Dudley Randall

Start Free Trial

An Interview with Dudley Randall

Download PDF PDF Page Citation Cite Share Link Share

SOURCE: “An Interview with Dudley Randall,” in The Black Scholar, Vol. 6, No. 9, June, 1975, pp. 87-90.

[In the following interview, Randall and Fowlkes discuss the process of creating poems such as “The Southern Road,”“The Profile on the Pillow,” and “Frederick Douglas and the Slavemaker.”]

On December 10, 1974 I interviewed Mr. Dudley Randall. Mr. Randall had been with us at our school for a week. I felt this was a good opportunity to get to know a famous person. Mr. Randall has edited three anthologies: For Malcolm, Black Poetry, and The Black Poets. He has published five books of poetry. His latest book is After the Killing. In 1965 he founded Broadside Press, which has published such poets as Gwendolyn Brooks, Don L. Lee, Nikki Giovanni, and Etheridge Knight. He has taught library science at Lincoln University of Missouri and English at University of Michigan and University of Detroit. He was poet-in-residence at University of Detroit from 1969 to 1974. At present he is a librarian and an instructor in Black Studies at University of Detroit.

[Fowlkes:] Mr. Randall, did your childhood in Washington, D.C. inspire you to write?

[Randall:] We left Washington when I was four years old, before I could read or write. However, I remember that my mother took us to a band concert in Towson, Maryland, where the band played “Maryland, My Maryland.” 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.” This is the earliest instance I can remember of my composing a poem.

You did post-graduate work in Humanities. How was your poetry influenced by this?

Humanities taught me to appreciate all the arts, especially architecture. It enabled me to enjoy the onion-spired churches in Russia, the cathedrals in Paris, and the monasteries in Prague. In Detroit I enjoy that red stone Romanesque church on Woodward and Forest, the lobby of the Fisher Building, and the Baldwin Piano Company building on Woodward, which is a replica of a chateau on the Loire. Speaking of poetry, my humanities thesis, if I ever get it done, will be to set words to the music of Chopin. Some of the piano pieces of Chopin are so emotional that they seem to speak. Therefore, I'll try to make my lyrics sing. I'll call them “Songs Without Words.”

Are the young poets here at our school different from others you have encountered?

The students here have potential. They use the same themes as some of the poems published by my publishing company. Some of these themes are love, dope, and poverty. These are legitimate themes, but because they are used so often they should be presented in new and original ways, not by repeating the cliche, “rats and roaches.” For instance, John Raven, the Bronx poet, wrote about a roach so big it would have “come right up / and gave me / five.” This is different, with the addition of humor. The students here do not experiment in form. They write mostly in rhymed couplets. They should try many forms: ballad stanzas, sonnets, haiku, cinquains, free verse. The young black poets today are experimenting. Free verse is being used widely. Poets are writing in the blues form, and are learning from music. Free verse, without regular rhythm or rhyme, allows the poet to express himself in his own style.

If every poet expresses himself in his own style, how can a poem be judged?

By the reader's reaction to the poem. Does the poem leave the reader cold? Or does it stir his emotions, give him new insights, make him think? How does the poet use images, rhythms, words? Are they original and new, or are they stolen from Don Lee or Nikki Giovanni? Is the poem economical? Does every word, every punctuation mark do its work in the poem, or are they superfluous?

Why was Broadside Press founded?

Because I was ignorant.

Because you were ignorant?

Yes. If I had known all the toil and problems that running a business entails, perhaps I wouldn't have started a business. But folksinger Jerry Moore wanted to set my “Ballad of Birmingham” to music, and in order to get it copyrighted I published it as a broadside. That's how Broadside Press began. Now we have eighty-nine broadsides, forty books, and eight anthologies. We have also published posters, tapes, books of criticism, and the autobiography of Gwendolyn Brooks, Report from Part One.

Did your working as a librarian enhance your poetry?

Some of my poems come out of my library experience. I was hospital librarian to the patients at Eloise, the Wayne County General Hospital. Out of that experience I wrote “To the Mercy Killers” and “George.” “George” also reflects my experience as a teen-aged laborer in the foundry of the Ford Motor Company. I have also written about my experience in World War II. A couple of those poems are “Helmeted Boy” and “Pacific Epitaphs.” “Helmeted Boy” (about Pee-Wee, a baby-faced high-school boy in basic training) is only four lines long, but it takes up four pages in my notebook, as I tried to concentrate all my thoughts and feelings about war into four lines.

What type of poems do you prefer to write, and why do you write?

I usually write serious poems related to my experiences in life. However, the popular “Booker T. and W. E. B.,” although basically serious, makes its point through wit and humor. I write because I have an urge to write and because I enjoy writing. Some of my happiest hours have been spent in writing. I wrote for years before I was published.

What is your method of composition?

I have good powers of concentration, and can write anywhere or any time. My wife says the house could be on fire and I wouldn't notice it, if I were reading or writing. I carry a notebook in my pocket so I can jot down ideas or transcribe a poem. I like to let a poem grow in my mind before I set it down on paper. I want every line, every word to be inevitable, so I let the poem grow and shape itself in my unconscious mind inevitably. I conceived “The Southern Road” while traveling to a basic training center in the South in 1943, but I didn't write the poem until after the war, in 1948. I conceived “The Old Women of Paris” and composed one line—“their backs curved like bridges across the Seine”—in 1966, when I was down and out in Paris and walked down the Boulevard Raspail morning and evening because I couldn't afford bus or taxi fare. But I didn't write the poem until 1974, one night when I couldn't sleep. I have my own method of composition, and every writer has to find the method which best suits him.

Which poems did you most enjoy composing?

I enjoy composing every poem. But if I had to choose, I might guess “The Southern Road,” “Frederick Douglass and the Slavebreaker,” and “The Profile on the Pillow.” I enjoyed writing “The Southern Road” because of problems of craftsmanship. I admired the poems of Francois Villon. Villon was a fourteenth century Frenchman who was a vagabond, a thief, and a murderer. But his “Ballade of the Dead Queens,” his “Ballade of His Mother to the Virgin Mary,” and his “Ballade Written the Night Before He Was To Be Hanged” are some of the most powerful poems ever written. His ballade form has been adapted into English poetry, but poets have diminished it into a trivial thing—light verse, vers de societe. I wanted to restore its gravity, its power. At the same I had read a book called Hypnotic Poetry. The author said that some poetry, like that of Edgar Allen Poe, by its melody and repetition induced in the reader a hypnotic, dream-like state. I wanted to use the ballade form with its repeated rhyme sounds and refrain, to induce in the reader a hypnotic state, but more like one of nightmare than of dream, as I told of the bestial South. I also wanted to introduce tension and complexity into the poem by mingling love and repulsion, and by extending the bestiality into other times and places, like the Middle Ages, when people were burned at the stake for slight differences of doctrine. These technical problems made the poem fascinating to write.

What about the other poems?

I enjoyed writing “Frederick Douglass and the Slavebreaker” because it was a commissioned poem and because it took its place in the poetic tradition. I was asked to write a poem for the dedication of the murals in the Frederick Douglass Branch library in Detroit. I knew that two other poets, Robert Hayden and Langston Hughes, had already written two famous poems about Douglass, so I was treading on hallowed ground. One day I was in the studio of the painter, LeRoy Foster, and saw his painting for the mural. It was not the familiar Frederick Douglass, with a long beard. It was a bare torso of a beardless boy. At once I said, “That's the teen-age Douglass when he fought old Cosey, the slave-breaker.” I knew I had found my subject. It was enjoyable to join the company of two fine poets like Hughes and Hayden.

What about the other poem?

“The Profile on the Pillow” was written in the late 1960s, in a time when cities were burning and there were rumors that the government was preparing concentration camps for black Americans, like the camps for Japanese-Americans in World War II. I tried to make it powerful by enclosing conflicting emotions in the same poem—love and fear, tenderness and terror. The tension of the times made writing that poem a powerful experience.

Which poems were highly praised by critics?

All of these. Both James Emanuel and Robert Hayden, who are poets and critics, have included “The Southern Road” in their anthologies. Sterling Brown, who is a grand old poet of the Negro Renaissance and a fine critic, told me he wants to include “Frederick Douglass and the Slavebreaker” in the new edition of his The Negro Caravan. Charles Rowell, a critic at Southern University, says he considers “The Profile on the Pillow” one of the most beautiful of love poems.

What do you think of my favorite poets, Nikki Giovanni and Gwendolyn Brooks?

I know and publish both Nikki and Gwen. Gwendolyn Brooks is one of the best poets writing today. Her blank verse in the poem “Riot” is some of the best blank verse in the language. Her expressive modulation of vowels and consonants is superb in the line “Not like two dainty Negroes from Winettka.” Her catalogue of luxuries, her nuances, and her irony in this poem show that she is a master of language. Nikki writes rapidly, and sometimes carelessly. If you point out bad spelling and grammar to her, she'll say defensively, “Let it stay.” Once she wrote a poem titled “To Dudley Randle,” and I didn't let that stay. On the other hand, she can write with originality and freshness. She wrote a poem about her first visit to Africa where she looked down from the plane and saw her grandmother sitting in a rocking chair with a lion cub by her side. What other poet would have written of her return to the Motherland like that?

Get Ahead with eNotes

Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.

Get 48 Hours Free Access
Previous

The Black Poets

Next

‘Endowing the World and Time’: The Life and Work of Dudley Randall

Loading...