Owen Dodson lecture, "Why and What is Drama?," at the University of Iowa, June 3, 1973

Speaker 1: The following is an address from the Fifth Annual Institute for Afro-American Culture, recorded at the University of Iowa June 3rd. The Institute took up the topic the Afro-American On Stage and Film. Speaking on Why and What is Drama is Owen Dodson, poet, novelist, and playwright. Introducing Mr. Dodson is Dr. Darwin Turner, Director of the Institute for Afro-American Culture at the University of Iowa. Darwin Turner: We're very pleased to welcome you to the opening session of the Fifth Annual Institute Afro-American Culture at the University of Iowa. For those of you who are not participating in the Institute, but who are simply attending a session, I should explain that I have already explained to our lecturer for the evening that the numbers of seats tenanted by invisible personages does not come as a surprise to us, because a session immediately preceding this for the Institute participants was held in this building. We wanted to have a room in this building, rather than transporting everything across campus, and at the same time we wanted to have a place large enough to permit perhaps a few outsiders to share this evening with us. At various places on the campus and in various newspapers, you will find announcements of programs that will be given in the evenings, lectures particularly in Shambaugh Auditorium. Darwin Turner: It is always a pleasure and a privilege to introduce an individual who is distinguished both in the academic world and as a creative artist. It is even more unusual, however, to find an artist who has earned international recognition in more than one field of creativity. Such, however, is the distinction of our guest lecturer for this evening, Owen Dodson, poet, playwright, novelist, director. Mr. Dodson received his bachelors Phi Beta Kappa from Bates College, which later honored him with a Doctor of Letters degree. He earned a Master of Arts from Yale University. As a teacher, he began at such institutions as Atlanta University, Spelman, Hampton, but he is best known probably as a Director and head of the Department of Drama for many years at Howard University in Washington, D.C. As an internationally recognized person, he's had the opportunity to lecture on drama and to read his poetry at colleges and universities throughout America and in the Caribbean. I understand that he has recently read his poetry at the Library of Congress in their series. Darwin Turner: He is distinguished as a writer. He holds many awards, having received the coveted Guggenheim, the Rosenwald, the Rockefeller. As a poet he is best known for Powerful Long Ladder, The Dream Awake: A History of the Negro in America, and his most recently completed work, which is to be published this year. I told Mr. Dodson that even if it is the trend to have long titles that I would say nasty things about a person who would change a title from Cages to the new title, The Morning Duke Ellington Praised the Lord and Seven Little Black Boys Tap Dance Unto Him. As a novelist, he is the author of Boy At the Window, and forthcoming this year will be A Bent House. Darwin Turner: Even though Mr. Dodson would be invited to lecture at institutions because of his general literary excellence, it is his eminence in theater which causes us to be especially delighted to have him as the first speaker of this drama institute. He has naturally been a writer, the author of Bayou Legend, the author of Divine Comedy, the author of The Garden of Time, which was produced by the American Negro Theater, the winner of a Maxwell Anderson Verse Drama Award, and the author of several short plays, A Pageant, operas such as A Christmas Miracle and The Confession Stone. That's only one facet of his contribution in theater. He's also been a director. As a director of college groups, he gave early guidance and development to such now distinguished Black actors and actresses as Hilda Sims, Gordon Heath, Earle Hyman. He has directed summer theaters throughout America. He was a director of one of the first college groups to participate in an international cultural exchange between America and countries in Europe and Scandinavian countries. That's not all. Darwin Turner: He was a charter member of the Negro Playwrights Company. He directed The Garden of Time in the Professional Theater for the American Negro Theater. He served as the executive secretary of a committee of the American Film Center, a committee charged with responsibility of devising means of eliminating the stereotypes of Blacks in motion pictures. He served as an artistic consultant to the Harlem School of the Arts Community Theater. Darwin Turner: If I continued to detail the accomplishments of Mr. Dodson, the recognition which he has received from critics, such details as the fact that his work is now published in at least 42 anthologies at last count, if I were to continue in this fashion, I would speak longer than he intends to. I can hear the voice of Mr. Dodson saying in his favorite idiom, "Hush, child." Without further ado, let me introduce Mr. Owen Dodson to talk on the subject Why and What is a Play. Owen Dodson: Thank you, Dr. Turner. I might say first that I'm very, very happy to be here, first of all, to be out of New York and its great confusion and its lack of fresh air, but more than that, to be able to participate in a program that seems to me so wisely gotten together and so that it will influence people all over the country, people who will go back to their own schools or communities and say something about what this Institute stands for, and perhaps use some of the ideas we have said here, we will say here in the next two weeks. Owen Dodson: Why and what is a play? To answer this question is like trying to define the colors of sunset to a friend born blind. It is a matter of taste, your experience, and so I said, "This is only my version of why and what is a play." As you work in the theater, I think you will find out that you will begin to have your own list of criteria, and sometimes you will be shocked at the greatness that breaks your particular taste. Owen Dodson: What do art and all artists have in common? Say Shakespeare's Hamlet, Hansberry's Raisin in the Sun, the paintings of Paul Klee, Hellman's The Little Foxes, the acting of Eleonora Duse, Da Vinci's Mona Lisa, Greta Garbo's Camille, the singing of Marian Anderson, the poetry of T.S. Eliot, the Museum of Modern Art, St. Peters in Rome, Baldwin's The Amen Corner. All these persons and places are inheritors of the greatest gifts that the gods can give to mankind, because of all the things that last in our world, the economic struggles, all of these things fade away, but art stays, either in remembrance, or you can still see it and view it, or read it, even if you don't see a play, for instance, acted. Owen Dodson: Art is capable of projecting form to the monotony and confusion of most of our days. Artists help us to hear the great joys and bear the great fears and sorrows. William Blake said that, "Joy and woe are woven fine, a clothing for the soul divine, under every grief and pine, runs a joy with silken twine. It is right, it should be so, man was made for joy and woe, and when this we rightly know, safely through the world we go." Art gives us samples and examples of what life can be and should be. Owen Dodson: Strindberg's grandson, when Strindberg was an old man, filled with fears, with honors, like the Nobel Prize, his grandson climbed into his lap and he said, "Grandpa, can God see in the dark?" Strindberg answered directly, "No, but your grandfather can." This is what artists can do. They can see into the dark of our psyche, and they can project even in the nighttime of our world, something of the illumination of what can happen when we listen, when we look, at the creations that are set before us, that are all around us, whether it be a tree, a bird, a play, or a picture. Owen Dodson: There are several things that I think all art has. One is universality. That is the first criteria. I remember a Norwegian saying to me, "You know, one of our Swedish actresses came over to your country, and when I asked her what she wanted to see, she said, 'I want to see Raisin in the Sun.'" He said, "Oh, you won't understand that. That's about Negroes and a Negro family." He said, "I'll get tickets if you want to see it." Afterwards he said, "Did you understand it?" She said, "Understand it? What is there to understand? It's about a mother who wanted her children and her grandson and even her plants to have a better life outside of roaches and rats in the ghettos." She says, "That's what all mothers want all over the world, a better life for their families." Owen Dodson: You see, in plays like The Amen Corner by James Baldwin, who set out and started to be one of the great writers of our time. We'll talk about him just briefly a little later. This is merely the story of a man who played the sax. He loved the sax as much as he loved his wife. His wife was a devotee of God. They never got along together. He left, and she started storefront churches in Philadelphia and in New York. He came back coughing. It wasn't tuberculosis. It's what we call consumption. He was consumed. Little by little, she realized that the love of God was the love of a person on this earth, that God was abstract, and she was sorry. The storefront churches in her mind were no more. It's a universal thing. We know that love can conquer everything. This is one of Baldwin's greatest works, because he says something to all of us. Don't give up anything. Once you've got him, never let him go. You know that song. Owen Dodson: In Riders to the Sea, there's an old Irish woman. Her last son has been drowned in the sea. Four other sons have been drowned. Her husband has been drowned. At the end of the play, as his body is brought in, she says, "I can be at peace now. Everything that could happen to me has happened." That is important. The tragedy can be a peace-giver, as well as a soul-breaker. Owen Dodson: Another thing that art can do came to me when I read a little biography of the great scene designer Robert Edmond Jones. He used to sit in the attic of his New England home, day after day. One day his mother said, "What in the world are you doing, boy?" He said, "I'm drawing pictures." She said, "Now what good is that going to do?" He said, "I figure that once you got an idea and set it down, it would stay." This of course is so important. We can die, buildings can topple, there can be all kinds of catastrophes, but Hamlet is always there. He's always 18 or 28 or whatever you want him to be. His tragedy, his exaltation, his philosophical mind will always be with us. He cannot be erased. The terrible fury and despicable quality of Hedda Gabler will always stay, because there are Hedda Gablers among us all and in us all. Owen Dodson: I remember writing about a little boy who came home one day with a black eye. His father said, "What happened to you, son?" He said, "I had a fight with William. He's bigger than me." The father said, "I guess we'll have to transfer you to another school." That little boy was wise. He said, "There are Williams everywhere." That art, these examples that stand before us, in writing, in buildings, and in paintings and sculpture, will always be there in some form or other, in the shape of buildings, but always in literature and always in plays, especially in the written word. Owen Dodson: One thing is suggestiveness. A playwright has only a short time, sometimes to put in a day on the stage, sometimes to show us a whole lifetime, sometimes to show us a whole epoch. In that time, now a few break the rules, like Eugene O'Neill in Mourning Becomes Electra or say Jean Genet in Screens, they last four hours or five hours, but the grip of their dramatic imagination can keep us in the theater, as long as we want them there. Of course that's one thing about the theater. If you are bored, then you leave, mentally or physically. This idea of suggestiveness, we've got to compress, everything must mean something, you don't have to have great love scenes between Romeo and Juliet. We do have that one. The greatest love scene is in two lines. After they have met in the garden, dawn is coming up, and they're afraid they'll be caught. Romeo climbs down the vines and begins to run down the garden. She calls, "Psst, Romeo," and he comes running back. I don't know the exact words, but it's like, "What do you want?" She said, "I did forget why I did call thee back." She wanted to see this mirage, this thing, as if she had glimpsed her great love and the tragedy of their love together. Owen Dodson: Clifford Odets's In Paradise Lost didn't have to have this woman who was uncapable of bearing a child say anything but one line, and we knew. We knew everything. She said, "If I had a child, I'd give it toys of gold to play with." That child we knew would be rotten, spoiled, that he would kick her in the teeth spiritually, after a while he wouldn't appreciate anything, that we can prepare ourselves for everything that was going to happen between both of them. Owen Dodson: Dumas fils, oh he was something. He ate prodigious meals! He made love prodigiously. He traveled to Italy and stopped in Naples, and he said, "I like this place." He stayed there 11 years and wrote volumes about it. Then he came back and ate prodigiously, fornicated prodigiously. It was quite something. One of his friends said, "Dumas, when you die, what are you going to say to death?" "Oh," he said, "She will be kind to me, for I will tell her stories." The arrogance of the man! Then loving women so much, he thought that everything was a woman, that even death could be conquered by fornication of some kind. Owen Dodson: When I came back, the day after Martin Luther King was killed, Washington was in chaos, absolute chaos. I had to stay out of the city. There was a curfew. The next morning when I came back, I walked to school. There was a little girl holding her father's hand. I guess it was her father. She was prancing along. She had on a little pinafore. It was starched and fixed. She said, "Today in school, we studied about Australia." Said, "You know they have kangaroos in Australia. They have pockets in their stomachs, and they hold their little children there." She went on and on. She said, "How many square miles?" I told her how many square miles. [inaudible]. He said, "Shut up, you little bag of shit!" We knew what happened when she got home, the environment, that all of the love and the strength and the teaching of that teacher would be destroyed, and her enthusiasm, unless she had some extra vein of iron in her. Owen Dodson: In The Little Foxes too, suggestiveness. They never say that Regina, who has really stolen all of the money in the house, would be punished, but at the end of the play, after she had let her husband die by not giving him his heart pills, her daughter comes in, says, "What happened to papa?" She said, "I'm going to Chicago." She said, "Will you sleep in my room tonight, Alexandra?" Alexandra says, "No." We know that retribution has set in, and there will be no redemption for her. That's the only indication, but it is suggestive of what is going to happen. You don't have to spell it all out. Owen Dodson: In Michelangelo's David, if you see him with a slingshot over his shoulder, you know that he represents all of the young men who are in rebellion against the old order and rebellion against the enemy and in rebellion against everything that tries to destroy the human spirit, a giant, the Goliath that pursues us all, and of course even our civilization. Owen Dodson: I remember there was a boy in the Navy. He was Black. When I say Black, I mean he was Black. It was a marvelous Blackness. It was like a piece of Barthe's sculpture. He hardly ever went off the base. He was ashamed of being Black. We were in a segregated camp that helped too. He hardly ever wanted to go out, but when he did go out and finally got to Chicago, he'd go through back alleys to his destination, so people wouldn't see how black he was. One day, I slipped a little poem that I wrote to him in his ... I think we had hammocks then. I wrote, "I'm so black they call me nighttime. When I walk alone, everyone looks for stars." He didn't go through back alleys anymore. He knew that he was a human being, that he was beautiful, and there was nothing that could shake him anymore because of his blackness. Owen Dodson: Insecurity. That is another thing that is so important. W.H. Auden, the great English poet, wrote, "Safe in Egypt we shall sigh for lost insecurity, only when its terrors come shall our flesh feel quite at home." We can see tragic examples of that in some of our Black artists and others. Owen Dodson: Richard Wright, who had written Black Boy, who had written Uncle Tom's Children, Native Son, and had shaken America with a new kind of indignation and intellectual and emotional protest, after he had made all of that [missoula] or bread, decided that he was going to France to escape it all and be free. Almost everything he wrote since then turned to lead. Turned to lead! He was secure. He had money. He had fame. He was acclaimed, and his writing sank. Owen Dodson: The same thing with James Baldwin. The magnificence of that bad play, Blues for Mister Charlie, the perfect play, The Amen Corner, his magnificent essays, all of these were what made James Baldwin, and then he decided to go to Africa. I said, "At last. He's been talking about Africa all ... He can go to Africa." He went up Africa to Morocco. He went to Istanbul to play around. I needn't go any further. Now he is settled in Paris, for the most part. We read Another Country, we read Tell Me How the Train's Been Gone, and it's a phony bunch of you know, so that this insecurity is important, so that the artist doesn't become fat with physical, financial success. Owen Dodson: Even a great artist like Wordsworth, who changed the course of Romantic poetry in the world, became Poet Laureate. He had an annual income. He was practically knighted by the Queen. Everywhere he went it was Wordsworth, Wordsworth. Browning wrote, he said, "Just for a handful of silver he left us, just for a ribbon to stick in his coat." You will find also a certain unexpectedness in great art. It doesn't turn out the way you think it's going to turn out, but it is right. You find juxtaposition, two things going side by side. Say joy and woe. Owen Dodson: I remember in 1964 I was in Rome, and I decided to go to St. Peters Square and see the Pope. There were thousands there. There were loud speakers of course, way up there, a mile away almost. The Pope came out on a litter with the Swiss guards holding him up. He had on the triple crown. He was the vicar truly of Christ. He said, "Sic!" as he blessed the crowd. He turned in each direction and kept repeating, "Sic semper gloria mundi. Thus passes the glory of the world." Do you know that the vicar of Christ, wearing the ornaments of the richest of the world, got the hiccups? Owen Dodson: This certain unexpectedness, there were people from the plains, a whole group of them who decided to come East, and they saw for the first time these hicks, the men with their hick hats, the women with their shawls, like Irish mourners on, saw the sea for the first time. The men took off their hats, and the women let down their shawls. Ain't that nice? It was a salute. A salute to nature, to a world they had never known. Owen Dodson: I remember when my oldest sister, who brought me up, died, and my youngest sister, when I told her the news, I was the only one with my oldest sister, she didn't become hysterical, she didn't cry. She said, "Where's my nail polish?" She said, "Where is my nail polish?" She opened drawers as if she were a thief or a burglar. She looked in the most unnatural places, under mattresses. She looked in the toaster. It was grief beyond. Beyond grief. It was so unexpected. It was so terrible. It was practically Greek. Owen Dodson: All through the play of Camille on the screen, they said Miss Garbo was saying, "You know, I am really a peasant at heart." She was the most elegant courtesan in Europe. If you were the most elegant courtesan in Paris, you were the most elegant. They said she kept saying, "At heart, I'm really a peasant." I never saw evidence of it. She ate with such delicacy. She only drank champagne and had oysters at 12:00. She lost her lover. She went to the country. Her lover's father came out to see her. As she approached the carriage, she stopped and gave a little country bow, and we knew, just that one thing, that she had been a peasant. Owen Dodson: A friend of mine, a poet, died. She was minor, but she was so wonderful as a friend. She was a good cook. I went to the undertakers to see Esther Popel Shaw. It was in a snowstorm. I went up these steps, and a tall, elegant undertaker man, he had undertakers clothes on, that white shirt and that black tie and that black suit and that look on his face, as if he had a personal loss. He said to this woman who came in ... No, she said to me, said, "Who would you like to view?" I said, "Mrs. Shaw." He said, "Down the hall and to your left." I looked at the flowers and things. As I was coming out, a woman came in, she was all dressed in black. She was Black. She had on those black stockings, I mean opaque stockings, not elegant black stockings like the young people wear now. He said, "Who would you like to view?" She said, "All of them!" I was in hysterics. Here I'd just seen this woman that I loved, and she was lying dead, but I was laughing as I went out of the funeral parlor. Owen Dodson: I remember when Countee Cullen died. They lived in the country. His wife called me up and she said, "I can't get down from Tuckahoe. Would you go by the undertakers and see if he looks all right, they got the right tie on him and his hair is combed the way you knew it should be?" I said, "Of course." I don't know why he was in this cheap brownstone undertakers parlor. I went downstairs and I rang the bell. Presently, a woman poked her head out of the third floor. She had on one of those kimonos, one of those pink kimonos. She said, "What do you want?" This is a fine poet, who loved craftsmanship, never unrestrained, always held in, always a great lover of beauty. I said, "I'd like to see Mr. Cullen." She said, "He ain't ready yet!" Of course I broke up. He was one of my best friends. Owen Dodson: These things always are happening, in all plays. You see it in Shakespeare in the porter scene after they have murdered, stabbed their king. Blood is on their hands, and the porter comes in drunk, and it gets almost hysterical. Here's this king who is so gentle, and you're laughing. So it is. The party before the cherry orchard is sold. When the party is going on, the cherry orchard has been sold. They don't know it yet. They're drinking champagne and they're dancing the polka. We know the cherry orchard has been sold. It breaks our heart, because these things are happening side by side. Owen Dodson: Language must always match emotion. That very often at the beginning of plays we have common, ordinary language, language that just says, "Come in. How do you do?" We have some tea. As the play progresses and the emotion builds, somehow even peasants, people who have no feeling for language, somehow they rise, they don't know it, to the occasion of their or their grief or whatever it is. Even in comedies this happens. We are laughing all throughout You Can't Take It With You, but at the end, I think it's the second act, old grandpa Vanderhof stands up and he says, "We want to thank you, Lord, for sending us this food and this bounty." He praises God. This old rapscallion who won't pay his income tax. I wish we all had the nerve to do that. Owen Dodson: In Juno and the Paycock, the language is fairly flatfooted, but there's a time when a boy is killed, and the mother says, "Take away their hearts of steel and give them hearts of love." Raisin in the Sun, this woman who has really not poetry in her, says to her younger daughter, "In my house, there is always God. Say it!" Said, "In my house there is always God. Say it or remove yourself." This girl says, "In my mother's house there is always God." The language rises to the occasion, just that one line. Owen Dodson: Lastly, there must be compassion. Compassion is something that you embrace people with, the crooks, the prostitutes, the people in the Watergate scandal, the murderers, the compassion of Mrs. King or of Mrs. Kennedy. She said, "Don't kill my husband's murderer. Don't kill him." It's almost a Christ-like thing. It reveals. It understands, or tries to understand. Owen Dodson: Art gives us the motivation to find out why people are the way they are instead of condemning them. The dope, we used to call them dope fiends. Now we have all kinds of fancy names, but that's what they are, dope fiends. Everybody who was a dope addict, is a dope addict for some reason or other. The alcoholic, for some reason or other. Owen Dodson: A playwright, like Eugene O'Neill in the Long Day's Journey Into Night, he doesn't condemn that mother who is addicted or the father who is a pinchpenny or the brother who says to his younger brother, "If you come out of that sanitarium, I'm going to kill you." Said, "Stay there." He lets us see them. They're illuminated before our eyes. He said, "This is the way it happens. This is the way it is." Owen Dodson: We don't condemn Blanche in Streetcar Named Desire. She has had men by the dozens. We know what happened, why she is the way she is, loneliness, emptiness, all of the traditions she was used to, scattered away. We don't condemn Baker Thomas, even though he has put the body of a girl in the furnace, although he gives her body to be burned, because at the end of the play when they're about to take him away to die, that young man is just ready to live. He has begun to understand that life is valuable and is something, and that he could have participated in the event of this life. Owen Dodson: The theater started as a rite in the temple of the spirit. It remains just that way. Rembrandt wandering the ghettos of Amsterdam, looking for models, found out that there was something golden in that old man, that little girl, that mother, in rags, and he painted them. He illuminated their souls. They shine from within. He found out there was something golden in them. Owen Dodson: Gorky, who saw the outcasts everywhere, even in his play The Lower Depths, has the spirit of Christ pass through, and for a moment, the alcoholic, the pervert, the consumptive realize that they have missed something. For just that small time, their lives are transformed, and they'll never forget when the pilgrim passed. We all, the highest and the lowest, may participate in the rituals of the theater, which embraces all of the arts. Darwin Turner: It seems far too commonplace for me to break the spell by saying that Mr. Dodson has agreed to take a moment or two to respond to questions. Many of you will be in the Institute tomorrow and will have an opportunity to talk with Mr. Dodson then. Some of you may wish to come up after the session tonight and talk with Mr. Dodson for a moment. Out of any respect for anyone who may have a burning question at this moment, let me permit you to ask it. Speaker 4: [inaudible]. I wonder if you'd consider that out of order right now. Owen Dodson: It wouldn't be out of order, except I don't have the poems. They're up in my room. If anyone has any questions, I can send for some, or if you're going to [inaudible] to the inner room, by that time I can have some poems and I can read some to you. I can read The Morning Duke Ellington Praised the Lord and Seven Little Black Davids Tap Danced Unto. If there are any other questions while I send for those, you can ask them. Tomorrow will be a talk, a session on new Black playwrights. We will talk a bit about Leroy Jones, a bit about Bullins, but mostly about playwrights who have another kind of vision and who have not the same kind of fight, but also have the vision and the vigor and sense that at the core of everything, if we are to survive, there is not garbage thrown into our faces. Yes? Speaker 5: [inaudible] there should be compassion. I was just wondering, should there never be condemnation? Should there never be condemnation? Owen Dodson: Let me send for some of those poems. Do we have time? I can answer that question. [inaudible]. Owen Dodson: I think I can read tomorrow. I think it'd be better, because I'll have my stuff together. That'll be after my talk tomorrow on the new playwrights. I purposely did not bring any Black drama tonight because I didn't want it to overlap with what I was trying to say about the general idea. All of this talk about art includes Mr. Bullins, Mr. [Maraka], or LeRoi Jones and several of the other playwrights. Some of them I have great respect for. The one thing that I will, my theme is going to be that we must be craftsmen as well as poets in the theater. When I say poets, I don't mean just writing poetry, poetic lines. It's poetic conceptions that can come true with the beauty of poetry, as well as quotable lines. Yes? Speaker 6: [inaudible]. Owen Dodson: I think Blues for Mister Charlie is a bad play, but it has moments of tremendous insight and tremendous writing, which I will just say a word about. It's a bad play because the form of it is bad. It is irregular. It is just as bad as Shakespeare's Love's Labors Lost, if you want to go to see that, or Two Gentlemen of Verona. Everybody had lapses. Speaker 6: I thought he was trying to experiment. Experimentation. Owen Dodson: Yeah, experimentation is just great, but experimentation means more than just trying to be different. The form that you write in must fit the subject matter, must fit the character. You just say, "I want to do this a different way." The subject matter and the characters dictate the way you will do a play. Just as Walt Whitman, for instance, didn't write, "Tell me not, in mournful numbers, life is but an empty dream, and the soul is dead in slumbers, and things are not what they seem." He made his own form, because it fitted the sprawling concept that he had of America and the largeness of his mind that wouldn't fit, say into a sonnet or a quatrain. You've got to be true to the form, and the form has got to fit what you are writing about. Owen Dodson: I had a teacher at Bates College. If I'm going over time, please tell me. At Bates College. He was marvelous. He said, "Owen, what do you think of this sonnet of Keats?" I forget what the sonnet was, but anyway, I was young and cocky then. I said, "I could write just as good." "Much have I traveled in the realms of gold," that's what it was, "Many goodly states and kingdoms seen." He said, "Oh, you can?" This is before the whole class. He said, "You will write four sonnets a week until you graduate, and you can't get away from me, because I'm your senior professor." He said, "I mean it." I wrote four sonnets a week. I had a stack of them after four years. He never criticized them or anything. I wrote about the rape of Negroes from Africa, of which I had then no feeling. I had been to Bates College and to a high school where there were two Negroes. I didn't know about all of this. Things that happened on the slave ship and the mothers being torn from their children and whippings and rapes and everything, all in sonnet form. Owen Dodson: At the end, he said, "I give you this A for effort." He said, "Now," he said, "You've got a wild subject matter, and you're trying to put the corset of a sonnet, that strict form. Some of these are Italian sonnets. You're trying to tell about the wild. A sonnet is cool." There are only a few that get away with it, like Claude McKay, "If we must die, let us not die like hogs. Hunted and pinned in an inglorious spot." Said, "Only a few can get away with it, and that's only one, but you've put all these lynchings and everything into these hundreds of sonnets!" You can ask me anything. Speaker 6: [inaudible]. Darwin Turner: I'd like to thank Mr. Dodson again, to thank you for coming, and to hope that those of you who are not participants in the Institute will have an opportunity to join with us for some of the open lectures that we will have in the evenings as the Institute continues. Good night.