A Photoplate for the Padre

Abstract

Lest reminiscence and revelation get confused and Callaloo readers get derailed, let me say straight out that more than a decade and a half at close quarters with Katherine and Warren Harper's precocious offspring has led me to conclude that it will be history as the high modes of the Harpergram, poetry as the kinesthetics of the slipped block, and biography as photoemulsive double negativity that will probably provide the real book-lowdown that is, not text-on Michael Steven Harper. His long-tongued cronies in Iowa City during the early sixties knew enough about Michael's proclivity for sartorial and shepherdly solicitude (double hats to keep warm and double-duty confraternity to keep sane and whole) to dub him-gridiron aspirations notwithstanding-the Padre. Though this has not been a poetic persona he and his critics have cultivated, and though his postcard Harpergrams and single-lensreflex spoor betray few benedictory traces, semblances of the pastoral impulse emerge often enough from behind the double-conscious veil of Harper's poetic ministry to show that the Iowa brotherhood monickered him well. Take the jacket photo of Healing Song for the Inner Ear, for instance. More than half a decade old now, it is still a potently proselytic image -alluring, quasi-cryptic, unabashedly exuberant-not much akin to what we anticipate from cover shots of poets who belong to the chairholding professoriate of Ivy League universities: A sea of hands-black hands-raised in apparent exaltation frame the broadly smiling face of an expansive dark-suited figure whose even darker sunglasses obscure eyes we presume are looking up over the sheaf of poems his own fingers hold and into the rapt faces the sea of waving hands imply. As an article of commerce, the jacket photo struck and still strikes a fervent communitarian note, locating this poet in that living antiphony with an audience which his progress in wordsmithing has consistently projected as an ideal. For those of us with more to locate him with, though, than such two-dimensional likenesses alone, the image has another kind of resonance, which brings into conjunction not only the lines of Healing Song but a long succession of texts, not only this frozen sighting of the poet-in-praxis but the continuing stream of camera images that Michael himself spawns to chart his way visually through the landscapes and raucous human geography of life as an intercontinental poetic missile. Let the metaphors be mixed. Harper, too, has become acquainted with ambivalence. It goes a long way back. His great grandfather is the one. A life like a found poema black bishop from Ontario, Canada, founding member of the American Negro Academy alongside Crummell and Du Bois, on a trek northward from the Cape in 1908, with the Word in hand, en route to holy war. Images of kin can be as compelling as the militance of a photograph in the passbook of a Bantu under detention. And if, as