My Kindred—In (Too Brief) Praise of a Joyful Poet

Night, let me be part of you
                       but in my own dark way.
—William J. Harris, “For Bill Hawkins, a Black Militant”

A few weeks ago, I was invited to be on a podcast and the young hosts wanted to know about how I, now nearly sixty-nine years old, came to be. Yes, I thought, I guess I have reached that point. Words have been written. Books have been published. I have met people and they’ve met me. There is now a trail. Hooray. And damn.

Thinking about that trail, I started to pull names and titles out of my memory and comment on the poets that I felt gave me something as I was figuring it out. There were two piles: poets you “had” to read in high school English classes—Frost, Pound, Eliot, Hughes, Dickinson, Sandburg, Whitman (this was the sixties). And the poets who were not in any of those anthologies that you either stumbled upon by following the bread crumbs or had pushed your way like contraband by hipper friends—the Beats, living feminist poets, the NYC poets, the Latin American poets (especially Parra, Neruda, and Vallejo), queer poets, poets of the Black Arts Movement and Black Diaspora. Too many to fully list here or fit in a brief hour-long interview.

Two piles, no road map. If you were a young Black poet and carried both of these streams in your head—the old American voices that held their own brilliance but flew over your neighborhood, and the voices closer to your life and ear that still didn’t quite match how you’d put things—where would you land? How would you put it?

Even though it was published in 1974 (six years before my first book) and we never met until we became friends and colleagues at Stony Brook in the nineties, when I finally read William J. Harris’s first book, Hey Fella Would You Mind Holding This Piano a Moment, it was as if we had been secretly passing notes to each other through the ether all those years. There is a high degree of play and playfulness in Hey Fella that I quickly warmed to. How do you write Black anger without the obvious fist? How do you acknowledge and interject elements of Black joy—TV, cartoons, flowers, movies—without appearing weak? Remember: this is a Black male speaker in 1974. Can a Black poetic include the surreal and the fantastic and still be considered “Black”?

The poems were a delight to read, and for the most part, brief—clean, fast, direct. Obvious craft and sure ear. Here’s how Harris dealt with the fantastic:

We were all sitting around
in the coffee shop
cutting each other—
having a nervous ball.
When an angel dropped in
and said I swear, directly to me:
“There is no love among you.”
“Hell, baby,” I said,
“do you expect flowers
to grow on
doorknobs?”
—“Nor Do I Expect”

And Black joy, here, where the ecstatic mingles with the mundane, and the speaker shares his joy and surprise over it:

Where did we love? In what holy places?
In super markets where we brought steaks
            and potato chips—
—From “Where Did We Love”

And finally, that fist:

Night, I know you are powerful and artistic
                       in your misspellings.
How distinctively I sense your brooding,
feel your warm breath against my face,
hear your laughter—not cruel only amused
                       and arrogant: young—
insisting on my guilt.
Night, let me be part of you
                       but in my own dark way.
—“For Bill Hawkins, a Black Militant”

I read the ending of that poem to mean I AM IN THE STREAM BUT IT’S MY CANOE. The book is so gently disarming and so much has arrived since its publication that it could be easy to miss (or dismiss) what the poet was trying to mess with here, the insistence that there has to be more than one way to be a Black poet. By the time I read this in 1990, I was already writing my third book, but knew I had found in Harris’s book a Black kindred point of view, one of many (like June Jordan and Lucille Clifton) who would help to keep me at it. William J. Harris’s fine scholarship is one of the reasons we will not forget Amiri Baraka, but the space that Harris has built with his own poetry is a house we should never abandon.