The Literary Corner: Introduction to African American Poetry with Eugene Redmond—Part I (side a)

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[african music]

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He took the lion lunge, hey hey. He took the tiger step, hey hey.

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He took the tomb trail, hey hey. He took the sacred plunge, hey hey.

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He made the ocean leap, hey hey. He made the gong gong call, hey hey.

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He made the death mouth, hey hey. He made the freedom creep, hey hey.

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He ate the juicy blues, hey hey. He ate the rat roach flat, hey hey. He ate the numb stare, hey hey.

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He ate the airborn shoes, hey hey. He caught the sassy space, hey hey.

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He taught, the caught the todem call, hey hey. He caught the kill flame, hey hey.

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He caught the funky grace, hey hey. He caught the funky grace, hey hey. He caught the funky grace, hey hey.

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[african music]

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The voice of Black American Poet, Eugene Redmond. Today's guest on Literary Corner Black Writers of the World,

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a series of analysis and interpretation of Black World Literature.

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Redmond has either authored or edited 11 books of poetry, fiction or literary history.

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His most popular ones being, Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry, JaNoah and the Green Stone and a River of Bones

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..with his background, we invited him to do a two parts historical introduction of Afro-American poetry.

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In this part one of the introductions to Afro-American poetry, Redmond begins with the earliest of Afro-American poets, Phillis Wheatley and takes us up to the 1920s and Harlem Renaissance. He is professor of English and Poet in Residence and Ethnic Studies at California State University, Sacramento. Eugene Redmond.

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[music]

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Phillis Wheatley, Jupiter Hammon, Briton Hammon, George Moses Horton; they come readily to mind and some people who were only part-time or occasional poets come to my mind.

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They include people like Gustavus Vassa, sometimes known as Olaudah Equiano,

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an African who gained his freedom and went on to write to what we now know as a slave narrative but he sometimes wrote poetry.

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Frederick Douglass sometimes wrote verse and there were others, um, um,

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well we don't have to name all those now, but there were others. In terms of the early poets many of them were literary, the result of literary experiments.

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Servant slaves in the north, for example, Phillis Wheatley, Jupiter Hammon, Briton Hammon and others who were allowed in their spare time or even encouraged to learn to read and write. Phillis Wheatley for example had mastered Greek, Latin, and English.

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It goes without saying by the time she was in her mid-teens.

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And she took as her models the English poets of the previous century. She herself writing at the time of the 1770s, having been brought to the United States around the age of 8 from, we think, Senegal.

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were sold to a Wheatley family in Boston, hence since Phillis Wheatley. There's not a great deal of race consciousness imagery and diction in Phillis Wheatley's work

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although there's a lot more than she is given credit for.

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But the one important thing about Phillis Wheatley, and most of the early poets,

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the poets of the late 1800s, excuse me, 18th Century,

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is that they provide a real significant barometer to the development of Black intellectual, psychological, philosophical, emotional behaviour and growth and development.

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In other words, what does the first African making contact with the American culture, with the quote "New World" do.

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How does he or she put words together, how does he or she put ideas together in a new language, in another language, in a foreign language? How does he or she envision the world or re-envision the world?

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But these isolated incidents were developing in more or less a correlative fashion to the folk material.

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So we actually have two spines when we talk about the development of Afro-American poetry. We are talking about the literary or the written form, right. These were the products of, in the north, servant slaves, people privileged and allowed, encouraged to read and write.

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At the same time on the plantations in the southern United States, you know, where the Black masses lived and where most of the Africans in the United States were brought to.

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There was a folk literature development, folk poetry, you know the field hollers, the shouts, the spirituals, the shouts, the gospels, ok. Now, so we must take in the folkloristic trump

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Brooks B. Robinson: The oral

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Eugene B. Redmond: The oral and gestural because that gave us...

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..style, it gave us form, it gave us verve, in short soul

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but on the other hand of course you have the literacy tradition. Now they merged later on but between the years of 1834 roughly and 1861,

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these were the peak years for anti-slavery activity, very stressful years for Blacks and Whites who joined them in the abolitionist effort.

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There was a lot of literary activity, mostly what we would call protest poetry in both the oral and the written, sometimes what we call the library forms.

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These poets formed pretty much the background, the spine, the foundation, for the literary tradition that we have in Afro-America today.

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I think one of the things we have to keep in mind when we talk about development of Afro-American poetry

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whether we are talking about the oral or literary, is that the act of creation

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and the act of liberation have always been connected and that and those two forks have formed the basis of the Black aesthetic, kind of an ideological aesthetic.

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Brooks B. Robinson: Okay. What about writers in the 1800s or the 19th Century?

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Eugene B. Redmond: Ok, in the 1800s of course we had the end of slavery writers, the abolitionist writers

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Brooks B. Robinson: Right.

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Eugene B. Redmond: but then after the Emancipation Proclamation, after the Civil War,

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we had a maturation of Afro-American poetry, a very, development, highly-stylized poetry and the epics of someone like a Whitman, who I've already mentioned or the fine poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, the excellent folk-based, Black-based work of James Weldon Johnson.

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But yes. The poetry of the latter quarter of the...

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country, also represented the two basic uh um forks you know in that that literary road, or in that that expression road of expression; one the oral and one the uh the written.

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We had what was called the plantation school,

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where it was called the dialect school of poetry. Now one of the problem with the uh dialect school or the writing of dialect as James Weldon Johnson discussed it in the 1920s,

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was that uh since Blacks did not invent or begin the practice of writing dialect, it was very difficult for them to pull out of basically the two stops or the two um uhh frames of references in to which people thrust the Black personality as soon as they heard dialect; one was humour and the other one was pity or pathos.

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And certainly, the Black personality has more than humour and pathos.
Brooks B. Robinson: Definitely

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Eugene B. Redmond: There's tragedy there, there is a serial comedy, there's comedy/tragedy, there's the mood, that mood encompass everything from the blues, to the ballad,

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to the sermon, to the jig, to the pensive ruminations in the cotton field. You know.

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So because White writers out of a need to pantomime and satirize first their own what's sometimes called Hoosier dialect and others

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and also they wanted to deride and to have some fun with the Black experience,

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started to talk about Black people in a comic, unrealistic dialect.

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Using a dialect that often was imitated (sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously) by later Black writers.

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Then the Black writer was forced to break through, to go through a winnowing, thrashing, breaking phase during which he came up with something that was more representative. The most important name associated with this of course is that of Paul Laurence Dunbar, the first poet after Phillis Wheatley, the first Black poet to make a major

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Eugene B. Redmond: Debt and the black as well as the national and international literary consciousness

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the real question, Folks is talking about the money, about the silver and the gold,

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all the time the seasons changing and the days is getting cold,

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and they's wondering about the metals whether we'll have one or two, while the price of coal is rising and there's two months rent that's due.

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Some folks say that gold is the only money that's worth the name, then the others rise and tell them that they ought to be ashamed and that silver is the only thing that save us from the power of the gold buzz raging 'round and seeking who he may devour.

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Well, you folks can keep on shouting with your gold and silver cries, but I tell you people [[hams?]] is scary and fouls is roosting high.

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It ain't the sort of money that has pestering my mind

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But the question I want answered is: how to get at any kind?

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Eugene B. Redmond: Dunbar lived to be to his mid 30 very tragic life unfortunately

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Eugene B. Redmond: but uh one of the major Afro American literary figures one of the major American figure literary figures he wrote in both the literary and the formal standard

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Eugene B. Redmond: excuse me literary English as well as the folk English as well as black dialect

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Eugene B. Redmond: but he wanted to be known for his poetry and literary English because he recognized the trap

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Eugene B. Redmond: that William Dean Howells who was the literary tsar of the united states and the last quarter of the 19th century had placed him in when he praised him purely on the basis of his dialect poetry,

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Eugene B. Redmond: in other words, he said you know this is a black man black man on the right dialect poetry and dialect poetry you know

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Eugene B. Redmond: is either comic or pitiful so this was part of the tragedy of Dunbar's life but Dunbar was so influential so devastating so impactful until literally schools of writing in Afro-America.

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Eugene B. Redmond: And an american journal, a white american journal evolved as a result of uh...his existence and of his...the way he's, his pacing of the literature. So right uh in the early part of the 20th Century for example you had Dunbar High School, Dunbar writing School, Dunbar Technical Schools, Dunbar community centers, very influential.

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Brooks B. Robinson: You've been listening to the literary corner black writers of the world. Today an introduction to Afro-American poetry part 1 with Professor Eugene Redmond of California State University at Sacramento. In part two of the introduction to Afro-American poetry, Redmond continues his historical presentation beginning with the Harlem renaissance poets and concluding with poets of the 1970s. Technical assistance provided by Bob Cham. I'm Brooks Robinson. The Literary Corner was made possible by funds from WHA Radio, Madison Wisconsin, a service of the University of Wisconsin extension.