Three American Poets

THREE AMERICAN POETS

                When writers speak with one another, ideas come into being.  In a conversation I had with C. Liegh McInnis a few days ago, he mentioned William Henry Holtzclaw and Booker T. Washington.  His comments triggered a bit of memory about Holtzclaw and Edward Smyth Jones( 1881-1968), about Holtzclaw's extending aid to Jones in his time of need. Giving a helping hand to someone is not a literary act.  But in this instance, it is a minor act of compassion that gives birth to a certain literary brightness and radical commenting on the black writing we understand African American literature to be. We may refer to a few of us who swim with deliberate purpose against the tides of literary and cultural studies.

                Sterling A. Brown swam with the tides of his time, noting in Negro Poetry and Drama (1937) ---

"Edward Smythe Jones' The Sylvan Cabin is pompously literary, none of his verses being a poetic as his biography.  Looking upon education at Harvard as the greatest thing in the world, he tramped to Harvard Square and there was arrested as a vagrant.  The poem making use of this experience is so sentimental that the reader is not shocked at his being jailed.  "O God Wilt Thou Help Me In School" expresses a commendable prayer in uncommendable rhyme."

Eugene B. Redmond elaborated on this very passage in Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry: A Critical History (1976) ---

Jones wrote "Harvard Square" while he was in jail.  The poem brought him immediate attention and helped speed up his release.  It is a hodgepodge of imitations of various European models.  He recites the names of Dante, Byron, Keats, Shelley, Burns, and the like in a bombast of stanzas. "A Song of Thanks," however, shows more sensitivity and deeper feeling.  While it leaves a lot to be desired, one can certainly feel the power growing through the repetition (in several dozen lines) of the phrase "For the," which precedes sun, flowers, rippling streams, and other facets of nature.  (128)

Redmond does not swim.  He navigates a boat through troubled waters of poetics  and transports us to a strange country of recognitions.  His wording "a hodgepodge of imitations of various European models" applies equally to Jones's poem and to some  contemporary practices in American cultural studies.

                What might we do with what we recognize?  We have the option of pondering the function of repetition in a history of black writing.  We can swerve to a critical question about Paul Laurence Dunbar, Edward Smyth(e) Jones, and Clint Smith and how the three of them establish intimacy with bars.  Why do "bars" matter in the interpretation of poetry?

                In "Sympathy," Dunbar begins his mediation on incarceration with

"I know what the caged bird feels, alas!"

and draws attention to the fact the bird's "blood is red on the cruel bars" and reminds us the persona knows why the bird sings  "When he beats his bars and he would be free;/It is not a carol of joy or glee,/But a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core,/But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings----"

and ends with the line "I know why the caged bird sings."

                Hold Durbar's words in mind as you read

BEHIND THE BARS

I am a pilgrim far from home,

A wanderer like Mars,

And thought my wanderings ne'er should come,

So fixed behind the bars!

I left my sunny Southern home

Beneath the silver stars;

A northward path began to roam,

Not seeking prison bars.

I sought a higher, holier life,

Which never virtue mars;

But Fate had spun a net of strife

For me behind the bars!

My mother's lowly thatched-roofed cot

My nobler senses jars;

And so I seek to aid her lot,

But not behind the bars!
 

'Tis said, forsooth, the poet learns

Through sufferings and wars

To sing the song which deepest burns

Behind the prison bars!

Thus I resign myself to Fate,

Regardless of her scars;

For soon she'll open wide the gate

For me behind the bars.

I plead to you, my fellow man,

For all who wear the tars;

To lend what little help you can

To us behind the bars.

O God, I breathe my prayer to Thee,

Who never sinner bars:

Set each immortal spirit free

Behind these prison bars!

Edward Smyth Jones, The Sylvan Cabin (1911)

Victorian literary pomposity notwithstanding, power emerges from the sequential repetition ---So fixed behind the bars/ Not seeking prison bars/ For me behind the bars/ But not behind the bars/Behind the prison bars/ For me behind the bars/To us behind the bars/Behind these prison bars.  This is not hodgepodge but hammering  that can transfix emotions. The interpreting mind sees and feels and assigns significance to bars in the Age of Trump, to the primal images of bar and cage that torment reflection on what precisely is mass incarceration in the long black songs of the new Jim Crow.

Take a quantum leap from Dunbar and Jones to Clint Smith's Counting Descent: Poems (2016) and read his prose poem "Beyond This Place" (41), marking the placement of the words "bars" and "cage" in the second stanza.  The magnetism of Smith's anti-romantic  directness in his sympathetic, compassionate poem about the place of imprisonment-----

It is a classroom of men who refuse to forget themselves, each word provides the sort of freedom a parole board can never grant.

slams us back to Dunbar and Jones.  Perhaps we also are moved to re-experience poems by Etheridge Knight, a major twentieth-century wordsmith in the prison house of poetry. And let us not ignore the accidental irony of Clint Smith's being a doctoral candidate at Harvard University.

So now you have it.  An idea about what Dunbar, Jones, and Smith have in common emerged from an ordinary conversation with C. Liegh McInnis. It is a single step in the long journey toward a liberated future.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            January 11, 2018