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FREEDOMWAYS                    FOURTH QUARTER 1972

with the Umbra writers (Calvin Hernton, Ishmael Reed, Joe Johnson, James Thompson, Steve Cannon, etc.) of the early sixties on the Lower East Side.
  The reason that Henderson has been largely ignored is not because his work lacks exceptional power and vision, but because he is not in the mainstream of what certain ideologues have deemed black poetry to be. That is, he is not in the mainstream of contemporary black poetry in America, with emphasis on contemporary and America because black poets have historically covered a wide range of territory when we consider the work of writers not only in this godforsaken country but in the West Indies and Africa.
  Henderson's work, to me, is fundamentally narrative; it tells stories of what happened, though not the story we might read in the NY Times. Narrative poetry is out of style today - so much of its function has been supplanted by fiction - but it is certainly in the African tradition, for oral narrative has been the basic African historical form. What does David tell us? Certainly not surface facts; instead we get a kind of surreal impressionistic picture, suffused through his deeply personal and urbanized lens. No better example than his masterful poem about New Orleans, "Burgundy Street":

four stories high
i viz both waterways of new o
the mississippi crescents devil horns
as lake ponchartrain shimmies to the ancient fires 
                   along her shores
both bring the breezes
from the gulf of mexico or usa proper
to this point
where all
         empties out
                   *     *    *

round the corner
the old black jassmen are preserved in a hall
waiting for the saints
to come amarching in
& riot

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