Stephen Henderson lecture, "Black Poetry of the 1960s: The Continuing Challenge," at the University of Iowa, June 8, 1978

Vincent Harding: ... Stephen Henderson Program, and let me introduce to you once more Steve Henderson. Stephen Henders...: Thank you very much, but first I'd like to take the time out for a commercial message. The message is that I'm very happy to be here, and especially to be on a program with Vincent Harding, because Vincent and I worked together at the Institute of the Black World in Atlanta. Whatever I tried to do in understanding the New Black Poetry, was a result of the support of the Institute. That's part of the whole story too, because many of the ideas that were circulating in the '60s were crystallized at places like the Institute for the Arts and Humanities, the Institute of the Black World. Stephen Henders...: Many of those ideas had to be formulated in independent or ancillary kinds of structures like the Institute of the Black World, because the established universities and colleges found it uncomfortable to harbor those people who made those kinds of statements and those kinds of ideas. Again, if you are interested in survival of these kinds of ideas, then you ought to involve yourself in the survival of those institutions. Stephen Henders...: Talking to you today about the '60s brought back a lot of memories, a lot of those are not altogether pleasant, because the '60s was a period of very, very high tensions. This afternoon, I'm not going to talk for 30 minutes, what I'd like to do is have you talk, because I know you get tired of listening to people read from text. But there are some things that I'd like to try to bring to some kind of focus, to recapitulate briefly on what I wanted to say this morning was that it's much too early to be placing arbitrary stamps of evaluation or disapproval on an entire period like the '60s. It's much too early to placing a rubber stamp on a very complex movement like the movement, Black culture movement of the 1960s. And it's much too early for all kinds of reasons. Stephen Henders...: It's much too early because number one, all the data have not come in. That means in terms of literature, there were many people who published just a few things in the '60s and kept a lot of things unpublished. It means also that if you take into consideration anybody's anthology, what you have is a highly selective viewpoint. In my particular case, I made not bone to say I was making, I was presenting a thesis and I stand by the thesis, and of course, the thesis has been criticized, and some of the criticisms are good. There are things that I would like to clarify. But it's much too early to say that the '60s was just a period of noisy Black macho image making. It's much too early for that. Stephen Henders...: I think after we have had the time and the space to distance ourselves from this period, you'll realize the very powerful catalytic impact of these young people and older people who came to intellectual and spiritual fruition in the '60s. If you think in terms of the free speech movement, the women's movement, the gay movement and all of those movements which helped to liberate many people, you'll see that much of that energy came off Black college campuses first. Then of course, spread to other campuses. When we look at ourselves and again in reaction to the '60s, and try to justify ourselves as pampered academicians, you say who were not involved in action, not involved in community, that those of us who did fight to come to grips with these ideas, with these circumstances, who were in effect doing what we were best prepared to do. Stephen Henders...: Now we have another job. It seems to me that the job now is the continuing job of the university. I'm very old fashioned, because I still think that people like John Henry Newman have something to say about what a university is. Universities are by definition of course conservative, but a university seems to me provides a kind of cauldron that all kinds of mess bubbles and boils. But it has to be made of very important material, strong material, so all those contradictions will be kept into a mix. A cauldron can be made out of lead, a cauldron can be made out of iron, but in the 1970s and what we're talking about is an electromagnetic bottle, which we hold all of this tremendous plasma that the physicists talk about, and some kind of shape, and the hope that we would eventually get a controlled spiritual thermonuclear reaction. Stephen Henders...: This is what I hope. One of the things that I talked already about, some of the origins as I saw them in a brief probe of two of the important documents, journals coming out of this movement, namely Umbra and the zine. I tried to show that the article that appeared in Saturday Review was a vicious attack, it was also an unfortunate manifestation of the arbitrary uses of political power masquerading as free speech and free enterprise. Here you had an attempt to give the coup de grace to an entire period, and it was very, very unfortunate. You read, in all probability, the responses that the Saturday Review allowed to be made, and these were of course highly selective responses. Stephen Henders...: You had a little response by Ishmael Reed, Ishmael Reed had prepared something much longer, which I saw and some of it appeared in Yardbird Reader. You had a sort of emotional outbreak by Nikki Giovanni, which was the way she wanted to deal with that. But then you had one of these old but effective devices, what I call the melting pot ploy. You don't have to be Jewish ploy, in order to enjoy kosher food. That's true, you don't have to be Black in order to enjoy Black literature or even understand the poet, that's not the point. The point was who controls the image? The point is whether or not we have to spend in America the rest of our lives together continually struggling with the real challenge, the real basis on which this country is founded. The problem is that it is not an old problem. Stephen Henders...: All of you remember of course images of Negros in American fiction, that whole series of things by people like Sterling Brown, modernized by Jean Yellin ... What's her last name? Jean Yellin ... What is her name? Jean Fagan Yellin and Sherley Anne Williams. So the thing is continuing, but the fact of the matter that it's not only in literature, but it's in the media. When you think in terms of a satellite 22,000 miles apparently stationary, relatively stationary in space able to project cultural images all over the world, when you think in terms of economic disparities between people, when you think in terms of cultural differences, when you think in terms of the fact that we are living indeed on planet earth, on spaceship earth, if we do have the capability to wipe out life on this earth, then things like image building are not frivolous. Stephen Henders...: Things like telling the truth are not frivolous, because it's not so much a matter of eliminating a people, as it is a matter of eliminating the fact they ever were. So those are some of the things at the basis of a concern. The people who reacted to, many of the people who reacted to this literature, like some of the responses that I mentioned, made essentially, it seems to me, political counter reactions. Not that everything that was stated in the '60s of course was good or was even accurate. But the fact of the matter is this for me, if I have to say what I feel the accomplishment of the cultural movement of the '60s was, the Black cultural movement, I have to say number one, it represented a major declaration of independence. A major declaration of independence. Stephen Henders...: Everybody didn't make it, but it was made. Now whether people had problems with saying that I am Black, rather than I'm Negro, rather than I'm colored, or whatever, the fact of the matter is that was said with such force and such conviction, the newspapers stopped saying Negro and they started saying Black. Now for those of us, those of you who are my age, it was important to have the word Negro capitalized. We had all kinds of chills when we saw the word Negro small N. But it was another thing and it represents a shift in consciousness, there was a a further shift when Black Americans started to say that we are an African people. It didn't make a damn bit of difference whether you knew Yoruba, Swahili, or whatnot, the crucial awareness comes when we realize that on the American continents, we already have a prefiguring of what Africa can be and will be. An embryo. Stephen Henders...: Because other factors are still on the continent, but we have a prefiguring, we already have a pan-African culture in certain dimensions on the American continents. That is part of the mix, and it's very, very complex. Another aspect of that of course is that though the jet traveled, we have very truncated, a very truncated sense of time and a very truncated sense of space, so that it's possible now to talk to Africans face to face. You have dense concentrations of African cultures in a place like New York City, a place like Washington DC in particular, and you have a new process going on. That is going to affect American culture, it's already affected American culture in all kinds of ways. Stephen Henders...: These people in the '60s were talking about the music, and they're using the music as a point of reference because music has, to use Walter Pater's thing, all art aspires to the condition of music. Music can be very precise, at the same time, it's very abstract. The people in the '60s and the '50s too were saying that this music carries a social and political fate, whether you interpret that as message or not. People dialed around and said that music is supposed to be this, lyrics are supposed to be the other, politics and sociology are not relevant. But the fact of the matter is that if you are going to play the Mozart sonatas and if you don't realize what liberties a pianist could take in embellishing the music of that period, and if you insist on playing the thing as it's specifically written, then you aren't being true to the music, you aren't being true to the circumstances. Stephen Henders...: If you assume that Mozart's orchestra is the same as the symphony orchestra of the day, and you assume that what you're hearing is what they heard, then of course, you're fooling yourself. So what I'm saying is that all we have to do for dealing with this period, we are honest in calling ourselves scientists, if we are honest in calling ourselves scholars and students, is what I call myself, a student, then of course we ought to apply the same judgements, the same seriousness that we apply to anything else. That's all. The same, see? So we look at the data. Number one, the data's not in. number two, how are we going to get it in? You have to go out and get it. Stephen Henders...: You have to go out and get it. Get it out of people's heads. Get it before people are lying. Get it before they get confused. Get it before they start lying. Get it before they start getting corrupted. That's part of it. We need to organize research, it's difficult. I've just been talking to some people at lunch and they are quite aware of the problems that are involved, but I'm pleased to find out that you are still hanging in there and that you realize the seriousness of the problem. Now I have singled out poetry, not only because I have a certain kind of impatience with some other forms of writing, but because poetry has had a kind of exalted place in the West, particularly in modern times. Stephen Henders...: The poet has been separated from the rest of society. You think of particularly the romantic conception of the poet as the alienated outsider, over against another conception which was, and another model which was revitalized in the '60s of the poet as spokesman for the people, the poet as a priest, the poet as a seer, the poet as a prophet. These things were said specifically and deliberately by people like Larry Neal, by people like Baraka. You have to see, that's another dimension of the thing. You have to see the poet in the context of his statement. So these are some of the dimensions that have to be brought to an understanding of the poetry, and by extension, understanding of literature. The critical framework has not been established. The critical framework needs to be established. Stephen Henders...: People took hard lines, and Baldwin was talking about the fact that people were talking about a Black aesthetic. I have been claimed by various parties on various sides, but what I try to do is to take a position on the Black aesthetic, so called, to a critique of the Black aesthetic. I think Joseph Jenkins was saying in the Afro-American Newspaper, in a review of understanding the New Black Poetry, that what I have tried to do is to make, to do a position paper on the Black aesthetic, and this is what I tried to do. Stephen Henders...: Somehow or the other, those of us who are Black and who teach literature and who teach English literature, American literature, whatnot, aren't schizophrenic. We read Shakespeare and understand Shakespeare, but when I study Shakespeare and Nathaniel Tillman, who is legendary in certain circles at Morehouse College in Atlanta, and Tillman plays this big stack of 78 records in which we hear the magnificent voice of Paul Robeson as Othello, that's a special kind of experience, which I don't lose, because I need that. Not only that, when I talk about that, it's part of my entire value system. Stephen Henders...: When I'm sitting at the desk or the library at the University of Wisconsin, studying Chaucer, I didn't like Chaucer in high school because the teacher couldn't teach it, why should she? The teacher couldn't teach it, and what is this funny looking stuff? But I'm reading it because Frederic Cassidy, who was born in Jamaica, you understand, Frederic Cassidy seduced me into Chaucer, and I love Chaucer. But then I look at Chaucer and I hear Chaucer, when I read Chaucer, I'm hearing the people in my hometown talk. Do you understand what I'm saying? When I read John [inaudible], and the Irish speech, it's not Irish speech to me. What I hear is Black speech, you see what I'm saying? Stephen Henders...: So my point of reference was not divided, my point of reference was Black. So the thing that bothered me in the January 1968 issue of Negro Digest, in which the survey was made of 38 writers involving for instance the Black aesthetic and the role of us and all that, the thing that bothered me was the fact that people were beating around the bush, they were talking about creating a Black aesthetic. Now Larry Neal immediately endeared himself to me when he said, "You don't need to create one, one already exists." It's like, "Hallelujah." I already knew that, all of us knew that. Stephen Henders...: I know that although I had been away from Key West, Florida for all these many years, when I get excited I sound just like grandfather. I know that when I listen to my sister talk on the telephone, she's talking about food, she's talking poetry. I know that when Vertamae Grosvenor writes about food, she's writing about what my sister talks about, and my sister talks poetry and Vertamae writes poetry, although it's prose. You understand what I'm saying? So what I had hoped to do was show on a personal level, I've never said this before in public, but you are so kind to make today, make me feel so much at home, I feel I can be personal, but I felt was that I'm going to in my way demonstrate the wholeness of my sensibility. Stephen Henders...: I think that what has happened, what happened in an ideological sense in the '60s was that the writers said, "We are going to state our wholeness." Larry is very precise, because he takes the archetypal metaphor of the boys and souls of Black folk, that whole consciousness business, and says what the poet, what the writers are going to do is to break down the double consciousness. Of course, after you do that, you start breaking down the barriers in various degrees of the relationship with self to the other society. After you do that, you have created a kind of chaos, as far as your relationship to the rest of the thing is concerned. You have to restructure all of that. You have to destroy in order to recreate. Stephen Henders...: So now, we are at that stage. A little beyond that stage, hopefully. But when people made the whole Black aesthetic argument, they said, "We have to destroy this." If you destroy, you have to destroy with a tool or you have to destroy with a weapon. So a lot of the harsh language was necessary. We use hard words with ourselves. Often harsh language was necessary, and people had to be shocked. The hardest word of all, ladies and gentlemen, the hardest word of all used against ourselves was not nigger, because we had gotten too accustomed to that, the hardest word was Black. The hardest word was Black. When you confronted that Blackness head on, you detonated all of that energy that was there. Stephen Henders...: So what the poets and other cultural workers were trying to do was to begin to harness that energy. What people like Luella, Lou Emma and Betty and Steve Henderson are trying to do is to say, "This is respectable, and let's deal with this." If we deal with this honestly, the sensibilities of all of us can be enlarged. If we are serious about living together in freedom, justice and all of that, then let's begin where we live. Now I just want to suggest something, my hope for the future of this poetry, some of the directions that it may possibly go. These are some things I scribbled down at 3:00 in the morning my time, 2:00 your time, so if it's incoherent it's probably because I was sleeping. Stephen Henders...: These are some of the things. In the first place, it seems to me that there should be and would be further explorations of the oral tradition. That was a word that was thrown around, a lot of people talked about blues, hadn't heard five blues in their lives. Lou Emma Holloway has listened to thousands, and so has Stephen Henderson, and so has Sterling Brown. But there were people who knew blues, many of these poets are authorities on jazz, are authorities on jazz, and they were interested in that aspect of what they called the new music that drew on these roots. This is roots before Haley, Haley didn't invent roots. This is roots before Haley. Stephen Henders...: So there, I would expect a further development of the jazz idea, the idea of jazz as poetry. The idea of jazz as poetry. Of course, the idea of jazz as a form of expression of modern sensibility is absolutely indispensable for us to deal with at some point. Because here you have a mechanism for unifying varying aspects of what appears to be a chaotic universe. You have a form which is perpetually changing, which is perpetually voracious, yet essentially the same. You have that. The danger is that the capitalistic system is similar, and in the hands of the people who are running certain things could be dangerous. Death can mimic life, [inaudible] can mimic calcium in the blood, in the marrow of the bones. So we need to keep the two separate. Stephen Henders...: I would expect if this poetry continues to be encouraged, linguistic explorations based on the vast varieties of Black speech, I touched on this, this morning, speech in the various islands of the Caribbean, in Africa and elsewhere. One of the very interesting things that came out of this movement was that you have had Africans living in this country for 10, 15 years who have their ancestral memories, their childhood memories, who have a full firm grasp of the political situation, who understand American life, and who particularly swing with American speech and understand it, Black speech in particular. People like [inaudible] are very important. Stephen Henders...: People from the Caribbean like Edward Brathwaite. Brathwaite does linguistic explorations in speech that go down to the mythic level, which come to the point where you say, "Here is speech emerging from consciousness, here is a poem in which a person has gone through a ritualistic experience, a kind of rebirth." What you have in that is a kind of stammering from English through folk English through a realization that the word is essentially, the word is African in this context. So a person stammers and ends up by saying, "Shango." It's fantastic to hear Brathwaite do that. Stephen Henders...: A word that was introduced into the consciousness of the reading public in the '60s was Nommo. We owe that popularization to Janheinz Jahn's book Muntu, and you can see, if you're looking at just a few periodicals, see that word creeping into use. But it was always out there like a foreign expression. I remember a poem by SC Anderson in which Anderson used Nommo, Kinte, whatever the other words were, but it was there on the page and he was recapitulating his memories, recapitulating his knowledge. Then my beautiful sister June Jordan wrote a poem which I read in Essence Magazine, in Essence Magazine, not the College Language Association Journal, not MLA, PMLA, not Black World, but Essence Magazine, a commercial magazine for Black women. Stephen Henders...: June would forgive me, because I can't read it, but there's just a portion of it in which she talks about the names of women, and she ends up with the word Nommo. If I can find that, I'll read it. Here it is. The poem is called Getting Down to Get Over. Getting Down to Get Over, now you know what that means, don't you? "Momma, Momma, Momma." She doesn't begin with a Swahili word, she doesn't start Nommo, and she doesn't care if white people say momma or Chinese people say momma, because they're Americans. She said momma, because she happens to have said momma when she was eight, nine, 10. Stephen Henders...: "Mommy, momma, momma. Mammy, nanny. She's making conscious exploration. Granny, woman, mistress, sister, love, Black girl, slave girl, gal, honey child, sweet stuff, sugar, sweet baby. Baby, baby, baby. Momma, momma. Black momma, Black bitch, Black pussy, piece of tail, nice piece of ass. Hey daddy," and so forth and so on. "Hey daddy, hey bruh. We walking together and talk together and dance and do together, dance and do. Hey daddy, bruh, hey. And this, hey Nina, Nikki, Noni, Nommo, Nommo, momma, Black momma." At that particular point, you have to hear her read it, because it's hard of the meaning of it. Stephen Henders...: "Nina, Nikki, Noni, Nommo, Nommo." By that time, she has domesticated the concept and the feeling of Nommo as the creative word, which is the original source of creation, which is woman. Which is ancestral Black woman, this is ... A Black man could not have written this, you understand. Well, I hope that more of that would be happening. Another thing that could happen, and I hope will happen, poets, just as academicians have become sort of self conscious about certain kinds of backgrounds, if you happen to have studied English and you knew all those forms, why not use it? Why not use it? Musicians don't have any problem with the fact that they know Scarlatti, that's just a matter of technique. If they love it and they're empowered, then they change it to something else. Stephen Henders...: Now if you can imagine that it's possible to take the heroic couplet, if you have a certain distance from it, it's not contaminated. If you are not completely brought up in that tradition of the heroic couplet or whatever, or the sonnet, it's still possible to revitalize that tradition from your particular stance, if you have a displacement. Now that has happened, and I'll tell you just a quick example of that, is when the young British singers, musicians in the '50s discovered blues. First of all, they were imitating the lines directly then they realized they can get into the feeling of a thing, and of course some of them are fantastic technicians, and Americans too. Stephen Henders...: But then they started to use the blues form to express their own sense of alienation or whatever. They did something right, because some of the Black musicians said, "They shouldn't play it." They didn't say sing it, they said they shouldn't play it. But it was useful to them, that's the point. I'm saying by reversing that, there are other things that could be possible. It's still possible to write an epic, there is still a sense of the heroic in Black life that hasn't been explored. The historical hasn't been explored fully. Now oddly enough, maybe it's not so odd after all, some of the writers who were not in the so-called Black aesthetic thing have moved into that. Stephen Henders...: Michael Hopper for example, makes very subtle use of history. Robert Hayden makes very subtle use of history. Another thing of course is the fact that we are living in 1978 in a thermonuclear world, a world in which thermonuclear energy for good or for ill, for ill at least is possible, for good it's possible. I'm saying that the whole world of science fiction is another potentially useful set of materials for the Black writer, particularly the poet. There's a science fiction short story by Baraka, there's some science fiction kinds of poems by Sun Ra, and that's a direction, and of course, in Robert Hayden. One, which I don't think is a very good one, in Angle of Ascent. Stephen Henders...: But one use of science that I want to close this brief set of remarks on is taken from a poem of Robert Hayden's. I was talking to Robert Hayden earlier this year, and I discovered he liked the whole business of UFOs. I said, "You're crazy, I'm crazy too." UFOs, fantastic possibilities there, whether mythic or scientific or whatever. Because the thing about science fiction is that quite often it prefigures what can be discovered and sometimes what will be discovered, because it makes you think in a certain kind of way. There does not seem to be a great deal of difference in creative thinking, whether it's in physics or in poetry. Stephen Henders...: So Robert Hayden told me that, I said, "Man, I really like that poem on stars. I really like that poem on stars." He said, "You know one thing, I just was reading, hung up on these stars and I read every damn thing I could find my hand on." He had his 40-cent thing of Coca-Cola, drinking and we were talking. So he has this long poem, I'm not going to read it all, on stars. It's a Black poem, and it's what I would call a saturated poem and by that I mean that it has absorbed as much Blackness as it needs. To know that Robert Hayden is Black and is writing this kind of statement is important, because it suggests that those people who have problems with so-called sociology and politics in literature can deal with the spiritual, but the spiritual is seen through the eyes of a Black man who happens to be a Baha'ian. Stephen Henders...: I can't interpret these symbols of the nine-pointed star at the end, but there is an article in CLA Journal which does. So it's very short, this is from Angle of Ascent, you'll see that's section one. "Stood there then among spirits and kindled shields praising Orion." Then the names of stars, "Betelgeuse, Aldebaran, [Abstractus Futiestes], the starlight crossed eons in metaspace to us." That's the language of science, metaspace. Things we take for granted that the scientist on the cutting edge of discovery does not take for granted. That a Keats for example would project in a poem, On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer, "Then felt I like some lonely watcher of the stars when a new planet spins into his ken." Stephen Henders...: That sense of discovery is like the sense of geographical exploration and discovery, and Hayden has recaptured that. Because you say, "A light year, what the hell is a light year?" You can't even grasp it. Light, 186 thousand miles a second, a minute, an hour, a year. Now you say that the nearest star to us is six or eight, I've forgotten which, six light years away. You start talking about thousands of light years, hundreds of light years, 186 thousand miles as your basic unit of measurement. You say meta, great beyond space to us. "Algol, Arcturus, Almach, how shall the mind keep warm save at spectral fires? How fire, but the light of paradox? Altair, Vega, Polaris, Mia." Stephen Henders...: I don't know what his response is to these names, but I see on one level certainly the fact that these, and he told me this, the names are just lovely names. But there's more to it of course than that. Then with all of that, the mythical and the physical, the mystical and the astronomical, now he comes to the historian. Section three, Sojourner Truth. "Comes walking barefoot out of slavery, ancestress, childless mother, following the stars. Her mind a star." Now he's not fooling around and says, "Starlight, star bright, first star I see tonight." Which has its own significance, her mind a star, he's already set the context. Stephen Henders...: Then he goes on, "Pulsars just discovered 10 years or so ago. Blue receding quasars, less than 10 years ago. They're vibrant radio waves." He knows what he's talking about. "Cosmic Ouija." You're probably too young to know what a Ouija Board is. "Cosmic Ouija, what is the mathematics of your language?" Then the nine-pointed star, "Stable stars, variable stars, hydrogen into helium, fusion's just a basic operation going on in stars. Radiations, spectral fires," how he repeats that. "And the nine-pointed star, sun star in the constellation of the nuclear will. Fixed star whose radiance, filtering down to us, lights, mind and spirit, signals future light." It's still a Black poem. It's a universal poem, and it's refracted through the mind of a single Black poet. Stephen Henders...: I suspect that there are, I hope there will be more of that. Technical questions of course still remain to be solved, and I think that the most difficult ones have to deal with the incorporation of music into poetry. Just how far can you go? Now the poets are starting to make certain kinds of statements, certain kinds of confessions even. In a piece which A.B. Spellman prepared for our writers' conference in May, he said that really the poets are envied the musicians. But I knew that all along, but it was good to hear A.B. say that. The poets envied the musicians, and the reason of course is obvious. I told you this morning about the improvisation, poetic improvisation by Dante and A.B., but it wasn't good, it wasn't good, by Dante and Larry. Stephen Henders...: But the idea was good, and it's still possible for some of that to eventuate into another kind of poetry. If people were honest, if people were honest, this could transform not only the poetry of Black people, but the poetry of the entire country. I hope that you, as scholars and teachers, will take this poetry and the context of this poetry with the same serious consideration that I think most of these writers wrote it in. At this time, if you would like to talk and take some of this weight off me, I'd be very happy. Vincent Harding: I attended that conference ...