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RECENT BOOKS
KAISER

poetry be a very good, prolific, young black poet and associate professor of English at Brown University. His other books of poetry are Dear John, Dear Coltrane: Poems, History Is Your Own Heartbeat, Photographs: Negatives: History As Apple Pie [Scarab Press, 243 Collins St., San Francisco, Calif., $7.50] and Debridement, Poems [Doubleday].)
Henderson, Stephen. UNDERSTANDING THE NEW BLACK POETRY: BLACK SPEECH AND BLACK MUSIC AS POETIC REFERENCES. New York: William Morrow. xxii, 394 pages. $9.95 (cloth); S3.50 (paper). (Henderson, formerly chairman of the Department of English at Morehouse College and a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of the Black World, is now a professor in the Afro-American Studies Department at Howard University. He started this discussion of black poetry in his half of the book The Militant Black Writer In Africa and the United States [1969] which he wrote with Mercer Cook. In both books Henderson shows the relationship between black poetry and black speech and black music. He spells this out much more clearly in terms of theme, structure and saturation in the introduction to Understanding the New Black Poetry, an anthology of the new black poetry. The title of his very long, 67-page introduction "The Forms of Things Unknown" seems to be taken from Herbert Read's book The Forms of Things Unknown [1960]. Henderson is dealing here basically with one art form, poetry, while Read's book is an attempt to work out an over-all aesthetic philosophy. Henderson makes Stanley Edgar Hyman's "American Negro Literature and the Folk Tradition" [in The Promised End, 1963] seem even more elementary than it is. Likewise Jack Richardson's ignorant lecture to Blacks on the black folk culture In "The Black Arts" [New York Review, Dec. 19, 1968]. But as I said in a brief review of The Militant Black Writer [FREEDOM-WAYS, Spring 1969], Henderson embraces Imamu Baraka's rather naive, bourgeois black nationhood or Pan-Africanism and sees the black writer's job as that of developing black consciousness toward the revolution. Now, the black struggle is basically socio-economic and the black writer's role is to unmask and reveal to the black people their real oppressors, using cultural forms, and to show them how to fight their enemy.)
Himes, Chester. BLACK ON BLACK: BABY SISTER AND SELECTED WRITINGS. New York: Doubleday. $6.95. (Here are 17 short stories, five essays and a film scenario by the veteran black novelist Himes whose autobiography The Quality of Hurt was just published in 1972.)
THE HISTORY OF BLACK AMERICANS: A STUDY GUIDE AND CURRICULUM OUTLINE. United Federation of Teachers, Box HBA, 260 Park Ave. South, New York City 10010. 120 pages. $5.00. (This book has many good photographs and prints. It is a very good detailed outline for teachers [with good bibliographies and listings of films, videotapes and recordings] prepared by white teachers. The book is reviewed by two Blacks [Jervis Anderson and Charles H. Wesley] and one white. The UFT earlier published Lesson Plans on African-American History [1969] that is not mentioned in the new book. Black teachers who prepared it accused UFT Pres. Albert Shanker's people of altering it before it was published. Why a second black history outline? Presumably to include more sociology, psychology and anthropology. Also to more or less neutralize all questions such as the Moynihan report on the black family, etc. Robert B. Hill's The Strengths of Black Families [1972] is not