Michael S. Harper
Letter to John Hope Franklin on his autobiography: MIRROR TO AMERICA
JUNETEENTH was first song then Roscoe Dunjee’s “Black Dispatch” editorials
(my favorite cousin Michon born in Guthrie when her parents had naught but each other)
Your preface to CHANT OF SAINTS zeroed in a literary grand orchid bouquet
(I grieved over the lynching of Corrie Cheek so nearby Fisk’s “Briar Patch” taken away)
Majesty of Mollie Buck Sr Aurelia Whittington “Thoroughgood” Mozella Buck Jr
(the xenophobic wit of Ted Currier in the bankteller’s vaudevillian sideshow:money)
Then walking the line at Harvard where you could not sit down but taught Newt to read (rental on the carrel was endlessly Blue & Gold Crimson&Black blood meridian fold)
Sterling called us’uns senegambians and negritos amidst the Gourmets at Harrisons
(you called them the ‘drinkers and the thinkers’ as Box Brown sent himself NEWS:urrl)
The codes of Cuffy/Uncle Tom:[framed tales] MANY THOUSAND GONE (“a sacred effort” only grandma’s visit with Fred Bailey at midnight could know)
Inventory: sacred documents built on slave labor as annals of “black and blue”
also Lincoln’s handwritten “Second Inaugural” Douglass heard and reported
“I been down so long that down don’t worry me.”– a sacred effort also
(“Every time I hear the spirit in my heart I will pray”—effortly sacred too)
“Geography is Fate” and ‘Going to the Territory’ a ‘grammar of motives’ in song
(“If You Want To Hide Something From Mose Put It In A Book” with pictures)
“I Shall Not, I shall not be moved Just Like A Tree Standing By The Water, I Shall Not Be Moved”(“I stand up through your destruction, I stand up.” instrumental “Lucille”)
The greenhouse as the artery against destruction—mean mean mean mean to be free
(“me and my baby gonna shine, shine, me and my baby gonna shine.”)
“Tell it Like it Is, Baby” again– ‘so you will not cut down trees or kill men’
(“every shut-eye aint asleep; every goodbye aint gone”)MANY THOUSAND GONE
Notes on the Long Poem (Tuscaloosa, AL)
‘letters from an imaginary friend’–begin here
Edwin Honig did a class on this beginning with Lorca
the women and the men meet at scylla/charybdis
(your long suit is lyric grace short shrift)
always begin with metrics make them count
whether they can read or write irmus next
lots of Whitman in Tuscaloosa many lessons
in guerilla warfare ala Nathan Bedford Forrest
all three volumes of Shelby Foote on battlefields
(Keats’s letters Proust Milton an exegesis
of Donald Justice’s sonnet on Eden for Berryman’s Iowan workshop)
Rukeyser Bishop Kumin Brooks “For My People”
and JUBILEE together, Walker’s dissertation on Vyree
(some Alice Walker student of Rukeyser tutelage)
make them study the industrial north Pittsburgh’s
steel the music of the hill Homestead Grays Josh
when it comes to the agrarians make them translate
Bear Bryant always won at home new stadium museum
no traffic in the olympic swimming pool your lane
not many eating holes but lunch on the river dutch
best bbq is out of town make sure you visit Oxford
good French restaurant in Birmingham 16th St church
documentary on George Wallace Owens&Louis birthmarks
Elvis in Tupulo angola lunch on Natchez Trace
you will need AC in the endowed house already there(the parking lot)
get buildings&grounds for pine needles now record rebel graves
who dug them
why the Big House and those shacks are so close together
Natal Visit of the Theme of Shoes
(for my daughter, Rachel)
You have called me beforehand
with the good news of the baby turning
acupuncture has done the trick of Chinese
medicine and your doctor approves via sonogram
Your feet are beginning to swell
you have taken off your rings and bracelets
in preparation for what could be a ‘c’ section
but as I said ‘the baby has turned’ perhaps for good
I point out the shoes from land’s end with no heel
and pass “discover” to you to order
what used to be called ‘the house of the happy feet’
(the Savoy ballroom quipped by Lana Turner
ages and ages ago when ‘imitation of life’ was vogue)
but this is no film of the American diaspora
and race prevails with gender so you go back to work
with your good news and unfinished business
your brother about to get on a train after MoMA
(he cannot be Picasso or Matisse but his own man)
we must all teach him to walk the walk
on his own stand trees bandstand natchez trace
so we go on in the dance of our lives
never knowing enough for any newborn
who will ask questions of all of us
forgive us for all our sins those of omission strong
you are already singing to him or her
as you dream night after night of being breathless
so close is she to your heart of hearts
so if at the turning and beyond he comes
in a line of procession of angels
concentrate on omphalos a string of pearls
ordered from a catalog
in comfortable feet
your beating heart
awaiting the gift of acupuncture
Cortege
Baldwin’s
Sonny’s Blues
what we will read
as an accompaniment
that issue
of the Partisan Review
with Golding criticism
stolen from the Hawkeye
library
Mr. Roth
accusing me
of plagiarism
this was not
the first test
it was “Jimmy”
preaching in L.A.
to hitman
Malcolm X
we all knew
about the FBI
that was
pressure
driving through Harlem
from St. John the Divine
“A Talk to Teachers”
comes to mind
the students
‘they just grew’
Faculty Study #421:Brown University Library
Without Charles Churchwell
there would have been ‘no study’
I put Coltrane up on the wall
the difficulty of the soprano
a legislation to be passed
in Providence Plantations
and could not “sing” on command:
carrying the mace uphill
in the ceremonial past
I conjured presidential
signatures at convocation
[commencement was free]
I stacked my study with texts
to teach the innocent and guilty
alike, taking Lincoln’s “sacred effort”
(across the street at John Hay)
as the only beacon I could follow
after Douglass
who raised troops for the Union
and should have processed
in formation at Harvard
after St. Gauden’s statuary
I can forgive anything
forget nothing
in the annals of Slavery
this university is built on
Womb of Space (Yaddo)for Wilson Harris
Orb or goblet of crystal prism
this is no kidney transplant eat
or be eaten the jaguar is king food line
vertical and horizontal coupling indefinite
but not hit or miss one hemisphere is always
replete the other abundant two halves devoured
you lie back in the calm of insects still uneaten
swarms all around you yet becalmed by instincts
not fully hidden or absorbed protected haven
you stroke on your back and sides but fins pronounce
themselves near the outlet you have seen deer
other cats the anaconda of the hysterical never
eating often but fully absorbing all waters trees
open and cut bark cylinders the change of color
like the skin shedding is the art of buddhist aura
as one moves along the food chain from bottom to top
sky reflected in the water and reversible clouds
the billowing of trees sculpture made in heaven
but fired on the anvil hephaestus knew myth of return
not any circle but oracular elongated elliptical
listen to all that inhabits you watch what happens
as you move among the biophere devouring blessing
all that lives and dies imminence of bloom shedding
you feel this at the top of the adrenals hormonal
flowering of change forgive the opposition taxed upon
fulcrums of mathematical engineering religion almanac
keeping score with the infinite inside you fully open
yet closure is separation the gift of what is always
What I Know This Very Day:
[Harry “Sweets” Edison, tribal inventor, dead at 83]
“I began in Kentucky
on a York cornet
I hated that horn
then I heard Pops
I heard Pops again
1 9 3 7 I was with Count
Pres named me “Sweetiepie”
moved to L A in ’50
I hated the horn
(so much practice)
when I could be playin’
with the boys
the Nation changed me
and I changed the nation”
note: Sweets’s father was a Zuni Indian
Tattoo
Though a simple rose under your skin
I look up the bugle ritual of recall
for sailors to regroup – soldiers at parade rest
and your sister who could not read as a child
needing you for sustenance – now you want it removed
Copenhagen (for me) is Tivoli played by Dexter Gordon
His love for that city –broad and low in balladry
for making the sound of recall a lullaby
with his name on it –he would love to see your tattoo
his magic at composition a call to Basie/Ellington
Hamp and two full days of practice at seventeen
with the makers of bebop – just off the train from LA
the son of a doctor whose doctoring gave such a smile
in the lower registers he was Mr. “Blue Note” (tenor)
he would venture his signature on conventions ROSE
and turn courtly in the madrigal – play you a hymn
and take you to his church (which was always the road)
so you know why you came from the north – a town
just out of sight from Copenhagen – and in this poem
provided your sister that special speech of signals
so the faerytale of being pricked into song
just under the skin was the song of a tent show
the tattooist fully sober and without shaky hands
and just beneath the surface of your blood
Cezanne’s Polynesian sorcerer – so genial in profile
that eating your salad is a school of painting
primal in the garden of the artist’s magic circle
where every gesture is the canon of tattoo
Michael S. Harper is University Professor and Professor of English at Brown University, where he has taught since 1970. He is the first Poet Laureate of the State of Rhode Island, a term he held from 1988-1993. In 1991 he was Visiting Scholar, at large, for Phi Betta Kappa, visiting nince campuses. He has published fifteen books of poetry, two of which were nominated for the National Book Award (1970 & 1977), Dear John, Dear Coltrane and Images of Kin, New and Selected Poems. Images of Kin won the Melville-Cane Award for the Poetry Society of America : History Is Your Own Heartbeat, 1971, won the Black Academy of Arts & Letters Award for poetry. He has edited the Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown, which he selected for the national Poetry Series, 1979. He is the co-editor of Chant of Saints, an anthology of African-American Art, Writing and Scholarship, and also co-editor of the “Ralph Ellison” special issue Carleton Micellany, winter 1980. He was guest editor for a special issue of Robert Hayden for Obsidian, 1981.