‘Endowing the World and Time’: The Life and Work of Dudley Randall
[In the following excerpt, Miller profiles Randall's poetry and comments on Randall's contributions towards the promotion of black writing.]
Dudley Randall, poet, librarian, and publisher, is one of the most important Black men of letters in the twentieth century. A child during the Harlem Renaissance, he was himself a leading poet of the subsequent generation of Black writers, and he later became a pioneer of the Black literary movement of the 1960s. His own work, so accomplished technically and profoundly concerned with the history and racial identity of Blacks, benefits from the ideas and literary forms of the Harlem Renaissance as well as from the critical awareness of the earlier Western Renaissance. Although he borrows eruditely from the sources, he culturally transforms them. Through the founding of the Broadside Press and his brilliant editorial work there, he made available to a wise audience the work of fellow poets such as Hayden, Danner, Brooks, and Walker. The variety of such writers indicates that Randall's publishing was in no sense programmatic or intent upon a particular kind of poetry. Indeed, his own skill, so firmly rooted in history, is as different in its assumptions from the more formalistic verse of a Brooks or a Danner as it is from the folk and religious poems of Walker. But Randall combines his own poetic credo with that of other poets to create a broad tolerance in what he publishes. In other words, he makes an active commitment to Black literature in general.
[Randall] has helped to deepen the technical breadth and authenticity of Black poetry. Collaborator and mentor during the Black Arts Movement (1960-75), Randall infused his own ballads with racial history. … Boone House, a cultural center founded by Margaret Danner in Detroit, was “home” to Randall from 1962 through 1964. There Randall and Danner read their own work each Sunday, and over the years the two of them collected a group of their poems. When Randall edited the Broadside anthology For Malcolm X, the prospects for publication encouraged him to bring out the collaborative book as well. Entitled Poem-Counterpoem (1966), it became the first major publication of Broadside Press.
Perhaps the first of its kind, the volume contains ten poems, alternately each by Danner and Randall. Replete with social and intellectual history, the verses stress nurture and growth. In “The Ballad of Birmingham” Randall compares racial progress to blossoming. Through octosyllabic couplets and incremental repetition, including a dialogue between a mother and her daughter, he achieves “dramatic reversal,” as Aristotle would call it, as well as epiphany. Based on historical incident, the bombing in 1963 of Martin Luther King Jr.'s church by white terrorists, eight quatrains portray one girl's life and death. (Four girls actually died in the bombing.) When the daughter in the poem asks to attend a Civil Rights rally, the loving and fearful mother forbids her to go to the rally. Allowed to go to church instead, the daughter dies anyway. Thus, the mother's concern was to no avail, for an evil world has no sanctuary, either in the street or in the church. After folk singer Jerry Moore read the poem in a newspaper, he set it to music, and Randall granted him permission to publish the lyrics with the tune.
“Memorial Wreath,” a Randall lyric of celebration, profits from well-structured analogues. Some imply the processes of resurrection, love, and blossoming. Others draw parallels between ancestry, suffering, and sacrifice; still others liken blues to racial continuity, to the inseparability of pain and beauty, and to the irony of racial experience, including art itself. Finally, when the speaker ultimately addresses his spiritual ancestors, the images come from the American nineteenth century. The more dramatically conceived and frequently anthologized ballad “Booker T. and W. E. B.” presents one voice's call and another's response. In alternating stanzas in the poem the two Black leaders (1856-1915; 1868-1963) express opposite views. While Booker T. Washington favors agriculture and domestic service, Du Bois emphasizes the human quest to learn liberally. Despite Washington's focus upon property, Du Bois proposes dignity and justice. Randall, who tries to present each man realistically, favors Du Bois, to whom the narrator gives the last line intentionally. A free verse, “For Margaret Danner / In Establishing Boone House” (December 1962), fuses quest and rebirth into benediction: “May your crocuses rise up through winter snow.” And the speaker in “Belle Isle,” the last lyric, addresses the poet's calling, “the inner principle … endowing / the world and time … joy and delight, for ever.”
During the first Black Writer's Conference at Fisk University in the 1960s, Randall met Margaret Burroughs, founder and director of the Du Sable Museum of African American History in Chicago. When he called her regarding the anthology For Malcolm X, his previous study had prepared him well. He was aware, as most Americans were not, that the father of Russian literature, Aleksander Pushkin, had African origins through a maternal grandfather. Randall, who had learned the Russian language after the Second World War, was able to read the literature in the original, which not only impressed him as much as had the work of Latin and French poets, but had moved him to undertake some translations, notably “Wait for Me” and “My Native Land” by K. M. Siminov.
On his return from Russia and once again at home in Boone House, Randall plunged into cultural activities and met some emerging and important Black writers. He attended art exhibits, jazz sessions, and monthly readings of poetry. Authors read from a new anthology, Beyond the Blues (1962), and from a special issue of Negro History Bulletin (October 1962). Randall befriended fellow poets Betty Ford, Harold Lawrence, and Naomi Long Madgett as well as Edward Simpkins and James Thompson.
In 1966 Randall met the celebrated poet Gwendolyn Brooks. When a reading club in Detroit invited her to read at Oakland University, he requested that several English teachers meet her at the train station. When he himself finally greeted her after the reading, she was surprised. From book reviews in Negro Digest, she had thought him fierce, but he had proved pleasantly mild: “I thought you were terrible, but you're all right.” While the two poets took snapshots together, she threw her arms happily around her new friend's shoulders, and, asked later to submit a poem for the new Broadside series, she granted him permission to republish “We Real Cool.” He would bring out her pamphlets Riot (1969), Family Pictures (1971), and Aloneness (1971). At first he declined to issue her autobiography, Report from Part One (1972), because he believed that Harper and Row could better promote the volume. When Brooks disagreed, he finally conceded the argument, and, upon the publication, Toni Cade Bambara responded enthusiastically on the front page of the New York Times Book Review.
With a favorable evaluation of Audre Lorde's first book, The First Cities (1966), in Negro Digest, Randall followed her progress in Cables or Rage (London: Paul Breman, 1970), but, when asked to publish her third book, From A Land Where Other People Live, he found himself overbooked. Brooks intervened on Lorde's behalf, however, and he finally relented. The volume, which came out under his imprint in 1973, was nominated for a National Book Award. After the ceremonies in New York he and Lorde went backstage to meet the poet Adrienne Rich. As he paused at the breast-high platform and wondered how to mount it, Lorde gave him a hand, “How's that,” she asked, “for a fat old lady?” A representative for Rich's publisher drove the two in a limousine to a cocktail party at the Biltmore Hotel, and Randall wondered secretly when Broadside might afford the luxury of a limousine. Although Lorde had promised to take him on the Staten Island ferry and show him her house in the area, they had celebrated too late; no time would be left during the next morning.
At the writer's conference at Fisk, Randall had strengthened the professional associations that would assure the publication of verses by established poets such as Hayden, Tolson, and Walker in the Broadside series. Securing from Brooks the permission to use the colloquial verse, “We Real Cool,” he published the first group—Poems of the Negro Revolt, a distinguished collection. Although he had the tendency at first to issue famous poems for popular dissemination, a reviewer in Small Press suggested that he might serve contemporary writing better by printing previously unpublished verse.
Randall, while at the conference at Fisk, had seen Margaret Burroughs’ sketches and heard Margaret Walker rehearse her afternoon reading; as he listened to Walker read about Malcolm X, he observed that most Black poets were writing about Malcolm, and Burroughs proposed that Randall edit a collection on the subject. When Randall invited her to co-edit the volume, she accepted, and David Llorens promised to announce the anthology in Negro Digest (later Black World). Randall received the first submission a few days later.
For Malcolm X brought Hayden, Walker, and Brooks together with the younger writers LeRoi Jones (Imamu Baraka), Larry Neal, Sonia Sanchez, and Etheridge Knight. Randall, through collaboration with them, learned about the magazines, Soulbook and Black Dialogue, but problems with the printer delayed publication until June 1967. At Fisk, Randall had seen a slim girl with David Llorens, and, when he returned to Detroit, he received a letter from Nikki Giovanni, who requested a copy of For Malcolm X to review in the college publication edited by her. Although For Malcolm X did not appear until 1967, after her graduation from Fisk, she reviewed the book for a Cincinnati newspaper. During the book signing by contributors at Margaret Burroughs’ museum, he met Haki Madhubuti (then Don L. Lee) and later received a copy of Madhubuti's Think Black. The younger poet had himself published 700 copies and sold them all in a week. When he and Randall read for a memorial program at a Chicago high school, Randall advised the new friend, “Now Don, read slowly, and pronounce each word distinctly.” Because Madhubuti read first and earned a standing ovation, Randall humorously promised himself to read thereafter “before, not after Don.” When visiting Detroit, Madhubuti usually went by Randall's home. Although all business agreements between the two poets were oral, Madhubuti clearly regarded them as binding, for he refused to sign with Random House, and when his second book, Black Pride (1968), was completed he asked Randall to provide an introduction. In 1969 Randall brought out Madhubuti's Don't Cry, Scream in both paperback and cloth editions, the latter then a first for Broadside, though he himself would later publish a similar edition of For Malcolm X.
Over the years Randall won professional warmth from Sonia Sanchez, one of the contributors to For Malcolm X. In his poetry class at the University of Detroit she had wondered whether to publish with Third World Press, Madhubuti's firm, or with Broadside, which she finally chose. When Randall had a heart murmur, Sanchez sent him various teas, and, chiding him for smoking, she drove him to bookstores in New York. When he flew to Africa in 1970, she and Nikki Giovanni went to the motel to see him off. For consistent dedication to Black American poetry, Randall won personal and communal loyalty.
Yet Dudley Randall remains a poet in his own right. Cities Burning (1968) captures his zeitgeist. Here the visionary lyrics and apocalyptic revelations concern urban riot, generational opposition, and Black imagemaking. “Roses and Revolutions,” a prophetic lyric in free verse written in 1948, addresses both the Civil Rights Movement and personal conscience. Two other poems, “The Rite” and “Black Poet, White Critic,” clarify in two brief quatrains Randall's theory of art. “The Rite” presents initially a dramatic dialogue and a narrative reflection which in turn give way to the conflict between the old and the young. Symbolically, the drama reenacts the Oedipal struggle between fathers and sons, for to some degree even rebels must cannibalize themselves off the very traditions they seek to overthrow. And insofar as revolutionaries or pseudo-revolutionaries themselves (Randall published many of their works) must emerge at least in part from precisely such tradition, destroying it completely would mean self-effacement. While the writer or any artist wants personal innovation, the younger author internalizes the older one, just as youth seeks to supersede and displace old age. Where such rebellious youth relives the inescapable lessons of the past, for the type of human existence itself never changes, so change itself, even revolution as espoused by militant Blacks in the sixties and early seventies, is necessarily incomplete. In “Black Poet, White Critic” the poet's drama becomes more racially focused as the detached narrator works through humorously to an interrogative punch line. Advising the poet to write “safely,” the critic cautions against the subjects of freedom and murder. Moved by “universal themes and timeless symbols,” the arbiter proposes a verbal portrait of the “white unicorn,” and in quipping back (“a white unicorn?”), the narrator underscores the subjectivity of beauty.
Two other poems, “The Idiot” and “The Melting Pot,” reveal Randall's technical range. The first, a humorous monologue, blends psychological depth with colloquial tone in order to portray police brutality. The police officer, who has called the speaker a Black “boy,” punches him in the face and drags him to the wall. Here the officer searches and cuffs him. Sufficiently angry to chastise the police, the narrator relents because, “I didn't want to hurt his feelings, / and lose the good will / of the good white folks downtown, / who hired him.” The irony is complex. The speaker feigns courage, but the rationalization signifies true cowardice. Why did the “good” people downtown hire the demonstrably bad policeman? The speaker's reasoning, ill-suited to an answer, breaks down. Rather than see others in true fashion, the idiot chooses doubly to blind himself. Almost hopelessly naive to white hypocrisy, he misreads direct racism as well. In eight rhymed quatrains “The Melting Pot” illustrates the ironic myth of the American mainstream to the protagonist, Sam. From the presented fable, including the wordplay and rhyme, the comic ballad leads to an ultimate epiphany, for thrown out of the American crucible a thousand times, Sam reconfirms, “I don't give a da … / Shove your old pot. You can like it or not, / but I'll be just what I am.”
Through poems such as “A Different Image,” Randall acknowledges the influence of African and Caribbean poets. Schooled well in Négritude, a philosophy espoused by French-speaking Blacks since 1945, he deepens Black experience into universal meaning. In 1968 he brought out James Emanuel's first book of poetry, The Treehouse and Other Poems and issued Nikki Giovanni's second book, Black Judgment. In the reprinting of Margaret Danner's Impressions of African Art Forms, a facsimile of the 1960 original, he redistributed the only known volume devoted entirely to the subject of African aesthetics. During 1969 he published books by poets Jon Eckels, Beatrice Murphy, Nancy Arnez, and Sonia Sanchez, as well as those by Marvin X, Keorapetse Kgositsile, and Stephany. Randall served as instructor of English at the University of Michigan in 1969 and from then until 1974 served as poet in residence at the University of Detroit. For a while at the University of Ghana, he studied African arts. Then he visited Togo and Dohemy. From 1970 through 1976 he completed an appointment to the advisory panel of the Michigan Council for the Arts.
His literary career has prospered; the fourteen poems in Love You (1970) achieve more thematic and formal focus than in his previous poetry. With scholarly range, he writes the poem of celebration, the monologue, and the short visionary lyric. Attentive to transitory love-making, as well as to the discrepancy between appearance and reality, he observes well the tension between the tangible and the intangible. Sometimes he uses skillful similes to verbalize a speaker's personal joy; he employs Steinesque wordplay. Through structured dramatic situations, he projects personal advice and consolation for fellows. “The Profile on the Pillow,” a well crafted verse, compares the narrator's trace of the lover's silhouette to the mature poet's commitment to humanity. Set against the race riots of the late sixties, the narrator-lover echoes clearly Brooks's speaker (“The Second Sermon on the Warpland”): “We may be consumed in the holocaust, / but I keep, against the ice and the fire, / the memory of your profile on the pillow.” Although love is intangible, the reader recognizes it through the writer's use of tangible light. Retreating from chaotic history, one person asks the other to “step into the circle of my arms,” withdrawing from the metaphorical whirlwind and fire, from physical and emotional exhaustion.
For Dudley Randall the early 1970s meant a balanced and personal retreat. Written from the thirties through the sixties, the poems in More to Remember (1971) comprise his first comprehensive collection. Although the individual verses are not arranged chronologically, each group represents a particular decade of his work. While times changed, the biting irony and humor developed. Poem, Counterpoem (1966) contains only the verses appropriately paired with Danner's, and Cities Burning (1968) has only those which reveal a disintegrating era. Then the most indispensable of his volumes, the latter includes the subjects of kindness and cruelty, incredible harvests, diversely classical forms, and natural beauty. Here Randall explores some contradictions in human psychology and in the Black Arts Movement, and, still a thinking poet, in doing so he displays artistic breadth. Adding to the literary strategies from earlier volumes, he draws upon personification, and though despite some occasional and prosaic overstatement he keeps a sharp ear. In deftly manipulating his point of view, Randall writes the lyric or the parable equally well. In “The Line Up,” a poem in four quatrains, a police inquiry is written as an extended metaphor. Here one views the worth of various literary periods while the verse employs a double voice. There is, on the one hand, the common speech of accused criminals, including the murderer, the young pimp, and the dirty old man, yet on the other hand, the speaker maintains an ironic detachment; he believes that the investigators ask the wrong questions. Although the police indict many people and record their crimes, the officers themselves hardly understand, nor can they explain their motives.
“Interview,” possibly the most sustained and brilliant of the generational poems, portrays an entrepreneur turned philanthropist. As the old man explains his principles to an intruding young reporter, an ambivalence is clearly apparent. The newsman, who has crossed protective moat and scaled a barbed wire fence, suggests boldly the mirror-image of the philanthropist himself at an earlier age. And in provoking the speaker's own credo, the youngster hears the man repudiate cynicism. The benefactor, self-trained in industry and discipline, avows to “Not snivel … prove to those / Who could not take the world just 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 … than … their years of whining and complaining.”
“On a Name for Black Americans,” a politically angry sermon, stresses self-reliance as well. “The spirit informs the name, / not the name the spirit.” While Randall suggests the name Du Bois temperamentally as well as ideally, he pragmatically implies Benjamin Franklin and Booker T. Washington. From childhood he remembers that Blacks worked hard once to have Negro capitalized, and he never considered the word derogatory. Although some Blacks have attempted to demean the term by using lower case or by applying it only to the submissive fellows, he still asserts that “what you are is more important than what you are called … that if you yourself, by your life and actions, are great … something of your greatness will rub off … dignify … actions affect words … In a more limited sense … words affect actions.”
The distinction between appearance and reality pervades More to Remember. “Put Your Muzzle Where Your Mouth Is (or shut up)” addresses sarcastically a theoretical Black revolutionary. Loudly telling others to kill, he has murdered none himself, and the protagonist who shouts “Black Power” in the poem “Informer” similarly deludes the listeners who overlook his whispers to the FBI. “Abu” reveals the contradictions through low burlesque, for the activist who has apparently decided to blow up City Hall advertises in the New York Times. Right in front of the FBI infiltrators, he promises to assassinate a white liberal who gave “only” half a million dollars to the NAACP, but, asked to comment later, “Says nothing ‘bout that Southern sheriff / killed three black prisoner / 'cept, he admired him / for his sin / cerity.” So consumed with self-hatred, Abu is a self-acknowledged coward, for his posture and rhetoric are less dangerous than foolishly deceptive. He criticizes readily some white liberals who pose no obvious threat, but he rationalizes away the need to confront the racist who does so. He is as hypocritical as is the protagonist in “militant Black, Poet,” who hangs himself after a white suburbanite downplays the “militant's” bitterness. Finally, the poem “Ancestors” exposes the revolutionary's own elitist tendencies. While such people fantasize about royal heritage, they demean humble origins. In “On Getting a Natural (For Gwendolyn Brooks),” the volume's final poem written in December 1969, Randall's speaker celebrates the humanist. At first too humble to admit her own charisma (“beauty is as beauty does”), Brooks blossoms into racial awareness, and her epiphany rings true.
In More to Remember the description concludes with Randall's aesthetic theory. In “The Ascent” he has represented the poet as visionary, and in “The Dilemma (My poems are not sufficiently obscure? To please the critics—Ray Durem),” he has revealed once more the tension in the artist, the modifier of both literary tradition and classical form. Whether from traditionalists or revolutionaries, the artist asserts intellectual independence. The appropriately titled “The Poet” illuminates the type. Sloppily dressed and bearded, the writer reads when he should work. Imagining a poem, he would rather turn a profit and convert to “outlandish religions”; he consorts with Blacks and Jews. Often disturbing the peace, a “foe of the established order,” he mingles with revolutionaries. In a satirical ploy the narrator plays temporarily the bigot's part: “When will you [the poet] slough off / This preposterous posture / And behave like a normal / Solid responsible / White Anglo Saxon Protestant.” Randall's artist philosophizes more than he lives (“The Trouble with Intellectuals”), but he feels deeply (“Mainly By the Music”).
Especially from 1972 through 1974, Randall contributed much to Black American culture. He participated in a poetry festival, “The Forerunners,” codirected by Woodie King at Howard University in 1972. He bolstered indirectly the early success of the Howard University Press, which would issue the proceedings, and in Washington he heard Owen Dodson read from a wheelchair. He listened to Sterling Brown present “Strong Men.” A recipient of the Kuumba Liberation Award in 1973, Randall participated in the seminar for socio-literature in the East West Culture Learning Institute at the University of Hawaii. He had established himself, says Addison Gayle, as one “who came to prominence, mainly, after the Renaissance years, who bridged the gap between poets of the twenties and those of the sixties and seventies … began the intensive questioning of the impossible dream, the final assault upon illusion that produces the confrontation with reality, the search for paradigms, images, metaphors, and symbols from the varied experiences of a people whose history stretches back beyond the Nile.”
Dudley Randall marks well the transition over six decades. His next pamphlet, After the Killing (1973), often assumes the style and voice of the younger poets. Although most of the verses included are recent, some are older ones. “To the Mercy Killers” appears with some poems completed during the sixties and seventies. Here Randall experiments with typographical lyrics and sharpens Juvenalian satire. Despite others’ inclinations toward modern compression, he avoids the direction of Wallace Stevens and Gwendolyn Brooks as well as the visionary sweep of Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes. Pausing occasionally for sexual deliberations, he lays bare intraracial prejudice and semantic deceptions. “Words Words Words” criticizes Black activists who constantly favor white and light-skinned women. When the expressions belie the deeds, Randall's speakers toy with ambiguities. While one Black says “fag—” means something else, another adds that “mother” does as well. The narrator concludes that “maybe black / doesn't mean black, / [two line space] but white.” The double space underscores the pause and insight.
The title poem, a parable, infuses murder with the solemnity of biblical myth. The literary world transmutes the poet's life into fable, for the historical Randall lived through World War II and Viet Nam. As in Robert Hayden's “In the Mourning Time,” the speaker distills Black anger into ritual. Supposedly dedicated to ultimate peace, the bloodthirsty man kills other people, whose children in turn kill his own. Another bloodthirsty one, three generations later, repeats the original's words: “And after the killing / there will be [triple or quadruple space] peace.” The blank space implies human extinction or an undesired solution. “To The Mercy Killers” translates the ritual more clearly into social portraits of totalitarianism and abortion, though neither subject may be fully intended. One man reclaims sarcastically the glowing life from others, the self-appointed gods who would destroy him. Elsewhere Randall's narrator states aphoristically: “There are degrees of courage. / One man is not afraid to die. / A second is not afraid to kill. / A third is not afraid to be merciful.”
With energy and commitment, Randall demonstrates Black self-determination now. Influenced more by modernist techniques, he discusses the love of writing and the joy of publishing. Despite the fun of teaching, he expects his professional and literary career to take new turns. While not tearing up his work, he writes only in the days he has time. He composes the poems in his head and then writes them later—sometimes while lying down or driving along the freeway.
Randall believed that young Black poets should be free from publishers like Random House and Morrow and, despite the emergence of new talents, that older poets should continue to be active. While abandoning sonorousness in his own art, he attempted looser forms and more colloquial diction. Wanting a widely diverse audience, Randall worked for richness and philosophical depth. To achieve freedom and flexibility he declined partnerships as well as incorporations, for he feared that stockholders would demand profits, would lower quality, or would publish prose. While his income from the press went into publishing new poetry volumes, Randall paid royalties to other poets. He confessed, “I am not well qualified to operate in a capitalistic society. I came of age during the Great Depression, and my attitude toward business is one of dislike and suspicion. Writers who send me manuscripts and speak of ‘making a buck’ turn me off.” Although dedicated to ideals, Randall remembered well the pragmatic lessons from the Black Renaissance. When the Depression came in the thirties, white publishers had dropped Blacks who earlier had been popular, so Randall recommended that Afro-Americans “build a stable base in their own communities.”
In “Coleman A. Young: Detroit Renaissance” the speaker advocates communal rebirth. Aware of contemporary mechanization, he still acknowledges the value of wisdom. The historical sweep, suggesting both racial and human consciousness, spans 3,000 years. The final lines allude at once to Langston Hughes’ Montage and Shakespeare's Tempest:
Together we [human community] will build
a city that will yield
to all their hopes and dreams so long deferred.
New faces will appear
too long neglected here;
new minds, new means will build a brave new world.
The rhythmically intoned “long” and the repetitive “new” achieve sound inflections, ones rare indeed in more formal Black poetry. Even the words of Shakespeare's Miranda (“brave new world”) assume a bluesesque depth and a suspended sharpness in half-stepped musical climbs.
Randall's recent book, A Litany of Friends (1981), demonstrates an intellectual depth of themes used and technical mastery of the poetic form. Of the eighty-two poems collected, twenty-four are reprints, and forty-eight are new. Six poems appeared first in Poem, Counterpoem (1966), four in Cities Burning (1968), one in Love You (1970), fourteen in More to Remember (1971), and nine in After the Killing (1973). Grouped topically, the verses demonstrate Randall's technical skill.
Randall enlarges the humanness of poetry written in English. Sensitive to Robert Hayden's historical allusions, he employs the sea-death imagery of Alfred Lord Tennyson, and he alludes equally well to Thomas Gray's graveyard school or to the blues tradition of Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown. Responsive to both romance and tragedy, Randall achieves the lyrical as well as the dramatically stoic poem. Creating both inner and outer voices, the private persona and the detached narrator, he reveals human consciousness.
In the sustained title poem of forty lines, Randall celebrates other people. Here are family members and fellow artists who helped him through a severe personal depression in the mid-seventies. While metaphors and similes emphasize kinship as well as journey, familial embrace signifies communal ritual. The ceremonial tone leads back through Black America to Africa. Without the mention of last names, the speaker thanks Gwendolyn Brooks for remembering him and sending gifts. He praises the late Hoyt Fuller for respecting him as a man rather than as a hero. In his mind he hears Etheridge Knight tell him to confront the pain and to transcend it. While the speaker thanks Audre Lorde for writing and sending donations, the narrator praises Sonia Sanchez, who phones him and sends herbs. So, friendship inspires personal restoration.
Two other poems, “My Muse” and “Maiden, Open,” suggest Randall's erudition. Well-versed in the poetic themes and forms of antiquity as well as in the English Renaissance, he shows the ambivalence of art and eternal love. In the seven stanzas of “My Muse” (October 1, 1980), he blends Greek sources with African sound. While the muse (“Zasha”) inspires the poet, his verses come either in tenderness or wrath. The speaker observes classical analogues between the African muse, Catullus’ Lesbia, and Shakespeare's dark lady as well as Dante's Beatrice and Poe's Annabel Lee. Restored to her rightful place in human mythology, the African muse appears as, “My Zasha / Who will live for ever in my poems / Who in my poems will be forever beautiful.” The blackness is sublime. Through the analogue between the poem and the damsel, “Maiden, Open” places eternalness equally against the enchanted landscape: “who ever tastes the poet's lips / Will never grow old, will never die. …”
More political poems such as “A Leader of the People (for Roy Wilkins),” written April 18, 1980, and “A Poet Is Not a Jukebox” distill racial history into literary type. Although Wilkins, an NAACP leader, was still alive then, today the verse marks an appropriate threnody. Dramatized in two voices, the optimistic one written in roman type and the pessimistic one expressed in italics, the poem contrasts Wilkins with the skeptical narrator. And, on a second level, it sets up Wilkins’ two selves, one visionary and the other pragmatic. Wilkins acknowledges a commitment to self-respect and independence, but the negative voice assures him that sacrifice earns the enduring hatred of men and women. When Wilkins answers he will risk hatred for love, the counterpart argues that others will rebuke him. Whereas Wilkins agrees to bear scorn and pride for the sake of Blacks, the other responds demonically so. Although Wilkins reaffirms the mission to withstand the enemies and save the people, the pessimist finished introspectively: “It is not your enemies who will do these things to you, / but your people.”
When the emphasis falls less upon betrayal than endurance, “A Poet Is Not a Jukebox” reaffirms an artistic independence. After writing a love poem, the speaker must defend the choice to a militant inquirer. Why, she asks, doesn't he portray the Miami riot? Now self-removed from social upheaval, he has worked lately for the Census and listened to music. In ignoring television, he has avoided the news as well. As a statement about artistic freedom, the poem leads through totalitarianism to a complexly human statement. The writer must achieve personal and emotional range, for out of love and the commitment to happiness and joy, he “writes about what he feels, what agitates his heart. …”
Apparently Randall edits in the same manner. While some scholars would view Randall today primarily as a publisher, others think of him as a man of letters. While he fails to shape his talent into polished rhythms and compressed images, he writes keenly in the ballad and sonnet forms, and in prophetic verse, he experiments in the parable and fable. Although attracted to the poetry of antiquity, including classical conventions, he also gives his energetic support to modern originality. While enabling him to perceive the love often overlooked in the poetry and life of Sonia Sanchez, his sensitive ear also helps him to appreciate the epic tone and Christian analogue in verses by Etheridge Knight, Sonia's former husband. Whether or not Dudley Randall is a great poet in his own right, Black American literary art has benefited from his great talent and love for fifty years.
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