The Map and the Territory: An Interview with Michael S. Harper.

The interview that follows was produced in a three-part process. The initial question-and-answer sessions took place in Providence, Rhode Island, during June 1997 and August 1998. Audio recordings of these meetings were made in Harper's loft, in his office on the campus of Brown University, and in his car while driving through the narrow streets of Providence, and subsequently transcribed. Professor Harper then reviewed the raw transcripts, editing and elaborating on his answers as he saw fit. He was also kind enough to provide written answers to questions that emerged during this revision process. On February 12, 1999, Professor Harper was satisfied with the interview and returned this text to me along with a note which read:

CODA: I am attaching several poems which are meant to elucidate some of the ideas in my responses. 'Let the doing be the exercise, not the exhibition' (Jean Toomer).

Antonucci: We can start by going back. In the 1973 interview with John O'Brien from Interviews with Black Writers, you state that the poem "Zeus Muse" "is about the making of grids, the relationship between horizontal and vertical axes and dominion." You continue, "Essentially it's about imperialism; it represents a gaze over all things, dominion over all things. But black people can't function in that particular vision of the grid. They're expendable, they've been annihilated; and not only black people but nonwhites, or pagans or Indians or anyone and anything in the way of this particular vision with its armies, navies and its technological system." Could you speak to the way that this and other poems challenge dominant notions of American identity in their mapping of the American cultural/historical landscape?

Harper: In the twenty-five years that have passed since the O'Brien interview the notions of a renegade commentator from without the magic circle have changed. The best answer to the question is attitudinal. Robert Hayden's poetry exemplifies the psychic landscape of the stranger. I share that resonance as an outsider; it is a condition I prefer to belonging, however comfortable that status might be.

Antonucci: Robert Hayden describes America as "a problem in metaphysics." In your interview with James Randell you call Hayden a great historian and symbolist poet. Would you care to elaborate on the idea of poets as historians?

Harper: Hayden says in his poem "[American Journal]":

america as much a problem in metaphysics as it is a nation earthly entity an iota in our galaxy an organism that changes even as i examine it fact and fantasy never twice the same so many variables

Pay attention to the lineation, the gaps, and the tentative feedback of an extraterrestrial come to observe us (see brackets around title) as a message given to us "Americans" as perceptions subject to enhancement and revision. This is a dynamic process. Perhaps our closeness to the intricacies of identity, including race and gender, blind us to what we have in common with humanity. And as Hayden reminds us, the "unknowable essence" is what we, as Americans and extraterrestrials, have in common. This means to me that we have neglected the largest part of our inheritance, the efficacy of religion as a faith in the future that might bind us all.

Hayden wrote the important essays on the presence of Black Americans in the State of Michigan for the Federal Writers' Project, even though the assignation of these essays was anonymous. If one would compare the poems Hayden wrote in The Black Spear sequence, in which Hayden took on Stephen Vincent Benet's "John Brown's Body," the linkage and responsibility Hayden absorbs into American Literary Historiography provide a good example of technique, a kind of personal shorthand which reviews and extends the insights of our predecessors as a living monument to the present and future. Hayden's poems continue to resonate long after his death, providing a usefulness for coming generations: a place to start, looking backward and forward to the metaphysics in Hayden's admonition:

america as much a problem in metaphysics

as

it is a nation earthly entity an iota in our galaxy

Antonucci: With respect to John Brown and his legacy as a literary figure and historical subject, your poetic commentary appears to be part of a larger discourse that includes works by Benet and Hayden as well as Robert Penn Warren and Du Bois. Is John Brown one of those issues/figures about which Americans need to "quarrel with ourselves"?

Harper: Yes. The most important part of the question for me is what John Brown meant to black people of his era. Many of those black men and women were not citizens at the time according to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, but they were human beings and friends to him. Where are the books, essays, articles about those kinship ties? Blacks on Brown, edited by Benjamin Quarles, includes my poem on the subject. When I wrote the poem, I envisioned a larger discourse on tributaries that Hayden had sketched out in The Black Spear sequence. After Debridement and Song: I Want a Witness, which I conceived originally as a single work, I lost confidence in my abilities to appropriate these complexities. Call it a failure of nerve or maturity, a coming to accept my own limitations. From my earliest attempts as a poet "in the American vein" I have been interested in the epic as practiced from the minority perspective.

Antonucci: What then do you understand as the significance and value of a black artist treating historical subjects? Are there any connections between your treatment of certain historical material and figures and those of, say, John Coltrane in "Alabama," Sterling Brown's "Backwater Blues," or Romare Bearden's A Night at Roseland or The Quilting Bee?

Harper: My admiration for Coltrane, Brown, and Bearden is illustrative of the distinction Ellison makes between ancestors and relatives. All three are ancestors. I chose them as icons for investigation. What inspires me most is their pioneering attitude and the new techniques they brought to their disciplines. They are models, not to be copied, but to be instructed by. "Backwater Blues," for example, was written by Bessie Smith and James P. Johnson about the Mississippi flood of 1927. Black men were chained to the levy, given no choice to fight against an horrific natural disaster. Faulkner wrote about it. Sterling Brown quoted several verses in "Backwater Blues" to give additional resonance against Tin Pan Alley composers of greater reputation and less ability. A close reading of his poem "Cabaret" provides analysis for the deadly world of entertainment and the sanctity of performance. That has been instruction to me.

Antonucci: As a follow up on these artists' examinations of space and landscape: The second section of your poem "Notes on Making: The Heroic Pattern Updated: 1997" reads like a piece of cryptic cartography. Does a poetic map emerge there as an artifact for which the "vernacular becomes skyline"?

Harper: The poem was written as a commentary for Joseph Norman's catalogue "Monologue II," an exhibition at Cornell University. I used this occasion to provide a promissory note to Mr. Norman's accomplishments (he happens to be a relative of the magnificent contralto Jessie Norman). At one level this poem is an extension of The Hero by Lord Raglan, in which the patterns of heroic exploit are examined in the twenty-two stages of heroic action. It is my hope that this effort stands for more than just an iteration of Raglan's analysis. The word cartography for me elicits the notion of cryptogram, a shorthand term for symbolic weight arranged in an artistic pattern of composition, the exegesis of which is probably beyond my skill. It is enough to be a maker, and as Billie Holiday suggests, we "don't explain." The artistic act is to make; however, I will accept skyline as one of the horizons I choose to function in. Check out Ralph Ellison's introduction to John Kouvenhoven's The Beercan by the Highway.

Antonucci: In the 1976 essay "Michael Harper's Extended Tree: John Coltrane and Sterling Brown," Robert Stepto writes that "Coltrane aids the poet in establishing a kinship of various cultures with his living adopted kin." Stepto presents your poetry as a medium which imagines the fabric of both an African-American and an American family. By extension, can his reading of your verse be applied to your perception of the American cultural landscape?

Harper: Yes. Stepto's essay in Chant of Saints, "After Modernism: After Hibernation," places my poem "History as Appletree" in a continuum of postmodern expression directly linked to Ellison's treatment of Classic Modernism in Invisible Man. Stepto's ability to read the complexities of genre and nuance are among the best I've seen by critics during this period. The phrase during this period is meant to enunciate both commonality and difference in the expression of individual artists. Stepto's range as an Americanist, including his belief in theory as a dynamic force, makes him an excellent reader of my poetry in process.

Antonucci: Ralph Ellison's essay "Going to the Territory" reveals an examination of both race ritual and the cultural landscape of the United States. In the essay he calls this geography "a symbol of the unknown included not only in places, but conditions relating to their racially defined status and the complex mystery of a society from which [African Americans] had been excluded." In your poetry does geography also function as "the symbol of the unknown"?

Harper: Yes. I will cite for you as an answer to the question a poem from Images of Kin called "Conferences with the Unknown." In the epigraph to that poem Frederick W. Turner III cites the following:" ...in another way the shocking and absurd disjunction of the Western towns and whatever natural environment has been permitted to survive around them: Colorado Springs, for example, with its pretentious 'downtown,' its hopeless grids of suburban bungalows--mocked and dwarfed by the solemnity of Pike's Peak."

I had the opportunity to visit with Turner as a friend and colleague several times in the Pioneer Valley and "way out west." A close reading of the poem is a detailed commentary of the psychic landscape we inherit; Turner's own bibliography as a student of Geronimo, geographer, folklorist, jazz critic, biographer of John Muir allows me to visit the terrain of Sand Creek, a small incident of American terrorism which stands for the potential to annihilate the other. At this late date, "the other" is ourselves.

Antonucci: This brings to mind several poems in which you address the work of U. B. Phillips, the Dunning School, D. W. Griffith, and Frederick Jackson Turner. Is it fair to understand your verse as offering a critique of specific traditions in American historiography? Can it be said that you are writing "against" one particular position or another?

Harper: Ralph Ellison said: "The Negro is the most intimate part of American History." For any artist to be fully conscious of his country he must learn to see the reductive elements of "historical truth" as at least in part a "theory of traduction." Phillips, Dunning, Griffith, Turner, all white males, would have to prove to me in their intimate lives, including the testimony of the women they knew and the daughters they raised and they did not raise, that they were capable of embracing Ellison's prism on intimacy. Miscegenation and incest are the underpinnings of Ellison's remarks. Strategic scenes in his novel Invisible Man elucidate this thesis.

Antonucci: In your interview with David Lloyd, he asked if you were "trying to re-write history" in your poems about black athletes, including Willie Mays and Jackie Robinson. At that time your answer suggested that there was more going on than a rewriting of history. Would you care to comment further?

Harper: I just saw a documentary on Willie Mays. Mays was the most dominant player from 1951 until 1970. He grew up with Joe DiMaggio as his model, and when he ended his career as a Met in New York, his favorite city, he had been betrayed by the New York/San Francisco Giants, who had assured him he would spend his entire career as a Giant. Like Michael Jordan, Mays had made money for all the baseball franchises during his era. Attendance went up when he appeared in opposing parks. He was the fuel, in terms of gates, for the opposition just as Jackie Robinson had been before him. What Mays and Robinson had given to America is immeasurable. What I am suggesting in both poems is that the thirst of "the bitch goddess of success" is unquenchable. The ethos of America and the survival of the country depend on intimate knowledge of games played in childhood translating politically as equity on an even playing field.

The question I pose to my readers in my aesthetics is represented by the hidden truths that underpin any art, and is resonant with this answer. In his chosen sport of baseball, Mays was beyond category. I consider myself a student of Mays, and when I am writing about him, although I may not be making reference to it, I have enormous kinship with him and with his abilities. I felt that he was an archetype and that he was not really seen as a kind of a magisterial figure, and part of it was because he was black. The poem "No. 24" might not be a summary of his career, and I am not trying to give a kind of annotation of his career, but what I am trying to do is speak about an occasion when he is stepping off the stage.

When Mays first came up, he was a boy; he was nineteen, twenty years old. He was a good ball player even when he was in his mid-teens in the Negro Leagues playing with the Birmingham Black Barons. When he was traded to the Mets, before he retired, he was a man of diminished skills. The fulcrum of my poem changes because Mays was so concerned about performing at his best in front of those New York crowds. People came out to see him play. There was nothing he couldn't do, and he did it better than everyone else. Anybody who went to a ball game and saw him play knew that he was better than Mantle. There were so many aspects of the game that he knew; and that doesn't mean that Mantle wasn't a great athlete, there's no question about that. Those are part of the dynamics going on in that Mays poem.

Another part of the poem lies in the fact that he's older than me and kind of defined my era. He was rookie of the year in 1951, the year that my family moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles. So, you have my own personal history in the poem, which is not important other than that it frames or defines a situation. My father was a Giants' fan. I grew up, was born and raised, in Brooklyn, but I wasn't a Brooklyn fan; I was a Giant fan and being a Giant fan entailed a certain kind of tradition. What the Giants represented was very singular. What made things different for me was that I was in a very ambivalent position.

When black athletes first came into the Major Leagues, I had already been following black athletes. I had been going to Negro League games. While other kids were going to Yankee Stadium, I was watching the Negro League games. Monte Irvin was known to me before he broke in with the Giants, and there were numerous others.

Antonucci: As you say, "No. 24" presents Mays's baseball skills diminishing. It also seems to chronicle the inability of this black athlete to attain a full measure of manhood in the eyes of a white public. As the poems says: "Cokes and comic books."

Harper: You've got to remember that we are playing a game here, but that game is deadly. There is a whole convention of archetypal figures who can't accommodate themselves to the world when they are playing the game. I believe that one of my strong points in writing poetry is my illusiveness. A lot of people accuse me of being obscure, but it's not so much obscurity as it is the fact that my sense of the canniness of the discussion of language and making metaphor is very ... warlike or combative, and you've got to be careful when you enter the lexicon of battle. You think this isn't deadly serious? This is what Ellison is talking about when he talks about aesthetic values. People fight hardest over aesthetic values. There is an awareness in the poem, whether this succeeds or not.

The lineation in my poems is akin to the inner phrasing of the great musicians who informed me about individual virtuoso performance and group musicianship. Hence the analogy between music and sports, particularly in the American landscape where fun is deadly serious. As Yeats said, "Memories are old identities." Both Robinson and Mays were the transitional points between the Negro Leagues and Major League baseball. How long would it take the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, to acknowledge these black players? The poem "Archives," written for my son Patrice, tries to answer this question.

Antonucci: On the subject of archives and records, it can be argued that Americans give history an exclusive hold or dominion over "the Past." Could you comment on the engagements between "history" and "memory" in your work?

Harper: It is arrogant as a living poet to theorize and comment on poems I have written, a kind of work-in-progress, as though I know the endpoint while immersed in the compositional moment. My hope is that the best of what I have to say is offered in that moment, where the weight of what I know and what I need to discover, including the mysteries around aesthetic process, will be useful to readers. What I strive for is a unique blend of eloquence and original phrasing as practiced by the best musicians, and equivalence of interior speech and historical wakefulness as a person alive in a dynamic reality. I surprise myself often by what I write and how oblivious I can be on the re-reading.

At this late point, I can't find the energy to revise with all my other chores. This is a blessing and a curse for one who does not have a great love for critics. I hope whatever criticism my efforts generate will be kindly. With so much amnesia in the world, and now the emerging electronics on the superhighway, I expect to be ignored or worse. However, as Cassandra has reminded us, the best of what I hope for should not be forgotten; or, in Ellison's words, "Who knows but that on the lower frequencies I speak for you?"

Antonucci: When you conducted an interview of Ralph Ellison, along with Robert Stepto (published in The Massachusetts Review, 1977), Ellison said, "I'd like to see more done on the role of geography in American Negro history.... Many Afro-American characteristics that are assumed to spring from the brutality of slavery are partially the result of geography, of localities in which they were enslaved. Some of this is suggested in the phrase 'sold down the river.' "He goes on to say more on the subject, some of which is excerpted in your essay "My Poetic Technique and the Humanization of the American Audience." Does Ellison's quote serve as a legend or key to the poetic landscape described in this essay?

Harper: The essay itself was haphazardly done in one sitting as part of an appearance on a program sponsored by R. Baxter Miller. I sat down and wrote it because he asked for it, and as a critic, he expected something more than an improvised text. Ellison taught me in the interview that for posterity's sake and his own sense of continuity the offhand response to complex questions is often inadequate. Anyone who compares the original tapes of the interview and the published product will see gaps of enunciation, omission, and expansion. I, myself, was green; that is, less experienced than Ellison in some of my queries. Ellison comments on people of lesser fame, but the ones most important to him and his development, for example, Roscoe Dungee, a newspaperman and civic activist from Oklahoma. People like Mr. Dungee were role models to whole communities fed spiritually by his eloquence. What Ellison meant by geography in these terms intends to place these agents in proper context and flesh out the American democr atic process. In retrospect, as I consider Ellison's essays and interviews, posthumously, I marvel at his wisdom and faith.

Antouncci: Would you care to discuss the ways in which Ellison and Harper employ a geographic approach to history in their work? Specifically, would you speak to their discussion of "the territory," particularly its boundaries and topography?

Harper: Ellison's idea of the territory is well-documented. I learned about Bessie Smith from my parents' record collection. She was dead before I was born. Ellison to me is not a relative but an ancestor. Ellison pointed out to me in numerous speeches that the American tongue and all its tributaries preceded America as a country--this complex formulation for colonial people embracing the functional ideals of American democracy which are still being played out. Ellison's faith was in the writers, including poets, who documented this process.

Antonucci: In the interview with Randall we touched on earlier, you are quoted as saying, "We [Americans] have a psychic weight of discovery and colonization, murder and slavery; the sacred documents such as the Bill of Rights are the reality and the tensions and parodies of self and national definition ...." How does your work imagine the United States and American psychic landscape as having a colonial legacy?

Harper: I remember having to re-write Randall's questions to me after a very hurried recording session. For me to answer this question now, as a native of Brooklyn, New York, born in the same house as my mother, after moving to Los Angeles with the family in 1951 and living through what Robert Lowell described as the tranquilized fifties, recalling the death of Mickey Cohen, local racketeer, and the redistribution of his control through the Mafia, most recently reflected in the movie LA Confidential, and in the wake of the 1960s and what is now called the Black Arts Movement, which began in the late 1950s from an experiential point of view, indicates how anomalously one sees the world as one looks back.

My experience at Iowa in the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1961 was only a year's immersion in what people used to call the Athens of the Midwest. Yet, I am able to see in retrospect the Iowa experience as middle America during that period for me: JFK, the beginnings of the Vietnam War, Coltrane's music at his zenith, the artistry of Miles Davis, the death and resurrection of Billie Holiday by poor imitators, rhythm and blues music of many locations appropriated by the Beatles and other British groups, then the Nixon and Reagan years--both appear as periods of false modesty about the efficacies of public education and their lack. Now the perilous nineties--with more millionaires made on the stock market than ever before during any period since the Reconstruction.

This psychic overview at the turn of the century makes my own development seem spotty, resonant, earnest, and partial. I remember being unwilling to hold the hands of other Iowa students while Civil Rights workers, many of them bombed in buses, were on campus to earn money for their efforts at civil disobedience. I could not hold hands in an audience of people singing "We Shall Overcome" who had participated in zoning restrictions in Iowa City, a university town with an almost non-existent residential black community. Through television, movies, documentaries, the sitcom, the Academy Awards, the Internet, and cyberspace we have still not fully touched what Ellison termed our "trained incapacity" as citizens trying to make a civil society. My hope is that the twenty-first century will no longer be characterized by what Du Bois termed the twentieth: "the problem of the color-line." I've spent my life not accepting the dictates of white supremacy, foreign and domestic.

Antonucci: This leads to what Robert Stepto calls "the Mexico poems." It would seem that through them your work finds its way into the anti-colonial or post-colonial category. Is this a fair account of your sensibility or just another label to duck?

Harper: In queries from critics about this question, my answer has always been both/and. I have been lucky enough to have traveled about the world representing my own country in official and unofficial capacities. It is interesting to me how people from other cultures allow me to speak for all and particularize my discourse as primarily racial. Since America was originally a colony breaking away from England, Americans still occupy a view as the most industrialized superhighway in the world of technology. Americans see their responsibility collectively and individually. This is both luck and a curse.

Antonucci: You have worked with and known a number of post-colonial African writers in your career. Frank Chipasula and the "When My Brothers Come Home" project is just one example. What effect, if any, have these experiences had on your work either as an American or African American writer?

Harper: As a teacher, I was able to encourage Mr. Chipasula in an independent study project on the poetry of sub-Saharan Africa in the modem period and see his efforts become an anthology published by a first-rate university press. I met him in Zambia, where he was in exile from Malawi. Since meeting him over two decades ago, he has returned home to his native country. His doctoral dissertation was on Yeats and Noh drama, and he continues to write poetry and criticism, and raise a family. Perhaps he will write a memoir about his experience and tell us how an artist can survive intercontinentally, with all his universal linguistic gifts, tribal and singular.

Antonucci: Your readers are no doubt familiar with the poetic consideration that you have given to the work of Romare Bearden. I'm interested in hearing your thoughts and comments about the impact that other works of visual art or by visual artists have made upon your verse--for example, Oliver Jackson.

Harper: Jackson's woodcut of the Pieta theme hangs in my loft as a reminder of a classical motif, the Pieta of the Virgin Mary and Jesus. Updated by Jackson's vision, his depicts two male figures, one assisting the other--an exploration of the motif of the double drawn with great skill and reminiscent of the craft one must have to make art. The notion of make is meant to suggest the construction of force as an artistic creed accomplished through technique in constructing new imagery.

I have known Oliver Jackson since 1961 and have explored ideas of the African continuum, the collaborative efforts of artists and the singular responsibility each artistic avenue demands, both expressive and philosophical. Jackson has been a productive friend and confidante since our meeting at Iowa. In an interview and later a retrospective piece written about the workshop at Iowa in memory of Paul Engle, it is Jackson's image as collaborator and fellow artist that remains most resonant to me up to this present day. Look for a poem called "Pieta," which would be dedicated to him.

The "High Modes" section of History is Your Own Heartbeat is a retelling of Jackson's vision as an artist, in which the grid discussion and the nine-part partition of the poem restructure my consideration of the nine muses. The recontextualization of that explanation for how the arts and sciences got into the world is examined as a poetic sequence with increments of discussion from Charlie Parker to Oliver Jackson. It is no accident that key references to the Pelopponesian Wars through the character of Alcibiades are meant to suggest the mode of war we are presently living in.

James Baldwin said, "Artists are here to disturb the peace." For artists of Oliver Jackson's accomplishment, the rigor of the poem is meant to suggest the accomplishments to come in Jackson's vision. John S. Wright has written a tour de force, a version of which was delivered at Bowdoin College on October 25, 1996, entitled "Michael Harper's 'High Modes': The Burden of Metaphor and the Artful Frequencies of Memory." This piece by John Wright and the work of the other critics of stature present on that occasion provoked the comment from me that I, as a poet, am now in apotheosis. As Sterling Brown said on his eightieth birthday, which he celebrated at Brown University, "At my age I'm not throwing anything back."

Michael Antonucci is a Ph.D. candidate at Emory University's Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts. His poetry has appeared in Janus Head and Poetry Motel.