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Kamarck, Edward (ed.) / Arts in society: the arts and the black revolution II
(1968)
Chapman, Abraham
Editorial comment: black poetry today, pp. 401-[410]
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Page 407
poet must stretch his consciousness not only in the direction of other non-western people across the earth, but in terms of pure reason and expand the mind areas to the far reaches of creativity's endlessness to find new ways of seeing the world the black poet of the west is caught up in. . . . We are in a position to know at first hand the social and political machinery that is threatening to destroy the earth and we can use creative and intellectual black criteria on it. I believe the artist does owe something to the society in which he is involved; he should be involved fully. This is the measure of the poet, and the black poet in his - from a white point of view - invisibility must hammer away at his own world of creative criticism of this society. A work of art, a poem, can be a complete 'thing'; it can be alone, not preaching, not trying to change men, and though it might change them, if the men are ready for it, the poem is not reduced in it's artistic status. I mean we black poets can) write poems of pure creative black energy right here in the white west and make them works of art without falling into the cheap market place of bullshit and propaganda. But it is a thin line to stand on. The best of the black poets are expressing themselves, the black experience, their visions of life, and their creative criticism of American society, in new poetry. The mediocre, and always and everywhere they outnumber the best, are not getting beyond propaganda, bombast, invective, and calls for revolutionary action. The "vehement/hatred" of white America proclaimed by Don Lee in his poem is rather characteristic of the tone, mood and feelings of the militant black nationalist movements of today. The question of tone is discussed by Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton in their recent book Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. They say: There has been only a 'civil rights' movement, whose tone of voice was adopted to an audience of middle class whites. It served as a sort of buffer zone between that audience and angry young blacks. It claimed to speak for the needs of a community, but it did not speak in the tone of that community. .. . .We had only the old language of love and suffering. And in most places - that is, from the liberals and middle class - we got 4 -+V back the old language of patience and progress. . . . For the masses of black people, this language resulted in virtually nothing. . . . The white society devised the language, adopted the rules and had the black community narcotized into believing that that language and those rules were, in fact, relevant. LeRoi Jones, the best known and most controversial of the black poets, has attuned his literary voice to the tone of hatred, in addition to anger and defiance, and has incorporated the language of hatred and the organization of hatred into his program for the black artist. In his essay "state/meant" which concludes his book Home: Social Essays (1966), LeRoi Jones declares: The Black Artist's role in America is to aid in the destruction of America as he knows it. His role is to report and reflect so precisely the nature of the society, and of himself in that society, that other men will be moved by the exactness of his rendering and, if they are black men, grow strong through this moving, having seen their own strength, and weakness; and if they are white men, tremble, curse, and go mad, because they will be drenched with the filth of their evil . . . The Black Artist must teach the White Eyes their deaths, and teach the black man how to bring these deaths about. The long-standing controversy among Negro poets and critics over the designations Negro poetry or poems by Negroes has not ended. Some would retain Negro poetry, the militant nationalists and many young poets would substitute black poetry, and others still adhere to the position initially enunciated by Countee Cullen. Among the latter is Robert Hayden, poet and Professor of English at Fisk University, awarded The Grand Prize for Poetry at the First World Festival of Negro Arts, held in Dakar, Senegal, in 1965, and editor of the latest hard-cover anthology of Negro poetry. He titled it Kaleidoscope: Poems by American Negro Poets and in his introduction he keeps alive the question of "whether we can speak with any real justification of 'Negro poetry' " which some object to "because it has been used disparagingly to indicate a kind of pseudo-poetry concerned with the race problem to the exclusion of almost everything else." Hayden, who
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