Ishmael Reed’s poetry has been as controversial as his fictional writing. It is stylistically innovative, sometimes to the bewilderment of readers. Less well known than his novels, his poetry strives to present thumbnail sketches of the history of African Americans in the United States. His most frequently anthologized poem, “I Am a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra,” tracks African Americans throughout history much as Langston Hughes does in “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.”

Conjure

In Conjure, a number of poems center on Birmingham, Greensboro, and other locales where African Americans have suffered indignities that compelled them to take action and engage in protest. This collection also includes Reed’s “Neo-HooDoo Manifesto,” “The Neo-HooDoo Aesthetic,” “Catechism of d Neoamerican HooDoo Church,” “HooDoo Poem in Transient,” and “For Cardinal Spellman Who Hated Voo Doo.” In creating Neo-HooDooism, Reed drew on voodoo and other African traditions to create a black aesthetic that did not derive from the white culture and was multicultural. Reed did not always write this term in the same way, sometimes using “Hoodoo,” “hoodoo,” and other variations. In many of the poems in Conjure, Reed eschews conventional punctuation and uses abbreviations such as “d” for “the,” “abt” for “about,” “shd” for “should,” and “yr” for “your.”

“Catechism of d Neoamerican HooDoo Church” is a particularly strident poem in which Reed, having been invited to take a teaching job, protests being denied the opportunity to teach because he “. . . refused to/ deform d works of ellison & wright—his betters—/ to accommodate a viewpoint this clerk thot irresistible.” Reed, in his academic life, was usually at odds with those who were considered his administrative superiors.

Chattanooga

In Chattanooga, Reed returned to more conventional punctuation and moved away from the abbreviations that he had been using. He has said that he did this because he wished to communicate to his readers as directly as possible.

In “Al Capone in Alaska,” Reed writes of what he calls a “hoodoo ecology,” whose values he contrasts with Judeo-Christian values. He ends the poem by having the American and Canadian Christians kill the whales with submachine guns: “They gallantly sail out &/ shoot them as if the Pacific/ were a Chicago garage on/ St. Valentine’s day.” He mixes an ecological statement with the historic St. Valentine’s Day massacre of 1929, a sort of intermixing that he frequently uses in his poetry.

The title poem, “Chattanooga,” has a strong biographical element. Reed writes of the city in which he was born, capturing a great deal of local color. In the fourth stanza, he tells of how his sixth-grade teacher asked him to name the highest mountain, and he, hesitatingly, said “Lookout Mountain” rather than the anticipated “Mount Everest.” His answer caused the “eastern nitpickers” in class to laugh, but this did not daunt him. Reed, of course, was taking liberties here because in actuality, he did not attend sixth grade or any of the earlier grades in Chattanooga, having long since relocated to Buffalo. Nevertheless, he makes his point satirically and effectively.

Points of View

Some of Reed’s most haunting writing is in Points of View, a collection of forty poems, some of which are mere snippets, as in the untitled poem that reads “I know of a man who treated his body like a dog/ the dog ran away.” This collection also contains one of Reed’s more celebrated poems, “Oakland Blues,” which departs stylistically from much of his other poetry. The poem presumably is the story of a father’s coping with the death of a child. The father appears to have come home from the funeral and is suffering from his loss. Reed does not give many details, but it appears that whatever killed the young girl had been festering in her for eighteen months.

In this poem, Reed uses the sorts of repetitions often heard in black churches. The poem relates the event in four six-line passages in which lines 3 and 4 are repetitions of lines 1 and 2. The tone is relaxed, but the cadences are compelling. For those unfamiliar with Reed’s writing, the poems in this collection would be a more accessible introduction.