Lodestar and Other Night Lights.

It is by now a commonplace to note the wide variety - the depth and breadth - of voice and perspectives present in contemporary African American poetry. Despite the attempts of mid-twentieth-century literary historians to demonstrate otherwise, African American poetry has never been a monolithic entity. True, traditions and patterns are woven through much of the poetry, but a unified "African American voice"? Never. The three volumes reviewed in this essay demonstrate vividly the multiplicity of voice and perspective currently shaping African American (and African Canadian) poetry today.

One needs to be something of a detective to read poetry - almost any poetry. I have a little of that detective in me, relishing the move through a complex poem, tracking its clues, patterns, traces, the mix of language and sound that illuminates and makes meaning. But I have to confess to being almost bested when I read Poetic Penguins by William Boyd.

In this, his first published volume of poetry, Boyd's fierce commitment to Christianity and to the social issues of race comes together in poems heavily coded with private symbols. In the preface, Boyd sets forth his belief that coming to terms with "Blackness" can only happen through a reformed and radically revisioned belief in Christ: "I have attempted in this Book, Poetic Penguins, to amalgamate through Blackness only in route to the holy Race, Christ's Body Members" (vii).

These poems are visually as well as linguistically striking. The typography is a blend of capital letters, italics, small fonts, larger fonts, and, on occasion, long hyphens. Neologisms (HE-OPSIS, roadsidestly) appear in several of the poems. Take "Schedule," for instance, a long poem that moves breathtakingly fast and, in all fairness, probably needs to be read as a whole rather than excerpted. Here is a sample from it (and to quote Muriel Rukeyser's message to her publisher, "Please believe the punctuation"):

THE NATIVITY of MORNING'S HESITANT Noon MEAL holds well my DAILY BREAD'S Eastern LOAF of my non-LABOR stored to freshly Eat CHRIST'S "BEHOLDS" mentioned many times to STOP Anxiety for looking ETERNITY. Scheduling Forever is always sent to PICK "BEHOLDS" up! So LEAVENED NO-NO or YES-YES runs not my PENICILLIN MOLD'S "HEY" as DAWN's passing Chaff to THUMB into a PLAY-OFF with Anxiety to go from the GRAIN of RUB-FOR or RUB-AGAINST on LIFE'S SPEEDWAY! - . . . "HERE am I send me, LORD! - The RESTRAINT of my Anxiety because THY BROWN BISCUITS baked SPEED-LIMIT as also my baked SOP of the ROAD to Pass the WAITING PATROLMAN not stopped to ANSWER "A FOREVER-REMARK ALONE for Speeding without as of YET to BEHOLD!" (20)

Poems like this need to be read more than once and to be read aloud. The delight comes in hearing Boyd's rhythmic combinations and the clang of an unfamiliar word nested within the familiar. In "'Lay Not up for Yourselves Treasures Upon Earth . . .,'" the speaker chants, "Stow up, even upper, / Until God's servant of an ultra back-stair / Modifies put-upon as a swapper / Of a phobia's front-stair of the pair" (49).

"Lamentation to Gwendolyn Brooks," begins with the lovely but somewhat predictable lines "Suffering deepens / To the pit of a beautiful valley," but then jars the reader into rethinking the familiar image in the next line, "With a plural of mountain seismic as a drill" (15). In this poem, the speaker meditates on suffering and betrayal ("Nevertheless, the cock crowed three times") and, finally, the artist's vision ("Unfogged on window-pains looked through for Christsake"). According to the Afterword by Arthur Mann Kaye, Gwendolyn Brooks is the only writer to have responded positively to Boyd's poetry, lauding his "spicy lines" and encouraging him to continue his craft (112).

Kaye provides a helpful overview of Boyd's work, but in mentioning Boyd's "nervous disorder" and his being granted a 100% disability from the U.S. Government, as well as his sketchy work history, I wonder if Kaye doesn't bias the reader against the poetry (the dust-jacket photograph doesn't help either; Boyd is dressed in what appears to be a pair of pajamas). Is this work merely the raving of a madman? We do well to remember that the same question was asked about Ezra Pound, among others. The answer, in Pound's case, was "sometimes," and yet much of his poetry sent shock waves through the literary community, changing forever the way we think about language and literature. Boyd's work should be read. His poetry should be tried and studied. Fitting Boyd's work into the traditions of African American literature will be a challenging but, I suspect, useful project. The promotional sheet sent with the book quotes Betsy Lindun's review from the Southern Pines (North Carolina) Pilot: "My reaction to these lines is the shock of first seeing a blazing Picasso unexpectedly. Give me time - puhlease, or Gertrude Stein."

Nagueyalti Warren's book Lodestar and Other Night Lights (1992) is comprised of poetry that, unlike Boyd's, is eminently accessible, and more recognizably in the traditions of African American writing. Warren's poetry, among other things, attests to the memory and power of those who have blazed trails before her. She writes of family, friends, historical figures, and artists. In "Testimony (for a poet i admire)," Warren announces that, while "people wait until poets die / to say how great they were," she wants to thank a particular poet (Nikki Giovanni) "for being creatively alive / strongly black." The poem's tone is loving and celebratory; this poet, says the speaker, "put the 'N' back / In democracy / Helping us understand the present system":

She pointed the way Held the mirror For all of us Willing to behold Our truly natural selves Thank you Nikki Rosa (31)

Warren's poems celebrate her racial heritage and critique historical and ongoing racism in the United States. Some of the poems bring historical moment and personal experience together. In "Till's Death Did Us Part," the speaker traces the move from South to North brought on by Emmett Till's death and how her "great grands journeyed North / Looking strange under tall buildings / Loving us still / But being so out of place - / And us with no space to run" (11). "A Nature Poem" uses jazz-inflected rhythms to describe a cruel "Miss Sunrise" who "comes cracking her whip" and "moves people quickly across red clay fields / on this Miss Morning." The poem's pace is as driving as the sun described by the speaker, who, in the second stanza, announces that, while this is a nature poem, it is not about "trees, birds / and early sunrisin' -" but is instead about

an early sunshining: bringing ebony hands to ivory rows of cotton burning/hot/sweat/ and maybe death before sunset. (21)

While many of the poems in this volume are quite fine, some suffer from overwriting; for example, the final stanza in "Snapshots" weakens the strong image of "'bowls of glorious golden strawberry / Cobbler from a great black-iron pan," by adding a gloss on what the speaker has learned since the time of the snapshot:

I know these were not the worst But the very best of times A strawberry of Southern memory - Funny, I didn't know it then. (9)

Although the sentiment is important to the poem, it could be more subtly wrought.

Occasionally Warren's attention to meter wavers, especially in a poem like "Red Trucks Remind Me of December," where the metrics and absence of rhyme in the last three lines ("Until nothing was left inside / Except newspaper glued to the walls / Covering the windy cracks" [9]) seem at odds with the rest of the poem's somewhat lilting rhythm, a rhythm that works well, clashing with the serious subject matter, the dispossession of a single mother and her children of their home and belongings ("Sam and the fat boy, Buck / Began loading all our belongings / In the back of the red pickup truck" [16]).

One of the best pieces in the book is the fast-moving poem for James Baldwin, "How Long's the Train Been Gone?" where the speaker begins with an image of "Grand Baldwin ebony hewn, ivory keyed" who "played Harlem spirituals in store front churches" (53). Warren sustains the musical metaphor throughout the poem nicely as she deftly weaves Baldwin's titles into the text of this tribute to the power and significance of his life and art:

Maahn, If Beale Street Could Talk we'd know the score - you sounding your native notes allegro showing us rainbow-edged dreams substances of things hoped for evidence of things unseen (54)

In "A Thousand Points of Light," Warren's speaker queries the originator of the phrase and, to borrow from Ralph Ellison, changes the joke and slips the yoke. By embedding the Republican conservative vision within multiple African American realities, Warren invests the phrase with new meaning, radicalizing it while drawing attention to the myopia of George Bush's political rhetoric. The poem catalogs African American greats (Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Anna Julia Cooper, Bessie Smith, Dr. Charles Drew, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King), as well as Nelson Mandela, repeatedly interrogating the meaning (and, of course, implications) of the title's term:

You mean like Harriet unafraid of the dark makin' her way North and coming back time and again for others?

A thousand points of light? . . .

You mean like Frederick taking no more whippins, jumpin' baad and eloquent?

Or you mean the light on King coming down from the mountaintop?

You mean the thousand points of light surrounding Mandela speaking to a million Black faces in Atlanta?

Whachu mean? (56-57)

A rich strand in African American literature is that of exile and return. For George Elliott Clarke, the trajectory of movement is from south to north, only in Whylah Falls (1990), north means Canadian rather than U.S. territory. Clarke's book is a complex, rich look at a community in Jarvis County, Nova Scotia, "founded in 1783 by African-American Loyalists seeking Liberty, Justice, and Beauty." Clarke describes Whylah Falls as a place "wrecked by country blues and warped by constant tears, . . . a snowy, northern Mississippi, with blood spattered, not on magnolias, but on pines, lilacs, and wild roses" (preface). The prefatory poem, "Look Homeward, Exile" (with its echoes of Thomas Wolfe), adumbrates the theme of exile and a transplanted South:

I can still see that soil crimsoned by butchered Hog and imbrued with rye, lye, and homely Spirituals everybody must know . . . .

Even in the cold North, however,

. . . Beauty survived, secreted In freight trains snorting in their pens, in babes Whose faces were coal-black mirrors, in strange Strummers who plucked Ghanaian banjos, hummed Blind blues - precise, ornate, rich needlepoint, In sermons scorched with sulphur and brimstone, And in my love's dark, orient skin that smelled Like orange peels and tasted like rum, good God! (10)

But there is another exile at stake in these poems. The speaker, X, has been gone from Waylah Falls for "four springs" and "five winters," gone from his love, Shelley, who "hung the moon backwards, crooned crooked poems / That no voice could straighten," who "curled among notes - petals / That scaled glissando from windows agape," but from whom he has been absent: "My pain will never end unless I can sleep beside my love, pluck the ripe moon, halve it, and share its sweet milk between us . . . . Shelly, that's how much, that's how much, I feel" (14, 30). What saves this book from narcissistic swooning is not only the elegant imagery and language, but the marvelous collage of styles, points of view, and subjects held together by the strand of X's longing for Shelly.

The book is divided into seven sections, each having its own subject and method: "The Adoration of Shelley," "The Trial of Saul," "The Witness of Selah," "The Passion of Pablo and Amarantha," "The Martyrdom of Othello Clemence," "The Gospel of Reverend F. R. Langford," and a final "Adoration of Shelley." What is particularly fine about this volume is the multiplicity of voices. Listen to Amarantha in "To Pablo":

In school, I hated poetry - those skinny, Malnourished poems that professors love; The bad grammar and dirty words that catch In the mouth like fishhooks, tear holes in speech. Pablo, your words are rain I run through, Grass I sleep in. (79)

or to the speaker in "Blues for X":

Pretty boy, towel your tears, And robe yourself in black. Pretty boy, dry your tears, You know I'm comin' back. I'm your lavish lover And I'm slavish in the sack. . . .

My bones are slender flutes And blues the bars you hum. You wanna stay my man, Serve me whisky when I come. (61)

Recalling elements of Spoon River Anthology and Paterson, Whylah Falls includes poems (ballads, lyrics, elegies), prose pieces, drama, letters, testimonials, photographs (a few), and even newspaper reprints - some hilarious:

Our mistake

Ex-MP Jack Thomson was misidentified in a photo appearing in last week's Moon. The photo was of the new Jarvis-Sewage Treatment Plant. The Moon regrets the error. (105)

Waylah Falls chronicles and critiques, in evocative and sometimes hauntingly beautiful language, not only the lives and deaths of the town's inhabitants, but, in many cases, the social and political context of those lives as well. In "The Argument" (from "The Trial of Saul"), a defense lawyer admits that the sins of Saul are "his own," but adds,

True, he has been sinned against: fifty years is too long to spend, a hunchback, stooped in a damp, vicious cave, dark with smoke and tuberculosis, shovelling gypsum just for the pennies to fix one's shoes. So folks, our hands are dirty. As surely as iodine or gypsum dust, we've helped to poison him. But it's too late for our tears. (35)

This is a book to be savored. A feast of styles and forms, the language is sinuous and sensual. Clarke's images are, in many cases, simply beautiful or quietly startling. A section of Clarke's "Vision of Justice" (included in "The Martyrdom of Othello Clemence"), aptly describes the magic this book creates:

Language has become volatile liquor, Firewater, that lovers pour for prophets Who haul, from air, tongues of pentecostal fire - Poetry come among us. (112)

Reviewed by

Ann Folwell Stanford DePaul University