Songlines in Michaeltree: New and Selected Poems.Michael S. Harper. Songlines in Michaeltree: New and Selected Poems Among the numerous literary works titled Selected Poems are the following:
The well-chosen selections in Michael Harper's Songlines in Michaeltree represent how Harper has successfully combined the social consciousness characteristic of African American literature African American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. The genre traces its origins to the works of such late 18th century writers as Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano, reached early high points with slave narratives with an uncommon commitment to formal innovation, an achievement that richly deserves this retrospective. From his earliest jazz poems and initial militancy to the broader perspectives of "Peace Gene" and "If You Don't Force It," the collection substantiates Harper's revealing claim in one of his concluding essays, "To The Reader," that he has been "at work at the experiential and theoretical level of the Africanness in us and on how to ... control technique with draftsmanlike precision and not betray referentiality, belief and artistic integrity," an ideal "informed by European aesthetics, but consistent with African modalities Modalities The factors and circumstances that cause a patient's symptoms to improve or worsen, including weather, time of day, effects of food, and similar factors. ." Throughout his career, as this volume shows, Harper used this "draftsmanlike" precision--achieved in crisp accentual ac·cen·tu·al adj. 1. Of or relating to accent. 2. Based on stress accents: accentual rhythm; accentual verse. lines, challenging syntax, bold imagery, and complex associations--to reinfor ce the difficulty of the brutal honesty Is the faculty to be extremely honest with anyone in any given situation. This facilitates communication in some degree, but may cause discomfort or strangeness in the receiver of the message. The discomfort in the receiver comes from the strange situation in witch the speaker puts him. and enduring compassion upon which he has based his ideal of artistic integrity. All of his verse frankly examines the tension between history and the individual self, the difficulty of crossing boundaries, including bounded notions of race and heritage, and the horror and solace of artistic creation, exemplifying how precision and integrity constitute both the aesthetic and the political substance of Harper's provocative and demanding art. The volume thus reveals that the result of Harper's lifelong pursuit of these ideals is an opus that consistently provokes and demands new ways of thinking about the difficulties and distinctiveness of African American African American Multiculture A person having origins in any of the black racial groups of Africa. See Race. life. These new ways include Harper's unusual, sometimes personal reservoir of allusion and his non-European conception of artistic precision, through which he resists the aesthetic stagnation Stagnation A period of little or no growth in the economy. Economic growth of less than 2-3% is considered stagnation. Sometimes used to describe low trading volume or inactive trading in securities. Notes: A good example of stagnation was the U.S. economy in the 1970s. and imprecision both of the political rhetoric that sometimes passes for a black aesthetic and of the racial bias in mainstream literary appreciation that tends to underestimate the complexity of minority and non-Western cultures. This unconventionality sometimes results in poems that fail to yield their meaning fully, and their incommunicative beauty will frustrate many readers, especially given the defiant attitude with which they are offered. But largely, this difficulty results in a new sense of how poetic language conveys insight about the human pain and hidden truth of black experience. The second t ime through the volume, after digesting its two essays and the notes to individual poems, I had developed the requisite awareness of an omnipresent om·ni·pres·ent adj. Present everywhere simultaneously. [Medieval Latin omnipres past and of Harper's critique of the racism of recorded history Recorded history can be defined as history that has been written down or recorded by the use of language, whereas history is a more general term referring simply to information about the past.[1] It starts in the 4th millennium BC, with the invention of writing. to appreciate both his unique sense of how history informs the personal and the beautiful continuity of his artistry. In his best poems about personal pain, about historical figures like Frederick Douglass or about musicians and writers and, therefore, about artistry, his chiseled chis·eled or chis·elled adj. Made or shaped with or as if with a chisel: a finely chiseled nose. Adj. 1. , forbidding poetics effectively suggest the harrowing unity between vision and memory, Western and non-Western, pain and beauty, by which Harper defines black identity and resists literary convention. Readers unfamiliar with Harper's work will find in this volume a comprehensive representation of how Harper pushes us to reconsider limited ideas of race and art, and given the volume's unique concluding material, scholars will have the means to assess more fully Harper's distinctive union of aesthetic and political ideals. As such, this volume deserves to be read, and Harper himself deserves to be remembered as one of the most important poets of his time. [c] 2002 Keith D. Leonard |
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