Dudley Randall: The Poet as Humanist
[In the following essay, Melhem discusses Randall's poetry and involvement with Broadside Press. A slightly different version of this essay appeared in Black American Literature Forum in 1983 under the title “Dudley Randall: A Humanist View.”]
“I never thought of myself as a leader,” says Dudley Randall in his soft, vibrant voice. Yet the historical impact of Broadside Press, begun in Detroit in 1965 “without capital, from the twelve dollars I took out of my paycheck to pay for the first Broadside,” attests to the modesty of his statement. Despite Randall's “silence” between 1976 and 1980, when the Press foundered as a result of overgenerous publishing commitments and subsequent debt; despite his depression during those years (he wrote no poetry until April of 1980), Broadside Press—which now continues in the hands of Hilda and Donald Vest—remains his edifice and achievement. It gave opportunity to dozens of unpublished as well as published Black writers (including all the poets in this study except Jayne Cortez). It produced Black Poetry: A Supplement to Anthologies Which Exclude Black Poets (1969), the first such anthology to appear under the imprint of a Black publisher. It revived and adapted the concept of the broadside, developed as a polemical device during the Puritan Revolution in seventeenth-century England. Randall's broadsides, many of them printed on oversized paper and decorated as works of art, suitable for framing, often served both aesthetics and rhetoric. But his deep concern was always for the best poetry, “the best words in the best order,” as he has stated, invoking Samuel T. Coleridge. An extension of this interest has been the Broadside Poets Theater, a distinguished series of readings inaugurated by Randall in August 1980. Drawing Black poets from across the country, it has become his chief commitment to the arts.
Randall began his career as a writer in 1927, at age thirteen. That year he published a sonnet on the “Young Poets’ Page” of the Detroit Free Press, winning first prize of a dollar. Music, religion, politics, and poetry were meshed early in his consciousness. Born on January 14, 1914, in Washington, D.C., he is the third (and the sole survivor) of the five children of Arthur George Clyde and Ada Viola (Bradley) Randall. The poet recalls going with his mother to a band concert in Towson, Maryland, when he was a child: “I was so impressed by the big bass drums and the big bass horns that I composed words about them to the melody of ‘Maryland, My Maryland,’ which the band had played. This is the earliest instance I can remember of my composing a poem.” Randall's father, a politically oriented preacher who managed the campaigns of several Black office seekers after the family moved to Detroit, took him and his brothers to hear W. E. B. Du Bois, Walter White, James Weldon Johnson, and others.
In high school Randall developed skill in prosody, which he advises poets to study. Although he writes often in free verse, he does so by choice, not necessity.
I believe there's an ideal, Platonic line for every thought. The job of the poet is to find it. In traditional verse, it's easier, as there's already a pattern given. Free verse is harder, as there's no given pattern for the line, and the poet has to find the one perfect line out of billions of possibilities. Therefore, the poet who hasn't mastered traditional verse and doesn't know a trochee from a hole in the ground, won't know what to look for or how to select when lines come into his mind. The line I like best in “Ballad of Birmingham” is the line in sprung rhythm, “but that smile / / was the last smile,” where the 2 spondees balance each other. Most free verse is bad, as is most traditional verse, but there's more bad free verse than traditional verse. I always scan my free verse, and I know what rhythms I'm using, and why.
The spareness of my ballads comes from Black folk poetry—spirituals & seculars—as well as from English folk poetry.
Randall also noted that Henry Well's Poetic Imagery Illustrated from Elizabethan Literature (1924), which classifies images, was an important stylistic influence, as were classical meters and French forms. He has translated some of Catullus into the hendecasyllabics and Sapphic strophes of the original. In translating, whether from Aleksandr Pushkin or Konstantin M. Simonov or Paul Verlaine, Randall tries to render the form as well as the content. His most ambitious project, the “translation” of Chopin preludes and waltzes into “songs without words”—lyrics so totally expressive of the music that they would merge with it—lies ahead. In addition to earning a bachelor's degree at Wayne University (now Wayne State) in 1949 and a master's in library science at the University of Michigan in 1951, Randall has gone on to complete course requirements for a master's degree in the humanities at Wayne State. The Chopin translations may become the thesis for that second master's.
Listening to classical music helps Randall to write. Although he recommends that the poet read widely, “in any language you know,” he agrees with Dorothea Brande's suggestion in Becoming a Writer (1937) that a wordless occupation, one that is rhythmical and monotonous, helps the creative process. He is not prescriptive about subject matter: “You write what you can,” he says.
Randall's feeling for working-class people was deepened by his years at the Ford Motor Company in Dearborn, Michigan (1932-37). “George” commemorates the experience. In 1935 he married Ruby Hands, and soon a daughter, Phyllis Ada, was born. He was employed at the U.S. Post Office in 1938 and worked there—with time out during World War II—until 1951, when he took his first library position. A second marriage took place in 1942. Inducted into the army in July 1943 and trained in North Carolina and Missouri, Randall was sent overseas in February 1944. As a supply sergeant in the headquarters detachment of the Signal Corps, he served in the Philippines and in various islands of the South Pacific. Although he saw no active combat, he was close to those who did. His “Pacific Epitaphs,” from More to Remember, epitomizes that tragic time.
The poet shies away from the label “pacifist,” yet he is strongly antiwar; see especially the title poem of his 1973 collection After the Killing and the “War” section of A Litany of Friends. Sadly, he likens war to an ongoing family feud and states, “I would say that conciliation is better than revenge.” He does accept the designation “humanist.” He tells of meeting Arna Bontemps in the 1960s at the Black Writers’ Conference sponsored by the University of Wisconsin: Randall, upon asking permission to join a group seated in the cafeteria, was told by Bontemps, “Yes, Dudley, since you're the only humanist here.” Like [Gwendolyn] Brooks, Randall sees people in terms of “family” and remains a family-oriented man. Numerous letters to his daughter, correspondence he prizes, contain his own drawings of his Pacific surroundings during the war, including lizards, sand crabs, and flying fish. His devotion to his third wife, Vivian Spencer, a psychiatric social worker whom he married in 1957, is made manifest in later poetry.
When Randall was discharged in 1946, he returned home to go back to school and his post office job. After receiving his master's degree from Michigan, he worked continuously as a librarian: at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri, from 1951 to 1954; at Morgan State College in Baltimore to 1956; in Wayne County Federated Library System in Detroit to 1969, and at the University of Detroit, where he was also Poet-in-Residence, to 1976. During those years he received many honors, among them the Wayne State Tompkins Award, for poetry in 1962 and for poetry and fiction in 1966, and the Kuumba Liberation Award in 1973. Both the University of Michigan and Wayne State have named him a Distinguished Alumnus, and in 1977 he received awards from the International Black Writers’ Conference and the Howard University Institute of Afro-American Studies. The following year the University of Detroit conferred upon him the honorary degree of Doctor of Literature. He is modestly but deeply proud of becoming, in 1981, the first Poet Laureate of Detroit.
The 1960s were critically formative years for Randall, as they were for all the poets in this study. Two stunning events in late 1963, the racist bombing of a church that resulted in the death of Black Sunday school children, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy, inspired the poems that were to become Randall's first broadsides. The “Ballad of Birmingham” and “Dressed All in Pink” began the Broadside Series and Broadside Press in 1965. Both poems were set to music by Jerry Moore; they were later included in Cities Burning. Another step in the history of the Press was marked by Randall's meeting with Margaret Danner at a party for the late Hoyt Fuller, editor of the journal Black World and then of First World. Danner had founded Boone House, the important Black arts center which, from 1962 to 1964, existed as a forerunner of similar projects later launched with government assistance. The two poets conceived Poem Counterpoem, a unique series of their paired poems that was released in 1966. In May 1966 Randall attended the first Writers’ Conference at Fisk University in Nashville. There he met Margaret Burroughs, with whom he developed the idea of the For Malcolm anthology (1967). As Randall observes, the press grew “by hunches, intuitions, trial, and error.” At the Conference, he obtained permission from Robert Hayden, Melvin B. Tolson, and Margaret Walker to use their poems in the Broadside Series. He wrote to Gwendolyn Brooks and obtained her consent to publish “We Real Cool.” Of this first group of six broadsides, Randall observes, “‘Poems of the Negro Revolt’ is, I think, one of the most distinguished groups in the Broadside Series, containing outstanding poems by some of our finest poets.”
The most significant act of confidence accorded Randall and Broadside Press was made by Gwendolyn Brooks when, in 1969, she turned to it for the publication of Riot. Randall acted as Brooks's editor and was especially helpful in organizing her autobiography, Report from Part One. Brooks, in turn, assisted in the selection of poems for Randall's More to Remember (1971), rewriting the preface and eliminating a number of pieces he had planned to include (he now wishes he had excluded even more). The warm friendship inspired both poets. In 1970, Randall dedicated his book Love You “to Gwendolyn, an inspiration to us all.”
Randall's democratic instincts are offended by what he calls “poet snobs.” In a forthright, unpublished poem about the period of his depression, he caustically contrasts some poets’ affectation of slovenliness with his own genuine reluctance to care for his body when he was despairing of life itself. With ribald wit he lists the authentic “credentials of dirtiness” and defends his present choice to dress well for public appearances. He feels strongly that poets should be interested in other people. “Shy and self-centered” in his early years, he gradually gained what he refers to as “negative capability” (adapting John Keats's phrase) by thinking of whatever person he meets instead of himself. Randall admires writers in whom he sees this capacity.
Though his humanism remains unaltered, Randall's thinking has undergone some modification over the years, partly as a result of his travels. He still does not “connect” with organized religion (although in Contemporary Authors, 1977, he listed his affiliation as Congregational), but his political tone seems more circumspect. “No,” he told me in Detroit, as he drew at his pipe and leaned back in a living room chair, “I'm not a socialist. I went to Russia, and I think people are just human beings all the world over.” Randall was referring to his 1966 trip with eight other artists to the Soviet Union, France, and Czechoslovakia. He was disturbed about the censorship and treatment of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Osip Mandelstam. In 1970 he visited Togo and Dahomey in Africa and studied African arts at the University of Ghana. That trip enriched his consciousness. Its residue may be seen in his current taste in dress, like his favored orange cap and bright, sometimes African clothing. Yet the impressions revealed contradictions:
Africa is a very big place. It is very hard to try to sum it up. … I think, moreover, that it is very unwise for a person to talk as if he knows a country after visiting it for only a short time and getting only superficial impressions. An instant expert! There were some contradictions. One of them, for example, was being part of an audience that was two-thirds Black, and the African speaker referred to us as “you white folks,” which may give you some idea of how … this person looked upon Black Americans. Yet I wouldn't generalize and say that every African had this attitude. In the villages that we visited, for example, they said: “We know that you are our brothers who were taken away from us, and now you are coming back to see the land where your fathers lived, and we welcome you back.”
Randall agrees with Haki Madhubuti that whites have been responsible for numerous depredations, but he does not put all whites into the same category. Though he notes wryly that poor whites, who face many of the same problems that Blacks encounter, can be just as prejudiced as those who are more affluent, he continues hopeful that people's attitudes can be altered and that “you can raise anybody's consciousness.” Randall maintains his integrationist stance because “we're all human beings.” He thinks it important, however, to promote Black solidarity, “to align yourself with those who are like you and in like condition.”
Before founding Broadside, Randall was published in various magazines; wider recognition came with the appearance of his work in prestigious anthologies: Rosey E. Pool's Beyond the Blues (1962); American Negro Poetry, edited by Arna Bontemps (1963); and Langston Hughes's New Negro Poets: U.S.A. (1964). It was the Hughes anthology (which bears a foreword by Gwendolyn Brooks) that first presented “The Southern Road” (later reprinted in Poem Counterpoem and A Litany of Friends), a brilliant poem in the strict and now rarely employed form of the ballade. An important French innovation of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the ballade is identified with the poetry of Francois Villon, whose work was characterized by intelligence, precision, and realism. Randall's own advice to poets (which appears in Contemporary Authors, 1977), begins: “Precision and accuracy are necessary for both white and black writers.” David Littlejohn cites “The Southern Road” as “a sophisticated rendering of the return-to-the-South theme.”
The ballade, usually in three stanzas of eight lines each plus an envoi of four, utilizes three end-rhymes and takes as its refrain the last line of the first stanza. Randall uses a stately iambic pentameter line, and his skill controls the emotionally charged material:
There the black river, boundary to hell,
And here the iron bridge, the ancient car,
And grim conductor, who with surly yell
Forbids white soldiers where the black ones are.
And I re-live the enforced avatar
Of desperate journey to a dark abode
Made by my sires before another war;
And I set forth upon the southern road.
Randall connects “the black river” of Black life with ancient myth: the “grim conductor” is Charon who, ironically, enforces segregation. The poet becomes the incarnation and epiphany of his forefathers in a pilgrimage of identity toward life and death.
The second stanza describes the destination, the paradoxical “land where shadowed songs like flowers swell / And where the earth is scarlet as a scar.” Because the poet's blood has been shed here, he will claim the land: “None can bar / My birthright.” The dual vision persists in the third stanza:
This darkness and these mountains loom a spell
Of peak-roofed town where yearning steeples soar
And the holy chanting of a bell
Shakes human incense on the throbbing air
When bonfires blaze and quivering bodies char.
Whose is the hair that crisped, and fiercely glowed?
I know it; and my entrails melt like tar
And I set forth upon the southern road.
Darkness and firelight, the sacred and the profane, spiritual immortality and physical death, redemption and murder vie dramatically as the poet, feeling himself ablaze (“I know it”), presses on. The tar simile merges poet with lynch victims, who were often tarred and then set afire. “Human incense” strikes a bitter irony in the religious context. Half-rhyme, used only in this stanza, sharpens the intellectual and visual contrasts among soar, air, char, tar.
In the closing quatrain, Randall invokes the land:
O fertile hillsides where my fathers are,
From which my woes like troubled streams have flowed,
Love you I must, though they may sweep me far.
And I set forth upon the southern road.
Significantly, the earth remains fertile, nourished by the poet's grief and blood, emblems of his people's suffering. The statement passionately affirms Randall's belief in the democratic potential of the United States, his conviction that “conciliation is better than revenge.” The poem's refrain gains a semantic increment subtly from stanza to stanza and so transforms from the first, where it functions narratively, to the second, where it asserts a claim, to the third, where it makes a heroic gesture. In the envoi it becomes a measure of love as Randall moves to the simple declarative of the close. The last line suggests the poet as separate yet strengthened by his experience, like Whitman's “simple, separate person” who can “yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.” This poem may be contrasted with the title poem of Sterling A. Brown's Southern Road (1932)—reprinted in Randall's useful anthology The Black Poets (1971)—which is a blues ballad in dialect expressing a chain gang member's hopeless view of his life.
Cities Burning (1968), the first collection of Randall's own poems, whose cover design and stark colors of red, black, and white resemble those of Brooks's Riot, reflects the revolutionary spirit of the sixties. Of its twelve poems, half—including the most polemical—are in free verse; the rest are rhymed. “Roses and Revolutions,” written in 1948, sets the tone:
Musing on roses and revolutions,
I saw night close down on the earth like a great dark wing,
and the lighted cities were like tapers in the night,
and I heard the lamentations of a million hearts
regretting life and crying for the grave.
The Whitmanic line and inflection draw the free verse to an affirmative close. There, the poet's prophetic vision of a future in which “all men walk proudly through the earth, / and the bombs and missiles lie at the bottom of the ocean / like the bones of dinosaurs buried under the shale of eras,” is confirmed by its radiance, in which will “burst into terrible and splendid bloom / the blood-red flower of revolution.” The coupling of revolution and blossom invokes the Brooks of the “Second Sermon on the Warpland” and her counsel to youth: “Conduct your blooming in the noise and whip of the whirlwind.”
Randall's interest in other art forms appears in “Primitives,” which compares the attempt of abstract art (Picasso is suggested) and modern poetry, especially the typographically experimental, to deal with the threat and hideous reality of modern warfare. His lyrical “Augury for an Infant,” addressed to his granddaughter, Venita Sherron, closes the volume hopefully, seeing the infant as “infinite possibility.” But the strongest poems, apart from the first, employ the lyrical understatement of Black folk poetry, the terseness of blues, “ballards,” spirituals, and seculars, and of old English ballads like “Edward, Edward,” “Lord Randal,” and “The Twa Corbies,” where deep feeling compresses into rhythm, rhyme, and the tragic frame. “Dressed All in Pink” begins quietly, with a specific reference to John F. Kennedy's ride though Dallas with his wife, Jacqueline, and Governor John Connally on November 22, 1963, and an allusive one to Camelot, land of the Kennedy dream:
It was a wet and cloudy day
when the prince took his last ride.
The prince rode with the governor,
and his princess rode beside.
Randall's formal mastery gives a spondaic emphasis to “last ride” in the only second line of any stanza thus distinguished in the seven-stanza poem. Having progressed through the shooting, the piece closes: “and her dress of pink so delicate / a deep, deep red is dyed.” The facts, ordered within the music and noble simplicity of the genre, elevate into myth.
The “Ballad of Birmingham,” on the page opposite the Kennedy poem, complements both subject and genre with a similar spare dignity. Like the assassination of the president, the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church on September 15, 1963, took place in the year of heightened civil rights protests. This “Negro Revolt” or “Black Rebellion” had culminated in the March on Washington in August by over 200,000 Black and white citizens, who had been stirred by Martin Luther King's “I have a dream” speech at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The following month, the Birmingham tragedy took the lives of four little girls at Sunday School and injured other children. The attack aroused nationwide grief and indignation, which the events in Dallas would soon intensify.
Randall focuses upon one child, personalizing both the horror and its context. The girl asks her mother's permission to participate in a freedom march. The mother, fearing the police dogs “and clubs and hoses, guns and jails,” protectively refuses and, in searing irony, suggests that her child go to Sunday School instead, where she will be safe. Dramatic tension builds as the mother lovingly dresses the child for church and smiles to think of her daughter “in the sacred place.” Then she hears the explosion: “her eyes grew wet and wild. / She raced through the streets of Birmingham / calling for her child.” The murder, as if too terrible for description and thus augmented by mystery, powerfully registers in this vignette of maternal anguish. The poem conveys the dreadful lesson: no place is sacred or safe in such a time and place. The name of Birmingham, a city then regarded as the “capital” of segregation, becomes a symbol: “Birmingham becomes any city or town in which the oppressed Black is killed out of racial prejudice.” [John T. Shawcross, “Names as ‘Symbols’ in Black Poetry,” in Literary Onomestics Studies, 1978].
Publication of the anthologies For Malcolm and Black Poetry, the addition of Gwendolyn Brooks, Don L. Lee, Sonia Sanchez, Etheridge Knight, Nikki Giovanni, and other important writers to the regular list, along with Broadside Series authors such as Robert Hayden, LeRoi Jones, Margaret Walker, and Melvin B. Tolson, enhanced the prestige of the Press as the unquestioned leader in Black publishing. In Black Poetry, Randall reprinted from Poem Counterpoem his own popular “George” and “Booker T. and W. E. B.” The latter imagines a dialogue between Booker T. Washington, epitome of the industrious, conservative Negro who accepts a subservient position—“Just keep your mouth shut, do not grouse, / But work, and save, and buy a house”—and W. E. B. Du Bois, the intellectual progenitor of the Civil Rights Movement, who disagrees: “For what can property avail / If dignity and justice fail?” Randall clearly and accurately represents both sides, although, as he acknowledges wryly, Du Bois has the last word: “Speak soft, and try your little plan, / But as for me, I'll be a man.”
“George,” on the other hand, a workingman's tribute in free verse, describes a foundry co-worker who once gave Randall his “highest accolade: / You said: ‘You not afraid of sweat. You strong as a mule.’” Years later, visiting the old man in a hospital ward, the poet poignantly returns the compliment.
In 1970, an important year for Randall, he traveled to Africa, and his volume of love poems, Love You, was published in London. Of the book's fourteen pieces, a few seem occasionally overwhelmed by ardent feelings. Others show the application of his fine lyricism to free verse, as in “The Profile on the Pillow,” and to metrical verse, in which “Black magic” seems to sing its refrain of “Black girl, black girl.” “Faces” lauds the beauty of ordinary, aging features shaped by experience, “not only crocus faces / or fresh-snowfall faces / but driftwood faces, grooved by salt waters.”
“Sanctuary,” the last poem, mainly in iambic pentameter with deliberately varied stresses, offers particular interest for its whirlwind imagery, recalling Brooks's “Second Sermon on the Warpland,” and its compounding (“nation-death-and-birth”), another heroic device of Brooks. “This is the time of the whirlwind and the fire” also reverts to the introductory poem, “The Profile on the Pillow,” where tender memory remains, despite possibilities that
Perhaps
you may cease to love me,
or we may be consumed in the holocaust,
but I keep, against the ice and the fire,
the memory of your profile on the pillow.
This opening poem may be considered as companion to Brook's “An Aspect of Love, / Alive in the Ice and Fire” (Riot, 1969), a title which alludes in mild irony to Robert Frost's “Fire and Ice.” Brooks, like Randall, offers a tentative hope that personal love will endure.
It should be noted that Randall's use of the strong word “holocaust,” which has acquired in this century the connotation of genocide, refers specifically to the widely held belief among Blacks, after the riots of the sixties, that the government was preparing concentration camps for their confinement, even extermination. The poet conveys an awareness of fatal peril that will hurl the lovers “with the other doomed spirits / around and around in the fury of the whirlwind”—an allusion to Dante's meeting, in his Inferno, with the lovers Paolo and Francesca, whose passion dooms them to be tossed forever by stormy winds. Brooks, on the other hand, uses the whirlwind as a symbol of social change.
Randall's energies converged in high gear upon a full edition, More to Remember: Poems of Four Decades (the 1930s through the 1960s), published by Third World Press the following year and dedicated to Don L. Lee. The collection shows a wide range of interests, prosodic skill, and experimentation, its poems almost evenly divided between rhyme and free verse—the latter featured in polemical pieces and the later poems. The main thrust is political and humane and includes lively commentary on poets and poetics. The book is organized by decades into four sections. The first, “The Kindness and the Cruelty,” begins significantly with “For Pharish Pinckney, Bindle Stiff During the Depression,” dedicated to the brother of Randall's second wife, Mildred. At one time, the youth had lived as a boxcar riding hobo who “learned the kindness and the cruelty / of the land that mothered and rejected you.” Here the ambivalence of the Black experience in the United States may be generalized to include all those oppressed by poverty (see the expanded version in A Litany of Friends). Other poems celebrate youth in forms close to the traditions of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century English poetry. “Shape of the Invisible,” a cinquain after Adelaide Crapsey yet showing Japanese influence, effectively measures poetic feet (1, 2, 3, 4, 1):
At dawn
Upon the snow
The delicate imprint
Left by the sleeping body of
The wind.
“Incredible Harvests,” the second section, marks an enhancement of poetic power and a life that encompasses fatherhood, love and other problems, wartime service, reflections on police arrest (see the blues ballad “Jailhouse Blues,” and “The Line-Up”), and frequently politics. Here the poet attends more closely to visual elements, most notably in “Pacific Epitaphs.” The abbreviated and irregular length of these seventeen impressions epitomizes the brief lives of the dead and of their tombs, scattered among Pacific islands. Deep feeling compresses into epigram and understatement, as in “Halmaherra,” “Laughing I left the earth. / Flaming returned,” and “Guadalcanal”:
Your letter.
These medals.
This grave.
Avoiding sentimentality, the poems convey a dignity of grief while employing the restraint of, ironically, the Japanese haiku or tanka. Randall himself points out the additional influences of Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology and of The Greek Anthology, which share a mode that is, in his words, “simple, spare, suggestive.”
Yet the poet's lyricism does not fail him. Following “Pacific Epitaphs,” “The Ascent” memorably describes an airman's view of the earth as he moves
Into the air like dandelion seed
Or like the spiral of lark into the light
Or fountain into sun. …
… … … … … … … … …
We poise in air, hang motionless, and see
The planet turn with slow grace of a dancer.
“Coral Atoll” extends the meditation on natural beauty in the wartime scene and ends with a line that suggests Randall's ideal of poetic form at the time: “Have died into a perfect form that sings.” One recalls Keats's “die into life” in speaking of Apollo (Hyperion, 1.130).
In several ways, by contrasting form and relating content, Randall emphasizes the senseless recurrence of war and the timeless fraternity of its dead. “Helmeted Boy” addresses a youth killed in battle:
Your forehead capped with steel
Is smoother than a coin
With profile of a boy who fell
At Marathon.
As in “Pacific Epitaphs,” the brevity of the lines conveys the brevity of life.
The third section, “If Not Attic, Alexandrian,” is the shortest yet displays an interesting variety of technique. It represents the 1950s, Randall notes, “when the nation was quiescent under President Eisenhower, and poetry was under the dominance of the Eliot/academic establishment.” It takes its title from “The Dilemma,” subtitled with a quotation from the late Ray Durem, “My poems are not sufficiently obscure / to please the critics.” In a Shakespearean sonnet, the speaker ironically claims that he cultivates his irony in order to be as confusing as the times. “So, though no Shelley, I'm a gentleman, / And, if not Attic, Alexandrian.” Thus, tongue in cheek, Randall presents a poem not marked by simple refinement (Attic) but concerned with technical perfection (Alexandrian).
Other sonnets in this section include “Anniversary Words,” in the even stricter Petrarchan form, addressed to the poet's wife: “You who have shared my scanty bread with me / and borne my carelessness and forget-fulness / with only occasional lack of tenderness, / who have long patiently endured my faculty / for genial neglect of practicality.” Apologia and appreciation, the poem may be instructively compared and contrasted with “For Vivian,” a more recent tribute (1983), published and then “calligraphized” in 1984, the poet notes, as Broadside No. 94:
Me, this snoring, belching, babbling semblance of man kind,
What woman could refrain from laughing at?
Or, caring more, quietly take her hat
And leave? Yet, these four and twenty years
You've stayed, though not without heart wring and tears.
For which my thanks. And bless your love which binds.
The third section also contains the poet's aesthetic credo “Aim,” which calls for “words transparent as the air, / which hint the whole by showing the part clear.” Randall comments that this poem shows his “liking for a classically natural style, without distracting eccentricities and obscurities.”
“Interview” presents another technical surprise. In a dramatic monologue in blank verse after the fashion of Robert Browning—its sixty lines constituting Randall's longest published poem—a rich, elderly man (Henry Ford?) explains his tax-exempt research foundation and his life's philosophy to a brash reporter. He grants the interview in order to
prove to those
Who could not take the world as they found it
And therefore lack the power to change it at all
That one old, greedy, and predacious villain
Can do more good in the world than all of them
In all their years of whining and complaining.
The portrait renders the shadowy grays as well as the clear blacks and whites of existence.
The relatively long closing section, “And Her Skin Deep Velvet Night,” takes its title from “On Getting a Natural (For Gwendolyn Brooks),” the tribute that ends the volume. Mordantly amusing, “Ancestors” questions: “Why are our ancestors / always kings or princes / and never the common people? … Or did the slavecatchers / steal only the aristocrats / and leave the fieldhands / laborers / streetcleaners / garbage collectors / dishwashers / cooks and maids / behind?” The democratic Randall tolerates neither snobbery nor intolerance. In “Aphorisms,” written with Blakean simplicity (Randall approves the comparison), he warns, “He who vilifies the Jew / next day will slander you. / / He who calls his neighbor ‘nigger’ / upon your turning back will snigger,” and ends on a religious note: “While he who calls a faith absurd / thrusts the spear into his Lord.”
The majority of the remaining poems in this group share a political nexus. “Hymn” expresses horror over “our worship” of the atomic bomb, which may end life on earth. “The Trouble with Intellectuals” and “The Intellectuals” were inspired by the difference between the Mensheviks who talked and the Bolsheviks who acted. A number of the poems scold the excesses of Black Nationalism and level criticisms of arrogance, extremism, and hypocrisy at some Black activists.
But there are tributes, too. The syncopated “Langston Blues” presents a moving elegy for one who brought “laughter from hell.” And the closing poem praises Brooks's adoption of a natural hair style and becomes an encomium of her beauty combined in spirit, action, and appearance: “And now her regal wooly crown / declares / I know / I'm black / AND / beautiful.”
In 1973 Randall published After the Killing, dedicated to the memory of a loyal Broadside worker, Ruth Elois Whitsitt Fondren. The fifteen poems, whose variety of subject matter accompanies the turn to even more free verse (only two are rhymed), show increased versatility in Randall's use of the form, to allow for more lyricism as well as argument. “African Suite,” the opening poem in five parts, gives Randall's impression of an African still racist and describes his feelings at visiting a Ghana castle that once held slaves. Some pieces apply Randall's critical humor to Blacks as well as to humanity in general, continuing the tact of More to Remember.
“After the Killing,” the title poem, evokes the Brooks metonymic, heroic style: “'We will kill', said the blood-thirster, / ‘and after the killing / there will be peace.’” Although Randall will not call the poem pacifistic, it does dramatize the absurdity of war, preventive or retaliatory, and of the arms race. “To the Mercy Killers,” a Shakespearean sonnet, powerfully affirms life to the end: “if ever mercy move you murder me, / I pray you, kindly killers, let me live.” “For Gwendolyn Brooks, Teacher,” utilizes spondaic energy and a spare meter: “You teach / without talk. / / Your life / is lesson. / / We give / because you do, / / are kind / because you are. / / Just live. / We will learn.” Randall ends the book with a translation, an earlier poem, “I Loved You Once” (Ya vas lyubil), from Pushkin, described in an editor's footnote as “the Russian of African descent who is credited for making the Russian language live again.”
After emerging from his silence in 1980, in 1981 Randall published A Litany of Friends: New and Selected Poems, his first book in eight years. Its moving title poem of dedication, autobiographical, identifies those many poets, friends, and family members who helped him morally, spiritually, and financially during his depression. The long-awaited book, which may be viewed in part as transitional, surprised some, pleased and dismayed others. It comprises excellent selections from previous years and volumes, interfaced with new or newly appearing poems in both free verse and conventional forms. “Verse Forms,” written in free verse, defends the sonnet: “A sonnet is an arrow. / Pointed and slim, it pierces / The slit in the armor.” (Compare Gwendolyn Brooks's earlier admonition in “The Second Sermon on the Warpland”: “not the pet bird of poets, that sweetest sonnet, / shall straddle the whirlwind.”)
“A Litany of Friends,” also in free verse, was begun April 1, 1980; along with “The Mini Skirt,” written on April 4, and “To an Old Man,” a sonnet written on Easter Sunday, two days later, it inaugurates the revived creative flow. The three poems, while they reflect the personal emphasis of much of the poetry, Black and white, of the seventies, reveal Randall's psychic energy shaping the two main categories of the new works: humanist concerns (in sections titled “Friends,” “War,” “Africa,” and “Me”) and love poetry (in “Eros,” which, followed in number by “Friends,” contains the bulk of the new poetry).
Part III, “War,” offers a distinguished set from More to Remember, including “Pacific Epitaphs.” Among the new or newly appearing antiwar poems are “Games,” a fine Petrarchan sonnet variant on boys’ war games transposed into real battle, and “Straight Talk from a Patriot,” a satirical quatrain on the Vietnam War. Of two translations from the Russian of Konstantin M. Simonov, the exquisitely achieved “My Native Land (Rodina),” in six rhymed quatrains of iambic pentameter, personalizes patriotism. Randall's translations, for which his skill and temperament seem equally suited, confirm the breadth of his consciousness.
The introductory section, “Friends,” reveals the warmth of the poet, who can write with stirring compassion of his dog (“Poor Dumb Butch”); with lyricism of his students (“My Students” is a series of fifteen haiku); and with imaginative appreciation of fellow Black poets (“The Six,” from 1975). At times the conventional form strains art into conventional registers, but when it succeeds, it does so notably. Randall comments: “Some of the love poems I wanted to sound simple and naive: ‘For love converts away from sad,’ using the adjective sad as a noun; ‘And never mind receive,’ using the verb receive as a noun, the object of the verb mind.”
What has disturbed some readers more than the uneven quality of certain pieces is their content. Part II, “Eros,” has incurred the most criticism, partly for its unabashed indulgence in sensual appreciation and its occasional Elizabethan inflection (as in “Maiden, Open” and “May and December: A Song”). But Randall replies: “Poets strain against barriers. Wordsworth attacked Pope's ‘poetic diction.’ Now, no contemporary poet would be caught dead using ‘poetic diction’ like ‘maiden,’ ‘bower,’ ‘sigh.’ It's this new interdiction that I fight. Call it ‘The New Romanticism,’ if you will. I fight for the right to use ‘romantic’ diction as much as the Black poets of the 1960s fought to use street language.” “The Mini Skirt” typifies the relaxed, Rabelaisian mode. Health of both ego and libido return here in force as the poet delights in his own recovery. The mischievous iconoclast appears in “The New Woman,” a reply inscribed “to M.H.W. and D.H.M.” (Mary Helen Washington and me), “who said that my poem ‘Women’ was sexist.” Hence, from the mildly amusing “I like women they're so warm & soft & sweet / Touch one & her skin yields like the flesh of a peach” of the older poem, “The New Woman” shifts to “I like women they're so hard & tough & strong / Feel their muscle it's hard & hairy as a coconut,” and charges on to a hilarious reversal of the first poem's images and values. An intriguing found poem, “The Erotic Poetry of Sir Isaac Newton,” convincingly adapts The Motion of Bodies (1687) to free verse. “Translation from Chopin”—Prelude Number 7 in A Major, Opus 28—the first published sample from Randall's intended project, seems to dissolve into the poignancy of the piece when read accompanied by the music.
Some of Randall's friends and fellow poets had expected stirring political broadsides, calls for justice, and exhortations to Black unity. Several wondered, as he observes in the militant apologia “A Poet Is Not a Jukebox,” “But why don't you write about the riot in Miami?” In this rebuttal, forthright in free verse, Randall admits ignorance of Miami because of his immediate needs to revive his economic and creative life. But his defense turns into a spirited offense. He warns that
Telling a Black poet what he ought to write
Is like some Commissar of Culture in Russia telling a poet
He'd better write about the new steel furnaces in the Novobigorsk
region,
Or the heroic feats of Soviet labor in digging the trans-Caucasus Canal,
Or the unprecedented achievement of workers in the sugar beet industry
who exceeded their quota by 400 per cent (it was later discovered to be a
typist's error).
Randall's unfailing humanity empathizes with the Russian poet who may be devastated by his mother's dying of cancer, or by other personal matters. Further, states Randall, as the broadside becomes an aesthetic manifesto,
I'll bet that in a hundred years the poems the Russian
people will read, sing, and love
Will be the poems about his mother's death, his unfaithful mistress,
or his wine, roses, and nightingales,
Not the poems about steel furnaces, the trans-Caucasus Canal, or the
sugar beet industry.
A poet writes about what he feels, what agitates his heart and sets
his pen in motion.
Not what some apparatchnik dictates, to promote his own career or theories.
Randall maintains his freedom to choose, in his own time, his own subjects, those which move him personally, including Miami. He goes on to defend writing about love and, with extravagant seriousness, offers love as a sociopolitical prescription. He sardonically notes that “If Josephine had given Napoleon more loving, he wouldn't have sown / the meadows of Europe with skulls.” In closing the poem and the book, Randall insists:
A poet is not a jukebox.
A poet is not a jukebox.
A poet is not a jukebox.
So don't tell me what
to write.
The revolutionary action of poets has ever been freely to create from their deepest psychic sources. Defending himself, ably and with humor, Randall affirms his own center, his humanist core. One anticipates that as the poet retrieves and reshapes the extensions of his daily life, he will again articulate the range of interests that have made him, in the words of R. Baxter Miller, “one of the most important Black men of letters in the twentieth century.” The reader will welcome his courageous heart, its wit, lyricism, and humane expansiveness.
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