eclipsed by science and technology: "No longer throne of a goddess to whom we pray." He remembers how, before modern science, the rhythms of the moon ordered experience in accord with beliefs:

Some I love who are dead
were watchers of the moon and knew its
  lore;
plated seeds, trimmed their hair,

Pierced their ears for gold hoop earrings
as it waxed or waned. (15)

In relation to modernity, the moon has become the "brilliant challenger of rocket experts, / the white hope of communications men," just another in a series of great white hopes. Hayden's commentary on the importance of Jack Johnson to the residents of his home neighborhood in Detroit in his poem "'Summertime and the Living...'" clarifies the racialized nature of the battle between tradition and science. Like Jack Johnson, the full moon, once the province of lore and ritual, has' become a tool of political modernity. Hayden witnesses the deep cultural and racial implications of the lunar eclipse. But, rather than calling forth a bygone time of wholesome innocence, Hayden's remembrance of "belief" provides the basis for trenchant critique. Offering a skeptical appraisal of the social priorities evidenced in then President Kennedy's pro-American space mission, Hayden writes:

Already a mooted goal and tomorrow
  perhaps
an arms base, a livid sector,
the full moon dominates the dark. (15)

In "The Poet and His Art," Hayden describes the relationship between image and politics reflected in his modernism. He concludes that he "aimed to write a poem that would give the lie to the bigots. But I wanted it to be a poem and not vindictive rhetoric, not propaganda" (173).

In "The Rabbi," Hayden places his persona's childhood interracial friendships amid exchanges that reflect adult prejudices. The young black man is curious about Jewish religious practice: "Once there, did [the Rabbi] put on / sackcloth and ashes? Wail?" Signaling the connection between religious institutions and segregation, he remembers, "He would not let me in to see / the gold menorah burning." Not allowed in the synagogue, the young man picks up a mix of culture and prejudice in the street:

Mazuzah, Pesach, Chanukah --
there were timbred words I learned,
were things I knew by glimpses.
And I learned schwartze too

And schnapps, which schwartzes bought
on credit from "Jew Baby." (17)

The kids aren't fully aware of, or interested in, the racism and exploitation that influence their culturally eclectic, improved games:

Tippling ironists laughed and said
he'd soon be rich as Rothschild

From their swinish Saturdays.
Hirschel and Molly and I meanwhile
divvied halveh, polly seeds,
were spies and owls and Fu Manchu.

In the final stanza, the institutional spaces inhibit the kids' interactive play. One culturally exclusive institution replaces another, and Hayden images the religious leader as a culturally paternalistic kidnapper.

But the synagogue became
New Calvary.
The rabbi bore my friends off
in his prayer shawl. (17)

The final image collects the petty insults and exploitations from above and shows the increasingly segregated conditions of early- and mid-twentieth-century black urban life that Hayden recalls from his childhood. Despite the religious cloak, the final moment of the poem shows Jewish movement out of the "ghetto" and toward the American economic mainstream. The persona is left behind.

Published immediately after "The Rabbi," "Belsen, Day of Liberation" juxtaposes the relative social mobility of Jewish people in the United States with the situation in WWII Europe. The second poem describes the liberation of a death camp by Allied troops. The dedication to Dr. Rosey Pool is itself an image of interracial cooperation. John Hatcher notes the importance of Pool's support to Hayden's career. Pool, whose parents were executed by the Nazis and who was herself imprisoned in a concentration camp, once told Hayden that "she and her fellow prisoners, wishing to pray together in secret yet lacking a common faith, used lines from Negro spintuals instead" (31). The pair of poems bears witness to the power and fluidity of human connection threatened by figures of division, and even systematically murdered by modem institutions of social control.

Another pairing of poems cuts to the terrible core of the battle between human dignity and racial abstraction for the soul of Whitman's vision of a vibrant and inclusive America. "The Ballad of Sue Ellen Westerfield" depicts the internal and external dangers inherent in interracial connections. The poem was inspired by his foster mother, Sue Hayden, who, as Hayden notes, "had once worked on a Mississippi River Steamer and had been married to Jim Barlow, a man she never forgot" (5). In "The Ballad," Hayden twists his impression of his foster mother's lost love into a divers s meditation on the entwined politics of gender and race. The poem systematically introduces stock historical themes and then complicates them with subtle amendments and intimations. The opening line invokes Old Testament poetics as well as a Faulknerian notion that acknowledging the history of the interracial "family" opens up new angles of vision into the complexities of the nation:

She grew up in bedeviled southern
 wilderness,
but had not been a slave, she said,
because her father wept and set her
 mother free.

The theme of plantation rape is ever-present, but, importantly, never explicitly stated in the poem. The image of the (presumably white) father weeping further complicates the relationship. Later the persona finds work as a maid on Mississippi river boats. If a whisper of rape sounds beneath the opening scene, something else lurks in the rest of the stanza:

She hardened in perilous rivertowns
and after The Surrender,
went as maid upon the tarnished
 Floating Palaces.
Rivermen reviled her for the rankling
 cold
sardonic pride
that gave a knife-edge to her comeliness.
 (21)

Hayden's portrait sits in uneasy proximity to the "Temptress/Sapphire! Redbone" stereotype of light-skinned and/or mixed-race black women. The sharp pride and "hardened" attitude are familiar features of the stereotype. If Hayden recalls that "it was W. H. Auden who once said to me that writing a poem is like solving for x in an equation," the same is true for reading Hayden's poems. The variable (or missing quantity) in the opening passage is plantation rape. In the second part, it's interracial love and consensual sex. Obviously, the historical reading of "The Surrender" is the North's victory in the Civil War. But, in Hayden's words, "a poem should have silences," and "a poem should have drama, should have tension" (192, 151). The historical chiche mutes the tension between the "hardened" woman and "The Surrender." There's a lurking sense of sexuality, even prostitution, behind the poem's equation.

Similarly, the second stanza opens with an image of silence, the importance of things unsaid. The woman has told the speaker stories "of the dangers lived through on the rivers," but when it comes to certain aspects of the past, she falls into silence. In fact, she employs a version of Hayden's creative approach to conserving the intensity of experience. In his diver's manifesto, Hayden challenged himself to "no longer share what is most personal with anyone--neither wife, friend, nor child" (25). In "The Ballad," he writes: The woman "never told of him, / whose name she'd vowed she would not speak again / till after Jordan." The conservation of energy preserves the intensity and private intimacy of her imagined connection through the years. The woman's s voice breaks through the narration to confess to herself "Oh he was nearer nearer now / than wearisome kith and kin." Her method of keeping her remembered companion closer than her family (kin) or community (kith) violates the racial and marital prescriptions as yet unmentioned in the poem.

Lest the reader become engrossed in sentimentality, Hayden immediately splices this image of imagined interracial intimacy with the silences (rape and prostitution) of the first stanza. Upon their first meeting

His blue eyes followed her
as she moved about her tasks upon the
     Memphis Rose.
He smiled and joshed, his voice quick-
   ened her.
She cursed the circumstance....(21)

If the reader associates the "he" who was "nearer nearer" with the "He" who "smiled and joshed," the "blue eyes" fall in line with the power to "set her mother free" as racially suggestive markers. The voyeuristic, stalking images of the eyes that "followed her" preserve the tension that existed in the plantation relationship between Sue Ellen's mother and father. Despite the silence surrounding the images, the connotations of "his voice quickened her" underscore the intimacy of her remembrance. The "circumstance" she cursed refers to the human connection which society will not allow. The silent themes suggest a more intimate conflict, but reading quickened as 'startled,' or 'harassed,' runs counter to the central senses of the term which imply a restoration of vigor, inspiration, animation. To complicate the scene even further, an archaic sense of the term associates quickened with pregnancy.

Hayden emphasizes the fugitive status of this human connection which exiles the figures from the social context of the poem. The man rescues the woman twice. Amid a burning and sinking ship, "he fought his way to her ... and helped her swim to shore." As he rescues others from the "hellmouth water," Sue Ellen feels her psyche coming apart. She wanders through the chaos, attempting to help others, until he returns:

A woman screaming under the raddled
  trees--
Sue Ellen felt it was herself who
  screamed.
The moaning of the hurt, the terrified--
  she held off shuddering despair
and went to comfort whom she could.
Wagons torches bells
and whimpering dusk of morning
and blankness lostness nothingness for
  her
until his arms had lifted her
into wild and secret dark. (22)

Wandering for "How long how long was it," they become "fugitives whose dangerous only hidingplace / was love." She makes the final choice not t pass for white and "forfeit what she was," along with her connection to "kith and kin." Completing the cycle, the man "wept as had her father once, they part, and "Until her dying bed," she "cursed the circumstance" (22). Denying none of the historical tropes, Hayden extends the "fugitive" status of interracial connection in American history which can be recovered only through Afro-Modernist descent. Fugitives from the social order, the images of connection become private, then secret, now silent. Hayden structures the interracial horrors into the silent frame of the poem and excavates the private sense of loss and remembrance.

In "Night, Death, Mississippi," which immediately follows "The Ballad of Sue Ellen Westerfield," Hayden again mutes the cliched scenes of historical brutality, but to a drastically different effect. He emphasizes that descent alters perceptions and remembrance, but it leaves the white supremacist world above intact. While its silences preserve the tensions, "The Ballad" is sentimental in structure. The forces of humanity, love, connection, and valor are pitted against the forces of tragedy, accident, and the racial "circumstance." In "Night, Death, Mississippi," the muted horrors frame a scene of the human condition thoroughly steeped in racial hatred and blood-thirst. Hayden portrays the power of racial hatred in an elder white man's interior. Rather than :hreaten love and connection, racial hatred here encodes and sustains the bonds between "kith and kin." Hayden's "Night, Death, Mississippi" looks beyond the abject image of human destruction in lynching. Even n this extreme situation, Hayden maintains his diver's vision and focuses in on the troubling dilemma that there's no easy division between the human and violent elements of the psyche or the nation. Hayden critiques the (largely Northern) liberal notion that it's "monsters" who enact these gothic horrors. Monstrous certainly, but not monsters. As the tragic best writing of Carson McCullers, Lillian Smith, Flannery O'Connor, and William Faulkner points out, it's mostly fathers, husbands, and sons out there in the Southern night. And as grisly events from 1999 indicate, the Southern night extends from the New Jersey Turnpike to Jasper, TX, from Albany, NY, to Evanston, IL, to Bloomington, IN.

In an interview with Tom Johnson, Yusef Komunyakaa commented that "poetry is really distilled empathy" (126). Empathy depends on connections which blur and join identities, often going beyond stable borders between "self" and "other," interior and exterior. No poem of Hayden's uses the structure of the democratic mconscious to extend the implications of this poetic empathy into more troubled waters of twentieth-century culture than "Night, Death, Mississippi." Grown too old to participate in the lynching rituals, the poem's protagonist paces his house, eagerly listening. Suddenly, he hears "A quavering cry. Screech-owl? / Or one of them?" (23). Reveling in the sounds--"Time was. A Cry? /A cry all right." -he lives vicariously through his son's participation. Feeling the close bond of shared ritual, he old man imagines meeting his son after the rite. Remembering the time he "Unbucked that one" and now "fevered by groinfire," he takes pleasure in the bond between father and on now reformed as that of monstrous man to monstrous man:

Have us a bottle,
Boy and me--
he's earned him a bottle--
when he gets home. (23)

Hayden, who confessed to having once written "a very bad play" about Harriet Tubman titled Go Down, Moses, seems to have Faulkner's novel by that title in mind as well. The ritualized hunting scenes and the old man's repetitions of "Time was. Time was" recall the tension in Faulkner's opening story "Was," a strangely wrought, beguiling, and problematic slapstick fugitive slave narrative told by one young Southerner, McCaslin Edmonds, to another, Ike McCaslin. One stanza of "Night, Death, Mississippi" recalls the most famous section of Faulkner's Go Down, Moses, "The Bear."

Christ, it was better
than hunting bear
which don't know why
you want him dead. (24)

Throughout the 1950s and '60s, James Baldwin's essays continually argued that black Southerners knew, basically, what was at stake in Southern race relations. White Southerners, Baldwin argued--extending his point to most white Northerners as well--could not face the psychological consequences they would have to face in order to end segregation. In a 1961 interview with Studs Terkel, Baldwin observed:

As a Negro, you represent a level of experience which Americans deny. This may sound mystical, but I think it's proven in great relief in the South. Consider the extraordinary price, the absolutely prohibitive price, the South has paid in order to--as it's quaintly put--keep the Negro in his place; and he has not succeeded in doing that, but has succeeded in having what is almost certainly the most bewildered, demoralized white population in the Western world. . . . [It's this] torment that goes on in a Southerner . . . . it seems to me [that] is the key to those terrifying mobs. It isn't hatred that drives those people in the streets. It's pure terror. (7-8)

Apparently, Hayden understood what Baldwin meant when he said that "Faulkner... can really get at the truth of what the black-white relationship is in the South" (7). While complicating the binary dilemma by adding a crucial American Indian theme into the "black-white" situation in "The Bear," Faulkner implies that the ones who don't know what's really at stake on the hunt for the "bear" are the white hunters themselves.

Hayden's allusion conserves this crucial irony. Like Faulkner's "white" bear hunters, Hayden's "hunters" are the ones who don't understand what Baldwin called "pure terror," muted by the mob and the hunt. Spliced between italicized Christ/lynching imagery which recalls Langston Hughes's 1931 poem "Christ in Alabama," Hayden's final stanza delivers a crushing blow. Mirroring the inter-generational exchanges of "The Ballad of Sue Ellen Westerfield," but leaving the generation unspecified, a mother calls to her children as a father returns from a hunt. Probably recalling his own childhood, the old man hears someone's (his? or his son's?) Southern mother say:

You kids fetch Paw
some water now so's he
can wash that blood
off him....

In the final line, the night itself seems trapped in a deathly evil design:

O night betrayed by darkness not its own (24)

From his diver's vantage point in "'Summertime and the Living...,'" he excavates the complex flux of vitality and violence in his childhood neighborhood. In "The Poet and His Art," he commented on the tension which gives the location Robert Stepto called the "symbolic South" (164) it's complex importance in African-American art:

For ghetto life as I knew it was full of contrasts. Violence and ugliness and cruelty. We kids were exposed to the grim realities, to coin a phrase, in spite of all our elders could do to protect us. But there was beauty, there was gentleness too. There was a vividness of life, and intensity of being. (141)

In "'Summertime,'" Hayden writes in the third person, which allows him to be "a little more objective, exteriorize up to a point." Drawing on Eliot's notion of the creative "point of view" which is at once interior and exterior to artists, Hayden comments about the use of the third person: "I could get a perspective and be both inside and outside of the poem at the same time. And, too, I was looking at another self--seeing myself in a different time dimension. You know the feeling you get when you see pictures of yourself as a child" (140).

Hayden describes the poetics of recollection in terms of descent and emergence which recall "The Diver": "Most of [the images] were down in my subconscious--that's where most of what I need for a poem is--and when I came to write 'Summertime,' why they just rose to the surface" (140). In "From The Life," written in 1977, when he returned to his old neighborhood as part of a film project, Hayden described the scene as a public crossroads:

Paradise Valley, that ironically named area of the old east side ghetto. St. Antoine: Saint Anthony: pronounced by Detroiters St. Anto-wine. Detroit's Beale Street. Respectable people shunned it as the devil's. It was often described as a sort of crossroads of the "colored world." You stand on St. Antoine and sooner or later everybody you know or ever heard of will be passing by. (18)

In a half-muted satirical tone, Hayden intones that everyone goes down to the crossroads, "sooner or later." St. Antowine, like crossroads throughout the diaspora, represents the meeting place of good and evil, of the depths of the self and the energy of the street. Hayden remembers its vibrant and destructive energy:

Kaleidoscopic in memory now, its sordidness all but forgotten. Restaurants, barbershops, pool halls, cabarets, blind pigs, gamblin' joints camouflaged as "Recreation Clubs." Shootings, stabbings, blaring jazz, and a liveliness, a gaiety at once desperate and releasing, at once wicked--Satan's playground--and good-hearted. (19)

His recollection of the main artery of Paradise Valley invokes images of every-and anything, except those of a safe space, or a mystical locus of an "authentic" self. In a passage which echoes Curtis Mayfield's classic excavation of the symbolic South, "The Other Side of Town," Hayden writes:

The good old days in the Detroit slums had never been good. ... these streets recalled for him voices, faces he had loved and ... a way of life forever part of his consciousness as an artist, forever a source for his poems, and forever a source of joy and pain never to be assuaged by awards, published books, prestige, accomplishment, such as it was, nor by the security that had come to him in the latter years of his life--a security distrusted and perhaps even feared. (21)

Hayden recalls that "the contrasts" of the poem "developed out of the material without my deliberately working toward them at first" (141) The key phrase is at first. Hayden refined the intense calm of the verses by using his algebraic technique to craft links to the jazz standard "Summertime" and to Gwendolyn Brooks's A Street in Bronzeville. Extending the jazz tradition of "quoting" standards in the course of improvised verses, Hayden's title is itself quoted directly from the lyrics.

"'Summertime and the Living...'" condenses the opening line of the song: "Summertime and the living is easy." By cutting the phrase short, Hayden's title ends on a capitalized image of vitality but frees the "grim realities" from the happy-go-lucky stereotypes associated with easy living (141). The pattern of quotation emphasizes the call-and-response rhythms which pattern exchanges in black cultural spaces. Hayden's poem also recalls that the song is essentially a lullaby sung, almost always sung by a woman, to a child. The line "your daddy's rich and your mama's good looking" reinforce a child's needful perception of his parents who, as Hayden notes above, can protect him or her, at best, only partially and temporarily from the street. The tension appears as the syrupy lyrics simply assume the "grim realities," the blues of the symbolic South. Hayden uses the placid satin backdrop as one aspect of a complex reality that includes "elders, / so harshened after each unrelenting day I that they were shouting-an gry." The cool tones of the music waft into "The fevered tossings of the dusk, the dark" (53).

Like modernist poetics of allusion, jazz quotations often sound ironies and punch-lines of implied jokes not quite shared with the audience. The opening lines of "'Summertime and the Living ...'" focus on wild plants and children growing up side-by-side:

Nobody planted roses, he recalls,
but sunflowers gangled there some
  times,
tough-stalked and bold
and like the vivid children there
  unplanned. (53)

The images of wild, "tough-stalked" plants (weeds really) and "vivid" ghetto kids voice Hayden's autobiographical connection to the "children there unplanned." Hayden, born Asa Bundy Sheffy, was himself raised by the Haydens as a fosterchild. The "gang" root of the word gangle, along with its rhythmic and tonal similarity to gangrel--'loose-jointed' and/or 'vagabond'--emphasizes the kinship between the wild urban plants and children in Hayden's memories of Paradise Valley. Hayden's images call directly to the "back yard" described by Gwendolyn Brooks's young, middle-class persona:

I've stayed in the front yard all my life.
I want a peek at the back
Where it's rough and untended and
  hungry weed grows.
A girl gets sick of a rose.

I want to go in the back yard now
And maybe down the alley,
To where the charity children play.
I want a good time today. (28)

But, Hayden writes from the "charity children['s]" side of the fence. The images of the "circus-poster horses curveted / in trees of heaven," and the elders who "would sit on broken steps," locate this poem on the front or street-side of the houses. The playful allusion in these images and the title of Hayden's poem becomes clear when one considers that Brooks's poem is entitled "a song in the front yard." Hayden's line "No roses there in summer-- / oh never roses except when people died--" recalls Brooks's classic "The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith":

No! He has not a flower to his name.
Except a feather one, for his lapel.
Apart from that, if he should think of
  flowers
It is in terms of dandelions or death.
  (43)

In "'Summertime and the Living ...,'" Hayden's description of the moments of deep cool on Beacon Street suggest a public sense of connection very different from the modernist images of rupture and disruption in the symbolic South. Hayden figures communal presence as a shared calm. The calm makes a drastic contrast, suggests a great distance, between the evening calm on Beacon Street and the hustle of St. Antoine. Splicing together tones and voices, he moves from comments laced with irony to a touching elegy:

But summer was, they said, the poor
  folks' time
of year. And he remembers
how they would sit on broken steps amid

The fevered tossings of the dusk, the dark,
wafting hearsay with funeral-parlor fans
or making evenings solemn by
their quietness. Feels their Mosaic eyes
upon him, though the florist roses
that only sorrow could afford
long since have bidden them
  Godspeed. (53)

In "From The Life" Hayden recounts the same impressions with different patterns, but retains the third person and the ironic point of entry. The quotations from the poem recall his comments about poetics and the excavation of memory. Hayden's prose recalls the poem which is his memory of the scene:

A street lamp. A point of reference.
Hattie and Elmer and M. C. the tomboy
who died in her teens, and he, old Four-
eyes. ... Summer evening time. It is
always summer when he thinks of his
life on Beacon Street. The grownups sit
on the front porch, taking ease after the

demands and vexations of the day. Leaf
shadows of trees of heaven. Ma is smok-
ing Piedmont cigarettes. Pa is nodding.
Auntie is taking the cool, as people used
to say, before she goes to the Chinese
restaurant where she is a waitress. (17-
18)

Hayden ends the poem on Sunday, returning to St. Antoine to describe the street preachers and parades. The beginning of the stanza invokes the importance of music and performance to sacred rituals, a point Hayden underscores in "Mourning Poem for the Queen of Sunday," which depicts a congregation lost without its lead vocalist, whose songs vied with "the world a-clang with evil" (50). Without the singer, who succumbed to temptation when "Satan sweet-talked her" and died when "four bullets hushed her," Hayden asks:

Who's going to make the old hardened
   sinner men tremble now
and the righteous rock?
Oh who and oh who will sing Jesus
   down
to help with struggling and doing
   without and being colored
all through blue Monday?
Till way next Sunday? (50)

Accenting the power of music in "From The Life," Hayden recalls that "it is the tambourines that attract the children, not the preacher, for what the preacher says is scary. When the women pass through the crowd with the preacher's hat asking for money for their church, the sinner men and women drop in a coin or two in expiation of their sins" (18). Again, the resonance between the autobiographical and the compression of poetic memory is dear in the opening of the final stanza of "'Summertime'":

Then grim street preachers shook
their tambouriness and Bibles in the
  face
tolerant wickedness; (53)

From his diver's point of view, Hayden continues to excavate the deep foundations of communal energies which flow in the call-and-response rhythms of the culture.

Hayden develops the implications of freedom and flight by weaving the African-American and Greek mythologies of flight and repatriation together in "O Daedalus, Fly Away Home":

My gran, he flew back to Africa,
just spread his arms and
  Flew away home. (71)

In "'Summertime and the Living...'" Hayden's images of flight draw subtly on the energy of the street and the lyrics of the song "Summertime." The song lyrics portray a parental vision of hope for a child: "One of these mornings I you're going to rise up singing / spread your wings and take to the sky." Wedged into the brutal confines of the symbolic South, Hayden's "'Summertime'" draws on the power of 1920s' political and popular cultural mythology to expand the song's image of personal flight into a communal vision of hope:

then Elks parades and big splendiferous
Jack Johnson in his diamond limousine
set the ghetto burgeoning
with fantasies
of Ethiopia spreading her gorgeous
  wings (53)

Hayden's modernist vision implies a hint of skepticism. But whether the skepticism is understood as Hayden's depends on the reader's response to Garveyism's Old Testament propaganda. Hayden was undoubtably aware of the numerous pitfalls suppressed by adoration of Garvey and the "burgeoning.., fantasies" of redemption and return. Nonetheless, Hayden's poem invokes the power of the communal patterns of life in the symbolic South which confirm Garvey (or his Afrocentric heirs) as much more than a huckster and Jack Johnson (Joe Louis or Muhammad Ali) as more than a boxer. In "The Poet and His Art," Hayden notes that "Jack Johnson was something of a folk-hero, and ghetto people admired him as a symbol.... His victories were their own vicarious triumphs over the oppressor. And they saw his eventual fall as the result of a plot to destroy him because he had dared to defy the conventions of the white world" (142).

The brilliance of Hayden's AfroModernist poetic technique lies in how he sifts together the various levels of experience in his diver's vision. As it happens, the ironic distance and sense of critique are not solely the product of the diver's modernism. In Hayden's "'Summertime,'" the distance comes through in words which seem to overburden the line: "splendiferous," and "diamond limousines" as chariots of repatriation and redemption. In "From The Life," Hayden witnesses the communal critique as he recalls a typical scene in which the ironies are debated and bantered back and forth in the audience of the parade. The scene suggests Garcia Lorca's understanding that duende can be supplied by hearers as well as singers. Noting the role of call-and-response in "Theory and Function of the Duende," he writes: "Often the composer's duende passes to the interpreter. It is also worth noting that even if the composer or poet is false, the interpreter's duende can create a new marvel bearing little resemblance to the or iginal work" (96). Likewise, Hayden understood the crucial role of audience and communal processes to a full sense of black performance. Hayden's account reads as if it's lifted out of a Hurston short story or one of Hughes's Jesse B. Simple vignettes:

In the hot sunshine of a Sunday afternoon the followers of Marcus Garvey, storm center of the Back to Africa movement (United Negro Improvement Association) during the 1920's, might be seen there marching in purple and green, carrying banners with black stars on them; chevaliers with plumed hats, black star nurses, children in trucks festooned with crepe paper. People stood along the curb watching, outraged or reassured. "Damn fools," one man might say. "I sure ain't lost nothing to Africa and I'm sure as hell ain't going back there to look for nothing." "Just like a zigaboo to talk like that," another might say. "Garvey trying to bring our race together and here you go low-rating him. Man, he talks good sense. We the onlies nation in the world don't have a country of our own and don't have a flag of our own." (19)

Rather than let the different voices intersect as Hughes did in the Simple stories or his own modernist epic Montage of a Dream Deferred, Hayden, through his crossroads poetics, distills the dissonance and communion in the space of a few words. He remembers moments of consensus as well: "But nobody quarreled when the Colored Elks or the Colored Masons or Woodmen stepped it off along St. Antoine. The music, the precision of the drill teams, the polish and gleam and sparkle, the ribbons and badges. Ethiopia spreading her gorgeous wings" (19). One of these mornings--

In "Covenant of Timelessness and Time," Wilburn Williams discusses how Hayden dealt with the difficult relationship of his modernist poetics to his social and historical interests. Williams argues correctly that, in order to resolve the dilemma, Hayden turns his realist's interest in history into a modernist's interest in "time." In his deeply Heraclitan poem "Theme and Variation" Hayden underscores the reality that awareness (past and present) is in a state of constant change:

all things alter even as I behold,
all things alter, the stranger said.

Alter, become a something more,
a something less. Are the reveling
   shadows
of a changing permanence. Are, are not
and same and other, the stranger said.
   (59)

In an interview entitled "A 'Romantic Realist,'" Hayden discusses his use of present tense in historical poems. For Hayden, imaging the past in the present tense pulls it loose from its stable moorings, keeps it becoming: "I think I may be using it to achieve dramatic immediacy and because in a sense there is no past, only the present. The past is also the present. The experiences I've had in the past are now a part of my mind, my subconscious, and they are there forever" (124).

In "Latin-American Poetry," Octavio Paz discusses the disjunction between poetics which engages history and modernist and symbolist poetics which abandons, or descends, from it. For Paz, "When history and poetry are consonant, the name of this coincidence is, for instance, Whitman; when there is discord between the two, the dissonance bears the name Baudelaire" (215). Paz then discusses the pitfalls of abandonment and withdrawal. He argues the need to remain in contact with social and historical concerns because abandonment "can only withdraw into itself... [and the] dangers attendant upon [it] are irresponsible song or silence" (215). Seen from this angle, Hayden's method of a deeper engagement through withdrawal set forth in "The Diver" offers a combination of Paz's modes.

Hayden's modernist interest in the "time" of history and his meditations on the "past-present" bring historical narratives and imagist poetics together. "Runagate, Runagate" shows both the presentness of the past and the entanglement of historical and imagistic themes. Breaking to some extent with the principles outlined in his diver's manifesto, Hayden foregrounds interactive exchange in the composition of "Runagate, Runagate." Interestingly, the revised version of the poem published in Selected Poems and subsequent volumes was inspired when Hayden heard Rosey Pool read an earlier version to an audience. Hayden had written the first version and decided that it was not worth revising. Unbeknownst to him, it was published in England. Pool brought it to Fisk where she read it for an audience that included Hayden. Hayden recalls:

Now I hadn't dared look at this poem for years, and as Rosey read it I was amazed and gratified to discover that most of it was much better than I'd thought. And as Rosey read--she is one of the finest readers of poetry I've ever heard--I realized the poem was worth saving, worth working on some more.... I went back to "Runagate," revised it drastically, though I kept the form I had used in the other versions. (183)

One stanza exemplifies the interaction at the crossroads between the imagistic descent and the historical engagement. Hayden splices realistic, matter-of-fact chronicles of brutality--actual slave owners' advertisements in nineteenth-century newspapers--with phrases from childhood games ("catch me if you can") and a meditation on the labyrinthine nature of underground quests. He frames the stanza with slaves' voices singing from the spirituals "No More Auction Block for Me," with its famous refrain "many thousands gone," and "Oh Freedom!" as they light out for "O mythic North/O star-shaped yonder Bible city":

No more auction block for me
no more driver's lash for me

   If you see my Pompey, 30 yrs of age,
   new breeches, plain stockings,
     negro shoes;
   if you see my Anna, likely young
       mulatto
   branded E on the right cheek, R on
      the left,
   catch them if you can and notify
      subscriber.
   Catch them if you can, but it won't be
      easy.
   They'll dart underground when you
      try to catch them,
   plunge into quicksand, whirlpools,
      mazes,
   turn into scorpions when you try to
      catch them.

And before I'll be a slave
I'll be buried in my grave (76)

If Whitman's discord with history mellowed as he aged and revised his Leaves of Grass, Hayden's revisions whetted the cutting edge of his cultural critique. Hayden's Angle of Ascent, Words in the Mourning Time, and Collected Poems show how he continued to hone his poetics into more lyrical and resonant combinations of black and world cultures, modernist process, and Baha'i faith. In 1977, upon his arrival in Paradise Valley, he thought to himself "wryly ... so I've become a grey eminence. ... But not, I hope, a good grey poet" (17). Not. But while, by almost all accounts, his work sharpened, the costs of the algebraic descents had mounted on Hayden's psychic life. Evincing the costs of the descendental path, in July of 1975, he wrote a hauntingly confessional letter to his younger friend Michael Harper, an excerpt of which serves as an epigraph to this essay. Momentarily flinging "aside the mask," Hayden wrote:

I got up one morning, not too long ago, and felt I could not go on with my life. The diver had to admit that he couldn't surface again, alone, without help. And the long and short of it is that I am now going to a psychiatrist--certainly, for me, an admission of almost complete defeat. I have lived through days of sheer spiritual horror, and but for my beautiful [wife] Erma I could not have borne it. well, this sounds like melodrama, sure enough, but it's ice-cold reality of which I speak. (Nicholas 997)

In a Shem-like response to his elder's suffering, Harper's reply looks the other way and congratulates Hayden for his decision to go against his diver's manifesto: "Remember: you had the sense to get someone to talk to" (999).

Hayden's letter makes it clear that even--possibly especially--the most brilliant Afro-Modernists rarely elude the "ice-cold reality" of the problems associated with poetic withdrawal and descent. As much as any mid-century writer, Robert Hayden bore the risks associated with exploring the modernist awareness of the contingent and contested intersection between culture and consciousness. Posthumously published, Hayden's Collected Poems begins with "The Diver" and ends with "American Journal." From the diver's depth, the "measured rise" becomes a satellite's scope on American culture. "American Journal" is a near-perfectly executed balance of detachment and engagement, critique and faith, knowing and belief. All is calibrated to keep the reader solving for Auden's "x," by now, fully Hayden's "own, wild, and free":

elan vital and that some thing essence
quiddity i cannot penetrate or name
   (195)

Works Cited

Baldwin, James. Just Above My Head. New York: Dial, 1979.

Baker, Houston. Blues, Ideology and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984.

Brooks, Gwendolyn. Blacks. Chicago: Third World P, 1987.

Conniff, Brian. "Answering 'The Waste Land': Robert Hayden and the Rise of the African American Poetic Sequence." African American Review 33 (1999): 487-506.

Dunbar, Paul Laurence. The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1967.

Effendi, Shoghi. The Promised Day is Come. Rutland, England: Bahai Publications Trust, 1996.

Faulkner, William. Go Down, Moses. 1942. New York: Vintage, 1990.

Fetrow, Fred. Robed Hayden. Boston: Twayne, 1984.

Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. 1900. New York: Macmillan, 1927.

--. "Dream Work and Interpretation." An Outline of Psycho-Analysis. Ed. and trans. James Stachey. New York: Norton, 1949. 23: 38-96.

Harding, James M. "Adorno, Ellison, and the Critique of Jazz." Cultural Critique 31 (1995): 129-58.

Hatcher, John. From the Auroral Darkness: The Life and Poetry of Robed Hayden. Oxford: George Ronald, 1984.

Hayden, Robert. American Journal. New York: Liveright, 1982.

--. Angle of Ascent: New and Selected Poems. New York: Liveright, 1975.

--. "A Certain Vision." Hayden, Collected Prose 90-114.

--. Collected Poems. Ed. Frederick Glaysher. New York: Liveright, 1985.

--. Collected Prose. Ed. Frederick Glaysher. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1984.

--. "Counterpoise Manifesto." Hayden, Collected Prose 41-42.

--. "From The Life: Some Remembrances." Hayden, Collected Prose 17-27.

--. "The Poet and His Art: A Conversation." Hayden, Collected Prose 129-204.

--. "A 'Romantic Realist.'" Hayden, Collected Prose 115-28.

--. Selected Poems. New York: October House, 1966.

--. "Something Patterned, Wild, and Free." Hayden, Collected Prose 74-78.

Heidegger, Martin. Nietzsche, Volume III: The Will to Power as Knowledge and Metaphysics. New York: HarperCollins, 1987.

Komunyakaa, Yusef. Blue Notes: Essays, Interviews, and Commentaries. Ed. Radiclani Clytus. Ann Arbor: U Michigan P, 2000.

--. "Masks." Indiana Review 19.1 (1996): 59-60.

Lorca, Gabriel Garcia. "Theory and Function of the Duende." Poetics of the New American Poetry. Ed. Donald Allen and Warren Tallman. New York: Grove P, 1973. 91-103.

Nicholas, Xavier, ed. "Robert Hayden and Michael Harper: A Literary Friendship." Callaloo 17 (1994): 976-1015.

O'Connor, Flannery. The Violent Bear It Away. 1955. New York: Noonday, 1998.

O'Sullivan, Maurice. "The Mask of Allusion in Robert Hayden's 'The Diver.'" CLA Journal 27.1 (1973): 85-92.

Standley, Fred L., and Louis Pratt, eds. Conversations with James Baldwin. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1989.

Whitman, Walt. Whitman: Complete Poetry and Collected Prose. Ed. Justin Caplan. New York: Library of America, 1982.

Williams, Wilburn. "Covenant of Timelessness and Time: Symbolism and History in Robert Hayden's Angle of Ascent." Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Art, and Scholarship. Ed. Michael S. Harper and Robert B. Stepto. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1979. 66-84.

Yeats, William Butler. The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats. Ed. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach. New York: Macmillan, 1966.

Edward M. Pavlic is an associate professor in the Department of English and Africana Studies Program at Union College in Schenectady, NY. A variant form of this essay appears in Crossroads Modernism: Descent and Emergence in African-American Literary Culture (U of Minnesota P, 2002). His book of poems Paraph of Bone & Other Kinds of Blue (Copper Canyon P) won the 2001 The American Poetry Review! Honickman First Book Award.